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Who invented writing?
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People speak probably
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tens of thousands of years, with one another,
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but we write our words only
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about 5,000 years.
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Before that time, information was stored
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with the aid of diagrams and pictures
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on pottery and walls of caves
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or it was woven into fabric.
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This artistic motives have put us on the path to writing.
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The writing system that we use in English,
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actually started with the Sumerian culture
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somewhere between 4500 and 1750 BC
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in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq and Syria.
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The Sumerians kept notes of their business deals
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by using. small clay figures of goats, donkeys and oxen
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When she discovered that two dimensional carvings
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on clay tablets were much easier.
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This symbol, for example, meant "mountain"
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this meant "head".
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If the area around the mouth was emphasized
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then it could mean "mouth".
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Mouth in combination with water meant "drink"
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and a mouth with bread "food".
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Add the symbol for ox far,
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then you "eat an ox."
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Voilà - the invention of writing.
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But some words have meanings
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that express tricky with symbols.
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How would an "ox in the mountains" signs?
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Remember, if you just draw what you mean,
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it is art, not a script.
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To ensure that the writing is,
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the symbol should represent a word.
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Can you read this?
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It's a famous quote from Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
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Exactly, "To be or not to be".
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That is the way the Sumerians have solved this problem.
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Os plus water plus mountain.
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But what has to do with water?
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Well, the Sumerian word for water
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sounds exactly like their word for "in".
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So "ox in mountains".
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Linguists call this the rebus.
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The Sumerians knew how
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meaning from written symbols could express
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and also to describe the sounds,
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, the Sumerians wrote their vocabulary expanded.
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Slowly but surely, the symbols for sound
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increasingly used
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