We take out our smartphone, call up the emojis and tap on the deer. And then on the bus. And then we read the combination aloud. With the Reh-Bus we wrote the word “Rebus” - and that with a Rebus. The mental leap from the images to the sound sequences of the words and from there to the use of their ambiguities was a spark in the spiritual development of mankind. He turned pictograms that directly depict things into characters that stand for the spoken words or syllables of a language - the basic principle of writing, which was discovered independently of one another in different parts of the world. It is followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs as well as the Central American Mayan script or the scripts of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures.The Chinese script, 3200 years old, is an example of its vitality. The pictorial character of the characters in these fonts is not always immediately recognizable. In the course of time they became more schematic, more abstract and linked with auxiliary markings to create phonetic and grammatical clarity.
In contrast to the syllabary, the alphabet, whose letters stand for individual sounds, is a late cultural phenomenon. According to the script researcher Silvia Ferrara, this is no coincidence, because the syllable, not the isolated sound, forms the basis of speech. The fact that the alphabet has spread all over the world is due to its efficiency, but Ferrara does not take it for granted that it came into existence at all. In her attractively designed book, which is primarily devoted to the early stages of the history of writing, the syllabary is in the foreground. She herself is a specialist in an important part of them, namely the archaic writings of the Aegean region, some of which, like the Cretan Linear A, have only just begun to be deciphered.She is also leading a research project at the University of Bologna on the worldwide origin of scripts.
There is never a shortage of resentful skeptics
Ferrara does not provide a systematic introduction, but rather a description of a journey through the ancient written landscapes of the world from pre-classical Greece via Egypt and Mesopotamia to China, Central America, the Easter Islands and the Indus Valley, interwoven with personal impressions.
Individual font creators also come into the picture, such as Hildegard von Bingen, who invented an alphabet for her Lingua Ignota (Unknown Language), which she also made herself, or Sequoyah, a silversmith from Tennessee who created a syllabary for the Cherokee language.
The subjective, opinionated style of the author, who also addresses the reader directly from time to time, makes the presentation lively. Occasionally, however, she does too much of a good thing, wanders off and loses the common thread. And Ferrara does not always make a sufficient distinction between her personal convictions and the state of research recognized in the subject. For example in the case of the Rongorongo, a system of symbols that was in use on Easter Island. Ferrara's claim that Rongorongo represents a language related to the Polynesian dialect spoken on the island today is not a general consensus. It is already controversial whether it is actually a font. For Ferrara, however, the doubters are “envious skeptics who are never lacking”.In her professional publications she expresses herself much more cautiously.