Writing is a product of man, and man is an animal. Animals have instincts and biases. Biases form patterns. Those patterns can be decoded.

If one perceives written language through the vantage point of evolutionary biology, similarities can be found in the characters of all scripts. The orienting factor is human survival.

Using Ancient Languages to Understand Our Own

The writings on this site compare Chinese Hanzi characters, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform—the oldest scripts—in order to find patterns that help us understand the alphabet's origins. Humans are nearly identical genetically, so we behave similarly. Those similarities play out in language. When we compare all ancient written languages together—including the alphabet—patterns emerge.

Ancient written languages reflect what was important to humans at the time the written scripts were created: sex and procreation. There are currently 7.6 billion of us on this earth. Evidently sex—and denial that sex is important—are key motivators to the human animal.

We know that writing started just after the domestication of animals (domestication of animals is roughly 20,000 year old, tokens which were used to account for those animals are roughly 10,000 years old, and actual writing is dated at 5,000 years old, though the Jiahu characters are dated at 8,600 years old and are recognizable by any Chinese reader today). Humans are 100,000-200,000 years old, so writing is a very new invention.

Did tracking animals and following footprints lead to writing? Possibly. Writing is an abstraction—we use it to represent reality. The first abstraction was recognizing that the footprints of the animal represented the animal. The second abstraction is the symbol created by a human that stands for that animal, that counts that animal, that accounts for that animal. Read more about animal signs here >

It would seem that in the domestication of animals, humans finally understood the necessity of the male in reproduction. Forty thousand (40,000) years ago megafauna disappeared around the world, and one prevalent theory is that humans killed them off because the humans didn’t understand that they needed to keep some animals around in order to get more.

When one considers that the Bible’s Noah’s Ark story is the world’s first sex education

—two by two, male and female—one discovers that re-examining and re-framing existing data with modern insight yields dramatically new perspectives. Noah’s Ark is a retelling of a portion of the The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is at least 2,100 years older than the Bible.

We know that circa 4,500 years ago the Sumerians understood procreation, based upon this character for “seed."

Domesticating animals caused the male to suddenly understand his role as father: “that child came from me!” That knowledge sparked the concept of ownership: My son. My woman. My field. My possessions.

Writing is a form of claiming ownership: accounting is a way of taking stock of one’s possessions.

One important possession was female and male humans, but the females are more valuable because they can make babies. Powerful men, like Genghis Khan, who has 16 million descendants living today, did not achieve that status as “super father" by consorting with men. A harem and a farm share one characteristic: females. A dynasty is a “gynasty.”

Comparing the relationship of the shape of written characters to the definitions given in lexicons and dictionaries highlights a focus on females—a commonality across many ancient written languages—and suggests that female mammals are the root of written language. This focus is because female mammals have the trinity: milk, offspring, and fun for males. This triumvirate drove both writing and civilization.

Our Team:

Chao Xu (in Chinese, Xu Chao, 超徐), Soochow University Physics BS, is the designer and programmer of Jennifer and Chao's HanziFinder.com tool, which is a substructure search engine of Chinese characters, essentially the first of its kind: www.HanziFinder.com

 

Together Chao and Jennifer have given scientific talks in the US at Genentech, and in China at Wuxi App Tec, Pharmaron, and Roche China about character analysis and substructure searching, as well as the congruities between Chinese and English characters,

 

Maggie Li (李琪) is Jennifer's translator and simultaneous interpreter. Together they have published two novels in Chinese in China, one of which Jennifer taught as a textbook at Soochow University in Suzhou, China because it had perfectly matched pages—English to Chinese—thanks to Maggie, who has also won an amazing amount of English language contests and is a fantastic dancer. Together Maggie and Jennifer have given many bilingual book readings and speeches.

 

 

Maggie Li wins a dictionary contest with one million original contestants.