Analog SFF, March 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The ceiling was curving around and gently upward, so it seemed I was rounding the obstruction. I was elated, and in a few minutes, I was on my belly, still pulling myself along with the screwdriver. I was afraid to stand up, because if something happened, I'd want to be able to dig in quickly.

  I became aware of my lights—the water had cleared considerably, and I played my main around. I thought I saw the cable dimly reflected, and I made in that direction. It was the upper part of the cable, shining in my light, angling from somewhere inside the huge obstruction up to what had to be the exit tunnel of Devil's Throat. Safety be damned, I stood up and took off for the cable.

  Immediately I was jerked off my feet, and I fell on my face. Something had caught. I reflexively twirled a hooked hand in a figure eight, but there was no one to signal. My jump line had played out and caught. I ripped it from its carabiner and threw it away. Standing, I could barely get any traction, but I leaned forward and pounded my feet.

  My legs hurt, and mud was swirling into the water. I drove on until I could see the cable gleaming just ahead. My gloves seized it like ravenous jaws, and my screwdriver fell away. I pulled myself up, hand over hand through the numbing water.

  I heard more sounds of cracking and roaring. A strong upwelling hit me, yanking the cable from my grip. I could only guess what caused it—perhaps some gigantic collapse in the Sinuses was coughing whole galleries of water upward.

  I had lost my last umbilical, surrendering at last to the elements I had so methodically conquered. Tumbling, I lost all sense of direction, struggling to keep my limbs from twisting behind me. My air pack was slipping, and I strangled the straps against my chest.

  The sound of an otherworldly surf crashing onto a rocky shore filled my helmet, and I imagined that a wave of static was also awakening my radio. I did crash, not onto rock, but onto a sheet of surging current that slapped me in what felt like a horizontal direction.

  Suddenly, my faceplate hit something hard. I was on my stomach, on the floor of a tunnel. I could see the glint of what might be a fixed line to one side.

  The rush of water subsided and fell back, dragging me with it. I grappled and kicked and managed to brace my legs against a protrusion. A terrible choking sound like the gulp of a leviathan swallowing the sea filled the cavern, and hissing vapor seemed to flee the world as the remnants of the lake fell into the bowels of Callisto.

  No, not bowels. A womb.

  It was now dry and pitch black, except for one bright bolt ahead. It was an illuminated line, which meant that I had to be just below the Devil's Throat—and only a couple of hundred yards from warmth and air and life. As I got up and made for the line, I found that my radio had indeed awoken. I was within range of the deep antenna.

  The signal strengthened, and the data broadened as the ribbed line vibrated through my fingers, singing to me of the way out. I filtered all the sounds and sights arriving from the WyrdNet, looking for something very specific. When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, it's nearly impossible to find. But when you're looking for a straw in a stack of needles, it's a lot easier. Whatever doesn't poke at you to buy something, provide personal data, sign a contract, be your “friend"—that's the message you're looking for.

  Got it!

  Sharron's blessed face appeared on my heads-up display. I wanted nothing more than to reach through millions of miles of WyrdNet and touch it. She smiled, and her latent voice said, “It's a boy.” That announcement, carried by excited photons, would soon ripple past Saturn and beyond, in all directions, chasing the very edge of space itself. The universe had just changed, ever so slightly, but forever.

  “Have you picked out a name?” she said.

  “Yes,” I answered. I was gasping, shivering, coughing, and crying. “Roger That.”

  Copyright © 2008 David Bartell

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Science Fact: FROM TOKEN TO SCRIPT: THE ORIGIN OF CUNEIFORM

  Henry Honken

  Logographic scripts

  Writing is speech made visible: along with walled cities, the wheel, metallurgy, and a code of laws, it's one of the defining marks of civilization.

  Though human language is thought to have originated anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, writing is very young. The earliest known written records go back only to the late fourth millennium B.C. During those four millennia, the art of writing was independently invented at least five times. Written texts, as opposed to pictographic records, appear first in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mohenjo-Daro. Over a thousand years later, the Shang oracle bones are inscribed with symbols, which later developed into Chinese characters. On the other side of the world, the Olmec precursors of the Maya glyphs first appear about 800 B.C.

  Writing systems can be roughly divided into alphabets, syllabaries, and logographic systems in increasing order of complexity. Aside from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, where texts are wholly or partially written with Chinese characters, all modern written languages use an alphabet. In spite of the advantages of simplicity and ease of learning that characterize an alphabet, however, all of the earliest scripts make use of either a syllabary or logographs[1].

  Almost all of the world's alphabets, many researchers think, have a common origin in the Near East around 1500 B.C. so that, for example, a continuous line of descent may be traced from early Semitic alphabets through the Greek alphabet to the Cyrillic alphabet used in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

  An alphabet has one symbol per phoneme, the minimal contrastive sound. Words are made up of phonemes organized into rhythmic units called syllables. In the English word “nitrate,” seven phonemes combine into two syllables “ni-” and “-trate,” phonetically [nai-tre:t].

  * * * *

  Table 1: Examples of Kana, Kanji, and Cuneiform

  * * * *

  As a result of their tangled histories, modern alphabets often suffer from irregularities. In the example word, the diphthong “ai” in the first syllable is written with a single character and the final -e is not even pronounced, its only function being to show that the preceding “a” should be pronounced as long [e:] as in “bait” [be:t], rather than short [ae] as in “bat” [baet].

  Note also that contrastive sound means that only those phonic differences that correlate with a difference of meaning are written. In the homophonous “night rate” [nait + re:t], the “t"s at the beginning of “-trate” and the end of “night” are phonetically different, but are written with the same symbol.

  A syllabary is a script that has a separate symbol for each possible syllable. This would be very unwieldy in English because of the great variety of syllable types but in languages with a simpler syllable structure a syllabary can be very efficient.

  Japanese has a mixed script. In addition to Chinese characters called “kanji,” Japanese employs two syllabaries, called “kana.” In general, Japanese syllables begin with a consonant and end with a vowel and there are no consonant clusters like the “-nks” in English “drinks.”

  The kana characters for the syllables “ka, ki, ku, ke, ko” (see Table 1) are completely different from the vowel symbols “a, i, u, e, o"; similarly, the characters for “ka, ta, ha, ma, ra” have no common element to represent the “-a.”

  Japanese kanji were borrowed from China through the offices of Korean Buddhist missionaries who had settled in Japan. These characters, still used by the Chinese after 35 centuries, form a logographic script. Logographs are characters that represent whole morphemes, the basic units that make up words. For example, in the word “manliness” there are three morphemes, “man,” “-li-,” and “-ness,” none of which can be further subdivided.

  Since there are thousands of morphemes in any language, a logographic script is much larger than an alphabet or syllabary. The average literate Japanese or Chinese will control around six or seven thousand characters. An additional difference between logographs and alphabetic symbols is that the former freque
ntly have an internal structure.

  Some Chinese characters are iconic, that is, derived from pictures of the concept they represent, but these comprise only a small percentage of the total. In Table 1, “sun” and “water” are examples. Other characters are combinations of one or more simpler characters like “bright” in Table 1, which is historically derived from “moon” and “window.”

  The majority of characters are composed of a semantic component called “the radical” and a phonetic component. In Table 1, the characters in the middle row of the kanji section are both read “chi.” The left part of chi “pool” is the water radical, a simplified form of “water” seen in the line above; this tells the reader the character has to do with fluids. The left part of chi “ground” is the earth radical which identifies the character as having something to do with earth. In both cases, the phonetic “chi” gives a clue to the pronunciation.

  Both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform are organized along similar principles with some iconic symbols and others with semantic and phonetic components.

  * * * *

  Ideas on the origin of writing

  Egyptian hieroglyphs seem to spring into existence full-grown like Athena from Zeus's brow. The oldest Sumerian characters sometimes show a development from clearly pictorial forms into the more abstract wedge-shaped characters, but here also the earliest records already make use of hundreds of symbols, many of which are not clearly motivated as pictures.

  As a result, most histories of writing are lamentably vague about the earliest stages. Up until the last couple of decades, the received opinion was that writing was invented in Mesopotamia and a century or so later spread to Egypt. Since the details of the two scripts are quite different, the spreading presumably took place by means of what anthropologists call stimulus diffusion.

  Like ions across a membrane, ideas diffuse from one culture to another. In recent years, karaoke diffused from Japan to America and the Goth style of clothing in the opposite direction. Stimulus diffusion means that the idea alone is borrowed[2]. In the Egyptian case, the presence of clearly Mesopotamian features such as the use of cylinder seals points to a strong Mesopotamian influence around the end of the fourth millennium b.c. and since the earliest known examples of hieroglyphs were dated about a hundred years later than the earliest records in Mesopotamia, researchers concluded hieroglyphic writing was inspired by the Sumerian example.

  Nevertheless, writing, in the form of seals, palettes, funerary stelae and so on, emerges in Egypt just before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the beginning of the Old Kingdom, already highly developed with many signs functioning as logograms and the rebus principle fully established[3].

  The Egyptians wrote on a paper-like substance made from the papyrus reed, but in Mesopotamia the medium was clay. The clay was formed by hand into squarish tablets, flat on one side and slightly convex on the obverse. The signs were scratched out or impressed into the clay by means of a stylus cut from a reed. In the earliest examples, some of the signs are recognizable pictures, but these are eventually all replaced by graphs made up of wedge-shaped (cuneiform) lines.

  The most ancient tablets (like those found at Uruk[4]) are different in many ways from later writing. They are almost all economic in nature (though some are dictionary-like lists of signs). The tablets are laid out in vertical columns and within the column each record is placed in a box. The ordering is not linear and the style is telegraphic like entries in an appointments book.

  The oldest records are in Sumerian, a language with no known relatives or descendants. Sumerian is agglutinative—with suffixes piled up in long chains: dumu ("son"); dumu-me ("sons"); dumu-me-a-ni ("for his sons")—and ergative; that is to say, the subject of a transitive verb takes a special suffix. It is thus quite different from any European language and when the first Sumerian records were discovered, puzzled scholars thought it was a trick of the scribes.

  * * * *

  Cuneiform

  About the middle of the third millennium, the neighboring kingdom of Akkad adapted the Sumerian cuneiform script to their own language (Athnaum akkaddtum—"tongue of Akkad"). Even at that immense distance of time, Akkadian is identifiably Semitic. Compare, for example, “bull"—urum in Akkadian, ir in Hebrew, or “house"—bu in Akkadian, and bit in Hebrew.

  The example below will give some idea of how the Akkadian scribes wrote a sentence.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The first line is the transcription identifying each sign as a Sumerian word, Akkadian syllable, or determinative (analogous to the radical or semantic component in Chinese characters in Table 1). Assyriologists conventionally transcribe Sumerian words with capitals and write determinatives in raised position. The second line is the Akkadian reading of the same cuneiform sentence. The preposition ana ("for") is written with two phonetic signs, “a” and “na.” The noun baet ("house,” here used for “temple") is written with a logogram whose Sumerian reading was “e.” The name of the god Dagon is written with the determinative dingir ("god") followed by two phonograms, “da” and “gan.” The noun daltam ("door") is written with the determinative gi ("wood") followed by the logogram for “door,” read “ig” in Sumerian. The sentence ends with the verb “make” written with the Sumerian logogram “du,” followed by a phonogram “u” to mark the past tense.

  Thus, like Japanese, the Akkadian cuneiform was a mixed script in which logographs were combined with phonetic signs. And just as kanji have both Chinese and Japanese readings, the cuneiform signs had Sumerian and Akkadian readings.

  Since the Akkadian phonetic system was completely different from that of Sumerian, the Akkadian scribes faced many problems in adapting cuneiform to their own language. As nearly as can be determined from the data, the consonant systems of the two languages were as in Table 2.

  * * * *

  Table 2: Consonant system of Sumerian and Akkadian

  * * * *

  The major problem faced by the scribes was that Akkadian possessed sounds not found in Sumerian, like the emphatic consonants[5] t., q, s.. These were never consistently distinguished in the history of the script. In particular, final consonants are indeterminate so that -ad, -at, and -at. can all be expressed by a sign read AD.

  As the script developed, two things happened that greatly obscured the pictorial element in the signs. First of all, all of the signs were rotated by 90 degrees. Secondly, the permissible components of signs were reduced to two: the wedge:

  and the “Winkelhaken”

  and the permissible orientations to horizontal, oblique (almost always pointing to four o'clock) and vertical.

  * * * *

  In addition to the script itself, the Akkadians borrowed the Sumerian sexagesimal numerical notation. Units were represented by a vertical

  wedge and tens by a Winkelhaken or hook

  After 2000 b.c. in the later Babylonian mathematics, this became a positional system in which, for example, 75 was expressed as 60 + 10 + 5; a vertical wedge, a hook, and five wedges.

  The kinds of texts also expanded from purely economical records to prayers, hymns, omens, literary and scholarly works, contracts and treaties. During most of the third and second millenniums, in fact, Akkadian was the international language of diplomacy.

  * * * *

  The Token System

  Speculations on the history of writing have been given a new twist in the last twenty years by Dr. Denise Schmandt-Besserat at the University of Texas. Although the origins of most writing systems are still shrouded in mystery, in the case of cuneiform at least, Schmandt-Besserat has suggested that the earliest Sumerian symbols are derived from an accounting system using baked clay tokens that goes back to Neolithic times. In other words, writing originated not out of a literary need as we moderns might expect, but out of that dry stick, accounting.

  The traditions of literate peoples have usually attributed the origin of writing to the gods:

  * * * *
<
br />   *stolen from Enki, god of wisdom, by his daughter Inanna.

  *taught to the Babylonians by the sea-creature Oannes (a being with the body of a fish, but the head, feet and voice of a man), the kind of evidence that Carl Sagan speculated might support a visit by aliens.

  *given to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai by Jehovah in the tablets of the law.

  * * * *

  But when scholars first began to speculate on the origin of writing in a systematic way, the iconic elements of early scripts suggested that writing began as pictures. This view, introduced by William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, based on his studies of Egyptian and Aztec texts, has held the field up till modern times. The fact that the majority of signs in the earliest writing are already so abstract that their pictorial origins can't be identified was blamed on primitive mentality or the clumsiness of scribes.

  Scholars generally agree that the first examples of true writing (as opposed to pictorial records) are the clay tablets found in Mesopotamia inscribed in Sumerian and another ancient language called Proto-Elamite. The earliest of these can be interpreted to some extent by reasoning back from the known cuneiform symbols and appear to deal exclusively with economic matters. These written records are dated at around 3500 B.C. but the first cities are very much older. The oldest level at Jericho dates back to 9000 B.C. The question then arises: How did city governments keep records in the period from 9000 to 3500 and, given that the oldest writing was already largely abstract and phonetic, what were the precursors of the Sumerian and Elamite scripts?

  Schmandt-Besserat's research did not originally deal with writing at all. She began her investigation with a study of uses of clay before pottery. In the course of examining clay assemblages retrieved from excavation sites in the Near East, she noticed many of them contained small objects in geometric shapes. Found everywhere, their function was mysterious. They were variously described by their finders as objects of uncertain purpose, enigmatic objects, amulets, game pieces and so on. “What they were used for is anyone's guess,” said archeologist Carleton Coon, who compared them to clay suppositories.