Chinese & the Alphabet: The only survivors?
I am following some of the interviews on the ChildrenOfTheCode.Org, particularly those by historians of the English orthography, including Richard Venezky, John H. Fisher, Thomas Cable. There is no shortage of informative and entertaining stories, but Drucker’s confidence in the following quote stunned me.
Dr. Johanna Drucker: There are only two writing systems in existence today, Chinese characters and the alphabet. People often say, well what do you mean by that? There’s Arabic letters, there’s Indian scripts, there’s Ethiopic letters, there’s all of these various kinds of letterforms. What do you mean there’s only two writing systems? Most people don’t understand that the alphabet is actually a synthesis of two early writing systems, Egyptian hieroglyphics and various forms of cuneiform. Once the alphabet came into existence, those other forms went out of existence. Not causally. Not because of the alphabet, but due to various other cultural and historical transformations. But, all the major writing systems that we use today either descend from the alphabet or Chinese writing.
Johanna Drucker is the author of the book Alphabetic Labyrinth. This is what ChildrenOfTheCode has to say about her:
Dr. Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She has been on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Harvard University. Dr. Drucker has authored many books including: Theorizing Modernism,The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, The Alphabetic Labyrinth, The Century of Artists’ Books and Figuring the Word. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental, visual poet.
** The Children of the Code animation (top right) was inspired by Dr. Drucker’s use of the image of the Pergamon Disc on the cover the Alphabetic Labyrinth (which we overlaid with the fetus drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci).
