Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news.unt.edu!hermes.oc.com!internet.spss.com!markrose
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Age of writing; ancient grammar
Message-ID: <D518By.Fx2@spss.com>
Sender: news@spss.com
Organization: SPSS Inc
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 1995 18:50:20 GMT
Lines: 28

Andrzej Pindor, in an article that has expired here, asked about the
age of Greek and Hebrew writing, and about whether grammatical information
can be recovered from Egyptian-style scripts.

The ancient Semitic alphabet dates back 3300 to 3800 years (estimates vary).
The Greek alphabet is about 2700 years old.  Greek was also written in a 
syllabic script (Linear B) about 3600 years ago; this script died out with 
the Minoan civilization.

The oldest script in the world is the Sumerian, a logographic script that
dates back about 5000 years.  Egyptian hieroglyphics are just a bit younger;
Chinese logograms go back 3500 years or so.

You don't need an alphabet to recover grammatical information.  Logographic
scripts record syntactic and morphological information as well as alphabets
do, and even a good deal of phonetic information.  

See Geoffrey Sampson's excellent _Writing Systems_ for more on all this.

So far as linguists have been able to discover, the kinds of language
this far back in history were exactly the same as the kinds that exist today.
Individual languages change, sometimes radically, but there is nothing 
about ancient languages that make them different in kind from today's
languages.

This should be no great surprise, given that anthropologists and linguists
generally think that language is at least 100,000 years old.  All we have
available for analysis is the tail end of that period of development.
