Script origin and typology

PTD recycled an old, unpublished talk of his for a submission to
Language Log:

Script origin and typology, part 1
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64775

Script origin and typology, part 2
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64822

Some interesting thoughts in there, e.g.:

  If, however, a language is not monosyllabic—as in, for instance,
  Indo-European or Semitic or Uralic or Altaic—the chances are
  rather less good that the picture put for one word would have the
  same sound as another word or one very like it, as with the
  Sumerian ti example. And that is why writing could get started
  in Sumerian, in Chinese, in Maya, and probably in Dravidian; while
  the best candidate for writing where it didn’t get started—the
  Inca civilization—did not use a monosyllabic language, and so
  came up with quipus for accounting, but not with writing.

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Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de