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As well as a written language based on the sounds of spoken language emerging in Mesopotamia, a "syllabary" emerged independently in the Mayan language of Mesoamerica. Glyphs did not represent objects as pictograms, but corresponded to sounds which were combined to make up words. They represented sound combinations of consonants and vowels or just consonants in the last syllable of a word. Yuri Knorozov's discovery of this principle and its further development led to the ancient Mayan glyphs being decipered (p48 "Ancient Maya", Arthur Demarest p 47-8) allowing their historical texts to be read.

Like many sites at Bloghof, this one is constantly spammed with trackbacks. These lead to all kinds of undesirable sites which should not be associated with dotAtelier. Whenever I delete them, which can only be done manually one-by-one, they are regenerated by the computers which send them. It seems the only way to stop this is to turn off commentaries for any other users in the internet. If commentaries are only allowed for Bloghof users, the trackbacks still come. I have now turned off the commentary function in blog entries which have had this trackback spam. I will continue to do this until it stops. New entries will not allow commentaries for this reason. If you want to leave a comment in English or German I would be happy to hear from you and I will answer. Please write in the guestbook.

A new animated exhibition featuring the beach can now be seen at the dotAtelier exhibition space.

Also new there is the dot-web exhibition. 

The earliest forms of writing have been found in Uruk in Mesopotamia. At first, as in other places, simple pictures were used in Uruk to represent things. The meaning of pictograms is quite obvious.

Subsequently, a link became established between spoken language and pictograms which led eventually to alphabet-based written languages. Parallel to the use of simple pictures as a written version of that which the represent, the pictures became a representation of the sound corresponding to that thing.

If we apply this principle in English, a spoken word such as “terrace” could be written with the pictures for “tear” and “ace”, or “factory” could be written with the pictures for “fact” and “tree” if they were available. In the cuneiform script, syllable sounds were used by scribes in texts together with word signs to enable them to “render human speech effectively in their script” (Michael Roaf, “Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia” p70). Pictograms came increasingly to represent sounds rather than things.

The step from syllables to smaller sound elements was not far off. Extra filler characters would have become necessary in combination with syllable sounds where a pictogram was not available. Syllable signs broke down into their sound elements.

Word signs have fallen out of usage by and large in alphabet-based languages except in playful contexts: . Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake