Writing Systems & Language
The invention, structure, and decipherment of human writing: cuneiform, hieroglyphs, alphabets, abjads, abugidas, and orthography.
How Was Writing Invented From Scratch?
From Neolithic clay accounting tokens and sealed bullae to external impressions, abstract numerals, and the phonetic rebus principle
All Published Explainers
Every verified first-principles analysis in this domain.
How Was Writing Invented From Scratch?
From Neolithic clay accounting tokens and sealed bullae to external impressions, abstract numerals, and the phonetic rebus principle
How Cuneiform Worked
From marsh reed styluses and alluvial clay impressions to logograms, syllabic phonograms, determinatives, and the polyphonic puzzle of Mesopotamia
How the Alphabet Was Invented
How Bronze Age Semitic miners in Sinai hacked Egyptian hieroglyphs, discarded hundreds of symbols, and created the 22-letter phonetic ancestor of almost all modern scripts
How Character Encoding and Unicode Actually Work
From Baudot telegraph tape and the 7-bit ASCII standard to code page mojibake and the universal UTF-8 byte scheme
How Linear B Was Deciphered
How Alice Kober's inflectional triplets and Michael Ventris's algebraic syllabary cracked an unknown Bronze Age script without a bilingual Rosetta Stone
How Hangul Was Designed
King Sejong, the 1443 Hunminjeongeum, articulatory vocal tract geometry, stroke addition, and the science of the featural alphabet
Why Do Some Scripts Write Right-to-Left?
Stone chiseling ergonomics, ink smudging on papyrus, Archaic Greek boustrophedon, and the historical bifurcation of world writing
Technical Systems & Protocols Analyzed
Hardware, protocol switches, and central clearing houses examined in this hub.