105. Primary Parallelism: the Beginnings of Writing
Primary parallelism can be established fairly frequently, but usually only with reference to a general principle, the applications of which invariably retain evidence of their original separateness.
An illustration is furnished by the history of writing, as sketched in the introductory paragraphs of the chapter on the Alphabet (§ [130-133]). Many nations have entered the simple stage of pictography. Only a few are known to have gone on to the stage of rebus or transitional writing—mixed pictograms or ideograms and phonograms. Of these, certainly two and possibly as many as four, five, or six devised their own rebus systems: the Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, Hittites, Cretans, and Mayas, in four continents. But here the parallel ceases. The content of the systems, the signs themselves and their sound values, are wholly different. The similarity applies only to the principle of reading pictures or symbols for their pictureless homonyms. The concrete application of this method has nothing in common in the several parallel cases. Finally, complete phonetic writing was invented but once, all alphabets, however diverse, being historical descendants of the primitive Semitic alphabet, which served as the sole source of a tremendous diffusion (§ [134-149]).
It is worth noting, however, that the first or pictographic stage of writing is by no means a thing that flows instinctively from all men. There are peoples, like some of the Indians of Brazil and California, deficient in the ability or habit, according as one may wish to term it, of expressing themselves in linear representations. They do not draw rude outlines to depict objects. Asked to do so, they profess inability, though set an example, or make a pathetically crude attempt. Their failure or refusal does not argue inherent lack of faculty, since the children of the same races, when put to school, draw figures with interest and often with success. The attitude of the adults is rather that of a person who had never heard even a snatch of music of any kind or seen an instrument, being taken to a concert and then asked to compose a simple little song. He would look upon this task as transcendently beyond his powers. There are no songless nations, but there are pictureless ones. Consequently picture-writing is not the spontaneous product which we, who as children are reared in an environment of pictures, might imagine it to be. If pictography were due to a primary parallelism, to a spontaneous outflow of the human mind, its absences would be in need of explanation. If, on the other hand, it is the result of a single diffusing development, this must have an antiquity of more than fifteen thousand years, as attested by the Old Stone Age paintings, and the failure of certain peoples to be affected is also in need of explanation.
Another case of parallelism is the recurring tendency to write syllabically instead of alphabetically. The Hindu inclination in this direction is discussed below (§ [146]). That the phonetic symbols of rebus systems should be largely syllabic is small wonder, for they are pictures of things named with whole words. But the Hindu script was derived from a Semitic letter alphabet, and its essentially syllabic nature thus represents a reversion. The Japanese in adding 47 purely phonetic characters to the Chinese ideograms in order to express grammatical elements, proper names, and the like in their speech, denoted a syllable by each character. A third as many consonant and vowel signs would have answered the same purpose. When Sequoya the Cherokee devised an alphabet for his people in order to equate them with the whites, he incorporated the forms of a number of the English letters, but the values of all his signs were syllabic. The same holds of the West African Vei writing invented in the nineteenth century by a native. He had had enough mission schooling to be stimulated by the idea of writing, but “instinctively” fell back on syllable signs even though this necessitated two hundred different characters.
There is an evident psychological reason for the uniformity of these endeavors: we image words, in fact produce them, in syllables, not in sounds. Any one, in slow speech, tends to syllabify, whereas few wholly illiterate people can be induced without patient training to utter the separate consonants and vowels of a word, even for the purpose of teaching a foreigner.
This case of parallelism rests, therefore, on a psychological fact of apperception. But it was the “accidents” of culture, not innate psychology, that determined the particular symbols, and their values, chosen by the Hindus, Japanese, Cherokee, and Vei, with the result that in these symbols there is no specific similarity.