Thanks, David! Agree – we actually have no way of knowing how he counted his languages; even today, it’s not unusual for people to exclude their mother tongue(s) from a count of their languages, or a widely used lingua franca that “everyone” is supposed to know …

Oh, sorry! I had managed to overlook your postscript and only saw that my comments never got through.

Yes, I certainly agree that stimulus diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt may be why the hieroglyphs were developed; they’re definitely not descended from cuneiform in any narrower sense than that, though (there is no correspondence in shapes, meanings or sounds).

Thank you, Ingrid! Agree that monolingualism is the much more unusual condition that requires explanation and only emerges under very specific circumstances …

The Rosetta Stone, bearing the same message in three different scripts (Egypt, 196 BCE) is well-known in Europe and its name is now a byword for multilingualism. Ashoka’s Edicts (Mauryan Empire, from 256 BCE), some of which are written in three different languages, are well-known in India and the subject of both ongoing research and public interest, as this news article shows: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/allahabad/script-used-in-ashokan-pillars-is-dhammlipi-not-brahmi-says-scholor/articleshow/52433957.cms

Now we can add the Manishtushu Obelisk to what we know about the prevalence of multilingual State administration.

A class of educated scribes must have been a necessity, but the multilingual skills of people all over the world who have had limited or no formal education are remarkable. While I haven’t done any research, some casual reflection on my own experiences indicates a link between monolingual societies and historically recent status as a colonising power- or personal dentification with that power.

Thank you for the detail history of the writing. It is very interesting to learn the history of writing, and how almost all languages around the world are the breeds of Sumerian multilanguage.

Without writing, people will not know about the history, which they could learn from. For example, though the first writing is in a form of spreadsheet rather than a story which most people might guess, it allowed the next generation to learn and understand about the complexity of social administration.

It is also interesting to acknowledge that the language mixing in Sumerian and Akkadian languages were the results of most people fluent in one spoken language only. This results in the Akkadian word ‘injected’ in the written language of Sumerian. Nowadays, I found that most of written language mixing is due to the writer being competent, if not fluent, in both languages.

Hi Chen and Ingrid, thank you for your interesting notes on multilingualism and the bilingual word list in which ancient people managed a lot from the art of writing on crude and/or inaccessible materials to the formal language training in the written-only Sumerian language apart from their actively spoken Akkadian language. Back then, the fundamental purpose was record keeping, and they displayed an excellence on language use to achieve that purpose. In modern days, people are advantageous in multimodalities, technology advancement and ubiquitous information, but we have limited abilities in interpretation and translation with a narrow focus on language mastery rather than values of cultures and social relationships.

Thanks, Zoe! Maybe we should ask what motives some cultures have had to become monolingual …

Majoring in linguistics, I have always been curious about how was it like to communicate when people didn’t have so-called official languages. Through this intriguing article, I have realized that the concept of ‘official language’ does not necessarily exist. On the other hand, language is not that limited as what I assumed, it is more about using loanwords, mixing with the other(s) to create a new writing system. As an heir of Sumerian, I feel so much proud of how bright our ancestors were and grateful for such great invention. On account of this principle of language formation, it is feasible for the descendants to develop different languages as an identical feature of a region like what we use today.

Cheers
Tammy

Thanks, Jay! It all started out with pictures, which became ever more abstract and slowly developed into logograms, as I explain here.