Writing was independently invented at least four times in human history: in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. The scripts of these civilizations are considered pristine, or developed from scratch by societies with no exposure to other literate cultures. All other writing systems are thought to be modeled after these four, or at least after the idea of them.
With future research, the number of pristine scripts could decrease, if archaeologists find evidence that any of these cultures copied the idea of writing from one another (most likely Mesopotamia and Egypt, because geography). And the number could grow, if other ancient symbol systems are deciphered and proven to represent true writing. But as it stands, most scholars believe that just these four scripts had independent origins.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2018/12/19/the-origins-of-writing/

A fun read for your weekend

Happy New Year to all our clients, employees, contractors, partners, friends and family! Have a successful 2019, everyone!

Many animals vocalize but may not be capable of vocal learning. Vocal learning is ability to imitate new sounds and use them correctly in different situations. Bats, cetaceans and birds are vocal learners. Orcas are advanced vocal learners in that they can imitate sounds of other species.
https://www.azula.com/orcas-learned-speak-dolphin-2476405389.html

Happy holidays to all our clients, employees, collaborators, partners, friends and family around the world!

Efforts are underway to train algorithms on a sample of 4,000 ancient administrative texts from a digitised database. Each records transactions or deliveries of sheep, reed bundles or beer to a temple or an individual. Originally impressed into the clay with a reed stylus, the texts have already been transliterated into our alphabet by modern scholars. The Sumerian word for big, for example, can be written in cuneiform signs, or it can be written in our alphabet as “gal”.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181207-how-ai-could-help-us-with-ancient-languages-like-sumerian

This fascinating study asked whether the senses are equally expressible (or, alternatively, ineffable) in all languages. Earlier work in the color domain has operationalized this notion by referring to “codability”: The linguists who studied it showed, for example, that length of response (number of syllables or words), reaction times, and agreement across speakers and within speakers over time, all correlated highly, but that agreement across speakers had by far the highest factor loading. They also showed that codability correlated with correct recognition of colors, concluding that “more nameable categories are nearer the top of the cognitive ‘deck’”. Codability is thus an important measure, rolling in Zipf’s law (frequency of names correlates with brevity) with perceptual accessibility. So this study extended the research across 64 languages to include all senses. And the results showed that language to language, there is no Aristotelian hierarchy of senses.
In Malay, for example, shape is the most codable of the senses on average and smell is the least codable, but in Umpila the exact opposite pattern holds—smell is the most codable and shape is the least.
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11369