Rich and Strange Aeons

My take on why the development of writing is associated with states:

Every 'pristine' writing system has started with pictographs and then advanced to some sort of logographs + rebus principle. Functional, but very complex, almost a second language to learn, and thus needing specialist scribes or a modern commitment and capacity for mass education. Which means, if not requiring a state per se, requiring a societal size and complexity that also gives you a state in practice.

(Such systems often spin off something simpler, like hiragana or what became the Phoenician abjad, but that almost never displaces elite writing in the original society[1], though it may be taken up by foreigners for their own use.)

A syllabary or alphabetic system is simple enough that people in a 'simple' tribe could easily pass it on to their children, for use in markers or letters or household notes. But no one sits down and develops a phonemic analysis of their language from scratch. The closest is Sequoyah creating the Cherokee syllabary, and that took 12 years of crazy intense work driven by already knowing that European writing existed and was useful, years in which he ended up recapitulating the pictograph -> logograph -> syllabary development.

So you could have literate hunter-gatherers or simple farming communities, but based on historical models they would never develop writing from scratch, because the path always goes through a really complex phase that they can't support.

[1] An exception being Korean hangul, which did mostly displace Chinese characters in South Korea -- nearly 500 years after its development by an actual king, and under the extreme pressures of modernization.

Out of my many fanfic ideas, today I wrote one down, 1900 words in 80 minutes, for a 2 chapter manga where I may have already written more words than exist in the source. Having cycled it through my imagination for the past few days, and being mostly dialogue, it flowed out pretty well -- and yet I find that even a tiny outline, say of the intended 'beats', might have helped, since I ended up combining two topics back to back when I'd meant for them to be separated by another episode. So that's interesting.

This link goes to a longish article on the complexity of sentences and changes therein. Those who are familiar with the literature of the 18th or 19th centuries, including such documents basic to the USA as the Declaration of Independence, may have noticed a difference in the length and complexity of many sentences from those periods, compared to those of the current era. The author says that there is a real difference, across not just time but also languages: it is written languages which most reliably embed clauses in each other like Russian dolls. Even oral languages which have the tools for such behavior may have likely acquired them from contact with written languages.

Does that mean purely oral languages are simpler? Nay! Though their sentences are allegedly childishly simple (examples given include "It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread." "He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then."), their complexity "erupts" elsewhere, with frighteningly complex word formation, such as in polysynthetic languages.

However, not all complexity is the same. The author claims that the word-formation form of complexity requires massive amounts of memorization, by speakers "marinating" in the language from childhood, and makes analogy to a rise in compound words in modern English whose meaning is not derivable by pattern. (Examples given: "A house boat, for example, is a boat that functions like a house, but a housecoat is a coat you wear in a house, and a housewife fits neither pattern.") Whereas syntactical complexity is generative: once learned, you can generate it, and decompose it, with equal ease and glee.

My lay grasp of linguistics is far from able to judge the accuracy of the claims. I would note though that it's not a matter of the article contrasting modern Western languages to indigenous ones like Yupik: the claim is that the earliest written languages also showed the pattern:

"According to linguist Guy Deutscher, the earliest clay tablets (about 2500 B.C.) of the ancient language Akkadian reveal few embedded clauses. The same is evidently true of the earliest stages of other ancient written languages such as Sumerian, Hittite, or Greek. Although these languages boasted a profusion of grammatical features suitable for expressing subtle nuances of meaning, and included a variety of fancy word-building techniques, they avoided complicated sentence recursion."

(Bold emphasis mine.)

So instead of recursive embedded clauses, you get long run-on sentences of chained clauses. Which rings a bell about something I found odd in translations of old Sumerian and Akkadian writing.

Finally, the article tries to link this to esoteric vs. exoteric communities. Small isolated communities can build up memory-taxing stores of word building patterns, which in turn keep the community isolated; large and diverse communities need something with clearer rules. The esoteric community needn't just be some small ancient tribe: modern scientific discourse is identified as an area where sentence complexity diminishes, while non-transparent compound nouns or phrases grow in use.

"Evidence shows that the most insular scientific communities have led the march away from elaborated sentences in favor of complex, compressed nouns: Science articles in specialist publications such as the Journal of Cell Biology contain fewer relative clauses and more noun compounds than articles in publications like Science, which target a more diverse community of scientists."

(That said, I recall a friend's advisor explaining scientific language differently: given a desire to appeal to many people for whom English is not their first language, the acts of keeping sentences simple and free of colorful idioms, and using unambiguous vocabulary, are virtues.)

Hanging out on /r/fanfiction recently, I've run across multiple people who hate 1st person narrators. This baffles me, like "I won't read books by women" or "I won't read books with a girl lead". There are so many great 1st POV books out there, including seminal works of the genre or its penumbra as well as 'literature': Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the parts of Moby Dick that aren't pure infodump, Amber, Night in the Lonesome October, Vlad Taltos, Book of the New Sun, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, Sunshine, Heart of Darkness, the Farseer trilogies, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Bertie Wooster, Hunger Games, Ancillary series, Black Company, 20,000 Leagues... and multiple high quality fanfics.

(Also my own Nanoha fics but I make no claims for the quality of those.)

So, since my previous post that mentioned finally writing a bit of fanfic, I've banged out maybe another 15,000 words. Not in one grand work, but in several slice of life conversations meant to be part of multiple cycles. Not 'published' at all yet, since both the writing and the ideas themselves are subject to revision. But what attracts me to the fandom has become more obvious.

MGLN = Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the show title, so I can use 'Nanoha' less ambiguously.

1. Artificial beings and loyalty

I've always been intrigued by AIs, and one of the intriguing things has been the prospect of designed motivation, e.g. beings that *want* to serve, or don't mind dying. Whether you view this as part of a utopian future, dystopian recreation of slavery, or just an interesting ethical challenge, it's, um, interesting. And while most SF works have just some kind of robots, MGLN has multiple kinds of artificial being and possible mental origins, creating a nice diversity.

(For hard SF I've thought of mixing Lungfish/Saturn's Children brain-emulation robots as surrogate people with the purer "we built this" servant-robots of Chobits; I don't think I've ever seen that elsewhere: these robots are people, these robots are self-aware tools.)

2. Precocious Child Agency

While lots of kid/teen shows have this, and often a viewer feeling that the story would be way more plausible with 3 years added to everyone's age, MGLN stands out in my experience for having 9-10 year old characters. And while TOS has a 9 year old drafted by hard necessity, StrikerS has two 10 year olds as regular military members. Running off with this, and ideas of apprenticeship and superpowered kids and such, is interesting to me. Also ties into my interest in overprotective parenting, free-range parenting, et al. (Conversely, spending the last 6 weeks around actual 8 and 11 year olds was an interesting reality check of sorts.)

3. Immortality

Also a lifelong interest of mine. Actually not a huge theme in MGLN, but one set of characters is at least two millennia old, two other kind of artificial being have no obvious lifespan limit, and my favorite character has accelerated healing and could plausibly be ageless, though canon hasn't hinted at that. Still, there's enough for me to work with, not even mentioning the Artificial Mage implications, the transhumanist implications of which I was actually trying to defuse for one story cycle.

4. Telepathy

There's barely any mind-reading in this franchise, but any magical characters have the ability to communicate mentally over a vaguely limited range (or unlimited, for the millennials.) The show sometimes has "A is talking out loud, B and C are snarking mentally as she does so"; that social phenomenon fascinates me. It's like being able to pass notes in class, or text, all the time. The show, of course, has it easy; I'm interested in first person POV, which makes for a challenge: A has no direct way of knowing B and C are talking mentally, but might guess if they make odd reactions, or stall out in the middle of spoken conversation. Which is totally rude but I doubt the temptation could be always resisted. Fanfics which remember the characters can do this get a plus from me.

I was studying first-person books I like, more closely, to get writing tips, and I realized I've probably been influenced by the Vlad Taltos books, most of which have Vlad snarking mentally with his familiar, along with the occasional conversation with other humanoids. Except for Athyra, which has the third-person POV of a teenage peasant, who gets to observe Vlad and his familiars. Hmm, and I think Orca has Kiera's POV on them too. More to study!