We did not invent words to carry knowledge and improve oir culture, we invented writing, and guess what, alphabets and words only came in thousands of years after that. Before it we had cuneiforms and various forms of pictograms, so don't assume the superiority of strictly alphabetic languages over other forms of communications.

Let's take english as a language, its capacity to convey emotion is quite limited as it was not born a language for literature. Language evolve, new forms of communication are born and merge with existing ones and together they are more powerful. It's not like we will switch to emoji only, altough if an emoji only culture existed, they would frown upon our "inexpressive, needlessly verbose weird letters" just like you are doing. Don't underestimate the scare of cultural changes over convention choices

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Cuneiform was a syllabic language. It had words and structure. It wasn't just "impressions of ideas" like pictographs. (Source: Near Eastern Archaeology was quite literally my university major)

So in no way am I referring only to "alphabetic" languages as you seem to imply. And Cuneiform is included in what I was talking about...language. Whether that's writing the epic of Gilgamesh or giving someone the worlds first bad yelp review.

Saying words didn't exist until indo-european alphabets emerged is frankly ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Saying that words didn't exist before we had writing of any kind is risible.

Writing, in the end, is intended to reflect speech, not the other way around. Writing as an invention (even in ur-forms like cave paintings) was intended to provide a way of recording speech in ways that allowed later use of it.