Glossary
A picture-sign used in early writing to represent contract-like information about labor and payment.
Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
pictogram
A source-grounded reading of Jiang’s lecture on Homer as the big bang of Greek civilization: empire turns writing into control, the polis turns speech into civic training, and the Iliad turns war into the...
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Topic Scope And Freshness
A source-grounded reading of Jiang’s lecture on Homer as the big bang of Greek civilization: empire turns writing into control, the polis turns speech into civic training, and the Iliad turns war into the...
Key Notes
model
He models writing's development as a movement from pictograms to symbols to ideograms to sounds and consonants, with each innovation making language more flexible.
Timestamped Evidence
Transcript
"...A contract. So, basically, the writing system, at first, was a pictogram, a pictograph, that served the function of a contract. So, for example,..."
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"...wheat. Does that make sense? So, they first started out as pictograms. And what they recognized is, hey, we can just have this as..."
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"So, now you have a concept, an idea, day, okay? We call this an ideogram. And guess what, guys? Chinese is an ideogramic language...."
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"And we call this the alphabet. Does it make sense? Okay? So, this is the development of writing. And the reason why we do..."
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"...in the beginning when we first start to write we had pictograms okay so this is the sun this is the moon okay sun..."
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"...This is moon. Okay? So that's the first stage. They have pictograms to represent ideas. Okay? Then what they would do is make the..."
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"...made literacy more difficult over time. All right? China took the pictograms and made them even more complex. And added these very complex grammatical..."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
Reading
A source-grounded reading of Jiang’s lecture on Homer as the big bang of Greek civilization: empire turns writing into control, the polis turns speech into civic training, and the Iliad turns war into the...
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Reading
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YouTube
Data
Reading
China had the technologies that made modernity possible, then built a political culture that made those technologies inert.
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Greek civilization begins as a reversal: chaos, illiteracy, and poverty force the polis, the alphabet, and Homer, until poetry teaches a new human being how to see, feel, and think.
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Related Topics
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