Question: What if Indigenous Precolumbian North Americans invented writing?

This is not so much a WI that I am trying to answer as it is a query to the experts. I would just like to know what would happen if one fairly prolific North American tribe or culture invented a phonetic script and if that script would possibly be adopted by other cultures. I'm not sure what time would be best for it but I'd put it a few centuries before the Old World unleashes it's maelstrom of death.

I'm well aware that the Mesoamericans had writing and that the Tawantinsuyu had that . . . Hair-knot colour coded necklace. I'm not sure about the invention of the Cree alphabet and where it lies chronologically, either- I mean for a fully independent alphabet invented by a powerful and prolific North American people that can have the chance to spread across.

Answers to this humble query are extremely appreciated, and I hope this prompt stirs some kind of interest for any prolific writers in here . . . *Unsubtle nudge*. Actually, knowing this place, there's probably already an excellent timeline along these lines, so a secondary purpose of this question is scouting for it, I guess.
 
Mesoamericans were North Americans, they lived north of Panama.

Assuming you mean north of Mesoamerica, there are two main candidates - the Eastern Woodlands and the American Southwest. The first has a lot of potential (i.e the Mi'kmaq had this although it was rather thoroughly coopted by missionaries so it's hard to know what it was like before Europeans, and the Ojibwe have this, none are true writing but they might have become one eventually - the Ojibwe ones had some degree of standardization). The Puebloans had their pictographs, and they could perhaps get it from Mesoamerica early on (although that's not really an "invnetion" like you wanted, then).
 
Mesoamericans were North Americans, they lived north of Panama.

Assuming you mean north of Mesoamerica, there are two main candidates - the Eastern Woodlands and the American Southwest. The first has a lot of potential (i.e the Mi'kmaq had this although it was rather thoroughly coopted by missionaries so it's hard to know what it was like before Europeans, and the Ojibwe have this, none are true writing but they might have become one eventually - the Ojibwe ones had some degree of standardization). The Puebloans had their pictographs, and they could perhaps get it from Mesoamerica early on (although that's not really an "invnetion" like you wanted, then).

It doesn't necessarily have to be an "invention", it just has to be phonetic, as phonetic alphabets seem unusually prolific and relatively easy to learn.
 
The languages mentioned so far appear to be logographic, can they transition into phonetic languages? If so, how, and if not why? And the negatory will surprise me as I'm pretty sure cueniforme slowly became phonetic in nature.
 
The languages mentioned so far appear to be logographic, can they transition into phonetic languages? If so, how, and if not why? And the negatory will surprise me as I'm pretty sure cueniforme slowly became phonetic in nature.
This type of teleological view of history should be avoided IMO - cuneiform became phonetic, but Chinese characters remain, well, remain what it is today.
 
It is... complicated.
True writing emerged independently three or (most likely to current scholarship) four times (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica). In all those cases, a phonetic component was there from the start (you actually can't have true writing without it, accoding to present consensus) but it was relatively secondary.
On the other hand, the alphabetic principle appears to have been invented only once. To the best of my knowledge, all abjads, alphabets and abugidas ever attested in the world, with very few partial exceptions like Meroitic and perhaps Ogham, are ultimately clearly derived or strongly inspired from the orginal Levantine abjad attested in the Ugaritic tablets, Proto-Canaanite fragments and (most probably) Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions.
(Meroitic seems to have evolved an alphasyllabic principle out the Egyptian logograms independently from the Canaanites and their neighbours, through a longer evolutionary process, but the underlying language is abysmally poorly understood and external influences from othr alphabetic societies like South Arabia or even India are considered a possibility).
The four original logographic systems, however, consistenly showed the ability to evolve toward systems where the phonetic element is more prominent (you could alternatively look at Meroitic as the ultimate stage of Egyptian Hieroglyphs in that direction), up to and including fully syllabic systems such as Japanese kana or Mycenean Linear B (both used in conjuction with logographs). These evolutions were hardly linear, and took millennia.
In China, this was blocked by the ortographic trend to merge the phonetic element and the semantic determinant (usually called "radical") into a visually unitary character that usually represents a monosyllabic morpheme or word. So in the Chinese script the phonetic element of writing tended to lose, if not importance, transparency and autonomy, stopping further moves toward a phonetic simplification of signs inventory (which actually tended to grow in Chinese far beyond what Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic had).
But even there, Korean and Japanese used that sign inventory to write at least partly phonetically.

What does all this tell us?
1) Inventing writing is rare. Writing tends to be a function of complex social organization, and starts out as a complex logographic system. In order to keep it going, you need specifially trained specialists and schools, simply to mantain the system into standardized shape. This, in turn, requires the economic surplus to mantain such a group of dedicated scribes (they haveto be fed, clothed and housed during year-long training) and the long-term political will/need to employ you surplus this way.
2) Simplifying writing into something like an alphabet (or abjad) is even rarer and not at all straightforward. Requires time, the only historical example we have points to over a millennium before someone had the idea. Part of it is about said class of scribes being pretty jelaous of its privileges and used to be upholders of tradition. Part of it is that we seem to be hardwired not to automatically parse language into alphabetic segments (syllables are perceptually more significant).

North America certainly had proto-writing, and society complex and affluent enough to keep some scribal class (you don't want your scribes to be too few, though, lest your script end up like Linear B).
It is conceivable that, either importing Mesoamerican systems or developing their signs, a true writing (bound to a single language at first) can be developed. It would be logographic at start; given time, a syllabary might emerge.
Syllabaries still require more training than alphabets (the signs to be memorized are in the low hundreds) but less than other systems, so you get it work if there is a sufficiently large societal demand for relatively widespread literacy.
But at that point, you'd have to ask how different what you have is from historical North American natives.
 
This type of teleological view of history should be avoided IMO - cuneiform became phonetic, but Chinese characters remain, well, remain what it is today.

Chinese aristocracy stayed in power, was culturally paramount over illiterate peasantry. No need for phonetics- besides, all of the people in China's sphere of influence eschewed Chinese characters in favour of phonetic scripts.
 
It is... complicated.
True writing emerged independently three or (most likely to current scholarship) four times (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica). In all those cases, a phonetic component was there from the start (you actually can't have true writing without it, accoding to present consensus) but it was relatively secondary.
On the other hand, the alphabetic principle appears to have been invented only once. To the best of my knowledge, all abjads, alphabets and abugidas ever attested in the world, with very few partial exceptions like Meroitic and perhaps Ogham, are ultimately clearly derived or strongly inspired from the orginal Levantine abjad attested in the Ugaritic tablets, Proto-Canaanite fragments and (most probably) Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions.
(Meroitic seems to have evolved an alphasyllabic principle out the Egyptian logograms independently from the Canaanites and their neighbours, through a longer evolutionary process, but the underlying language is abysmally poorly understood and external influences from othr alphabetic societies like South Arabia or even India are considered a possibility).
The four original logographic systems, however, consistenly showed the ability to evolve toward systems where the phonetic element is more prominent (you could alternatively look at Meroitic as the ultimate stage of Egyptian Hieroglyphs in that direction), up to and including fully syllabic systems such as Japanese kana or Mycenean Linear B (both used in conjuction with logographs). These evolutions were hardly linear, and took millennia.
In China, this was blocked by the ortographic trend to merge the phonetic element and the semantic determinant (usually called "radical") into a visually unitary character that usually represents a monosyllabic morpheme or word. So in the Chinese script the phonetic element of writing tended to lose, if not importance, transparency and autonomy, stopping further moves toward a phonetic simplification of signs inventory (which actually tended to grow in Chinese far beyond what Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic had).
But even there, Korean and Japanese used that sign inventory to write at least partly phonetically.

What does all this tell us?
1) Inventing writing is rare. Writing tends to be a function of complex social organization, and starts out as a complex logographic system. In order to keep it going, you need specifially trained specialists and schools, simply to mantain the system into standardized shape. This, in turn, requires the economic surplus to mantain such a group of dedicated scribes (they haveto be fed, clothed and housed during year-long training) and the long-term political will/need to employ you surplus this way.
2) Simplifying writing into something like an alphabet (or abjad) is even rarer and not at all straightforward. Requires time, the only historical example we have points to over a millennium before someone had the idea. Part of it is about said class of scribes being pretty jelaous of its privileges and used to be upholders of tradition. Part of it is that we seem to be hardwired not to automatically parse language into alphabetic segments (syllables are perceptually more significant).

North America certainly had proto-writing, and society complex and affluent enough to keep some scribal class (you don't want your scribes to be too few, though, lest your script end up like Linear B).
It is conceivable that, either importing Mesoamerican systems or developing their signs, a true writing (bound to a single language at first) can be developed. It would be logographic at start; given time, a syllabary might emerge.
Syllabaries still require more training than alphabets (the signs to be memorized are in the low hundreds) but less than other systems, so you get it work if there is a sufficiently large societal demand for relatively widespread literacy.
But at that point, you'd have to ask how different what you have is from historical North American natives.
Thank you. This is a definitive answer to my question.
 
Egyptian is almost certainly not independent of Mesopotamia (or actually a common "writing ancestor" that influenced both). China, given the time frame, most likely was not independent either. It's the same propaganda you see when it comes to agriculture. Just because you independently come up with new and unique symbols does not mean you didn't borrow the "concept" from elsewhere. That's what happened with domesticating animals and plants; and writing as well. Once you know someone has done the idea, it's easy to look around you and copy it locally your own way. But it still doesn't make it independent.
 
Egyptian is almost certainly not independent of Mesopotamia (or actually a common "writing ancestor" that influenced both). China, given the time frame, most likely was not independent either. It's the same propaganda you see when it comes to agriculture. Just because you independently come up with new and unique symbols does not mean you didn't borrow the "concept" from elsewhere. That's what happened with domesticating animals and plants; and writing as well. Once you know someone has done the idea, it's easy to look around you and copy it locally your own way. But it still doesn't make it independent.

I'd still say it were semi-independent though. And certainly all of the precolumbians got there stuff independently.
 
Egyptian is almost certainly not independent of Mesopotamia (or actually a common "writing ancestor" that influenced both). China, given the time frame, most likely was not independent either. It's the same propaganda you see when it comes to agriculture. Just because you independently come up with new and unique symbols does not mean you didn't borrow the "concept" from elsewhere. That's what happened with domesticating animals and plants; and writing as well. Once you know someone has done the idea, it's easy to look around you and copy it locally your own way. But it still doesn't make it independent.

Conceivably, there are only two inventions of writing whose mutual independence is almost watertight: Near East and Mesoamerica.

(There's also a small case for the Vinca symbols, by the way, but we have nothing like significant proof that it was actually writing - and little chance to ever get any; I am under the impression that we simply don't know enough about them, and we are unlikely to discover something that changes this).

The point is, however, that, unlike other cases where evidence for inspiration or derivation is actually there, we do not have any evidence whatsoever for Near Eastern influence, derivation or ispiration upon the earliest known writing in China. It is true, on the other hand, that the earlist phases of development of writing in China are essentially not documented at all (unless recent discoveries I am not aware of have been made). The aspect of the Shang characters, however, with its pictographic features, strongly suggests independent development. Furthermore, to best of my knowledge there is no known venue of contact that could provide the idea of writing to the Chinese from the Near East in the relevant timeframe. I am not aware of a single potsherd of anything resembling writing East of Elam and West of China in the mid-to-late Bronze Age (that would be big news). There's Indus Valley script before that (and possibility of some sort of writing remaining in use in India on perishable materials after its collapse, although no proof), but, AFAIK, there's not any sort of documented contact between India and China at the time (which would be centuries before the Shang oracle bones). And let's not even begin with the question if the Indus Valley script was actually a script (there's been some fairly nasty dispute about it; I am inclined to think it was, FWIW).
So, at the present state of knowledge (or lack thereof), I think that the case for independent writing in China is reasonably solid.

Much less so for Egypt indeed.
The full sequence of writing development is only fully documented in Mesopotamia. We can therefore assume with good confidence that the Early "Sumerians"* between the Late Uruk and Pre-dynastic periods, in the late fourth millennium BC, made the invention on their own, through a series of decently clearly understood steps, as an evolution of early methods of centralized bureaucratic accounting used by temples and palaces. Simple considerations of geographical and chronological proximity make the idea of contact/inspiration from Mesopotamia to Egypt far more plausible than it is the case for China.
However, currently available evidence does not support it. Recent discoveries point to writing existing in Egypt earlier that previously thought (and closer to a time when it had just barely emerged in Sumer) and also suggest a pretty different employ, and possibly origin, that is not as tighly related with accounting and bureacracy, and more closely to ritual/funerary contexts. This might be, however, a fluke of what documens made it to us.
One could posit the reverse way (Egyptian inspiration to Sumer) but this is unlikely in the view of the aforementioned decently clear internal sequence we have in Mesopotamia.
There is also no writing whatsoever known in the intervening regions in the relevant time, although this is not a clear proof of much since we DO have good reason to believe that trade contacts between Sumer and Egypt existed even that early.
In the end, some degree of cross-fertilization or influence, or Mesopotamian inspiration, is certainly possible with regard to writing. We simply do not have any sort of evidence about it, and some hints pointing to the contrary.
I am of two minds on the topic myself.

I feel reasonably safe saying (as I will tomorrow, to my students) that writing was invented independently probably three times, and possibly four. But the end, of course, we don't know.

I admit, anyway, that is based on the absence of proof, not on the proof of absence**.

* Quotation marks because it is not to be intended in ethnic terms, and the Sumerian identity of the written language can only be ascertained in the period, when writing was already developed.
** I cannot think of how absence of contact can be proven.
 
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I'd still say it were semi-independent though. And certainly all of the precolumbians got there stuff independently.

Theoretically, we do not have the absolute, completely airthight certainty that the idea of writing was not somehow introduced to Mesoamerica by, say, a shipwrecked Egyptian sailor from the Late Middle Kingdom who ended up to the Mexican shores through a wildly unlikely set of almost praeternaturally lucky coincidences... we simply may assume that it would be such an extremely unlikely possibility that we rightly discount it entirely unless we find a hieroglyphic stele in Mexico or something equally shocking... which I am willing to bet is not happening.
 
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There is also Nsibidi.
It is not as standardized as other known writing systems, to the point that its status as actual writing may be debated (at least for some phases of its documented history).
It is also unclear when and how it originated; it seems doubtful that it can fully qualify as "independent invention of writing" as its earliest known attestations appear to be long after the relevant area was in contact with literate societies. But it is also poorly studied, and its origins apparently poorly understood and very poorly documented. There is also an almost complete lack of decent availble scholarship about it.

(I vaguely recall having read something to the effect that some signs resemble Nok motifs, but I might be misremembering, and it proves nothing anyway).

It is still essentially independent in the visual structure. Might provide a rough analog for the lines of evolution of the Pre-Columbian proto-writing symbolic systems.
 
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Is there the slight shadow of a possibility that a Phoenician trade ship could get cast away? I know it's a beloved theory but is it plausible?
 

Lateknight

Banned
Is there the slight shadow of a possibility that a Phoenician trade ship could get cast away? I know it's a beloved theory but is it plausible?

I don't know anyways I don't think the traders were literate generally. It always strikes me as big racist when people suppose that the natives couldn't invent things themselves no they needed someone else to show them.
 

Benevolent

Banned
Wiigwaasabak and micmac hieroglyphs stayed localized, unless it reaches a point that made it valuable in say major trade or multi-ethnic religious affairs I assume it would remain so.
 
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