ABSTRACT
Like number, writing was not a unique event that spread outward like an irreversible wave of progress. Instead, the creation of writing appears to be a human response to life getting complicated, and it was invented and re-invented many times over. The Sumerians extended the power of their language to express meaning by including more phonetic elements, and it gradually became more recognisable as the written representation of a spoken language. Modern forms of writing have come about through the overlaying of myriads of decisions across the centuries, but the cortex of all the decision-makers would already have undergone their preliminary tuning. When written language contains phonograms, reading requires visual symbols to be turned into speech before their meaning can be understood. Language is perhaps the best known example of "laterality", when a mental ability draws unevenly on the two sides of the brain.
