Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Communication History and Technology
Communication History and Technology
Communication History and Technology
TECHNOLOGY
COMMUNICATION
Speech
The available fossil evidence
hints that modern
adaptations for speech
appeared somewhere
between 1.5 million and
500,000 years ago. The
dynamics of evolution of
speech acquisition is
complex since it is
influenced by factors like
culturally transmitted sounds
and genetic evolution.
Writing
The history of writing dates back to the various writing systems
that evolved in the Early Bronze Age (late 4th millennium BC)
out of Neolithic proto-writing.
The evolution of writing is said to have evolved from protowriting which means pictorial messages /symbols/scribbles
that cannot be called "actual writing". For convenience we
will classify the evolution of writing into the following subcategories:
Symbols
Cave Paintings
Petroglyphs/ Rock Carvings
Pictograms
Ideograms
Writing
Symbols
Symbols developed
as a communication
tool that not only
ensures better
understanding but
also increased
longevity of the
message.
Cave Paintings
The Upper Paleolithic cave
paintings, which are a
type of rock art are the
oldest known symbols.
Homo sapiens' first crack
at communicating
information was painting.
The oldest known cave
painting is that of the
Chauvet Cave dating
back to 30,000 BC.
Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs are nothing but
rock carvings. These
Petroglyphs date back to
10,000 BC, when the
Homo sapiens have been
known to have acquired
the art of carving by
making incisions or
carvings on the rock
surface.
There have been instances
of woodcarvings and
even tattoos.
Pictograms
Pictographs were the next step in
the evolution of writing. One
prominent feature that
separates petroglyphs from the
pictograms is that petroglyphs
simply depict a single event,
but pictograms narrate a story
about the event and hence can
be used to convey chronology
of several events.
Pictograms have been sighted in
the history of various ancient
cultures since around 9000 BC.
The pictograms gave way to the
evolution of Cuneiform script,
which is considered as the
earliest known form of written
expression.
Ideogram
An ideogram is an advanced
version of the pictogram. It is a
visual or graphic symbol that
represents an idea. Several
communities across the world
came up with varied ideograms
to represent numerous ideas
however, since ideas like
expression of emotions are
universal in nature, so are
many ideograms.
Ideograms are the source of
inception for most of the
logographic writing systems
like the Chinese script.
The Alphabets
The Egyptians were the first to come
up with an alphabetical system
around 2700 BC which consisted of
22 heiroglyphs.
Each heiroglyph began with a single
consonant of their language, plus a
vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied
by the speaker. Initially, these
glyphs were used as a guide for
pronunciation of the logograms, to
mark grammatical intonation and to
record foreign names.
This script passed on to many other
civilizations and inspired different
alphabetical systems like the
Phoenician alphabets, Arabic
scripts, Hebrew, Latin alphabets,
Italic alphabets, Glagolithic
alphabets or the Cyrillic alphabets.
Tele-communication
The Semaphore or the optical telegraph
system was an apparatus for
conveying information by means of
visual signals.
The system used towers with pivoting
blades or paddles, in a matrix.
Information was encoded by the
position of the mechanical elements
and the message can be interpreted
by the position of the blade.
Although the mention of the idea of a
semaphore has been recorded in the
name of an English scientist Robert
Hooke, the idea was put to practice in
France during the 1700s, when an
engineer called Claude Chappe
covered France with a network of 556
stations over a distance of 4,800
kilometers.
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Assignment
Make youre your own tool of