Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 13, 2023

First came pictures, then came picture-writing, then came letters of the alphabet, then came dialog balloons. (Chinese skipped the alphabet step.)

Egyptians put Personal names inside of dialogue ballons.

Pretty sure people were talking to each other long before anyone could draw or write.

I’m not sure which came first …

… but in my dictionary “Language” comes before “Pictures”

Speaking was prior to writing. Pictorial images came before scripted expression. Cartoon Strips merger pictures and text together.

Writing came much later than language in human history. In fact, it’s very recent in our timeline, so how would cave drawers write dialogue without an alphabet?

How about an hybrid, sign language?

Spoken language first, but in some cases pictures ARE a language.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

I never had a thought balloon about that before.

if the sports team coach has to explain something to some of his foreign players a drawing board works even without knowledge of each others language.

She said “language,” Caulfied, not “writing.”

Maybe there wasn’t all that much time between the two.

Cave people were too busy surviving to worry about dialogue balloons.

There’s cave paintings of the same animal depicted in multiple positions and overlapping each other. Scientists now believe that this may have been an early attempt at animation, as waving a flickering torch in front of the images may have given the animal drawings the illusion of movement. Our early ancestors were more intelligent, creative, and clever than most people give them credit for.

Writing was a new and disruptive technology, and Socrates complained that it would make people forgetful and lazy (and we only know that because Plato wrote it down).

.

Of course, he also may have been worried that it would displace old men as repositories of information.

but how do you know that wasn’t their ‘language’?

Some people say fire. Some say the wheel. Some fast-forward a million years and say nuclear fission or the internet. My own nominee for humanity’s greatest invention (not discovery, not luck, not a gift of the gods) is language.

I agree. Pictures first.

Which came first, the word chicken or a picture of an egg?

Somebody drew a picture. And then another somebody asked “What’s that?”

Language came first, then the tower of Babel, then pictures, since after they couldn’t understand each other, they tried drawing to tell each other what was going on…

Language. It’s faster to say “there’s a bear in that cave” than to draw it.

Speaking came long before writing

Well, that settles it.

Ah, the age-old and apparently immortal confusion between “language” and “writing”.