Something written had to exist in order to be read, so writing is at least a second older than reading.
You must log in or # to comment.
Writing and reading had to have developed simultaneously, otherwise the person writing was just drawing. To be writing you have to be able to interpret what you are writing.
Its a chicken and egg situation. The chicken has to come from the egg but the egg has to come from the chicken. In reality, both the chicken and the egg had to come from something that was neither recognizable as a chicken nor an egg. The proto chicken if you will. In the case of writing that would probably be using symbols to indicate numbers of things. Or hieroglyphs. Pictures that are representative of ideas like words, even though they are not words themselves
Pictographs is the term.
The chicken-egg paradox in writing is that at some point someone came up with a symbol that meant something more than “drawing of profile of buffalo means buffalo.” So when that one person said “OK, I’m drawing a buffalo with an arrow above it, that means ‘go hunting’” there was an hour or two between writing and reading being invented.
No. You can read signs. Like foot prints, or fire scars. Or you can count actually objects before you invent tallying.
An individual person can learn to read before they learn to write, and that’s almost always the case. But the very, very first person to ever do either of those things wrote before he read.
The very first person to write was doing so with the intent of it being read. They didn’t make marks that they didn’t understand and then later discover their meaning. Writing makes no sense without reading. These two things happened in unison, one does not predate the other.
I wasn’t taking about an individual, I was talking about humans as a species and culture.
There may also have been a series of simple pictures that someone had put next to each other, then someone else figuring out “hey, if I make the symbols simple enough and draw a lot of them, I can actually record stories completely accurately!”
In that case, the reading would come first, as the reader would be the first one to interpret the simplistic images as text.
It would have been both invented at the same time right? The person writing it would have needed to decipher their own markings.
Yeah, agreed. But OP could be technically correct, if you count the almost non existing time the person wrote something before the light from the writing reached the eye.
But then again, there’s a higher chance someone splashed something random on a wall and thought “hey that looks like something” making reading the first, because the “writing” was not intentional making it a different action.
Makes sense? Maybe.
