Re: What do you regard as the 2 best inventions in history and why ?

On Fri, 4 Dec 2008, Matthew Johnson wrote:

In article <7df70514-0ec8-40a9-8ae7-b8730a8c85eb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Trevor says...

What are your picks of the 2 best (whatever your definition of that
is) inventions in history that have influenced humanity for the better
and please why, for each one named.

1) alphabetic writing and 2) fractional reserve banking.

1) influence humanity for the better since it vastly improved mankind's ability
to communicate and preserve memory. Alphabetic writing is FAR superior for both
these purpose when compared to the competitors, syllabries and hieroglyphic
systems. Much easier to teach to lots of people, too.

Why FAR superior? Ideographic scripts can be used for written
communication between people who don't share a spoken language - how well
do alphabetic scripts fare in the same task? Ideographic scripts may well
be better for preserving information since changes in the spoken language
don't matter as much.

Representing the spoken language, as we get using a phonetic alphabetic
script, can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage.

How significant are the advantages of alphabetic over syllabic? The
syllabic script represents the spoken laguage better. Perhaps the ideal is
something like the Korean alphabet, essentially a phonetic alphabet
arranged by syllables.

Ease of learning is a definite advantage for alphabetic versus
ideographic, big enough to have led to replacement (or at least
acceleration of replacement) of ideographs by alphabets. The only cases I
know of alphabets being replaced by ideographs are due to the
big-ideograph-using-neighbour effect, or imperialism. For ordinary writing
anyway - one might consider the spread of the non-alphabet writing of
mathematics as an example.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://espace.uq.edu.au/list/author_id/1189/
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html
.

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