Idea+diffusion

Blueprints may be secret or may be illegible to outsiders. Idea diffusion happens when a group hears of a certain result and tries to build the roots to it. Cherokee (the written language) was built up from observations of English writing. The original attempts of demanding pictures, and then of symbols for each word, failed. Sequoyah eventually whittled it down to characters representing sounds, based on English letters, with some originals added. Jared Diamond suspects that some of the various forms of writing in the Middle to Far East, from Egypt to Turkey to China, used idea diffusion to some extent to form their various writing forms within such a short period of time.

Chinese writing originates around 1300 B.C. Other forms of writing elsewhere, farther to the west, had popped up earlier, but they were far away and there was nothing in between, so Chinese writing may well have been independently developed. The han'gul Korean alphabet (developed by King Sejong in 1446 A.D.) was apparently based upon the structure of Chinese characters and by the alphabetic principle of Mongolian or Tibetan writing.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are the most famous of all ancient writing systems. Egyptian writing, surprisingly, shows little evidence of being influenced. (In ancient Egyptian religion, the god Thoth created writing and knowledge. It was said that he brought to the Earth the gift of Medu Netjer [Gods' Words] and for hundreds of years the "sacred script" was used to record the words and deeds of the pharaohs and the gods and goddesses.) On the other hand, Jared Diamond suspects otherwise, with the nearby Sumer and its writing system developing not too long before Egypt's. The other seemingly independent writing systems that showed up after Sumerian and Egyptian writing in Iran, Crete, and Turkey, Diamond suggests, were probably spurred by the Sumerian and Egyptian systems, but not based upon them.

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