> current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian heiroglyphics. You can do the basic things like...
Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.
The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.
> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?
For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.
> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.
Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.
I acknowledge you know a lot more about Hieroglyphics than me. But my comments were based on the understanding that it was really the development of an alphabet by the Phoenicians that took writing from an obscure system to something usable by every day people. Maybe this isn't the case?
Also English is widely acknowledged to be a very expressive language compared to, say, Swedish which has a sparser every day vocabulary. I'd be surprised if you told me that the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics.
I agree, Excel is a programming environment. Could do with better version control and debugging though.
I'm sorry there is no evidence that a particular language is 'better' than any other.
All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies - English happens (now) to have a very large specialist vocabulary (which wasn't available to Shakespeare) and which it actually shares with most other languages.
Shakespeare got his vocab up by generating a host of new English words from French, Latin and the other dominant languages of the time.
As we speak the Kiyuku Shakespeare is stealing words for his play.
> the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics
On a technical point you could copy Shakespeare into it now - it has (most) of the current English sounds and with a couple of conventions/accents you would be good to go. I wouldn't recommend switching writing systems anytime soon.
> All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies
I spent a lot of time working in Sweden and had many conversations with the locals (all of whom know English very well). Many of them remarked that English has more alternative words for something than Swedish and that each one has a subtly different meaning. For example, how you can use "grand" in place of "big" or "large", they all mean roughly the same thing but "grand" brings with it additional meaning. So, my personal experience appears to contradict this statement.
My point is really that languages and alphabets are tools and some tools make certain jobs easier. You could write a website in assembly, but its easier in Rails. However, I suspect our ancestors will look back at Rails and have similar feelings to us when we look back at ancient writing systems now.
Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.
The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.
> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?
For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.
> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.
Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.