The Tools Make the Text
Cursive, cuneiform, and a post-keyboard world
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
If you’ve missed the news, A.I. is living up to its promise of helping to create major breakthroughs in research, in this case, the realm of paleography.
A group of researchers from multiple institutions have just released their paper on their new machine-learning model for translating ancient Akkadian texts into English. Akkadian is just one of several languages preserved in cuneiform on ancient clay tablets dating back five to six thousand years, and the project promises to assist translate thousands of clay tablet, allowing for faster analysis than could be done with an army of Akkadian specialists (of which there are not many to begin with).
(Will this get us another Ea-nāṣir? I can just taste the excitement, it smells like copper!)
Unrelated but totally related, a friend shared this essay: How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive.
I thought: well yeah, because what we use to write determines how we write.
Cuneiform looks very awkward and weird to modern people, what with all the little wedges stamped into the clay. Why weren’t they using an alphabet? Or characters? Or logograms?
Because when you are writing on clay, making a stamp creates a clearer image than dragging your stylus across it.
Which leads to the question, why clay? Why reed styluses?
Because ink (or paint) and paper are both technologically complex and resource-intensive materials. There was definitely paint and probably some kind of paper in existence by that time, but they were not common materials, and even small batches required trained craftsmen, time, and expensive material resources to create.
There were no blank notebooks and spare pens lying around for someone to pick up and dash off a note, but there was a lot of clay and a lot of naturally growing reeds. If you needed to create a receipt or a make a note for a customer, you picked up a handful of clay, smacked it into a small tablet shape, and started punching it with the end of a reed. A clay tablet is inexpensive all the way around: time, expense, and materials. The only real investment was in teaching people how to read cuneiform, which was why scribes were often highly prized and well compensated, no matter how cheap the clay they used.
Likewise, the switch from fountain pens to ballpoint pens likely did have some role to play in the shift away from cursive. My father was a schoolboy in the 1930s, so he learned the Palmer method of cursive in school, using pencils and, yes, fountain pens. He was probably introduced to ballpoint pens during WWII, when he was a pilot in the European theater. At the time, ball point pens were the height of new-fangled writing technology!
My entire life, he wrote exclusively in print letters, not cursive. The only time I saw his rather elegant cursive was for his signature. I asked him about it once and he simply said, “it’s easier to read and less messy.”
Me, a child of the ballpoint pen era, had no idea what he meant by “messy” but I came to suspect it was a commentary on using fountain pens.
When it is hard to drag the stylus across the clay legibly, you make stamped wedges. When you have access to a lot of water and cheaper materials, you whip up some paint/ink and pound out some papyri to draw hieroglyphs on. When it is hard to drag a ballpoint pen across cheap paper, you start writing in print letters instead of cursive.
What does this mean in the world of keyboards?
Honestly, I’d argue we’re already moving past keyboards, thanks to A.I.
Like the Palmer method of writing during my father’s young adulthood, cursive today is already turning into an unusual skill that people have to purposefully seek out in order to learn. Similarly, touch typing has been falling out of the school system for decades, and while it is still very useful, we are already at the point where it is becoming an esoteric skill-set that people have to purposefully seek out and learn.
When it comes to keyboards, over the course of a few decades we’ve gone from typewriters, which for about 100 years required a special skill set only a select portion of the population needed learn and use regularly, to ubiquitous computer keyboards. Now we also have smartphone keyboards, and swipe-style keyboards, and dictation.
This begs the heretofore unimaginable question: How much longer will we really need old fashioned keyboards?
People like me will need keyboards until we die or cannot physically use them anymore, honestly, but I’m a 55 year old GenX. My guess is that the Millennial generation after me is the going to be the last generation truly dependent on any kind of keyboard at all.
Younger people are already comfortable using verbal commands and dictation, and that number will grow as time goes on, especially as A.I. becomes more (and more) sophisticated (and make no mistake, it is artificial intelligence that is behind swipe keyboards and dictation). People will get acclimated to talking instead of typing (even writing) for everything.
Sure, it will probably take years, if not decades, but there will come a time when a keyboard is as esoteric a household appliance as typewriters are now.
Like my father, I’m bridging the gap of a change of technologies, and I suspect in less than 50 (20? 30?) years my ability to touch-type will be as quaint and underutilized as my father’s fancy cursive.
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