A University of Wisconsin professor traced the unusual history of writing from knotted strings to picture alphabets Wednesday night.
UW Anthropology professor Frank Salomon spoke about his current project–studying a form of writing still used today through knotted, colored strings called khipus in South American culture.
He argued writing, in the minds of English speakers, is confined to the world of the English alphabet, and changing this frame of mind is essential for other forms of writing to survive.
“The definition of writing has to flex a lot or else become irrelevant. The most generous definition is ‘communicating by inscribed marks,'” Salomon said.
Although the Romanized letters are what most of America is used to, Salomon urged the audience to not let the English alphabet constrict what they think writing can be.
Instead, he urged the audience to realize the importance of other scripts and forms of writing.
His work raises fundamental questions about what it means to write and read. It broadly focuses on sign systems and codes. Salomon researches language and how it is connected to various kinds of writing.
One such writing system is the South American khipus — a series of colored string that was knotted on a base ten system to keep track of things such as censuses, inventories, tribute records or other quantities.
During his travels to South America, Salomon said he encountered villages using khipus to make sure each person in the village was doing the work they were responsible for. The khipus were used as a time clock.
Salomon said “[Khipus] were considerably faster and more accurate than the ones which the earliest Spaniards in the region could manage.”
Although Salomon said the khipus was still a part of South American culture, the role it was playing was dwindling steadily.
“Upholding endangered scripts are more central than they ever were to everybody’s larger literacy,” Salomon said.
Salomon said that re-examining the concept of letters themselves continues to be a productive way of refreshing humanistic conversations. One example he gave was of Native American groups and their invention of non-European alphabets.
He referred to the creation of the Cherokee syllabary, a type of hieroglyphics, which made reading and writing in the language possible.
Salomon said the creator of Cherokee syllabary created a picture alphabet with each character based on the type of noise the character made.
UW sophomore Matt Weinstein said he enjoyed Salomon’s lecture. He said he found the lecture interesting even though he was initially confused by some of Salomon’s jargon.
Weinstein said it was a different perspective on writing, one that interested him because he doesn’t often think about the nuances and history of writing.
Salomon, a professor at Madison since 1982, primarily teaches courses on the Andean peoples, but also touches on religion, research design and methods and literacy.
His written work on the Incan record keeping system has been praised by scholars as the most important work ever produced about the subject.