The closest was probably the guy who invented the Korean alphabet. Dude looked at the scribes and scholars struggling to fit Chinese characters to a language they don’t mesh with at all in terms of phonetics and grammar and said “fine, I’ll do it myself”.
Indeed, but he understood the concept of writing already, and several existing scripts (besides Chinese) were known to him and his court, so he could consciously take those ideas and work with them.
Right? I just mean, to a modern person it seems obvious and simple, but when I really thought about it, if I had never had an example of writing in front of me, the concept wouldn’t have been obvious to me at all.
See my other comment, but naturally evolving writing systems arose from drawing pictures over millennia; noone just started writing letters.
thanks? but I didn’t deny it.
It means there almost certainly never was such a genius.
The closest was probably the guy who invented the Korean alphabet. Dude looked at the scribes and scholars struggling to fit Chinese characters to a language they don’t mesh with at all in terms of phonetics and grammar and said “fine, I’ll do it myself”.
That’s also how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be
Cyrillic was at least based on Greek, for Korean it looks like mostly original glyphs
Indeed, but he understood the concept of writing already, and several existing scripts (besides Chinese) were known to him and his court, so he could consciously take those ideas and work with them.
Right? I just mean, to a modern person it seems obvious and simple, but when I really thought about it, if I had never had an example of writing in front of me, the concept wouldn’t have been obvious to me at all.