The Best Invention of Humanity
The Best Invention
Today’s topic is the best invention of humanity. There are no doubts that this subject is extremely disputable, because almost all inventions seem to be irreplaceable in modern life. While thinking about the most useful thing that people cannot live without, I reached a conclusion that there must be something basic, something that made other inventions possible. Going back to the humanity civilization origins, I found that one thing that we consider as a natural and innate part of rational beings was also invented by mankind a lot of centuries ago and was the greatest breakthrough in transferring and storing information. Yes, I’m talking about written language.
Now, try to imagine your life without books. According to the Google calculations conducted in 2010, there are about 130 millions of books that have ever been created by people. And it may be said with certainty that books and other written documents enabled to lay the foundation for all scientific discoveries. Science without written language is just scrappy separate knowledge, because science needs a way to store information and transmit it from generation to generation without loss of details. It is a fact that around 6,100 out of 6,500 classified languages don’t have a writing system. But let me note, that spoken language is used for saving nation history, legends and tales. And native speakers of such languages were utterly far from scientific progress. James Brested, famous American historian and orientalist, said: as well as the ability to speak distinguishes a human from an animal; written language distinguishes a civilized human from a barbarian.
Another argument is about the influence of written language appearance on human mentation development. Written language acquisition leads to state of mind transformation. Writing system functions are fixed deeply and permanently in a human brain. Have you ever heard about literal agnosia? This is a psychic disease when human can’t
Today’s topic is the best invention of humanity. There are no doubts that this subject is extremely disputable, because almost all inventions seem to be irreplaceable in modern life. While thinking about the most useful thing that people cannot live without, I reached a conclusion that there must be something basic, something that made other inventions possible. Going back to the humanity civilization origins, I found that one thing that we consider as a natural and innate part of rational beings was also invented by mankind a lot of centuries ago and was the greatest breakthrough in transferring and storing information. Yes, I’m talking about written language.
Now, try to imagine your life without books. According to the Google calculations conducted in 2010, there are about 130 millions of books that have ever been created by people. And it may be said with certainty that books and other written documents enabled to lay the foundation for all scientific discoveries. Science without written language is just scrappy separate knowledge, because science needs a way to store information and transmit it from generation to generation without loss of details. It is a fact that around 6,100 out of 6,500 classified languages don’t have a writing system. But let me note, that spoken language is used for saving nation history, legends and tales. And native speakers of such languages were utterly far from scientific progress. James Brested, famous American historian and orientalist, said: as well as the ability to speak distinguishes a human from an animal; written language distinguishes a civilized human from a barbarian.
Another argument is about the influence of written language appearance on human mentation development. Written language acquisition leads to state of mind transformation. Writing system functions are fixed deeply and permanently in a human brain. Have you ever heard about literal agnosia? This is a psychic disease when human can’t