SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The NewScientist has an update on the work to interpret the Inca khipus, or chains of knots, which are known to have been used for accounting. Now it is looking likely that the khipus were a full writing system containing narratives, but that they must be read through sense of touch not just vision.
Under strict supervision, Hyland set about photographing the cords, reviewing the manuscripts and taking notes. Each khipu had hundreds of pendant cords, and they were more colourful and complex than anything she had ever seen. It was clear the various animal fibres used could only be identified by touch. The villagers told her the khipus were the "language of animals" and insisted that the different fibres have significance.
Her analysis eventually revealed that the pendants came in 95 different combinations of colour, fibre type and direction of ply. That is within the range of symbols typically found in syllabic writing systems, where a set of signs (say, the letters C-A-T) aligns with the sound of speech (the word "cat"). "I thought 'Woah, could this be a syllabic writing system?'," says Hyland. She has since hypothesised that the khipus contain a combination of phonetic symbols and ideographic ones, where a symbol represents a whole word.
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
Earlier in SN:
Harvard Student Helps Crack Mystery of Inca Code (2018)
Twisted Textile Cords May Contain Clues to Inca Messages (2017)
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday November 30 2018, @09:41PM (1 child)
It was probably restricted to either a dedicated class of scribes or was a skill for specific disciplines (tax collectors, messengers, or whatever) rather than a common skill. It appears to me to be too complex and time consuming to create for non-specialized usage.
It could have been useful for letters, but I'd need to see proof to believe it. I could see it being like a formal invitation or declaration sort of thing.
Most forms of writing developed for the purposes of resource tracking (tax collection, harvests, etc) and recording obligations/treaties/contracts/pacts though. I'd expect the Incans to be no different on that front.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @04:14PM
If it was used by messengers, then it pretty much by definition was used for letters, wasn't it? The question is whether many people could write their own letters, or had to have the messenger do it for them, and then read it to the recipient. And whether they could afford a messenger's services. Pretty much like any other written language - pretty much everywhere writing was developed, for a long time even the nobility couldn't read or write. It was mostly restricted to the scribes, and then clergy - there just wasn't enough demand for reading and writing for any other purposes.
Knotting certainly does seem like it would be a lot more labor intensive than writing modern Latin or Cyrillic characters. But with practice, maybe not so much worse than painting a Chinese character, or imprinting cuniform. Probably a lot more difficult to streamline over the ages than the pictographs that became modern alphabets though. I mean, you could restrict yourself to knots that could be tied in the middle of a string, maybe develop some specialty "knitting needles", but my guess is that it was a writing system that never had the potential to become even as common and versatile as written Chinese. Where from what I've heard most native speakers have a much larger spoken vocabulary than written.