Topics for Composition and Discussion

• Oh those poor Ukrainians – they’ve lost touch with their native culture!

• Do you agree that American cultural hegemony is a popular myth?

• Do you think that Ukrainian culture is in danger of disappearing because of American cultural hegemony.

Text c. A Case of Cultural Borrowing

Nineteenth-century authors interpreted history as a progression from savagery to civilization. The most important signs of this transition included the development of agriculture, metallurgy, complex technology, and writing. Writing was traditionally restricted geographically: until the expansion of Islam and of colonial Europeans, it was absent from Australia, Pacific islands, subequatorial Africa, and the New World except for a small part of Mesoamerica.

Knowledge brings power. Writing brings power to modern societies by making it possible to transmit knowledge from distant lands and remote times. Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern means of conquest.

The diffusion of writing from its sites of origin raises some important questions. How did writing systems spread? Did they spread by being copied, or did existing systems inspire (надихали) neighboring peoples to invent their own systems?

The two independent systems of writing were invented by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia before 3000 B.C. and by Mexican Indians (Maya) around 600 B.C. Probably all other peoples who have developed wring since then (including Egyptians and Chinese) have borrowed, adapted, or at least been inspired by existing systems.

Sumerian cuneiform writing consisted of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word; phonetic signs used for spelling syllables ((склади) or letters; and determinatives (детермінанти), which were not pronounced but were used to indicate the category of the word. Maya writing contained both logograms and phonetic signs.

All other writing systems were probably modified from or at least inspired by Sumerians or early Mesoamerican writing. After the Sumerians and early Mexicans had invented writing, the principles of their writing spread to other societies. There were two ways of transmitting this knowledge. One is blueprint copying (калькування) or modifying the existing system. Another way is “idea diffusion”, when you receive the basic idea and reinvent the details. Egyptians and other peoples probably learned from Sumerians about the idea and principles of writing, and then devised all the specific forms of the letters themselves. In the eighth century B.C., the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician consonant (приголосні) alphabet, adding vowels (голосні) to it.

In a few cases, we know something about the individuals who designed writing systems by copying in the remote past. For instance, the Cyrillic alphabet (used today in Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and other countries) is an adaptation of Greek and Hebrew letters devised by Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the Slavs in the ninth century A.D. The first preserved texts for any Germanic language are in the Gothic alphabet created by Bishop Ulfilas. Armenian alphabet was invented by Mesrop Mashtots in the fifth century A.D. by borrowing the “one sound – one letter” idea and modifying Ethiopian syllabic signs.

Exercise 15.

Read Text C and answer the following questions:

• Why does writing bring power to modern societies?

• How did writing systems spread?

• What do we know about the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet?