The Development of Language and Writing

The evolution of humankind is like one person's lifetime: just as a child grows while learning language, language began to develop when the modern humans who had lived in the coastal regions of Southeast Asia from 60,000 years ago began village life. The linguist Johanna Nichols pointed out that human language began in the coastal regions of Southeast Asia before the ice age. The beginnings of Southeast Asian language divide into Austronesian in the south and Austroasiatic in the north.

The southern languages are connected to the island nations, to the Dravidian of southern India, and to Hamito-Semitic in Arabia and North Africa, and are used as modern languages. The northern languages were used as Sino-Tibetan throughout eastern and Central Asia, then grew northward into Ural-Altaic and southwestward into Indo-European, becoming the languages used by the largest population in the modern world. In the course of the northern languages' growth, as their speakers migrated into what had been southern-language regions, there was a strong tendency to replace southern languages with northern ones.

Johanna Nichols explained the historical relationship of three language types: the two ordered language forms of "subject–verb–modifier" and "subject–modifier–verb," plus a disordered, unorganized language form. The languages of our country, Japan and Mongolia belong to the second form, while European and Chinese languages belong to the first. It is said that the region of China's east coast originally had the second form but was later replaced by the first. Languages of undeveloped regions have many of the disordered third form, northern languages have many of the second form, and southern languages many of the first. It is clear that all the language forms of the world exist in Southeast Asia and that their roots too are in Southeast Asia.

Around 2,600 years ago, when the imperial social organization of East Asia was being passed on to India by way of eastern India, the Taoism and Confucianism that had begun in clan society appeared on the Ganges between China and India as Buddhism, an imperial religion adapted to imperial society. Together with India's sculptural art it spread along China's east coast, and Buddhist culture blossomed in East Asia in the Northern Wei's Yungang Grottoes. The Gupta state in the Indus basin to the west of India became a Buddhist nation, and Greek kings of the Mediterranean coast came to the Buddhist temples of India and China, became Buddhist monks, and learned and trained in the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. The yin-yang thought they learned then later became the foundation of the Western philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. East Asia's yin-yang thought — the religion of the moon and the sun — can also be seen in the Moon Pyramid and Sun Pyramid of Central America's Aztec culture.

The Development of Writing

Beginning to write by drawing the meaning of language as pictures (paleography, the study of ancient writing) — writing appearing on bamboo, animal bones, tortoise shells, tree bark, cloth, silk, earthenware, stone slabs, Neolithic metal and so on — is common here as it can be seen nowhere else in the world. And finally on paper: the oldest and most numerous records are accumulated in East Asia. The evolution from pictures to letters is also found in countless examples in Southeast Asia, and the kinds of scripts are many and varied. The surviving scripts date from 7,000 years ago, but it is supposed that writing was used from before the thaw. The script of East Asia's Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1050 BCE) stabilized together with its culture, and in the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1050–771 BCE) writing reached its golden age.

The records the Sumerians left baked in clay are also interpreted as explanations about the East Asian dragon. The shapes of thousands of Chinese characters were also established before 600 BCE and published in the Book of Changes, the Taoist scripture, and it is said that Confucius loved reading the Book of Changes as a young man. Imagining the evolution of writing over the thousands of years before that makes us imagine that in Southeast Asia, before Europe's thaw, forms of writing already existed in tribal society.

The languages, writing and science of the Southeast Asian empires were the capacity for intellectual growth in modern humankind's childhood. From 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, people lived as clan societies gathering on the coasts; then from 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, as population swelled into tribal societies settled through gathering and farming, they migrated inland along the rivers, and along the coastlines — we can suppose — their writing was carried over into the Maya script of the Americas around 1,000 BC, and at the same time into the Phoenician script of those who migrated onto the coasts of Europe.

In the records of the excavation of the Ur region, religious artifacts bearing the look of East Asian people were excavated from the oldest layer. After that the Sumerians appear in the Mesopotamian region with the language and writing of Southeast Asia, the Code of Hammurabi is introduced in Babylonia, peoples who worshipped birds and bulls appear in the Mediterranean, and soon after, metal culture appears. Because these cultures are not sudden inventions or discoveries but appear through an evolutionary process of more than 10,000 years, I believe they were possible only in Southeast Asia, which had a larger population and a longer history.