Courses

How have humans captured thought, memory, and meaning across millennia? This course explores the history and diversity of linguistics and writing systems, tracing how people have recorded language and ideas in extraordinary ways. We begin with the earliest visual records—cave paintings and symbolic markings—then follow the emergence of scripts in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. We’ll examine alphabets, pictograms, calligraphy, and printing and consider how writing technologies have shaped culture and society. The course also explores how systems of recording information embody linguistic structures and worldviews—why Chinese characters express meaning through form while the Phoenician alphabet abstracted sound—and how such developments transformed human communication. Finally, we turn to number systems, secret codes, universal symbols, and even communication in nature—from the syntax of birdsong to the color signals of cephalopods like octopuses—to reveal the universal impulse to share meaning.