Researching the development and concepts surrounding Hypertext there certain names that tend to reappear. Some are already inscribed in history. The subject of Hypertext primarily identifies heroes in the fields
of Computer/Information Science
and Literature Studies.
As a tangent, if there is such a thing, I will put in a few Language and Writing
references. Because the next step is to let go of the Hypertext concept and move on to Cybernetic Systems and Consciousness studies.
Piero Scaruffi
Thinking About Thought , The Hidden Metaphysics of Language
http://scaruffi.com/tat/language.html
"We don’t learn a language by memorizing all possible sentences of it. We learn and then use an abstraction that allows us to deal with any sentence in that language. That abstraction is the grammar of the language."
"From this scenario, the Danish semiologist Jesper Hoffmeyer has drawn his own conclusions: in the beginning there were stories, and then little by little individual words rose out of them. Which implies that language is fundamentally narrative in nature; that language is corporeal, has to do with motor-based behavior; and that the unit of communication among animals is the whole message, not the word.
HISTORY OF LANGUAGE AND WRITING
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/lx1/Writinglect.html
Mark Liberman at the University of Pennsylvania
"1. The History of Writing
"The dating of the beginning of human language is not easy, but we have a clear picture of the relevant interval for the upper and lower boundaries. There were hominids with a human-like vocal tract as early as 200,000 [BCE], but they probably did not have a sufficiently developed nervous system to control it until about 100,000 [BCE], ---
"Nothing that we can call writing, however, evolved before about 3000 [BCE]. In other words, spoken human language seems to have been around from at least 30,000 - 50,000 years before writing was invented.---"
Donald Ryan Archaeologist, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington
The history of writing
http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm
"As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years [BCE], humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is not known.---
" The Egyptians used the acrophones as a consonantal system along with their syllabic and idiographic system, therefore the alphabet was not yet born. The acrophonic principal of Egyptian clearly influenced Proto-Canaanite/Proto-Sinaitic around 1700 [BCE]. Inscriptions found at the site of the ancient torquoise mines at Serabit-al-Khadim in the Sinai use less than 30 signs, definite evidence of a consonantal alphabet rather than a syllabic system.
"The Semitic languages diversified along geographic lines as Northwest Semitic, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast. Northwest Semitic consists of 2 major groups, Aramaic and Canaanite. Canaanite is represented by Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew. Northeast Semitic consists of the ancestral Akkadian, represented by Babylonian and Assyrian. The Southwest and Southeast Semitic languages consisted of North and South Arabic and Ethiopic.---"
Jim A. Cornwell
"Chronological Chart of the Alphabet and Where Writing Came From? "
http://www.mazzaroth.com/ChapterThree/AncientWriting.htm
Dr. John Robert Skoyles
[ Skoyles [is that a Swedish name? He deserves recognition for a variety of reasons.
And he even has a Manifesto. Another example of Internet Attitude.]
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.html
"Origins of modern cognition links neural plasticity and the prefrontal cortex -- "scientifically together they explain the mental exaptation of our species and its minds (Gould). It further enables us to develop a neurological foundation for our symbolic culture."
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/right2.html
"Has human cognition been historically invariant? In this paper I suggest that for the cognitive neurological processes responsible for reading have changed. I argue that the initial leftward writing direction provides evidence for a right hemisphere literacy among the first users of the alphabet."
Skoyles Manifesto
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.html
"Scholars and scientists are irresponsible when they specialize: if an academic career prevents a dawn to dusk investigation then the career should be dumped not the breadth of ones scholarship. Not to do so is unethical: many ideas critical to human welfare will never emerge to better human existence if everyone specializes. Trivially, much scholarship and science is finding and fitting together jigsaw puzzle pieces. Many of those pieces are widely scattered ---
"knowledge does not respect the boundaries of academic departments and careers. No one should put having a job before putting themselves in a position to find them and so advance knowledge and better the lives of ordinary people."
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/gold.html
"New ideas in science are not always right just because they are new.
Nor are the old ideas always wrong just because they are old."
