Linguistic View - Advanced Civilizations

They probably won't use pictorial form as much due to having the ability to communicate telepathically it is probably left over knowledge from ancient times.

Unfortunately, I'm no expert in linguistics. Ancient civilizations have been known to use a writing style that was meant to represent things, and sometimes these writing were etched into stone along with imagery....for whatever reason, I'm not sure, but I can only guess they wanted to make a symbol of some sort. Judging from some scenes shown in the Prometheus trailers, the Space Jockeys seem to be doing the same thing; the writing seems to resemble Sumerian or Cuneiform...eh, there I go proving my lack of knowledge concerning ancient or extinct languages. I'm fascinated with Sumerian things, but studying them is hard, and their phonetic system is sure to be a gigantic challenge for me. ): As for how they can communicate with us, I'm sure that will be shown in Prometheus. I would think that they have the intelligence to communicate with us, though now that I say that, I wonder how they can communicate with us if their intelligence is so extraordinary compared to ours. This makes me wonder if how they speak to us would be in a way as best as they can possibly do for us to understand and comprehend them, because our total intelligence may not be able to comprehend their less-laymen method of communication.

@Sky thank you for your post, it's very interesting, I am fascinated by linguistics (and languages in general) though I am not an expert, nor an amateur (not enough time to dedicate myself to linguistics, unfortunately). Your question is very deep, but I think that the answer is that the authors didn't go so deep into linguistics as to understand the difference between pictorial and stroke based, so they just chose something that they found cool.

This is right up my alley! :•) I'll try not to be too long-winded. Sumerian is a mixed system of logograms and phonetics. The logograms came first with numbers for doing "accounting" (of the sale of things, gifts to rulers, etc.) The phonetics came later as an innovation so that things that were not tangible things could be more easily represented, etc. Having fewer total symbols makes the system easier to learn and manage. This same model was likely transferred to the Egyptians, but they used a much more literal style of picture (drawn people, snakes, flowers, etc.) over millennia (thousands of years) the systems gradually morphed into more "sound focused" approaches and this idea was borrowed OUT of cuneiform into pure sound focused systems in what it is today Israel and Syria. The languages there are very focused on consonants, so the vowels are not faithfully represented, but the alphabetic evolution through all of that through the Greeks, etc. are the most "evolved" in the sense of being the most new and efficient and now we have both vowels and consonants with equal importance. In the other direction toward India the Indus Valley cultures had similar systems to the Sumerians and that morphed into or otherwise the sound focused [url=http://www.omniglot.com/writing/brahmi.htm]Brahmi[/url] was borrowed from the Middle East. This Brahmi system evolved into the Devanagari (and many other systems) that are used in India today. They deal with vowels a bit differently than we do in the Roman alphabet, and technically the systems are called "abugida" and not "alphabet." I have analyzed many of the writing examples we have seen in the clips for Prometheus and I believe that the art department created a "standard script" that the Engineers presumably use for "everyday language" and then there is a different script that looks like "early Chinese" on the urns. [u]The "standard" version seems to be based on the mixed systems of Sumer and Egypt.[/u] I doubt that they are actually anything more than gibberish, but if they do represent a language that was constructed for the Engineers for the film, I will learn to read and write it as much as possible based on what is released by the franchise. Note: The sounds shown here are just theoretical placeholders that map logically to the glyphs in a POSSIBLE phonemic relationship. Voicing, vowel tone/pitch, etc. are affected by 180° rotation of the glyphs. Palatization is indicated by a dot. [img]http://masempul.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/text-analysis.jpg[/img] I do feel that there are some glyphs in the Engineer "standard" writing that are not intended to be phonetic, but overall, it could easily be a primarily phonetic system that mimics what goes on in South Korea today. The language written is primarily phonetic, but Chinese characters are mixed in occasionally for stylistic purposes and ones of TRADITION. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul]The Korean alphabet[/url] was intentionally engineered for that language by Korean linguists, but 100s of years ago. It's very systematic and well-conceived and completely MODERN, but created (stylistically) out of a Chinese-brush influenced history. [img]http://www.hanja-edu.com/images/NK_1.jpg[/img] Scientifically speaking, I feel this is [u]likely[/u] what the Engineers have in terms of a SYSTEM.

Thanks sukkal! I love this thread!

Thanks Sukkal for the informative post. I'll do a bit more reading and post about my observations on this.

Examples of [url=http://youtu.be/_q-8ot4-K80]spoken Sumerian[/url] from actual texts and professors at Cambridge.

I love this thread, too!