Casual

While working at EnglishCentral, my friend Burak and I, were sent to the company’s office in America for a month right after we were graduated. Due to jetlag, I was falling asleep around 7-8 PM and waking up around 2-3 AM. I would wake up at three in the morning and read Patrick Rothfuss’s The Kingkiller Chronicle series until work hours. I read for hours, returned directly to my hotel after work, and continued reading. While my other friends who came to Boston were traveling around New York and Salem, my only desire was to return to my room. I was even declared the most frugal visitor in the office (they were probably kind enough not to announce that I was also the most antisocial). ...

You probably know that the concept of “writing” was invented by some Mesopotamian people called Sumerian (Some Mesoamerican folks also independently discovered it, though much later than Sumerians did). Have you ever thought, though, how they invented it? Because when you think about it, it’s actually quite a hard task. They had to learn how to decompose a continuous sound into a speech unit, or how to even recognize that sound in all the places it’s used in the language, find symbols to represent those and whatnot. Somehow, they managed to do it. Let’s dive into the details. ...