My Summer project, to finish all of the books I’ve started, is proceeding apace — a good thing now that it’s Fall — and I’ve just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the chapter “Blueprints and Borrowed Letters,” Jared Diamond discusses first the area in which writing arose by independent invention, and then those in which it was adopted by duplication or memetic transfer. Or, as he puts it, by blueprint or idea transfer. While I find all languages interesting, it is most amazing the differences in approach by those who were inspired by the mere idea, particularly Cherokee and Hangul (한글).
As the story goes, Sequoyah and Sejong brilliantly leaped thousands of years of linguistic evolution.