Languages can be divided into families and families into groups. The largest family of languages today is Indo-European, which is a confusing category because it designates specifically most of the languages of Europe, but also includes two other groups: the Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent and the Indo-Iranian languages which are spoken not only in Iran but also in Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, and in "Kurdistan", which is not a country but a convenient label for the lands occupied by Kurds mainly in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. At the start of civilization, Indo-Europeans extended from southern Russia east as far as western China and west to Europe. By then their three main branches had already separated. Other important families of languages were Afro-Asiatic (including Semites), Altaic, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Finno-Ugric, and Sino-Tibetan (its bulk being Sinitics). Linguists do not know where Korean and Japanese belong. Commonly held views are that Japanese is related to Korean and that half the words in Korean are Chinese, but there is scepticism about Korean being affiliated to Chinese.

Afro-Asiatics occupied northern Africa, Arabia, and the Near East. Sinitic languages are ancestral to Chinese. Altaic-speakers, from whom Mongolian and Turkic languages stem, were occupying lands north of the Sinitics. South of the Sinitics were Austronesians and the ancestors of Austro-Asiatics (Thais and Laotians). From the southeastern coast of China the Austronesians were on the way to Taiwan from where they spread to the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia and all over the Pacific Ocean. Dravidians possibly extended from Elam (southwestern Iran) to India. Finno-Ugrics formed scattered groups north of the Eurasian steppes. Australia and New Guinea were begetting hundreds of languages from one stem in each place. Pre-Columbian America constituted a jigsaw of tongues that linguists still haven't entirely put together, but sub-Saharan, central, and southern Africa contained only a handful of language families, perhaps because it was in southern Africa that humanity began.

The Sumerians invented writing in a script called cuneiform. Writing was also developed in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan and other pre Columbian American glyphs, Mycenaean Linear B, and Chinese characters. The Minoans, the Hindus River Valley Civilization, and perhaps other cultures also discovered writing, but their scripts have not been deciphered.5 All writing began as pictograms, attempts to represent concepts graphically. Cuneiform writing in its fully developed form (ca3000) combines the use of logograms (signs for meanings) and logograms used as syllables. Chinese pictograms evolved into characters, which represent meanings through esthetically pleasing but extremely complex signs. Chinese languages, almost exclusively monosyllabic, are tonal--any syllable can be intoned in between four and six different ways--and they lack certain phonetic values, all of which makes characters clumsy for the transcription of non-Chinese sounds. Theoretically, you could create an alphabet from characters, but each letter would be unnecessarily difficult to write and there would be a problem with vowels. Mayan glyphs were at a sort of halfway stage between pictograms and logograms. However, Egyptian hieroglyphs (so-called because of their association with sacred inscriptions) were mostly logograms.

Cuneiform was adaptable to other polysyllabic languages and was used for Semitic languages, such as Akkadian; for Elamite, another probably isolate; and for the Indo-European language of the Hittites. Cuneiform writing spread from Mesopotamia to the Semitic-speaking city of Mari west of the Euphrates in eastern Syria. From there it reached Ebla (south of modern Aleppo), which became a significant independent city state (ca2550). As a spoken every-day tongue, Sumerian was on the way to extinction when Akkad founded the first Mesopotamian empire (ca2340), but because of the general use of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and because of cultural myths that became part of a common Mesopotamian tradition, Sumerian survived as the learned language of Assyrians and Babylonians, in the way that Greek and especially Latin were for centuries the languages of higher culture in western civilization.

The decipherment of Linear B revealed only the most elementary sort of inventories and there is, among specialists, some discrepancy as to whether the Myceneaean script has been thoroughly figured out. Minoan Linear A remains a mystery but it coexisted for a time with Linear B.

It was during the Shang period--very shakily dated, but about the time when Crete was invaded by the Mycenaeans (1500 BCE)--that characters were invented in China. Chinese comprises at least six major related languages (those with at least eighteen million speakers) all of which are written in characters. Since characters are basically logograms, e.g., the universal traffic sign for "one way street" or "do not enter", if a speaker of Mandarin, the official language of China, writes a sentence, a speaker of Wu--the second most important Chinese language in terms of numbers of speakers (ninety million)--can grasp its meaning even if he does not understand a word of spoken Mandarin. Characters are also called ideograms, but it would be an error to deduce from this that it is possible to have a written language that is not spoken. The first Chinese characters were oracular pronouncements inscribed in bone fragments and tortoise shells. However magical their origin and use, they provide some historical information about foundations and other political events. Although Chinese influence irradiated far beyond the empire's frontier--although not as far as any point in central China, say, Wuhan in Hubei province, is from today's Chinese borders--characters were only adopted outside of China by Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. But Koreans devised an alphabet from characters and the Japanese combine characters with syllabaries (kana). Vietnamese was Romanized or alphabetized in the 17th century by a French Jesuit. In general, logograms and syllabaries are clumsy and the phonetic flexibility of alphabetic writing tends to replace logograms, as happened in Mesopotamia when the Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the use of cuneiform.