Numbers and Letters

Today's discussion in class raised an interesting question:

What happens when a writing system combines numbers and letters?

In addition, what happens when they are separate?

From heavy mysticism to advanced math, I think it makes a world of difference.

I also think it doesn't.

Take Arabic, Babylonian, and Hebrew for example.

Hebrew culture maintained a sacred record of their history and teachings that became the Torah. Over time, this text was considered holy and infallible, and extremely abstruse methods of studying cropped up around it. Mysticism in this culture later led to the development of numerology (a.k.a. Gematria), where the numerical values of the text could be used to link words, ideas, and passages.

Arabic culture maintained a sacred tradition and later record of the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, known as the Koran (or any of that word's many transliterations). Over time, this text was considered holy and infallible, and intense scrutiny of its text led to developments in linguistics and cryptography (The Codebreakers. Kahn, David). This culture fostered developments in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and engineering. One of the most interesting developments was the adoption and adaptation of a particular number system from India (note other systems referenced), which we use (a descendant of) today. This distinct separation between language and numerals prevented a strong mystical link between religious text and scientific rigor.

Note that both cultures considered (and consider) the universe and its laws to be the work of God, and so they are worthy of thorough investigation. (This is particularly important to me at the moment as I just read a Discover Magazine article involving the efforts of Hasidic Jews to integrate genetic testing into their culture.)

Babylon is another interesting example. Here we find a very strong religious component, complete with sacred texts, yet Babylon became known for many years as The Place To Go for scientific learning. (This was before it became a major military power, possibly during the Akkadian Empire.)

Thinking about this topic, I started looking for counterexamples and found the Greeks. They had strong oral traditions in the Epics, though strong support for the written word took a long time to appear (e.g. Plato's era). Greek language and culture were quite well known in the scientific community of the day, bringing us names such as Pythagoras, Euclid, and Archimedes. Greek engineering was rather advanced for its time. The native numbering system that they used was interesting in that it had a set of characters for each value of each power of ten...up to a certain point (explanation complete with translator). While they later adopted the Hindi-Arabic system, it was well after many of their advances in science and mathematics.

How does how we write influence how we think?