My understanding is that most writing systems began with immobile agricultural societies to tally objects for the sake of tax, storage, and trade: “5 apple, 2 wheat, 6 pig” where the nouns being numbered start out as ideograms with a visible connection to the thing they refer to. This is apparently a fairly “obvious” thing to do because it seems to have occurred independently to the Mayans, and Sumerians, and probably the Chinese and Egyptians, and probably some others I’ve never heard of. The Incas accidentally ended up with a relatively non-upgradeable notation system when they used specialized knotting systems for roughly this purpose, so its possible for humans starting from scratch as a group to completely miss this, but it seems rare to miss it.
The hard thing seems to be independently inventing a notation for speech sounds, rather than words, and tends to happen when adapting an existing system of ideograms to a new culture. From memory and Le Wik, the Egyptian symbol system was probably re-purposed for Semitic languages and that eventually inspired Phoenician (from whence we get “phonetics”), and the Japanese syllabary grew out of the use of Chinese symbols for the sounds they made.
My understanding is that most writing systems began with immobile agricultural societies to tally objects for the sake of tax, storage, and trade: “5 apple, 2 wheat, 6 pig” where the nouns being numbered start out as ideograms with a visible connection to the thing they refer to. This is apparently a fairly “obvious” thing to do because it seems to have occurred independently to the Mayans, and Sumerians, and probably the Chinese and Egyptians, and probably some others I’ve never heard of. The Incas accidentally ended up with a relatively non-upgradeable notation system when they used specialized knotting systems for roughly this purpose, so its possible for humans starting from scratch as a group to completely miss this, but it seems rare to miss it.
The hard thing seems to be independently inventing a notation for speech sounds, rather than words, and tends to happen when adapting an existing system of ideograms to a new culture. From memory and Le Wik, the Egyptian symbol system was probably re-purposed for Semitic languages and that eventually inspired Phoenician (from whence we get “phonetics”), and the Japanese syllabary grew out of the use of Chinese symbols for the sounds they made.
Dictionaries don’t back you up on that etymology. Both words come from Greek, but one word meant “purple” and the other meant “sound”.
Wiktionary claims “Phonecian” was from a greek transliteration of Egyptian, and does not mention “purple”.
But yes, “phonetics” clearly came from the word for “sound”.