Some cultures employ alternatives to fully fledged alphabets, such as the syllabary-using Cherokee. Others, such as the Japanese, mix syllabaries with complex logographic characters. But the biggest country to use something other than an alphabet that you or I might recognize is China.
Intentionally or not, Larry Page and Sergey Brin effectively wound up glossing over China when they rolled out their new corporate brand and said "it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations."
The Chinese might object by saying their writing system represents language, too, even if it doesn't use letters. You see, China's use of a logographic script is pretty much the complete opposite of an alphabet. You can think of an alphabet as a set of individually meaningless building blocks that, when you put them together, create sounds, words and meaning. In Chinese, every character, every building block, already has its own self-contained sound and meaning. Imagine if the letter "b" referred to the sun.
China is one of the few countries on earth that don't use an alphabet. And it so happens that China and Google have also shared a very stormy relationship in the past. In response to Beijing's practice of censoring search results for sensitive terms like "Tiananmen Square," Google in 2010 decided to redirect all searches made from the mainland to its Hong Kong-based search engine, where lighter regulations permitted more politically controversial search results to be shown.
China's crackdown led Google to withdraw more or less entirely from the country, and it's now the one place where the search giant simply appears to have given up. That the word/name "alphabet" doesn't cover the Chinese language therefore seems like a fitting, if entirely coincidental, snub.
The reason this might be interesting to anthropologists is due to a substantial and decades-long academic debate over whether we place too much value on alphabetic writing systems. In the 1950s, a Polish historian named Ignace Gelb theorized that languages evolve, just like plants and animals do — only that Gelb imagined that you could only evolve forward and that alphabets represented the pinnacle of linguistic evolution. Along these lines, others such as Marshall McLuhan have argued that alphabetic systems are responsible for promoting analytical behavior and the ability to perform high-level abstraction and classification.
The idea that there is a "best" writing system naturally implies that others are inferior, and critics of this theory have argued that this is an unhelpfully Western-centric bias.
"The alphabetic literacy theory has asserted the West's permanent superiority over the East due to the psychological and cultural effects of the alphabet," wrote Paul Grosswiler, a professor of communication at the University of Maine, in 2004. "Science, philosophy, logic, rationality, democracy, and monotheism are said to be inextricably linked to the alphabet in this theory."
Rationality, these critics said, is a characteristic common to all human cultures, not just the ones that can trace their writing system back to the Greeks. Asian concepts of yin and yang, and theories of elemental properties like fire and water, could be thought of as a certain kind of classification system for explaining nature, according to Grosswiler.
Over time, some former proponents of the so-called "alphabet effect" have walked back their theories. Some, like Cambridge University's Jack Goody, conceded that they were too quick to write off advances in knowledge that occurred in China.
"It is a gross ethnocentric error of Europe to attribute too much to the alphabet and too much to the West," Goody wrote, according to Grosswiler.
Still, others maintain that logographic systems like Chinese are less efficient at conveying precise meaning. Whether that's true or not, it's certainly the case that many Western students struggle to pick up the language, though many do.
It's not clear that Google was conscious of this academic fight before Larry and Sergey named their new holding company. But it's there, and by pointing to alphabets as a symbol of human progress, they leapt into the middle of what's actually a really important dialogue about how humanity really works.