1. Teppo Räisänen School of Business and Information Management Oulu University of Applied Sciences

2. History of writing  The distinction of history and pre-history is writing  The earliest writing systems were picture writing systems (at least 6600 BC)  Glyphs relate to object  Insufficient to represent a language

3. History of writing  Five civilizations discovered writing more or less independently

4. History of writing  Five civilizations discovered writing more or less independently  Sumer, 3000+ BC  Egypt, 3000+ BC  China, 2650+ BC  India, ~2000 BC  Mesoamerica (Olmecs), 1000 BC

5. History of writing  The major writing systems broadly fall into four categories  Logographic  Syllabic  Alphabetic  Featural  Fifth is ideographic category  Characters represent ideas  Never developed into full language

6. History of writing  Logographies  Characters represent a word or morpheme  Morpheme = smallest component of word that has semantic meaning  No writing system is fully logographic, all have phonetic components  Examples  Maya, Kanji, Chinese (syllabic in nature)

7. History of writing  Syllabic  Set of written symbols represent (or approximate) syllables  A character represent a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone  Examples  Kana (Hiragana, Katakana), Mycenean Greek

8. History of writing  Alphabetic  A small set of symbols which represent a phenome of the language  Most countries in the world today use Latin alphabet  Thanks to Roman Empire, and European influence in 1400+ AD  We will focus mostly on Latin alphabet

9. History of writing

10.  Featural  Featural scripts represent finer details than alphabets  Characters do not represent whole phonemes but rather the elements that make up the phonemes.  Examples  Sign languages, fictional languages (Tolkien’s Tengwar)

11. History of writing  What is the history of writing in your country?  When was writing discovered?  Who discovered it?  What kind of alphabets/logographs do you use in your country?  How do you write…  Hello  What is your name?  …in your native language