The development of writing

Introduction The development of writing is a relatively recent phenomenon. A very large number of the languages found in the world today are used only in the spoken form. Human attempts to represent information visually may be traced back to cave drawings 20.000 years ago or to clay tokens 10.000 years ago.

Pictograms and ideograms When some of the pictures of cave drawings came to represent particular images, we describe this product as a form of picture-writing or pictograms. But when they came to represent abstract ideas, we call it idea-writing or ideograms. (sun) (heat, daytime + sun)

A key property of both pictograms and ideograms is that they do not represent words or sounds in a particular language. Modern pictograms are language-independent. symbols

It is generally thought that there are pictographic or ideographic origins for a large number of symbols which turn up in later writing system

Logograms When the relationship between the symbol and the entity or idea becomes abstract, we can be confident that the symbol is used to represent words in a language. This symbol is described as an example of word-writing or “logograms”. A good example of logographic writing is used by the Sumerians, in the southern part of modern Iraq, between 5.000 and 6.000 years ago. Because of the particular shape used in their symbols, these inscriptions are described as cuneiform writing.

The term ‘cuneiform’ means ‘wedge-shaped’ and the inscriptions used by the Sumerians were produced by pressing a wedge-shaped implement into soft clay tablets. Resulting in forms like

The relationship between the written form and the object it represents become arbitrary. So, by the time of the Sumerians, we have evidence that a written system which was word-based had come into existence and referred to as ‘the earliest known writing system’. A modern writing system which is based on the use of logograms can be found in China. Chinese written symbols represent the meaning of words and not the sounds of the spoken language. One advantage of such a system is that two speakers of very different dialects can both read the same written text. However, one disadvantage is that an extremely large number of different written symbols exists within this writing system (more than 2000 characters).

The history of most other writing systems illustrates a development away from logographic writing to phonographic writing (symbols represent sounds)

Rebus writing Rebus writing is a process in which the symbol for one entity is taken over as the symbol for the spoken word used to refer to that entity. What this process accomplishes is a sizeable reduction in the number of symbols needed in a writing system (cf ex. p. 12)

Syllabic writing Syllabic writing employs a set of symbols which represent the pronunciation of syllables. There are no purely syllabic writing system in use today. Some languages such as modern Japanese and Cherokee Indian have a (partially) syllabic writing system or a ‘syllabary’.

Both the Egyptian and the Sumerian evolved to the point where some of the earlier logographic symbols were used to represent spoken syllables. However, the full use of a syllabic writing system appeared between 3.000 and 4.000 years ago by the Phoenicians who took many symbols from earlier Egyptian writing. By about 1.000 BC the Phoenicians had a fully developed syllabic writing system.

Alphabetic writing An alphabet is essentially a set of written symbols which each represents a single type of sound. The alphabets of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew consist of consonant symbols. This early form of alphabetic script, originating in the writing system of the Phoenicians, is the general source of most other alphabets to be found in the world. Significantly, the Greek took the alphabetizing process a stage further by also using separate symbols to represent the vowel sounds as distinct entities. This change produced a distinct symbol for the vowel a (alpha) to go with existing symbols for consonant

Such as b (beta). The Greek should be given credit for taking the inherently syllabic system from the Phoenicians and creating a writing system in which the single-symbol to single-sound correspondence was fully realized. This revised alphabet passed from Greek to the rest of Western Europe and underwent several modifications to fit the requirements of the spoken languages encountered. It also passed to Eastern Europe where Slavic languages were spoken. The modified version, called the Cyrillic alphabet, is the basis of the writing system used in Russian today. (cf. p.14 origins of letters in modern European alaphabets) (cf. p.14

Written English If indeed the origins of the alphabetic writing system were based on a correspondence between single symbol and single sound type, then one might reasonably ask why there is such a frequent mismatch between the forms of written English and the sounds of spoken English.

The reason is sought in a number of historical influences on the form of written English. In the 15thC. when printing was produced to England, the spelling of English was fixed with a number of written conventions derived from Latin and French. In the 16thC. a large number of older written English words were recreated by spelling reformers to bring their written forms more into line with what were erroneously supposed to be their Latin origins. Thus, the sources of the mismatch begin to become clear.