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WRITING SYSTEMS

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Writing

• The word writing has three related but distinct meanings :

1. system or characters

2. penmanship or handwriting

3. composition

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Writing

• Writing, is the symbolic representation of language in storable graphic form.

• It is a comparatively recent cultural development, having occurred over the past five thousand years.

• We have no idea where speech began, but we know that writing originated only in certain areas of the world.

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Speech and Writing

As different as they are, speech and writing share one major characteristic: just as spoken language shows an arbitrary link between sound and meaning, the various symbols and techniques used in written language show an arbitrary link between symbol and sound

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Writing Systems

• People wrongly assume that Latin or Roman characters are the only writing system

• Many written languages not only do not use the Roman alphabet; they use no alphabet at all

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Writing

All writing can be grouped into two basic types, called logographic and phonographic (depending n the technique of linguistic representation they use)

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Logographic Writing

• The term logographic refers to a type of writing in which symbols represent morphemes or entire words

• Logographic writing is the oldest type of genuine writing

• Ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform inscriptions, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and primordial Chinese characters were all highly logographic in their early stages

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Logographic Writing

• In fact, all writing systems maintain some logographic symbols

• Conventional abbreviations such as &, %, $, and the like are logographic, as are the symbols for numerals

• To a certain extent, logographic writing can be read independently of its language of origin

• For example, the Arabic numbers 1, 2, 7, 10 and so on can be read in any language

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Logographs

• The word logograph comes etymologically from two Greek words :

logos word / sign

graph write

• Logographs are also known as ideographs

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Logographic Writing

• It must be noted that a logographic writing system, like a pictographic one is nonarbitrary in that there is nearly a one- to-one correlation between signifier (character) and signified (object, attitude or idea)

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Phonographic Writing• No writing system is purely logographic• Nor can it be, since using a separate symbol to

write each word in a language is simply to cumbersome

• Throughout human history, writing systems have always evolved signs that represent some aspect of pronunciation

• In phonographic writing (from Greek phonos ‘sound’), the symbols represent syllables or segments

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Syllabic Writing

• As the name suggests, syllabic writing employs symbols to represent syllables

• A set of syllabic symbols is called a syllabary• A syllabaric system is more arbitrary and more

economical than a pictographic or logographic system

• The only major language in use today, that is written as a syllabary is Japanese

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Alphabetic Writing

• Alphabetic writing represents consonant and vowel segments

• Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is devised to represent details of pronunciation, ordinary alphabets generally ignore non-phonemic phenomena

• Thus the spelling of English wordslike pan and nap represents the phonemes /p/, / n/, and /ae/, but ignores consonant aspiration, vowel nasalization, stress etc

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Alphabetic Writing

• The word alphabet is a shortened form of the names of the first two letters in the Greek system, alpha and beta

• An alphabet system, unlike the others, is based on the sounds that comprise morphemes -- and not on the shapes of objects, nor on the morphemes, nor on the syllables, but on sounds that make up syllables and morphemes

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The History of Writing

• Writing systems emerged and spread around the earth over a long period of time

• Though we can trace the spread of some systems over a wide area, writing may have emerged independently in several different places

• It is surprising that we cannot say with certainty how a comparatively recent cultural phenomenon like writing originated

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The History of Writing

• We do know that writing developed in historically recorded stages, the earliest of which involves direct representation of objects and which is sometimes called prewriting

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Prewriting• Figures and scenes depicted on cave walls and

rock faces in the Americas, Africa, and Europe, twelve thousand years ago or perhaps even earlier may have been forerunners of writing

• Some of these petroglyphs (scenes painted on stone) may represent a type of proto-literate stage that did not evolve into a full-fledged writing system. These drawings depict a wide range of human and animal activity, and may even have been intended for purposes of linguistic communication

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Pictographs• Whatever their purpose, there is little doubt that

pictures were among the precursors of the written word

• Early writing systems evolved from pictorial representations called pictograms/pictographs or picture writing

• Pictographs contain characters which are essentially pictorial rather than graphic

• advantage ?? (one need not know the language to interpret the characters )

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Pictographs• Each pictograph was an image of the object or

objects (and in some cases, concepts) it represented, and, as far as we know, offerred no clues to pronunciation

• Pictograms are still used today, and they reflect the memory-aid nature of this form of prewriting. Signs indicating roadside services are pictographic in nature. The Canadian Olympic Association has developed a standard set of pictograms to indicate sporting events

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Rebuses and the Emergence of Writing

• This major development in the history of writing took place around 3000BC with the first use of Sumerian symbols to represent sound rather than just meaning

• Known as the REBUS principle, this innovation allowed a sign to be used for any word that was pronounced like the word whose meaning it originally represented

( Rebuses are puzzles whose solutions depend partly on recognising pictures, partly on recognising

letters and partly on recognising sound)

+ T N + - C

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Towards Syllabic Writing

• Thanks to the rebus principle, concepts that could not be directly depicted by a picture/pictogram could be represented in writing

• Once the breakthrough towards phonographic writing had been made, it did not take long (in historical terms) before syllabic writing began to emerge

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Syllabic Writing

• Within about five to six hundred years, signs that clearly represent not just homophonous words, but parts of words--specifically syllables--had become well established in Sumerian writing

• Sumerian writing, however, never developed in to a pure syllabary

• Logographic elements were interpersed with syllabic ones

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Hieroglyphics

• At about the same time Sumerian pictography was flourishing, a similar system of pictorial communication was in use in Egypt

• The Egyptian signs have become known as hieroglyphics (meaning ‘sacred inscriptions, in Greek)

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The Emergence of Alphabets

• In the Middle east, alphabetic writing was slowly emerging from mixed writing systems

• The Semitc people of ancient Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) had devised a writing system of twenty-two consonantal signs as early as 1000BC

• This system was written horizontally, right to left• This ultimately lead to the development of many

alphabetic writing systems, including both the Greek and Latin alphabets

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Alphabets

• A great number of alphabetic systems evolved and flourished in addition to the Greek and Latin alphabets

• Some of these are Runic writing, Cyrillic script, the Roman alphabet

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Some Non-European Writing Systems

• Chinese writing - the Chinese system of writing developed out of pictograms that eventually came to represent morphemes (most of which are also words)

• Japanese writing- the writing system of modern japanese is arguably the most complicated in the entire world. Its use requires knowledge of three distinct scripts, including a pair of syllabaries-- katakana and hiragana (which were created by modifying Chinese characters)

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Summary

• The development of writing has been one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements

• From pictograms, and logograms, the graphic representation of language has developed through syllabic writing to the alphabet

• This was achieved through the creation of a relationship between graphic symbols and sounds