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
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so on can be read in any language
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
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segments
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
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communication
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 twentytwo 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
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Greek and Latin alphabets
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
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