Writing Systems
5.0 FULL WRITING SYSTEMS. The three major ancient writing systems thought to have developed
independently from one another are (1) the Sumerian writing system around 3,000 B.C., (2) the Chinese
writing system around 1500 B.C., and (3) the Maya writing system around 200–300 B.C. (DeFrancis 1989;
Senner 1989; Coulmas 1996). These systems were all logographic. In a logographic writing system, each
symbol represents either a word or a meaningful segment of a word, also called a morpheme. The earliest
logographic symbols represented concrete or visible objects, for example, a drawing of a mountain to
represent the word mountain. These logograms are called various names, including hieroglyphs in the
Egyptian writing system, glyphs in the Mayan writing system, and characters in the Chinese writing
system (DeFrancis 1989; Senner 1989; Coulmas 1996). Because each symbol or character usually also
coincides with just one syllable, these kinds of writing systems are also sometimes referred to as
logosyllabaries.
F IGURE 2. A NCIENT MAYA GLYPHS ( LOGOGRAMS)2
As you might imagine, words for proper names and more abstract concepts posed a difficulty for these
logographic systems. The speakers of ancient languages found a solution for this problem; they began to
use already established logograms to represent additional words that were pronounced the same way. This
is called the rebus principle, and it formed the basis for writing systems based on the sounds of language.
The rebus principle refers to the process by which a unit that originally stands for just one word comes
to represent other words with the same pronunciation (Gelb 1963; DeFrancis 1989; Noth 1990; Houston
2004). An example would be using the symbol for eye in English (for instance, a picture of an eye) to
represent the word I. In ancient Sumerian writing, the written word ti, which originally meant ‘arrow’, came
to be used to write the word for ‘life’, which was also pronounced ti (Senner 1989; Glassner 2003). In the
Egyptian writing system, the word wr, which originally meant ‘swallow’, came to be used to write the word
for ‘big’, which was also pronounced wr (Coulmas 1996; Bauer 2007).
The grapheme is the core of a writing system. A grapheme can be defined as the arbitrary symbol that
represents the smallest segment of speech of any given writing system, for instance the letters of English
or the characters of Chinese (DeFrancis 1989:54). According to DeFrancis (1989:49), the duality principle
is the basis for all forms of writing. This means that all writing systems convey meaning by two means: (1)
the use of symbols that represent sound-related information; and (2) the use of symbols that represent non-
sound-related information. If a language uses one of these less in its writing system, it will compensate by
using the other more. An example of a writing system that is heavy on the sound-related component is
Finnish, in which there is a very close correspondence between characters and symbols. For instance, in the
Finnish alphabet, the letter a represents only the sound [ɑ] and the letter i represents only the sound [i]
(Ager 2011). Unlike Finnish, Chinese has much less correspondence between sound and symbol, so it
compensates with semantic clues, elements of characters called semantic radicals that indicate something
about the meaning of the characters (DeFrancis 1989:51).
Radicals will be discussed further in the section below on logographic writing systems, but some
examples will be provided here. The examples from Mandarin Chinese given in this chapter are written in
Chinese characters as well as in pinyin, an alphabetic system that was developed for writing Mandarin
Chinese. In pinyin, the four tones of Mandarin are marked as diacritics above the nuclear vowel of the word,
with̄ representing the first tone,́ representing the second tone,̌ representing the third tone, and `
representing the fourth tone. One example of a semantic radical is the Chinese radical for water, written
as 氵, which is found in the Mandarin Chinese words for ‘float’ (漂, written in pinyin as piāo and
pronounced [pjaʊ] with the first tone), ‘lake’ (湖, written in pinyin as hú and pronounced [hu] with the
second tone), and ‘river’ (江, written in pinyin as jiāng and pronounced [ʤjaŋ] with the first tone), all of
which are related to the concept of water.
5.1 TYPES OF FULL WRITING SYSTEMS: LOGOGRAPHIC SYSTEMS. As mentioned earlier in this chapter,
the early writing systems were all logographic. The system of characters used to write the Chinese
languages is perhaps the most oft-cited example of a modern logographic writing system. This is because
each Chinese character represents a word or a part of a word. For instance, the character 熊, written in
pinyin as xióng and pronounced (approximately) [sjɔŋ] with the second tone, means ‘bear’ (the animal),
and the character 猫, written māo in pinyin and pronounced [maʊ] with the first tone, means ‘cat’. When
combined, they form a new word, 熊猫 xióngmāo, ‘panda’. The advantage of this kind of logographic
system is that one only needs to know the meaning of each character or combination of characters, and not
the pronunciation, in order to be able to read it. This is an advantage for the speakers of the many different
and mutually incomprehensible Chinese languages, who can communicate with each other through the
written word even when they are not able to communicate with each other through speech. There are 13
different languages spoken in present-day China, according to Ethnologue, but each of those languages has
many different sub-dialects (Lewis 2009). It is therefore quite useful to have a writing system that can be
used across such linguistically diverse terrain.
Of course, an obvious disadvantage of this kind of system is that it is difficult to know how to pronounce
a word based on its written form alone, which makes it very difficult for learners who are not familiar with
Chinese characters to learn to read and write them. However, while it has been said for many years that
Chinese is not a phonetic writing system, DeFrancis (1989) estimates that the Chinese writing system is in
fact 25% phonetic, meaning that at least some information about the way a character is pronounced can be
deduced from its written form. It was mentioned above that Chinese has semantic radicals that give some
information about the meaning of a word. Chinese also has phonetic radicals that give sound-related
information about a word. For instance, the characters 妈 (mā, pronounced [ma] with the first tone, meaning
‘mother’), 骂 (mà, pronounced [ma] with the fourth tone, meaning ‘to scold’), and 吗 (ma, also pronounced
[ma] but with a neutral tone, a word used to mark questions) all contain the phonetic radical 马 ma,
pronounced [ma], which indicates the basic pronunciation of the character (but not the tone). The character
for ‘mother’, 妈, contains the semantic radical 女, which refers to woman, clearly related to the idea that
a mother is a woman. The character for ‘scold’, 骂, and the question marker, 吗, each contain the semantic
radical for ‘mouth’, 口, which is related to their meanings as having to do with speaking. You can see that
the Chinese writing system, therefore, is a fusion of both sound-related and meaning-related elements
(DeFrancis 1989; Unger 2004).
A second disadvantage to this type of system is the large number of symbols that learners must
memorize in order to be able to read and write the language. It is estimated that a person must know around
3,000 characters to be able to read a Chinese magazine or newspaper and around 6,000 to be able to read
Chinese literature or technical articles (Ager 2011). It is therefore quite difficult for many adult second
language learners of Chinese and Japanese (which also makes use of Chinese characters) who are not
familiar with this kind of writing system to master it.
5.2 S YLLABARIES. Because their symbols often stood for whole syllables, the world’s earliest known
writing systems—Sumerian, Chinese, and Mayan—were all syllabic systems (DeFrancis 1989; Coulmas
1996). In a syllabic writing system (also called a syllabary), each symbol stands for one syllable. One
might imagine that it is easier to process languages in terms of whole syllables than it is to process a larger
number of independent units of meaning, like individual consonants and vowels. In particular, features of
certain languages make a syllabary a much more efficient writing system. If a language has only a relatively
small number of allowable syllable structures, as for instance is the case with Japanese, which allows only
syllables of the structure (optional consonant)+vowel (+optional nasal) (also expressed as (C)V(N)), then
a syllabary is a good system for processing written language as quickly as possible. Some examples of
syllabic writing systems are the Japanese kana system (hiragana and katakana) and the Cherokee syllabary
(DeFrancis 1989).
Figure 3 above is a table of the Japanese katakana syllabary, which is one of the two syllabaries that
Japanese uses for its written language in addition to Chinese characters, or kanji. The Japanese hiragana
and katakana syllabaries have the same numbers and types of symbols (48 in total), and differ only in their
domains of application. While hiragana is used for native Japanese words, katakana is used for words that
have come into Japanese from other languages, e.g. hamburger from English, spelled ハンバーガー
(pronounced [hɑmbɑ:ɡɑ:]).
The Cherokee syllabary is shown in Figure 4 below. This syllabary was developed around 1820 by
Sequoyah, a native speaker of the language. Cherokee is a language that has approximately 16,400 speakers
today, the majority of whom reside in Oklahoma, with about 1,000 speakers residing in Western North
Carolina (Lewis 2009). Sequoyah assigned Cherokee sounds to letters, as you can see in Figure 4.
Altogether there are 85 signs in the Cherokee syllabary: 78 signs consisting of a consonant plus a vowel in
that order (CV), six independent vowel signs, and one sign for the consonant [s]. This syllabary is very
well-suited for Cherokee, in which the vast majority of syllables are of the sequence consonant+vowel (CV)
(or just a vowel with no consonant before it), and the only consonant that can occur at the end of a syllable
is [s] (hence the separate symbol for [s]). Like all other writing systems, there are aspects of the spoken
language that the Cherokee syllabary fails to capture. For instance, it does not mark any differences between
short and long vowels, which is an important distinction in the spoken language; the words for ‘salt’ [a:ma]
and ‘water’ [ama] are spelled the same way, though one has a long vowel (represented by ‘:’), and the other
has a short vowel (Scancarelli and Hardy 2005).
The Cherokee syllabary proved very useful for the Cherokee people, as thousands of Cherokee speakers
became literate in it shortly after it was introduced to the public, and newspapers and magazines were
printed in Cherokee (DeFrancis 1989; Coulmas 1996). It is still used by some Cherokee for religious
purposes and in the domain of Indian medicine, and interest in revitalizing the Cherokee language has led
to increased usage of the syllabary in educational contexts and in publications (Coulmas 1996; Bender
2002).
5.3 ALPHABETS. In an alphabetic system, letters or characters are used to represent the basic sounds of a
language that determine meaning. The Greek alphabet, from which the Roman alphabet was developed,
was itself an offshoot of the Phoenician alphabet and was the first known alphabet to have separate symbols
for both consonants and vowels. Some other examples of alphabetic systems are Finnish, German, English,
Russian, and Korean (DeFrancis 1989:52). They can be further divided according to their characteristics,
which will be described below. There are consonantal systems, inherent vowel systems, and featural
systems.
In an ideal alphabet, each letter would represent only one sound. In practice, this kind of alphabet does
not exist, though some alphabets that approach this ideal are Finnish and Hawaiian. As mentioned above,
there is approximately a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol in Finnish. This is because
the standardization of the written language for Finnish took place in the mid-nineteenth century, so there
has not been much time for deviation from a system of one-to-one correspondences between sounds and
symbols (Coulmas 1996). Hawaiian also has a relatively ideal alphabet, with five vowel symbols that
represent short vowels when written alone and long vowels when written with a symbol called a macron
(Hawaiian kahakō) above them, in addition to eight consonant symbols. The development of the Hawaiian
alphabet is discussed at length in the chapter Hawaiian: evolution of an alphabet by Albert J. Schütz in this
volume.
English spelling is a different situation altogether. Anyone who has attempted to learn English knows
that there is frequently no one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol, and there are many
spelling irregularities. Consider how you would pronounce the words people, rake, and height if you
assumed that each letter actually stood for a separate sound. In addition, as mentioned above, it is frequently
the case in English that one sound can be represented by different spelling combinations, for instance the
vowel sound [i] in meat, free, and seize. These inconsistencies in English spelling are a result of historical
occurrences that affected the writing system, such as the Norman Conquest, during which time English
spelling was affected by French spelling (Scragg 1974). While the written form of English has remained
the same for many years, the spoken language has changed, so that many written symbols are now
unnecessary yet still persist in the written language. The following poem by T.S. Watt cited in George Yule’s
(1985:33) book The Study of Language highlights the idiosyncrasies of the English spelling system.
5.4 CONSONANTAL ALPHABETS: ABJADS. Other alphabetic writing systems are consonant-based, in
which each symbol represents a consonant, and vowels are usually not marked. These alphabets, called
abjads, are used by the Semitic family of scripts and include Arabic and Hebrew. They reflect the fact that
in languages of this family, the core meanings of speech are carried through the consonants, while vowels
are used to indicate “less important” information like verb tense and aspect (Badawi, Carter and Gully
2004). The Arabic alphabet contains 28 basic letters (consonants), is written from right to left, and has been
used to write many spoken languages, including Urdu, Malay, Uighur, Turkish, Somali, and Swahili
(Coulmas 1996; Ager 2011). In Arabic, semantic stems generally consist of three or four consonants. Take,
for example, the Arabic root k-t-b, which expresses the basic meaning ‘write’. Addition of the vowels a and
i in between the root consonants produces katib, which means ‘writer’, while addition of two a vowels in
the root produces katab, which means ‘to write’ (Badawi, Carter and Gully 2004). You can see that the
primary meaning of words in Arabic is carried by consonants, with vowels supplying supplemental
information about morphology, so a consonantal writing system is efficient for writing Arabic.
5.5 INHERENT- VOWEL ALPHABETS: ABUGIDAS. In an inherent-vowel alphabetic system, also called an
abugida, each symbol denotes a consonant combined with a particular vowel. This might sound like a
syllabary, but the difference is that, while in a syllabary each combination of consonant plus vowel is written
using a unique symbol, in an abugida, there is one symbol representing a particular consonant-plus-vowel
sequence, and marks are used to represent different vowels. Abugidas are similar to the abjads mentioned
above in that consonant marking is most important, but different from abjads in that they mark vowels.
Unlike alphabets such as English and Finnish, however, in abugidas vowels do not have independent status
as letters/symbols, and cannot stand alone. Examples of abugidas are the Brahmic family of scripts used in
India and Southeast Asia, which includes the Devanagari script of Hindi and Sanskrit as well as the scripts
of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. An example from Hindi is , which is pronounced [ka]. This
symbol can be modified by adding vowel marks to produce the following syllables: [ki], [ku], [ke], or [ko] (Ager 2011; Abugida 2010).
5.6 F EATURAL ALPHABETS. Another type of alphabet, which has been described as “elegant” and
“scientific” by many scholars, is the Korean writing system, called Hangul. It was developed in the 1400s
by a team of scholars under King Sejong (Sampson 1985). It is labeled by some as a featural system,
meaning that its symbols are not arbitrary; rather, they are intended to represent a feature or features of the
spoken language. The letters of Hangul were designed to depict the place of articulation of the sounds which
they represent. For instance, the symbol for [k] <ㄱ> is supposed to represent the tongue touching the soft
palate, or velum, and the Hangul letters for [n] and [d] depict the tongue tip raised to touch the palate
(Sampson 1985). These letters are organized in blocks that represent syllables.
Even though this system was notably efficient for writing Korean, many educated classes looked down
on it and continued to use Chinese because it was traditionally the language of scholarly and official writing.
The prestige of the Chinese writing system in Korea was so great that Hangul was not much used a written
language before the 1880s (Sampson 1985; Lee 2003). During the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-
1945), the Korean language and Hangul script were suppressed, and Koreans were forced to use Japanese.
When Korea gained independence in 1945, Hangul became Korea’s national writing system as well as a
symbol of its independence (Lee 2003). The case of Korean Hangul clearly illustrates how social, political,
and identity-related factors can be intricately intertwined with the usage and development of a writing
system.