Teppo Räisänen
School of Business and Information Management
Oulu University of Applied Sciences
WRITING
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
History of writing
 Five civilizations discovered writing more or
less independently
History of writing
 Five civilizations discovered writing more or
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
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
less independently
Sumer, 3000+ BC
Egypt, 3000+ BC
China, 2650+ BC
India, ~2000 BC
Mesoamerica (Olmecs), 1000 BC
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
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)
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
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
History of writing
History of writing
 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)
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