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ACADEMIC AMERICAN ENCYCLOPEDIA

EVOLUTION OF WRITING SYSTEMS

Full writing systems may be defined as those collections of arbitrary signs that can represent all the words of the languages to which they are applied. Limited writing systems, consisting of marks made for counting or identification, go back 30,000 years; but the evolution of full writing systems has taken place only during the past 5,000 years.

Although in use for only a relatively brief period of history, writing systems have made possible the technological advances that have taken humanity from hunting, gathering, and simple farming to the exploration of space. Writing created a permanent record of knowledge so that a fund of information could accumulate from one generation to the next. Before writing, human knowledge was confined by the limits of memory--what one could learn for oneself or find out from talking to someone else. Writing extended the geography of communication: whereas early visual systems, such as signaling by gestures or with fires or smoke, were limited to the range of eyesight and subject to misinterpretation, writing allowed accurate communication at a distance without traveling or relying on the memory of a messenger.


Limited and Full Writing

Limited writing includes both picture writing, or pictography, and ideography, the use of pictures to represent not the object drawn but some attribute or idea suggested by the object (for example, the use of a drawing of the sun to represent the idea of warmth). Limited writing refers directly to the object or idea portrayed. Pictograms or ideograms call to mind an image or concept that then may be expressed in language; the reader does not need to know the language of the writer but can translate the signs directly into his or her own language.

A full or true writing system represents words, not objects. However elaborate, the earliest systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Central America qualify only as limited writing since they used signs that refer to the objects represented and not to the words for the objects. A recently created limited writing system, international traffic signs, is effective because it avoids language; simple pictures, not words or phrases incomprehensible to illiterates or speakers of other languages, warn drivers of road hazards and traffic regulations. Other widely used modern systems of limited writing, such as musical or scientific notation, electronic circuit diagrams, and blueprints, all use less space than full writing to convey specific technical information.


Word, Syllabic, and Alphabetic Writing

To represent a language adequately, a full writing system must maintain fixed correspondences between its signs and the elements of the language. A writing system that has a sign for each word in the language is called logographic, one that has signs for the different syllables that occur is called syllabic, and one that has a sign for each sound of the language is called alphabetic.

To understand a message written in a full writing system, the reader must know the language of the writer. This does not mean, however, that a writing system can be used for only one language and no other. Throughout history writing systems have been transferred with great effectiveness from one language to another--as from Chinese to Japanese or from Latin to English.


Forerunners of writing

Called petrograms if drawn or printed on the surface of rocks and petroglyphs if cut into the rock, primitive drawings have been found on every continent except Antarctica. Early paintings like those on the ceiling of the cave at ALTAMIRA, Spain (c.14,000-c.9500 BC), or on the walls of Barrier Canyon, Utah (c.4000 BC), belong as much to the history of art as to the history of writing. Other pictures or series of pictures, however, such as Eskimo ivory carvings and New Zealand petroglyphs, seem to have been designed more for communication than for aesthetic pleasure (see INSCRIPTION).

The markings of the Mesolithic AZILIAN culture of southern France that were made on flint pebbles may descend from pictures of men and animals but apparently took on a magical or religious significance. Prehistoric Egyptian and Anatolian potters and masons used marks to identify their handiwork. In China, Africa, and the Americas, ancient peoples used knotted cords, notched sticks, and other mnemonic devices to help them count or keep track of time or distance.

The AZTEC took their writing system from the MAYA. Although all the highly pictographic Aztec symbols and most of the increasingly stylized Mayan ones stood for objects or concepts (including numbers) rather than for words, syllables, or sounds, some Mayan symbols may have become phonetic.


Logographic Systems

When pictograms or ideograms become so stylized as to be no longer recognizable as representations of particular objects, users (both readers and writers) begin to transfer the significance of the signs from the objects to the names for those objects--that is, the signs come to signify words rather than objects, and writing becomes phoneticized. So far, scholars have discovered seven ancient civilizations in which the transference from picture writing to word writing took place: Sumerian (3100 BC; see SUMER), Egyptian (3000 BC; see EGYPT, ANCIENT), Proto-Elamite (3000 BC; see ELAM), Proto-Indic (2200 BC; see INDUS CIVILIZATION), Cretan (2000 BC; see CRETE), Hittite (1500 BC; see HITTITES), and Chinese (1500 BC; see CHINA, HISTORY OF). Of the writing systems used by these civilizations, three--Proto-Elamite, Proto-Indic, and Cretan--have yet to be deciphered, and only one, Chinese, remains in use today. The Proto-Elamite and Proto-Indic systems left no known descendants, but Cretan gave rise to Linear A and LINEAR B.

The Sumerians, living in southern Mesopotamia, evolved their CUNEIFORM writing system toward the end of the 4th millennium BC. Derived from Latin cuneus, "wedge," the word cuneiform describes the wedge-shaped strokes used to form the characters of the Sumerian and several later, derivative scripts, including those for Akkadian (see AKKAD) and its two dialects, Babylonian (see BABYLONIA) and Assyrian (see ASSYRIA), and for Eblaite (see EBLA). Egyptian HIEROGLYPHICS were perfected during the first dynasty (3110-2884 BC). The adjective hieroglyphic, from Greek Hieroglyphikos, "of holy carvings," denotes any system of highly stylized but still recognizable pictures and has been applied to both the ancient Cretan and Mayan writing systems.

Various forms of Hittite (see LANGUAGES, EXTINCT), belonging to the group of INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, were spoken in Anatolia from the 2d millennium BC to shortly after the time of Christ. So-called Hieroglyphic Hittite (1500-700 BC) used pictures unrelated to those of the Egyptian system, but Cuneiform Hittite (1500-1200 BC)--a distinct language--borrowed its characters from Mesopotamia. Most of them scratches on bones or shells, the 2,000-3,000 identifiable characters of ancient Chinese constitute the ancestors of the present-day script (see SINO-TIBETAN LANGUAGES).


Semantic and Phonetic Indicators

In most logographic systems, one sign can represent several distinct words. With purely logographic writing, this ambiguity is not resolved, and the reader must deduce the correct word from the context. Other logographic systems, however, include semantic or phonetic complements--often called determinatives or phonetic indicators.

Determinatives indicate the class or category--such as gods, countries, fish, birds, verbs of motion, verbs of building, objects made of wood, objects made of stone--to which the word represented by the logogram belongs. For example, the Sumerian logogram APIN (originally a pictogram of a plow) stood for the Sumerian words apin, "plow," engar, "farmer," and uru, "to cultivate." When APIN appeared together with the logogram GIS, for "wood," the combination GIS-APIN indicated that the intended word belonged to the class of objects made of wood, and hence APIN was to be read as apin, "plow." Similarly, when used in conjunction with the logogram LU, "man," APIN meant engar, "farmer." Since Sumerian writing did not use determinatives with verbs, APIN alone, without a determinative, normally represented uru, "to cultivate."

Phonetic indicators show part or all of the pronunciation of the word represented by the logogram. To use a modern example, the numeral 4 (a logogram) means the cardinal number "four." To express the ordinal, a phonetic indicator -th is attached and the combination 4th read as "fourth." The sign -th calls to mind not an idea or even the word associated with the idea, but a sound constituting part of the word represented by the logogram. Every logogram, with or without a phonetic indicator, is wholly phonetic in the sense that it stands for a specific word with a phonetic realization.


The Rebus Principle

After a logogram has lost all resemblance to the object that it refers to, the logogram may come to stand for other words--homonyms--that have the same, or nearly the same, pronunciation. If the sign subsequently comes to stand not for the words themselves but only for their common phonetic shape or pronunciation, then the logogram has become a REBUS. Writing with such logograms is sometimes called writing according to the rebus principle.

The Sumerian sign TI (originally a pictogram of an arrow), standing for the Sumerian word ti, "arrow," came also to represent the near-homonym til, "to live," creating a new logogram with a meaning wholly distinct from the sign's original meaning. Then the sign began to be used simply for the sound, or syllable, ti, independent of any logographic connotation.


Logosyllabic Writing

With signs such as TI representing only syllables, case endings and verbal inflections could be expressed by attaching the appropriate syllabic sign to the root logogram. Unlike phonetic indicators, syllabic signs were meant to be read and interpreted as elements of the language being written. In most logosyllabic (or word-syllabic) writing, words are still indicated with logograms, while the syllabic signs are reserved for grammatical elements.

Syllabic writing also enabled signs partly to express a desired grammatical element and partly to serve as phonetic indicators. The Sumerian logogram DU (originally a pictogram of a foot) represented several verbs connected with the feet, including gin, "to go," gub, "to stand," and tum, "to bring." Adding the syllabic sign for the nominalizing particle -a allowed DU-a to represent all three verbal nouns, but it soon became a convention to use a syllabic sign that also showed the proper reading of the logogram. Thus the combined symbol DU-na meant gin-a, "going," DU-ba meant gub-a, "standing," and DU-ma meant tum-a, "bringing."


Syllabaries

A conflict arises in any logographic or logosyllabic writing system between economy--the number of signs required to write a given message--and explicitness--the number of signs required to avoid ambiguity of meaning. Even after grouping all words with similar meanings under one logogram, a logosyllabic system still needs 500-600 signs. By contrast, a purely syllabic system may have less than 100 signs and seldom has more than 200. An elaborate syllabary--the name given to the collection of characters each of which represents a syllable--can have signs for consonant plus vowel, vowel plus consonant, or consonant plus vowel plus consonant. A purely phonetic script, syllabic writing reduces ambiguity by indicating the precise pronunciation of each word.

An open syllabary--a syllabary simplified to only consonant-plus-vowel signs--reduces the number of signs required to the number of consonants times the number of vowels in the language, plus signs for just the vowels. Even so, an open syllabary cannot express such phonological features as double consonants, consonant clusters, and final consonants. Reducing the consonant-plus-vowel signs simply to signs for a consonant plus any vowel greatly increases economy--it reduces the number of signs to the number of consonant sounds in the language--but decreases explicitness because the reader must supply the correct vowel sounds.


Ancient Syllabaries

Four types of syllabaries developed from the seven ancient logographic systems: cuneiform syllabaries from Sumerian, West Semitic syllabaries from Egyptian, the Cypriot syllabary from Cretan (see CYPRUS), and the Japanese syllabary, or kana, from Chinese (see JAPANESE LANGUAGE). Cuneiform syllabaries derived from Sumerian include those for the extinct languages Urartian (see URARTU), Elamite, Hattic, Hurrian, Luwian, and Palaic. West Semitic peoples of Syria and Palestine created an open syllabary from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system by leaving out logograms and the signs for more complex syllables (see AFROASIATIC LANGUAGES). Apart from that exemplified by a few short inscriptions of c.1500 BC found in Sinai, the earliest such West Semitic syllabary belongs to UGARIT, on the northern Syrian coast, and dates from c.1300 BC.


The Cherokee Syllabary

In 1809 a native Cherokee named SEQUOYA (George Guess) undertook to develop a writing system for his people. After discarding an ideographic system as too cumbersome, by 1821 he had perfected a syllabary with 85 characters. Sequoya borrowed some of his signs from the Latin alphabet but gave them completely different values (the sign D, for instance, represents the vowel a). Other signs resemble Arabic numerals or Latin letters either turned upside down or otherwise modified; still others seem to be arbitrary creations. Within a decade almost all the men of the tribe had learned to read and write, and although the script subsequently fell into disuse, it is preserved in many manuscripts, newspapers, and printed books.


The Alphabet

By c.1000 BC, other West Semitic peoples besides the Ugarits had developed syllabaries from Egyptian hieroglyphics; it was from one of these peoples--ARABS, ARAMAEANS, Hebrews (see HEBREW LANGUAGE), or Phoenicians (see PHOENICIA), but probably the last--that the Greeks borrowed their writing system during the 9th century BC (see GREEK LANGUAGE). Soon after, the Greeks made the final step of dividing the consonants from the vowels and writing each separately. The resulting system--called an alphabet, from the names of the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta--is unique. The Greeks and no other civilization before or since (with the doubtful exception of the Koreans; see KOREAN LANGUAGE) invented the alphabet; all subsequent alphabets, ancient or modern, derive from the Greek one. Alphabetic writing represents the best compromise yet developed between economy and explicitness. Although for a given utterance alphabetic writing requires more signs than does logographic or syllabic writing, the total number of signs in the system remains small, and ambiguity is virtually eliminated because the writer can spell out each sound of each word.


The Greek Alphabet and Its Descendants

Since the Semitic syllabaries had signs only for consonants, the Greeks needed to find characters to represent the vowels of their language. According to the standard view, the Greeks simply adopted the Semitic signs for five consonants that did not occur in Greek and applied the signs to vowels. The Semitic letter aleph, representing a smooth breathing, became Greek alpha, representing the vowel "a"; he became epsilon, "e"; yodh became iota, "i"; ayin became omicron, "o"; and waw became upsilon, "u." Hebrew and other Semitic systems had already used some consonant signs to indicate the vowel of the preceding syllable. The Greek innovation, however, consisted of having signs that represented only vowels and having the signs represent the vowels directly.

Asian offshoots of the Greek alphabet include those used in LYCIA, LYDIA, Caria, Pamphylia, and Phrygia. In Africa, the term Coptic denotes both the language descended from ancient Egyptian and the Greek-derived alphabet used to write the language from the 3d to 13th centuries AD. When Ulfilas (AD c.311-381), bishop of the GOTHS, created an alphabet for Gothic (see GERMANIC LANGUAGES), he took 19 or 20 of his 27 letters from Greek and most of the rest from Latin. The earliest surviving texts written in SLAVIC LANGUAGES, from the 10th and 11th centuries, employ the CYRILLIC ALPHABET, also derived from Greek and traditionally ascribed to Saint Cyril (see CYRIL AND METHODIUS). On the Italian peninsula, both the Messapii to the south and the ETRUSCANS to the north had adapted the Greek alphabet to their languages several centuries before Christ.


The Etruscan and Latin Alphabets and Their Descendants

The Etruscan alphabet, exemplified by more than 10,000 inscriptions dating from the 8th century BC to the 1st century AD, in its original form consisted of 26 letters. From the Etruscan derive the Piceni, Venetic, Italic (Oscan, Umbrian, and Siculian), North Etruscan or Alpine, and Latin or Roman alphabets. The first three did not survive into the Christian era, but early Germanic tribes took their RUNES from the North Etruscan alphabet, and with only slight modifications the Latin alphabet has been adopted as the script of most modern European languages, including English.

The earliest Latin inscriptions, from the 7th to 5th centuries BC, used 21 letters, retaining only one (that derived from Greek sigma) of the three Etruscan symbols for s-sounds and reserving for numbers the symbols for three aspirates not found in the LATIN LANGUAGE (derivatives of theta, phi, and chi signified 100, 1,000, and 50, respectively, but later became identified with those letters--C, M, and L--whose forms they most closely resembled). During the 1st century BC, the Romans added the letters Y and Z to the end of their alphabet to represent two sounds newly introduced into Latin by such Greek loanwords as zephyrus, "the west wind." The letter J developed as a variant of I, and U and W developed as variants of V during late classical times, but the distinctions were not kept systematically until the 17th century.

Both in its majuscule (capital letters) and minuscule (small letters) forms, the Latin alphabet was carried throughout medieval Europe by the Roman Catholic church--to the Irish (see CELTIC LANGUAGES) and MEROVINGIANS in the 6th century and the ANGLO-SAXONS and Germans in the 7th. The oldest surviving texts in the ENGLISH LANGUAGE written with Latin letters date from c.700 (see the articles on the individual letters of the English alphabet, A, B, C, and so on).


Mixed Writing Systems

Few writing systems exist in purely logographic, syllabic, or alphabetic form. Most systems use logograms for numbers, and English includes the signs & ("and") and $ ("dollars") and the percent sign. English also creates logograms from initials, like the readily recognizable configurations USA and FBI. Other abbreviations, such as NATO and UNESCO, are pronounced like words, and some, like laser (formerly written LASER, for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), have become lowercased.

Furthermore, neither logograms, syllabaries, alphabets, nor any combinations thereof can capture in themselves such crucial prosodic nuances of spoken language as pause, stress, tone, and pitch, indicating hesitation, surprise, anger, or interrogation. The bare written expression sit down may remain inscrutable, but its vocal equivalent, depending on the speaker's stress and tone of voice, reveals whether a polite invitation, a command, or a threat is intended. To relieve ambiguity, writing systems through the ages have developed a number of conventions and auxiliary marks, notably spacing and PUNCTUATION.


Spelling, Pronunciation, and Change

The ideal alphabet imposes a direct relation between the sounds of a language and the signs that represent them. In practice, signs represent combinations of sounds (the English letter X stands for the sounds k + s) or more than one sound (C stands for k or s), and combinations of signs represent one sound (the letters PH for f) or different sounds (TH represents the voiceless initial fricative of thin as well as the voiced one of this). Still, serious obstacles confront attempts to reform the spelling of English or any other language. In all languages, pronunciation changes continually, so a new spelling system would itself need reforming after a time. Every language has dialects; some English speakers rhyme log and dog, or marry and merry, but others do not. Whose pronunciation will determine the spellings of words?

Writing systems tend to be conservative. Ancient peoples attributed a divine origin to their scripts and therefore hesitated to change or modify them. Major innovations occur when one people borrows a writing system from another. When the Akkadians adapted the syllabic portion of Sumerian cuneiform to their own language, they reserved the logograms as a kind of shorthand, thus replacing a logosyllabic system with a syllabic system supplemented by logograms. When the Hittites subsequently borrowed Akkadian cuneiform, they eliminated most of the polyphonous and homophonous signs and many of the logograms but retained several Akkadian syllabic spellings as logograms.

Although unwilling to modify the structure of their writing systems, ancient people did simplify signs. The Akkadians kept the basic principles of their cuneiform intact for more than 2,000 years, but they reduced the number of strokes per sign and within each sign grouped together all strokes running in the same direction. I. J. GELB AND R. M. WHITING Bibliography: Chadwick, John, The Decipherment of Linear B, 2d ed. (1967); Cleator, P. E., Lost Languages (1959); Diringer, David, Writing (1962) and The Alphabet, 3d ed., 2 vols. (1968); Doblhofer, Ernst, Voices in Stone: The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings, trans. by Mervyn Savill (1961; repr. 1973); Driver, G. R., Semitic Writing, 3d ed. (1976); Gelb, Ignace J., A Study of Writing, rev. ed. (1963); Marshack, Alexander, The Roots of Civilization (1972); Mercer, Samuel, The Origin of Writing and Our Alphabet (1959); Moorhouse, A. C., The Triumph of the Alphabet (1953); Ober, J. H., Writing (1965); Ogg, Oscar, The 26 Letters, rev. ed. (1971); Ullman, Berthold L., Ancient Writing and Its Influence (1932; repr. 1969).

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