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ACADEMIC AMERICAN ENCYCLOPEDIA
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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).
Copyright (c) 1993 Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Limited and Full Writing