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Home , Coptic alphabet, Latin alphabet, Syllabary, Writing, Writing system, Written language

Linguists generally agree with the following statement by one of the founders of the modern science of language.

Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by visible marks.

Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)

Some version of this is clearly true, as we can see by looking at the of the human species and of each human individual. In both regards, precedes .

Speech Writing

Present in every society Present only in some societies, and only rather recently

Learned before writing Learned after is acquired

Learned by all children in normal Learned only by instruction, and often not circumstances, without instruction learned at all

Human evolution has made speaking Evolution has not specifically favored easier writing

Another way to express Bloomfield' point is to say that writing is "parasitic" on speech, expressing some but not all of the things that speech expresses. Specifically, writing convey the sequence of known or other elements of a language in a real or hypothetical utterance, and indicate (usually somewhat less well) the pronunciation of words not already known to the reader. Aspects of speech that writing leaves out can include emphasis, , of , accent or , and individual characteristics.

Some caveats are in order.

In the first place, writing is usually not used for "recording language" in the sense of transcribing speech. Writing may substitute for speech, as in a , or may deploy the expressive resources of spoken language in visual structures (such as tables) that can' easily replicated in spoken form at all.

In the second place, writing systems may include some conventions that are substantially independent of speech. For example, Geoff Nunberg has argued that in English is not only or even primarily a of the phrasing and intonation of spoken English, but rather an autonomous for indicating certain kinds of textual relationships. Also, words that are pronounced the same way may not be written the same way (""), and vice versa ("homographs"). Still, Bloomfield was basically correct: writing is a way of using "visible marks" to point to pieces of real or potential spoken language.

Types of writing

Here are the traditional terms for different types of writing systems; in fact they're best treated as ways to talk about particular rather than entire sytems, since particular systems often mix types of symbols.

Ideographic (idea-writing):

The refers to an idea or general concept, not a specific of some language; therefore this is not true (linguistic) writing.

Societies exclusively use ideographic symbols until writing is invented or borrowed. The Dakota Indians of the northern plains of the U.S. on occasion used a series of symbols, one for the passage of each year (or "winter"), to keep track of events beyond the of living individuals. A famous example of such a winter count was maintained by Lone Dog of the Yankton band of Dakotas, living in Montana; it runs from 1800-1871.

The symbols begin in the center of a buffalo hide and spiral outward. These symbols are examples of ideographic proto- writing, since they are not connected to particular words, but rather to events or ideas that are suggested by the images. Symbols that are pictures (more or less) of the thing they represent are called pictographs.

For example, in 1823-24 white soldiers made their first appearance in the region, and attacked an Arikara fort. (Garrick Mallery's Picture-Writing of the American Indians, 1893, pp. 266-287.)

This design serves to remind the interpreter of the count of that event; but much of the detail has to be provided by memory. In other words, it is a .

In societies with writing, ideographs are still quite useful, particularly when a independent of a particular language is desired. Road and other public signs are increasingly ideographic in today's world.

The written word restroom would be of use only to a (literate) speaker of English, whereas this symbol is easily learned regardless of a person's linguistic background. The kinds of messages that can be conveyed without reference to language are quite limited, however.

Ideographic systems as such have never developed into a form fully capable of conveying unlimited messages from one person to another. Instead, they either remain as limited systems operating within a highly restricted application -- say, to keep warehouse records or direct traffic -- or else they develop into a genuine , capable of conveying any linguistic message. In the second case, the process of development into a genuine writing system always involves adding some phonetic aspects, in ways we' describe shortly. Logographic (word-writing):

Each sign refers to a specific word (or rather, a ""), not just the general idea behind that word.

The notion of "word" is not entirely correct here; instead, the right idea is "morpheme," the minimal unit of we learned about in the lecture.

All the early writing systems of antiquity are heavily logographic, because what happens at the beginning of writing is a shift from idea to word as the element being represented by a symbol.

For example, this depiction of a 's tools stands for the Egyptian word originally pronounced something like ziçiR, meaning "write" (Some details of Egyptian pronunciation are to debate.) It is a logograph.

Similarly, this Chinese symbol (when read in Mandarin) stands for the word ma 3 (the "3" means falling-rising tone), meaning "horse." (It's a simplification of what began as a drawing of a horse.)

Nothing about these representations indicates the pronunciation; this lack is one of the basic characteristics of a logograph as an individual symbol. Some more examples from Chinese:

shan 1 ren 2 4 huo 3 shui 3 kou 3 shang 4 xia 4 "mountai "person" "tree" "fire" "water" "mouth" "above" "below" " But all writing systems involve reference to pronunciation in some way, including Chinese for the great majority of its characters, as we'll see below.

Syllabic:

Each sign refers to a , typically a plus a .

An example of a in which each symbol normally represents a syllable is the of Japanese. (It's just one part of the complex .) Here's the word watakushi, meaning "" (a polite form).

Notice that each symbol stands for a consonant plus a vowel -- just four symbols are needed, as opposed to the nine used to write it in English letters. There are two Japanese : hiragana, for native including suffixes , for borrowed vocabulary such as English words

Both sets of syllabic symbols are shown in this chart (hiragana on top). Notice that voiced obstruents are indicated by adding two small strokes to the symbol for the corresponding voiceless consonant; and /p/ is derived from // by adding a small circle.

The nearly empty column labeled "n" gives the symbols used when /n/ occurs at the end of a syllable. Japanese also makes great use of originally , in ways too complex to describe here.

While some basic symbols in Chinese are truly logographic, including the ones we saw above, the great majority of characters actually consist of two parts: one that tells about meaning, and one that indicates (with varying accuracy) the pronunciation. So the ma 3 "horse" above functions as a phonetic indicator in the following character for "mother," which points to the spoken word ma 1 with a high tone. (The left side of this character means FEMALE.)

Since the "horse" component indicates the pronunciation of the whole syllable [ma], it is a syllabic symbol.

For each component character, one part is the phonetic, and the other is the semantic; generally the rest of what that character expresses independently is ignored. Thus in "mother" above, the left character means FEMALE, while the same character, as part of "servant" below, is used for its sound [nü].

nü 3 2

"female" "servant"

(with HAND)

The resulting compound character has a particular pronunciation, of course, so it can also be used as the phonetic in other, denser characters. For historical reasons, this is quite common.

nu 2 nu 3 nu 4

"servant" "work" "anger"

(with STRENGTH) (with HEART)

In the majority of cases, seen also here, the phonetic component of the character is an imperfect reflection of the pronunciation (sometimes the tone is different, sometimes the consonant or vowel, sometimes all of them).

The important point is that Chinese, though in some ways logographic, also has a large phonetic aspect to its symbols -- more exactly, a syllabic one. The imprecision of the phonetic aspect is analogous to the irregularities of English .That is, English spelling usually tells us what the are, but unless we know in advance, it often gives us only imperfect about pronunciation. We can be sure that "tough" will not be pronounced "congressional" or "", but only knowledge of the word itself tells us that it rhymes with "rough" and not with "dough" or "through" or "plough".

Alphabetic:

Each sign refers to a single sound, whether a consonant or a vowel.

This type of script hardly needs illustration, since English uses the . But there are several aspects of English spelling that depart from a "pure" alphabet.

Digraphs, or the use of two letters to write a single sound; as well as rarer trigraphs.

• fish, chin, thin • see, too, saw • watch

Silent letters that aren't pronounced at all.

• caught • give

There are, of course, also many inconsistencies and irregularities in the use of the symbols.

Homographs, or the same with different phonetic values.

• meat, great, bread I read it yesterday o I'll read it tomorrow • ether, either

Homophones, or different spellings with the same phonetic values.

• bread, red • off, cough

These "impurities" or quirks of the don't change the fact that the basic nature of the system is one symbol per sound -- that's the standard from which these examples deviate (rather than, say, a syllabic standard).

Whether or not digraphs are necessary depends on the resources of a particular alphabet, and what sounds need to be written. Borrowed words often present special circumstances.

For example, the Cyrillic alphabet has many letters for which English (or the more generally) needs to resort to digraphs and even more complex solutions. Consider the Russian Khrushchev.

This word is transliterated kh--u-shch--. Notice the digraph kh and the tetragraph (?!) shch. Since the Latin alphabet has no equivalents, these new combinations are necessary to render the Russian letters. (In cases like this, hyphens are helpful in showing the equivalents of each letter.)

Of course, sometimes it's another language that needs to resort to these strategies when borrowing an English word.

German, for example, has no letter for the consonant sound in judge (that sound is absent from native German words.) So in borrowing the word jungle, it actually needs a tetragraph as well.

Dschungel

By the way, the word jungle came into English from , where there is also a single symbol for that initial consonant sound. So here English didn't have to resort to a digraph: the two ' scripts were nicely compatible.

There are many other kinds of as well. One sub-part of the Egyptian writing system was alphabetic, though originally it indicated only (like the Semitic alphabets that are probably descended from Egyptian). One example is the word twt, meaning "image," which we can render as toot. The little loaf of bread stands for the sound [t], and the quail chick for the sound [].

This was the first part of the name Tutankhamun, literally "living image of Amun."

The modern Semitic alphabets work in a similar way. In Hebrew, for example, only certain are written (as secondary functions of consonant characters), and there can be multiple ways of a word. (These alphabets are written from right to left.)

In , in can be trickier to identify the letters, since most of them have to be connected up in fashion. Here's one example with three letters.

Since in everyday writing short vowels are not written, and doubled consonants are not distinguished, this word can be read in several ways, including:

kataba " wrote" kutiba "it was written" kattaba "he caused to write" kutub "" Context generally makes things clear, just as it does for ambiguous English written words like read and bow. But of course English writing, while extremely ambiguous if one is trying to pronounce unfamiliar words, is less ambiguous once you've learned it than a script that leaves out vowels entirely. For example, while you can't be sure whether ea will be pronounced [i] or [E] in a particular word, you can be quite sure it won't be pronounced [a], [o], [u], [aw], [oy], [ay] or any number of other possibilities. So the Semitic alphabets which do not write the vowels are more ambiguous than . But there seems to be a reason for this. As suggested by the examples above, Semitic words generally have a root made up of three consonants, with the vowels in between indicating derivational and inflectional variants. Information of this sort can generally be gleaned quite easily from the context. Because of this structure, it is very rare that the lack of vowels would leave unclear which root is involved, so the following two possibilities, which would be indistinguishible if we wrote English without vowels, would be quite distinct in a Semitic language:

He's leading/loading the donkey.

Origins of writing

The following shows the dates at which a number of writing systems first appeared (some much earlier than others).

Writing was invented several (perhaps four different times) in the history of the world, though the exact number is a matter of debate. (For example, there's good reason to think that Egyptian writing was inspired by contact with Sumer, but the system itself was a new creation.) These dates are debated as well.

Sumerian 3200 BCE Egyptian 3050 BCE Chinese 1200 BCE Maya 292 CE

The earliest writing seems to have arisen in southern (modern Iraq), among the Sumerian people, between 3200 and 3000 BCE. (Egyptian writing arises at nearly the same , and was possibly inspired by it in some way.) They developed a system of icons inscribed on clay tablets for keeping temple economic records.

A typical example includes icons for "two", "sheep", "house" (also "temple"), and the goddess "" with the general symbol for "god" used to identify divine beings. These diagrams show the original pictures; the Sumerian words; and the English .

Such early are difficult to interpret, largely because they lack indication of verbs and the interrelations of nouns -- precisely what full language excels at. The meaning might be

"two sheep received from the temple of Inanna", or

"two sheep delivered to the temple of Inanna", or perhaps something else entirely.

Thus these marks constituted a limited system, which in the beginning may only have served to remind the of what he had once already known (a mnemonic, like the Dakota winter count). However, as long as agreed-on standards were obeyed, another person could also read the record in the same way. In this regard, these early documents were similar to many systems for record-keeping, based on symbolic tokens of many sorts, developed over and over again in many over the millennia -- marks on stone or bone, clay figurines, even knots in cords. As become more complex, however, record-keeping needs become increasingly complex as well. The ability of trained third parties to read such records in a consistent way becomes increasingly important for mediating or adjudicating disputes in non-violent ways.

In the case of the Sumerian record-keeping system, two crucial innovations led (over a few hundred years) to a full writing system, capable of expressing anything that could be expressed in the (written) words of the .

The first innovation was the Rebus Principle (Homophonic Principle): if you can't make a picture of something, use a picture of something with the same (or similar) sound. That is, when a word for some easily drawn was homophonous with (had the same pronunciation as) some more abstract word, the originally pictographic sign could be used for the homophonous word as well.

For example, the following sign for a "water" was originally two wavy lines. It was also used for the preposition "in" which in Sumerian had the same pronunciation.

a "water"

a "in"

It also soon came to mean the sound [a] in general -- regardless of the meaning of the word in which it occurred -- thereby acquiring a truly phonetic use. For example, it could be used to help write the suffix ani meaning "his" or "her."

Similarly, a picture of the concrete object gi "reed" was used for the abstract verb "reimburse." This is the world's first clear example of rebus, in a tablet from Jemdet Nasr, dated to around 2900 BCE.

gi "reed"

gi "reimburse"

Such rebus extensions solve the problem of writing words for abstract concepts, though they also create a new problem of ambiguity -- but no more so than any phonetic writing system that writes homophonous words identically (such as English bank for the edge of a river and for a financial institution).

The second innovation was what we might call the Charades Principle: if you combine an ambiguous or vague picture of the meaning of a word, with a little information about what the word sounds like, you can get a more effective of the identity of the word than if you tried to use only imperfect information about meaning, or imperfect information about sound.

To give an example from Sumerian, the basic meaning of the following sign was KA "mouth."

But it also had other . For example, it was augmented with the phonetic me to create EME "tongue".

Similarly, it is augmented with to create NUNDUM "lip".

Thus a Sumerian reader was in effect being asked to play a sort of game of charades: what word has something to do with "mouth" and sounds like [me]? -- why of course, that's EME, "tongue"! These combinations became conventionalized, resulting in a system that was presumably somewhat easier to learn to read than to learn to write, but was not very efficient in either direction.

Still, the result was a complete writing system, in which the Sumerians wrote down not just warehouse records, but poems, diplomatic treaties, letters, contracts and judicial decisions, dictionaries, and epic myths.

A modern version of a similar "charades" system is what we've already seen for Chinese characters. Recall that most characters can be analyzed as containing two elements, one of which provides semantic information, while the other provides phonological information, as in the FEMALE and [ma] of "mother."

It's important to note and remember that these "charades" are completely conventionalized: an educated reader of Chinese doesn't have to guess every time a familiar character is seen. But when a rare or unfamiliar character is encountered, this is precisely the sort of guessing strategy that could reveal the word to which the character refers without consulting a dictionary.

It is clearly inappropriate to call the Chinese system "ideographic", as is sometimes done. Chinese characters refer to specific morphemes, not vague ideas. However, Chinese characters are simultaneously a kind of syllabic writing, since the phonetic element is always a syllable in size. The term "morpho-syllabic" has been created to describe it.

No one has ever developed a full system based on ideographic principles, although people have often surmised that this would be useful, because it would (or at least could) be . The problem is that "universality" means only that it is equally hard for everyone to develop and learn such a system. If it is feasible to design such a system at all, it is at least very, very difficult.

The problem is this. The number of ideas that can be expressed by language is huge, and the idea expressed by a word is actually quite precise. When we say house we do not mean any place where someone can live, or any sheltering structure or even the same thing as we mean when we say home. These distinctions are important, and in order to be as communicative as normal language, a fully ideographic system would have to be able to make them clearly, but it is not clear how this would be done simple by altering the picture. In order to be certain that the person reading the sign would understand precisely what the writer meant, a certain amount of conventionality would have to be introduced. Once this happens, though, we are left again with a system that must be learned. The more expressive we want it to be, the more will have to be conventionalized, and the more will have to be learned. In order to be as fully expressive as a natural human language, our ideographic communication system would probably require about as much learning as any other language. We would be left then with something like , an interesting attempt which will raise a certain amount of interest and have a certain amount of success, but will probably ultimately fail because it's simpler to use a language that at least one part of the population already speaks.

Since everyone already knows at least one ordinary spoken language, practical people will always tend to give up on the ideographic system and start using a written form of their speech, as soon as they can figure out how to do this.

But this is no easy task. It is rather difficult to get enough conscious access to the phonological structure of speech to design an alphabetic writing system, and very few languages have small enough inventories of for a syllabic system to be an easy place to start. More importantly, the idea of constructing a full writing system (on any basis, phonological or otherwise) is not at all an obvious one.

So writing seems to have started with for mnemonic aids in record keeping, as seen above, or as of insight in divination. As the inventory of signs increases, the possibility arises to begin using some of the signs as rebuses or as phonological/semantic combinations. This is much more efficient than trying to design a new symbol for every word or morpheme. Once this meaning-plus-sound process begins, it can develop into a full (if complex and inefficient) writing system, able to encode any passage in the language. This development seems to have occurred independently at least three times: in Mesopotamia; in ; and in .

Various other developments are then logically possible. The Chinese (and other cultures influenced by them, including ) developed a meaning-plus-sound system based on the syllabic unit. The Mayans did the same. A logical next step is to increase efficiency by doing away with some or all of the meaning-related units in favor of a consistent syllabary of some sort. Such syllabaries were developed throughout East Asia, but in most cases they did not displace the meaning-plus-sound elements. Instead they supplemented them for certain uses (such as the encoding of grammatical particles in Japanese) or for certain populations (such as women in some places and periods in China).

By contrast, the developed a meaning-plus-sound system based on consonants. This naturally led to purely consonantal writing systems for some of the , notably Phoenician.

It was the Phoenicians who brought the alphabet to the . The innovation of the Greeks was to invent vowel letters -- but this was essentially by accident, since the Greeks misheard some Phoenician words starting with unfamiliar "guttural" consonants as starting with vowels. For example the greek letter , ancestor of modern A, represents a in the Semitic is called 'aleph). They thus used the symbols for א languages (the corresponding Hebrew letter these unfamiliar consonants to stand for the vowels of their language, and the first full alphabet, with special symbols for individual vowels and consonants, was born.

Several times in history, writing systems were developed from scratch over the course of several years by a single person or a group of people, instead of developing slowly over time. writing (invented by a man named Sequioia, who was, as far as we know, illiterate) is an example of such emergence of writing de nuovo.

Flexibility of writing systems

In principle, any fully linguistic script can be used to write any language; this is proved by the fact that foreign can be rendered in new scripts. Scripts are just better adapted to some languages than to others, especially with respect to the individual sounds (in any script) and sound combinations (in a syllabary) that need to be expressed.

In addition, the is filled with examples of scripts adapted to new languages, often unrelated and of very different structures. Some examples:

Developed for... Used for... Sumerian Akkadian Hittite Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese (formerly) Arabic Persian Turkish (formerly) Hebrew Ladino Latin English and hundreds more

These examples could easily be multiplied. These adaptations involves changes of varying degrees, such that the result may sometimes be considered a new script (such as Greek as adapted to Etruscan, Latin and Old Church Slavic).

Along the same lines, what is essentially the same language can be actively written in different systems. Sometimes this depends on ethnicity or religion, other times on historical shifts.

One language... Different scripts... Hindi Urdu Arabic Serbian Cyrillic Croatian Latin Turkish (pre-1928) Arabic Turkish (post-1928) Latin Vietnamese (pre-1910) Chinese Vietnamese (post-1910) Latin South Korean (less and less) Chinese plus alphabet North Korean (post-1949) Pure hangul alphabet Egyptian Coptic (Late Egyptian) (from Greek)

Once a writing system is "full", i.e. includes a way to write sounds, it's possible (though not always convenient) to use that system to write any language. The point of having a phonetic alphabet such as the IPA is to be able to write down any language at all in the most convenient way.