Chapter 5 Writing Systems

Chapter 5 Writing Systems There are many differences between spoken and written language. To the linguist, the most important is: Spoken language is the birthright of all humans; every human being is born with the ability to learn a language and (except under extremely pathological circumstances) does so with- in a few years; we will talk about this issue in more detail in Chapter 13. Written language is an artifact peculiar to certain cultures. Vast numbers of people have lived out their lives as perfectly productive members of society without ever learning to read or write, or even imagining that such activities might be possible. All human beings everywhere acquire language; writing has only been invented a few times in the history of the world, in a few cultural environments. When i speak of the ‘invention’ of writing, i mean the development of a writing system, a method for making a permanent representation of language, in a culture that has not previously been ex- posed to any such system from an outside source.1 By this definition, as far as we know writing has been invented only 5 times in the history of the world, in 5 places:2 Mesopotamia: the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, ca. 5000 years ago. More specifically, the writing system was developed by the Sumerians, the first urban civilization to occupy this region, and later adopted by later residents and their neigh- bours. Egypt: the fertile valley of the Nile River in Northeastern Africa, ca. 5000 years ago. We do not know to what extent, and/or in what direction(s), these two may have influenced each other. China: the writing system characteristic of modern Chinese is known to have existed in the time of the 商朝, a little over 3000 years ago; written inscriptions dating from that period but similar enough to modern 漢字 to be read have been found in the 揚子江 valley near Anyang. Internal evidence strongly suggests that writing had already been being practiced for some time before these inscriptions were made.3 More recent findings (reported April 2000) in 山東省 strongly indicate that the Chinese writing system was already beginning to evolve 4800 years ago, making it near- ly as ancient as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems. 1On the basis of this definition, the Europeans never invented writing, so far as we know; they got the idea from other cultures outside Europe, as i shall outline below. 2In previous editions of this text i included, as a sixth instance of the invention of writing, the ‘Harappan’ inscriptions found in the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan and dating over 4000 years ago. However, in 2004 Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel argued convincingly that these inscriptions do not qualify as a real ‘written language’ in the strict sense of the term. Cf. their paper ‘The Collapse of the Indic-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization’ (Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 11-2, pp. 19–57). 3Nature of evidence: 1 The characters are already much stylized, noticeably removed from their (presumed) picto- graphic origins. 2 The inscriptions include the word 書, representing a bunch of bamboo strips tied together, imply- ing that such collections of writing existed and the Chinese were accustomed to writing on perishable material rather than on bone, which is the medium of the earliest known inscriptions. 102 Central America: roughly 1000 years ago, the Aztecs and Mayans had something in the way of a serviceable writing system. Easter Island: inscriptions have been found on the great statues for which this small island in the Pacific Ocean is justly famous. They are, however, so far completely undeciphered, so there's virtually nothing i or almost anybody else can say about them. Writing Systems in Linguistic Science During the past century or so, linguists have by and large ignored or avoided the subject of writing systems, although rather paradoxically most linguistic research is based on written, not spoken, records. Part of the reason for this is that, as i remarked earlier, writing is an artifact, something that human beings have had to deliberately invent, while Language itself, the subject matter of linguistic research, is the natural birthright of all humans. This would suggest that there is a sig- nificant difference between Language and writing, even though writing is in one sense merely the visual representation of Language. And this is certainly true; we are speaking animals, not writing animals. Language is a skill we all learn effortlessly in childhood; writing is a skill which, if we learn at all, we learn through arduous practice in a formal context. In that sense they are clearly two very different skills, and linguists have often used this fact to argue that the study of writing can teach us nothing about Language. It should be noted that this attitude of traditional linguistic science is strikingly at variance with the attitude common to the general educated public. The average educated person tends to place extra emphasis on the written form of a language, to the point that there is an often unspoken or even unconscious assumption that written expressions that resemble each other visually must somehow resemble each other also in sound if not in meaning. Thus, i have on many occasions run into the assumption that, since the name of the capital of Russia is properly represented in writing as in (1a), it must be pronounced as in (1b) as opposed to the more correct pronuncia- tion in (1c). And, at least until they've been properly educated, Westerners have a very strong tendency to assume that the symbols in (2a) must be pronounced [r] or [ª], and of course the one in (2b) must be pronounced [°p] or [ip], while the one in (2c) often looks to us Westerners like a rather elaborate letter ‘E’. Another common assumption i've run into is that, since written Japa- nese looks so much like written Chinese, the languages themselves must be related, although as we shall see in Chapter 22 there is no good reason to believe any such thing. (1) a. москва b. [mŠkb\] c. [moskva] (2) a. 尺, 民 b. 印 c. 佳 Outside of East Asia and its immediately surrounding islands (i'm thinking here primarily of Japan and Taiwan), almost all languages nowadays that have any written form at all make use of some kind of alphabet; outside of Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa, the overwhelming majority of written languages make use of some form of the Roman alphabet, the same alphabet i'm using here. This is due not to a common cultural inheritance shared by all these languages but to the history of imperialism and cultural domination of various nations — mostly but not all European — that happen to use alphabets of one kind or another — mostly Roman — for writing their own languages. Latin, English, and Fijian are all written with the Roman alphabet, but as we shall see later this does not mean that the Roman alphabet is particularly well suited to representing all three of these languages. And in India there are several different alphabets competing 103 with each other, which differ often considerably in their outward, visual form but not necessarily in their underlying, structural organization, and at least one language, Sanskrit, is routinely written in all of them without any alteration in its content. It is an error to assume that the character of a language can be immediately deduced by a quick examination of its superficial written ap- pearance. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the study of writing can be very relevant indeed to the study of Language. A full-fledged writing system, of the sort i'm talking about in this chapter, the sort that is capable of recording most if not all of the content of spoken language, represents to a great extent the way the community that uses it thinks about their language. And if we're interested in the psychology of language use — and this is one of the major concerns of modern languistics — then how people think about their language is relevant to our study. Furthermore, there are different types of writing systems, and they seem to be appropriate for different types of languages. And so the study of writing systems becomes important for that recurring theme of mine, linguistic typology. Types of Writing Systems Students of writing systems, especially the few linguists who have been looking into this area, have coined the term ‘grapheme’ to refer to the units that make up a writing system. This word, analogous to the terms ‘morpheme’ and ‘phoneme’ that we have already met, refers to the most basic units, the ones that are treated by the system and by the people who are familiar with its use as distinct and indivisible entities. Thus, in an alphabetic system such as that used to write English, each individual letter is a grapheme; in the Chinese 漢字 system, each of the thousands of characters that can fill a square space is a grapheme. The classification of writing systems into various types is based on what sorts of linguistic ele- ments are typically represented by the individual graphemes of a given writing system. Students of writing systems most commonly recognize three basic types, though as we shall see these three types to some extent define a continuum and there are writing systems that are of ‘mixed’ type, combining characteristics of two of the three basic types or even all three.

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