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Home , Aramaic alphabet, Coptic alphabet, Meroitic script, Rongorongo

9780198606536_essay01.indd 2 8/17/2009 2:19:03 PM systems • 1 1 Writing Systems Andrew Robinson

1 The emergence of writing 2 Development and diffusion of writing systems 3 4 Classification of writing systems 5 The origin of the 6 The family of 7 Chinese and Japanese writing 8 Electronic writing

1 The emergence of writing istrators and merchants. Still others think it was not an invention at all, but an accidental discovery. Many Without writing, there would no recording, no regard it as the result of evolution over a long period, ­history, and of course no books. The creation of writ- rather than a flash of inspiration. One particularly ing permitted the command of a ruler and his seal to well-aired theory holds that writing grew out of a extend far beyond his sight and voice, and even to long-standing counting system of clay ‘tokens’. Such survive his death. If the did not exist, ‘tokens’—varying from simple, plain discs to more for example, the world would be virtually unaware of complex, incised shapes whose exact purpose is the nondescript Egyptian king Ptolemy V Epiphanes, unknown—have been found in many Middle Eastern whose priests promulgated his decree upon the stone archaeological sites, and have been dated from 8000 in three *scripts: hieroglyphic, , and (Greek) to 1500 bc. The substitution of two-dimensional sym- alphabetic. bols in clay for these three-dimensional tokens was a How did writing begin? The favoured explanation, first step towards writing, according to this theory. until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, was divine One major difficulty is that the ‘tokens’ continued to origin. Today, many—probably most—scholars accept exist long after the emergence of Sumerian that the earliest writing evolved from accountancy, writing; another is that a two-dimensional symbol on though it is puzzling that such accounts are little in a clay *tablet might be thought to be a less, not a more, evidence in the surviving writing of , advanced concept than a three-dimensional clay India, China, and Central America (which does not ‘token’. It seems more likely that ‘tokens’ accompanied preclude commercial record-keeping on perishable the emergence of writing, rather than giving rise to materials such as bamboo in these early civilizations). writing. In other words, some time in the late 4th millennium Apart from the ‘tokens’, numerous examples exist of bc, in the cities of Sumer in , the ‘cradle what might be termed ‘proto-writing’. They include of civilization’, the complexity of trade and admin­ the Ice Age symbols found in caves in southern France, istration reached a point where it outstripped the which are probably 20,000 years old. A cave at Peche power of memory among the governing elite. To Merle, in the Lot, contains a lively Ice Age graffito record transactions in an indisputable, permanent showing a stencilled hand and a pattern of red form became essential. dots. This may simply mean: ‘I was here, with my Some scholars believe that a conscious search for a animals’—or perhaps the symbolism is deeper. Other solution to this problem by an unknown Sumerian prehistoric images show animals such as horses, individual in the city of Uruk (biblical Erech), c.3300 a stag’ head, and bison, overlaid with signs; and bc, produced writing. Others posit that writing was notched bones have been found that apparently served the work of a group, presumably of clever admin­ as lunar calendars.

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Fig. 1 Some cuneiform signs, showing the pictographic form (c.3000 c ), an early cuneiform representation (c.2400 b c ), and the late Assyrian form (c.650 b c ), now turned through 90 degrees, with the meaning.

‘Proto-writing’ is not writing in the full sense of ing to the (doubtful) claims of some Chinese archaeo­ the word. A scholar of writing, the Sinologist John logists. In many cases, their iconicity soon became so DeFrancis, has defined ‘full’ writing as a ‘system of abstract that it is barely perceptible to us. Fig. 1 shows graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and how the Sumerian developed into the all thought’—a concise and influential definition. wedge-shaped cuneiform signs that went on to dom­ According to this, ‘proto-writing’ would include, in inate Middle Eastern writing for some 3,000 years. addition to Ice Age cave symbols and Middle Eastern Yet pictograms were insufficient to express the clay ‘tokens’, the Pictish symbol stones and tallies such kinds of words, and their constituent parts, that as the fascinating knotted Inca quipus, but also con- ­cannot be depicted. Essential to the development of temporary sign systems such as international trans- ‘full’ writing, as opposed to limited, purely picto- portation symbols, highway code signs, computer graphic, ‘proto-writing’, was the discovery of the icons, and mathematical and musical notation. None *rebus principle. This radical idea, from the Latin of these ancient or modern systems is capable of meaning ‘by things’, enables phonetic values to be expressing ‘any and all thought’, but each is good represented by pictographic symbols. Thus in English, at specialized communication (DeFrancis, Visible a picture of a bee beside the figure 4 might (if one Speech, 4). were so minded) represent ‘before’, and a bee with a picture of a tray might stand for ‘betray’, while a pic- ture of an ant next to a buzzing beehive full of honey, 2 Development and diffusion of writing might (less obviously) represent ‘Anthony’. Egyptian systems are full of rebuses, for instance the ‘sun’ To express the full range of human thought requires sign, 0, ­pronounced R(a) or R(), is the first symbol a intimately linked with spoken lan- in the hieroglyphic spelling of the pharaoh Ramesses. guage. For, as the founder of modern linguistics, In an early Sumerian tablet, the abstract word ‘reim- Ferdinand de Saussure, wrote, language may be com- burse’ is represented by a picture of a reed, because pared to a sheet of paper: ‘Thought is on one side of ‘reimburse’ and ‘reed’ shared the same phonetic value, the sheet and sound on the reverse side. Just as it is gi, in the Sumerian language. impossible to take a pair of scissors and cut one side Once writing of this ‘full’ kind, capable of express- of the paper without at the same time cutting the ing the complete range of speech and thought, was other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate sound invented, accidentally discovered, or evolved, did it from thought, or thought from sound’ (Saussure, 111). then diffuse throughout the globe from Mesopotamia? The symbols of what may have become the first ‘full’ It appears that the earliest such writing in Egypt dates writing system are generally thought to have been from 3100 bc, that in the Indus Valley (undeciphered pictograms: iconic drawings of, say, a pot, or a fish, or seal stones) from 2500 bc, that in Crete (the undeci- a head with an open jaw (representing the concept of phered Linear A ) from 1750 bc, that in China eating). These have been found in Mesopotamia and (the ‘oracle bones’) from 1200 bc, and that in Mexico Egypt dating to the mid-4th millennium bc, in the (the undeciphered Olmec script) from 900 bc—all Indus Valley dating to the 3rd millennium, and in dates are approximate and subject to new archaeo- China dating to as early as the 5th millennium, accord­ logical discoveries. On this basis, it seems reasonable

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that the idea of writing, but not the signs of a particu- different scholars. At one extreme, everyone agrees lar script, could have spread gradually from culture that the have been deciphered— to distant culture. After all, 600 or 700 years were because every trained Egyptologist would make the required for the idea of printing to reach Europe from same sense of virtually every word of a given hiero- China (if we discount the isolated and enigmatic glyphic inscription (though their individual trans­ Phaistos disc of c.1700 bc, found in Crete in 1908, lations would still differ, as do all independent which appears to be ‘printed’), and even longer for the translations of the same work from one language into idea of paper to spread to Europe (see 10): why should another). At the other extreme, (almost) every scholar writing not have reached China from Mesopotamia agrees that the script of the Indus Valley civilization is over an even longer period? undeciphered—because no one can make sense of Nevertheless, in the absence of solid evidence for its seals and other inscriptions to the satisfaction of transmission of the idea (even in the case of the much anyone else. Between these extremes lies a vast spec- more proximate civilizations of Mesopotamia and trum of opinion. In the case of the Mayan hieroglyphic Egypt), a majority of scholars prefer to think that writ- writing of Central America, for example, most schol- ing developed independently in the major civilizations ars agree that a high proportion, as much as 85 per of the ancient world. The optimist, or at any rate the cent, of the inscriptions can be meaningfully read, and anti-imperialist, will choose to emphasize the intelli- yet there remain large numbers of individual Mayan gence and inventiveness of human societies; the pes- that are contentious or obscure. No absolute simist, who takes a more conservative view of history, distinction exists by which a script can be judged to be will tend to assume that humans prefer to copy what deciphered or undeciphered; we should instead speak already exists, as faithfully as they can, restricting of degrees of *decipherment. The most useful criterion their innovations to cases of absolute necessity. is that a proposed decipherment can generate consis- The latter is the favoured explanation for how the tent readings from new samples of the script, prefer- Greeks (at the beginning of the 1st millennium bc) ably produced by persons other than the original borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, adding decipherer. in the process signs for the not written in In this sense, the Egyptian hieroglyphs were deci- the Phoenician script (see 3). There are many other phered in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion examples of script borrowings, such as the Japanese and others; Babylonian cuneiform in the 1850s by taking the in the 1st millennium ad Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and others; Mycenaean and incorporating them into a highly complex writing in 1952–3 by Michael Ventris; and the Mayan system that mixes several thousand Chinese char­ hieroglyphs by and others in the 1950s acters with slightly fewer than 100, much simpler, and after—to name only the most important of the syllabic symbols of Japanese origin. If ever the successful . This leaves a number of script of —the most isolated significant undeciphered scripts, such as the Etruscan inhabited spot on earth—is deciphered, it may shed script from Italy, the Indus Valley script from Pakistan/ light on the intriguing question of whether the Easter India, Linear A from Crete, the from Islanders invented Rongorongo unaided, brought the , the Proto-Elamite script from Iran/Iraq, idea of writing from Polynesia in their canoes, or Rongorongo from Easter Island, and the Olmec, ­borrowed it from Europeans who first visited Easter Zapotec, and Isthmian scripts from Mexico. They may Island in the 18th century. If Rongorongo could be be resolved into three basic categories: an unknown proved to have been invented unaided on Easter script writing a known language; a known script writ- Island, this would at last guarantee that writing must ing an unknown language; and an unknown script have had multiple origins, rather than radiating from writing an unknown language. The Mayan hieroglyphs a single source. were until their decipherment an example of the first category, since the Mayan languages are still spoken, and the Zapotec script may be, too, if it writes a lan- 3 Decipherment guage related to modern Zapotec; Etruscan writing is In ordinary conversation, to decipher someone’s ‘inde- an example of the second category, since the Etruscan cipherable’ handwriting means to make sense of the script is basically the same as the , but meaning; it does not imply that one can read every the Etruscan language is not related to Indo-European single word. In its more technical sense, as applied to or other languages; while the Indus Valley script is an ancient scripts, ‘deciphered’ means different things to example of the last category, since the script bears

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Fig. 2 A schematic diagram of phonography and logography in writing systems.

no resemblance to any other script and the language above) operate on one basic principle. Both alphabets of the civilization does not appear to have survived and the Chinese and Japanese scripts use symbols to (unless, as some scholars speculate, it is related to the represent sounds (i.e. phonetic signs); and all writing Dravidian languages of south India). systems mix such phonetic symbols with logographic In each undeciphered case, the techniques used in symbols (i.e. semantic signs). What differs between successful decipherments have been applied, with writing systems—apart from the forms of the signs, varying results. Ventris—perhaps the most ingenious of course—is the proportion of phonetic to semantic of all the decipherers, since alone had no help from signs. The higher the proportion of phonetic repre- a bilingual aid like the Rosetta Stone—gave a masterly sentation in a script, the easier it is to guess the pro- summary of the science and art of decipherment: nunciation of a word. In English the proportion is high, in Chinese it is low. Thus, English spelling rep- Each operation needs to be planned in three phases: resents English speech sound by sound more accur­ an exhaustive analysis of the signs, words, and contexts ately than Chinese characters represent Mandarin in all the available inscriptions, designed to extract speech; but Finnish spelling represents the Finnish every possible clue as to the spelling system, meaning language better than English spelling represents and language structure; an experimental substitution of phonetic values to give possible words and inflections in ­spoken English. The Finnish script is highly efficient a known or postulated language; and a decisive check, phonetically, while the Chinese (and Japanese) script is preferably with the aid of virgin material, to ensure that phonetically seriously deficient—as indicated in Fig. 2. the apparent results are not due to fantasy, coincidence or There is thus no such thing as a ‘pure’ writing circular reasoning. (Ventris, 200) ­system, that is, a ‘full’ writing system capable of ex­ pressing meaning entirely through alphabetic ­letters or syllabic signs or —because all ‘full’ writ- 4 Classification of writing systems ing systems are a mixture of phonetic and semantic Europeans and Americans of ordinary * must signs. How best to classify writing systems is therefore recognize and write around 52 alphabetic signs (26 a controversial matter. For example, some scholars capital letters and their lower-case equivalents), and deny the existence of alphabets prior to the Greek sundry other signs, such as numerals, ­alphabet, on the grounds that the Phoenician script marks, and ‘whole-word’ semantic signs, for example marked only , no vowels (like the early +, =, &, %, £, $, which are generally called logograms * script). Nevertheless, classifying labels are or *analphabetics. Japanese readers, by contrast, are useful to remind us of the predominant nature of dif- supposed to know and be able to write some 2,000 ferent systems. The tree shown in Fig. 3 divides writ- signs, and, if they are highly educated, must recognize ing systems according to this criterion, not according 5,000 signs or more. The two situations, in Europe/ to their age; it does not show how one writing system America and in Japan, appear to be poles apart. In may have given rise to another historically. (The bro- fact, however, the different writing systems resemble ken lines indicate possible influences of one system each other more than at first appears. upon another, for example Chinese characters on the Contrary to what many people think, all scripts that Japanese syllabic ‘’.) Thus, the Phoenician script are ‘full’ writing (in the sense defined by DeFrancis is labelled a ‘consonantal alphabet’, with the emphasis

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Fig. 3 The classification of writing systems.

on its consonants and without significant *logo­ the alphabet appeared in Greece; how the Greeks graphy, in contrast to the ‘logo-consonantal’ system of thought of adding letters standing for the vowels as Egyptian hieroglyphs, where logography dominates well as the consonants; and how, even more funda- but there is also a phonetic element based on the mentally, the idea of an alphabet occurred to the pre- consonants—24 signs, each representing a . Greek societies at the eastern end of the Mediterranean The tree’s terminology is self-explanatory, except per- during the 2nd millennium bc. The first well-attested haps for ‘phonemic’: the phoneme is the smallest alphabets belong to ancient Ugarit, today’s Ras Shamra contrastive unit in the sound system of a language, for on the coast of Syria, where a 30-sign cuneiform example the English phonemes /e/ and /a/ in set alphabet was used in the 14th century bc; and to the and sat, and the consonantal phonemes /b/ and /p/ in Phoenicians in Canaan in the late 2nd millennium bc, bat and pat. who used 22 consonantal letters. Scholars have devoted their lives to these questions, but the evidence is too scanty for firm conclusions. It 5 The origin of the alphabet is not known whether the alphabet evolved from the If the emergence of writing is full of riddles, then the scripts of Mesopotamia (cuneiform), Egypt (hiero- enigma of the first alphabet is even more perplexing. glyphs), and Crete (Linear A and B)—or whether it That the alphabet reached the modern world via the struck a single unknown individual ‘in a flash’. Nor is ancient Greeks is well known—the word ‘alphabet’ it known why an alphabet was thought necessary. It comes from the first two of the Greek letters, seems most likely that it was the result of commercial and —but we have no clear idea of how and when imperatives. In other words, commerce demanded

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a simpler and quicker means of recording trans­ actions than, say, Babylonian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, ­and also a convenient way to note the babel of languages of the various empires and groups trading with each other around the Mediterranean. If so, then it is surprising that there is no evidence of trade and commerce in the early alphabetic inscrip- tions of Greece. This, and other considerations, have led a few scholars to postulate, controversially, that the Greek alphabet was invented to record the oral epics of Homer in the 8th century bc. In the absence of proof, anecdote and myth have filled the vacuum. Children are often evoked as inven- tors of the alphabet, because they would not have had Fig. 4 The proto-Sinaitic theory of the origin of the alphabet. the preconceptions of adult writers and their elders’ investment in existing scripts. One possibility is that a Petrie guessed that the unknown script was prob­ bright Canaanite child in northern Syria, fed up with ably an alphabet, because it comprised fewer than 30 having to learn cuneiform and hieroglyphs, borrowed signs (out of a much larger number of text characters); from the hieroglyphs the familiar idea of a small num- and he thought that its language was probably Semitic, ber of signs standing for single consonants and then since he knew that Semites from Canaan—modern Is­ invented some new signs for the basic consonantal rael and Lebanon—had worked these mines, in many sounds of his own Semitic language. Perhaps the child cases as slaves. Ten years later another distinguished first doodled the signs in the dust of some ancient Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, studied the ‘proto-­ street: a simple outline of a house, Semitic ‘beth’ (the Sinaitic’ signs and noted resemblances between some ‘’ in ‘alphabet’), became the sign for ‘b’. In the 20th of them and certain pictographic Egyptian hiero- century, Rudyard Kipling’s child protagonist in ‘How glyphs. Gardiner now named each sign with the the Alphabet Was Made’, Taffimai, designs what she Semitic word equivalent to the sign’s meaning in calls ‘noise-pictures’. The letter ‘A’ is a picture of a carp Egyptian (the Semitic words were known from bib­ with its barbelled mouth wide open; this, Taffimai lical scholarship) (see Fig. 4). These Semitic names tells her father, looks like his open mouth when he are the same as the names of the letters of the Hebrew utters the sound ah. The letter ‘’ matches the egg-or- alphabet—a fact that did not surprise Gardiner, since stone shape and resembles her father’s mouth saying he knew that the Hebrews had lived in Canaan in the oh. The letter ‘S’ represents a snake, and stands for the late 2nd millennium bc. However, although the names hissing sound of the snake. In this somewhat far- are the same, the shapes of the Hebrew letters are dif- fetched way, a whole alphabet is created by Taffimai. ferent from the proto-Sinaitic­ signs, suggesting that To quote an earlier poet, William Blake wrote in any link between them cannot be a straightforward Jerusalem: ‘God . . . in mysterious Sinai’s awful cave / one. To Man the wond’rous art of writing gave’. A small Gardiner’s hypothesis enabled him to translate one sphinx in the at one time seemed to of the inscriptions that occurred on the sphinx from show that Blake was right, at least about the origin of Serabit el-Khadim as ‘Baalat’—in English transcription the alphabet. The sphinx was found in 1905 at Serabit with the vowels spelt out. (Hebrew and other Semitic el-Khadim in Sinai, a desolate place remote from civil­ scripts do not directly indicate vowels; readers guess ization, by the famous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. them from their knowledge of the language, as ex- He was excavating some old turquoise mines that plained in ‘The family of alphabets’ below.) Gardiner’s were active in ancient Egyptian times. Petrie dated the reading made sense: Baalat means ‘the Lady’ and is a sphinx to the middle of the 18th Dynasty; today, its recognized Semitic name for the goddess Hathor in date is thought to be c.1500 bc. On one side of it is a the Sinai region. Accordingly, the inscription on the strange inscription; on the other, and between the sphinx seemed to be an Egyptian-Semitic bilingual. paws, there are further inscriptions of the same kind, Unfortunately, no further decipherment proved ten­ plus some Egyptian hieroglyphs that read: ‘beloved of able, mainly because of lack of material and the fact Hathor, mistress of turquoise’. Similar inscriptions that many of the proto-Sinaitic signs had no hiero- were written on the rocks of this remote area. glyphic equivalents. Scholarly hopes of finding the

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story of the Exodus in these scratchings were scotched. 6 The family of alphabets Nevertheless, it is conceivable that a script similar to the proto-Sinaitic script was used by Moses to write From its unclear origins on the eastern shores of the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone. the Mediterranean, writing employing the alpha­ It is still not known whether Gardiner’s 1916 guess betic principle spread—westwards (via Greek) to the was correct, plausible though it is. For some decades Romans and thence to modern Europe, eastwards (via after Petrie’s discoveries in Sinai, the inscriptions were , in all probability) to India and thence to taken to be the ‘missing link’ between the Egyptian Southeast Asia. By the 20th century, as a consequence hieroglyphs and the cuneiform alphabet at Ugarit and of colonial empires, most of the world’s peoples except the . But it seems unconvincing the Chinese and Japanese were writing in alphabetic that lowly—and presumably illiterate—miners in out- scripts. These employ on average between 20 and 40 of-the-way Sinai should have created an alphabet; basic signs; the smallest, Rotokas, used in Papua New prima facie, they seem to be unlikely inventors. Guinea, has 12 letters, the largest, Khmer, used in Subsequent discoveries in Lebanon and Israel have Cambodia, has 74 letters. shown the Sinaitic theory of the alphabet to be a The western alphabetic link between the Greeks romantic fiction. These inscriptions, dated to the 17th and the Romans was Etruscan—as is clear from the and 16th centuries bc—a little earlier than the proto- early Greek letter-forms inscribed on Etruscan objects Sinaitic inscriptions—suggest that the people then dating from the 7th century bc, which were then bor- living in the land of Canaan were the inventors of the rowed for early Latin inscriptions. This early acquisi- alphabet, which would be reasonable. They were cos- tion from Greek accounts for the differences between mopolitan traders at the crossroads of the Egyptian, some modern European letter forms and the modern Hittite, Babylonian, and Cretan empires; they were Greek letters, which are based on a later Greek alpha- not wedded to an existing writing system; they needed bet known as Ionian that became standard in Greece a script that was easy to learn, quick to write, and in 403–2 bc. The eastern alphabetic link is indicated unambiguous. Although unproven, it is probable that by the fact that in Mesopotamia, by the 5th century bc, the (proto-)Canaanites were the first to use an many cuneiform documents carried a notation of their alphabet. substance in the 22 letters of the , In the late 1990s, however, the picture was further inked onto the tablet with a *writing brush. From the complicated by new discoveries in Egypt itself; and a time of Alexander the Great onwards, cuneiform was revised version of the Gardiner theory now seems increasingly superseded by Aramaic; it eventually fell plausible. In 1999, two Egyptologists, John Coleman into disuse around the beginning of the Christian era, Darnell and his wife, Deborah, announced that they with the last cuneiform inscription dated ad 75. In had found examples of what appeared to be alphabetic Egypt, fairly soon after that, the (con- writing at Wadi el-Hol, west of Thebes, while they sisting of 24 Greek letters plus 6 letters borrowed were surveying ancient travel routes in the southern from Egyptian demotic script) supplanted Egyptian Egyptian desert. The date of the inscriptions is c.1900– hieroglyphs; the last Egyptian hieroglyphic inscrip- 1800 bc, which places them considerably ­earlier than tion is dated ad 394. the inscriptions from Lebanon and Israel, and makes The Aramaic script is the ancestor of modern Arabic, them the earliest known alphabetic . the sacred script of Islam, and of modern (‘square’) The two short inscriptions are written in a Semitic Hebrew script, as used in Israel (see 8). (A second script and, according to the experts, the letters were Hebrew script, known as ‘old Hebrew’, evolved from most probably developed in a fashion similar to a the Phoenician script and disappeared from secular semi-* form of the Egyptian script. The writer use with the dispersion of the Jews in the 6th century is thought to have been a scribe travelling with a group bc.) The first independent Arab kingdom, that of the of mercenaries (there were many such mercenaries , centred on Petra in modern Jordan, spoke working for the pharaohs). If the Darnell theory turns a form of Arabic but wrote in the Aramaic script. The out to be correct, then it appears that the alphabetic presence of certain distinctively Arabic forms and words idea was after all inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphs in these Aramaic inscriptions eventually gave way and invented in Egypt, rather than in Palestine. This to the writing of the Arabic language in Nabataean latest evidence is by no means conclusive, however, Aramaic script. This was the precursor of the Arabic and the search for more alphabetic inscriptions in script, which arose during the first half of the 1st mil- Egypt continues. lennium ad and replaced the Aramaic script (see 38).

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Fig. 5 The evolution of the main European alphabetic scripts.

Both the Arabic and Hebrew scripts write only the from the Greek alphabet in the 9th century ad consonants, not the vowels, in their respective Semitic (see 35), the Korean alphabet invented by languages, using 28 letters in Arabic and 22 in Hebrew. King Sejong in the 15th century (see 41), or the Thus, the three letters in that stand so-called Cherokee alphabet (really a ), for ktb or ktv can take the meanings: ‘katav’ (I wrote), invented by a Native American, Sequoya, in the US ‘kotav’ (I write, a writer), ‘katoov’ (written), ‘kitav’ around 1821. Also excluded are , since the origin ­(letters, script), and even ‘kitovet’ (address), ‘kitoobah’ of the runic alphabet, in the 2nd century ad or earlier, (marriage certificate), or ‘katban’ (scribe). In practice, though clearly influenced by the Roman alphabet, is however, various additional signs have been devel­ not known (see 26). oped to aid the reader in pronouncing the Hebrew and Arabic vowels. The commonest of these is a sys- 7 Chinese and Japanese writing tem of dots placed above and below a letter, referred to as ‘vowel points’ or matres lectionis (Latin for If great claims are made for the power of the alphabet, ‘mothers of reading’). even greater ones attach to Chinese writing. The The time chart in Fig. 5 shows the main lines of ­evident complexity of the system encourages the emergence of the modern alphabetic scripts from the notion that it operates quite differently from other Proto-Sinaitic/Canaanite scripts of the 2nd millen- modern writing systems. The obscurity of its origins— nium bc. It does not include the Indian scripts and which may or may not have involved foreign stimulus their Southeast Asian derivatives, since their con­ from, for example, Mesopotamian writing—reinforces nection with Aramaic is problematic and, strictly its apparent uniqueness. The antiquity of the modern speaking, unproven. (The earliest Indian scripts, Chinese characters, many of which are clearly recog­ ­leaving aside the undeciphered Indus Valley writing, nizable in the Shang ‘oracle bone’ inscriptions of are and Brahmi, used in the rock edicts about 1200 bc, further supports this view, abetted by of the emperor in the 3rd century bc.) Nor nationalist pride in the system’s exceptional longevity, does the chart show later alphabets such as the which exceeds that of cuneiform and equals that of the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia, which was adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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The most important claim is that Chinese charac- syllabic ‘kana’ (46 ‘’ and 46 ‘’)—the ters are ‘ideographic’—a word now generally avoided forms of which are actually simplified versions of by scholars in favour of the more specific ‘logo­ the Chinese characters—in order to make clear how graphic’. That is, the characters are thought to be the characters were to be pronounced in Japanese capable of communicating ideas without the inter­ and how to transcribe native words. It would have vention of phoneticism or indeed spoken language. been simpler, one might reasonably think, if the Thus, Chinese speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese Japanese had used only these invented signs and had who do not know each other’s ‘dialect’ and cannot talk abandoned the Chinese characters altogether—but to each other are said to be able to communicate in this would have entailed the rejection of an ancient writing through Chinese characters. Some scholars writing system of huge prestige. Just as a knowledge (both Chinese and westerners) have even claimed of Latin was until quite recently a sine qua non for the that the same scenario applies to Chinese, Japanese, educated European, so a familiarity with Chinese has Korean, and Vietnamese speakers, whose languages always been considered essential by the Japanese differ greatly but who have shared the use of Chinese literati. characters in their scripts. This, of course, would be inconceivable for equivalent English, French, 8 Electronic writing German, and Italian speakers, who also share one (Roman) script. The implication is that the Chinese As the 6th millennium of recorded civilization opened, writing system works in a completely different way Mesopotamia was again at the centre of historical from scripts with a large phonographic component: events. Where once, at the birth of writing, the state- writing systems are therefore said to come in two craft of absolute rulers like Hammurabi and Darius fundamental varieties, one ideographic (e.g. Chinese), was recorded in Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and the other phonographic (e.g. alphabets). cuneiform on clay and stone, now the Iraq Each of these claims is false. No ‘full’ writing sys- wars against Saddam Hussein generated millions of tem, as already explained, can be divorced from the mainly alphabetic words on paper and on the *World sounds of a spoken language. Written Chinese is based Wide Web written in a babel of world languages. on Mandarin, also known as Putonghua (‘common Yet, although today’s technologies of writing are speech’), a language spoken by over 70 per cent of immeasurably different from those of the 3rd millen- Chinese—hence the myth of the universal intelligibil- nium bc, its linguistic principles have not changed ity of Chinese characters. A speaker of Cantonese very much since the composition of the Sumerian epic wishing to communicate in writing with a speaker of of Gilgamesh (see 19). However, the seismic impact of Mandarin must learn Mandarin as well as the charac- electronic writing and archiving on information dis- ters. The characters have both a phonetic and a tribution and research has polarized the debate about semantic component, which readers must learn to the correct definition of ‘writing’. Must ‘full’ writing recognize. The former gives a clue to the pronunci­ depend on a spoken language, as maintained in this ation of the character, the latter to its meaning. essay? Or can it float free of its phonetic anchor? Generally, the phonetic component proves a better Although some people persist in thinking that the guide to pronunciation than the semantic does to digital revolution since the 1990s has made little or no meaning—contrary to predictions based on the ideo- difference to what happens in their minds when they graphic notion of Chinese. actually read, write, and think, others as stoutly main- The Japanese language differs greatly from the tain that the *digitization of writing is radically alter- Chinese, phonologically, grammatically, and syntacti- ing our absorption of knowledge and will at last usher cally. Even so, the Japanese based their writing system in the ideographic utopia imagined by the philosopher on the Chinese characters, as remarked earlier. In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 1690s: ‘As regards borrowing the thousands of Chinese signs during the signs, I see . . . clearly that it is to the interest of the early centuries of the 1st millennium ad, the Japanese Republic of Letters and especially of students, that altered the original Chinese pronunciation in par­ learned men should reach agreement on signs’ (Mead ticular ways corresponding to the sounds of the Japa­ and Modley, 58). Moreover, this faith in the increasing nese language. (Indeed ‘’, the Japanese word intelligence of computers—with their ubiquitous pic- for Chinese character, is an approximation of the tographic and logographic icons—chimes with many Mandarin term ‘hanzi’.) Eventually, they invented two scholars’ growing respect for the intelligence behind fairly small sets of supplementary phonetic signs, the ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of

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Fig. 6 A clay tablet in cuneiform script from Nineveh, in northern Iraq, written in the 7th century b c , showing part of the epic of Gilgamesh. Associated with *Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, the *tablets were identified in 1872 by George Smith in the British Museum’s collections.

the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese ­characters, P. Daniels and W. Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their (1996) hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic, and . Darnell, ed., Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the phonetic signs. This conviction has in turn encour- Wadi El-Hol (2006) aged a belief in the need to see each writing system as J. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language (1984) — (1989) enmeshed within a whole culture, instead of viewing A. Gardiner, ‘The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet’, it simply as a technical solution to a problem of effi- Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 3 (1916), 1–6 cient visual representation of the culture’s language. R. Harris, The Origin of Writing (1986) Although one may or may not share the belief in the S. Houston, ed., The First Writing (2004) power of digitization, and one may remain sceptical . Mead and R. Modley, ‘Communication Among All People, about the expressive virtues of logography, this hol­ Everywhere’, Natural History, 77.7 (1968), 56–63 istic view of writing systems is surely a healthy devel- M. Pope, The Story of Decipherment, 2e (1999) opment that reflects the real relationship between A. Robinson, The Story of Writing, 2e (2007) writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. — Lost Languages, 2e (2009) — Writing and Script (2009) F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1983) Bibliography J. M. Unger, (2004) [British Museum,] Reading the Past (1990) M. Ventris, ‘A Note on Decipherment Methods’, Antiquity, M. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, 2e (1999) 27 (1953), 200–206

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