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Home , Arabic alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Demotic (Egyptian), Glagolitic script, Greek alphabet, Gujarati script

WRITING SYSTEMS Tjeerd TICHELAAR

Meaning, sound and looks during the manifold changes of sovereignty between the new national states of 19th and 20th century Eastern and Geographical names, as all names, can viewed from South-Eastern Europe: examples are Austrian Karlsbad three different aspects: semantic, phonetic and graphic. changing into Czech Karlovy Vary, Hungarian Újvidék Semantically, names carry meaning at the time they are becoming Croat Novi Sad. An example outside Europe, coined. Because of its meaning as ‘ford on the Roman but equally associated with the emergence of national road’, there could, at least to local people, be no misun- sentiments, is the of Spanish Casablanca derstanding about the location of the settlement named (itself a translation of Portuguese Casa Branca – the Por- Stratford. The meaning may be lost in the course of time, tuguese founded the place in 1515) into ad-Dar al- either because the the name springs from is no Bayda’. In other cases, name changes following transfer longer current, or because the name itself degenerates to of ownership explicitly reflect a change in the meaning such an extent that its meaning can no longer be recog- the object has to the new owner compared to the one nized. More often, the original meaning ceases to be attached to it by his predecessor. The seaport city of appropriate. The Greek settlement named Neapolis or Reval was just a ‘little sand bank’ to its Danish founders ‘New Town’ by its founders, to set it apart from the ‘old in 1219. Although it successively passed into Teutonic town’ they had fled (neighbouring Kymai, that had been (1346), Swedish (1561), and Russian hands (1710), it established six or seven generations earlier by colonists was allowed to retain its name; but upon the emergence from the Ionian city state of ), retained its Greek of the independent Estonian nation-state in 1917, the name as it was incorporated in the Roman republic in the town now chosen to be the nation’ capital reverted to a 4th century BC. As long as Greek remained the (local) co-existing Estonian appellation reflecting what it had in Roman Neapolis, which it did for from the beginning on meant to the Estonians: the about seven more centuries until the reign of Constantine ‘Danish fortress’ (Tan-linn, through the centuries con- the Great, the name of the city, its meaning still being tracted to Tallinn). understood, was fairly safe. After that, the state language Phonetically, names consist of a succession of vocal , in a regional variety spoken for long by the sounds that as a whole reminds the recipient of the majority of the commoners in the city, replaced Greek as objects they represent. The very fact that names do the language of administration. To the speakers of the degenerate – only incidents like Roma, Cremona, Capua regional variety of Latin, that consequently developed (Latin) and Argos (Greek) are known to have subsisted into the Romance Napolitan language (or ), the through larger spans of time without phonetic damage, meaning of Neapolis was lost; to its citizens, the city and even these did so only after they became latinized actually appeared ancient instead of new. Kymai had .. hellenized – indicates that the sound aspect has for completely been overshadowed even before the Romans long been dominant above both the semantic and the came; what remained of it was, ironically, destroyed by graphic aspects in determining the evolution of names. the Napolitans in the early 13th century. The name This dominance can be explained by the heavy depend- Neapolis ultimately degenerated into Napoli in the ence on oral communication in ‘passing the ’ Napolitan and Italian that succeeded Latin as throughout history, and, in connection with this, maybe the language of administration (the latter actually as late by the role played by the well-trained auditive memory in as the 19th century). the process of learning/memorizing information con- Unlike the Latin-speaking heirs of Napoli, new foreign- veyed through language. language users of existing names are occasionally known It has been demonstrated earlier that the phonetic quali- to make efforts to retain the meaning of a name after its ties of a name can lead to misinterpretation and thus language has been discarded. Translation of names was influence the evolution of the name itself. The generic never a Roman policy – another famous ‘New Town’, the element ‘-wic’ (settlement) in the Anglo-Saxon name of Phoenician colony of Qart Hadash, was also incorporated York, Eoforwic, was misunderstood as ‘-vík’ (bay) by the into the empire under its own native name, be it in this Danish invaders taking over the settlement in the 9th cen- case latinized into ‘Carthago’ – but was very popular tury, demonstrating that the mere suggestion of phonetic

59 recognition was enough for the Danes to set aside any were most likely systems of notation of administrative semantic objections against this interpretation: the town data, consisting of and… names. The data taken they named after a ‘bay’ was then, as it is now, situated at down were trade and cadastral data, that, as it was fore- a solid inland location. Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons seen, needed to be remembered and consulted at a yet before them had misunderstood the specific element unknown point in the future, by a yet unknown indi- ‘ebur-’ (yew-tree) of the preceeding Brythonic-Roman vidual. Once proven successful, these systems held a name Eburacum as ‘eofor’ (wild boar), also resulting in promise to allow local rulers to spread their word, and semantic mutilation of the original name. The latter is an thus their law and authority, beyond the range of their example of a very commonly occurring process called and muscles. The first known scripts thus devel- popular etymology, in which the historic background of a oped in the Sumerian city states of the late 4th millennium name is reconstructed without taking into account the BC, and enabled these local centres of power to grow into rules of phonetic change as they are known by historical territorial states exceeding the vision of the central linguists, resulting in erroneous semantic interpretations zigurrat (tower). Shortly after this innovation was intro- and, in the worst case, wrongful (hyper)correction of the duced in Sumeria, an elaborate emerged on the name. banks of the , where a powerful centralized Egyptian empire was about to see the light. As long as names were predominantly transmitted through oral communication, their graphic representa- Whether the idea of spread throughout the world tion showed little stability. The need of (ortho)graphic from one Sumerian origin or it emerged independently in standardization was rarely felt, and both between and different cultures, the development of writing systems within documents names referring to the same object seems to follow a universal sequence from purely picto- could be spelled in different ways. The fact that this was rial representation () to sets of abstracted considered acceptable suggests that written documents sound-representing symbols (phonograms). Pictograms were essentially meant to support oral transaction: when convey meaning without intervention of sound values; it aloud, the exact of the name, as of there may be a meaning ‘town’, ‘river’ or ‘moun- any word, was of little relevance. tain’ irrespective of what the word for ‘town’, ‘river’ or ‘mountain’ sounds like, and thus regardless of any spe- It is a fairly recent development that writing takes cific language. Such a symbol is named a . The absolute preponderance over the spoken word. More than advantage of is their universal applicability – in the past, public administration pervaded into all seg- because they are language-independent – but they have ments of social and economic life. A completely new sit- the obvious disadvantage that there must be a separate uation was created by the introduction of computers in symbol for every word. A consisting of pic- the administrative processes. Unprecedentedly, the com- tograms only cannot be expected to be completely puter made it possible to process graphic data, translated learned and memorized by anyone, as only a limited into digital code, without human intervention in the form of concrete substantives could possibly be repre- of (phonetic) reading, As the pronouncing, understanding sented by naturally drawn pictures. and correcting human interpreter was by-passed, this short-circuiting of the linguistic data interpretation All complete writing systems the world has ever known, process necessarily demanded a stricter than ever graphic from the highly pictorial Egyptian to the standardization. modern , do effectively contain both logograms and phonograms. As purely pictorial ‘proto-scripts’ develop into ‘scripts’ or writing systems, naturally drawn pictograms are stylised and augmented with drawings for The graphic aspect of language: writing abstract phenomena (hence called ), and will The need for graphic representation of the sounds of lan- ultimately contain logograms for all basic of a spe- guage became felt when the span of time and distance of cific language. Phonograms are developed out of man’s utterances was requested to exceed the physical logograms through a process starting with the rebus prin- limitations of the speaker. An administration of greater ciple: the sound values (in a specific language!) of mono- volume and complexity than that what an individual was syllabic words are attached to the logograms representing able to remember, required some kind of notation that these words, thus creating a phonetic or syl- could be separated from that individual and that specific labic script. A fully syllabic script would contain as many point in time. The embryonic predecessors of writing symbols as the language it is used for contains . A syllabary can develop further into an alphabetic

60 system, in which single (units of sound) The ancient world saw a number of other scripts appear instead of syllables are represented by symbols – thus and disappear, among which two scripts used by the requiring even less symbols. Alphabets may contain both Minoan language of pre-Mycenaean : a hiero- the and the used by a language, or be glyphic script and a (probably) syllabic script called consonantal (containing consonants only). To the sym- ; an adaptation of Cretan Linear A by the Myce- bols (letters) of consonantal alphabets, the vowels fol- naean (Greek) invaders of the island to accommodate for lowing sounds may, either optionally or oblig- the syllables of their own Indo-European language, that atory, be added to the letters by diacritical marks (vocal- was consequently exported to mainland and ization), as may certain phonetic modifications of the (Linear ); the as yet undeciphered script of the consonants (nasalization, aspiration etc.). Indus civilization, the language of which is also unknown; and a Canaanite introduced in the As said, even in alphabetic scripts some logograms per- Levantine city state of Ugarit (in present-day ) as a, sist: examples are the ciphers (0,1,2,…, in English: ‘one’, for the Semitic Canaanite language, preferable alterna- ‘two’, ‘three’…) and signs like + (in English: ‘plus’), – tive to the Sumerian-based Akkadian script. (in English: ‘minus’), & (in English: ‘and’), and, recently added, @ (in English: ‘at’). The Ugarit cuneiform is thought to deserve the honour of having been the first real : it contained only about 30 letters.

Scripts of the world A not too certain genealogy links the Semitic scripts emerging after the ‘sea people’ migrations around 1200 The cradle of most of the modern phonographic scripts is BC to Akkadian cuneiform. The alphabetic pioneer of the . The oldest known Sumerian and Ugarit was, together with the city itself, wiped out during Egyptian pictographic inscriptions considered to be this major turmoil that affected the whole Mediterranean scripts date from the 4th millennium BC. Egyptian hiero- area. South of Ugarit, a new Canaanitic nation emerged glyphic ideograms were progressively phoneticized, out of the ashes, that from a girdle of well-defended sea receiving the phonetic value of the consonantal content cities was about to build a network of trading colonies of of the words they represented. Likewise, the Sumerian an unprecedented territorial extent: it reached from the logograms were phoneticized as early as in the 3rd mil- Levantine homeland all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. lennium BC, giving rise to an essentially syllabic writing This nation, called , obviously needed an effec- system known as cuneiform (after its wedge-shaped char- tive to hold itself together; that it was acters). focussed on effective communication was demonstrated It was the unique endurance of the introvert Egyptian cul- by its impressive beaconing system, that made it possible ture ( succeeded to remain Egyptian and ‘egypto- to send a message from Tyre (now Lebanon) along the phone’for thousands of years), that left the contemporary southern coast of the Mediterranean all the way to Gades Sumerians with the greater immediate posterity, as far as (now Cadiz, south-western Spain) within hours. The writing is concerned. In the 24th century BC the Phoenicians invented an alphabet of 22 consonants, that Sumerian states were subdued by the Semitic Akkadians, was later borrowed and adapted by their major competi- whose language supplanted Sumerian as the language of tors in the Mediterranean: the . administration in the Mesopotamian area. From the To accommodate the Semitic script to the of Sumerians, whose language eventually disappeared, the their own Indo-European language, the Greeks applied Akkadians adopted the syllabic cuneiform script. As their some unneeded characters for the representation of language was totally unrelated to Sumerian, the script vowels, and augmented the alphabet with some newly now definitely became phonographic in essence. designed letters. Initially there were two separate Greek After its invention by the Sumerians, the cuneiform script alphabets, a western (Chalcidian) and an eastern one survived for more than 3000 years. Cuneiform scripts (Ionian); the latter, more specifically the Miletan variant, were used to represent the words and sounds of about 15 became the standard script as acquired political different languages – among which , and economic supremacy among the Greek city states. It Elamitic (a presently extinct language isolate) and Indo- spread into Asia with the conquests of Alexander the European languages (Hittite, Old-Persian). Most, but not Great, and remained influential during the hey-day of the all of the scripts (Old-Persian) made use of the symbols . introduced by the Sumerians.

61 In the , the Greek script served as the basis Picts, and the of the Germanic peoples. A few runic for the development of two new alphabets for the liturgies symbols still survive as augmentations to the alphabets of of the Slavic-Orthodox churches: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Icelandic and Faeroese. The was in use for some time in In Egypt, the Ionian was modified and and (in Croatia as long as the 17th century), augmented with some letters from (a stylised while the Cyrillic alphabet subsisted in , Bosnia descendant of the ancient hieroglyphs) to create the and Hercegovina, , Montenegro, and Coptic script, that to date is still in use for the liturgy of the Soviet Union. In Russia it was revised during the the Coptic Church. reign of Peter the Great (1708–1710): some letters were discarded, others were reshaped so that they became The is classified as a Canaanite ver- more similar in appearance to the letters of the Latin sion of the North-Semitic script. North-Semitic further alphabet. Through the expansion of tsarist Russia, the includes an version, that competes with Phoeni- alphabet reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean (and cian in successfulness. Influential descendants of this temporarily across the Bering Strait into Alaska), its posi- Aramaic script are: 1) the alphabet; 2) the tion being consolidated in the 20th century by the polit- Nabataean script, out of which the Arabic alphabets ical equilibrium between the Soviet Union and the Latin- developed; 3) the Pahlavi script; 4) the Sogdian script. writing ‘Western world’. Although for the phonetic tran- The Hebrew and Arabic alphabets conveyed the Holy scription of some minority languages Soviet linguists Scriptures of the Jewish and Islamic religions, which was preferred to use the , most of the languages of great consequence to their dissemination. Where the of the Soviet Union (with as most important exceptions use of the stayed confined to the Estonian, the , Georgian and Armenian) Hebrew and languages as well as the languages used, up to the collapse of the Union in 1992, Cyrillic of some numerically less important Jewish sects like the scripts. The former Socialist Soviet Republics of Mol- Turkic Karaim in Ukraine and Lithuania, the Arabic davia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan reverted to Roman alphabet spread, from the 7th century on, together with scripts after gaining independence. the Islamic faith, from the Atlantic coast of Northern Africa all the way to the Malay Archipelago. The Arabic In Italy, where the Greeks of (and espe- script is currently used mainly by Afro-Asiatic (Arabic) cially Campania) closely interacted with the Etruscans, and Indo-European (Persian, Tadzhik, ) languages; the Chalcidian Greek alphabet was taken over by the in the past it served Altaic (Turkish, Azeri) and Austrone- latter, who passed the script (but not their non-Indo-Euro- sian languages (Malay, Javanese, Madurese) as well. pean language) on to the Romans eventually subduing Likewise, the Pahlavi alphabet of Sassanide Persia spread them. The success of the Roman (Latin) alphabet, that with the Zoroastrian religion over large parts of Central spread all around the world – initially together with the Asia. As Pahlavi was an impoverished version of the Ara- advances of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic maic consonant script, in spite of a large number of com- faith, later as a consequence of Western colonization – is plex ligatures poorly equipped to accommodate the evident. The languages of the non-Orthodox nations of phonology of the Indo-European , it was Europe are now almost all written in alphabets the letters in the Zoroastrian parishes eventually substituted with of which are practically identical to those of the classical the script, that was better suited to represent the . Only in Ireland, with its early tradition of Persian phonemes. The supremacy of the Islamic religion writing, a Gaelic alphabet coexists with the modern Latin prevented this script, however, to play any role of impor- script. The Gaelic alphabet was derived from the Latin tance in Persia: modern Persian is written in the as early as the 5th century AD. script, augmented with a couple of characters for A score of other also developed scripts phonemes not occurring in Arabic. The Pahlavi script did out of the Chalcidian, either by direct adoption from the possibly influence a few alphabets that are currently still Greeks in , or through mediation of the in use: Georgian Mkhedruli, and the Armenian script . dating from the 5th century AD. Even before the Roman conquests (that didn’ reach them A Sogdian adaptation of the Aramaic script was adopted anyway) and christianisation, the peoples of Northern by the Turkic-speaking Uyghur nation. In spite of many Europe already adopted some scripts that were most specifically Uyghur modifications, the script remained probably derived from, or at least influenced by, the Italic defective for the representation of the Turkic consonantal alphabets: the script of the British and phonemes: especially the meaningful discrimination

62 between voiced and unvoiced consonants, foreign to the for the Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Iranian (Indo-European) , could not be and Tulu, spoken in the southern part of represented. With the introduction of Islam, the India; 2) the Singhalese script of Sri Lanka; 3) the adopted the (Perso-)Arabic script. The alphabet of Oriya spoken in Orissa; 4) the Indonesian revived in , as the script of the 13th century Kawi-scripts used by Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese and empire of Kubilai Khan. Until 1941 it was in use in Outer some other native languages. Since the arrival of Islam in Mongolia, after which it was, because of the political Java, the Kawi scripts were progressively superseded by dominance of the Soviet Union over the People’s the and, in the 20th century, also by Latin Republic of Mongolia, supplanted with a modified script, but they subsisted in Bali and around the Javanese Cyrillic alphabet. In the People’s Republic of , the kratons (royal palaces). At present they are taught again Sogdian-Mongolian alphabet is reported to be still in use in elementary and secondary schools. amongst speakers of the Mongolian and Manchu Other representatives of the Indian alphabets are the minority languages. Âksâr script, from which the modern Khmer and Thai More recent adaptations of the are the alphabets where derived, and the , that laid at so-called Neo-Aramaic alphabets, to date still in litur- the base of the Sino-Tibetan languages Lao and Burmese gical use by the Maronite Church (Estrangelo), the and Austronesian Cham, spoken in Vietnam and Cam- Syrian-Jacobite Church (Serto) and the Nestorian bodia. Church (Nestorian). The major modern systems of writing that cannot be Southern Semitic alphabets, it is thought, may have been traced back to a Semitic origin have developed from the the source of both the Ethiopian alphabet and the Indian largely (but not exclusively) logographic script of China. , although the latter is disputed. The orig- The Chinese script, dating back at least until the 2nd mil- inal Ethiopian script survived, with addition of vocal dia- lennium BC, contains some 50,000 different characters. critics, in the alphabet used to date for Amharic and other The (unrelated) Japanese language adopted Chinese languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea (Tigre, Tigrinya). logograms starting from the 3rd century AD. The - nese-based script is currently in use together (and The Brahmi alphabet was, in the course of the 1st millen- intermixed) with the two times 50 syllabic charac- nium BC, developed to convey the rich Indo-Aryan liter- ters ( for general use, and specifically ature, thereby replacing the lost script of the pre-Indo- for the transcription of foreign words and names). European Indus culture. Initially there was some compe- tition from the Aramaic-based script, but from The Korean script was not derived from Chinese, but the 5th century BC onwards Brahmi-based alphabets devised in the 15th century on an alphabetic basis. The emerged throughout the Indian sub-continent to provide a alphabet, consisting of 25 letters (vowels as well as con- vehicle for the diversity of Indo-European and Dravidian sonants), is sometimes used in combination with Chinese languages used in the area. Their dissemination followed logograms. the spread of the Hindu religion and literature. A Alphabets of unknown origin are, or were in a not too dis- northern variety of Brahmi, the , gave in the tant past, in use for the Berber language Tuareg (Tafi- 7th century AD birth to Nagari, which is still the alphabet nagh, a consonantal script possibly derived from the used by , Hindi and a number of other Indo- ancient Numidian alphabet), and some regional lan- Aryan languages (.. Marathi, Nepali, Bihari), as well as guages in : Batak (in North Sumatra) and Bug- some Dravidian and Munda languages. inese (in Southwest Celebes). The latter is supposed to Also derived from the Nagari script were: 1) the Bengal have had its origins in Java, and thus be related to the alphabet, currently in use in different varieties for Bengal scripts of Southern India. (spoken in Bangladesh and West Bengal), Assamese and In order to allow representation of the phonemes of as the Munda-language Santali; 2) the , still many known languages as possible, the International very close to Nagari but lacking the horizontal lines Phonetic Association (IPA) developed an artificial script above the letters; 3) , the alphabet used by Pun- on the base of the Latin alphabet. This script is occasion- jabi, attached since the 11th century to the Sikh religion; ally used to put as yet unwritten languages to paper, but 4) the Tibetan Fagspa script. because of its complexity its usage is effectively confined Southern varieties of Brahmi (Grantha, Pallawa) differ- to circles of linguistic specialists. entiated into: 1) a number of highly divergent alphabets

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