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Lecture 4: Writing
Writing is something we must learn, we can’t acquire it.
Origins of language
petroglyphs – cave drawings by ancient humans (20000 year ago), they are portrayals of life at that time and were more artistic expressions than of communication
pictograms – “picture writings”, each picture is a direct image of the object it represents. They were used in the past and they are still used today. An example of modern pictographic writing are international signs.
ideograms – “idea pictures”/”idea writing” – they are less direct representations. For example the meaning of the picture of sun 
can be extended to represent ideas such as warmth, light, daytime.
The writing system of Sumerians – the oldest known system of writing
Sumerians – people who lived more than 6000 years ago in southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) and left a great number of clay tablets containing business documents (they were commercially oriented people and as their business grew, they needed more elaborate permanent records), prayers, poems, proverbs.
the writing system of Sumerians – their pictography evolved into symbols which were wedge – shaped. They were called cuneiform (cuneus = wedge) and were pressed into soft clay tablets that have survived.
hieroglyphs
Greek hiero = sacred + glyphikos = carvings
a similar system to Sumerian pictography used by Egiptians
Evolution of Sumerian pictograms to cuneiform
cuneiform script
represented words of the language
people cope to associate the symbol with the name of what the symbol represented
logographic/word writing uses logograms which are the symbols of word-writing system, are ideograms that additionally to the concept represent the word or morpheme
syllabic writing
because other ancient people, the Babylonians and Persians borrowed cuneiform writing system to represent the sound of the syllables in their own languages and so cuneiform evolved into a syllabic writing system
in a syllabic writing each syllable is represented by its own symbol
emoticons
faces expressing particular emotions, they are a modern pictographic system, used in text messages and e-mails 
pictographic symbols
are graphic signs with no visual relationship to the words they represent. A single sign can be used to represent other words consisting of the same sound. For example 
used for sun could also be used for son.
rebus
a representation of words by picture of objects whose names sound like the words
alphabetic writing
the Phoenicians were aware of hieroglyphs as well as Sumerian writing. They have developed the West Semitic syllabary – a writing system of 22 characters. The characters stood for consonants alone (it was the reader who provided the vowels) For example: (C n y rd ths – can you read this)
when the Greeks borrowed the system, they used the leftover consonant symbols to represent vowels. The result was the alphabetic writing (alphabet = alpha + beta i.e. the first two letters of the Greek alphabet) – a system in which both consonants and vowels are symbolized.
modern writing systems
most alphabetic systems today derive from the Greek system
4 types of writing:
logographic – “word writing” – every symbol/character represents a word or morpheme (Chinese)
syllabic – each symbol represents a syllable (Japanese)
consonantal – each symbol represents a consonant, vowels may be represented by a diacritical marks (Hebrew)
alphabetic – each symbol represent a vowel or a consonant (Polish, English)
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