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)