Writing is the representation of
language in a
text medium through the use of a set of signs or
symbols (known as a
writing system).
It is distinguished from
illustration,
such as
cave drawing and
painting, and the recording of language via a
non-textual medium such as
magnetic tape audio.
In
Eurasia writing began as a consequence of
the burgeoning needs of accounting. Around the 4th millennium BC,
the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of
memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording
and presenting transactions in a permanent form (Robinson, 2003,
p. 36). In
Mesoamerica writing may
have evolved through calendrics and a political necessity for
recording historical events.
Writing as a category
Writing, more particularly, refers to two things:
writing as a
noun, the
thing
that is written; and
writing as a
verb, which designates the
activity of
writing. It refers to the
inscription of
characters on a medium, thereby forming
words, and larger units of
language, known as texts. It also refers to
the creation of meaning and the
information thereby generated. In that regard,
linguistics (and related
sciences) distinguishes between the
written language and the
spoken language. The significance of the
medium by which meaning and information is conveyed is indicated by
the distinction made in the arts and sciences. For example,while
public speaking and
poetry reading are both types of
speech, the former is governed by the
rules of
rhetoric and the latter by
poetics.
A person who composes a message or story in the form of text is
generally known as a
writer or an
author. However, more specific designations exist
which are dictated by the particular nature of the text such as
that of
poet,
essayist,
novelist,
playwright,
journalist,
and more. A
translator is a specialized
multilingual writer who must fully understand a message written by
somebody else in one language; the translator's job is to produce a
document of faithfully equivalent message in a completely different
language. A person who
transcribes or produces text to
deliver a message authored by another person is known as a
scribe,
typist or
typesetter. A person who produces text with
emphasis on the
aesthetics of
glyphs is known as a
calligrapher or
graphic designer.
Writing is also a distinctly
human activity.
It has been said that a
monkey, randomly
typing away on a
typewriter (in the days
when typewriters replaced the
pen or
plume as the preferred
instrument of writing) could re-create
Shakespeare-- but only if it lived long enough
(this is known as the
infinite
monkey theorem). Such writing has been speculatively designated
as
coincidental. It is also speculated
that
extraterrestrial beings
exist who may possess knowledge of writing. At this point in time,
the only confirmed writing in existence is of human origin.
Means for recording information
Wells argues that writing has the ability to "put agreements, laws,
commandments on record. It made the growth of states larger than
the old city states possible. The command of the priest or king and
his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice and could survive
his death" (Wells in Robinson, 2003, p. 35).
Writing systems
The major
writing systems – methods
of inscription – broadly fall into four categories: logographic,
syllabic, alphabetic, and featural.Another category,
ideographic (symbols for ideas), has never been
developed sufficiently to represent language. A sixth category,
pictographic, is insufficient to
represent language on its own, but often forms the core of
logographies.
Logographies
A
logogram is a written character which
represents a word or
morpheme. The vast
number of logograms needed to write a language, and the many years
required to learn them, are the major disadvantage of the
logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, the
efficiency of reading logographic writing once it is learned is a
major advantage.No writing system is wholly logographic: all have
phonetic components as well as logograms ("logosyllabic" components
in the case of
Chinese
characters,
cuneiform, and
Mayan, where a glyph may stand for a morpheme,
a syllable, or both; "logoconsonantal" in the case of hieroglyphs),
and many have an ideographic component (Chinese "radicals",
hieroglyphic "determiners"). For example, in Mayan, the glyph for
"fin", pronounced "ka'", was also used to represent the syllable
"ka" whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be
indicated, or when there was no logogram. In Chinese, about 90% of
characters are compounds of a semantic (meaning) element called a
radical with an existing character to indicate the
pronunciation, called a
phonetic. However, such phonetic
elements complement the logographic elements, rather than vice
versa.
The main logographic system in use today is Chinese characters,
used with some modification for various languages of China,
Japanese, and, to a lesser extent, Korean in South Korea. Another
is the classical
Yi script.
Syllabaries
A
syllabary is a set of written symbols
that represent (or approximate)
syllables.
A glyph in a syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by
a vowel, or just a vowel alone, though in some scripts more complex
syllables (such as consonant-vowel-consonant, or
consonant-consonant-vowel) may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically
related syllables are not so indicated in the script. For instance,
the syllable "ka" may look nothing like the syllable "ki", nor will
syllables with the same vowels be similar.
Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple
syllable structure, such as Japanese.
Other languages that
use syllabic writing include the Linear B
script for Mycenaean Greek; Cherokee; Ndjuka, an
English-based creole language of
Surinam
; and the Vai script of
Liberia
. Most logographic systems have a strong
syllabic component.
Ethiopic, though
technically an alphabet, has fused consonants and vowels together
to the point that it's learned as if it were a syllabary.
Alphabets
An
alphabet is a small set of symbols, each
of which roughly represents or historically represented a phoneme
of the language. In a perfectly
phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters
would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could
predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a
speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its
spelling.
As languages often evolve independently of their writing systems,
and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not
designed for, the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond
to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to
another and even within a single language.
Abjads
In most of the alphabets of the Mid-East, only consonants are
indicated, or vowels may be indicated with optional diacritics.
This property originated since the Egyptian times in the
hieroglyphs. Such systems are called
abjads, derived from the Arabic word for
"alphabet".
Abugidas
In most of the alphabets of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are
indicated through diacritics or modification of the shape of the
consonant. These are called
abugidas. Some abugidas, such as
Ethiopic and
Cree, are learned by children
as syllabaries, and so are often called "syllabics". However,
unlike true syllabaries, there is not an independent glyph for each
syllable.
Sometimes the term "alphabet" is restricted to systems with
separate letters for consonants and vowels, such as the
Latin alphabet, although abugidas and abjads
may also be accepted as alphabets. Because of this use,
Greek is often considered to be the first
alphabet.
Featural scripts
A featural script notates the building blocks of the phonemes that
make up a language. For instance, all sounds pronounced with the
lips ("labial" sounds) may have some element in common. In the
Latin alphabet, this is accidentally the case with the letters "b"
and "p"; however, labial "m" is completely dissimilar, and the
similar-looking "q" is not labial. In Korean
hangul, however, all four labial consonants are based
on the same basic element. However, in practice, Korean is learned
by children as an ordinary alphabet, and the featural elements tend
to pass unnoticed.
Another featural script is
SignWriting,
the most popular writing system for many
sign languages, where the shapes and
movements of the hands and face are represented
iconically. Featural scripts are also common in
fictional or invented systems, such as
Tolkien's Tengwar.
Historical significance of writing systems
Historians draw a distinction between prehistory and history, with
history defined by the advent of writing. The cave paintings and
petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be considered precursors of
writing, but are not considered writing because they did not
represent language directly.
Writing systems always develop and change based on the needs of the
people who use them. Sometimes the shape, orientation and meaning
of individual signs also changes over time. By tracing the
development of a script it is possible to learn about the needs of
the people who used the script as well as how it changed over
time.
Tools and materials
The many tools and writing materials used throughout history
include
stone tablets,
clay tablets,
wax
tablets,
vellum,
parchment,
paper,
copperplate,
styluses,
quills,
ink brushes,
pencils,
pens, and many
styles of
lithography. It is speculated
that the Incas might have employed knotted threads known as
quipu (or khipu) as a writing system.
The typewriter and various forms of word processors have
subsequently become widespread writing tools, and various studies
have compared the ways in which writers have framed the experience
of writing with such tools as compared with the pen or
pencil.
For more information see
writing
implements.
History of early writing
By definition, the modern practice of
history begins with written records; evidence of
human culture without writing is the realm of
prehistory.
The writing process evolved from economic necessity in the ancient
near east. Archaeologist
Denise
Schmandt-Besserat determined the link between previously
uncategorized clay "tokens" and the first known writing,
cuneiform. The clay tokens were used to represent
commodities, and perhaps even units of
time
spent in labor, and their number and type became more complex as
civilization advanced. A degree of complexity was reached when over
a hundred different kinds of tokens had to be accounted for, and
tokens were wrapped and fired in clay, with markings to indicate
the kind of tokens inside. These markings soon replaced the tokens
themselves, and the clay envelopes were demonstrably the prototype
for clay writing tablets.
Mesopotamia
The original
Mesopotamian writing
system was derived from this method of keeping accounts, and by the
end of the
4th millennium BC, this
had evolved into using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft
clay for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with
pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was
being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually
replaced by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term
cuneiform), at first only for
logograms, but evolved to include phonetic
elements by the 29th century BC. Around the 26th century BC,
cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken
Sumerian. Also in that period, cuneiform
writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms,
syllables, and numbers, and this script was adapted to another
Mesopotamian language,
Akkadian,
and from there to others such as
Hurrian, and
Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to
this writing system include those for
Ugaritic and
Old Persian.
China
In
China
historians have found out a lot about the early
Chinese dynasties from the written documents left behind.
From the
Shang Dynasty most of this
writing has survived on bones or bronze implements. Markings on
turtle shells
(used as
oracle bones) have been
carbon-dated to around 1500 BC. Historians have found that the type
of
media used had an effect on what the
writing was documenting and how it was used.
There have
recently been discoveries of
tortoise-shell carvings dating back to c. 6000 BC, but whether
or not the carvings are of sufficient complexity to qualify as
writing is under debate. If it is deemed to be a written language,
writing in China will predate Mesopotamian cuneiform, long
acknowledged as the first appearance of writing, by some 2000
years.
Egypt
The earliest known
hieroglyphic
inscriptions are the
Narmer Palette,
dating to c.3200 BC, and several recent discoveries that may be
slightly older, though the glyphs were based on a much older
artistic tradition. The hieroglyphic script was
logographic with phonetic adjuncts that included an
effective
alphabet.
Writing was very important in maintaining the Egyptian empire, and
literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of
scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were
allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple,
pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was
always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely
made even more so, as this preserved the scribes' status.
The
world's oldest known
alphabet was developed in central Egypt
around 2000
BC from a hieroglyphic prototype, and
over the next 500 years spread to Canaan and
eventually to the rest of the world.
Indus Valley
Indus script refers to short strings of symbols
associated with the
Indus
Valley Civilization used between 2600–1900 BC. In spite of many
attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered.
The script generally refers to that used in the mature Harappan
phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early
Harappa after 3500 BC,, and was followed by the mature Harappan
script. The script is written from right to left, and sometimes
follows a
boustrophedonic style.
Since the number of principal signs is about 400-600, midway
between typical logographic and syllabic scripts, many scholars
accept the script to be logo-syllabic (typically syllabic scripts
have about 50-100 signs whereas logographic scripts have a very
large number of principal signs). Several scholars maintain that
structural analysis indicates an
agglutinative language underlies the script.
However, this is contradicted by the occurrence of signs supposedly
representing suffixes at the beginning or middle of words.
Turkmenistan
Archaeologists have recently discovered that there was a
civilization in Central Asia using writing 4,000 years ago. An
excavation near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, revealed an
inscription on a piece of stone that was used as a stamp
seal.
Phoenician writing system and descendants
The
Phoenician writing system was
adapted from the Proto-Caananite script in around the 11th century
BC, which in turn borrowed ideas from
Egyptian hieroglyphics. This writing
system was an
abjad — that is, a
writing system in which only consonants are
represented. This script was adapted by the
Greeks, who adapted certain consonantal signs
to represent their vowels. The
Cumae
alphabet, a
variant of the early Greek
alphabet gave rise to the
Etruscan
alphabet, and its own descendants, such as the
Latin alphabet and
Runes.
Other descendants from the
Greek
alphabet include the
Cyrillic
alphabet, used to write
Russian, among others. The Phoenician
system was also adapted into the
Aramaic
script, from which the
Hebrew
script and also that of
Arabic are
descended.
The
Tifinagh script (Berber languages) is
descended from the Libyco-Berber script which is assumed to be of
Phoenician origin.
Mesoamerica
A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing was discovered in the
Mexican state of Veracruz, and is an example of the oldest script
in the Western Hemisphere preceding the oldest
Zapotec writing dated to about 500 BC.
It is thought to be
Olmec.
Of several
pre-Columbian scripts in
Mesoamerica, the one that appears to
have been best developed, and the only one to be deciphered, is the
Maya script. The earliest inscriptions
which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BC, and writing
was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the
Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century AD. Maya writing used
logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat
similar in function to modern Japanese writing.
Creation of text or information
Composition
Creativity
Author
Writer
Critiques
Writers sometimes search out others to evaluate or criticize their
work. To this end, many writers join
writing circles, often found at local
libraries or
bookstores. With the evolution of the
Internet, writing circles have started to go
online.
See also
References
- The Khipu Database Project,
http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/index.html
- The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing,
Samuel Noah Kramer, Thirty Nine Firsts In Recorded History
pp 381-383
- China Daily, 12 June 2003, Archaeologists Rewrite
History,
http://www.china.org.cn/english/2003/Jun/66806.htm
- Whitehouse, David (1999) 'Earliest writing' found BBC
- (Lal 1966)
- (Wells 1999)
- (Bryant 2000)
Further reading
- A History of Writing: From Hieroglyph to
Multimedia, edited by Anne-Marie Christin, Flammarion
(in French, hardcover: 408 pages, 2002, ISBN 2-08-010887-5)
- In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew
Language. By Joel M. Hoffman, 2004. Chapter 3 covers the invention of writing and its
various stages.
- Origins of writing on AncientScripts.com
- Museum of Writing: UK Museum of Writing with
information on writing history and implements
- On ERIC Digests: Writing Instruction: Current Practices in the
Classroom; Writing Development; Writing Instruction: Changing Views over the
Years
- Children of the Code: The Power of Writing - Online
Video
- Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic
Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23463-2 (hardcover);
ISBN 0-631-23464-0 (paperback)
- Robinson, Andrew "The Origins of Writing" in David Crowley and
Paul Heyer (eds) Communication in History: Technology, Culture,
Society (Allyn and Bacon, 2003).
External links