Writing

The Development of Writing

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Writing is a system of human communication by means of visual symbols or signs. The most primitive stages of ‘writing’, or marking on objects , date almost from the time of the earliest human beings. However, the first fully developed system of writing appeared only 5,500 years ago.

Counting devices have been used in all parts of the world. Such devices include sticks, pebble, clay tokens, and strings. For example, a shepherd could record the exact number of sheep in his flock by cutting one notch in a stick for each sheep

Rock drawing conveyed a clearer meaning, but were not so useful for counting. A simple rock drawing was found near a dangerously steep trail in New Mexico, U.S.A. The design shows a mountain goat and a man riding a horse. The mountain goat stands on all fours, but the horse and rider are upside down. It warns a horseman that a mountain goat can climb the rocky trail but that his horse cannot.

Ideographs are Indian drawings , with the same characteristic feature of any primitive drawing, it expresses a group of ideas without a clear connection with any language. Anyone can understand it even if he or she doesn’t understand the language of the person who wrote it. This way of expressing ideas, not necessarily in words is called ideography. Pictures drawn for the purpose of communication differ only slightly from pictures drawn for artistic purposes. Communication pictures are simplified and stereotyped and they have no details that are not needed as part of the communication.

Human beings took decisive steps in developing real writing when they learned to express ideas indirectly. They did this by using signs that stood for the words in their language, not the ideas the words stood for. This kind of writing is called logography. To see how it works, take a message as "the king killed a lion". In ideography the message would include two drawings, one showing a man with the insignia of his office, such as a crown, holding a spear in his hand, and the other showing a lion. Logography, or word writing, would express the same message by signs that stands for words themselves. One picture, of a man wearing a crown, stands for the word "king". A spear stands for the word kill, and a drawing of a lion stands for "lion". If the king killed three lions, the phrase "three lions" would be expressed in word writing by two signs, one standing for the numeral three and the other for "lion". In ideography, the message would contain pictures of three lions. Early in the development of this writing, the pictures became simplified and formal. They often showed only a part for the whole, such as a crown for the word king. But pictures cannot represent words like "a" or " the" , nor can they represent grammatical endings like the "-ed" of "killed".

The Sumerians were the first people to reach the stage of a primitive writing, about 3,500 BC they kept records with such simple entries as "10 arrows" and the sign for a personal name, or "5 cows" and the sign for another name. However, they had difficulty in writing names and abstract ideas.

Phonetics

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To overcome this problems, the found that they could use word-symbols of objects that were easy to picture, like "arrow", to stand for words that sounded similar but hard to picture. The sign for "arrow" could also stand for "life" , because the word ti means both things in Sumerian. This principle of phonetics, often called rebus principle, is the most important single step in the story of writing. If the arrow sign could stand for both "arrow" and "life", because they are both pronounced ti, why not use the arrow sign for the sound ti wherever it occurs, regardless of its meaning? The Sumerian language was made up largely of one syllable words, so it was not difficult for the people to work out a syllabary of about one hundred phonetic signs. Sumerian writing is called logo-syllabic, or word syllabic. It uses both logograms, or word signs, and syllabograms, or syllabic signs. Logograms expressed most of the words in the language, and syllabograms expressed rare and abstract words and proper names. Sumerian writing gradually developed the wedgelike appearance we call cuneiform.

The Egyptians developed another important word-syllabic writing, hieroglyphic, about 3000 BC It resembled Sumerian in using word-sings, but differed in the choice of syllabic signs, but the Egyptians did not. The Hittites also had a writing of their own, hieroglyphic Hittie, that was related to some of the systems used in the lands around the Aegan Sea.

Perhaps about 1500, the Chinese began the most highly developed word writing in the world, the peoples of the Middle East usually had only a few hundred word signs, but the Chinese may have as many as 50,000. They use some of these signs for the syllables in proper names or in foreign words.

Alphabet

The older word-syllable systems were gradually simplified. From the complicated Egyptian system, the Semites of Syria, especially the Phoenicians, developed simple systems of from 22 to 30 signs, each standing for a consonant followed by any vowel. The Japanese worked out a syllabic system with symbols for an initial consonant and different vowels. They also used many word symbols borrowed from Chinese. The alphabet was the next step. The Greeks were the first to evolve a system of vowel signs, creating the first alphabetic system of writing.

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