Writing

Language manifests itself as speech, i.e. as articulated sounds. But speech can also be represented visually in the graphic medium. The use of visual signs to represent speech is known as writing.


In evolutionary terms writing did not develop as a simple substitute for speech. The earliest graphic signs so far discovered were unearthed in western Asia from the Neolithic era. They are elemental shapes on clay tokens that were probably used as image-making forms or casts (Schmandt-Besserat 1978,1992).

The earliest writing systems were all independent of speech and not alphabetic or syllabic in nature. They were pictorial. In the ancient civilization of Sumer around 3500 BC, for instance, pictorial writing was used to record agricultural transactions and astronomical observations. Most of the Sumerian pictographs represented nouns such as stars and animals, with a few for such qualisigns as "small," "big," and "bright." A few centuries later, this pictographic system was expanded to include verbs: to sleep, for example, was represented by a person in a supine position. To facilitate the speed of writing, the Sumerians eventually streamlined their pictographs and transformed them into symbols for the actual sounds of speech. These were written down on clay tablets with a stylus in a form of writing known as cuneiform.

Pictographs are images of objects, people, or events—for example, a drawing of the sun stands for the spoken word sun. Pictographic forms of writing are still in existence today even in alphabet-using cultures: e.g. the images of males and females painted on bathroom doors are examples of pictographs. More abstract forms of pictographic signs are called ideographs (or ideograms). These may bear some resemblance to their referents, but assume much more of a conventional knowledge of the relation between signifier and signified on the part of the user. International symbols for such things as public telephones, washrooms, etc. are all ideographic. More abstract ideographs are known as logographs (or logograms). These show a highly-evolved form of symbolicity which, nevertheless, has a basis in iconicity. A logographic system combines various pictographs for the purpose of indicating non-picturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs for sun and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east.
By about 3000 BC the ancient Egyptians also used a pictographic script—known as hieroglyphic. But in their case, the pictographs were becoming more alphabetic, standing for parts of words. Hieroglyphic writing was used to record hymns and prayers, to register the names and titles of individuals and deities, and to record various community activities—hieroglyphic derives from Greek hieros "holy" and glyphein "to carve."
From such pictographic-ideographic systems emerged the first syllables. These were systems of signs for representing syllables. They were developed by the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria from the ideographs of the Egyptian system during the last half of the second millennium BC. Syllables are still used in some cultures. Japanese, for example, is still written with two complete syllabaries—the hiragana and the katakana—devised to supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese.

The emergence of syllabaries on the scene bears witness to the fact that, once writing became a flourishing enterprise in the ancient civilizations, it was convenient for it to be produced without pictures. The transition from pictorial to sound representation—the alphabet principle—came about to make writing rapid and efficient in its use of space. So, for example, instead of drawing the full head of an ox (1) only its bare outline was drawn; which (2) stood for the ox; which (3) eventually came to stand for the word for ox (aleph in Hebrew); and which (4) finally stood just for the first sound in the word (a for aleph). Stage (4) occurred around 1000 BC when the ancient Phoenicians systematically created the first true alphabetic system for recording sounds. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and started the practice of naming each symbol by such words as alpha, beta, gamma, etc., which were imitations of Phoenician words: aleph "ox," beth "house," gimel "camel," etc. Alphabetic writing has become the norm in Western cultures. But in every alphabetic symbol that we now use to record our thoughts abstractly, there is an iconic history and prehistory that has become dim or virtually unseeable because our eyes are no longer trained to extract pictorial meaning from it.

Alphabetic writing is a truly remarkable achievement. It has made possible the recording and transmission of knowledge. Indeed, in Western culture to be an alphabet-user is to be literate and thus educated. So close is the link between the two that we can scarcely think of knowledge unless it is recorded in some alphabetic form and preserved in some book form for posterity; nor can we think of a person as educated unless we know that s/he can read and write verbal texts competently. In order to read and write, one must follow a sequence of characters arranged in a particular spatial order. For example, English writing flows from left to right, Hebrew from right to left, and Chinese from top to bottom. In all alphabet-using cultures, the ability to read and write does not emerge spontaneously. The child must be trained to recognize the alphabetic system and use it systematically to encode and decode written texts.

Besides its intrinsic value, the ability to read has economic consequences in modern societies. Adults who are better-than-average readers are more likely to have high-paying jobs. The growing technologization of society has brought along with it increasing demands for literacy, which the schools are hard pressed to meet. The reading ability needed to comprehend materials important to daily living, such as income tax forms and newspapers, has been estimated to be as high as the twelfth-grade level in North America. Some efforts have been made to simplify forms and manuals, but the lack of sufficient reading ability definitely impairs a person’s capacity to function in modern society.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.