THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING

There are a number of legends and stories concerning the invention of the written form of the
language. To name just a few, here are some examples of them:
1. Greek legend brings the story of Cadmus, a Prince of Pheonicia, who was the founder
of Thebes, who allegedly invented the alphabet and brought it along with him;
2. In one Chinese tale the inventor of writing was the four-eyed dragon-god Cang Jie, but
in another one written forms first appeared as kind of markings on the back of the
chi-lin, a white unicorn;
3. In Babylonian tradition god Nebo invented writing;
4. In Egyptian mythology it was god Thoth who presented humans with both writing and
speech;
5. The Talmudic scholar Rabbi Akiba accepts as true the fact that the alphabet was
existent long before humans were created;
6. Islamic teaching presents both writing and speech as a gift from Allah himself as a
present to humans but not angels.

Undoubtedly, one issue can certainly be perceived as true: before any word of written form
appeared, countless spoken ones had been uttered. The development of writing systems is
definitely a long-term process. It is impossible that at some point in the past someone woke up
and miraculously knew how to write. The process is gradual. Even in today’s world, there are
still languages that exist only in their spoken form and the written form is still being
structured.
How far back can we trace the written form of the language?
Scientists believe that it is possible to trace human endeavours to present visual information
back to various cave drawings about 20,000 years ago. Another source of such data can be
seen in clay tokens from the period dating back to about 10,000 years ago. However, the
writing system that is based on a sort of alphabetic system is traced back to inscriptions
chiselled only around 3,000 years ago.

1. Pictograms and ideograms.

One Chinese proverb says, “one picture is worth a thousand words”.
Most likely first attempts of presenting the written form of the language were cave drawings
made by ancient humans. Such drawings chiselled in caves are called petroglyphs, like those
found in the Altamira cave in northern Spain. Scientists can read them but the reason why
they were created in the first place, remains a mystery. They must have been examples of
aesthetic representation, pictorial art or part of a tradition – scientists do not believe in their
communicative purpose.

A pictogram (from Latin pictus “drawn” and Greek γράμμα “writing”) can also be called a
pictogramme or pictograph (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English
Language Unabridged). A pictogram is an ideogram that expresses its sense through its
visual resemblance to a real physical object. Each ‘picture’ shows an exact image of the
object it represents. The said image and the meaning are bound by nonarbitrary relationship.
What is important is that fact that pictograms do not represent the linguistic names given to
such objects. As a consequence, pictograms do not represent either the sounds or the words
of spoken language.
Pictographic writing is still popular and widely used in modern world. Today, pictograms are
used in international road signs, chemical hazard labels, laundry labels, safety pictograms,
food symbols, weather forecasts, etc. Nowadays, both pictograms and ideograms are
language-independent.
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa “idea” + γράφω gráphō “to write”) is a
graphic symbol that stands for an idea or concept. It is portrayed in a much less direct form
than a pictogram and one might have to learn what the meaning of it really is. Very often,
once a pictogram has been accepted as the representation of a particular object, for example
the picture of a sun ☼, its meaning can be extended to abstract sense, like warmth, light,
daytime, etc. The principal part of the usage of ideograms is that the representative symbols
should be used in unified forms and conveyed similar meaning. There MUST be a
conventional relationship between the graphic symbol and its interpretation. After some time,
the symbol may be changed into a much simpler graphic form but with the same meaning, for
example the said symbol of the sun ☼, may be simplified to the form of ʘ.
In conclusion, pictograms are more “picture-like” forms and ideograms are more abstract. It
comes from the difference in the relationship between the symbol and the entity it represents
within these two forms. Similarly to pictograms, ideograms do not represent either the sounds
or the words of spoken language.

2. Cuneiform writing / logograms / logographs

Whenever symbols come to be used to represent words in the language, they are called
logograms or logographs. They are examples of so called “word-writing”. Probably the best
example of logographic writing system is that used by Sumerians, an ancient people of
unknown origin, who lived in the south of modern Iraq. The people left innumerable clay
tablets containing business documents, epics, prayers, poems, proverbs, etc. The data is so
copious that scholars managed to prepare a seventeen-volume dictionary of Sumerian written
language. An example of modern usage of logograms can be found in Chinese. There are
numerous instances of symbols or characters that are used to represent a single word and not
the sound of the language.
Due to the particular shapes used in their symbols, these inscriptions are often known as
cuneiform writing (from Latin cuneus “wedge”). The term itself means “wedge-shaped” and
it refers to the wedge-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay tablets. The forms the symbols
produce in that way give no indication as to their meaning or what they may portray.
Therefore, it is a clear example of “word-writing”. The Sumerian cuneiform writing is
refereed to as the “the earliest known writing system”. In this oldest writing system, the
symbol indicates both the word and the concept. Therefore, we can say that logograms are
kind of ideograms that apart from the concept also represent the word or morpheme for that
concept. The cuneiform writing was borrowed by many, for example the Babylonians,
Assyrians, and Persians; however, they often adopted it and used it to represent the sounds of
the syllables in their other tongue. That was when the cuneiform writing evolved into
syllable writing system. Within this new system, each syllable is represented by its own
symbol, and words are written syllable by syllable. Syllabic writing systems are far more
efficient than word-writing ones, and what is more, they are less absorbing for the memory.
However, languages that are identified as ones having a rich structure of syllables containing
many consonant clusters cannot be efficiently written in a syllabary.
The English language with its numerous consonants and vowels may create astronomical
number of possible syllables; therefore, English and other Indo-European languages are
unsuitable for a syllabary.
Conversely, the Japanese language can serve as good example of syllabic writing, to some
extent. It is because all Japanese words can be phonologically written by means of about one
hundred syllables, mostly consonant-vowel (CV) type. There are also no underlying
consonants. Japanese has two syllabaries:
 katakana (forty six characters, called kana) – used for borrowed words and for special
effects;
 hiragana (forty six characters, called kana) – used for native words.
 3. Rebus writing
Rebus writing is a way of using symbols representing the sound of language. The symbol has
no longer a visual relationship to the word it represents but becomes the phonographic
symbol, which indicates the sounds of the represented words. Such instances are called
homophones – one single sign represents all possible words with the same sound. For
example: ad – add, ate – eight, eye – I, knows – nose, thyme – time, threw – though, etc. More
examples can be found on the Internet:
http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.html

4. Alphabetic writing
There is a short and direct path from a syllable-writing system to an alphabetic one, where the
symbols represent single sounds of the language. An alphabet is, therefore, a set of written
symbols which each represents a single type of a sound.
The early form of the writing systems, originating from the Phoenicians, is considered the
general source of other alphabets found in the world. Early Greeks, however, took the whole
process of alphabetizing one step further by using separate symbols for vowels and
consonants (a – alpha, b – beta). The Phoenician syllabary was not satisfactory for Greeks as
in Greek vowels cannot be determined by grammatical context. (Semitic writing was based on
consonants and the vowels were provided by the reader through his/her knowledge of the
language).
Some scholars believe that Greeks should be given credit for inheriting the syllabic system
from the Phoenicians and forming a writing system where the single-symbol to single-sound
correspondence is fully realised. From Greeks, via the Romans, the alphabet entered Western
languages, as well. Of course, it underwent many modifications on the way to best fit the
particular language’s requirements of its spoken form. In Eastern Europe, the Greek alphabet
was modified into Cyrillic alphabet (after St. Cyril, a ninth century Christian missionary). It
gave way to the Russian writing system used in Russia today.