02.
1 Language and its Signs
It is important to understand language through its historical origins and its establishment as a
communication instrument adopted by humans. Regarding the first aspect, we may never know
with certainty the process that gave rise to language. It is assumed that this distinctive human
trait began to develop around one and a half million years ago with Australopithecus, or "ape-
man." Fossil studies suggest that this first hominid already communicated with his
contemporaries through intentional sound signals, rather than automatic shouts. This was the
first step toward the verbalization of language.
Scholars believe that a million years ago, a decisive phase in the development of speech
occurred: the rehearsal of the first words by Homo erectus. But it was with Homo sapiens
sapiens that humanity would take this adventure to its ultimate consequences, completing,
around 40,000 years ago, the definitive process of the conquest of language. This adventure,
however, was not limited to the diverse capacity of language to produce sounds; it sought a way
to crystallize sonic ideas through forms of recording.
Since the dawn of time, when beings became human through language, humans have sought to
perpetuate images of events they experienced. To this end, they have been concerned with
recording facts through a technique we call writing. In human societies, since then, writing has
occupied such an important place that it must be recovered as a means of understanding human
existence through time.
About six thousand years ago, the oldest known writing system emerged in Mesopotamia:
Sumerian. It responded to the priests' need to preserve religious liturgies. The Sumerian system
would become the prototype for other important writing systems, such as Egyptian, for
example. Before reaching its current state, writing went through two stages. Initially, it was
pictographic—to denote a cat, for example, a drawing of the animal was made. Over time, the
drawings became simpler, and some of them began to be assigned arbitrary meanings—a jug
with one line would represent a measure of barley, with two, a measure of beer. This made it
possible to represent ideas and words. Ideographic writing was created.
The shift from the ideographic to the syllabic and alphabetic systems marked the next step in
the evolution of writing. This may have been caused by the need to simplify the code to
accommodate the number of registers originating from spoken language. Thus, signs took over
the representation of sounds. The first syllabic systems, however, still had shortcomings. The
most obvious was the enormous number of signs used to represent the sounds of the language.
For example, cuneiform writing, originating from Mesopotamia, had hundreds of signs (its
organization was syllabic), a feature that was not easy for people to learn. The alphabet created
by the Phoenicians, a trading people of ancient times, was more practical. Writing was simplified
due to the reduction in the number of signs used, an aspect that facilitated learning as well as
the task of writing. The Phoenicians created a writing system composed of 22 signs. This method
revolutionized traditional writing, as instead of different syllabic signs, alphabetic signs became
the representation of units of the language's sound. Thus, a set of signs formed words—such as
those spoken. In this way, writing became phonetic, beginning to graphically represent the
richness of speech. This form of recording became predominant as a recording system adopted
by civilizations.
We must not forget that from the creation of writing to the present day, language has become
a complex system that has slowly changed over the centuries. It is a sophisticated instrument of
communication that relied on the use of a system of conventional signs. Signs, in particular, are
linked to real objects or abstract realities—called referents—whose sequence of sounds and
graphic form is called a signifier, which corresponds to an idea or concept called meaning. Signs
are inserted into a context that is the result of an agreement learned through a cultural
convention, a society, and are therefore not perennial, but rather evolve over time.
From birth, individuals, linked to different cultural contexts, experience experiences, whose
meanings develop from the learning of a linguistic system. People's understanding assumes an
organization, where mediation depends, to a large extent, on the cultural signs responsible for
the apparatus that will provide a framework for reading reality.
