Writing

Last week I wrote about paper, and how much I, as a writer, appreciate it. But even more, I appreciate writing itself: the existence of a system for conveying information by putting marks on paper. What I said about our civilization being built on paper is only half true: our civilization is really built on what we write on that paper.

Before writing, knowledge was limited by human memory. With writing, knowledge began to accumulate from generation to generation.

The first forms of writing were pictography and ideography. Pictography means “picture writing”: drawing a picture of whatever you are trying to convey,whether it’s the sun or your favorite cow. Ideography, or “idea writing,” uses those pictures not just to represent the things themselves, but also associated ideas: for example, your drawing of the sun could also represent “warmth,” and your drawing of the cow could also represent “milk” (or possibly “friend,” depending on just how attached you are to your cow).

Pictography and ideography are forms of “limited writing.” “Full writing” systems are those where the symbols represent spoken words and not objects. But we still use pictographs and ideographs, for international traffic signs, musical notation, electronic circuit diagrams and blueprints, among other things, because in those specialized instances, they’re actually more efficient than full writing. (Imagine teaching an orchestra to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with nothing but written descriptions of each part!)

There are three kinds of full writing systems: logographic, which has a sign for each word, syllabic, which has different signs for different syllables, and alphabetic, which has a sign for each sound.

Logographic systems grew out of pictographs, which eventually became so stylized they were no longer recognizable as drawings of objects, and instead became associated with the names of the objects: the sound of the spoken word. This is how Chinese works; in China, the jump from pictographs to logographs took place about 1500 B.C.

Two other famous logographic systems are cuneiform writing and hieroglyphics. Cuneiform, or wedge-shaped writing, was developed by the Sumerians about 3,000 B.C., and the Babylonians, Assyrians and other subsequent civilizations adopted it. It was wedge shaped because it was created by pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet. (And I thought MY books were heavy last time I moved!)

Hieroglyphics are associated mostly with Egypt, but the Cretans and the Mayans both used something similar. The name means “holy carvings,” but actually it was used for everything from counting sheep to graffiti.

The trouble with logographics is that one symbol can represent several similar-sounding words. Sometimes this problem is resolved by adding additional signs, but sometimes all the reader has to go on is context. (“Fifty figs? I thought you wrote pigs!”)

Adding signs to logograms to indicate how they should be pronounced eventually resulted in symbols that stood for only parts of words, or syllables. This simplified things, since it took between 500 and 600 signs in most languages to make logographics workable, whereas creating signs for syllables reduced that to between 100 and 200.

But then one (and, amazingly, only one!) civilization made the leap to creating a different symbol for each sound. About 800 B.C. the Greeks created stand-alone consonants and stand-alone vowels, shocking their neighbors: after all, you can’t even pronounce a consonant without a vowel, so how dare they divorce the two?

Shocking or not, it worked, and every alphabet since has been based on the Greeks’. (The very name, alphabet, is from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.) Alphabets allow you to spell out an unfamiliar word, virtually eliminating the confusion between similar-sounding words. For any single word you need more symbols than in logographic or syllabic writing, but not THAT many, and the total number of symbols required is reduced from 100 or more to, in our case, just 26.

Our alphabet is really the Latin alphabet, which was developed from the Etruscan alphabet, which was adapted from the Greek alphabet. With just a few simple characters, it allows us to make permanent records of our thoughts, emotions, knowledge and wisdom.

It also allows people like me avoid physical labour and still make a living.

You’ve got to like that!

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1992/11/writing/

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