Writing

WritingIINTRODUCTION

Writing,methodofhumanintercommunication by means of arbitrary visual marks forming a system. Writing can be achieved in either limited or full systems, a full system being one that is capable of expressing unambiguously any concept that can be formulated in language.

IILIMITED WRITING SYSTEMS

Limitedwritingsystems are generally used for purposes such as keeping accounts or as mnemonic devices for recalling significant facts or conveying general meanings. Also called subwriting, limited systems of writing include picture writing (or pictography), ideography, and the use of marked or unmarked objects as mnemonic devices. Such systems are characterized by a high degree of ambiguity because there is no fixed correspondence between the signs of the writing system and the language represented. For this reason interpretation of a limited system is usually independent of language. The purpose of the pictogram, ideogram, or object is to call to mind an image or impression that is subsequently expressed in language. This is clearly the procedure involved in the Native American picture writing that can be read easily by practically anyone with no knowledge whatever of Native American languages. On the other hand, if interpretation of limited writing systems is attempted without a knowledge of the cultural background of the writer, the image or impression called to mind by the writing will be meaningless or misunderstood.

IIIFULL WRITING SYSTEMS

Afullwritingsystem is capable of expressing any concept that can be formulated in language. Therefore, full writing systems are characterized by a more or less fixed correspondence between the signs of the writing system and elements of the language the writing represents. The elements of language represented, then, can be words, syllables, or phonemes (the smallest units of speech that distinguish two different utterances in a language). Thus, writing systems can be categorized as word (or logographic), syllabic, or alphabetic. Because full writing systems represent elements of language, knowledge of the language written is required to understand the meaning intended by the writer. This does not mean that a writing system is tied to one language. In fact, writing systems are rather easily transferred from one language to another. This means only that, unlike a pictographic system, a full system conveys no meaning to the reader without a knowledge of the underlying language.

IVWORD (OR LOGOGRAM) SYSTEMS

Wordwritingsystemsare characterized by many signs called logograms which represent complete words. Such signs frequently represent a series of related words, and in many cases, one sign represents several separate and distinct words. In purely logographic writing, such distinctions usually remain unresolved and the writing is ambiguous. Certain types of signs, however, can be used to resolve the ambiguity and assure correct reading of the logogram. These signs are used as semantic and phonetic indicators and are often called determinatives and phonetic complements. Determinatives are signs used to indicate the class or category to which the word represented by the logogram belongs. Determinatives are logograms themselves and are not read but serve only to indicate the semantic group, such as gods, countries, birds, fish, verbs of motion, verbs of building, objects made of wood, objects made of stone, and so on, to which the logogram belongs. Phonetic complements are similar in use but more specific in that they show part or all of the pronunciation of the word that the logogram represents. In modern alphabetic writing in English, for example, the logogram 2 is read two. When the ordinal number is referred to, however, the phonetic complement d is attached and the logogram, plus complement 2nd, is read second. In this example, for the first time, signs are used for purely phonetic (or nonlogographic) purposes. In other words, the sign functions not to call to mind an idea and the word associated with it, but to recall a sound which is part of the word that the logogram being read represents. Originally, phonetic indicators were chosen from the logograms that have a meaning corresponding to the desired sound. This device is known as phonetic transfer or, more commonly, rebus writing. Like determinatives, phonetic indicators are not to be read but serve only to facilitate the reading of the basic logogram.

Thusfar,elementsof language are expressed only by logograms. Such representation is adequate for most nouns and simple verbs, but not adequate for most adjectives and adverbs, and especially for pronouns and proper nouns such as personal names. It cannot express all the nuances of case endings and verbal inflection. A full system of writing, as defined above, must be capable of expressing all these if they exist in the language. Without this capability, a purely logographic writing system cannot be classified as a full system even if it makes use of semantic and phonetic indicators.

VSYLLABIC SYSTEMS

Theprincipleofphonetic transfer was used to overcome the limitations of logographic writings. By using signs to represent sounds, in this case, syllables, words that had no logographic representation could be expressed. In addition, morphemes, or case endings and verbal inflection, could be expressed by attaching the signs representing their sounds to the root logogram. It should be noted that, unlike phonetic indicators, such signs are to be read and interpreted as elements of the language being written.

Thecombinedlogo-syllabic system represents the first system of full writing. Once a system has reached a full capability of expression, the conflict in its development is between economy of writing (number of signs required to write a given utterance), and reduction of ambiguity. The major disadvantage of a logo-syllabic system is that it requires a very large number of signs because the number of words in a language is quite large. Grouping all words with similar meanings under one logogram, or using the same sign for different words, reduces the number of signs required, but such a system still needs at least 500 or 600 signs. Furthermore, ambiguity is very likely unless indicators are used, which means sacrificing the main advantage of having to use fewer signs per utterance. On the other hand, the number of signs needed for a purely syllabic system can be less than 100 and is seldom more than 200. The use of syllabic writing has the further advantage that the logograms do not have to be interpreted by the reader because the words are written out unambiguously in the phonetic script. The disadvantage of syllabic writing is that the system requires, on the average, more signs to write a given utterance. In its simplest form, a syllabic system consists only of consonant and vowel signs and signs for simple vowels.

Thenextstepisthereduction of the syllabary, or the list of syllables, to only consonant and vowel signs, with the vowels undifferentiated. This reduces the number of signs required to the number of consonant sounds in the language, but increases the ambiguity in that the correct vowel sounds have to be supplied by the reader. Because this is syllabic writing the number of signs required to write a given utterance is the same as that for the simple syllabic system that expresses each vowel fully. The reduced syllabic system requires many fewer signs; therefore, each sign can be simpler. Although this type of writing is considered alphabetic by many people, it is more accurately called semialphabetic, as it does not indicate each phoneme of the language separately and unambiguously.

VIALPHABETIC SYSTEMS

Thefinalsteptoward fully alphabetic writing is the separation of the consonant sounds from the vowel sounds, and the separate writing of each. This requires a few more signs but eliminates the ambiguity of having the reader supply the vowels. Alphabetic writing requires the greatest number of signs for a given utterance, but the number of signs required for the system is small enough so that the signs can still be very simple. Because each sign represents a phoneme, the word that is intended by the writer is spelled out explicitly, and no sounds are required to be supplied by the reader. See Alphabet.

Thesesystemsoutline the theory and methods of writing, but in actual fact writing systems do not exist in these pure forms. Elements from one type of system are almost always found incorporated in another; an example is the number of logograms used with the modern alphabetic writing system.

VIIHISTORY OF WRITING

Writingsystemsalways tended to be conservative, their origins often being attributed to divine sources. Any change or modification was met with great hesitation, and even today, attempts to reform spelling or eliminate inconsistencies in writing conventions meet with strong resistance. Because of this conservatism major innovations in the structure of a writing system usually occurred when one people borrowed a system from another people. The Akkadians, for example, adapted the syllabic portion of the Sumerian logo-syllabic system to their own language, but retained the logograms, and used them regularly as a type of shorthand (see Sumerian Language). When the Hittites borrowed the system from the Akkadians for their own language, they eliminated most of the polyphonous and homophonous syllabic signs and many of the Sumerian logograms, but used a number of Akkadian syllabic spellings as logograms (see Hittite Language).

Archaeologicaldiscoveries suggest that Egyptian hieroglyphs may be the oldest form of writing. The earliest evidence of an Egyptian hieroglyphic system is believed to be from about 3300 or 3200 bc. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia also were writing before 3000 bc.

Ataboutthesametime, so-called Proto-Elamite writing developed in Elam. This system has yet to be deciphered, and nothing can be said of its nature at the present time except that, from the number of signs used, it is logo-syllabic. Logo-syllabic systems of writing also developed, at a later date, in the Aegean, in Anatolia, in the Indus Valley, and in China (see Chinese Language). From these logo-syllabic systems, syllabaries were borrowed by other peoples to write their own languages. The syllabary in its simplest and most reduced form (that is, signs for consonant plus any vowel) was borrowed by the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria from the Egyptians, leaving behind the logograms and more complex syllables of the Egyptian system, during the last half of the 2nd millennium bc (see Semitic Languages). This syllabary was almost ready-made because Egyptian writing had never expressed vowels. The earliest such semialphabetic writing is found in the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, which date back to about 1500 bc. Another such system, dated to about 1300 bc, was found at Ugarit on the northern Syrian coast, but in this case the writing was inscribed on clay in the manner of Mesopotamian cuneiform. Similar writing systems were developed by the other peoples of this region, and it was from the Phoenicians that the Greeks borrowed their writing system. The Greeks took the final step of separating the consonants from the vowels and writing each separately, thus arriving at full alphabetic writing about 800 bc (see Greek Language). Alphabetic writing has yet to be improved upon in terms of the definition of a full writing system. See also separate articles on all the individual letters of the English alphabet.

Contributed

By:Ignace Jay GelbR. M. Whiting

Further reading

AlphabetChappell, Warren. The Living Alphabet. University Press of Virginia, 1975, 1980. Brief description of the development of the Latin alphabet, plus calligraphy instruction.

Logan, Robert K. The Alphabet Effect. St. Martin's, 1987. The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization (title page).

Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. Mysteries of the Alphabet. Abbeville, 1999. An illustrated history of the invention and development of each letter of the alphabet.

Patton, Sally. Alphabetics: A History of Our Alphabet. Zephyr, 1989. For intermediate readers.

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Viking, 1998. A detailed and absorbing examination of how alphabetic literacy reconfigured culture, religion, and history.

Solo, Dan X. Classic Roman Alphabets: Complete Fonts. Dover, 1983. Various styles of lettering.

Writing

Crump, C. G., and Ernest Jacob, eds. Legacy of the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press, 1926. Classic work on medieval manuscripts.

Drucker, Johanna. The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination. Thames & Hudson, 1994. A detailed illustrated history of the development of writing; for adult readers.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. Verso, 1976, 1997. A classic history of the development of the book and its profound effects on modernity.

Hall, David B. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Intriguing analysis of how the printed book has influenced American culture.

Martin, Henri Jean. The History and Power of Writing. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Traces the development of writing through four millennia, from its beginnings up to the current technological age.

Osley, A. S. Calligraphy and Paleography. October House, 1966. Writing styles and letter information.

Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. Thames & Hudson, 1995. Illustrated introduction to the development of writing.

Sayce, A. H. The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions. Ares, 1977. Review of methods of deciphering, as well as the nature of inscriptions and their relationship to ancient cultures.

Senner, Wayne M., ed. The Origins of Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 1989, 1991. How early humankind developed writing.

Walker, C. B. Reading the Past. University of California Press, 1991. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet (title page).

Writing

form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language.

This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought and the fact that spoken language has a number of levels of structure, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest units of speech used to distinguish one word or morpheme from another), any one of which a writing system can map onto or represent. Indeed, the history of writing is in part a matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in the attempt to construct an efficient, general, and economical writing system capable of serving a range of socially valuable functions. Literacy is a matter of competence with a writing system and with the specialized functions that written language serves in a particular society.

A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the International Phonetic Association, is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.

While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.

Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the extremely limited set of alternatives a reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of purposes efficiently.

General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same, will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recorded vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic characters to be memorized is extremely large.

Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the sound-based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence some hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such writing systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.

Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however, should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.

Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes. For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.

Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features. Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say: Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.

No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese, consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets, which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat, meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit than foreach sound unit.

The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.

History of writing systems

While speaking is a universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until recently concentrated on a single aspect, increased efficiency, with the Greek invention of the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs that can express the full range of meanings in a language. As Eric Havelock wrote, At a stroke the Greeks provided a table of elements of linguistic sound not only manageable because of economy, but for the first time in the history of homo sapiens, also accurate. Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by word-based writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.

The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique; the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech. The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp distinction between the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents.

It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to serve mnemonic purposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms but once invented could serve aesthetic functions.

Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which have simple syllabic structure and a great number of homophones, a writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabary or an alphabet, would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that more recent accounts of writing systems have stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently, given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as appropriate to the languages they represent.

Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development, and there are many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be traced back to the beginnings of symbol-making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that Oriental writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.

Writing as a system of signs

Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system for symbolizing these symbols. A writing system may be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents the utterances of a language. Writing renders language visible; while speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparison, permanent. Both speaking and writing depend upon the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by someone not familiar with the linguistic structure underlying the oral form of the language. Yet writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, which would not be produced orally. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect. Scholars account for these facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms and functions. These alternative relations may be depicted as follows:

It is the fact that writing is an expression of language rather than simply a way of transcribing speech that gives to writing, and hence to written language and to literacy, their special properties. As long as writing was seen merely as transcription, as it was by such pioneering linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield earlier in the 20th century, its conceptual significance was seriously underestimated. Once writing was seen as providing a new medium for linguistic expression, its distinctness from speech was more clearly grasped. Scholars such as Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong were among the first to analyze the conceptual and social implications of using written as opposed to oral forms of communication.

Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs. Gesturessuch as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreementare visible signs but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures, similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of writing.

But the boundary between pictures and writing becomes less clear when pictures are used conventionally to convey particular meanings. In order to distinguish pictures from pictorial signs it is necessary to notice that language has two primary levels of structure that the French linguist Andr Martinet referred to as the double articulation of language: the meaning structures on one hand and the sound patterns on the other. Indeed, linguists define grammar as a system for mappingestablishing a system of relations betweensound and meaning. These levels of structure admit of several subdivisions, any one of which may be captured in a writing system. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a word. Thus the word boys is composed of two morphemes, boy and plurality. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning. Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less well-defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.

The basic linguistic unit of the sound system is called a phoneme; it is a minimal, contrastive sound unit that distinguishes one utterance from another. Phonemes may be further analyzed in terms of a set of underlying distinctive features, features specifying the ways the sound is physically produced by passing breath through the throat and positioning the tongue and lips. Phonemes may be thought of as roughly equivalent to the sound segments known as consonants and vowels, and combinations of these segments make up syllables.

Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by some writing system or other. Writing systems, consequently, fall into two large general classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable or phoneme.

The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented to express thought directly, bypassing language altogether. The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect writing system, which would reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be readable by all human beings regardless of their mother tongues. We now know that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too intimately related to language to be represented independently of it.

More recently there have been attempts to invent forms for communicating explicit messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such messages are communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus the skirted human figure painted on the door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on the Pioneer spacecraft, the Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside down painted on a rock near a precipitous trail, and the visual patterns branded on range cattle are all attempts to use visual marks to communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular language.

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet door is an elliptical way of writing women's washroom, just as the word women had been earlier. The plaque on the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader already knows how to express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider expressed the message that horses and riders should avoid the trail. And the brand can be read as the name of the owner's ranch.

Such signs, therefore, express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by representing meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word. They do so by expressing these meanings elliptically. Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a restricted set of possible meanings. While such pictorial signs could not be turned into a general writing system, they can be extremely efficient in serving a restricted set of functions.

The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are sufficiently great for some scholars to maintain that they are not legitimate types of writing. These differences are that pictorial signs are motivated, that is, they visually suggest their meanings, and that they express whole propositions rather than single words. Other scholars would include such signs as a form of writing because they are a conventional means for expressing a particular linguistic meaning. Scholars agree that such a collection of signs could express only an extremely limited set of meanings.

A similar case is the ancient mosaic found at the entrance of a house in Pompeii, depicting a snarling dog on a chain and bearing the inscription cave canem, beware of the dog. Even nonreaders could read the message; the picture is therefore a form of writing rather than of picture making. Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read them. Such reading ability is described as environmental literacy, not associated with books and schooling.

Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such symbols as the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many languages, appear to express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic structure. However, it is more useful to think of these numerals as a particular orthography for representing the meaning structure of these numbers rather than their sound structures. The advantages of this orthography are that the orthography permits the user to carry out mathematical operations, such as carrying, borrowing, and the like, and that the same orthography may be assigned different phonological equivalents in different languages using the same number system. Thus, the numeral 2 is pronounced two in English, deux in French, zwei in German, and so on. Yet it represents not a thought but the word, a piece of language.

It is for these reasons that writing is said to be a system for transcribing language, not for representing thought directly. There are, of course, other systems for representing thought, including such activities as picture making, dance, and mime. These, however, are not representations of ordinary language; rather, they constitute what the American philosopher Nelson Goodman has called the languages of art. These languages, or semiotic systems, are systems of signs that are used for expressive and representational purposes. Each of these semiotic systems may, in turn, be represented by a notational system, a system for representing the semiotic system. Thus writing can be defined formally as a notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form.

Writing is so pervasive in everyday life that many people take it to be synonymous with language, and this confusion affects their understanding of language. The word denotes ambiguously both the oral form and the written form, and so people may confuse them. This occurs, for example, when people think that the sounds of language are made up of letters. Even Aristotle used the same word, gramma, to refer to the basic units of both speech and writing. Yet it is important to distinguish them. People may have competence in a language and yet know nothing about its written form. Similarly, writing is so fundamental to a modern, literate society that its significance has often been overestimated. Since the 18th century it has been common to identify literacy with civilization, indeed with all civil virtues. When European countries colonized other regions they thought it as important to teach savages to read and write as to convert them to Christianity. Modern anthropology has helped to revise what now seems a quaint set of priorities by showing not only that there are no genuinely primitive languages, but that differing languages mask no unbridgeable differences between human beings. All human beings are rational, speak a language of enormous expressive power, and live in, maintain, and transmit to their young a complex social and moral order.

Scholars of literature have in the past half-century amassed compelling evidence to demonstrate that a complex social order and a rich verbal culture can exist in nonliterate societies. The American scholar Milman Parry, writing in the 1920s, showed that the Homeric epic poems, long regarded as models of literary virtuosity, were in fact the product not of a literate but of an oral tradition. These poems were produced by bards who could not write and were delivered in recitals to audiences who could not read. Writing made possible the recording of these poems, not their composition. The hard and fast dividing line that put civilization and literacy on one side and savagery and irrationality on the other has been abandoned. To be unlettered is no longer confused with being ignorant.

Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet. The accepted view today is that all writing systems represent relatively optimal solutions to a large and unique set of constraints, including the structure of the language represented, the functions that the system serves, and the balance of advantages to the reader as opposed to the writer. Consequently, while there are important differences between speaking and writing and between various forms of writing, these differences vary in importance and in effect from language to language and from society to society.

The functions of writing

Given that literacy is not a prerequisite of rationality and civilization, it may be asked why writing systems were invented and why, when they were, they so completely displaced preexisting oral traditions. Many accounts have been given of the dramatic impact on an oral culture of the encounter with written text. Isak Dinesen, in her autobiographical Out of Africa, reported on the response of Kikuyu tribesmen to their first exposures to written texts: I learned that the effect of a piece of news was many times magnified when it was imparted by writing. The messages that would have been received with doubt and scorn if they had been given by word of mouth were now taken as gospel truth.

Certainly writing has been observed to displace oral traditions. The American scholar Albert Lord wrote: When writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same purposes as the oral narrative song, when it is employed for telling stories and is widespread enough to find an audience capable of reading, this audience seeks its entertainment and instruction in books rather than in the living songs of men, and the older art gradually disappears.

The adoption and use of writing systems depend primarily on their ability to preserve language and information through time and across space. But the use of a writing system for this purpose is shaped in part by the nature of the system and by the cultural practices in the society that has adopted it. These uses tend, therefore, to be local and specific and characteristic of a particular literate society.

The Canadian economist Harold Innis classified writing systems into two basic types: those that bind through time, exemplified by Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in stone and Akkadian cuneiform incised in clay; and those that bind across space, exemplified by the portable papyri used by the Romans. Writing used to store information for posterity may be considered to serve an archival function. Such writing may be used not only for constructing, accumulating, and preserving records of political, religious, scientific, and literary interest but also for the more mundane purpose of keeping trade accounts and records. Writing used to transmit information across space, as in letters, encyclicals, newspapers, and the like, may be considered to serve a communicative function. Writing used for purely private ends, to record notes, diaries, or other personal data, may be considered to serve a mnemonic function.

Almost any notational form may be used for mnemonic purposes, for only the person who wrote the message needs to be able to read it. The carved notches in a wooden counting stick or the pebbles in a counting sack corresponding to the number of cattle under the care of a cowherd are suitable aide-mmoire, since the writer knows what the notches or pebbles represent. But such a system could not be read by others; it would not be clear what the notches represented or even that they represented anything a tall. For a writing system to be communicative, the signs must be conventionalized so that the meaning can be grasped by other readers. Such a system may be restricted to a small set of familiar messages that can be read by a limited circle of acquaintances. But for a writing system to serve an archival function it must be sufficiently conventionalized to permit decoding and interpretation by readers who may know nothing about the writer or his message. It is only with the development of explicit writing systems capable of representing the nuances conveyed in speech that writing can be used archivally or communicatively.

Types of writing systems

A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the International Phonetic Association,is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.

While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.

Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the extremely limited set of alternatives a reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of purposes efficiently.

General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same, will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recorded vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic characters to be memorized is extremely large.

Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the sound-based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence some hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such writing systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.

Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however, should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.

Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes. For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.

Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features. Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say: Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.

No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese, consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets, which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat, meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit than foreach sound unit.

The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.

History of writing systems

While speaking is a universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until recently concentrated on a single aspect, increased efficiency, with the Greek invention of the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs that can express the full range of meanings in a language. As Eric Havelock wrote, At a stroke the Greeks provided a table of elements of linguistic sound not only manageable because of economy, but for the first time in the history of homo sapiens, also accurate. Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by word-based writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.

The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It isalso unique; the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech. The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp distinctionbetween the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents.

It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to serve mnemonicpurposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms but once invented could serve aesthetic functions.

Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese and Japanese,which have simple syllabic structure and a great number of homophones, a writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabaryor an alphabet, would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that more recent accounts of writing systems have stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently, given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as appropriate to the languages they represent.

Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development,and there are many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be traced back to the beginnings of symbol-making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that Oriental writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.

Types of writing systems

A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the International Phonetic Association,is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.

While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.

Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the extremely limited set of alternativesa reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of purposes efficiently.

General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same, will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recordedvocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic charactersto be memorized is extremely large.

Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the sound-based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence somehundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such writing systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.

Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however, should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.

Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes. For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.

Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features. Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say: Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.

No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese, consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets, which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat, meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit than foreach sound unit.

The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.

Chinese writing

Chinese is a language with clearly distinguished syllables, each of which corresponds to a meaningful unit, a morpheme. As it is an isolating language, rather than an inflected language like Latin or, to a lesser degree, English, each morpheme is represented separately by a separate syllable. Whereas in English one word, for example, make, yields, when inflected, a family of related words (make, makes, making, made, etc.), in Chinese one character would represent one morpheme (e.g., make). Because each morpheme is represented by a different character, and because the numberof morphemes in a language is far larger than the number of syllables, sucha writing system needs an extremely large number of characters or graphs.

It is not known when Chinese writing originated. The earliest known samples are from the time of the Shang dynasty (18th12th century BC), but by then it was already a highly developed system, essentially similar to its present form. By 1400 BC the script included some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can be read to this day. The script was fixed in its present form during the Ch'in period (221206 BC). The earliest graphs were schematic pictures of what they represented; the graph for man resembled a standing man, that for woman depicted a kneeling figure, perhaps doing housework.

Because basic characters or graphs were motivated, that is, the graph was made to resemble the object it represented, it has sometimes been concluded that Chinese writing is ideographic, representing ideas rather than the structures of a language. It is now recognized that the system represents the Chinese language by means of a logographic script. Each graph or character corresponds to one meaningful unit of the language, not directly to a unit of thought.

Although it was possible to make up simple signs representing common objects, many words were not readily picturable. To represent such words, the phonographic principle was adopted. A graph that pictured some object was borrowed to write a different word that happened to sound similar. With this invention the Chinese approached the form of writing invented by the Sumerians. However, because of the enormous number of Chinese words that sound the same, to have carried through the phonographic principle would have resulted in a writing system in which many of the words could be read in more than one way. That is, a written character would be enormously ambiguous.

The solution to the problem of ambiguity of characters, a solution adopted about 213 BC, was to distinguish two words having the same sound and represented by the same graph by adding another graph to give a clue to themeaning of the particular word intended. Such complex graphs or characters consist of two parts, one part suggesting the sound, the other part the meaning. The system was then standardized so as to approach the ideal of one distinctive graph representing each morpheme in the language.The limitation is that a language that has thousands of morphemes would require thousands of characters. As the characters are formed from simple lines in various orientations and arrangements, they came to possess greatcomplexity.

Not only did the principle of the script change with time, so too did the form of the graphs. The earliest writing consisted of carved inscriptions. Before the beginning of the Christian Era, the script came to be written with brush and ink on paper. The result was that the shapes of the graphs lost their pictorial, motivated quality. The brushwork allowed a great deal of scope for aesthetic considerations.

The relation between the written Chinese language and its oral form is very different from the analogous relation between written and spoken English. InChinese many different words are expressed by the identical sound pattern188 different words are expressed by the syllable /yi/while each of those words is expressed by a distinctive visual pattern. A piece of written text read orally to another person is often quite incomprehensible because of the large number of homophones. In conversation literate Chinese speakers frequently draw characters in the air to distinguish between homophones. Written text, on the other hand, is completely unambiguous. InEnglish, by contrast, writing is often thought of as a reflection, albeit imperfect, of speech.

To make the script easier to read, a system of transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet was adopted in 1958. The system was not intended to replace the logographic script but to indicate the sounds of graphs in dictionaries and to supplement graphs on such things as road signs and posters. A second reform simplified the characters by reducing the number of strokes used in writing them. Simplification, however, tends to make the characters more similar in appearance; thus they are more easily confused, and the value of the reform is limited.

Most scholars now believe that neither the logographic Chinese writing system nor the alphabetic writing system of Indo-European possesses any overall advantage. The Chinese system requires more memorization, while the alphabet requires more analysis and synthesis; both appear to be relatively optimal devices for the transcription of their respective, very different, languages.

A second factor makes the use of a logographic system particularly significant for Chinese. A single logographic system is capable of representing very different spoken forms. As was mentioned earlier, the numerals 1, 2, and 3 are logograms that represent different words in a number of different languages.

Chinese logographs form a common medium of communication for a vast nation because they can be read by people speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects of Chinese. Since the Communist Revolution thegrammar and vocabulary of modern Mandarin Chinese has served as the standard written language.

Chinese writing system

basically logographic writing system using symbols of pictorial origin to represent words of the Chinese language. Dictionaries of Chinese record as many as 40,000 distinct symbols (usually called characters), but a corpus of about 10,000 (those used by Chinese telegraphers, whorepresent them by 4-unit code groups) is sufficientfor practically all purposes. Knowledge of at least 2,000 characters is necessary to be functionally literate in Chinese. Particular words in most casesare represented either by one symbol intended to express the meaning of the word or by a combination of symbols.

The Chinese writing system apparently began to develop in the early 2nd millennium BC. The earliest known inscriptions, each of which contains between 10 and 60 characters incised on pieces of bone and tortoiseshell that were used for oracular divination, date from the Shang (or Yin) dynasty (18th12th century). Later stages in the development of Chinese writing include the ku-wen (ancient figures) found in inscriptions from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1123) and the early years of the Chou dynasty that followed. The major script of the Chou dynasty, which ruled from 1111 to 225 BC, was the ta chuan (great seal), also called the Chou wen (Chou script). By the end of the Chou dynasty the ta chuan had degenerated to some extent; it was replaced c. 213BC (during the Ch'in dynasty, which ruled from 221 to 206 BC) by the hsiao chuan (lesser seal). During this period the writing brush was invented, and the characters acquired a more modern appearance; from this basically modern script (called li shu or li tzu), many different styles, or hands, have developed.

The Chinese traditionally divide the characters into six types (called liu shu, six scripts), the most common of which is hsing sheng, the type of character that combines a semantic element (called a radical) with a phonetic element intended to remind the reader of the pronunciation of the word. The phonetic element is usually a contracted form of another character with the same pronunciation as that of the word intended. For example, the characterfor k'o river is composed of the radical shui water plus the phonetic ko, the meaning of which (fruit) is irrelevant; the combined water-ko symbol suggests the word k'o meaning river. Seventy-five percent of all Chinese characters are of this type.

The other types of characters are hsiang hsing, characters that were originally pictographs (these have a semantic element originally expressed by a picture, such as the character for t'ien field, which represents a field by means of a square divided into quarters); chih shih, characters intended to be symbolic of logical or abstract terms (e.g., erh, two, is indicated by two horizontal lines); hui i, characters formed by a combination of elements thought to be logically associated (e.g., the symbols for man and word are combined to represent the word meaning true, sincere, truth); chuan chu, modifications or distortions of characters to form new characters, usually of somewhat related meaning (e.g., the character for shan mountain turned sideways means fou tableland); and chia chieh, characters borrowed from (or sometimes originally mistaken for) others, usually words of different meaning but similar pronunciation (e.g., the character for tsu foot is used for tsu to be sufficient).

Chinese characters are arranged in dictionaries according to the radicals of which they are composed or with which they are traditionally associated. The214 radicals are arranged in modern dictionaries according to the number of pen strokes used in writing them.

Phonetic scripts for the language have been invented, based both on Chinese characters and on the Latin alphabet, and are now widely used. In an attempt to standardize the spelling of Chinese in Roman languages, the Chinese government adopted the Pinyin (q.v.) system of transliteration in 1958. This system is based on the phonetic transliteration of the Peking, or Northern Mandarin, dialect (the major dialect in China) and is gradually replacing the WadeGiles system (q.v.) established in the 19th century.

Japanese writing

The Japanese came into contact with Chinese culture during the Chinese Han dynasty (206 BCAD 220), and they began to write their own language in the 5th century AD, basing their writing system on the Chinese model. But the two languages are fundamentally different in structure; whereas Chinese words are monosyllables, Japanese words often consist of several syllables, and whereas Chinese is an isolating language, Japanese is an inflected language. To write such a language, the Japanese developed a mixed system, partly logographic, based on the Chinese system, and partly syllabic, using the same characters in a second way for their sound values. In kun writing Chinese characters were used to represent Japanese words that have a similar meaning, while other characters were adopted to represent sounds.

In the 8th century the phonographic principle was applied more systematically in a writing system called man'yxgana, a syllabary very similar in form to the Semitic alphabet. However, given the large number of homophones and the fact that man'yogana was combined with kun writing, it was almost impossible to establish a single correct reading of a text. Indeed, scribes took pride in being able to read the same text in various ways.

In the 9th or 10th century two sets of syllabic signs evolved, one called hiragana, or plain kana, which consists of simplified outlines, written cursively, of Chinese characters, the other called katakana, or partial kana, which consists of carefully written parts of the original Chinese characters. Writing with the full Chinese characters is called kanji. The two sets of kana characters are limited as are other syllabaries in that they are not unambiguous; kanji are unambiguous but are very complex visually. Consequently, modern Japanese writing uses a combination of characters from all three of these systems. In 1946 a standardizing reform established a limited list of 1,850 kanji (enlarged to 1,945 in 1981) and encouraged the use of kana for all other words. Modern written Japanese uses many more hiragana graphs than kanji in a piece of text.

Even with modern reforms, written Japanese is difficult to read unambiguously because of the great degree of homophony in the vocabulary. The word kan, for example, means sweet, be affected, print, be accustomed to, view, investigate, slow, tube, enjoy, a volume, Chinese, and Korean, among others. As a result a reader must know rather precisely whatis being discussed in order to read a text accurately. Poetry, in particular, takes quite a different form in Japanese than in Indo-European languages.

Korean writing

Korea, too, adopted its institutions and culture from the Chinese. Until the 20th century the normal medium of written communication was in Chinese, using the Chinese writing system. But beginning in about the 6th century theChinese script was adapted to write Korean. The application of Chinese script to the Korean language created problems almost identical to those that arose in using Chinese to write the Japanese language. Yet the borrowed kanji script continues to be used for some purposes to this day. The most remarkable development in Korean writing was the invention of Hangul (han'gl) by King Sejong in 1446. It is a featural script consisting of some 28 letters that have a systematic visual structure directly related to the phonetic features of the phonemes. This writing system owes nothing to the Chinese orthography (see above Types of writing systems: Chinese writing).

Because the principles employed by various writing systems vary greatly and because the languages they represent are organized so differently, it is difficult to state any general principles of the evolution of writing systems. Yetit appears that they all began with motivated pictorial signs representing objects. To turn such signs into a general orthography required the recognition that the signs must represent sound patterns and the consequent invention of the phonographic principle. Depending on the language, such sound-based systems developed in two directions. Westernscripts went furthest in the phonographic direction, representing words by means of syllables and syllables by means of consonantal writing systems and eventually developing a full vocalic alphabet. Eastern scripts preserved the logographic principle even though some of the logographs were sound-based; each word was represented by a distinctive visual character. Only one practical orthography, Korean, adopted a featural system, and that invention bore little or no relation to neighbouring orthographies.

Literacy: the uses of writing

The rise of literacy

The invention of devices for representing language is inextricably related to issues of literacy; that is, to issues of who can use the script and what it can be used for. Competence with written language, both in reading and writing, is known as literacy. High levels of literacy are required for using scripts for awide range of somewhat specialized functions. When a large number of individuals in a society are competent in using written language to serve these functions, the whole society may be referred to as a literate society.

Just as scripts have a history, so, too, does literacy have a history. This history closely reflects the increasing number of ways in which written materials have been used and the increasing number of readers who have been able to use them. Scripts were elaborated to serve new purposes; more importantly, new kinds of writing systems permitted them to serve a wider range of purposes by a larger number of individuals.

Although the uses of writing reflect a host of religious, political, and social factors and hence are not determined simply by orthography, two dimensions of the script are important in understanding the growth of literacy: learnability and expressive power. Learnability refers to the ease with which the script can be acquired, and expressive power refers to the resources of the script for unambiguously expressing the full range of meanings available in the oral language. These two dimensions are inversely related to each other. Simple, restricted scripts are readily learned. Pictographic signs such as those used in environmental writing and logographic scripts with a limited set of characters are easiest to learn and, indeed, are acquired more or less automatically by children. Syllabaries such as the Cree syllabary are reported to be learnable in a day, while the indigenous Liberian Vai syllabary is learned in a few days. Consonantal scripts and alphabets are difficult to learn and usually require a few years of schooling. Full logographic systems, such as Chinese, or mixed systems, such as Japanese, are difficult to acquire because they require the memorization of thousands of distinctive characters. Once learned, however,they appear to function as well as alphabets.

But pictographic signs and logographic scripts with a limited, readily learnable set of graphs are restricted to expressing a limited range of meanings. Syllabaries are highly ambiguous and hence dependent on knowledge not only of the script but also on the likely content of the message. Syllabaries therefore serve a restricted set of functions, primarily personal correspondence. They are of limited use in expressing novel meanings that could be read in the same way by all readers of the script. Consonantal and alphabetic writing systems can express essentially all the lexical and grammatical meanings in the language (but not the intonation) and are thus highly suitable for the expression of original meanings. They constitute an ideal medium for technical, legal, literary, and scientific texts that must be read in the same way by readers dispersed in both time and space. Some scholars have held that the high degree of literacy in the West is a consequence of the optimality of the alphabet in balancing the two dimensions of learnability and expressive power. Such generalizations, however, ignore the fact that the optimal balance may differ from language tolanguage. A consonantal writing system is almost as complete for Hebrew as the alphabet is for Greek, but a consonantal writing system would be hopelessly ambiguous for Greek. Similarly, a syllabary or an alphabet wouldbe quite useless for Chinese, a language with a staggering degree of homophony. Logographic systems achieve a comparable level of explicitness by the addition of new characters, but the ease of addition is traded off against the ease of acquisition. Instead of attempting to determinewhether one system is better than another, it is perhaps more reasonable toassume that each script is optimal for the language it represents and for thefunctions it has evolved to serve.

The ease of acquisition of a script is an important factor in determining whether a script remains the possession of an elite or whether it can be democratized, that is, turned into a possession of ordinary people. Syllabaries are readily learned, but their residual ambiguity tends to restrict their uses. Alphabets have been viewed by many historians as decisive in the democratization of writing; alphabetic writing could become a possession of ordinary people and yet serve a full range of functions. However, democratization of a script appears to have more to do with the availability of reading materials and of instruction in reading and the perceived relevance of literacy skills to the readers. Even in a literate society,most readers learn to read only a narrow range of written materials; specialized materials, such as those pertaining to science or government, remain the domain of elites who have acquired additional education.

The second factor determining the social breadth of the use of writing is the range of functions that a script serves. The functions served are directly related to the orthography. Early forms of writing served an extremely narrow range of functions and were wholly unsuitable for others. While tokens served for simple record keeping, and early Sumerian writing was useful for a range of administrative purposes, a relatively complete script is required for writing histories, edicts, treaties, and scientific and literary works that, to be useful, must be read in the same way by all readers. Considerable scholarly controversy surrounds the question of the role of the invention of more complete or explicit scripts, such as the alphabet, in the evolution of these more specialized uses of language. If the alphabet were decisive, onecould look for the basis of many of the particular features of Western culture in the invention of an alphabetic orthography.

This question is far from resolved. Historically, the rise of cities coincided with the development of a script suitable for serving bureaucratic purposes. Later, the scientific and philosophical tradition that originated in classical Greece and that pre