Writing system
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A writing system comprises a particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular
Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. Writing systems also include punctuation to aid interpretation and encode additional meaning, including that which is communicated verbally by qualities such as rhythm, tone, pitch, accent, inflection or intonation.
Writing was first invented in the late 4th millennium BC. Each independently invented writing system in human history evolved from a system of proto-writing not fully capable of encoding spoken language. These systems used a small number of ideograms, but were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
General properties
Writing systems are distinguished from other symbolic communication systems in that a writing system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal features of maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some symbols on informational signs, such as the symbols for male and female, are also not language related, but can grow to become part of language if they are often used in conjunction with language elements. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, but are used in writing and thus must be considered part of writing systems.
Every human community possesses language, and language is arguably an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication have been sporadic, uneven and slow. Once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no longer present in the spoken language. One of the great benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language.
All writing systems require a set of defined base elements, individually termed signs or graphemes and collectively called a script.[1] The orthography of the writing system is the set of rules and conventions understood and shared by a community, which assigns meaning to the ordering of and relationship between the graphemes. The orthography represents the constructions of at least one (generally spoken) language.
Writing systems also require some physical means of representing symbols in a permanent or semi-permanent medium where the symbols may then be interpreted, for example writing may be done by pen on paper. Writing systems are usually visual, but tactile writing systems also exist.
The exact relationship between writing systems and languages can be complex. A single language (e.g. Hindustani) can have multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. Chinese characters, for example, represent multiple spoken languages within China, and also were the early writing system for the Vietnamese language until Vietnamese switched to the Latin script.
Basic terminology
The terminology used to describe writing systems differs somewhat from field to field.
Text, writing, reading and orthography
The generic term text
Grapheme and phoneme
A
An individual grapheme may be represented in a wide variety of ways, where each variation is visually distinct in some regard, but all are interpreted as representing the "same" grapheme. These individual variations are known as
Glyph, sign and character
The terms glyph, sign and character are sometimes used to refer to graphemes. Glyphs in
Complete and partial writing systems
Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent the spoken language in its entirety.[5]
History
Proto-writing systems
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples are:
- "Token system", a recording system used for accounting purposes in Mesopotamia c. 9000 BC[6]
- Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BC
- Vinča symbols (Tărtăria tablets), c. 5300 BC
- Proto-cuneiform c. 3500 BC[7]
- Possibly the early better source needed]
- Nsibidi script, c. before 500 AD[citation needed]
Invention of writing systems
Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the
The
Alphabetic writing
The first known
Functional classification
Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, the most common and basic one being a broad division into three categories: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic (or segmental). Logographies use characters that represent semantic units, such as words or morphemes. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras. Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes. Alphabets consist of three types: Abjads generally only have letters for consonants, while pure alphabets have letters for both consonants and vowels. Abugidas use characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs.
Along these lines, linguist David Diringer proposed a classification of five types of writing systems: pictographic script, ideographic script, analytic transitional script, phonetic script, alphabetic script[15]
However, a single writing system may include aspects of multiple of these categories in different proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely. The term complex system is sometimes used to describe those where the mixture makes classification problematic. Modern linguists, therefore, often regard this type of categorization of writing systems as too simplistic.
Logographic systems
A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters have been used with varying degrees of modification in varieties of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mayan writing system are also systems with certain logographic features, although they have marked phonetic features as well and are no longer in current use.
In Chinese, each character represents a syllabic morpheme, or, occasionally half of a morpheme for very limited numbers of disyllabic morphemes. In such a system, se(x)dec-, hexa(kai)deca-, hexadec- and sixteen would all be written with the same set of two logograms, one logogram for all cognates for six and one for all cognates for -teen, leaving the reader to
As each character represents a single word (or, more precisely, a morpheme), many different logograms are required in order to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. The vast array of logograms and the need to remember what they all mean are considered by many as major disadvantages of logographic systems compared to alphabetic systems.
Since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system could theoretically be used to write different spoken languages. In practice, the ability to communicate across languages works best in closely related languages, like the varieties of Chinese, and works only to a lesser extent for less closely related languages, as differences in syntax reduce the cross-linguistic portability of a given logographic system. For example, Japanese uses Chinese logograms (known as kanji) extensively in its writing systems, with most (but not all) of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings as in Chinese. As a result, short and concise phrases written in Chinese such as those on signs and in newspaper headlines are often easy for a Japanese reader to comprehend. However, the grammatical differences between Japanese and Chinese are large enough that a long Chinese text is not readily understandable to a Japanese reader without knowledge of basic Chinese grammar. Similarly, a Chinese reader can get a general idea of what a long Japanese kanji text means, but usually cannot understand the text fully.
While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems, many languages use a few logograms. A good example of modern western logograms is the
The apostrophe can also be regarded as a logogram, corresponding to the kana の in Japanese.[further explanation needed]
Logograms are sometimes called
Syllabaries
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone.
In a "true syllabary", there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for /ke/, /ka/ and /ko/ have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (voiceless velar plosive). Some more recently created writing systems such as the
Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since a different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 syllables, which are represented by the syllabic Hiragana characters. The English language, on the other hand, uses complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, adding up to about 15,000 to 16,000 different syllables, which would make it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary..
Syllabaries with much larger character inventories do exist. The
Other languages that use true syllabaries include
Alphabets
An alphabet is a small set of letters (basic written symbols), each of which roughly represents or represented historically a
The first type of alphabet that was developed was the
Some abjads, like Arabic and Hebrew, have markings for vowels as well. However, they use them only in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets. Of these, the most famous example is the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language. The term abjad takes its name from the old order of the
An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. Thus, in an abugida there may or may not be a sign for "k" with no vowel, but also one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition of diacritical marks and so on.
The contrast with "true
Featural systems
A featural script represents finer detail than an alphabet. Here symbols do not represent whole phonemes, but rather the elements (features) that make up the phonemes, such as voicing or its place of articulation. Theoretically, each feature could be written with a separate letter; and abjads or abugidas, or indeed syllabaries, could be featural, but the only prominent system of this sort is Korean hangul. In hangul, the featural symbols are combined into alphabetic letters, and these letters are in turn joined into syllabic blocks, so that the system combines three levels of phonological representation.
Many scholars, e.g.
Ambiguous systems
Most writing systems are not purely one type. The English writing system, for example, includes numerals and other logograms such as #, $, and &, and the written language often does not match well with the spoken one. As mentioned above, all logographic systems have phonetic components as well, whether along the lines of a syllabary, such as Chinese ("logo-syllabic"), or an abjad, as in Egyptian ("logo-consonantal").
Some scripts, however, are truly ambiguous. The
The
Alternative categorizations of writing systems
Modern linguists have proposed a number of alternative ways to categorize writing systems.
Archibald Hill[17] split writing into three major categories of linguistic analysis, one of which covers discourses and is not usually considered writing proper:
- discourse system
- iconic discourse system, e.g. Amerindian
- conventional discourse system, e.g. Quipu
- iconic discourse system, e.g.
- morphemic writing system, e.g. Anatolian Hieroglyphs
- phonemic writing system
- partial phonemic writing system, e.g. Hebrew, Arabic
- poly-phonemic writing system, e.g. Cherokee
- mono-phonemic writing system
- phonemic writing system, e.g. Old English
- morpho-phonemic writing system, e.g. Modern English
- phonemic writing system, e.g.
- partial phonemic writing system, e.g.
Computational linguist Geoffrey Sampson draws a distinction between semasiography and glottography:
- semasiography, relating visible marks to meaning directly without reference to any specific spoken language
- glottography, using visible marks to represent forms of a spoken language
- logography, representing a spoken language by assigning distinctive visible marks to linguistic elements of André Martinet's "first articulation" (Martinet 1949), i.e. morphemes or words
- phonography, achieving the same goal by assigning marks to elements of the "second articulation", e.g. phonemes, syllables
DeFrancis,[18] criticizing Sampson's[19] introduction of semasiographic writing and featural alphabets stresses the phonographic quality of writing proper
- pictures
- nonwriting
- writing
- rebus
- syllabic systems
- pure syllabic, e.g. Linear B, Yi, Kana, Cherokee
- morpho-syllabic, e.g. Sumerian, Chinese, Mayan
- consonantal
- morpho-consonantal, e.g. Egyptian
- pure consonantal, e.g. Phoenician
- alphabetic
- pure phonemic, e.g. Greek
- morpho-phonemic, e.g. English
- syllabic systems
- rebus
Faber[20] categorizes phonographic writing by two levels, linearity and coding:
- logographic, e.g. Ancient Egyptian
- phonographic
- syllabically linear
- syllabically coded, e.g. Kana, Akkadian
- segmentally coded, e.g. Amharic, Devanagari
- segmentally linear
- complete (alphabet), e.g. Greco-Latin, Cyrillic
- defective, e.g. Aramaic, Old South Arabian, Paleo-Hebrew
- syllabically linear
Type | Each symbol represents | Example |
---|---|---|
Logosyllabary
|
word or morpheme as well as syllable | Chinese characters |
Syllabary | syllable | Japanese kana |
Abjad (consonantary) | consonant | Arabic alphabet |
Alphabet | consonant or vowel | Latin alphabet |
Abugida | consonant accompanied by specific vowel, modifying symbols represent other vowels |
Indian Devanagari |
Featural system | distinctive feature of segment | Korean Hangul |
Graphic classification
Perhaps the primary graphic distinction made in classifications is that of linearity. Linear writing systems are those in which the characters are composed of lines, such as the Latin alphabet and
Cuneiform was probably the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously.[22][23] The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of the script.
Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate, which can be leather (Louis Braille's original material), stiff paper, plastic or metal.
There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including
Directionality
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Scripts are graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions:[24] horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right (LTR or sinistrodextrally) and right-to-left (RTL or dextrosinistrally). It was most commonly written boustrophedonically: starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction.
The
Chinese characters sometimes, as in signage, especially when signifying something old or traditional, may also be written from right to left if written horizontally, but this is a special case of the traditional "vertical (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the board" (tbrl) direction, although every column has only one character. No boards with more than two rows adopt the rltb direction, four characters forming a square must either follow tbrl or lrtb. The
Several scripts used in the
Left-to-right writing has the advantage that, since most people are
On computers
In computers and telecommunication systems, writing systems are generally not codified as such,[
Today, many such standards are re-defined in a collective standard, the
A
See also
- List of writing systems
- Constructed script
- Calligraphy
- Defective script
- Digraphia
- Epigraphy
- Formal language
- Grammatology
- International phonetic alphabet
- ISO 15924
- Orthography
- Pasigraphy
- Penmanship
- Paleography
- Phonemic orthography
- Phonetic transcription
- Numeral system
- Transliteration
- Transcription (linguistics)
- Writing
- Written language
- X-SAMPA
References
- ^ Coulmas 2003, p. 35.
- ^ David Crystal (2008), A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th Edition, p. 481, Wiley
- ^ Hadumod Bußmann (1998), Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, p. 1294, Taylor & Francis
- ^ Hadumod Bußmann (1998), Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, p. 979, Taylor & Francis
- ^ Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer (2012), The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, p. 194, Cengage Learning
- ^ Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "An Archaic Recording System and the Origin of Writing." Syro-Mesopotamian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–32, 1977
- ISBN 978-1-885923-76-9
- ^ "Machine learning could finally crack the 4,000-year-old Indus script". 25 January 2017.
- ISBN 9780521838610. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
- ISBN 9780521470308. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
- ^ David N. Keightley, Noel Barnard. The Origins of Chinese civilization. Page 415-416
- ISBN 0-631-21481-X.
- ^ Millard 1986, p. 396
- ^ Haarmann 2004, p. 96
- ^ David Diringer (1962): Writing. London.
- doi:10.1075/wll.7.2.06pri, archived from the original(PDF) on 2017-10-10, retrieved 2015-12-05
- ^ Archibald Hill (1967): The typology of Writing systems. In: William A. Austin (ed.), Papers in Linguistics in Honor of Leon Dostert. The Hague, 92–99.
- ^ John DeFrancis (1989): Visible speech. The diverse oneness of writing systems. Honolulu
- ^ Geoffrey Sampson (1986): Writing Systems. A Linguistic Approach. London
- ^ Alice Faber (1992): Phonemic segmentation as an epiphenomenon. Evidence from the history of alphabetic writing. In: Pamela Downing et al. (ed.): The Linguistics of Literacy. Amsterdam. 111–134.
- ^ Daniels & Bright 1996, p. 4
- ^ Cammarosano, Michele. "Cuneiform Writing Techniques". cuneiform.neocities.org. Retrieved 2018-07-18.
- ^ Cammarosano, Michele (2014). "The Cuneiform Stylus". Mesopotamia. XLIX: 53–90.
- ISBN 3-11-007344-7.
- ^ "Berber". Ancient Scripts. Archived from the original on 2017-08-26. Retrieved 2017-10-09.
- PMID 30679750.
- S2CID 214768754.
- ^ Why is Hebrew written from right to left? Israeli Box
- ^ "Why Do We Read English From Left To Right?". March 11, 2012.
Sources
- Cisse, Mamadou (2006). "Ecrits et écriture en Afrique de l'Ouest". Sudlangues (in French). 6. Dakar. ISSN 0851-7215. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- Coulmas, Florian (2002) [1996]. The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems (reprint ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-19446-0.
- Coulmas, Florian (2003). Writing systems: an introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-78217-3.
- ISBN 0-195-07993-0.
- DeFrancis, John (1990) [1986]. The Chinese language: fact and fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. ISBN 978-0-824-81068-9.
- Haarmann, Harald (2004). Geschichte der Schrift [History of Writing] (in German) (2nd ed.). München: C. H. Beck. ISBN 3-406-47998-7.
- Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's orthographic dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1842-5.
- Millard, A. R. (1986). "The Infancy of the Alphabet". World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398. .
- Nishiyama, Yutaka (2010). "The Mathematics of Direction in Writing" (PDF). International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. 61 (3): 347–356.
- Rogers, Henry (2005). Writing systems: a linguistic approach. Blackwell textbooks in linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-23463-0.
- Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems: a linguistic introduction. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-804-71254-5.
- Smalley, William A. (1964). Smalley, William A. (ed.). Orthography studies: articles on new writing systems. London: United Bible Society. OCLC 5522014.
External links
- The World's Writing Systems, All 294 known writing systems, each with a typographic reference glyph and Unicode status