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World’s Writing Systems

World’s Writing Systems. Priyankoo Sarmah Dept. of HSS. Languages and Writing. How many languages are there in the world? How many of them have writing systems? Objectives Earliest Writing Systems Chinese writing system Cuneiform writing system Hieroglyphs. Chinese Script. Chinese

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World’s Writing Systems

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  1. World’s Writing Systems Priyankoo SarmahDept. of HSS

  2. Languages and Writing • How many languages are there in the world? • How many of them have writing systems? • Objectives • Earliest Writing Systems • Chinese writing system • Cuneiform writing system • Hieroglyphs

  3. Chinese Script • Chinese Jiahu script (6600 BC) probably is the earliest

  4. Chinese Script • Methods of creating characters in Chinese • Pictography • Phonetic Extension • Semantic Extension • Differentiation • Phonetic Extension‘horse’ <馬> and ‘mother’ are similar. So the same character can be used for both words • Semantic ExtensionThe character for drill <鑽> can be used for both ‘to drill’ and ‘a drill’ • DifferentiationTo differentiate between ‘mother’ and ‘horse’ Chinese use the character for ‘woman’ <女>with the character for ‘horse’ <媽>.

  5. Chinese Script <安> According to a recent count Chinese has 106,230 such characters. For basic literacy a person should know 1500 characters. A person with a university education usually knows about 4000 characters. For scholars, the number is about 6000. In ordinary readings, 1000 characters are used 90%, 2400 characters account for 99% and 3800 characters account for 99.9% of the usage.

  6. Use in Japanese and Korean • Chinese characters are also used in Japanese and Korean. • In Japanese they have two kinds of pronunciation for the Chinese characters. • 山 /yama/ or /san/ ‘mountain’ • 手 /te/ or /shou/ ‘hand’ • 空 /kara/ or /utsuo/ ‘empty’

  7. Cuneiform • 5000 year old script used by the Sumerianpeople living in Mesopotemia. • Emerged from record keeping on clay tablets. • = 1 = =

  8. Hieroglyphs

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