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Chapter 3. The Development of Writing. Is Writing as early as speaking?.
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Chapter 3 The Development of Writing
Is Writing as early as speaking? • Writing is relatively new - it was invented for the first time by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia in about 3200 BCE. Indians of Mexico invented it independently around 600 BCE, and the rise of Egyptian and Chinese systems may have been independent as well.
Pictograms • is a form of writing which conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object
Pictographs are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania. Pictographs are often used as simple, pictorial, representational symbols by most contemporary cultures.
ideograms • An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφωgrafo "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept.
Pictograms and Ideograms • A key property of both forms is that they do not represent words or sounds in a particular language • What happens when the symbols are used to represent words, not pictures or ideas?
Logograms • logograms are visual symbols representing words • Example: the system used by the Sumerians in the southern part of modern Iraq around 5000 years ago. These inscriptions are described cuneiform writing.
What is Cuneiform? • It means ‘wedge-shaped’ and the inscriptions used by the Sumerians were produced by pressing a wedge-shapedimplement into soft clay tablets, resulting in form such as the following: • The form of this symbol really gives no clue to what type of entity is being referred to. The relationship between the written form and the object it represents has become arbitrary.
Logograms • Found in China • Many Chinese written symbols, or characters, are used as representations of the meanings of words or parts of words, and not of the sounds of spoken language.
Logograms • Advantages: two speakers of very different dialects of Chinese can both read the same written text. • Disadvantages: Quite a large number of written symbols are required within this type of writing systems (the official list of of modern chinese characters contain 2500 ch. Other lists contain up to 50000 ch. + memory load • Solution?
Rebus writing • The term rebus refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound.
Syllabic writing • A set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. • When a writing system employs a set of symbols each one representing the pronunciation of a syllable, it is described as syllabic writing.
Modern Japanese is known of having a partially syllabic writing system. • The Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana (developed around AD 700). They are mainly used to write some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words, e.g. hotel is written with three kana, ホテル (ho-te-ru), in Japanese.
Alphabetic writing • An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language. • Occurred in the development of writing in the Semitic languages: Arabic and Hebrew (consonantal alphabet) • Hieroglyphics, Greek, Roman and English
Written English • What is the reason behind frequent mismatch between the forms of written English (you know) and the sounds of spoken English (yu no). • Historical influences on the form of written English
“ the spelling of English language was largely fixed in the form that was used when printing was introduced into 15th century England. At that time, there were a number of conventions regarding the written representations of words that had been derives from forms used in writing other languages, notably Latin and french. Moreover, early printers were native Dutch speakers and could not make consistently accurate decisions about English pronunciations.
Home assignment • Study questions P.25
