Early Forms of Writing

1. Early Forms of Writing

2. History of Writing • Many legends associated with the inventions of writing. • Greek legend – Prince of Phonecia, Cadmus • Chinese Fable – their 4-eyed dragon god, Cang Jie did it. • Babylonian God Nebo gave it to the Egyptians. • In Islam – the alphabet was invented by Allah and presented to humans, but not the angels.

3. Early writing • Began with PETROGLYPHS – or cave drawings 20,000 yrs ago in Spain • PICTOGRAMS – pix drawings • Represent direct objects • Once it was accepted as representing an object – then it was extended to representing ideas associated with the objects, thus Ideograms.

4. Pictograms • Some common examples

5. Cuneiform Writing • Cuneiform – latin words ‘wedge’ and ‘shape’. • Originated in Sumeria • More than 6,000 years ago • The oldest known writing system • On clay slabs – writing about prayers, epics, poems, docs, etc.

6. Cuneiform writing (cont) Its Evolution • It evolved and later became known as logographic, or word writing • Each symbol represents both word and concept – like ideograms • Later borrowed by the Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians – spread thruout Asia Minor • They used them to represent the sounds in their language

7. Cuneiform writing (cont) Its Evolution • Cuneiform later evolved into syllabic writing • The Persians greatly simplified the original cuneiform writing.

9. Emoticons • Modern pictographic system • Similar to cuneiform – many symbols are combined to form meanings /concepts • :-) :’-( B-(

10. The Rebus Principle • When a graphic symbol no longer has a visual relationship to the word it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, standing for the sounds that represent the word. • A single sign can represent all words with the same sound – eg.  means ‘sun’ and ‘son’. • An advert which uses this principle – ‘31wonderful flavours’ • This is not an efficient system, why?

11. Hieroglyphs • At the same time as the Sumerian’s cuneiform – 4000BC – Egyptians using same form of writing • Greeks term it as Hieroglyphs • This system represents both concept and word for the concept. So – became logographic writing system.

12. Modern Writing System • A majority of the alphabets of today’s modern writing system comes from the Greeks. • Word Writing – or logographic writing system • A written character represents both the meaning and pronunciation of each word or morpheme(smallest meaningful unit of language). • English words – 26 words and symbols • Chinese and Japanese – many characters that represent sounds or words – an exception.

13. Syllabic Writing • A system without consonant clusters (-ght, -ng) • more efficient than word-writing systems, but has many variation of sounds – in the Jap lang all words can be phonologically represented in 100 syllables. • Cherokee people also adopted the syllabic writing system but only recently invented in 1821.

14. Consonantal Alphabet Writing • Hebrew and Arabic are languages with alphabets that consist of only consonants. • Eg Arabic consonant ktb forms the root words for kitab (book), katab (write), etc. • Compared to English, I like to eat out. = LK T T T. • Works well with person who knows the spoken language.

15. Reading assignmet • Chap 12 – Fromkin et al. • The end