The Development Of Writing

1. The Development of Writing
There are a large number of languages in the
world today that exist only in speech and do not
have a written form
 For the languages that do have writing systems,
the development of writing is a relatively recent
phenomenon
 The roots of writing tradition go back only a few
thousand years
An account of the early history gradually emerged
but it comprises many gaps and ambiguities
It is difficult to decide whether a piece of graphic
expression should be taken as an artistic image or
as a symbol of primitive writing

2. Practically it is possible to differentiate or
assume as artistic expression conveys
subjective and personal meanings and linguistic
symbol is conventionalized and institutionalized
Problematic area: In Egyptian an Greek the
same word was used for both ‘write’ and ‘draw’
The Fact: Writing systems evolved
independently of each other at different times in
several parts of the world – in Mesopotamia,
China, Meso-America etc.
Much of the evidence used in the reconstruction
of ancient writing systems comes from
inscriptions on stones or tablets found in the
rubble of ruined cities

3. Precursors
Tables discovered in various parts of the Middle East and
south-east Europe from around 3500 BC.
Large number of tablets found in sites around the Rivers Tigris
and Euphrates made by Sumerians
Such tablets seem to have recorded matters such as business
transactions, tax account, land sales etc.
However, The interpretation of single signs and early groups
of signs is often not possible
 There are no clear borders between picture/symbol and what
is already a sign in a writing system (specific phonetic content
which would be read in the same way by any reader in a group
of readers)
The system was developed so that information could be
recorded

4. Predynastic tablets from Abydos and Symbols on pottery

5. Use of clay tokens having several
distinctive shapes, seem to have been
used as a system of accounting from at
least 9
th
millennium BC.

6. Around 3100 B.C. people began to record amounts of different crops.
Barley was one of the most important crops in southern Mesopotamia
and when it was first drawn it looked like this.
Scribes drew the sign on soft clay tablets using a pointed tool,
probably made out of a reed.

7. Scribes were very important people
They were trained to write cuneiform
and record many of the languages
spoken in Mesopotamia
Without scribes, letters would not have
been written or read, royal monuments
would not have been carved with
cuneiform, and stories would have been
told and then forgotten
Scribes wrote on different shaped
objects depending on the type of
information they wanted to record

8. Although the signs had changed over the centuries there
were more changes to come. Nobody can explain why the
changes happened
The most ancient tablets have signs drawn in boxes. Later,
the signs were written in rows, arranged in the order in
which they were read
Another change was that the tablets were written so that
all of the signs appeared to be lying on their side
The barley sign looked like this

9. Not only the shape, but also the use of the sign had been
changing. The barley sign could now be used in two ways.
It could represent barley, as on this tablet, which tells us that
Urra-ilum was given barley.
It could also be used to represent a sound. The Sumerian word
for barley was 'she'. So the barley sign was used to represent
the sound 'she' in a word.
For example, this tablet tells us about cakes given out from the
temple. The Sumerian word for figure cake is 'she-er-ku'.

10. 'She-er-ku'

11. Stages in the development of writing
Stage 1: Signs are only used as symbols
Stage 2: The beginning of writing: limited
standardization
The surviving sources indicate that the hieroglyphic
writing system followed from the beginning the
rules/system which were used throughout Egyptian
history
 Early developments include the emergence of norms in
writing direction, forms of individual signs, orthography of
single words, and the gradual tendency towards writing
longer inscriptions
Already in the first dynasties the writing system began to
become standardized. Actions are often expressed not
by writing a word (verb), but by depicting the action

12. Inscriptions on predynastic jars
Numbers
early short phonetic Inscriptions
Stelae from Abydos
Ivory, bone and wooden tablets of the first Dynasty




13. Stage 3: developing standardization
It seems that at the beginning only very few
people could write: at these limits,
standardization was not needed
At the point where the writing was used for
more people, a fixed system was needed, and
soon developed
Even in the Third Dynasty most inscriptions
still consist of lists of titles or offerings
 The signs and the writing of many words are
already those found in the Old Kingdom

14. Seal impressions of the second half of the first Dynasty and later
Private stelae of the Second Dynasty are more complex
Tomb inscriptions of the Third Dynasty are mainly titles

15. Types of Writing Systems
Pictograms and Ideograms
When the picture of something (like the sun) comes to
represent particular image or recognizable picture of
entities in a certain way, it can be described as a form of
picture-writing or pictogram
Modern forms of pictograms lead you to the phone booth,
bus stop, coffee shop and to the restrooms at the airport
even if you don't speak and read the particular language
When a pictogram takes a more fixed symbolic form and
comes to be used for instance not only to represent 'sun'
but also 'heat' and 'daytime', it is considered as part of a
system of idea-writing or ideograms

16. 
no intention to draw the reality exactly or artistically rather
symbols must be sufficiently clear and simple to enable
them to be immediately recognized and reproduced as
occasion demands as part of a narrative
The sequence of the symbols may be described verbally in
variety o f ways
Importance of context and background information
Convey abstract or conventional meaning
Ideograms or ideographs display no clear pictorial link with
external reality
No pure ideographic system exists
All primitive writing system were mixture of pictographic,
ideographic, and linguistic elements

17. The distinction between pictograms and ideograms is essentially
a difference between the symbol and the entity it represents
The more picture-like forms are pictograms, the more abstract
and derived forms are ideograms
 A key property of both pictograms and ideograms is that they do
not represent words or sounds in a particular language
Pictograms

18. Cuneiform
Dates from 4
th
millennium BC.
Used to express both non-phonological and phonological
writing systems in several languages
Derives from ‘Latin’ meaning ‘wedge-shaped’
Refers to the technique used to make symbols
A stylus was pressed into a tablet of soft clay to make a
sequence of short straight strokes
Later on other materials were used
At first symbols were written top to bottom
Later symbols were turned to their sides, from left to right
Earliest form was developed from pictographs

19. used to record a variety of information such as temple activities,
business and trade
Cuneiform was also used to write stories, myths, and personal
letters

20. The cuneiform script was used to write different languages. In
Mesopotamia it was used to write both Sumerian and Akkadian. It
was also used to write other languages like Elamite, Hittite and, as
carved here in stone, Urartian
Cuneiform script was used by other peoples because they needed
to be able to record information but they did not have their own
systems for writing down their languages

21. We can write any language using cuneiform.

the word for sheep
she - epsi - e - niudu
sheepseniudu
EnglishAkkadianSumerian

22. Logograms
A large number of symbols in later writing systems are thought
to have pictographic or ideographic origins
When the symbols come to represent words in a language, they
are described as examples of word-writing or logograms where
the graphemes or characters represent words
 In Egyptian hieroglyphics means 'house‘ and derives from a
diagram representing the floor-plan of a house
In Chinese writing it means 'river‘ and derives from the pictorial
description of a stream flowing between two banks

23. Examples: Chinese and its derivative script &
Japanese kanji
Several thousand graphemes are involved in a
logographic system
Great Chinese dictionary of K’ang His (1662-1722)
Contains nearly 50, 000 characters, most of them are
highly specialized or archaic
Characters are classified on the basis of strokes
used to write them

24. Rebus Writing
The process of Rebus writing is a way of using existing
symbols to represent the sounds of language
The symbol for one entity is taken over as the symbol for the
sound of the spoken word that is used to refer to that entity
This, of course, establishes a sizeable reduction of the
number of symbols needed in a writing system
/ba/ means 'boat‘
/baba/ means 'father'

25. Syllabic Writing
When a writing system employs a set of symbols which
represent the pronunciation of syllables, it is described as
syllabic writing
Phonological system
Each grapheme corresponds to a spoken syllable, vowel-
consonant pair usually
 There do not seem to be any purely syllabic writing systems
in use today, but Japanese can be described as having an at
least partly syllabic writing system
 In the 19th century Cherokee Indians invented and used a
syllabic writing system to produce written from spoken
language
The first fully developed syllabic writing system was used by
the Phoenicians at around 1000 B.C.

26. Alphabetic Writing
An alphabet is essentially a set of written symbols which
each represent a single type of sound
Direct correspondence between graphemes and phonemes
System needs a small number of units
Arbitrary Nature
 This is what seems to have occurred in languages such as
Arabic and Hebrew
The early Greeks included symbols for vowels in their
alphabet, and the modern European alphabet can be traced
from Egyptian to Phoenician then to Early Greek and finally
to the Roman alphabet

27. Written English
There does seem to be a frequent mismatch between the
forms of written and the sounds of spoken English today
 There may be a number of historical reasons for this, one
of them is language change
Fixed spelling of written English in the form that was used
in fifteenth century England
Derivations from forms used in writing in other languages
Recreation from old English I sixteenth century by spelling
reformers
Written form provide unreliable clues with reference to
spoken English