Unit 3: The origins of writing
Introduction:
• The palest ink is better than the sharpest memory.
• A definition for writing: “the symbolic representation of language through the use of graphic
signs.
• Unlike speech, the writing system is not simply acquired (it has to be learned).
• Not all languages have a written form and not all human beings know how to write.
• The earliest writing for which we have clear evidence of: cuneiform, which was marked on
clay tablets about 5,000 years ago.
Writing and speech:
• All units of writing, whether letters or characters, are based on units of speech.
• Speech is primary due to the following reasons:
-Writing is a later historical development than spoken language.
-Writing doesn´t exist everywhere that a spoken language exists. There are communities where a
written form of a language is not used, but there are no communities with a written language and
no spoken form.
-Writing must be taught, whereas spoken language is acquired automatically.
-Neurolinguistic evidence demonstrates that the written language processing and production is
overland on the spoken language canters in the brain.
Why do people believe that writing is more perfect than
speech?:
• Writing is a product of deliberation, correction and revision. It is usually more aptly worded
and better organized, containing fewer errors, hesitations and incomplete sentences.
• Writing is associated with education and educated speech, as it must be learnt.
• Speech is ephemeral and transient, whereas writing lasts and can be preserved for a very
long time. Thus, writing has the appearance of being more stable, even though different
spelling systems exists (BrE and AmE, for example).
Writing systems:
Pictograms:
• Pictograms are picture-like, iconic drawings that represent a reality. Each pictogram is a
direct image of the object it represents.
• The fact that pictograms are iconic means that they are not arbitrary.
• Pictograms did not have any relation to the language spoken, as the pictures represented
objects in the world, rather than the names given to these objects.
Ideograms:
• In time, that picture of the sun might turned into a more fixed symbolic form that might
come to be used for heat, daytime, and of course the sun. Thus, the symbol is transformed
into a reference to an idea.
• The distinction between pictograms and ideograms is essentially a difference in the
relationship between the symbol and the entity it represents. The more “picture-like”
forms are pictograms, and the more abstract derived forms are ideograms.
• Ideograms were less iconic and more symbolic, and although the reality they include a
slightly high level of abstraction.
Logograms:
• Symbols used to represent words in a language. It is arbitrary: the form of this symbol gives
us no clue to what type of entity is being referred to.
• Contemporary logograms in English: $, @, &.
• Chinese is based, to a certain extent, on the use of logograms.
• Advantages of this system: two speakers with different dialects, who might have a great
difficulty understanding each other´s spoken forms, can both read the same written text.
• Disadvantages: quite a large number of different written symbols are required within this
type of writing system. All of these symbols must be memorized.
Rebus writing:
• The symbol for one entity is taken over as the symbol for the sound of the spoken word used
to refer to the entity.
• The rebus is a representation of syllables and words by the pictures of the objects whose
names sound like the intended syllables.
• Rebus writing is a particular use we can make of logograms.
Syllabic writing:
• When a writing system employs a set of symbols each one representing the pronunciation of
a syllable, it a described as syllabic writing.
• There are no purely syllabic writing systems in use today, but modern Japanese can be
written with a set of single symbols representing spoken syllables and is consequently often
described as having a (partially) syllabic system.
Alphabetic writing:
• An alphabet is a set of written symbols, each representing a single type of sound.
• The earliest known alphabet is the North Semitic, which was the basic source of the most
other alphabets to be found in the world. It only contained consonants.
• The early Greeks took the alphabetizing process a stage further by also using separate
symbols to represent the vowel sounds.
• This revised alphabet passed to the rest of Western Europe through the Romans and, along
the way, underwent several modifications to fit the requirements of the spoken languages
encountered. As a result, we talk about the Roman alphabet as the writing system used for
English.
Written English:
• If the origins of the alphabetic system were based on a correspondence between a single
symbol and a single sound type... why is there a frequent mismatch between the forms of
the written English and the sounds of the spoken English?
• “You know”>/ ju noʊ /
• Other languages, such as Spanish, have writing systems that hold much more closely to the
one-sound-one-symbol principle.
• The spelling of the contemporary English allows for a lot of variation in how each sound is
represented.
• The vowel sound represented by /i/ is written in various ways, for example:
• The English writing system is, thus, alphabetic in a very loose sense.
• The spelling of written English 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 representation of
words that has been derived from forms used in writing other languages, notably Latin and
French. For example, the French combination “qu” replaced Old English “cw” in words like
queen.
• The printing process also played its part: many of the early printers were native Dutch
speakers and often had doubts regarding English spelling. When this happened, they applied
and often had doubts regarding English spelling. When this happened, they applied their
own conventions.
• The Great Vowel Shift: it affected the pronunciation of long vowels, but such changes were
not reflected in spelling.
• Words such as sweet were originally pronounced as short vowels. However, vowels changed
their point of articulation and the pronunciation of words such as sweet into a long vowel.
• A large number of older written English words were actually recreated by 16th century
spelling reforms to bring their written forms more into line with what were supposed,
sometimes erroneously, to be their Latin origins (e.g., dette became debt, doute became
doubt).
Spelling reform:
• Why not doing a spelling reform? It would be time-saving and it would help foreign learners
of English!
• Well... what would we do with the transition period? (Should we write with the old or the
new spelling conventions? What would we do with all the textbooks that already exist?
• A spelling system that does not reflect dialect variations and is understandable to all
speakers is essential, and the English spelling already does that.
