A study guide to the history of writing
by Ed Vajda
True writing: any system of symbols that represents the sounds of a language, whether regularly or irregularly. A general term for writing symbol is grapheme. Each grapheme has a particular sound value (or set of sound values, if the system has a one-to-many correspondence between sound and symbol).
Non writing: any graphic symbol or picture which represent a concept without regard to specific sound. The term pre-writing refers to such concept-pictures that later evolved into sound symbols.
Remember that writing is secondary to human speech. Even today many languages remain unwritten.
Four ways to classify writing systems:
1. Classification according to the type of sound unit represented by the grapheme.
Syllabary: most graphemes in this type of writing system convey an entire syllable of sound. Syllable graphemes are sometimes called syllabemes. All the earliest true writing systems were basically syllabaries: Sumerian cuneiform (3200BC); Egyptian hieroglyphics (2900BC), deciphered by 1822 by the Frenchman Champollion using the famous Rosetta stone inscription; Chinese characters (1200BC), Maya glyphs (200BC), fully deciphered only a few years ago. Syllabaries in use today include: modern Chinese characters (the hanzi); the two Japanese kana syllabaries; the Cherokee syllabary, invented in 1821 by Sequoya and often mistakenly referred to as an alphabet; and the Cree and Inuit (Eskimo) syllabaries invented more recently.
Alphabet: most graphemes in this type of writing system convey a single sound, not an entire syllable. Alphabetic graphemes are called letters. Alphabets may use diacritics (marks which alter the pronunciation of letters, such as the Spanish tilde ~) or digraphs (a pair of graphemes which conveys a single sound, such as English sh or ch).
The first alphabet was invented in about 1800BC in what is now Lebanon and is known as the West Semitic alphabet. It was based on the shapes of about 28 Egyptian hieroglyphs each used to denote a single consonant sound (the first consonant in the Semitic name for each hieroglyphic symbol, such as 'alf (ox), beta (house), gimel (camel), dalet (door), etc.). The Phoenicians (1200BC) adopted and spread this alphabet (but Phoenician wasn't the first alphabet). All alphabets in use today are directly descended from the original West Semitic alphabet. Notable alphabets no longer in use include: Etruscan (the writing of pre-Roman Italy), Runes (the first Germanic alphabet, called the "futhark"), and Ogham (a pre-Christian, or Pagan, writing of Ireland). The only exception is Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which, apparently, was invented by King Sejong in 1444 AD with no influence from Europe or Western Asia.
The West Semitic alphabet originally had no vowels; technically, it was a consonantal writing system, or a vowel-neutral syllabary, rather than a full alphabet. Modern alphabets that are primarily consonantal writing systems are Arabic and Hebrew (although diacritic marks may be added to specify vowels).
The first full writing system was invented circa 776BC by the Greek Cadmus, who borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted certain letters to indicate vowels. The Greek alphabet influenced many subsequent versions of the full alphabet still in use today. These include: Modern Greek, as well as Georgian and Armenian (both codified circa 320AD by the Christianizer Meshrop Mashtots), Roman (hundreds of variants, such as English, French, Turkish, and even the IPA), Cyrillic (also with hundreds of variants, including Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian; remember that Cyril, the Byzantine Greek missionary to the Slavs, originally invented the Glagolithic alphabet in the 9th century but his followers soon replaced it with an alphabet much more closely resembling Greek, which they called Cyrillic in his honor), Ethiopic (used to write Amharic and Tegrinya in Ethiopia), and the many beautiful alphabets of India, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia which are descended from the Devanagari, the alphabet used to write Sanskrit, which itself was an early offshoot of the West Semitic alphabet.
Featural alphabet: The basic grapheme in a writing system may represent not the phone (as in an alphabet) but the phonetic feature. In a featural system, for instance, all the symbols for labials would contain a specific mark denoting the lips; and all the nasals would contain a specific mark denoting nasality. The Korean alphabet, the Hangul, comes closest to being a featural writing system; many of the strokes that make up the letters represent articulatory features such as labial, velar, etc. The Hangul could be called a featural alphabet, or a partially featural alphabet. The IPA also contains many featural representations, such as the diacritic symbols for the glottal stop, nasalization of vowels, etc.; and the Japanese kana have one or two featural symbols, such as the marks to indicate voiced obstruents).
Word and morpheme writing: It is also possible to have a logographic (word) writing system or a morphemic writing system. No language is written exclusively with a word or morphemic writing system, although Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji often denote whole words or morphemes.
Chinese characters, or hanzi, are used to denote syllables of sound. Since 40% of Chinese words consist of a single syllable, the Chinese characters used to write them are logographs as well as syllabemes. The remaining 70% of Chinese words, however, are polysyllabic, and each syllable is written with a separate character. Also, since nearly 90% of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic, in most instances a character represents not only a syllable but also an entire morpheme. Still, about 11% of Chinese morphemes consist of two or more syllables. In these cases, the character denotes a syllable which is not a morpheme. Thus, Chinese characters are really a syllabary (only one character out of 30,000+ denotes a non-syllabic sound) and only partially constitute a logographic or morpheme writing system. Since the meaning or function of each syllable is taken into account in the writing, there are thousands of characters; Hanzi represent, in fact, the world's most irregular syllabary, with meaning playing nearly as great a role as sound in the system of graphemes.
Japanese writing. The Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters borrowed to write Japanese) are used to write morphemes--even morphemes which are polysyllabic. This means that the Kanji are a true morpheme writing system. However, Japanese uses the Kanji only for writing Chinese borrowings and certain native Japanese roots. The remaining Japanese morphemes (non-Chinese borrowings as well as native suffixes and function words) are written with one of two regular syllabaries called kana:
1) the hiragana ("ordinary" or "cursive writing") is used to write native Japanese suffixes and function words
2) the katakana ("partial" or "side writing") is used to write words borrowed from languages other than Chinese, for writing direct speech, and for special emphasis--much like English uses italics).
Thus, Japanese mixes two forms of phonetically regular syllabic writing (the two kanas) with non-phonetically-specific morpheme writing (the Kanji) according to a complex set of stylistic rules. Japanese cannot be written solely with a morphemic writing system.
2. A second way to classify writing systems is according to the economy, or regularity, of correspondence between sound and grapheme (does one symbol denote one and only one sound regardless of meaning; or does the sound value of many symbols also depend upon the meaning of the words of which they form a part). Some syllabaries are extremely regular (the Japanese kana and, slightly less so, the Cherokee syllabary); others are quite irregular, with thousands of different syllabemes whose meaning and sound value must be memorized--all of the first writing systems were irregular syllabaries and the Chinese hanzi (characters) represent the only such irregular syllabary still in use. Alphabets tend to be highly regular (usually, the more recently an alphabet has come into use, the more regular it is; Georgian, however, is also highly regular, even though it has been in use for centuries.) But some alphabets are also quite irregular, and the meaning of words must be also taken into account in spelling. Modern English is perhaps the most irregular alphabet of all--with complex rules for reading what is written (orthoepy, or orthoepic rules) and spelling what is spoken (orthography, or orthographic rules). Still, the sound to symbol correspondence of English graphemes is far more regular than Chinese.
3. A third way to classify writing systems is according to how graphemes are grouped together on a page to form larger units. A grouping of written symbols is known as a frame. Many languages, like English, use the word as a frame. Languages with western style punctuation also use the sentence as a frame. Some languages also use the syllable at a frame; each Chinese character, for example, is its own frame. The Ethiopic alphabet also uses the syllable as a frame: each grapheme consists of two parts, a larger consonant symbol with a smaller vowel symbol attached to it. Korean also uses the syllable as a frame (in addition to word and sentence), since letters are arranged in syllable groups rather than in strict linear order (the syllable groups are arranged in linear order).
4. One final way to classify writing systems is according to the direction of the linear arrangement of the graphemes. Most western alphabets, including Georgian and Armenian, are written horizontally from left to right. Arabic and Hebrew are written horizontally from right to left. And some forms of ancient Greek were written with the lines alternating from left to right and right to left--the boustrophedon, or "ox-turning," method. Some syllabic scripts of East Asia are written vertically, notably Chinese and Japanese. Mongolian traditionally used a vertically arranged alphabet.