Writing

Written language is secondary to speech

1. Children acquire spoken language naturally;

    writing must be taught.  

2. All human societies have complex spoken language;

    only a minority use writing systems.

3. Origin of spoken language - buried deep in the past

    the first writing developed less than 6,000 years ago.

Writing developed from pictures

True writing denotes specific sounds or other units of language

Pre-writing (pictures or similar symbols) denotes concepts directly

pictograms - pictures that convey meaning (iconic)

ideograms - more symbolic, less iconic

Notable pre-writing systems

Cave drawings in S.Europe, Africa, Australia

Native American wampum belts

Inca quipu (knotted cords)

Yukagir (northern Siberia) pictographs and ideographs

True writing is read; pictures are verbalized about

John DeFrancis calls writing visible speech in The Diverse Oneness of Writing

All writing systems:  graphic symbol (grapheme) = sound unit of language

Ways to classify writing systems

1. Type of sound unit represented

   alphabet (composed of letters) - represents segmental phonemes

   syllabary (composed of syllabemes) - represents syllables of sound

       modern syllabaries:  Chinese, Cherokee

   morphemic - only Japanese Kanji

   logographic - represents whole words (such a system doesn't exist)

2. Regularity of grapheme/sound unit correspondence

highly irregular                                                             one to one correspondence

Chinese characters                      French            Spanish                IPA

Japanese Kanji                English                                                 Georgian

3. Frame (what unit is surrounded by the white spaces on paper

   letter, syllable, word

printed English: each letter is a frame, each word as a secondary frame

cursive English:  uses only the word as a frame.

Chinese: each syllable is a frame (each character represents a syllable

4. Linear arrangement

horizontal, left to right:  most modern alphabets

horizontal, right to left:  Hebrew, Arabic, the earliest alphabets

boustrophedon (ox-turning) - left to right alternating with right to left (Ancient Greek)