Many legends have been devised to explain the origins of written language. The Egyptians
believed the god Troth had revealed the art of writing to King Thomas. Thomas denounced
writing as a root to laziness; those who used it would neglect to exercise their memories. For the
Greeks it was the Prince Cadmus who invented the alphabet, and who was later banished for his
teaching. For the Chinese the dragon-god Cang Je invented writing for some, while others
believed writing first appeared as markings on a turtle's back. Many other legends exist, but it's
well known now that written words developed over thousands of years.
The first form of writing emerged as cave paintings over 20,000 years ago that depicted literal
portrayals of various aspects of life. These drawings developed later into "pictograms".
Pictograms were literal impressions of objects or events. There was no direct link between
spoken language and this form of written language. The use of pictograms can still be found
today, used by many native cultures, but also found in mainstream cultures as road signs, on
public bathroom doors, and used to represent a place to eat, to sleep, to fill your gas tank, or
make a phone call. These symbols have the advantage of being internationally recognizable,
producing meaning that might not be expressible in spoken language.
Pictograms eventually developed into "ideograms," which represented ideas rather than objects.
Some ideograms might include a picture of the sun to represent heat, or light, or daytime. Ideograms
became more abstract and eventually began to represent the sounds of spoken language. The
Sumerians , who lived in southern Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago, provide us with a
detailed development of word writing systems. They used abstract forms of lines and shapes
called "cuneiform writing", which literally meant "wedged shape". The pressed a wedged shape
object in clay tablets. Each of these abstract symbols represented a single word. The Sumerians
were eventually conquered by the Babylonians who adopted their cuneiform writing system. The
Babylonians, and later the Persians, used the symbols to represent syllables. In this way
cuneiform writing developed into a syllabic writing system.
Around the same time the Egyptians had developed a writing system similar to the Sumerians
called "hieroglyphics". Hieroglyphics were also pictographic, which eventually came to
represent syllables, and the sounds of language. It is not clear however, if the writing systems
developed by each culture were influenced by each other. It is possible they developed
independent of each other. In the evolution of mankind this might indicate the faculty to precess
and represent symbolic information. You might refer back to the discussion of semiotics and
draw parallels between the development of symbolic thought in children and the development of
symbolic thought throughout the evolution of mankind.
About 1500 B.C. the Phoenicians of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean adopted the
Egyptian hieroglyphics and developed them into a set of 22 consonant vowel (CV) pairs. This
syllabic system was later used by the Greeks. The Phoenicians system was considered inefficient
by the Greeks; their language was more complex and not easily interpretable with the
Phoenician system. Nonetheless the Greeks adopted the system but developed it into a series of
symbols that represented individual sounds of their language. This was the first step in the
development of the alphabetic system that exists for most cultures today. There is some
argument that this jump from syllabic to alphabetic writing systems happened more than once,
but most scholars believe that today's alphabetic writing systems were derived from the Greeks,
and which eventually migrated to southern Italy developing into Latin and spread by the Roman
empire throughout the world.
Today's Systems of Writing
Today there are three types of writing systems: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic systems. Of
the world's major languages, only the Chinese and Japanese writing systems are non-alphabetic.
There is also some argument that a forth "consonantal" system exists. Languages such as
Hebrew and Arabic are written without vowels; vowel sounds are predicted by the context of
words and other letters.
A logographic system is a word writing system, in which single characters represent single
words. The problem with such a system is that thousands of symbols must be learned. As a result
learning to write can be a life long undertaking. In recent years the Chinese government has
adopted a spelling system using the Roman alphabet, called "Pinyin". This system can be used
to teach the more memory intensive logographic system, and is used to help foreigners, often
found on street signs and other forms of instruction. On the other hand the logographic system
has it's advantages. Throughout the Orient many mutually unintelligible languages or dialects
exist. Their writing systems however are the same. As a result those who speak different
languages are able to communicate through writing. It is unlikely that and alphabetic system will
replace the logographic system because the result would be hundreds, if not thousands, of
different languages that would divide their culture into many. Alphabetic and syllabic writing
systems also contain logographic symbols: numbers, $, &, @, %, etc.
A syllabic system is a syllable writing system, used primarily in Japan. They have two systems.
One, called "kana", is made up of two 46 characters syllabaries, "katakana" and "hiragana" .
The first represents syllables and the second represents inflection (ie. past tense, plurals, etc.)
The entire Japanese language can be represented with kana, by combining characters that represent
clusters of sounds, such as "ga" or "ba", as well as prefixes and suffixes. A second system,
"kanji", contains many symbols that appear in Chinese written language, and characters can
represent individual words. Thus, some Chinese writing can be interpreted by a Japanese reader,
and vice versa. All words can be represented in kana, and many of those can also be represented
in kanji. Other syllabic writing systems are used by the Cherokee people. There writing system
was developed relatively recently in 1821, and survives today essentially unchanged.
The alphabetic system is a sound writing system common to most modern cultures. Though
alphabetic systems can appear quite different from each other, they all have a common letter to
sound correspondence. Most alphabetic systems do not represent every sound with a different
letter. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has been devised as a way to represent the
speech sounds of all alphabetic languages.
What about English!
The English writing system has so many exceptions to letter-to-sound correspondence rules that
it appears chaotic to someone learning it as a second language. The spoken word "fish"
could be spelled "ghoti"-- using the gh from tough, the o from women, and ti from nation. There
are positional constraints however that would prevent fish from being written in this way, but it
illustrates the irregularity of the English language. In English, 40 or so phonemes (speech
sounds) are represented with 26 characters. Some phonemes are represented by more than one
character (c & k, j & g, f & ph...), some represent more than one phoneme (g in great and
general, c in cat and city, f in first and of,....), and others make no sound at all (k in knight, b in
lamb). Within this apparent chaos there are rules however that govern pronunciation.
Irregularity in spellings is a relative thing. Take for example, the words "come and some". They
are considered irregular because they are not pronounced like " dome, home, gnome, or Rome,
pronunciations based on the silent trailing e rule that makes the "o" a long pronunciation. But
how often do these latter regular spellings appear while reading compared to the irregular ones.
The frequency at which words appear in text has a strong influence on our ability to recognize
them; you will easily recognize the word "have" for example, without realizing that it is an
irregular spelling. Such an approach is called the "analogy approach" to regularity. Words
become regular the more often you see them. Interestingly, the 15 to 20 percent of irregularly
spelled words on a typical page appear more frequently in text than regularly spelled words.
You are probably aware of the debate between phonics and whole word techniques for teaching
children to read. Which approach is best for teaching children to write? Is spelling important in
learning to write? Or, should the creative aspects of writing be the primary focus of teaching
writing skills?
References
Fromkin, V. & Rodman, R (1993) An Introduction to Language 5th Edition. Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich: New York.
Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1987) The Psychology of Reading and Language
Comprehension. Allyn & Bacon: Newton, Massachusetts.
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