The History of Writing
From pictograms to cuneiform to the alphabet, writing has come a long way
With love letters, research essays, captivating books, and even the text on your phone, writing really shapes the way we use language in our culture. It also tells us a lot about a culture through factors like the different kinds of utensils, medium, and systems that you could use, and the emphasis of certain aspects of a language over others. Japan’s emphasis on the significance of calligraphy for example, or even the revival of the Hebrew language in Israel after its decline for over 1600 years!
Writing can also be used to analyze the context of the origin of the language and the history behind it. Through analyzing ancient writing systems, we have been able to learn so much about the way our ancestors lived a couple thousand years ago.
Here I’ll show the progress of writing methods over time:
Pictographs: The first known writing system is the concept of pictographs. Pictographs are basically drawings that represent a physical object and are used to communicate ideas. They originated in around 9000 BC in cultures everywhere, including ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.
Ideographs: Pictographs can’t represent concepts or feelings, such as hope or need, so ideographs were developed! Ideographs are pictographs that can represent concepts through metonymy or combinations of similar pictographs. Evidence shows this was developed around 8000 years ago in China.
Logographs: Logographs combine pictographs and ideographs, they’re combinations that represent whole words. They began to be developed from pictographs in 5000 BC in China, some Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Sumerian Cuneiform.
Mayan script from the Maya civilization of 2600 BC southern Mexico is a form of logograph. This script was written in forms of blocks that would combine pictographs and ideographs to form words and sentences.
Cuneiform: Cuneiform was a writing system used in Ancient Mesopotamia by Sumerians around 3500 BC. It is a syllabary system, which means that every digit represents a sound or syllable. It started as a pictographic system, but the drawings became tedious and inconvenient. Therefore, they decided to simplify the strokes of these drawings into lines.
Then these simplified drawings began to represent sounds, as well as specific words. The concept of using pictographs for their sounds is called the rebus principle.
Abjad: An Abjad is a writing system that has a character that represents a consonant. In Egypt, the Phoenician Abjad system originated in around 1050 BC from taking the logographs for common words, then using the first consonant of that word to represent a sound.
Some languages like Arabic and Hebrew, use diacritics or markings to indicate a vowel sound. They typically have a default vowel sound that you pronounce with the consonants.
Alphabet: The Greeks recognized the lack of vowels, and adapted vowels to the Phoenician Abjad to form the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet has been used continuously since 750 BC.
Abugida/Alphasyllabary: Similar to the Abjad system, Hindi has characters that represent consonants. And also similarly to Arabic and Hebrew, Hindi and other alphasyllabaries use diacritics to change the vowel of a consonant letter. The difference between abjads with diacritics and alphasyllabaries is that alphasyllabaries require the use of diacritics, while abjads don’t.
So, over time we can see how different languages developed and specified based on uses and origin. Although most languages originated from simple drawings, they have now developed into the dynamic world of culture and communication that we have today.
Thank you!
Hi! My name is Alyssa Gould. I’m super passionate about languages and using Natural Language Processing to help learn about languages!
Feel free to contact me at anytime at alyssa25g25@gmail.com and add me on LinkedIn!
