Writing is the most important means of transmitting speech over a distance, through it, people can use the vast amount of knowledge of mankind and preserve it for future generations. Different experiences generated different Types of writing.
types of writing
The types of writing is an organized and more or less standardized set of signs for the communication of ideas. Writing differs from other existing or possible symbolic communication systems in that it is always associated with some language and language spoken in that language.
Unlike writing, various types of visual and graphic representations of information, such as drawings, paintings, nonverbal cartographic elements, etc., are not correlated with any particular language. Symbols on information signs are also not related to language, although they can become part of language if actively used in combination with other linguistic elements.
Some other symbols are: numbers, logograms - they do not have a direct connection to a specific language, but are often used in writing and can therefore be considered part of the written language. While writing and speaking are useful for conveying a message, writing differs in that it is also a form of tracking and transferring information.
The process of encoding and decoding writing systems involves a shared understanding between writers and readers as to the meaning of all the symbols or characters used to write. Handwriting is usually drawn on durable media, such as paper or electronic device, although non-durable methods can also be used, such as writing on a display device, in the sand, or in the sky.
General characteristics
Language is inherent in every human community, and this fact can be considered as an integral and defining characteristic of all humanity as a whole. However, the development of writing and the process of gradual replacement of traditional forms of oral communication were sporadic, uneven and slow.
Once established, writing in the general case undergoes change less voluntarily than oral speech, thus preserving specific features and expressions that are no longer characteristic of the actual state of a living language. One of the most important advantages of using writing is the ability to create permanent records of information expressed in language. The appearance and existence of writing requires:
- A group of certain basic components or symbols, individually called signs, and collectively, a writing system.
- A set of rules and conditions (ie spelling), understood by the community and used by all or most of its participants, that determines the meaning of the basic elements (graphemes), their order and relationship to each other.
- A common language in the community, whose constructions are reflected in these elements and rules, and can also be reconstructed from them by interpreting what is written;
- Any physical means of clearly representing symbols so that they can be read in one way or another (visually or by touch).
Most writing systems are characterized by such an arrangement of symbolic elements that allows them to be combined into larger groups (words, acronyms, and other lexemes) because a significantly larger number of meanings can be conveyed than is possible. it can be provided by the symbols themselves.
To achieve the most complete transfer of linguistic content in writing systems, concatenation of small groups of characters is also used. Many writing systems use a special set of characters (punctuation) through which additional structure and organization of written speech is provided, as well as the transmission of message features, which are conveyed in speech through pauses, tone, stress, intonation, etc.
Also, writing usually has a certain method of formatting written messages, which follows the rules of oral speech (grammar, syntax, etc.), so that the reader can perceive the meaning of the written message as accurately as possible.
Historical development
Before writing, only oral transmission of knowledge was possible. Distortions of meaning, the omission or addition of content, are mostly unavoidable in oral communication. Psychological, social and cultural factors play a fundamental role in oral tradition. Vital information, but also secret knowledge, rituals, myths and legends, which have a similar core, but may differ considerably in detail, have been passed down orally throughout the world.
Thousands of years ago the first non-nomadic cultures flourished. Instead of wandering, these people captured and domesticated animals and grew vegetables and other crops (early agriculture, which began ten to twelve thousand years ago, after the last ice age ended in Eurasia). This brought many changes, including the ability to store and swap things. The first artificial memory systems were created, which were used to document trade.
Writing also developed from these early memory systems. Writing made it possible to record things that had nothing to do with commerce, such as stories that until then could only be transmitted orally. Presumably, writing originated some five thousand to six thousand years ago, around 3500 BC in Sumer and later in very different areas of the world, such as Egypt, the Indus Valley and China and (between 1200 and 400 BC) also in Mesoamerica.
The types of writing probably spread from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley and into Egypt. Chinese writing is believed to have developed independently of it. In general, one sees in history a kind of development from pictographic writing (each concept has its own writing) through syllable writing (simplified pictography) to alphabetic writing (only vowels and/or consonants have a writing) .
Alphabetic writing, unlike the thousands of characters in pictographs, only needs a few dozen characters to write and read. The first alphabet was probably the Phoenician alphabet, which originated around 2000 BC The Phoenicians, a seafaring people, used this alphabet which, unlike the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, had only a few dozen characters and was therefore it was easier to learn.
This writing led to Aramaic and Greek type of writing. These same scripts led to the scripts used throughout the region, from Western Asia to Africa and Europe. The Greek alphabet introduced explicit letters for vowel sounds for the first time in history.
The Greek and Latin scripts gave rise to various European scripts in the first centuries AD, such as the Runes, the Gothic and Cyrillic alphabets, while the Aramaic script developed into the Hebrew, Arabic and Syrian alphabet, the latter of which was even developed in the Mongolian script. The South Arabian script gave rise to the Ethiopian script. Some scholars think that the Brahmic script types of India and Southeast Asia are also descended from the Aramaic script.
writing systems
A writing system is an organized method of storing and transferring messages based on a language. Writing is usually visual (less often tactile) with a set of characters or symbols. In general, there are three main types of writing: logogram, syllabic writing and alphabetic writing.
logogram
A logogram is a single symbol or grapheme that denotes a concrete or abstract concept of reality. A logogram that denotes a concept through a graphic symbol is an ideogram. One that represents you directly, through an image, often stylized, is a pictogram. A logogram is a single written character that represents a complete grammatical word. Most Chinese characters are classified as logograms.
It should be remembered that the birth of painting took place in the days of ancient peoples before the appearance of statehood. However, these early attempts did not rise to the level of a systematic tool for transmitting information. The essence of pictographic writing is that a certain concept is expressed with the help of a certain sign.
For example, the concept of "person" can be conveyed through the image of a person. Gradually simplifying, the icons move further and further away from the original images, they begin to acquire multiple meanings. However, pictography could not satisfy all the needs of writing that arise with the development of concepts and abstract thought, and so ideography was born.
Today, the most widely used pictorial script is Chinese, which is written with thousands of pictorial images (hanzi characters). Today, in addition to the classical glyph, a simplified Chinese glyph is also used which is somewhat easier to learn and write. Over time, some fifty-six thousand unique Hanzi characters have been created, but a well-trained and well-read Chinese knows only about seven thousand on average.
Also, Japanese is partially written with image characters. Japanese writing is actually a combination of three different types of writing, the most important of which, Kanji, has been adopted almost unchanged from Chinese Hanzi. The numbers used in the Western world are in fact figurative signs.
Ideography (writing in concepts) is used to transmit what has no visualization. For example, to denote the concept of "surveillance", which is impossible to draw, they described the organ through which it manifests, that is, the eye. Therefore, drawing an eye as a pictogram means «eye» and as an ideogram «vigilance». Consequently, the drawing could have direct and figurative meanings.
In hieroglyphic writing, it is often difficult to distinguish the underlying original image. Typical structural elements appear in hieroglyphs, repeating in different signs. Probably, the reason for this was a person's desire to simplify the recording of a written text, to simplify the teaching of writing.
However, hieroglyphic writing still retained a significant drawback - it had no connection with the pronunciation of the word. As a result, written and oral speech existed as if they were separate. Also, in languages that are characterized by a change in the form of a word depending on its syntactic function, it was necessary to supplement hieroglyphs with special designations for word forms.
syllabic writing
A significant step towards the convergence of oral and written speech was the formation of syllabic writing. The most famous syllabic script types are cuneiform (ancient Persian, Akkadian, and other heirs of the Sumerian script), some West Semitic variants of cuneiform (for example, Ugaritic cuneiform), and Japanese syllabic systems (katakana and hiragana).
The Phoenician script (consonant) has played a very important role in the life of mankind. It was this that formed the basis of the Greek script, from which Latin, Cyrillic and, consequently, most modern scripts originated.
Syllabic script is rare in modern times. While pictographs use a single character for a complete word, syllabic script uses one character for a particular syllable, which together form words. A sign in a syllable script usually symbolizes a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel.
In syllabic writing there is no graphic correspondence between phonetically related characters, for example the characters for ke, ka and ko do not have a resemblance in their spelling that indicates their common k sound. Examples of this are the Cherokee syllabic script types and Japanese Katakana and Hiragana. Several Inuit languages also have a syllabic script, the Inuktitut script. In the past, writing of this type was quite common: such as hieroglyphics and the writing of the Mayans.
alphabet writing
When the Greeks began to use the Phoenician script, they were faced with the problem of fully conveying the sound of words using the Phoenician consonantal system. The fact is that in Phoenician writing, in essence, there were no letters to denote vowel sounds. For the Greeks, due to the peculiarities of the formation of word forms, this turned out to be inconvenient. Therefore, special symbols appeared to denote vowels.
As a result, writing has moved to an even more universal level. Now, using about thirty signs that anyone could easily learn, almost any word in the spoken language could be conveyed. Alphabetic writing, due to its simplicity, spread rapidly throughout the world (although in some civilizations the transition to it did not occur).
An alphabet is a standardized set of written symbols or graphemes called "letters" that represent the phonemes of a spoken language in writing. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet. Alphabetic writing was invented by the Semitic peoples, of which the Phoenicians were the best known. Through their contacts with the surrounding peoples, with the necessary adjustments, the Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs adopted this alphabet.
Since the alphabet originally comes from the Semitic peoples, in whom the meaning of words is largely determined by consonants, this alphabet was a consonantal or abjad script. An abjad is an alphabetic script where there is one letter per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they only have letters for consonants, vowels are not usually written.
Clay tablets at Ugarit already show roughly the same letter order as modern ABC. All abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts and descend from the Proto-Sinaitic script. The reason for this is that the Semitic languages and the related Berber languages consist of a morphological structure that does not normally require the indication of vowels. Some abjads, like Arabic and Hebrew, have signs for vowels.
Many abjad-derived scripts have been enhanced with vowel characters, making them "full alphabets" or "true". This usually happens when a letter is adapted into a non-Semitic language. The most famous example is the development of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet. When the Greeks adopted it into their language, they reserved some letters, which were not needed in Greek, for the vowels: the He became E, the Samek became O, the Alef became A.
Through the Greeks, the Romans also took over and after some adjustments it became the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is also heavily based on the Greek alphabet. An abugida is an alphabetic script where the base letters designate consonants with an inherent vowel and where adjustments can be made to the base letters in a consistent way to indicate other vowels.
So, in an abugida, there may or may not be a letter for k without a vowel, but there may be a letter for both ka and ke. In many abugidas this base letter adjustment is equivalent to adding a vowel mark, but there are also other possibilities such as rotating the base letters or adding diacritics. The contrast of abugidas with "true syllables" is that the latter have a separate character per possible syllable and have no systematic graphic similarities.
The graphic resemblance of most abugidas is due to the fact that they are derived from abjads and that the consonants form the base letters, and the new vowel markings are just an addition to the base letters. Some examples are the Ge'ez script and the many Brahmic scripts of South and Southeast Asia, all of which date back to the classical Brahmic script.
Basic terminology
In considering specific types of writing, the study of writing as a whole developed along several partially unrelated directions. Because of this, the terminology used may vary somewhat depending on a particular field of study.
The generic term "text" refers to a sample of written material. The act of generating and writing text, respectively, is defined as writing and the act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading. The methodology and rules governing the observance of a certain structure and sequence of written signs are combined under the name of orthography, within which the concept of orthography is also distinguished in relation to alphabetic writing systems.
The specific basic unit of writing, as mentioned above, is the grapheme. Graphemes are minimal meaningful units, the totality of which encompasses the entire set of structural elements, from which, according to the rules for their correlation and use, written texts can be composed in one or several writing systems. This concept is similar to the concept of phoneme that exists in the field of oral speech study.
This or that grapheme can be represented in different ways, and each of its specific entries may differ visually from another, but they will all be interpreted the same way nonetheless. Just as a particular sound is called an allophone of a phoneme, so a particular recording is defined as an allograph of a grapheme. Three different allographs can be, for example, the same bold, underlined and italic font.
The choice of a specific allograph is dictated by the medium used, the recording medium, the writer's author's stylistics, the characteristics of the graphemes before and after, time constraints, the intended audience, mostly unrecognized characteristics of individual writing, etc.
Sometimes the terms "glyph," "sign," "symbol," and the like are used to denote a grapheme. The specific meanings of these terms vary depending on a particular field of knowledge; You may notice, for example, that glyphs in most writing systems consist of lines or strokes and are therefore called linear, but in certain types of writing they may consist of other structural elements (for example, dots in braille) and yet also called glyphs.
Directionality
Different writings are written in different directions. Primitive alphabets can be written in any direction: horizontal (left to right or right to left) or vertical (up or down). It could also be written starting horizontally in one direction, then going back to the end of the line and reversing the direction.
The Greek alphabet and its successors agreed on a pattern from left to right, top to bottom of the page. Others, like Arabic, came to be written from right to left. Many East Asian scripts, such as Chinese and Japanese, are written from top to bottom, from right to left of the page.
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