WRITING AND HISTORY

The first writing system

The first known writing system was Mesopotamian
cuneiform.
The first language to be written was Sumerian.
The first writing surface-cum-material was clay, and
the first writing implement was a reed stylus of
triangular cross section: a scribe would shape a suitably
sized patty of clay and smooth its surfaces, then touch a
corner of the stylus to the surface, leaving shallow
wedge- shaped impressions.
From one to a dozen or so wedges make up a single
cuneiform sign.
 The first recognizable documents come from about 3200
bce from the city of Uruk, and the script remained in use,
recognizably the same, down to at least the third century
ce.
Each Sumerian sign (and there were something over a
thousand of them) originally stood for a Sumerian word,
and was a picture of the object named by the word.
Signs for objects could also be used for related verbs: a leg
could represent “walk,” for instance.
 Parts of cunieform signs do not reflect their sound or meaning

xi “mix” ma
Ja an “god”
mud “fear” ig “doorleaf”
kun “tail”
kam (number determinative) be “if”
gil “entangle” za
Since Sumerian words were mostly just one
syllable long (consonant- or vowel-initial,
open or closed), the signs that stood for those
syllables could also be used for other similar
words for items that could not be easily
pictured; one of the earliest examples is the
sign for ti “arrow” also being used for ti “life.”
 Akkadian cuneiform
The Sumerian language eventually went out of use, to be replaced
by the Semitic language Akkadian, but Sumerian remained a
language of liturgy and scholarship; and cuneiform writing was
used for Akkadian.
Akkadian cuneiform is more complicated than Sumerian, because
any given sign could have sound value(s) based on its Akkadian
meaning(s) as well as its Sumerian, and many syllables could be
represented by several different signs, or could be spelled in
different ways, and because the Akkadian sound system differs
considerably from the Sumerian, and moreover signs could still be
used for their meanings rather than their sounds without any
indication of such use; in this limited way, a logosyllabic writing
system includes isolated instances of purely logographic writing.
 Logographic writing
Logographic writing is a system of
writing in which the printed symbols
represent entire words without relating
to pronunciation.
Chinese is an example of logographic
writing
Akkadian cuneiform
 Akkadian
However, of the 600 or so signs in the Akkadian
sign list, only about 200 would be used in any
particular time period or area.
A device for clarifying the writing is the use of
determinatives, signs indicating the semantic
sphere of the items they accompanied: personal
names, wooden objects, cities, countries, plural
nouns, etc.
 Cuneiform
Cuneiform was also used for many other
languages of the ancient Near East, such as
Elamite, Hurrian, and Urartian, and in these
adaptations from Akkadian usage, the script was
more syllabic than logographic.
An exception is seen in Hittite, which
incorporates both Sumerian and Akkadian
spellings into texts that nonetheless were to be
read in Hittite.
 Egyptian
A language that was never written in cuneiform, because it had
developed its own writing system, is ancient Egyptian.
Rudimentary hieroglyphic writing appears shortly after the
beginnings of cuneiform, and it is speculated that the idea of
writing somehow came from Sumer to Egypt; but from the very
beginning there is no visual similarity and, more important, the
sounds recorded are not syllables, but consonants only.
 All the phonetic Egyptian hieroglyphs
beginning with labials
b mv p p)] wbn
b)] mì pds wï
b)]s mì pv wvm
bv mn pr wn
bì)] mnw w wn
bì)] mr w)] wp
bìt mr w)]ï wr
 Egyptian Hieroglyphs
.Egyptian hieroglyphs remained consonants, and the
script includes diacritic dots to distinguish both letters
whose shapes merged during its Nabatean prehistory
and letters for sounds that had merged in Aramaic but
not in Arabic
Proto-Semitic *t *ñ *v *x *d *ï *i *i´ *k *ó *[ *g´

Aramaic t v d i k [

Arabic t ñ v x d ï i d· k z· [ g´
 Hittite
Two script traditions that ultimately left no issue, are found at
opposite ends of the ancient Near East. Several (logo)syllabic
writing systems are found around the Aegean Sea – “Hittite”
hieroglyphs (fifteenth to eighth centuries bce) in western
Anatolia, Linear B (sixteenth to thirteenth centuries bce) in Crete,
and Cypriote syllabary (eighth to third centuries bce) in Cyprus
(as well as some presumed antecedents of the latter two, including
the still enigmatic Linear A) – for Luvian and two stages of Greek
respectively.
They are basically pictographic like Egyptian, but they record
syllables, not consonants only, and representatives of earlier
stages have not been found, so their origin is mysterious.
Hittite cuneiform on a tablet
 Chinese
Another development of that period in East Asia
was the invention of writing for Chinese. While the
earliest attested inscriptions (late Shang dynasty, ca.
1200 bce) are “oracle bone” communications with the
gods, most likely writing began there for the same
mundane commercial reasons as elsewhere, but only
perishable materials were used.
Oracle bone script
 Chinese
The principles of writing Chinese have not changed
over more than 3,000 years, though the esthetics and
the shapes of the characters certainly have. Earliest
written Chinese, like Sumerian, used primarily mono-
syllabic morphemes, but the combination of phonetic
and semantic information was made explicit and
obligatory in most “characters” so that the vast majority
of characters comprise two parts, and there are
considerably more characters in the repertoire. While
the biggest dictionaries list upwards of 60,000, an
inventory of 5,000 or so characters is adequate for most
needs.
 Hiragana
Chinese writing was tried for both Korean and
Japanese, with unsatisfactory results in both cases.
Japanese developed a pair of syllabaries (kana) from a
selected group of characters that had been in use for
their syllabic value.
Hiragana are used for writing grammatical
morphemes attached to Chinese characters (kanji) that
are used for content words, and katakana are used for
foreign words. Korean struggled with characters
longer than Japanese and came up with a unique
script.
Ancient Hiragana script
 Adjads
Abjads seem well suited to Semitic languages,
which are supposed to involve consonantal
“roots” and vowel “patterns” (though this
analysis is increasingly recognized as an artefact
of the Arabic writing system as it was available
to the Arab grammarians who devised it), but
are less appropriate to Indo-European languages
where vocalization is more unpredictable than
in Semitic.
Two different schemes for the obligatory
recording of vowels emerged. The first, seen
with the first attempts to write Greek with the
Phoenician abjad, probably around 800 bce,
seems accidental and inevitable:
Semitic has a larger repertoire of consonants
than Greek, and (phonemic perception being
what it is), the letters representing sounds,
especially laryngeals, not found in Greek would
be heard as indicating the succeeding vowels.
Thus Phoenician ‹]› was taken to represent /a/,
‹h› for /e/, ‹y› for /i/, ‹[› for /o/, and ‹w› for /u/.
And so the alphabet was born.
The correspondences are seen in both the
shapes of the letters and their positions in the
respective alphabetical orders. Greek
settlements used slightly varying inventories of
letters; the most significant for the history of
writing was in Italy, where the alphabet was
passed on to the Etruscans and other local
peoples, and in turn from the Etruscans to the
Romans.
Abjad Alphabet
 Abugida
The second Indo-European adaptation of the Semitic
abjad occurred in India, probably no earlier than the
third century bce (Falk 1993). Here the method was
not separate letters for vowels, but appendages – left,
right, above, or below – to the consonant letters to
designate the vowels (short other than a, and long)
and diphthongs of the Indic and Dravidian languages,
using the type Peter Daniels calls abugida.
Abugida writing
 The Indian style of writing
The Indic style of writing was carried by Buddhist
missionaries throughout Southeast Asia, where
essentially the same principle remains at work in such
diverse-looking scripts as the Thai and Lao, Burmese,
Khmer (Cambodian), and Javanese, as well as a host of
less standardized ones.
The missionaries also brought writing to Tibet late in
the first millennium ce (apparently from southern India,
though the lineage of the Tibetan script is not entirely
clear).