Writing

I INTRODUCTION
Writing, method of human intercommunication by means of arbitrary visual marks forming
a system. Writing can be achieved in either limited or full systems, a full system being one
that is capable of expressing unambiguously any concept that can be formulated in language.

II

LIMITED WRITING SYSTEMS

Limited writing systems are generally used for purposes such as keeping accounts or as
mnemonic devices for recalling significant facts or conveying general meanings. Also called
subwriting, limited systems of writing include picture writing (or pictography), ideography,
and the use of marked or unmarked objects as mnemonic devices. Such systems are
characterized by a high degree of ambiguity because there is no fixed correspondence
between the signs of the writing system and the language represented. For this reason
interpretation of a limited system is usually independent of language. The purpose of the
pictogram, ideogram, or object is to call to mind an image or impression that is subsequently
expressed in language. This is clearly the procedure involved in the Native American picture
writing that can be read easily by practically anyone with no knowledge whatever of
Native American languages. On the other hand, if interpretation of limited writing systems is
attempted without a knowledge of the cultural background of the writer, the image or
impression called to mind by the writing will be meaningless or misunderstood.

III

FULL WRITING SYSTEMS

A full writing system is capable of expressing any concept that can be formulated in
language. Therefore, full writing systems are characterized by a more or less fixed
correspondence between the signs of the writing system and elements of the language the
writing represents. The elements of language represented, then, can be words, syllables, or
phonemes (the smallest units of speech that distinguish two different utterances in a
language). Thus, writing systems can be categorized as word (or logographic), syllabic, or
alphabetic. Because full writing systems represent elements of language, knowledge of the
language written is required to understand the meaning intended by the writer. This does not
mean that a writing system is tied to one language. In fact, writing systems are rather easily
transferred from one language to another. This means only that, unlike a pictographic
system, a full system conveys no meaning to the reader without a knowledge of the
underlying language.

IV

WORD (OR LOGOGRAM) SYSTEMS

Word writing systems are characterized by many signs called logograms which represent
complete words. Such signs frequently represent a series of related words, and in many
cases, one sign represents several separate and distinct words. In purely logographic writing,
such distinctions usually remain unresolved and the writing is ambiguous. Certain types of
signs, however, can be used to resolve the ambiguity and assure correct reading of the
logogram. These signs are used as semantic and phonetic indicators and are often called
determinatives and phonetic complements. Determinatives are signs used to indicate the
class or category to which the word represented by the logogram belongs. Determinatives
are logograms themselves and are not read but serve only to indicate the semantic group,
such as gods, countries, birds, fish, verbs of motion, verbs of building, objects made of
wood, objects made of stone, and so on, to which the logogram belongs. Phonetic
complements are similar in use but more specific in that they show part or all of the
pronunciation of the word that the logogram represents. In modern alphabetic writing in
English, for example, the logogram 2 is read two. When the ordinal number is referred

to, however, the phonetic complement d is attached and the logogram, plus complement
2nd, is read second. In this example, for the first time, signs are used for purely phonetic
(or nonlogographic) purposes. In other words, the sign functions not to call to mind an idea
and the word associated with it, but to recall a sound which is part of the word that the
logogram being read represents. Originally, phonetic indicators were chosen from the
logograms that have a meaning corresponding to the desired sound. This device is known as
phonetic transfer or, more commonly, rebus writing. Like determinatives, phonetic
indicators are not to be read but serve only to facilitate the reading of the basic logogram.
Thus far, elements of language are expressed only by logograms. Such representation is
adequate for most nouns and simple verbs, but not adequate for most adjectives and adverbs,
and especially for pronouns and proper nouns such as personal names. It cannot express all
the nuances of case endings and verbal inflection. A full system of writing, as defined above,
must be capable of expressing all these if they exist in the language. Without this capability,
a purely logographic writing system cannot be classified as a full system even if it makes
use of semantic and phonetic indicators.

SYLLABIC SYSTEMS
The principle of phonetic transfer was used to overcome the limitations of logographic
writings. By using signs to represent sounds, in this case, syllables, words that had no
logographic representation could be expressed. In addition, morphemes, or case endings and
verbal inflection, could be expressed by attaching the signs representing their sounds to the
root logogram. It should be noted that, unlike phonetic indicators, such signs are to be read
and interpreted as elements of the language being written.
The combined logo-syllabic system represents the first system of full writing. Once a system
has reached a full capability of expression, the conflict in its development is between
economy of writing (number of signs required to write a given utterance), and reduction of
ambiguity. The major disadvantage of a logo-syllabic system is that it requires a very large
number of signs because the number of words in a language is quite large. Grouping all
words with similar meanings under one logogram, or using the same sign for different
words, reduces the number of signs required, but such a system still needs at least 500 or
600 signs. Furthermore, ambiguity is very likely unless indicators are used, which means
sacrificing the main advantage of having to use fewer signs per utterance. On the other hand,
the number of signs needed for a purely syllabic system can be less than 100 and is seldom
more than 200. The use of syllabic writing has the further advantage that the logograms do
not have to be interpreted by the reader because the words are written out unambiguously in
the phonetic script. The disadvantage of syllabic writing is that the system requires, on the
average, more signs to write a given utterance. In its simplest form, a syllabic system
consists only of consonant and vowel signs and signs for simple vowels.
The next step is the reduction of the syllabary, or the list of syllables, to only consonant and
vowel signs, with the vowels undifferentiated. This reduces the number of signs required to
the number of consonant sounds in the language, but increases the ambiguity in that the
correct vowel sounds have to be supplied by the reader. Because this is syllabic writing the
number of signs required to write a given utterance is the same as that for the simple syllabic
system that expresses each vowel fully. The reduced syllabic system requires many fewer
signs; therefore, each sign can be simpler. Although this type of writing is considered
alphabetic by many people, it is more accurately called semialphabetic, as it does not
indicate each phoneme of the language separately and unambiguously.

VI

ALPHABETIC SYSTEMS
The final step toward fully alphabetic writing is the separation of the consonant sounds from
the vowel sounds, and the separate writing of each. This requires a few more signs but

eliminates the ambiguity of having the reader supply the vowels. Alphabetic writing requires
the greatest number of signs for a given utterance, but the number of signs required for the
system is small enough so that the signs can still be very simple. Because each sign
represents a phoneme, the word that is intended by the writer is spelled out explicitly, and no
sounds are required to be supplied by the reader. See Alphabet.
These systems outline the theory and methods of writing, but in actual fact writing systems
do not exist in these pure forms. Elements from one type of system are almost always found
incorporated in another; an example is the number of logograms used with the modern
alphabetic writing system.

VII

HISTORY OF WRITING
Writing systems always tended to be conservative, their origins often being attributed to
divine sources. Any change or modification was met with great hesitation, and even today,
attempts to reform spelling or eliminate inconsistencies in writing conventions meet with
strong resistance. Because of this conservatism major innovations in the structure of a
writing system usually occurred when one people borrowed a system from another people.
The Akkadians, for example, adapted the syllabic portion of the Sumerian logo-syllabic
system to their own language, but retained the logograms, and used them regularly as a type
of shorthand (see Sumerian Language). When the Hittites borrowed the system from the
Akkadians for their own language, they eliminated most of the polyphonous and
homophonous syllabic signs and many of the Sumerian logograms, but used a number of
Akkadian syllabic spellings as logograms (see Hittite Language).
Archaeological discoveries suggest that Egyptian hieroglyphs may be the oldest form of
writing. The earliest evidence of an Egyptian hieroglyphic system is believed to be from
about 3300 or 3200 BC. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia also were writing before 3000 BC.
At about the same time, so-called Proto-Elamite writing developed in Elam. This system has
yet to be deciphered, and nothing can be said of its nature at the present time except that,
from the number of signs used, it is logo-syllabic. Logo-syllabic systems of writing also
developed, at a later date, in the Aegean, in Anatolia, in the Indus Valley, and in China (see
Chinese Language). From these logo-syllabic systems, syllabaries were borrowed by other
peoples to write their own languages. The syllabary in its simplest and most reduced form
(that is, signs for consonant plus any vowel) was borrowed by the Semitic peoples of
Palestine and Syria from the Egyptians, leaving behind the logograms and more complex
syllables of the Egyptian system, during the last half of the 2nd millennium BC (see Semitic
Languages). This syllabary was almost ready-made because Egyptian writing had never
expressed vowels. The earliest such semialphabetic writing is found in the so-called ProtoSinaitic inscriptions, which date back to about 1500 BC. Another such system, dated to about
1300 BC, was found at Ugarit on the northern Syrian coast, but in this case the writing was
inscribed on clay in the manner of Mesopotamian cuneiform. Similar writing systems were
developed by the other peoples of this region, and it was from the Phoenicians that the
Greeks borrowed their writing system. The Greeks took the final step of separating the
consonants from the vowels and writing each separately, thus arriving at full alphabetic
writing about 800 BC (see Greek Language). Alphabetic writing has yet to be improved upon
in terms of the definition of a full writing system. See also separate articles on all the
individual letters of the English alphabet.
Contributed
By:
Ignace Jay Gelb
R. M. Whiting

Further reading
Alphabet
Chappell, Warren. The Living Alphabet. University Press of Virginia, 1975, 1980. Brief description of
the development of the Latin alphabet, plus calligraphy instruction.
Logan, Robert K. The Alphabet Effect. St. Martin's, 1987. The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the
Development of Western Civilization (title page).
Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. Mysteries of the Alphabet. Abbeville, 1999. An illustrated history of the invention
and development of each letter of the alphabet.
Patton, Sally. Alphabetics: A History of Our Alphabet. Zephyr, 1989. For intermediate readers.
Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Viking,
1998. A detailed and absorbing examination of how alphabetic literacy reconfigured culture, religion,
and history.
Solo, Dan X. Classic Roman Alphabets: Complete Fonts. Dover, 1983. Various styles of lettering.

Writing
Crump, C. G., and Ernest Jacob, eds. Legacy of the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press, 1926. Classic
work on medieval manuscripts.
Drucker, Johanna. The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination. Thames &
Hudson, 1994. A detailed illustrated history of the development of writing; for adult readers.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800.
Trans. David Gerard. Verso, 1976, 1997. A classic history of the development of the book and its
profound effects on modernity.
Hall, David B. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. University of Massachusetts Press,
1996. Intriguing analysis of how the printed book has influenced American culture.
Martin, Henri Jean. The History and Power of Writing. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. University of Chicago
Press, 1995. Traces the development of writing through four millennia, from its beginnings up to the
current technological age.
Osley, A. S. Calligraphy and Paleography. October House, 1966. Writing styles and letter information.
Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. Thames & Hudson, 1995. Illustrated introduction to the
development of writing.
Sayce, A. H. The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions. Ares, 1977. Review of methods of
deciphering, as well as the nature of inscriptions and their relationship to ancient cultures.
Senner, Wayne M., ed. The Origins of Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 1989, 1991. How early
humankind developed writing.
Walker, C. B. Reading the Past. University of California Press, 1991. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform
to the Alphabet (title page).

Writing
form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by
convention, to some particular structural level of language.
This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of language
rather than a direct representation of thought and the fact that spoken language has a number
of levels of structure, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest

units of speech used to distinguish one word or morpheme from another), any one of which
a writing system can map onto or represent. Indeed, the history of writing is in part a
matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in
the attempt to construct an efficient, general, and economical writing system capable of
serving a range of socially valuable functions. Literacy is a matter of competence with a
writing system and with the specialized functions that written language serves in a particular
society.
A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of
visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some
structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful
unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system;
if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is
called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is
called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the
International Phonetic Association, is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a
common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie
the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.
While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing
systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.
Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as
they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the
extremely limited set of alternatives a reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of
little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to
that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of
purposes efficiently.
General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or
sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is
represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same,
will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable
words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recorded
vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic characters to be
memorized is extremely large.
Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of
speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the
sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The
word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script
dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the
most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the soundbased, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language,
while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence some
hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such writing
systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of
different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and
ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.
Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a
syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the
syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant
sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is
involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however,
should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language

like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put
are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written
expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the
content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the
absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages
vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark
inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of
meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall
meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure
of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the
efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the
invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.
Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The
smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into
the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by
passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic
element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that
constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the
syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of
representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a
small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can
generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowelconsonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological
differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which
morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a
language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes.
For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.
Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental
units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive
features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue
touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the
sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features.
Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean
Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century
and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In
Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small
marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the
articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of
the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around
some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In
addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks
to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say:
Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must
unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.
No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese,
consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based
on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore

relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets,
which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same
meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for
example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and
photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets
often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical
but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat,
meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading
process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and
efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit
than foreach sound unit.
The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes
required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing
linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved
by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and
paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the
invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties
of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.
History of writing systems
While speaking is a universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species
from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic
instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each
generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until
recently concentrated on a single aspect, increased efficiency, with the Greek invention of
the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency
is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs that can express the full range of
meanings in a language. As Eric Havelock wrote, At a stroke the Greeks provided a table of
elements of linguistic sound not only manageable because of economy, but for the first time
in the history of homo sapiens, also accurate. Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this
evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by wordbased writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized
syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.
The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique;
the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a
model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more
basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it
has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech.
The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows
the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for
new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for
nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp
distinction between the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies
require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which
of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents.
It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the
writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are
invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to

satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to
serve mnemonic purposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and
archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms but once invented could
serve aesthetic functions.
Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the
language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not
necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese
and Japanese, which have simple syllabic structure and a great number of homophones, a
writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabary or an alphabet,
would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that more recent accounts of
writing systems have stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently,
given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the
notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more
primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as
appropriate to the languages they represent.
Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development, and there are
many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once
and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be
traced back to the beginnings of symbol-making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that
Oriental writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are
two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the
Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.
Writing as a system of signs
Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system for symbolizing these symbols. A
writing system may be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents
the utterances of a language. Writing renders language visible; while speech is ephemeral,
writing is concrete and, by comparison, permanent. Both speaking and writing depend upon
the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by
someone not familiar with the linguistic structure underlying the oral form of the language.
Yet writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of
special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, which
would not be produced orally. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct
and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect. Scholars account for these
facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to
speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms
and functions. These alternative relations may be depicted as follows:
It is the fact that writing is an expression of language rather than simply a way of
transcribing speech that gives to writing, and hence to written language and to literacy, their
special properties. As long as writing was seen merely as transcription, as it was by such
pioneering linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield earlier in the 20th
century, its conceptual significance was seriously underestimated. Once writing was seen as
providing a new medium for linguistic expression, its distinctness from speech was more
clearly grasped. Scholars such as Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jack
Goody, and Walter Ong were among the first to analyze the conceptual and social
implications of using written as opposed to oral forms of communication.

Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs.
Gesturessuch as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreementare visible
signs but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures,
similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of
writing.
But the boundary between pictures and writing becomes less clear when pictures are used
conventionally to convey particular meanings. In order to distinguish pictures from pictorial
signs it is necessary to notice that language has two primary levels of structure that the
French linguist Andr Martinet referred to as the double articulation of language: the
meaning structures on one hand and the sound patterns on the other. Indeed, linguists define
grammar as a system for mappingestablishing a system of relations betweensound and
meaning. These levels of structure admit of several subdivisions, any one of which may be
captured in a writing system. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme;
one or more morphemes make up a word. Thus the word boys is composed of two
morphemes, boy and plurality. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express
larger units of meaning. Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions
and less well-defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.
The basic linguistic unit of the sound system is called a phoneme; it is a minimal, contrastive
sound unit that distinguishes one utterance from another. Phonemes may be further analyzed
in terms of a set of underlying distinctive features, features specifying the ways the sound is
physically produced by passing breath through the throat and positioning the tongue and
lips. Phonemes may be thought of as roughly equivalent to the sound segments known as
consonants and vowels, and combinations of these segments make up syllables.
Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of
meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by
some writing system or other. Writing systems, consequently, fall into two large general
classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or
morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable
or phoneme.
The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to
believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented
to express thought directly, bypassing language altogether. The 17th-century German
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect writing system, which would
reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be readable by all human beings regardless of
their mother tongues. We now know that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too
intimately related to language to be represented independently of it.
More recently there have been attempts to invent forms for communicating explicit
messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such messages are
communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus the skirted human figure painted on the
door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on the Pioneer spacecraft, the
Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside down painted on a rock near a precipitous
trail, and the visual patterns branded on range cattle are all attempts to use visual marks to
communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular language.

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure
and because they function to express one of a highly restricted range of meanings already
known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the
toilet door is an elliptical way of writing women's washroom, just as the word women
had been earlier. The plaque on the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader
already knows how to express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider
expressed the message that horses and riders should avoid the trail. And the brand can be
read as the name of the owner's ranch.
Such signs, therefore, express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by representing
meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word. They do so by expressing
these meanings elliptically. Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a
restricted set of possible meanings. While such pictorial signs could not be turned into a
general writing system, they can be extremely efficient in serving a restricted set of
functions.
The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are sufficiently great
for some scholars to maintain that they are not legitimate types of writing. These differences
are that pictorial signs are motivated, that is, they visually suggest their meanings, and that
they express whole propositions rather than single words. Other scholars would include such
signs as a form of writing because they are a conventional means for expressing a particular
linguistic meaning. Scholars agree that such a collection of signs could express only an
extremely limited set of meanings.
A similar case is the ancient mosaic found at the entrance of a house in Pompeii, depicting a
snarling dog on a chain and bearing the inscription cave canem, beware of the dog. Even
nonreaders could read the message; the picture is therefore a form of writing rather than of
picture making. Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are
so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read them.
Such reading ability is described as environmental literacy, not associated with books and
schooling.
Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such symbols as the
Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many languages, appear to
express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic structure. However, it is more
useful to think of these numerals as a particular orthography for representing the meaning
structure of these numbers rather than their sound structures. The advantages of this
orthography are that the orthography permits the user to carry out mathematical operations,
such as carrying, borrowing, and the like, and that the same orthography may be assigned
different phonological equivalents in different languages using the same number system.
Thus, the numeral 2 is pronounced two in English, deux in French, zwei in German,
and so on. Yet it represents not a thought but the word, a piece of language.
It is for these reasons that writing is said to be a system for transcribing language, not for
representing thought directly. There are, of course, other systems for representing thought,
including such activities as picture making, dance, and mime. These, however, are not
representations of ordinary language; rather, they constitute what the American philosopher
Nelson Goodman has called the languages of art. These languages, or semiotic systems,
are systems of signs that are used for expressive and representational purposes. Each of
these semiotic systems may, in turn, be represented by a notational system, a system for

representing the semiotic system. Thus writing can be defined formally as a notational
system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form.
Writing is so pervasive in everyday life that many people take it to be synonymous with
language, and this confusion affects their understanding of language. The word denotes
ambiguously both the oral form and the written form, and so people may confuse them. This
occurs, for example, when people think that the sounds of language are made up of letters.
Even Aristotle used the same word, gramma, to refer to the basic units of both speech and
writing. Yet it is important to distinguish them. People may have competence in a language
and yet know nothing about its written form. Similarly, writing is so fundamental to a
modern, literate society that its significance has often been overestimated. Since the 18th
century it has been common to identify literacy with civilization, indeed with all civil
virtues. When European countries colonized other regions they thought it as important to
teach savages to read and write as to convert them to Christianity. Modern anthropology
has helped to revise what now seems a quaint set of priorities by showing not only that there
are no genuinely primitive languages, but that differing languages mask no unbridgeable
differences between human beings. All human beings are rational, speak a language of
enormous expressive power, and live in, maintain, and transmit to their young a complex
social and moral order.
Scholars of literature have in the past half-century amassed compelling evidence to
demonstrate that a complex social order and a rich verbal culture can exist in nonliterate
societies. The American scholar Milman Parry, writing in the 1920s, showed that the
Homeric epic poems, long regarded as models of literary virtuosity, were in fact the product
not of a literate but of an oral tradition. These poems were produced by bards who could not
write and were delivered in recitals to audiences who could not read. Writing made possible
the recording of these poems, not their composition. The hard and fast dividing line that put
civilization and literacy on one side and savagery and irrationality on the other has been
abandoned. To be unlettered is no longer confused with being ignorant.
Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a
progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet. The accepted view today is that
all writing systems represent relatively optimal solutions to a large and unique set of
constraints, including the structure of the language represented, the functions that the system
serves, and the balance of advantages to the reader as opposed to the writer. Consequently,
while there are important differences between speaking and writing and between various
forms of writing, these differences vary in importance and in effect from language to
language and from society to society.
The functions of writing
Given that literacy is not a prerequisite of rationality and civilization, it may be asked why
writing systems were invented and why, when they were, they so completely displaced
preexisting oral traditions. Many accounts have been given of the dramatic impact on an
oral culture of the encounter with written text. Isak Dinesen, in her autobiographical Out
of Africa, reported on the response of Kikuyu tribesmen to their first exposures to written
texts: I learned that the effect of a piece of news was many times magnified when it was
imparted by writing. The messages that would have been received with doubt and scorn if
they had been given by word of mouth were now taken as gospel truth.

Certainly writing has been observed to displace oral traditions. The American scholar Albert
Lord wrote: When writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same purposes as the
oral narrative song, when it is employed for telling stories and is widespread enough to find
an audience capable of reading, this audience seeks its entertainment and instruction in
books rather than in the living songs of men, and the older art gradually disappears.
The adoption and use of writing systems depend primarily on their ability to preserve
language and information through time and across space. But the use of a writing system for
this purpose is shaped in part by the nature of the system and by the cultural practices in the
society that has adopted it. These uses tend, therefore, to be local and specific and
characteristic of a particular literate society.
The Canadian economist Harold Innis classified writing systems into two basic types: those
that bind through time, exemplified by Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in stone and Akkadian
cuneiform incised in clay; and those that bind across space, exemplified by the portable
papyri used by the Romans. Writing used to store information for posterity may be
considered to serve an archival function. Such writing may be used not only for
constructing, accumulating, and preserving records of political, religious, scientific, and
literary interest but also for the more mundane purpose of keeping trade accounts and
records. Writing used to transmit information across space, as in letters, encyclicals,
newspapers, and the like, may be considered to serve a communicative function. Writing
used for purely private ends, to record notes, diaries, or other personal data, may be
considered to serve a mnemonic function.
Almost any notational form may be used for mnemonic purposes, for only the person who
wrote the message needs to be able to read it. The carved notches in a wooden counting
stick or the pebbles in a counting sack corresponding to the number of cattle under the care
of a cowherd are suitable aide-mmoire, since the writer knows what the notches or pebbles
represent. But such a system could not be read by others; it would not be clear what the
notches represented or even that they represented anything a tall. For a writing system to be
communicative, the signs must be conventionalized so that the meaning can be grasped by
other readers. Such a system may be restricted to a small set of familiar messages that can be
read by a limited circle of acquaintances. But for a writing system to serve an archival
function it must be sufficiently conventionalized to permit decoding and interpretation by
readers who may know nothing about the writer or his message. It is only with the
development of explicit writing systems capable of representing the nuances conveyed in
speech that writing can be used archivally or communicatively.
Types of writing systems
A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of
visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some
structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful
unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system;
if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is
called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is
called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the
International Phonetic Association,is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a
common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie
the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.

While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing
systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.
Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as
they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the
extremely limited set of alternatives a reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of
little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to
that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of
purposes efficiently.
General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or
sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is
represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same,
will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable
words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recorded
vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic characters to be
memorized is extremely large.
Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of
speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the
sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The
word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script
dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the
most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the soundbased, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language,
while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence some
hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such writing
systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of
different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and
ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.
Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a
syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the
syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant
sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is
involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however,
should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language
like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put
are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written
expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the
content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the
absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages
vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark
inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of
meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall
meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure
of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the
efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the
invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.

Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The
smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into
the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by
passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic
element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that
constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the
syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of
representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a
small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can
generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowelconsonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological
differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which
morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a
language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes.
For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.
Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental
units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive
features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue
touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the
sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features.
Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean
Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century
and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In
Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small
marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the
articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of
the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around
some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In
addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks
to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say:
Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must
unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.
No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese,
consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based
on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore
relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets,
which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same
meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for
example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and
photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets
often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical
but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat,
meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading
process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and
efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit
than foreach sound unit.

The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes
required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing
linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved
by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and
paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the
invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties
of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.
History of writing systems
While speaking is a universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species
from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic
instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each
generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until
recently concentrated on a single aspect, increased efficiency, with the Greek invention of
the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency
is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs that can express the full range of
meanings in a language. As Eric Havelock wrote, At a stroke the Greeks provided a table of
elements of linguistic sound not only manageable because of economy, but for the first time
in the history of homo sapiens, also accurate. Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this
evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by wordbased writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized
syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.
The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It isalso unique;
the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a
model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more
basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it
has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech.
The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows
the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for
new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for
nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp
distinctionbetween the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies
require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which
of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents.
It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the
writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are
invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to
satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to
serve mnemonicpurposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and
archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms but once invented could
serve aesthetic functions.
Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the
language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not
necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese
and Japanese,which have simple syllabic structure and a great number of homophones, a
writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabaryor an alphabet,
would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that more recent accounts of

writing systems have stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently,
given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the
notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more
primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as
appropriate to the languages they represent.
Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development,and there are
many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once
and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be
traced back to the beginnings of symbol-making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that
Oriental writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are
two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the
Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.
Types of writing systems
A writing system, technically referred to as a script or orthography, consists of a set of
visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some
structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful
unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system;
if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is
called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is
called an alphabetic system. (A phonetic alphabet, such as the one devised by the
International Phonetic Association,is one designed to transcribe any oral language into a
common script.) Finally, a writing system based upon the articulatory features that underlie
the phoneme, such as voicing and place of articulation, is called a featural writing system.
While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing
systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type.
Pictorial signs, such as the informational signs at a modern international airport (insofar as
they can properly be called writing) can bear explicit linguistic messages only because of the
extremely limited set of alternativesa reader is required to choose among. Such writing is of
little use for conveying new messages since there is no convention for decoding them, and to
that extent it cannot be a general writing system. It can, however, serve a limited set of
purposes efficiently.
General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or
sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is
represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same,
will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable
words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a
recordedvocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic charactersto be
memorized is extremely large.
Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of
speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the
sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The
word paper has two syllables, pa-per. A syllabary such as Linear B, the Mycenaean script
dating from about 1400 BC, would have a graph for each of those syllables. Syllables are the
most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the sound-

based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language,
while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence
somehundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even then such
writing systems are far from explicit, for any string of syllabic graphs may be read in a
number of different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior
knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork.
Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a
syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the
syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant
sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is
involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however,
should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language
like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put
are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written
expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the
content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the
absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages
vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark
inflections, such as tense and aspect, that, while of some importance to the representation of
meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall
meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure
of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the
efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the
invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture.
Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The
smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, buta syllable may be analyzed into
the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The syllable pa is produced by
passing a column of air through the vocal chords, an action that constitutes the vocalic
element, bounded at the outset by sudden release of air through the lips, an action that
constitutes the consonantal element. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the
syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of
representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a
small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels can
generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowelconsonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent afull range of phonological
differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which
morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a
language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes.
For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient.
Featural writing systems exploit the fact that even phonemes are not the most fundamental
units of analysis of speech. Rather, phonemes may be analyzed into sets of distinctive
features. The phonemes represented by the letters n and d share the feature of the tongue
touching the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth. Featural writing systems analyze the
sounds described as consonants and vowels into their shared and distinguishing features.
Examples of writing systems that employ at least in part a featural approach are the Korean
Hangul (han'gl) script created, according to tradition, by King Sejong in the 15th century
and Pitman shorthand, a systemfor rapid writing invented in Britain in the 19th century. In

Hangul, vowels are represented by long horizontal or vertical lines distinguished by small
marks, while consonants are represented by two-dimensional signs that suggest the
articulations involved: pairs of lines representing lips together, tongue touching the roof of
the mouth, an open throat, and the like. As the phonological system is organized around
some dozen such features, an efficient script can be constructed out of 24 basic graphs. In
addition, such a script makes syllables visually discriminable by organizing them into blocks
to facilitate rapid reading. Such properties led the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson to say:
Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Han'gul must
unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.
No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese,
consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based
on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore
relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets,
which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same
meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for
example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and
photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets
often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical
but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat,
meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading
process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and
efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit
than foreach sound unit.
The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes
required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing
linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved
by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and
paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the
invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties
of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed.
Chinese writing
Chinese is a language with clearly distinguished syllables, each of which corresponds to a
meaningful unit, a morpheme. As it is an isolating language, rather than an inflected
language like Latin or, to a lesser degree, English, each morpheme is represented separately
by a separate syllable. Whereas in English one word, for example, make, yields, when
inflected, a family of related words (make, makes, making, made, etc.), in Chinese one
character would represent one morpheme (e.g., make). Because each morpheme is
represented by a different character, and because the numberof morphemes in a language is
far larger than the number of syllables, sucha writing system needs an extremely large
number of characters or graphs.
It is not known when Chinese writing originated. The earliest known samples are from the
time of the Shang dynasty (18th12th century BC), but by then it was already a highly
developed system, essentially similar to its present form. By 1400 BC the script included
some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can be read to this day. The script was fixed
in its present form during the Ch'in period (221206 BC). The earliest graphs were

schematic pictures of what they represented; the graph for man resembled a standing man,
that for woman depicted a kneeling figure, perhaps doing housework.
Because basic characters or graphs were motivated, that is, the graph was made to
resemble the object it represented, it has sometimes been concluded that Chinese writing is
ideographic, representing ideas rather than the structures of a language. It is now recognized
that the system represents the Chinese language by means of a logographic script. Each
graph or character corresponds to one meaningful unit of the language, not directly to a unit
of thought.
Although it was possible to make up simple signs representing common objects, many
words were not readily picturable. To represent such words, the phonographic principle was
adopted. A graph that pictured some object was borrowed to write a different word that
happened to sound similar. With this invention the Chinese approached the form of writing
invented by the Sumerians. However, because of the enormous number of Chinese words
that sound the same, to have carried through the phonographic principle would have resulted
in a writing system in which many of the words could be read in more than one way. That is,
a written character would be enormously ambiguous.
The solution to the problem of ambiguity of characters, a solution adopted about 213 BC,
was to distinguish two words having the same sound and represented by the same graph by
adding another graph to give a clue to themeaning of the particular word intended. Such
complex graphs or characters consist of two parts, one part suggesting the sound, the other
part the meaning. The system was then standardized so as to approach the ideal of one
distinctive graph representing each morpheme in the language.The limitation is that a
language that has thousands of morphemes would require thousands of characters. As the
characters are formed from simple lines in various orientations and arrangements, they came
to possess greatcomplexity.
Not only did the principle of the script change with time, so too did the form of the graphs.
The earliest writing consisted of carved inscriptions. Before the beginning of the Christian
Era, the script came to be written with brush and ink on paper. The result was that the shapes
of the graphs lost their pictorial, motivated quality. The brushwork allowed a great deal of
scope for aesthetic considerations.
The relation between the written Chinese language and its oral form is very different from
the analogous relation between written and spoken English. InChinese many different words
are expressed by the identical sound pattern188 different words are expressed by the
syllable /yi/while each of those words is expressed by a distinctive visual pattern. A piece
of written text read orally to another person is often quite incomprehensible because of the
large number of homophones. In conversation literate Chinese speakers frequently draw
characters in the air to distinguish between homophones. Written text, on the other hand, is
completely unambiguous. InEnglish, by contrast, writing is often thought of as a reflection,
albeit imperfect, of speech.
To make the script easier to read, a system of transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet
was adopted in 1958. The system was not intended to replace the logographic script but to
indicate the sounds of graphs in dictionaries and to supplement graphs on such things as
road signs and posters. A second reform simplified the characters by reducing the number of
strokes used in writing them. Simplification, however, tends to make the characters more

similar in appearance; thus they are more easily confused, and the value of the reform is
limited.
Most scholars now believe that neither the logographic Chinese writing system nor the
alphabetic writing system of Indo-European possesses any overall advantage. The Chinese
system requires more memorization, while the alphabet requires more analysis and
synthesis; both appear to be relatively optimal devices for the transcription of their
respective, very different, languages.
A second factor makes the use of a logographic system particularly significant for Chinese.
A single logographic system is capable of representing very different spoken forms. As was
mentioned earlier, the numerals 1, 2, and 3 are logograms that represent different words in a
number of different languages.
Chinese logographs form a common medium of communication for a vast nation because
they can be read by people speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects of Chinese. Since
the Communist Revolution thegrammar and vocabulary of modern Mandarin Chinese has
served as the standard written language.
Chinese writing system
basically logographic writing system using symbols of pictorial origin to represent words of
the Chinese language. Dictionaries of Chinese record as many as 40,000 distinct symbols
(usually called characters), but a corpus of about 10,000 (those used by Chinese
telegraphers, whorepresent them by 4-unit code groups) is sufficientfor practically all
purposes. Knowledge of at least 2,000 characters is necessary to be functionally literate in
Chinese. Particular words in most casesare represented either by one symbol intended to
express the meaning of the word or by a combination of symbols.
The Chinese writing system apparently began to develop in the early 2nd millennium BC.
The earliest known inscriptions, each of which contains between 10 and 60 characters
incised on pieces of bone and tortoiseshell that were used for oracular divination, date from
the Shang (or Yin) dynasty (18th12th century). Later stages in the development of Chinese
writing include the ku-wen (ancient figures) found in inscriptions from the late Shang
dynasty (c. 1123) and the early years of the Chou dynasty that followed. The major script of
the Chou dynasty, which ruled from 1111 to 225 BC, was the ta chuan (great seal), also
called the Chou wen (Chou script). By the end of the Chou dynasty the ta chuan had
degenerated to some extent; it was replaced c. 213BC (during the Ch'in dynasty, which ruled
from 221 to 206 BC) by the hsiao chuan (lesser seal). During this period the writing brush
was invented, and the characters acquired a more modern appearance; from this basically
modern script (called li shu or li tzu), many different styles, or hands, have developed.
The Chinese traditionally divide the characters into six types (called liu shu, six scripts),
the most common of which is hsing sheng, the type of character that combines a semantic
element (called a radical) with a phonetic element intended to remind the reader of the
pronunciation of the word. The phonetic element is usually a contracted form of another
character with the same pronunciation as that of the word intended. For example, the
characterfor k'o river is composed of the radical shui water plus the phonetic ko, the
meaning of which (fruit) is irrelevant; the combined water-ko symbol suggests the word
k'o meaning river. Seventy-five percent of all Chinese characters are of this type.

The other types of characters are hsiang hsing, characters that were originally pictographs
(these have a semantic element originally expressed by a picture, such as the character for
t'ien field, which represents a field by means of a square divided into quarters); chih shih,
characters intended to be symbolic of logical or abstract terms (e.g., erh, two, is indicated
by two horizontal lines); hui i, characters formed by a combination of elements thought to be
logically associated (e.g., the symbols for man and word are combined to represent the
word meaning true, sincere, truth); chuan chu, modifications or distortions of characters to
form new characters, usually of somewhat related meaning (e.g., the character for shan
mountain turned sideways means fou tableland); and chia chieh, characters borrowed
from (or sometimes originally mistaken for) others, usually words of different meaning but
similar pronunciation (e.g., the character for tsu foot is used for tsu to be sufficient).
Chinese characters are arranged in dictionaries according to the radicals of which they are
composed or with which they are traditionally associated. The214 radicals are arranged in
modern dictionaries according to the number of pen strokes used in writing them.
Phonetic scripts for the language have been invented, based both on Chinese characters and
on the Latin alphabet, and are now widely used. In an attempt to standardize the spelling of
Chinese in Roman languages, the Chinese government adopted the Pinyin (q.v.) system of
transliteration in 1958. This system is based on the phonetic transliteration of the Peking, or
Northern Mandarin, dialect (the major dialect in China) and is gradually replacing the
WadeGiles system (q.v.) established in the 19th century.
Japanese writing
The Japanese came into contact with Chinese culture during the Chinese Han dynasty (206
BCAD 220), and they began to write their own language in the 5th century AD, basing
their writing system on the Chinese model. But the two languages are fundamentally
different in structure; whereas Chinese words are monosyllables, Japanese words often
consist of several syllables, and whereas Chinese is an isolating language, Japanese is an
inflected language. To write such a language, the Japanese developed a mixed system, partly
logographic, based on the Chinese system, and partly syllabic, using the same characters in a
second way for their sound values. In kun writing Chinese characters were used to represent
Japanese words that have a similar meaning, while other characters were adopted to
represent sounds.
In the 8th century the phonographic principle was applied more systematically in a writing
system called man'yxgana, a syllabary very similar in form to the Semitic alphabet.
However, given the large number of homophones and the fact that man'yogana was
combined with kun writing, it was almost impossible to establish a single correct reading of
a text. Indeed, scribes took pride in being able to read the same text in various ways.
In the 9th or 10th century two sets of syllabic signs evolved, one called hiragana, or plain
kana, which consists of simplified outlines, written cursively, of Chinese characters, the
other called katakana, or partial kana, which consists of carefully written parts of the
original Chinese characters. Writing with the full Chinese characters is called kanji. The two
sets of kana characters are limited as are other syllabaries in that they are not unambiguous;
kanji are unambiguous but are very complex visually. Consequently, modern Japanese
writing uses a combination of characters from all three of these systems. In 1946 a
standardizing reform established a limited list of 1,850 kanji (enlarged to 1,945 in 1981) and

encouraged the use of kana for all other words. Modern written Japanese uses many more
hiragana graphs than kanji in a piece of text.
Even with modern reforms, written Japanese is difficult to read unambiguously because of
the great degree of homophony in the vocabulary. The word kan, for example, means
sweet, be affected, print, be accustomed to, view, investigate, slow, tube,
enjoy, a volume, Chinese, and Korean, among others. As a result a reader must
know rather precisely whatis being discussed in order to read a text accurately. Poetry, in
particular, takes quite a different form in Japanese than in Indo-European languages.
Korean writing
Korea, too, adopted its institutions and culture from the Chinese. Until the 20th century the
normal medium of written communication was in Chinese, using the Chinese writing
system. But beginning in about the 6th century theChinese script was adapted to write
Korean. The application of Chinese script to the Korean language created problems almost
identical to those that arose in using Chinese to write the Japanese language. Yet the
borrowed kanji script continues to be used for some purposes to this day. The most
remarkable development in Korean writing was the invention of Hangul (han'gl) by King
Sejong in 1446. It is a featural script consisting of some 28 letters that have a systematic
visual structure directly related to the phonetic features of the phonemes. This writing
system owes nothing to the Chinese orthography (see above Types of writing systems:
Chinese writing).
Because the principles employed by various writing systems vary greatly and because the
languages they represent are organized so differently, it is difficult to state any general
principles of the evolution of writing systems. Yetit appears that they all began with
motivated pictorial signs representing objects. To turn such signs into a general orthography
required the recognition that the signs must represent sound patterns and the consequent
invention of the phonographic principle. Depending on the language, such sound-based
systems developed in two directions. Westernscripts went furthest in the phonographic
direction, representing words by means of syllables and syllables by means of consonantal
writing systems and eventually developing a full vocalic alphabet. Eastern scripts preserved
the logographic principle even though some of the logographs were sound-based; each word
was represented by a distinctive visual character. Only one practical orthography, Korean,
adopted a featural system, and that invention bore little or no relation to neighbouring
orthographies.
Literacy: the uses of writing
The rise of literacy
The invention of devices for representing language is inextricably related to issues of
literacy; that is, to issues of who can use the script and what it can be used for. Competence
with written language, both in reading and writing, is known as literacy. High levels of
literacy are required for using scripts for awide range of somewhat specialized functions.
When a large number of individuals in a society are competent in using written language to
serve these functions, the whole society may be referred to as a literate society.

Just as scripts have a history, so, too, does literacy have a history. This history closely
reflects the increasing number of ways in which written materials have been used and the
increasing number of readers who have been able to use them. Scripts were elaborated to
serve new purposes; more importantly, new kinds of writing systems permitted them to
serve a wider range of purposes by a larger number of individuals.
Although the uses of writing reflect a host of religious, political, and social factors and
hence are not determined simply by orthography, two dimensions of the script are important
in understanding the growth of literacy: learnability and expressive power. Learnability
refers to the ease with which the script can be acquired, and expressive power refers to the
resources of the script for unambiguously expressing the full range of meanings available in
the oral language. These two dimensions are inversely related to each other. Simple,
restricted scripts are readily learned. Pictographic signs such as those used in
environmental writing and logographic scripts with a limited set of characters are easiest
to learn and, indeed, are acquired more or less automatically by children. Syllabaries such as
the Cree syllabary are reported to be learnable in a day, while the indigenous Liberian Vai
syllabary is learned in a few days. Consonantal scripts and alphabets are difficult to learn
and usually require a few years of schooling. Full logographic systems, such as Chinese, or
mixed systems, such as Japanese, are difficult to acquire because they require the
memorization of thousands of distinctive characters. Once learned, however,they appear to
function as well as alphabets.
But pictographic signs and logographic scripts with a limited, readily learnable set of graphs
are restricted to expressing a limited range of meanings. Syllabaries are highly ambiguous
and hence dependent on knowledge not only of the script but also on the likely content of
the message. Syllabaries therefore serve a restricted set of functions, primarily personal
correspondence. They are of limited use in expressing novel meanings that could be read in
the same way by all readers of the script. Consonantal and alphabetic writing systems can
express essentially all the lexical and grammatical meanings in the language (but not the
intonation) and are thus highly suitable for the expression of original meanings. They
constitute an ideal medium for technical, legal, literary, and scientific texts that must be read
in the same way by readers dispersed in both time and space. Some scholars have held that
the high degree of literacy in the West is a consequence of the optimality of the alphabet in
balancing the two dimensions of learnability and expressive power. Such generalizations,
however, ignore the fact that the optimal balance may differ from language tolanguage. A
consonantal writing system is almost as complete for Hebrew as the alphabet is for Greek,
but a consonantal writing system would be hopelessly ambiguous for Greek. Similarly, a
syllabary or an alphabet wouldbe quite useless for Chinese, a language with a staggering
degree of homophony. Logographic systems achieve a comparable level of explicitness by
the addition of new characters, but the ease of addition is traded off against the ease of
acquisition. Instead of attempting to determinewhether one system is better than another, it is
perhaps more reasonable toassume that each script is optimal for the language it represents
and for thefunctions it has evolved to serve.
The ease of acquisition of a script is an important factor in determining whether a script
remains the possession of an elite or whether it can be democratized, that is, turned into a
possession of ordinary people. Syllabaries are readily learned, but their residual ambiguity
tends to restrict their uses. Alphabets have been viewed by many historians as decisive in the
democratization of writing; alphabetic writing could become a possession of ordinary people
and yet serve a full range of functions. However, democratization of a script appears to have

more to do with the availability of reading materials and of instruction in reading and the
perceived relevance of literacy skills to the readers. Even in a literate society,most readers
learn to read only a narrow range of written materials; specialized materials, such as those
pertaining to science or government, remain the domain of elites who have acquired
additional education.
The second factor determining the social breadth of the use of writing is the range of
functions that a script serves. The functions served are directly related to the orthography.
Early forms of writing served an extremely narrow range of functions and were wholly
unsuitable for others. While tokens served for simple record keeping, and early Sumerian
writing was useful for a range of administrative purposes, a relatively complete script is
required for writing histories, edicts, treaties, and scientific and literary works that, to be
useful, must be read in the same way by all readers. Considerable scholarly controversy
surrounds the question of the role of the invention of more complete or explicit scripts, such
as the alphabet, in the evolution of these more specialized uses of language. If the alphabet
were decisive, onecould look for the basis of many of the particular features of Western
culture in the invention of an alphabetic orthography.
This question is far from resolved. Historically, the rise of cities coincided with the
development of a script suitable for serving bureaucratic purposes. Later, the scientific and
philosophical tradition that originated in classical Greece and that prevails in the West to this
day developed along with the alphabet. Many writers, including Eric Havelock, have
maintained that the alphabet was a decisive factor in the cultural development of the West.
Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong have claimed that the rise of literacy and the decline of
orality in the later Middle Ages were fundamental to the culturalflowering known as the
Renaissance.
It is perhaps characteristic of alphabet-based conceptions of literacy to drawa strict
distinction between reading and interpreting. As interpretation came to be seen as
interpolation into or distortion of the text, the attempt was made to write texts in such a
manner as to reduce the possibility of variant interpretations. This resulted in the attempt to
write texts with univocal meanings, texts that mean neither more nor less than what they say.
To achieve this required the formalization of grammatical structures, the conventionalization
of meanings of terms, and the invention of standard punctuation. Such textual developments
were especially important for the specialized functions of science and philosophy. The
distinction between meaning and interpretation fostered the idea that texts have a literal
meaning, that knowledge can be completely expressed by means of such literal meanings,
and that texts can be autonomous and objective. In the Western tradition, knowledge is
treated as if it were an ideal text, as something that is regarded by most learners as given
rather than created. These assumptions about meaning were important to both the literary
and the scientific traditions that took form in western Europe in the 17th century and that
continue to this day.
The particular form of writing, whether logographic, syllabic, or alphabetic, is less important
than the existence of some form that is general enough to serve a full range of purposes.
Literate societies, whether Chinese or Sumerian, have always been esteemed by nonliterate
societies, which have borrowed heavily from them. Thus the Romans borrowed Greek
literacy, andthe Japanese and Koreans borrowed Chinese literacy. Once adopted and used for
administrative, scientific, legal, and literary purposes, literacy altered the society that it was
part of in a variety of ways.

Writing allows exactly repeatable statements to be circulated widely and preserved. It allows
readers to scan a text back and forth and to study, compare, and interpret at their leisure. It
allows writers to deliberate over word choice and to construct lists, tables, recipes, and
indexes. It fosters an objectified sense of time, a linear conception of space. It separates the
message from the author and from the context in which it was written, thereby
decontextualizing, or universalizing the meaning of, language. It allows the creation of
new forms of verbal structure, like the syllogism, and of numerical structures, like the
multiplication table. When writing becomes a predominant institutional and archival form it
has contributed to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by
skepticism and science. Writing has permitted the development of extensive bureaucracy,
accounting, and legal systems organized on the basis of explicit rules and procedures.
Writing has replaced face-to-face governance with written law and depersonalized
administrative procedures. And, on the other hand, it has turned writers from scribes into
authors and thereby contributed to the recognition of the importance of the thoughts of
individualsand consequently to the development of individualism.
Literacy and schooling
Literacy and schooling
Whereas oral language is learned quite independently of whether it is taughtor not, literacy
is largely dependent upon teaching. While some local or indigenous scripts are taught
relatively informally by parents or someone who knows the script well, widespread or
universal literacy is dependent upon schooling. Indeed, in many societies schooling and
literacy have been almost synonymous. Schools in such diverse places as Sumer and China
developed concurrently with the development of a full writing system and were concerned
primarily with teaching first adults and later children to read and write. And it is
inconceivable that modern, technological societies could survive without schools to develop
high levels of literacy.
Although schooling is critical to the development of literacy, it is not, by itself, sufficient.
Historians have shown that the level of literacy produced by the schools of any society is
directly tied to the functions and levels of literacy in the society as a whole. Consequently, it
is unrealistic to expect that a modern, literate society could be created simply through
establishing schools and teaching children to read. Schools tend to reflect the society rather
than to change it dramatically. Schooling in Western societies is successful in achieving
relatively high levels of literacy in part because of theliteracy practices in the larger society.
When compulsory schooling was introduced in Britain, Europe, and America in the 19th
century, it was nurtured by an environment of lay literacy in which as much as 75 percent
of the population could use written materials for such informal purposes as keeping diaries,
reading and writing notes and letters, and personal record keeping. Such a climate of
widespread practical literacy is important to the effectiveness of schooling. The relation
between literate practices in the home and the level of literacy achieved by children in the
school has been amply documented.
It is common to think of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. In part such thinking
is a consequence of the naive assumption that alphabetic literacy is a matter simply of
decoding graphs into sounds and vice versa. In fact, literacy involves competence in reading,
writing, and interpreting texts ofvarious sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher
levels of comprehension and interpretation. These higher levels depend upon knowledge
both of specialized uses of language and of specialized bodies of knowledge. The intimate

relations among language, literacy, and specialized bodies of knowledge have contributed to
the identification of literacy with schooling.
As different scripts serve different functions and make different demands upon readers, it is
a complex matter to define literacy in universal terms and so to judge the literacy levels of a
society at different periods or to compare one society with another. Scripts that, because of
incompleteness or inexplicitness, rely heavily upon the prior knowledge of reader and writer
remain the domain of a specialized elite, as did cuneiform, or they are used for rather
restricted purposes, as is Cree syllabic. Scripts that are relatively explicit and complete
permit a reader who is unfamiliar with a text to read it in a reliable way and hence can be
used for a much broader range of functions.
The form of the script may be less crucial than the range of functions a scriptserves and the
breadth of its readership, that is, the degree of literacy of the society. With the growth of
readership come increased production of materials to be read, increased number of social
functions the script is usedfor, and the invention of new, more specialized genres of writing.
The novel form, for example, was invented in Europe only in the 17th century, when there
was a broadly based reading public. Other specialized uses of writing developed much
earlier. As European societies became more literate during the Middle Ages, writing came to
be used for functions that earlier had been performed by oral language and by ritual.
Indenture of servants, deeding of property, evidence at trials, and accounts of the lives of
saints all came to be functions of written texts. As literacy began to be required for these
vital social purposes, oral language came to be seen as loose and unruly and lacking in social
authority. And people who could not read and write came to be regarded as rude and
ignorantin short, unlettered.
Rising levels of literacy in Europe were closely related to great social transformations,
notably the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science. The right to read the
Bible for oneself and to discover its meaning was the fundamental tenet of Protestantism,
and the private study and verification of written texts was important to science. Both of
these functions were enormously facilitated by the development of printing from movable
type and by the translation of important books from scholarly Latin into vernacular
languages. With the increase in the uses of writing and the spread of printing there were
more texts to read. Concurrently, European society as a whole became more literate in two
ways: more individuals learned to read and write their native tongues, and even those who
could notthemselves read and write came to rely upon written documents as loci of authority
and significance. In the 18th and 19th centuries in western Europe and in America, even
before the establishment of compulsory schooling, more than half of the population had
some competence in reading and writing. Compulsory schooling had, by the end of the 19th
century, made some level of literacy more or less universal.
Partly because of the close tie between schooling and literacy, literacy levelsare often
defined exclusively in terms of the number of years that a person has attended school.
Educational institutions usually differentiate a basic, orfunctional, level of literacy, roughly
equivalent to six years of schooling, from a high level of literacy, a level of competence
roughly equivalent to 10 to 12 years of schooling. Such categorical distinctions have been
criticized because they are insensitive to the diversity of particular uses of literacy in even a
literate society and the irrelevance of the school to many of them. Many people incapable of
or uninterested in reading continuous texts pertaining to science and literature nonetheless

read menus, catalogs, letters, labels, warnings, invoices, and a range of other materials of
relevance and interest to them.
Moreover, literacy levels are judged against a sliding standard. The more literate the society
becomes, the higher a standard of literacy is judged as functional. In Sweden in the 17th
century a person was judged as literate, and allowed to marry, if he could read bits of the
catechism and sign the church registry. In the United States at the time of World War II,
when soldiers were screened for military service the army defined a minimal level of
literacy as that normally achieved in the fifth grade (about 10 years of age).By 1966 the
criterion of functional literacy in the United States had been raised to completion of
secondary school by the Adult Education Act passed by Congress in that year.
Using this criterion, some writers have claimed that 25 percent of U.S. adults are
functionally illiterate. Some commentators see in such figures a social problem of great
importance and promote various programs of educational reform intended to produce higher
levels of literacy. However, most scholars criticize such statistics as meaningless on two
grounds. First, they are based on a questionable identification of competence with success in
a single institution, the school, rather than in the relevant contexts of application. Second,
they do not adequately reflect the extent to which even those individuals who are classified
as functionally illiterate depend upon and participate in literate activities in modern
societies. Such persons know how to participate in a great many literacy-based institutions
how to read signs, labels, and letters, how to deal with ballots, how to sign checks and write
notesif not the special literate skills usually acquired in school. More important, even if
they are not highly skilled in literate activities they know what it is to be literate, what texts
are, how they are written and interpreted, how they accumulate to form a tradition, and
howthey are consulted and used in multiple ways in a literate society.
As an alternative to simply identifying levels of literacy with years of schooling, some
scholars have distinguished levels of literacy in another way. Environmental or lay literacy is
the term used to designate that form of unspecialized competence involved in generally
dealing with a literate environment. Such literacy need never be taught. It is a type of
literacy that is acquired through participating in a literate environment in which written
signs, labels, trademarks, headlines, sports scores, and the like are ubiquitous. Such a
general, if low, level of literacy, which stands somewhat apart from the particular skills of
reading and writing, first arose in Europe in the later Middle Ages with the development of
what the Canadian historian Brian Stock refers to as textual communities. A textual
community consisted of a band of believers formed around an interpreter who read and
interpreted religious texts. Because the authority of the teacher rested in the text rather than
in the church, members of the community came to know certain general truths about texts
and about writing: that they could be read, understood, studied, consulted; that they were
more reliable than hearsay; that they were permanent; and that they possessed authority.
Everyone in a literate society is literate in this sense; all know the nature, uses, and functions
of writing even if they do not personally practice it.
A literate society is also dependent upon the development of elite literacy, a high level of
literate competence, possessed by a relatively small percentage of the population, in such
specialized fields of endeavour as science, law, or literature. High levels of literate
competence involve learninga somewhat specialized vocabulary as well as the nuances of
meaning that are relevant to lexical choice. It is estimated that literate people have a reading
vocabulary, consisting of words that are encountered only in readingand writing, that may be

more than double the size of their ordinary speakingvocabulary. In addition to specialized
vocabularies, high levels of literate competence involve knowledge of specialized
grammatical constructions that serve to set out explicitly the logical form of an argument
and of specialized genres or literary forms such as description, explanation, argument, and
instructions that can be used for building complex linguistic structures or genres, such as
narrative and expository texts. These specialized skills require for mastery many years of
formal schooling. Once such forms are acquired in literate contexts they can also be used in
speech. For this reason literacy is not tied exclusively to writing; just as one can write in an
essentially oral style, so one can speak in a manner characteristic of written language.
Literacy makes it possible to speak a written language.
David R. Olson
Egyptian writing
The ancient Egyptian writing was a logosyllabic one, having symbols representing either
complete words or syllables of words; identical signs were used for syllables with identical
consonants but different vowels. According to the external form of the signs, the writing is
classified as hieroglyphic when it is found on inscriptions on stone, metal, and other hard
surfaces and as hieratic and later demotic when it is used for cursive writing on papyrus
manuscripts. Typologically the three forms of writing are identical. Coptic was written in an
alphabet based on Greek and partly on Demotic. There is a considerable literature in
Egyptian and in Coptic (in the latter, mostly of a religious nature; see also hieroglyphic
writing).
Hermetic writing
also called Hermetica, works of revelation on occult, theological, and philosophical subjects
ascribed to the Egyptian god Thoth (Greek Hermes Trismegistos [Hermes the ThriceGreatest]), who was believed to be the inventor of writing and the patron of all the arts
dependent on writing. The collection, written in Greek and Latin, probably dates from the
middle of the 1st to the end of the 3rd century AD. It was written in the form of Platonic
dialogues and falls into two main classes: popular Hermetism, which deals with astrology
and the other occult sciences; and learned Hermetism, which is concerned with theology
and philosophy.
From the Renaissance until the end of the 19th century, popular Hermetic literature received
little scholarly attention. More recent study, however, has shown that its development
preceded that of learned Hermetism and that it reflects ideas and beliefs that were widely
held in the early Roman Empire and are therefore significant for the religious and
intellectual history of the time.
In the Hellenistic age there was a growing distrust of traditional Greek rationalism and a
breaking down of the distinction between science and religion. Hermes-Thoth was but one
of the gods and prophets (chiefly Oriental) to whom men turned for a divinely revealed
wisdom.
In this period the works ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos were primarily on astrology; to
these were later added treatises on medicine, alchemy (TabulaSmaragdina [Emerald
Tablet], a favourite source for medieval alchemists), and magic. The underlying concept of
astrologythat the cosmos constituted a unity and that all parts of it were interdependent

was basic also to the otheroccult sciences. To make this principle effective in practice (and
Hermetic science was intensely utilitarian), it was necessary to know the laws of
sympathy and antipathy by which the parts of the universe were related. But because these
assumed affinities did not, in fact, exist and hence could not be discovered by ordinary
scientific methods, recourse had to be made to divine revelation. The aim of Hermetism, like
that of Gnosticism (a contemporary religious-philosophical movement), was the deification
or rebirth of man through the knowledge (gnosis) of the one transcendent God,the world,
and men.
The theological writings are represented chiefly by the 17 treatises of the Corpus
Hermeticum, by extensive fragments in the writings of Stobaeus, and by a Latin translation
of the Asclepius, preserved among the works of Apuleius. Though the setting of these is
Egyptian, the philosophy is Greek. The Hermetic writings, in fact, present a fusion of
Eastern religious elements with Platonic, Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean philosophies. It is
unlikely, however, that there was any well-defined Hermetic community, or church.
Hermetism was extensively cultivated by the Arabs, and through them it reached and
influenced the West. There are frequent allusions to Hermes Trismegistos in late medieval
and in Renaissance literature.
Cuneiform
system of writing used in the ancient Middle East. The name, a coinage from Latin and
Middle French roots meaning wedge-shaped, has been the modern designation from the
early 18th century onward. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant
writing system in the ancient Middle East. Its active history comprised the last three
millennia BC; its long development and geographic expansion involved numerous
successive cultures and languages; and its overall significance as an international
graphicmedium of civilization is second only to that of the Phoenician-Greek-Latin
alphabet.
Origin and character of cuneiform
The origins of cuneiform may be traced back approximately to the end of the 4th millennium
BC. At that time the Sumerians, a people of unknown ethnic and linguistic affinities,
inhabited southern Mesopotamia and the region west of the mouth of the Euphrates known
as Chaldea. While it does not follow that they were the earliest inhabitants of the region or
the true originators of their system of writing, it is to them that the first attested traces of
cuneiform writing are conclusively assigned. The earliest written records in the Sumerian
language are pictographic tablets from Uruk (Erech), evidently lists or ledgers of
commodities identified by drawings of the objects and accompanied by numerals and
personal names. Such word writing was able to express only the basic ideas of concrete
objects. Numerical notions were easily rendered by the repetitional use of strokes or circles.
However, the representation of proper names, for example, necessitated an early recourse to
the rebus principlei.e., the use of pictographic shapes to evoke in the reader's mind an
underlying sound formrather than the basic notion of the drawn object. This brought about a
transition from pure word writing to a partial phonetic script. Thus, for example, the picture
of a hand came to stand not only for Sumerian u (hand) but also for the phonetic syllable
u in any required context. Sumerianwords were largely monosyllabic, so the signs generally
denoted syllables, and the resulting mixture is termed a word-syllabic script. The inventory
of phonetic symbols henceforth enabled the Sumerians to denote grammaticalelements by

phonetic complements added to the word signs (logograms or ideograms). Because

Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, several logograms frequently
yielded identical phonetic values and are distinguished in modern transliteration(as, for
example, ba, b, b, ba4). Because a logogram often represented several related notions with
different names (e.g., sun, day, bright), it was capable ofassuming more than one
phonetic value (this feature is called polyphony).
In the course of the 3rd millennium the writing became successively more cursive, and the
pictographs developed into conventionalized linear drawings. Due to the prevalent use of
clay tablets as writing material (stone, metal, or wood also were employed occasionally), the
linear strokes acquired a wedge-shaped appearance by being pressed into the soft clay with
the slanted edge of a stylus. Curving lines disappeared from writing, and the normal order of
signs was fixed as running from left to right, without any word-divider. This change from
earlier columns running downward entailed turning the signs on one side.
Spread and development of cuneiform
Before these developments had been completed, the Sumerian writing system was adopted
by the Akkadians, Semitic invaders who established themselves in Mesopotamia about the
middle of the 3rd millennium. In adapting the script to their wholly different language, the
Akkadians retained the Sumerian logograms and combinations of logograms for more
complex notions but pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept
the phonetic values but extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple
types (open or closed syllables like ba or ab). Many more complex syllabic values of
Sumerian logograms (of the type kan,mul, bat) were transferred to the phonetic level, and
polyphony became an increasingly serious complication in Akkadian cuneiform (e.g., the
original pictograph for sun may be read phonetically as ud, tam, t, par, laN, Ni).
TheAkkadian readings of the logograms added new complicated values. Thus the sign for
land or mountain range (originally a picture of three mountain tops) has the phonetic
value kur on the basis of Sumerian but also mat and ad from Akkadian m(tu (land) and
ad (mountain). No effort was made until very late to alleviate the resulting confusion,
and equivalent graphies like ta-am and tam continued to exist side by side throughout the
long history of Akkadian cuneiform.
The earliest type of Semitic cuneiform in Mesopotamia is called the Old Akkadian, seen for
example in the inscriptions of the ruler Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2279 BC). Sumer, the
southernmost part of the country, continued to be a loose agglomeration of independent citystates until it was united by Gudea of Lagash (died c. 2124 BC) in a last brief manifestation
of specifically Sumerian culture. The political hegemony then passed decisively to the
Akkadians, and King Hammurabi of Babylon (died 1750 BC) unified all of southern
Mesopotamia. Babylonia thus became the great and influential centre of Mesopotamian
culture. The Code of Hammurabi is written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which developed
throughout the shiftingand less brilliant later eras of Babylonian history into Middle and
New Babylonian types. Farther north in Mesopotamia the beginnings of Assur were
humbler. Specifically Old Assyrian cuneiform is attested mostly in the records of Assyrian
trading colonists in central Asia Minor (c. 1950 BC; the so-called Cappadocian tablets) and
Middle Assyrian in an extensive Law Code and other documents. The Neo-Assyrian period
was the great era of Assyrian power, and the writing culminated in the extensive records
from thelibrary of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (c. 650 BC).

The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the 3rd millennium,
when the country of Elam in southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture
and adopted the system of writing. The Elamite sideline of cuneiform continued far into the
1st millennium BC, when it presumably provided the Indo-European Persians with the
external model for creating a new simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old
Persian language. The Hurrians in northern Mesopotamia and around the upper stretches of
the Euphrates adopted Old Akkadian cuneiform around 2000 BC and passed it on to the
Indo-European Hittites, who had invaded central Asia Minor at about that time.
In the 2nd millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia, frequently in somewhat distorted and
barbarous varieties, became a lingua franca of international intercourse in the entire Middle
East, and cuneiform writing thus became a universal medium of written communication. The
political correspondence of the era was conducted almost exclusively in that language and
writing. Cuneiform was sometimes adapted, as in the consonantal script of the Canaanite
city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast (c. 1400 BC), or simply taken over, as in the inscriptions
of the kingdom of Urartu or Haldi in the Armenian mountains from the 9th to 6th centuries
BC; the language is remotely related to Hurrian, and the script is a borrowed variety of NeoAssyrian cuneiform. Even after the fall of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms in the 7th
and 6th centuries BC, when Aramaic had become the general popular language, rather
decadent varieties of Late Babylonian and Assyrian survived as written languages in
cuneiform almost down to the time of Christ.
Influence of cuneiform
The main type of cuneiform, with its inventory of ideograms (including determinatives or
classifiers) and phonetic signs, is a word-syllabic system like the Egyptian, hieroglyphic
Hittite, Minoan-Mycenaean, proto-Elamite, andproto-Indic. The Sumerian system seems to
be the oldest. To what extent it stimulated the origin or influenced the development of the
others is a difficultproblem connected with the monogenesis or polygenesis (common or
multiple origin) of writing. The Phoenician consonantal script provided the new typological
pattern on which the Ugaritic and Old Persian systems wereconstructed, keeping only the
outer likeness of the wedge form.
Heiroglyphic writing
a system that employs characters in the form of pictures. These individual signs, called
hieroglyphs, may be read either as pictures, as symbols for pictures, or as symbols for
sounds.
The name hieroglyphic (from the Greek word for sacred carving) is first encountered in
the writings of Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC). Earlier, other Greeks had spoken of
sacred signs when referring to Egyptian writing.Among the Egyptian scripts, the Greeks
labeled as hieroglyphic the script that they found on temple walls and public monuments, in
which the characters were pictures sculpted in stone. The Greeks distinguished this script
from two other forms of Egyptian writing that were written with ink on papyrus or on other
smooth surfaces. These were known as the hieratic, which was still employed during the
time of the ancient Greeks for religious texts, and the demotic, the cursive script used for
ordinary documents.
Hieroglyphic, in the strict meaning of the word, designates only the writing on Egyptian
monuments. The word has, however, been applied for about 100 years to the writing of other

peoples, insofar as it consists of picture signs used as writing characters. The name
hieroglyphics is, for example, always used to designate the scripts of the Indus civilization
and of the Hittites, who also possessed other scripts, in addition to the Mayan, the Incan, and
Easter Island writing forms, and also the signs on the Phaistos Disk on Crete. Colloquially,
the word hieroglyphics has been extended to mean any sort of illegible or barely legible
writing.
Because of their pictorial form, hieroglyphs were difficult to write and were used only for
monument inscriptions. They were usually supplemented in the writing of a people by other,
more convenient scripts. Among living writing systems, hieroglyphic scripts are no longer
used.
This article is concerned only with Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
Development of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
The most ancient hieroglyphs date from the end of the 4th millennium BC and comprise
annotations to the scenes cut in relieffound on slabs of slate in chapels or tombsthat had
been donated as votive offerings. Although by no means all of these earliest signs can be
read today, it is nonetheless probable that these forms are based on the same system as the
later classical hieroglyphs. In individual cases, it can be said with certainty that it is not the
copied object that is designated but rather another word phonetically similar to it. This
circumstance means that hieroglyphs were from the very beginning phonetic symbols. An
earlier stage consisting exclusively of picture writing using actual illustrations of the
intended words cannot be shown to have existed in Egypt; indeed, such a stage can with
great probability be ruled out. No development from pictures to letters took place;
hieroglyphic writing was never solely a system of picture writing. It canalso be said with
certainty that the jar marks (signs on the bottom of clay vessels) that occur at roughly the
same period do not represent a primitive form of the script. Rather, these designs developed
in parallel fashion to hieroglyphic writing and were influenced by it.
It is not possible to prove the connection of hieroglyphs to the slightly older cuneiform
characters used by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia. Such a relationship is
improbable because the two scripts are based on entirely different systems. What is
conceivable is a general tendency toward words being fixed by the use of signs, without
transmission of particular systems.
Invention and uses of hieroglyphic writing
The need to identify a pictorial representation with a specific, unique event, such as a hunt
or a particular battle, led to the invention of hieroglyphic writing. Hieroglyphs added to a
scene signified that this illustration represented a particular war rather than an unspecified
one or war in general. This new attitude toward time and toward history as unique events in
time led to the invention of hieroglyphic writing. The system first appeared only in
connection with relief depictions, which they explained by means of place-names.
Beginning in the 1st dynasty (c. 2925c. 2775 BC), images of persons were also annotated
with their names or titles, a further step towardexpressing individuality and uniqueness. The
so-called annalistic tablets of the first two dynasties were pictorial representations of the
events of a year with specifically designated personal names, places, and incidents. For

example, accompanying a scene of the pharaoh's triumph over his enemiesis the annotation
the first occasion of the defeat of the Libyans. Simultaneously, the writing of the
Egyptians began to appear unaccompanied by pictorial representations, especially on
cylindrical seals.These roller-shaped incised stones were rolled over the moist clay of jar
stoppers. Their inscription prevented the sealed jar from being covertly opened and at the
same time described its contents and designated the official responsible for it. In the case of
wine, its origin from a specific vineyard and often also the destination of the shipment were
designated, and, as a rule, so was the name of the reigning king.
From the stone inscriptions of the 1st dynasty, only individual names are known, these being
mainly the names of kings. In the 2nd dynasty, titles andnames of offerings appear, and, at
the end of this dynasty, sentences occur for the first time. The discovery of a blank papyrus
scroll in the grave of a high official, however, shows that longer texts could have been
written much earlier; i.e., since the early part of the 1st dynasty.

Relationship of writing and art

The form of these hieroglyphs of the archaic period (the 1st to 2nd dynasty) corresponds
exactly to the art style of this age. Although definite traditions orconventions were quickly
formed with respect to the choice of perspectivee.g., a hand was depicted only as a palm,
an eye or a mouth inscribed only in front viewthe proportions remained flexible. The
prerequisite of every writing system is a basic standardization, but such a standardization is
not equivalent to a canon (an established body of rules and principles) in the degree of
stylistic conformity that it requires. A recognized canon of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
arose in the 3rd dynasty and was maintained until the end of the use of the script.
In that hieroglyphic signs represented pictures of living beings or inanimate objects, they
retained a close connection to the fine arts. The same models formed the basis of both
writing and art, and the style of the writing symbols usually changed with the art style. This
correspondence occurred above all because the same craftsmen painted or incised both the
writing symbols and the pictures. Deviations from the fine arts occurred when the writing,
which was more closely bound to convention, retained patterns that the fine arts had
eliminated. The face in front view is an example of this. This representation, apart from very
special instances, was eventually rejected asan artistic form, the human face being shown
only in profile. The front view ofthe face was, however, retained as a hieroglyph from the
archaic period to the end of the use of hieroglyphic writing. Similar cases involve the
depictionof various tools and implements. Although the objects themselves fell out of use in
the course of historye.g., clubs used as weaponstheir representations, mainly
misunderstood, were preserved in the hieroglyphic script. The hieroglyphs corresponding to
objects that had disappeared from daily life were therefore no longer well known and were
often distorted beyond recognition. But the style of representation in the hieroglyphs still
remained closely bound to the art of the respective epoch. Thus there appeared taut, slender
forms or sensuous, fleshy ones, or even completely bloated characters, according to the art
style of the period.
Media for hieroglyphic writing

In historical times (2800 BCAD 300), hieroglyphic writing was used for inscribing stone
monuments and appears in Egyptian relief techniques, both high relief and bas-relief; in
painted form; on metal, sometimes in cast form and sometimes incised; and on wood. In
addition, hieroglyphs appear in the most varied kinds of metal and wood inlay work. All of
these applications correspond exactly with the techniques used in fine art, and the same
craftsmen who produced the works of art painted or incised the hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Hieroglyphic texts are found primarily on the walls of temples and tombs, butthey also
appear on memorials and gravestones, on statues, on coffins, and on all sorts of vessels and
implements. Hieroglyphic writing was used as much for secular textshistorical
inscriptions, songs, legal documents, scientific documentsas for religious subject matter
cult rituals, myths, hymns, grave inscriptions of all kinds, and prayers. These inscriptions
were,of course, only a decorative monumental writing, unsuitable for everyday purposes.
For popular use, hieratic script was developed, an abbreviated form of the picture symbols
such as would naturally develop in writing with brush and ink on smooth surfaces like
papyrus, wood, and limestone.
Writing and religion
The influence of religious concepts upon hieroglyphic writing was confined to two cases. In
the 3rd millennium, certain signs were avoided or used in garbled form in grave inscriptions
for fear that the living beings represented by these signs could harm the deceased who lay
helpless in the grave. Among these taboo symbols were human figures and dangerous
animals, such as scorpions and snakes. Second, in all periods and for all uses of thewriting,
symbols to which a positive religious significance was attached were regularly placed in
front of other signs, even if they were to be read afterthem. Among these were hieroglyphs
for God or individual gods, as well as those for the king or the palace. Thus, for example, the
two signs , denoting the word combination servant of God (priest), are written so that
thesymbol for God, , stands in front of that for servant, , although the former is to be read
last. Moreover, theology traced the invention of hieroglyphic writingback to the god Thoth,
although this myth of its divine origin did not have an effect on the development of the
script. In the late period, Egyptian texts referred to hieroglyphic inscriptions as writing of
God's words; earlier, in contrast, they were simply called pictures.
Literacy and knowledge of hieroglyphic writing
At all periods only a limited circle understood the script. Only those who needed the
knowledge in their professions acquired the arts of writing and reading. These people were,
for example, officials, doctors, and priests (insofar as they had to be able to read rituals and
other sacred texts), as wellas craftsmen whose work included the making of inscriptions.
Under Greekand especially under Roman rule, the knowledge declined and was entirely
confined to temples where priests instructed their pupils in the study of hieroglyphic writing.
From the time of the rule of the Ptolemies (305 to 30 BC), national consciousness became
more and more narrowly bound up with religion, and for both the national consciousness
and religion alike the tradition-filled hieroglyphic writing was an outward signin the
fullest sense, asymbol. There was no lack of attempts to replace the hieroglyphic writing,
cumbersome and ever more divergent from the spoken language, with the simpler and more
convenient Greek script. Such experiments, however, remained ineffective precisely because
of the emotional value that the old writing system had when the country was under the
foreign domination of the Macedonian Greeks and the Romans.

Christianity and the Greek alphabet

The situation was altered with the conversion of the country to Christianity in the 2nd and
3rd centuries AD. The new religion fought against the Egyptian polytheism and traditions,
and with its victory, the Greek script triumphed. From the beginning, Egyptian Christians
used the Greek alphabet for writingtheir spoken Egyptian language. This practice involved
enlarging the Greek alphabet with seven supplementary letters for Egyptian sounds not
present in Greek. As a consequence, the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing quickly
declined. The last evidence of the writing system is a rock inscription from the island of
Philae, dating from Aug. 24, 394, from the reign of the emperor Theodosius I. The language
as well as the writing system of the Egyptian Christians is called Coptic.
Characteristics of hieroglyphic writing
The system of hieroglyphic writing has two basic features: first, representable objects are
portrayed as pictures (ideograms) and, second, the picture signs are given the phonetic value
of the words for these represented objects (phonograms). At the same time, these signs are
also written to designate homonyms, similar-sounding words. The writing disregards vowels
and also, in earlier times, the semivowels i, y, and w, thus offering more possibilities for the
transference of signs to words with identical consonant combinations. For example, the sign
for wood is written as a branch, , which is pronounced with the consonants N and t, which
occur in the Egyptian word for wood. Other words with the same series of consonants can
also be written with the same basic signe.g., Nt after, NtX to retreat, or NtX to
carve. Words that consisted of only one consonant, plus one or more vowels, supplied
single consonant signs. The Egyptians, however, never reduced their writing to an alphabet
by discarding the multiconsonant signs; rather, they retained clearly the form of the original
words. When doubts occurred, as in the case of the three signs for the frequent
consonantseries m + r (the hoe, , the chisel, , and the pyramid, ), the plurality was used to
make clear distinctions between words: all derivations from the stem mr to love were
written with the hoe; those from the stem mr to be ill, with the chisel; and those words
related to pyramids with the sign for pyramid. Thus, two or more existing signs for the same
sound or combination of sounds were retained and used in conscious distinction to promote
easier readability. Although each sign originally had only one reading, occasional
ambiguities did develop through the convergence of twosymbols of similar form, such as
those for the thighbone and the shankbone of an animal. A few signs, therefore, had two or,
less commonly, three readings in classical Egyptian writing.
Heiratic script
The Egyptian cursive script, called hieratic writing, received its name from the Greek
hieratikos (priestly) at a time when the script was used only for sacred texts. Everyday
secular documents were written in another style, the demotic (Greek dAmotikos, for the
people or in common use) script.
The structure of the hieratic script corresponds with that of hieroglyphic writing. Changes
occurred in the characters of hieratic simply because they could be written rapidly with
brush or rush and ink on papyrus. In general, the picture form is not, or not easily,
recognizable. Because their models were well known and in current use throughout Egyptian

history, the hieratic symbols never strayed too far from them. Nevertheless, the system
differs from the hieroglyphic script in some important respects:
1. Hieratic was written in one direction only, from right to left. In earlier times the lines had
run vertically and later, about 2000 BC, horizontally. Subsequently the papyrus scrolls were
written in columns of changing widths.

2. There were ligatures in hieratic so that two, but no more than two, signs could be written
in one stroke.
3. As a consequence of its decreased legibility, the spelling of the hieratic script was more
rigid than that of hieroglyphic writing. Variations from uniformity at a given time were
minor; but, during the course of the various periods, the spelling developed and changed. As
a result, hieratic texts do not correspond exactly to contemporary hieroglyphic texts, either
in the placing of signs or in the spelling of words.
4. Hieratic used diacritical additions to distinguish between two signs that had grown similar
to one another because of cursive writing. For example, the cow's leg received a
supplementary distinguishing cross, because in hieratic it had come to resemble the sign for
the leg of a man. Certain hieratic signs were taken into the hieroglyphic script.
All commonplace documentse.g., letters, catalogs, and official writswere written in
hieratic script, as were literary and religious texts. In the life of the Egyptians, hieratic script
played a larger role than hieroglyphic writing and was also taught earlier in the schools. In
offices, hieratic was replaced by demotic in the 7th century BC, but it remained in fashion
until much later for religious texts of all sorts. The latest hieratic texts stem from the end of
the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd century AD.
Demotic script
Demotic script is first encountered at the beginning of the 26th dynasty, in about 660 BC.
The writing signs plainly demonstrate its connection with the hieratic script, although the
exact relationship is not yet clear. The demotic characters are more cursive (flowing and
joined) and thus more similar to one another, with the result that they are more difficult to
read than are the hieratic forms. Countering this difficulty, there is less freedom for the
writer's individual variations. It appears that demotic was originally developed expressly for
government office usethat is, for documents in which the language was extensively
formalized and thus well suited for the use of a standardized cursive script. Only some time
after its introduction was it usedfor literary texts in addition to documents and letters; much
later it was employed for religious texts also. The latest dated demotic text, from Dec. 2,
425, consists of a rock inscription at Philae. In contrast to hieratic, which is almost without
exception written in ink on papyrus or other flat surfaces, demotic inscriptions are not
infrequently found engraved in stone or carved in wood.
The demotic system corresponds to the hieratic and hence also to the hieroglyphic system.
Alongside the traditional spelling, however, there was another spelling that took account of
the markedly altered phonetic form of the words by appropriate respelling. This
characteristic applied especially toa large number of words that did not occur in the older

language and for which no written form had consequently been passed down. The
nontraditional spelling could also be used for old, familiar words.

Indic writing system

those that include the syllabic KharohY and semialphabetic Br(hmY scripts of ancient
India. No systems of writing subsequently developed from the KharohY script. Br(hmY,
however, is thought to be the forerunner of all of the scripts used for writing the languages
of India, Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia (exceptions include those areas in which
native writing systems have been replaced by the Latin or Arabic alphabet or by Chinese).
A northern form of Br(hmY developed into the Gupta scripts, from which derived the
Tibetan and Khotanese systems. (Khotanese was also influenced by the KharohY script.)
From the Tibetan script were derived the writing system of the Lepch( (Rong)the
aboriginal inhabitants of Sikkim, Indiaand the Passepa writing system of the Chinese
Imperial chancery under the Yan dynasty (12791368); the Passepa system is no longer in
use.
A southern form of Br(hmY developed into the Grantha alphabet, from which in turn the
writing systems of the Dravidian languages of southern India (e.g., Tamil, Malayalam,
Telugu, and Kannada) as well as the writing systems of the Sinhalese language of Ceylon,
the Khmer and Mon languages of Southeast Asia, and the Kavi, or Old Javanese, system of
Indonesia were developed. The Thai writing system is thought by scholars to be derived
from that of the Khmer, the Burmese and Lao systems from that of Mon, and the Buginese
and Batak systems of Indonesia from that of Kavi. The scripts used by speakers of the Tai
dialects other than Shan and Lao are derived from the Burmese writing system. The ancient
Cham inscriptions of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) speakers who formerlyinhabited
southern Vietnam are also written in a script of South Indic origin. See also Br(hmY;
Grantha alphabet; Gupta script; KharohY.
Mayan writng
system of writing used by the people of the Mayan Indian civilization of Meso-America
from about the 3rd century AD until about the end of the 17th century, 200 years after the
Spanish conquest of Mexico. It was the only true writing system developed in the preColumbian Americas. Mayan inscriptions are found on stelae (standing stone slabs), stone
lintels, sculpture, and pottery, as well as on the few surviving Mayan books, or codices.
The Mayan system of writing contains more than 800 characters, many of which are
hieroglyphic; i.e., they are recognizable pictures of real objects. The signs are pictorial,
representing animals, people, and objects of daily life. Until the mid-20th century, very little
Mayan writing could be deciphered except for the symbols representing numbers, dates, and
rulers' names anddenoting such events as birth, death, and capture. Most scholars accepted
the theory that the Mayan writing system was entirely logographicthat is, that each glyph,
or sign, represented an entire word. In addition, it was widely believed that the Mayan
inscriptions were largely religious in character.
During the 1950s the linguist Yury Knorozov demonstrated that the Mayan writing system
contained both logograms and phonetic signs representing syllables. In 1958 Heinrich Berlin
established that a certain category of glyphs referred either to places or to the ruling families

associated with those places; two years later Tatiana Prouskouriakoff established that the
inscriptions were primarily historical: they recorded events in the lives of Mayan rulers and
their families. The work of these three scholars constituteda revolution in Mayan studies,
and in succeeding decades the deciphermentof the writing proceeded at an accelerating rate.
The Mayan writing system is complex: a single sign may function as a logogram and also
have one or more syllabic values; similarly, a single logographic sign may be used to
represent several words that are pronounced in the same way. In addition, different signs
may share phoneticor logographic values. In some cases scholars understand the meaning of
a logographic sign, but have not determined its readingi.e., what word it stands for; other
signs can be deciphered phonetically, but their meanings are not known. Nevertheless, by the
early 1990s scholars had read a substantial number of inscriptions, affording much new
information about Mayan language, history, social and political organization, and ritual life.
Books in Mayan hieroglyphs, called codices, existed before the Spanish conquest of Yucatn
about 1540, but most works written in the script were destroyed as pagan by Spanish priests.
Only four Mayan codices are known to survive: the Dresden Codex, or Codex Dresdensis,
probably dating from the 11th or 12th century, a copy of earlier texts of the 5th to 9th
century AD; theMadrid Codex, or Codex Tro-Cortesianus, dating from the 15th century; the
Paris Codex, or Codex Peresianus, probably slightly older than the Madrid Codex; and the
Grolier Codex, discovered in 1971 and dated to the 13th century AD. The codices were
made of fig-bark paper folded like an accordion; their covers were of jaguar skin.
Pahlavi writng
Pahlavi also spelled Pehlevi, writing system of the Persian people from the 2nd century Bc
until the advent of Isl(m (7th century AD); the Zoroastrian sacred book, the Avesta, is
written in a variant of Pahlavi called Avestan.
The Pahlavi alphabet developed from the Aramaic alphabet and occurred in at least three
local varieties: northwestern, called Pahlavik, or Arsacid; southwestern, called Parsik, or
S(s(nian; and eastern. All were written from right to left. Of the 22 letters in Aramaic, most
came to represent more than onesound in Pahlavi; several were not used at all, and one
evolved into two letters in Pahlavi. Northwestern Pahlavi had 20 letters, and southwestern
had 19. Avestan, a cursive script, had 50 distinct letters and was perhaps separately invented,
though patterned after Pahlavi.
A peculiarity of the Pahlavi writing system was the custom of using Aramaic words to
represent Pahlavi words; these served, so to speak, as ideograms. An example is the word for
king, in Pahlavi sh(h, which was consistently writtenm-l-k after the Aramaic word for
king, malka, but read as sh(h. A great many such ideograms were in standard use,
including all pronouns and conjunctions and many nouns and verbs, making Pahlavi quite
difficult to read.