B. The rise of writing

Early writing started off as pictograms – pictorial representations, in the way that some modern road signs still do. The advantage of using pictograms as opposed to words is that the reader need not know a specific language to make sense of it, and the message can register quickly. (On the other hand, they might also be ambiguous.) I find it fascinating how road signs might differ from country to country: see below.

French cow	British cow	Spanish cow	Portuguese cow

Spanish schoolchildren	British schoolchildren	American schoolchildren
Australian schoolchildren	Singaporean schoolchildren	South African schoolchildren

The earliest pictographic writing known to us was from Sumeria (in modern-day Iraq). Through time, presumably these logograms began to be read as words. By around 3000 BC, these symbols also began to not only represent words but also sounds. (In roughly the same way, we try to represent ideas in a charade game when we try to enact in actions and signs a notion that sounds like another one. We might try to get our team to say byte by making biting actions.) Through time the symbols came to represent syllables more so than words or morphemes.

Here, we see Sumerian cuneiform syllabic symbols (cuneiform, meaning ‘wedge’ or ‘wedge shaped’ refers to the characters of the ancient inscriptions of Persia, Assyria, etc., composed of wedge-shaped or arrow-headed elements; and hence to the inscriptions or records themselves). At around the same time, Egyptian signs, known as hieroglyphics (‘sacred inscriptions’, Gk) also developed, and the symbols represented both sound and meaning.

Alphabetic writing began to emerge, and around 1000 BC, the Phoenicians devised an alphabet (above). This is the source of major alphabetic writing systems today including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic scripts. The spread could be related to the fact that they were traders and therefore travelled a lot.

The Greeks revolved or inverted the Phoenician letters (above) to produce Greek ones (below).

They largely retained the Phoenician names of the letters; whereas the Phoenicians had aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, etc., the Greeks had alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. Our modern word alphabet is derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

The Greeks occupied southern Italy in the eighth and seventh centuries BC and their alphabet was adapted by the Etruscans living in central Italy. The Romans adapted the Etruscan version of the Greek alphabet to give us the Latin alphabet or the Roman alphabet (above). With the rise of the Roman empire from around the first century AD, it was this alphabet that was adapted by speakers of other languages in Europe – these languages had no written form at this time. Many of these languages had sounds that could not be easily represented using the existing alphabet. Some languages introduced diacritics (little marks above or below the letters, such as the French cedilla <ç>, the Spanish tilde <ñ> or the German umlaut <ä>). Most made use of digraphs or trigraphs (combinations of two or three letters). For example, <ch>, <sh> and <th> are digraphs in English because they represent sounds which are not the result of the combination of the sounds represented by the individual letters. And finally, different languages might also give different phonemic values to different letters (what sounds do the letters <c>, <j> and <x> represent in different languages?).

Another alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet (below), now used for writing Russian and some other languages spoken in Eastern Europe.

Two alphabets derived from Phoenician (but not through Greek, unlike the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets) are the Arabic (first below) and Hebrew alphabets (second below).

Unlike the alphabets derived from the Greek one, the letters represent consonants (as opposed to vowel) sounds. Instead, vowels are indicated with diacritic dots. In addition, they are written right-to-left (as was the case in Phoenician) rather than left-to-right (in the alphabets derived from Greek). The Arabic writing spread largely because of its status as the language of the Koran (Qur’an) and of Islam. Muslims are strongly encouraged to recite the Koran in its original language Arabic; and this makes them different from Christians who are encouraged to read the Bible in their own languages (rather than in the original Hebrew and Greek).

A. General

C. Early English writing

D. English writing after 1100

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