The History of Writing (part 1)
An Egyptian legend relates that when the god Thoth revealed his discovery of the art of writing to King Thamos, the good King denounced it as an enemy of civilization. “Children and young people,” protested the monarch, “who had hither to been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would cease to appl
themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.”
WILL DURANT, The Story of Civilization vol. 1, 1935
There are many legends and stories about the invention of writing. Greek legend has it that Cadmus, Prince of Phoenicia and founder of the city of Thebes, invented the alphabet and brought it with him to Greece. In one Chinese fable, the four-eyed dragon-god Cang Jie invented writing, but in another, writing firstappeared as markings on the back of the chi-lin, a white unicorn of Chinese legend. In other myths, the Babylonian god Nebo and the Egyptian god Thoth gave writing as well as speech to humans. The Talmudic scholar Rabbi Akiba believed that the alphabet existed before humans were created, and according to Hindu tradition the Goddess Saraswati, wife of Brahma, invented writing.
Although these are delightful stories, it is evident that before a single word was written, uncountable billions were spoken. The invention of writing comes relatively late in human history, and its development was gradual. It is highly
unlikely that a particularly gifted ancestor awoke one morning and decided,“Today I’ll invent a writing system.”
Pictograms and Ideograms
One picture is worth a thousand words.
CHINESE PROVERB
The roots of writing were the early drawings made by ancient humans. Cave art,called petroglyphs, such as those found in the Altamira cave in northern Spain, created by humans living more than 20,000 years ago, can be “read” today.
They are literal portrayals of life at that time. We don’t know why they were produced; they may be aesthetic expressions rather than pictorial communications. Later drawings, however, are clearly “picture writings,” or pictograms.
Unlike modern writing systems, each picture or pictogram is a direct image of the object it represents. There is a nonarbitrary relationship between the form and meaning of the symbol. Comic strips minus captions are pictographic—
literal representations of the ideas to be communicated. This early form of writing represented objects in the world directly rather than through the linguistic names given to these objects. Thus they did not represent the words and sounds of spoken language.
Pictographic writing has been found throughout the world, ancient and modern: among Africans, Native Americans including the Inuits of Alaska and Canada, the Incas of Peru, the Yukagirians of Siberia, and the people of Oceania.
Pictograms are used today in international road signs, where the native language of the region might not be understood by all travelers. Such symbols do not depend on words. For example, a traveler does not need to know English to
understand the signs used by the U.S. National Park Service (Figure 11.1).Once a pictogram was accepted as the representation of an object, its meaning was extended to attributes of that object, or concepts associated with it.
A picture of the sun could represent warmth, heat, light, daytime, and so on.
Pictograms began to represent ideas rather than objects. Such generalized pictograms are called ideograms (“idea pictures” or “idea writing”).
The difference between pictograms and ideograms is not always clear. Ideograms tend to be less direct representations, and one may have to learn what a particular ideogram means. Pictograms tend to be more literal. For example,
the no parking symbol consisting of a black letter P inside a red circle with a slanting red line through it is an ideogram. It represents the idea of no parking abstractly. A no parking symbol showing an automobile being towed away is more literal, more like a pictogram.
Inevitably, pictograms and ideograms became highly stylized and difficult to interpret without knowing the system. To learn the system, one learned the words of the language that the ideograms represented. Thus the ideograms became linguistic symbols. They stood for the words, both meaning and sounds, that represented the ideas. This stage was a revolutionary step in the development of writing systems.
(VICTORIA FROMKIN
Late, University of California, Los Angeles
ROBERT RODMAN
North Carolina State University, Raleigh
NINA HYAMS
University of California, Los Angeles
An Introduction
to Language 9e)