Notes on Linguistics
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Much of what we know about writing stems from the records left by the Sumer-
ians, an ancient people of unknown origin, who built a civilization in southern
Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) more than 6,000 years ago. They left innumerable
clay tablets containing business documents, epics, prayers, poems, proverbs, and
so on. So copious are these written records that the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dic-
tionary Project has been able to publish electronically an eighteen-volume online
dictionary of their written language. It has been available since June 2006.
The writing system of the Sumerians is the oldest one known. They were a
commercially oriented people, and as their business deals became increasingly
complex, the need for permanent records arose. An elaborate pictography was
developed, along with a system of tallies. Some examples are shown here:
Over the centuries the Sumerians simplified and conventionalized their pic-
tography. They began to produce the symbols of their written language by using
a wedge-shaped stylus that was pressed into soft clay tablets. The tablets hard-
ened in the desert sun to produce permanent records that were far hardier than
modern paper or electronic documents. Had the original American Declaration
of Independence been written this way, it would not be in need of restoration
and preservation. This form of writing is called cuneiform—literally, “wedge-
shaped” (from Latin cuneus, “wedge”). Here is an illustration of the evolution of
Sumerian pictograms to cuneiform: images below.
As cuneiform evolved, its users began to
think of the symbols more in terms of the name of the things represented than
of the things themselves. Eventually cuneiform script came to represent words of
the language. Such a system is called logographic, or word writing. In this oldest
type of writing system, the symbol stands for both the word and the concept,
which it may still resemble, however abstractly. Thus logograms, the symbols of
a word-writing system, are ideograms that represent in addition to the concept,
the word or morpheme in the language for that concept.
The cuneiform writing system spread throughout the Middle East and Asia
Minor. The Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians borrowed it. In adopting cune-
iform characters, the borrowers often used them to represent the sounds of the
syllables in their own languages. In this way cuneiform evolved into a syllabic
writing system.
In a syllabic writing system, each syllable in the language is represented by its
own symbol, and words are written syllable by syllable. Cuneiform writing was
never purely syllabic. A large residue of symbols remained that stood for whole
words. The Assyrians retained many word symbols, even though every word
in their language could be written out syllabically if it were desired.
The Persians (ca. 600–400 b.c.e.) devised a greatly simplified syllabic alpha-
bet for their language, which made little use of word symbols. By the reign of
Darius I (521–486 b.c.e.), this writing system was in wide use.

Emoticons are strings of text characters that, when viewed sideways, form a
face expressing a particular emotion. (Some are fixed symbols such as ☺). They
are used mostly in e-mail and text messaging to express a feeling. They are a The History of Writing 545
modern, pictographic system similar to cuneiform in that the same symbols are
combined in different manners to convey different concepts. Most everyone who
uses e-mail recognizes the smiley face to mean “not serious” or “just jok-
ing.” Several less common emoticons, and their generally accepted meanings,
are shown here:
:’–( “crying”
:–S “bizarre”
|:*) “drunk”
:–)~ “drooling”
@}->—— “a rose”
The invention, use, and acceptance of emoticons reflect on a small scale how
a writing system such as cuneiform might have spread throughout a country.