Writing system


A writing system is any conventional system for representing a particular language using a set of symbols, as well as the rules those symbols encode. The earliest conventional writing systems appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independently invented writing system gradually emerged from a system of proto-writing, where a small number of ideographs were used in a manner incapable of fully encoding language, and thus lacking the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
Writing systems are generally classified according to how their symbols, called graphemes, relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systemswhich include alphabets and syllabariesuse graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language. Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes. They are typically divided into three sub-types: Pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, abjads generally only use letters representing consonant sounds, and abugidas use letters representing consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras. By contrast, logographic writing systems use graphemes that represent the units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes. Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands, respectively.

Background: relationship with language

According to most contemporary definitions, writing is a visual and tactile notation representing language. As such, the use of writing by a community presupposes an analysis of the structure of language at some level. The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language. This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text is referred to as writing, and the act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading.
The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle. While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not; writing emerged much more recently, and was independently invented in only a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with a spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphereincluding the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century.
In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speechwhich was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition.

General terminology

While researchers of writing systems generally use some of the same core terminology, precise definitions and interpretations can vary by author, often depending on their theoretical approach.
A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements that, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require a set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script. The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on the speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as the allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter may be represented by the double-storey and single-storey shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in the text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting.
Orthography refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets, orthography includes the concept of spelling. For example, English orthography includes uppercase and lowercase forms for 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, punctuation marks, and other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent the spoken language in its entirety.

History

In each instance, writing emerged from systems of proto-writing, though historically most proto-writing systems did not produce writing systems. Proto-writing uses ideographic and mnemonic symbols to communicate, but lacks the capability to fully encode language. Examples include:
Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human historyfirst emerging as cuneiform, a system initially used to write the Sumerian language in southern Mesopotamia; it was later adapted to write Akkadian as its speakers spread throughout the region, with Akkadian writing appearing in significant quantities. Cuneiform was closely followed by Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3100 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated. Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley. There is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems, including Olmec and the Maya script, are likewise associated with an independent invention.
With each independent invention of writing, the ideographs used in proto-writing were decoupled from the direct representation of ideas, and gradually came to represent words instead. This occurred via application of the rebus principle, where a symbol was appropriated to represent an additional word that happened to be similar in pronunciation to the word for the idea originally represented by the symbol. This allowed words without concrete visualizations to be represented by symbols for the first time; the gradual shift from ideographic symbols to those wholly representing language took place over centuries, and required the conscious analysis of a given language by those attempting to write it.
The Indus script, found on different types of artefacts produced by the Indus Valley Civilization on the Indian subcontinent, remains undeciphered, and whether it functioned as true writing is not agreed upon.
Alphabetic writing descends from previous morphographic writing, and first appeared to write a Semitic language spoken in the Sinai Peninsula. Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script, or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet, and its child in the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet, which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems.

Classification by basic linguistic unit

Writing systems are most often classified according to what units of language a system's graphemes correspond to. At the most basic level, writing systems can be either phonographic when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic when graphemes represent units of meaning. Depending on the author, the older term logographic is often used, either with the same meaning as morphographic, or specifically in reference to systems where the basic unit being written is the word. Recent scholarship generally prefers morphographic over logographic, with the latter seen as potentially vague or misleadingin part because systems usually operate on the level of morphemes, not words. Some authors make a distinct primary divisionbetween pleremic systems with graphemes that have semantic value in isolation, and cenemic systems with graphemes that lack any such separable meaning.
Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras. Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes. Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants, pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels, and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed a five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts.
In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include the ampersand and the numerals,, etc.which correspond to specific words and not to the underlying sounds. Most writing systems can be described as mixed systems that feature elements of both phonography and morphography.