When we think of the history of language, we often think first of writing. English departments are based on literature, and a bachelor's degree in French is most often a degree in French literature, with the spoken language occupying a secondary role. Literacy is a gauge of one's language ability. The written word has been imbued with prestige and authority. We learn grammar from written texts, and in fact, different grammatical rules apply to the spoken versus the written language. Consider the following sentence:
Johns friends knead two move there sisters cars inn side. Not so good--there's no punctuation and many incorrect words ('knead' for 'need', etc...). Now read the above sentence out loud. Spoken, there is no telling it apart from the grammatical:
John's friends need to move their sisters' cars inside.
Further, spoken language is filled with 'gonna', 'wanna', 'yeah', and others, but these are rarely written. Linguists are generally interested in spoken language because only when we speak do we use our language naturally. To truly understand the world's languages, it is insufficient to study only writing. Further, throughout human history, the majority of languages were never written down. Even today, most of the world's citizens are not literate, yet they all, barring physical impairment, speak a language fluently.
That said, writing systems are very interesting and important to human society! In that spirit, over the next few weeks, we will take a look at the different types of writing systems that have developed over time around the globe.
Spoken language predates written language by tens of thousands of years. In fact, the earliest 'writing' was quite simplistic--pictographic symbols. These represent objects, so to imagine a pictographic system, assume you wanted to write "two apples", you would have to draw a picture of two apples. This works fine for apples, but you are unable to draw a sentence like "John's friends need to move their sister's cars inside" or even "Come here", a shortcoming for a writing system.
The first examples of a true writing system date from around 3500 BC; they consist of ideographic (or logographic) symbols etched on clay tablets in various parts of the Middle East. Ideographic symbols are a more abstract form of writing in that they represent ideas and abstract objects. Early Egyptian hieroglyphics are such a system. A good way to think of these symbols is to imagine an appropriate symbol for the sun. In a pictographic system, one would presumably draw a sun-- let's assume the child-like circle with several stick-like rays radiating out from it. In an ideographic system, the symbol for sun would probably only loosely resemble a sun, maybe just a circle. As these systems developed, the symbols resembled the objects they represented less and less. Related meanings could emerge: the circle might not represent only 'sun', but 'life,' 'day,' even 'God.' Chinese writing is an ideographic system, and with few exceptions, it is basically impossible to tell the meaning of a symbol just by looking at it. The best way to think of an ideographic system is that each symbol represents a word.
Go To Page: 1 2
