Writing System Essay Research Paper Complextext LanguagesIn (стр. 3 из 3)

3.Legacy applications are those that have been inherited from a prior era. They may be obsolete, but must be supported.

4.The Basic Display Algorithm was initially published in the Directionality Appendix A of the Unicode standard.

5.Other complex-text languages that have their own national glyphs for decimal digits are Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan and Thai.

http://rabbitmoon.home.mindspring.com/asw/ws.html

Writing Systems

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems defines a writing system as “a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way”. This simple explanation encompasses a huge spectrum of writing systems with vastly different stylistic and structural characteristics spanning across many regions of this planet.

Writing provides a way of extending human memory by imprinting into media less fickle than the human brain. However, many early philosophers, such as Plato, have branded writing as a detriment to the human intellect. They argued that it makes the brain lazy and decreases the capacity of memory. It is true that many non-writing cultures often pass long poems and proses from generation to generation without any change, and writing cultures can’t seem to do that. But writing was a very useful invention for complex and high-population cultures.

Writing was used for record keeping to correctly counting agricultural products, for keeping the calendar to plant crops at the correct time. And writing was used for religious purpose (divination and communicating with the supernatural world) and socio-political functions (reinforcing the kingship).

However, writing isn’t an absolute requirement of urban culture. In past centuries, scientists had used writing as one of the “signs” of civilization, which is an incorrect assumption. The Incas and earlier Andean civilizations never developed a writing system. They, in turn, came up with interesting solutions: they used the quips (a series of ropes with knots indicating amounts) for record keeping, and complex tapestries as calendars. The Mississipians who built Cahokia didn’t seem to have used any kind of record keeping at all, but they built very impressive cities in the American Midwest.

Because writing is so intricate there has been many theories concerning the origins of writing.

Writing systems differ structure, stylistically, familiarly, geographically, and so on. Here’s the several ways I categorize them:

Types: Classification according to how the system works.

Families: Classification according to “genetic” relations.

Regions: Classification according to geographical regions.

A to Z: Alphabetical listing of scripts, just for your convenience.

The study of writing systems is a very broad field, and I cannot claim that this website will reveal every detail. Far from it, in fact. I think I only cover 10% of all writing systems of the world. There are many good books out there, and you can start in my Bibliography section.

Created March 19, 2000

Mythological Origins

Among many ancient societies, writing held a extremely special and important roll. Often writing is so revered that myths and deities were drawn up to explain its divine origin.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the invention of writing is attributed to the god Thoth or Tehuti (Dhwty in Egyptian), who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented art and science. In some Egyptian myths, Thoth is also portrayed as the creator of speech and possessing the power to transform speech into material objects.

This ties in closely with the Egyptian belief that in order for a person to achieve immortality his or her name must be spoken or inscribed somewhere forever.

In Mesopotamia, among the Sumerians the god Enlil was the creator of writing. Later during Assyrian, and Babylonian periods, the god Nabu was credited as the inventor of writing and scribe of the gods. And similar to Thoth, Mesopotamian scribal gods also exhibit the power of creation via divine speech.

Among the Maya, the supreme deity Itzamna was a shaman and sorcerer as well as the creator of the world. (In fact, the root of his name, “itz”, can be roughly translated as “magical substance, usually secreted by some object, that sustains the gods”). Itzamna was also responsible for the creation of writing and time keeping. Strangely enough, though, Itzamna isn’t a scribal god. This duty falls on usually a pair of monkey gods as depicted on many Maya pots and is also preserved in the highland Maya epic “Popol Vuh”. Still, in one rare case, the scribe is a rabbit.

In China, the invention of writing was not attributed to a deity but instead to a legendary ancient sage named Fu Hsi, who also invented divination of the future by using turtle shells (hence the oracle bones). He’s also an amazing marketing guru too. Next time you visit a Chinese household, look up when you’re at the front door, and you might see a little circular mirror surrounded by eight multi-line symbols. These symbols (trig rams) are used to communicate with spirits, and together with the mirror they serve as evil repellent too. Just imagine how many of these have been sold in the past 4,000 years! Move over Bill Gates! If Fu Hsi had filed for patents he would have owned the whole world by now!

Ahem … anyway, in these ancient cultures, the creation and use of writing was closely tied to divine creative powers. By uttering or writing down a word, objects get created or people get immortal. They reinforced the notion of writing as supernatural and therefore enforced the exclusivity of the “scribe” class.

Monogenesis? Evolution?!

Okay, let’s jump ahead in time to the 19th century. Overzealous and Euro centric (I’m using euphemisms here), scholars held that writing was invented only once in Mesopotamia, and all subsequent writing systems were offshoot of this original. They claim that Chinese and Indus writing were evolved from Middle Eastern prototypes, and they completely treat Maya not as a writing system but as a purely calendrical and mnemonic system.

What’s worse is that they started abusing poor Darwin’s theory of evolution. They separate writing systems into functional types, which is okay and still scientific. But then they assigned “evolved-ness” to each group, with alphabet being the most evolved and inherently the best system. Logographic systems like Chinese are considered primitive, archaic, and much inferior, and syllabic systems fall somewhere in between. Their rationale is that alphabets have a small number of signs (easy on your memory) and allow the writer to specify every phonetic value in the language down to the most minute detail.

The biggest problem with this monogenesis and evolution of writing system is obviously that of culturally tinted views. It easily placed Europe as the pinnacle of civilization, relegated the rest of the world to the “primitive” and “unevolved” nature of all other continents of the world, and helped to justify Europe’s imperialistic age.

This whole thing started to crack when the evidence for the indigenous origin of Chinese became very strong with the discovery of the oracle bones and the lack of any earlier text in the vast space between the Iranian plateau and the Yellow River.

Modern Day Views

Nowadays there is more-or-less consensus on these points:

Writing was invented in parallel in at least three, or four, places: Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica, and possibly Indus. No type of writing system is superior or inferior to another, as the type is often dependent on the language they represent (unless it’s English). Writing system is not a marker of civilization, as many major urban culture did not employ (full evolved) writing such as the Incas.

The Rabbit Scribe

Rabbits have been the embodiment of different natural and human attributes. Sometimes they are seen as symbols of fertility (as they reproduce so quickly and in great numbers). Other times they are associated with the moon, as the gray patches on the moon to many cultures is a leaping rabbit. Yet some other time they are tricksters, helping the heroes of a story in defeating the bad guys.

But in a Classic Maya funerary vase from northern Guatemala, now in the Princeton University Art Museum, the rabbit was made into a scribal god! Among the Maya, divine scribes usually are monkeys. It is not known if there were any rabbit scribe gods among the Maya. The scene on the vase describes the ghastly rituals in the underworld. It may even be an illustrated chapter from the adventures of the Hero Twins (as recorded in the Quich? Maya holy book Popol Vuh). The rabbit sits below an important old god, perhaps diligently recording the human sacrifice happening in front of the old god in a jaguar-pelt bound codex. Or perhaps he’s doing something else…writing poetry, history, jokes, obscene stories?

Well, the rabbit god may have been some forgotten figure in Maya mythology. Or it may have been just a playful invention on the part of the painter of the vase. We just don’t know at this moment.

Transforming the Rabbit Scribe…

The following are two pictures of the same rabbit, the left one represent how he looks on a piece of paper as drawn by Michael Coe, while the right one is how he looks on Ancient Scripts’ main page.

The old rabbit, as I scanned it from a black-and-white drawing. Notice the background scene:

Somebody’s foot, and the dark band in the middle which is the raised floor of a house.

My updates to the scan…Added color, erased the background drawings, and enlarged his eye and moved it forward to make him look cuter.

Created Sept 5, 1997

Types of Writing Systems

Writing systems can be classified in “types” by the way they represent the underlying language. Note, however, that not every script neatly fits into each type.

Proto-Writing: This is the most rudimentary type of writing system. Examples of this type usually have small inventory of signs and large room for interpretation. They don’t denote full running texts but instead serve more like mnemonic devices for the reader.

However, they are writing systems because in some small way they do represent the underlying language, no matter how poorly. Naxi Mixtec

Logographic: A system of this kind uses a tremendous number of signs, each to represent a morpheme. A morpheme is the minimal unit in a language that carries some meaning. So, a logogram, a sign in a logographic system, may represent a word, or part of a word (like a suffix to denote a plural noun). Because of this, the number of signs could grow to staggering numbers like Chinese which has more than 10,000 signs (most of them unused in everyday usage).

Sumerian cuneiform

Chinese

Indus (?)

Classic Yi

Jurchen

Khitan

Logo-phonetic: This is sort of like stripped down versions of logographic systems. In essence, there are two types of signs, ones denoting morphemes and ones denoting sound. Most of the logo-phonetic are logo-syllabic, meaning that they denote syllables.

An exception is Egyptian, whose phonetic signs denote consonants. Akkadian/Assyrian cuneiform Hieroglyphic Luwian

La Mojarra

Maya

Zapotec (?)

Japanese

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Syllabic: In a syllabic writing system, the overwhelming number of signs are used solely for their phonetic values. A few non-phonetic are used for numbers, punctuation, and commonly used words.

Iberian

Cherokee

Cypriot

Linear A

Linear B

Old Persian

Mero?tic

Modern Yi

Byblos Script (?)

Consonantal Alphabetic: Vowels are not written in purely consonantal alphabets, which are descendents of Proto-Canaanite. “Alphabet” for this type of script is somewhat controversial, because you can also argue that it is a syllabic script where each sign consists of consonant and a vowel, but the vowel is not specified.

Ugaritic

Berber and Tifinagh

Proto-Canaanite & Phoenician

South Arabian

Aramaic

Syllabic Alphabetic: South Asian scripts such as Brahmi and its descendents fit into both syllabary and alphabet. It is syllabic because the basic sign contains a consonant and a vowel. However, every sign has the same vowel, such as /a/ in Brahmi. To make syllables with a different vowel, you add special markings to the basic sign, which is somewhat like an alphabet. Hence the name “syllabic alphabet”.

Brahmi

Kharosthi

Devanagari

Tibetan

Ethiopic

C and V Alphabetic: Nearly all the sounds in a language can be represented by an appropriate consonant and vowel alphabet. However, just take a look at English spelling and you can almost feel we’re back to logographic systems

!

Avestan

Futhark

Glagolitic

Ogham

Unknown: Sometimes it is possible to infer what type a script is by counting the number of signs it has. However, sometimes it is impossible because there isn?t enough textual evidence to establish what the type is. The most famous example of this is the Phaistos Disc.

What about ideographic?

You may have also encountered the term “ideographic”. What it describes is a writing system whose symbols represent ideas. So, any person speaking any language given that they know which symbol in the system represents which idea can read an ideographic writing system. However, the concept of an “ideographic” writing system does not apply to any known writing system. Every writing system in the world replicates a language, so it encodes sounds and grammatical rules. Even at the most primitive level, in writing systems like Naxi or Mixtec, where extremely pictorial signs consist of the main bulk of the system, tricks to spell names using the rebus principle can still be detected.

Futhermore, because of the nature of language, putting words together make more complex ideas. Since there are an infinite number of combinations of words, there clearly cannot be sufficient signs to represent each idea in a language. So, the writing system must mimick the natural language by putting two signs together to form a compound that represents the more complex idea. However, when this happens, signs don’t just get juxtaposed randomly, but instead in some predescribed way that follows the grammatical rule of the language. All of a sudden, this turns into a logographic system!

My point is that ideographic systems don’t exist. It is a myth. Any writing system starts off as logographic and grows from there.

This is, of course, just my opinion, but I feel that it rests relatively well on solid data from writing systems of the world