Writing systemFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to:
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writing system is a type of
symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in
language.
General propertiesWriting systems are distinguished from other possible
symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as
information signs,
painting,
maps and
mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken language.
Every human community possesses language, a feature regarded by many as an innate and defining condition of mankind. However the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional
oral systems of communication has been sporadic, uneven and slow. Once established, writing systems on the whole change more slowly than their spoken counterparts, and often preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. The great benefit of writing systems is their ability to maintain a persistent record of information expressed in a language, which can be retrieved independently of the initial act of formulation.
All writing systems require:
- at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed characters and collectively called a script;
- at least one set of rules and conventions (orthography understood and shared by a community, which arbitrarily assign meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and relations to one another;
- at least one language (generally spoken) whose constructions are represented and able to be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;
- some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).
Basic terminologyA Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia.The study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines in the examination of individual scripts and as such the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field.
The generic term
text may be used to refer to an individual product of a writing system. The act of composing a text may be referred to as
writing, and the act of interpreting the text as
reading. In the study of writing systems,
orthography refers to the method and rules of observed writing structure (literal meaning, "correct writing"), and in particular for
alphabetic systems, includes the concept of
spelling.
A
grapheme is the technical term
coined to refer to the specific base or atomic units of a given writing system. Graphemes are the
minimally significant elements which taken together comprise the set of "building blocks" out of which texts of a given writing system may be constructed, along with rules of correspondence and use. The concept is similar to that of the
phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. For example, in the
Latinbased writing system of standard contemporary English, examples of graphemes include the
majuscule and
minuscule forms of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet (corresponding to various phonemes), marks of
punctuation(mostly non-phonemic), and a few other symbols such as those for
numerals (logograms for numbers).
Note that an individual grapheme may be represented in a wide variety of ways, where each variation is visually distinct in some regard, but all are interpreted as representing the "same" grapheme. These individual variations are known as
allograps of a grapheme (compare with the term
allophoneused in linguistic study). For example, the minuscule letter
a has different allographs when written as a
cursive,
block or
typed letter. The selection between different allographs may be influenced by the medium used, the
writing instrumet the stylistic choice of the writer and the largely unconscious features of an individual's
handwriting.
The terms
glyph,
sign and
character are sometimes used to refer to a grapheme. Common usage varies from discipline to discipline; compare
cuneiform sign,
Maya glyph,
Chinese character. The glyphs of most writing systems are made up of lines (or strokes) and are therefore called
liner, but there are glyphs in
non-liear writing systems made up of other types of marks, such as Cuneiform and
Braille.
Writing systems are
conceptual systems, as are the languages to which they refer. Writing systems may be regarded as
complete according to the extent to which they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language.
History of writing systemsMain article:
History of writingWriting systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of
ideographic and/or early
mnemonic symbols. The best known examples are:
- Jiahu Script symbols on tortoise shells in Jiahu, ca. 6600 BC
- Vinča script (Tărtăria tablets), ca. 4500 BC
- Early Indus script ca. 3500 BC
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the
Bronze Age in the late
Neolithic of the late
4th millennium BC. The
Sumerian archaic
cuneiform scriptand the
Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about
2600 BC.
The
Chinese script likely developed independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around
1600 BC.
The
pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others
Olmec and
Maya scripts) are also generally believed to have had independent origins.
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around
2000 BC as a representation of language developed for
Semitic slaves in Egypt by Egyptians (see
History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the
Phoenicia alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
Functional classification of writing systemsFor lists of writing systems by type, see
List of writing systems.This textbook for
Puyi shows the
English alphabet. Although the English letters run from left to right, the Chinese explanations run from top to bottom, as traditionally writtenThe oldest-known forms of writing were primarily
logographic in nature, based on
pictographic and
ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories:
logographic,
syllabic, and
alphabetic (or
segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely. The term
complex system is sometimes used to describe those where the admixture makes classification problematic.
[edit] Logographic writing systemsMain article:
LogogramA
logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most
Chinese characters are classified as logograms.
As each character represents a single word (or, more precisely, a
morpheme), many logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, this is only true for closely related languages, like the
Chinese languages, as syntactical constraints reduce the portability of a given logographic system.
Japanese uses
Chinese logograms extensively in its writing systems, with most of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings. However, the semantics, and especially the grammar, are different enough that a long Chinese text is not readily understandable to a Japanese reader without any knowledge of basic
Chinese grammar, though short and concise phrases such as those on signs and newspaper headlines are much easier to comprehend.
While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the
Hindu-Arabic numerals — everyone who uses those symbols understands what
1 means whether he or she calls it
one,
eins,
uno,
yi,
ichi,
ehad or
jedan. Other western logograms include the
ampersand &, used for
and, the
at sign @, used in many contexts for
at, the
percent sign% and the many signs representing units of currency (
$,
¢, [url=http://www.sytym.com/wiki/Euro_sign]
