Writing

Writing

Considering that historians have traditionally identified the beginning of civilization with the emergence of written language, writing could well be considered humankind's most important invention. The various writing systems in existence today have followed different paths of development; all, however, have their origin in the use of pictures to represent objects. The earliest extant cave drawings are at least 15,000 years old. It appears that the most ancient writing systems emerged, changing from idiosyncratic drawings into organized representation, when primitive cultures developed into settled agricultural societies; anthropologists and historians speculate that the increased need for record-keeping spurred writing's development as trade and government became more complex.

The oldest known form of writing is probably cuneiform, developed by the Sumerians in the Near East as early as 4000 b.c. Cuneiform derives its name from the Latin cuneus (wedge), referring to the wedges that were used to inscribe such writing onto soft clay tablets. Cuneiform symbols, like those of other ancient languages, originated as pictograms, simple drawings which stood for the spoken names of the objects they represented; pictograms are generally considered the first step in the evolution of pictures into words. For example, an early hunter-gatherer might have drawn a picture of a bird to represent that animal. Eventually, this picture would become recognized as the equivalent of the spoken word "bird "; once this connection was made, the picture would be simplified with repeated use, becoming a pictogram. Another well-known example of such stylized picture-writing is the Egyptian system of hieroglyphics, which is believed to have originated around 3000 b.c. and continued in use until around 300 a.d. In the case of cuneiform writing, as people became accustomed to the concept of pictograms, they began to draw them in increasingly abstract, simplified ways which bore less and less resemblance to the original picture. The cuneiform for "bird," to continue the example, eventually evolved into two crossed wedge marks next to a vertical wedge mark, a symbol which no longer looked anything like a bird, but which still was equated with the spoken word "bird" and which could be written much faster than a picture could be drawn. Such abstract signs are called logograms.

Logograms had limitations, however. Firstly, they necessitated a writing system in which one had to memorize thousands of symbols (cuneiform had more than 20,000). Secondly, they expressed inadequately, if at all, abstract concepts, such as "life." In response to these and other problems, the Sumerians began to use cuneiform symbols to stand for the sounds of the spoken words as well as the words themselves, so that two logograms could be strung together to produce the sound of a third word that could not be pictured. The technique is similar to that of modern-day rebus puzzles, in which, for example, a picture of a beer bottle next to the numeral "8" would spell the word "berate" (beer + eight = berate). This stage in the development of writing, in which a symbol can stand for a word or a sound, is called word-syllabic writing.

The Semites of the Mediterranean coast, neighbors of the Sumerians, took the Sumerian word-sign system and, between 1500 and 1000 b.c., simplified it radically, retaining only a few of the original symbols and using them only to represent sounds, from which they strung together the words of their spoken language. One Semitic group, the Phoenicians, developed a 22-character system around 1000 b.c., in which each character stood for a one-syllable sound beginning in a consonant and ending in a vowel. This system is considered by many the first alphabet; other scholars contend that the first true alphabet was that developed by the Greeks, who added vowel symbols to the consonant-syllables of the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, from whom it evolved into the Latin alphabet, which was spread throughout the Roman Empire and is today used in Romance languages. The Arabic and Cyrillic alphabet, used in eastern Europe, also derive ultimately from Phoenician.

Not all writing systems in use today have gone through all these developmental stages. The Chinese system, for example, has more than 80,000 symbols that can stand for words or phonetic sounds, as in Sumerian word-syllabic writing; used by twenty percent of the world's population, it has remained essentially unchanged since the second millennium b.c.