ABSTRACT
A writing-system is a way of writing a language—in Sampson's terms, ‘a given set of written marks together with a particular set of conventions for their use’ (1985:21). The term ‘writing-system’ is not, however, widely used outside linguistics, nor is it universally used by linguists themselves. Outside linguistics, whether in specialised treatments of this aspect of language (e.g. Diringer 1968, Gelb 1952, to name two of the principal histories of writing) or in ordinary educated discourse, a number of other terms do service for, or get confused with, this central concept. These include script, spelling, alphabet, language and orthography. This list is not exhaustive (we might have included the term ‘character’ for instance), but these are the five expressions with which we shall deal in sections 2–6, after a consideration of writing-system in section 1.
