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In the modern industrial society, writing is so obviously important that we take it for granted. An illiterate person is viewed as seriously handicapped. Yet, until about 200 years ago, the majority of people were illiterate, and in some parts of the world this is still true. For most of us, however, modern daily life depends heavily on writing where it is central in education and in many types of work as well as in providing us with a significant source of pleasure. We are surrounded by newspapers, magazines, books, signs, and computer text. We must distinguish carefully between writing

and language. Language is an innate ability of human beings. We all learn to speak with no formal training. Writing, however, is not innate; it must always be consciously taught and learned. Children only learn to read and write some years after they have learned to speak. Language is a complex system relating sound

and meaning. Writing is a graphic representation of a linguistic utterance. This definition of writing rules out pictures as writing. Pictures or drawings may indeed communicate, perhaps reminding the viewer of a story or event, but they are not writing in this sense because they do not represent specific linguistic utterances. A picture of a man fishing might be read in English as The man is fishing, The man hopes to catch a fish, The man enjoys fishing, or many other ways. The sentence The man is fishing, however, can only be read aloud in one way; to read this sentence as The man hopes to catch a fish or even with such a small difference as The man was fishingwould be regarded

History

Writing is relatively recent in human life, no older than about 5,500 years; human beings were speaking millennia earlier. Writing has only been invented three times from scratch. Much more often it has been borrowed from and applied to a different language. The invention of writing requires acquiring the notion that symbols can represent linguistic units, e.g., words, and then ways must be developed for writing any word in the language. If writing did not exist today, we might possibly create a writing system for English in this way: for the word eye, we might create a picture of an eye (see Figure 1); such a creation is called a pictogram, an element of a writing system, because it is a graphic way of representing a specific linguistic utterance, namely the word eye. Then, we might use semantic extension to

extend the meaning of this symbol to other words of a similar meaning, such as see or vision. We might also extend the meaning of this symbol to the pronoun I using phonetic extension. In both types of extension, we would have to rely on the context to tell us which word was intended. If sorting out these different meanings for this symbol became too difficult, we might differentiate them with extra marks. For the verb see, we might add an arrow to indicate symbolically the action of a verb. For I, we might make a compound of the eye and a stick figure for a person. Using these and other devices, we could create symbols adequate to write an entire language. Today, we can see that Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters were created using

We are certain that writing was independently invented three times. First, in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians about 3300 BCE. Second, in China about 1500 BCE. And finally by the Mayans in Mesoamerica (southern Mexico and neighbouring areas) between 500 and 300 BCE. Living in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians had

small clay geometrically shaped objects called tokens for accounting purposes. They made bookkeeping records by pressing these objects into clay tablets, then they began to draw the image with a pointed stick, and finally used a triangular stylus to make wedge-shaped symbols (see Figure 2). Their writing is known as cuneiform. Using the principles mentioned above, the Sumerians created a writing system capable of writing any utterance in the language. The Akkadians, speaking a very different language, conquered the Sumerians in the second millennium BCE and adapted cuneiform writing to their own Semitic language Akkadian. Some symbols represented morphemes, and some represented sounds, generally consonant-vowel sequences. Although Akkadian writing was extremely complicated and required considerable schooling to master, it enjoyed enormous success with the last known text written in the first century CE. The earliest known Chinese writing is the

oracle-bone inscriptions; these are texts on bone or shell predicting future events. Chinese writing

early writing. Although the inventory of characters and the calligraphic style of writing has changed over the centuries, the structural principles of the writing system have remained very much the same. Chinese writing was borrowed by neighbouring cultures and adapted for Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. The surviving documents fromMesoamerica in

Maya are primarily stone tablets of an historical

nature; most texts were written 250-900 CE. These texts are notable for their very careful calendrical details. Circumstances in the Mayan world changed causing writing to become considerably less common around 1000 CE, and it died out entirely around 1600 although Mayan languages continue to be spoken in the area today. Knowledge of the writing system was lost, and modern decipherment of the Maya texts only dates from the 1950s. The Egyptians likely borrowed the notion of

writing from the Sumerians around 3000 BCE although some scholars argue that Egyptian writing is an independent invention. Although Egyptian writing is also a mixture of morphographic and phonographic writing (see below), it is pictorially and structurally quite different from cuneiform writing. It is also quite complex, but it lasted until around 450 CE. Semitic-speaking peoples from the eastern end

of the Mediterranean likely acquired writing from the Egyptians around 1500 BCE. They simplified the system considerably to under 30 symbols; these were used to represent only the consonants; such a system is known as an abjad (see the discussion of Arabic below). This Semitic writing spread to all the Semitic languages in the area including Phoenician, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. It spread eastwards to other languages across Asia. Most likely it is the source of, or at least had a strong influence on Brahmi of India which is the ancestor of all the native scripts of India, Tibet, and most of Southeast Asia. Today, this Semitic writing is used for several languages, principally Arabic and Hebrew; it is written in lines running from right-to-left. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people of the

Syria-Lebanon area, brought their script to Greece. The Greeks adjusted the Semitic writing system slightly by adding vowels producing the first alphabet and changing the direction of writing to left-to-right. The Greek alphabet was borrowed and adapted for several languages: Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic, and Gothic. Significantly, it spread to Italy and was adapted to Latin, becoming the Roman alphabet which spread throughout western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet has become the most widely used script in the world. Today, all writing in the world is derived from

created in a social context where such scripts were in use.