ABSTRACT
The significance of writing rests on the fact that it does not fade rapidly, as speech does. Writing allows for the persistence of messages and the geometric accumulation of culture. However, writing is secondary to speech because no true writing system exists separately from a "mother" language that is mediated through speech (or signing). Writing is a visual representation of speech and, quite recently, of sign language. There are three basic types of writing; each shows a different intimacy to language. Logographic writing uses symbols that represent whole words or morphemes. The same logogram, having the same meaning, could be pronounced entirely differently in different languages or dialects of the same language. The other two writing systems employ symbols that stand for sounds, either syllables or phonemes. Some potential spelling problems, such as having different spellings for the same sound (homophones), are actually helpful in providing a logographic mechanism to distinguish meanings.
