“WRITING”- HOW IT WAS ORIGINATED?

 

The question of how to represent a spoken language exactly has been a problem over many centuries back. Then came necessity to establish a format of WRITING to represent the said words. For most ordinary purposes the use of the alphabet in the way conventionally accepted by any particular language is adequate, and the alphabet itself is indeed the culmination of many thousands of years of development of writing systems. 

Before the invention of the alphabet, there were other systems of recording visual messages. Visual communication was in some places quite highly developed, so that there were relatively elaborate ways of marking trees, using smoke signals, knotted cords, and so on, which symbolically and visually conveyed messages otherwise conveyed only by word of mouth. This form of language must, one feels, have been restricted to the passing of information and orders, and must have been useful only in an immediate context.

The earliest form of writing can be traced back to Sumerian civilisation about 3300 B.C., which was originally pictographic but which later developed more advanced forms.

The stages by which writing developed are:

·        At the earliest stage, a message might be conveyed simply by the drawing of a picture. This can be “interpreted” into any language and is therefore not a representation of speech.

·        Many modern advertisements rely largely on this sort of message, so that similar advertisements can be used right across the world. Few, however, dispense entirely with words.

·        From this use of simple pictures, the next stage was to simplify and conventionalise the pictures so that a circle might come to represent the sun, or a picture of a man might be reduced to a shape suggesting only remotely a body, head and legs.

·        Sometimes the symbols ceased to represent things, but came to be used to represent ideas, so that the circle comes to be not only the sun, but also heat or light, or a God associated with the sun. This was then “ideographic writing”, useful but still limited in what it could do.

·        It then seems that signs gradually came to be associated not with the thing or idea represented, but with the sound or group of sounds in the language which was used in speech to represent them, so that there was then a representation at least two stages from the original. This now is the writing representing speech sounds.

·        At one stage symbols represented, not individual sounds but syllables, as does the Japanese script even today. This was, however, cumbersome when language developed words with two or more consonants in a single syllable.

·        The development of the modern alphabet where symbols represent sounds is much more economical and adaptable.

·        Once alphabetical writing is achieved, the written language becomes a very flexible instrument and it can achieve a life of its own, to some degree independent of speech

·        The extent to which written language influences the lives of millions of people is incalculable.