Anthropology of Reading and Writing Exam 2 FINISHED

Syllables are

Innate to people, they can easily break down syllables in their language without training

How we separate syllables is specific to the language that we speak

A syllable always has a vowel (or vowel like)

Syllabaries

Writing system where symbols represent syllables

Cherokee Syllabary

Inventor: Seqouyah

Sparked by the “talking leaves” (newspapers)

Started as logograms and developed to a syllabary

It was easy to learn

Abjad

A writing system that only marks consonants

(they are almost alphabets because they represent only sounds)

Ex. Arabic, Hebrew

Abugidas

Like abjads but they contain vowels as diacritics

Diacritics

A sign written above or below a letter that indicates pronunciation

Arabic development

There was very little writing in pre-Islamic Arabic

With Islam in 622 NEW, writing exploded

The Quran was very important for writing development

How is Arabic written

Written right to left, 28 letters plus other symbols

Always cursive, always linked together

So most letters have four shapes, as initial, medial, final, and isolated

Arabic numbers are written left to right

Two different writing systems of Arabic

classical arabic and modern arabic

Semitic Abjad Origins

Emerged around 1500 OLD

Possibly from Egyptian origins

Semitic languages

Semitic languages have noncatenative morphology (not together, separated)

Roots are isolated sets of consonants, usually 3 (triconsonantal roots)

Words are made by filling in consonants

Hebrew

Is an Abjad

Direction of writing: Right to left

Used to write: Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, and many other Jewish languages

Why are semitic languages important for the history of writing

Semitic Akkadians were among the very first people to write

Also because an early West Semitic speaker invented the abjad, from which descends all the non-Chinese writing systems in use today

East Semitic family

Akkadian (the main one)

Babylonian

Assyrian

East Semitic speakers lived in Mesopotamia

West Semitic Family

Ugaritic

Canaanite

Phoenician

Hebrew

Aramaic

Arabic

The Semitic symbols were used acrophonically

In acrophony, a symbol is used to represent the first phoneme in the object portrayed. For example, if, in English, I use a picture of a tulip to represent /t/

The Semitic abjad was at least partially based on

a simplified application of Egyptian writing

The Proto-Canaanite script

was invented around 1700 OLD by Canaanites who had some knowledge of Egyptian writing

original signs were pictographs

evolved into linear letters

The Phoenicians

After 1050 OLD, the Semitic peoples in the northern Levant (Mediterranean) came to be known as the Phoenicians

they founded a number of colonies, and the language of these colonies was known as Punic

The Aramaic abjad

The Aramæans adopted the Phoenician script and by 750 OLD, they had developed an identifiable form, distinct from its Phoenician origin

The Hebrews borrowed the abjad from the Phoenicians and

developed a new form known as the Old Hebrew abjad

Why did Hebrew kind of disappear

In 586 OLD, the Babylonians conquered the Hebrews

They spoke Aramaic so the Hebrews in captivity did too

After their return to Israel, Hebrew became restricted to religious purposes, and Aramaic became the ordinary spoken language

Who adopted Aramaic as their official language

The Assyrians, the Akkadians, Babylonians, and later the Persians

Alexander the Great

In 330 OLD, Alexander the Great conquered Persia and established Greek as the official language

The spread of Islam did what

Helped Arabic replace Aramaic as the common language of the Middle East

Reviving Hebrew

In 19th century NEW, a movement arose to revive Hebrew as a spoken language

This movement succeeded and coincided with the establishment of the modern state of Israel

This is the only known case of the successful revival of a dead language

Invent of Islam and Arabic

With the advent of Islam (622 NEW) Arabic experienced an explosion of writing

Tradition holds that Mohammed himself was illiterate and dictated the Qur'an. the Islamic sacred text, to scribes

As Islam spread, some converts began to speak Arabic, and others used the Arabic script to write their own language

Sequoyah

A Cherokee who invented a language solely in 1821

English name was George Gist

first person known to history to have achieved literacy by single-handedly inventing a writing system

born sometime around 1770 in Tuskegee

Lived during time of colonization

Creating cherokee

Sequoyah started with logographic writing but abandoned it because there were too many symbols

He then started to think about syllables and came up with 200 phonological pieces

He eventually reduced it to 85 signs

Egyptian Hieroglyphs origin

Did not appear to evolve over centuries

Came into existence suddenly around 3100 BC

Developed two cursive scripts: hieratic and demotic, which existed alongside the hieroglyphs

Hieratic became a priestly script after it was ousted by demotic

Rosetta Stone

Most famous inscription in the world

Discovered in Egypt in 1799

A slab of compact granite

Reading Egyptian hieroglyphs

Two hundred years ago, no one knew how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, it was assumed that their exotic symbols represented mystical ideas and thoughts

*The rosetta stone was key in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs

Writing on the Rosetta Stone

Written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Demotic

The hieroglyphic section was damaged

There were 6 cartouches in the hieroglyphic inscriptions

Deciphering the Rosetta Stone

They started to decipher by searching for the repeating of names such as Ptolemy

From this they were able to draw up a tentative demotic alphabet

Cartouches

The word cartouche was coined by French soldiers in Egypt who were part of Napoleon’s invasion

A cartouche is an oval frame containing a royal name in hieroglyphs

Discovering the Rosetta Stone

A demolition squad of Napoleon’s soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone in mid-July 1799

It was most likely built into a very old wall in the village of Rashid (aka Rosetta), on a branch of the Nile River

Movement of the Rosetta Stone

The stone was moved from Rashid to Cairo and copies were made and distributed to scholars of Europe during 1800.

In 1801, the stone was moved to Alexandria to avoid its capture by the British.

Eventually it was handed over and taken to Britain and displayed in the British Museum ever since

Thomas Young

Worked on the Rosetta Stone in 1814

He thought that the demotic script was a mixture of alphabetic signs and other, hieroglyphic-type signs

Jean François Champollion

Accredited with the full decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs (1823) and the fundamentals of hieroglyphs

He was rivals with young as he believed that the hieroglyphs were completely non-phonetic

He made further progress with the Philae Obelisk inscription, and then agreed that the cartouches were alphabetical

Coptic

A language in the last phase of ancient Egypt

Essential in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs because

Champollion used his fluency in Coptic to match the sounds of ancient Egyptian names (like Ptolemy). By comparing Coptic spellings of names with their hieroglyphic counterparts, he could determine the phonetic values of individual symbols.

The Fundementals of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

The writing system is a mixture of semantic symbols (logograms) and phonetic signs (alphabetic)

A pictogram may function as a phonogram (letter sound) or a logogram, depending

Sumerian Influence on Egyptian Hieroglyphics

The basic idea of phonography was borrowed by the Egyptians from the Sumerians

The Direction of Hierglyphs

Written and read both from right to left and from left to right. Whichever direction was chosen, the signs faced that direction

Reasons for left to right or right to left preference of hieroglyphs

Symmetry of inscriptions (aesthetic appeal)

Showing respect to gods and kings

Ease of reading

Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian

No one knows how the ancient Egyptians sounded in conversation because it is extinct

Also the result of Egyptians not marking the vowels in their script

Clues on pronunciation come from Coptic, as vowels were written in this stage

The second clue to pronunciation comes from two other ancient languages: Assyrian and Babylonian

The Hieroglyphic ‘Alphabet’

There are 24 uniconsonantal signs (one letter) in the hieroglyphic script

The script used biconsonantal, triconsonantal, and non-phonetic signs (logograms)

5 Types of Hieroglyphs

Uniconsonantal signs (the ‘alphabet’)

Biconsonantal signs

Triconsonantal signs

Phonetic complements (adding a uniconsonantal sign to a word to conform pronunciation)

Determinatives/logograms (added to the end of a phonogram to indicate a word’s meaning)

Ancient Maya

The Spanish inquisitors were responsible for eradicating almost all Mayan writing and customs. But we also get our knowledge of the Mayas from them.

Maya Numbers

The first part of the Mayan writing system to be deciphered in the 19th century

Used the idea of place value where it increases in multiples of 20 (1, 20, 400, 8000 etc.)

A shell symbolised 0, a dot stood for 1, a bar for five

Place value increased vertically

Maya Calendar

Consisted of 18 named months, each 20 days long, and one month of 5 days (365 days)

Deciphering Mayan Glyphs

A major step was the realization that they were partially phonetic

Two obstacles: The Mayan languages in the 1950s were not well known to scholars

It combined phonography and logography

( & Mayan glyphs are more unpredictable than Egyptian glyphs)

( & Glyphs were fused together and hard to discern)

Fray Diego de Landa

The most important Spanish inquisitor

He made his ‘Landa’ alphabet based on assumptions he made about the Mayan alphabet

He applied this to the Maya language in hopes of decipherment but a lot of this didn’t fit

Léon de Rosny

In 1876, he applied the Landa alphabet to the glyph for ‘turkey’

From this he proposed that Mayan writing was a phonetic system, based on syllables

This was discredited

Knorosov

Also produced a series of decipherments and they were ridiculed by Sir Eric Thompson

Sir Eric Thompson

The leading Mayanist of the 1900s

What else made decipherment of the Rosetta Stone hard

Egyptian is no longer spoken, people in Egypt now speak Arabic, this made decipherment harder because there is less knowledge about the sounds of the language

Egyptian Demotic

Consonantal alphabet

Demotic glyphs represent single consonants (so this is also a semitic language)

Not writing that you use everyday, connected to royalty, maybe seen on shrines

Why was decipherment of Egyptian Glyphs hard

1. There is a combination of logograms and phonograms

2. Within the logograms, some symbols represent syllables and some represent a single sound

3. Determinatives do not sound anything and were not meant to be read (they instead gave meaning to what you were reading) but if you didn’t know that principle it’ll mess with your decipherment

4. There are many homophones

The Writing of Egyptian Glyphs

Associated to the ruling elites

Religious and administrative functions

Various forms: rock inscriptions, wood carvings, wall paintings, papyrus and ink

Mayan Culture was from

2600 BCE to about 1200 CE

Various forms of writing mayan glyphs

rock inscription, jaguar skins, murals, ceramics

How do you read Mayan Glyphs

In paired columns left to right, top to bottom

The oldest Chinese inscriptions have been found on

Oracle bones (Old turtle shells and ox scapulae)

They are records of divinations by the 12 kings of the Shang dynasty

Chinese characters can be classified by

Number of strokes

Radicals

Phonetic

Semantic

The general meaning of characters

Basic and compound chinese characters

Basic characters are called dutizi

Compound characters are called hetizi

What are difficulties with chinese characters

Many characters

Many homophones

Takes a long time to learn

Need to master around 3500 to be considered literate

Dictionaries have no consensus on organization

Development of Chinese Characters

The change in styles of writing a given character generally reflects periods in Chinese history

Shang → Great Seal → Small Seal → Scribal → Regular → Simplified

Classifying Chinese Characters

Traditionally, Chinese characters have been divided into five groups according to their composition:

1. Pictograms (Full pictures)

2. Simple Representation (Shows abstract ideas using simple marks or symbols)

3. Compound Representational (combine two or more simple characters to show a new meaning)

4. (Involves the Rebus principle) (Use a character for its sound rather than its original meaning)

5. Semantic-Phonetic (Combines two parts — one shows the meaning, and the other shows the pronunciation)

The Chinese Language is made up of

8 regional languages with multiple dialects

Over 70 percent of Chinese people speak Mandarin

The Japanese based their writing system on

chinese characters, which they referred to as ‘Kanji”

you need 2000 basic characters to be considered literate in Kanji

kana

Eventually the Japanese invented a small set of supplementary symbols known as “kana”

Two categories of pronunciation of Japanese

“Kun” (native Japanese)

“On” (derived from Chinese)

Two Japanese Syllabaries

1. Hiragana

2. Katakana

Both consist of 46 signs

Originally Hiragana was used for informal writing and Katakana for more formal works

Today Hiragana is used more frequently

Kana versus Kanji

All Japanese sentences can be written entirely in Kana

They don’t practice this (abandon Kanji) because homophony is too common in Kana making it hard to use

The introduction of pinyin

was NOT successful in taking over Chinese writing

(Pinyin is a system that uses the Latin alphabet to romanize Standard Chinese)

What writing system is used in Japanese mainly for foreign names and foreign words

Katakana