Chapter 15: Writing Systems
Writing, Language, and Culture
- Writing is not language
- Writing systems are largely arbitrary
- Writing and culture influence each other
- Five classes of writing systems:
- Orthographies- the vast majority of writing systems
- Pedographies- writing systems designed for learners
- Technographies- scientific tools designed and used by a specialized field
- Shorthands- written faster than orthographies, designed to be fast enough to record speech verbatim
- Cryptographies- codes designed to conceal information
Types of Writing Systems
- Writing can represent sound and/or meaning
- Phonographic systems- system that rely predominantly on the representation of sound
- Syllabic writing systems- uses characters to represent particular sequences of sounds
- Phonemic writing systems- uses characters that represent individual sounds or segment
- Alphabet- systems that represent all sounds
- Abjads- systems that represent consonants but not vowels
- Abugidas- systems that represent the consonants with full graphemes and the vowels with extra marks
- Morphographic systems- systems that rely predominantly on a correspondence between a written grapheme and a particular morpheme
- Pictograms- pictures drawn to express ideas
- Rebus principle- borrowing a symbol only for the phonemic value that it encodes
The Historical Evolution of Writing Systems
- Writing can be @@developed and invented@@, a @@new script can be created@@ for a language, or a @@writing system can be borrowed and adapted@@
- Morphographic writing systems were developed @@first@@
- It is thought that phonographic writing systems were developed from morphographic writing systems