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