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