origin of writing, alphabets, language, sumerian writing, pictographic, ideographic.
origin of writing.
The Polish American Assyriologist Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by word-based writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.
The invention of the alphabet is a major achievements. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.
Sumerian writing
The outline of the development of the Sumerian writing system has been worked out by paleographers. It has long been known that the earliest writing system in the world was Sumerian script, which in its later stages was known as cuneiform. The earliest stages of development are still a matter of much speculation based on fragmentary evidence. The French American archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, building Archaeologists have discovered in lower Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) large numbers of small, distinctively shaped clay objects. These are thought to date back to as early as 8000 BCE, about the time that hunter-gatherer societies were giving way to an agricultural way of life. A greatly elaborated set of these clay shapes—some shaped like jars and some like various animals and occasionally inserted in clay envelopes—dates from 3500 BCE, about the time of the rise of cities. Some of the envelopes have markings that correspond to the clay shapes inside. Moreover, these markings are more or less similar to the shapes drawn on clay tablets that date back to about 3100 BCE and that are unambiguously related to the Sumerian language. These markings are thought to constitute a logographic form of writing consisting of some 1,200 different characters representing numerals, names, and such material objects as cloth and cow.
The theory advanced by Schmandt-Besserat to explain this transformation is that the clay shapes are tokens representing agricultural goods such as grain, sheep, and cattle and that they were used as a form of bookkeeping. The multiplication of types of tokens could correspond to the increase in the number of kinds of goods that were exchanged with the rise of urbanization in the 4th millennium BCE.
Archaic Sumerian used mostly graphs representing numerals, names for objects. The writing system takes the name cuneiform.
The next major stage lution of Sumerian writing was the adoption of the phonographic principle, the use of a sign to represent a common sound rather than a common meaning. For example, the graph representing “water” appears to have been used also to represent the locative suffix “in,” because the latter sounded the same as, or similar to, the word water. It is as if in English a person used the word ball to stand for a person named Bill on the grounds that it is easy to represent the ball with a circular graph while there is no obvious way to represent Bill, and the two words sound similar. The Sumerian script, however, remained primarily logographic and resorted to phonographic signs only when forced to, for representing unpicturable words and for distinguishing ambiguous graphs.
Sumerian script was adopted in the 3rd millennium BCE by the Akkadians, who greatly expanded the phonographic properties of the script. The Assyrians and the Babylonians, both speaking dialects of the Akkadian language, were responsible for most of the cuneiform writing in a form known today as Akkadian cuneiform.
Alphabetic systems
While cuneiform had many graphs that represented syllables, many syllables were not represented. The methods used for representing syllables that did not have distinctive graphs were quite unsystematic. The first writing system consistently based on the sound structure of a language was Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek orthography developed about 1400 BCE and deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, an English architect and cryptographer. The script is strictly syllabic; each consonant-vowel pair is given a distinctive graph. As an example, a set of syllables that an alphabetic system would represent with the consonant p plus a vowel are all represented in Linear B by different graphs. Although the script is highly systematic, it provides a limited representation of the phonology of Mycenaean Greek. Greek contains many syllables that are not simple consonant-vowel combinations, and not all consonantal sounds are followed by vowels. Linear B is thus an incomplete script for representing the phonological structures of the spoken language.