A Stroke, a Letter, an Alphabet — A Brief History of Writing and Writing Systems (PART I)

Prologue: What does it feel like to be illiterate?

How could you ever be illiterate? To me, and I’m sure to quite a lot of people who take literacy for granted, this remains one of the confounding childhood questions that doesn’t seem to have an answer. How is it even possible to not be able to jot down what you speak? Funnily, and almost ironically though, I myself was later proven to be among the illiterate population — in my mother tongue, Shanghainese.

It didn’t take me too long, though to get the hang of the Shanghainese script after I happened to run into a Wikipedia page in that language (mostly attributed to my fluency in Mandarin). In addition to my eventual acquisition of the Shanghainese orthography, another takeaway from that somewhat idiotic experience runs as follows; writing, the visual system for representing language, is so crucial that it defines what a language is. As the famous Chinese proverb goes, the palest ink is better than the sharpest memory. Writing overcomes limitations of brain storage and allows communication across space and through time. From a historical point of view, writing allowed for the administration of empires, perseverance of valuable knowledge, and the organisation of large-scale military campaigns.

Writings of ancient Romans inspired philosophers a millennium later to undergo the Renaissance, marking a turning point in European history. Writings by Spanish explorers motivated conquistadors to launch the colonisation of the new world. Religious and political writings, on the other hand, inspired millions of faithful believers or devout revolutionaries into battling and killing each other during the course of thousands of years for their version of a Brave New World. Writing is, indeed, an amazing achievement by humanity.

The School of Athens, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino.

It’s wrong to assume that any civilisation possesses writings. Hunter-gatherers obviously would not make great writers, as they struggled to accumulate any non-portable possession. This could also explain why any steppe hordes, regardless of their time frame, failed to utilise writing until they had decided to subjugate a substantially large feudal realm and settle down in their lands. There’s simply nothing you could store other than the absolute necessities small enough to carry if you moved around all day. On the other hand, sedentary people were also not guaranteed to be able to write (and read). The Incas were still using “quipu,” or a type of knot-record to administer their Peruvian empire at the time they succumbed to the Spanish conquistador, Fransisco Pizarro, and his tiny 168-men army.

A page from Christopher Colombus' Journal

Why then, did only some people and not others develop writing, given its overwhelming value? Furthermore, among those who managed to master writing, why did their scripts end up being so drastically different? Why didn’t, say, the Chinese just follow the example of the Roman alphabet rather than sticking onto their intriguing yet ridiculously non-user-friendly idea of ideograms? Tracing the development of writing not only gives us linguistic knowledge on how beautiful languages are, they also give us insights into cultural history that it provides.

There are, as far as we know, more than 7,000 existing human languages in the world, but less than a hundred writing systems, or scripts used to record them. Thousands of languages don’t even have their written form, to start with. It also makes sense that a writing system can be associated with more than one language, the best example being that of the Latin script. This could often confuse non-linguisticians, but when I say the “Latin script” I mean the collection of symbols employed by the Latin alphabet (aka. ABCDE). Both English and French are notable members of the Latin alphabet despite the significant variations that the latter made to vowel letters in adaptation to French phonology.

Writing Systems and Where to Find them. The Latin alphabet is in gray.

What people don’t tend to know, is the fact that a single language can have multiple scripts at its disposal. The Kazakh language, for example, is simultaneously being written in the Arabic script (in Xinjiang, China) as well as both Latin and Cylliric writings in the nation of Kazakhstan. Mongolian could be written in both Cylliric (as in the Mongolian Republic) and Uyghuric in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Chinese, due to its relatively limited syllables and high occurrence of synonyms, is probably one of the languages most resilient to foreign writing systems. It nonetheless employs a Latin transcription, called pinyin, to make language-learning less painful for children or language students. This further proves the linguistic fact that any writing systems can be used for any language, independently of the phonology and grammar. Still, languages opted for (through either invention or adoption) the type of writing that communicates the most effectively and efficiently, thus contributing to the diversity of cultures we see today.

The Kazakh Language in three different alphabets

Writing: How does it come into being?

How exactly do you invent a writing system? In fact, that task is so challenging that there have been only a few occasions in history where people invented writing entirely on their own. All 7,000 known writing systems today can be traced back to only four of them; namely, the writing of the Sumerians (3,000 B.C), the Egyptians (3,000 B.C.), the Chinese (1,300 B.C.) and the Mexican Indians (600 B.C.). Any other writing system in the world, at any time, is either descendant of these systems or at least inspired by them. While all languages are proven to be equally capable of producing any meanings, writing systems, on the other hand, had much vaster differences between one another. As a result, there are clear-cut distinctions between different stages of writing, which we will be now investigating.

Writing is scarce and therefore, hard to invent for obvious reasons. One major difficulty is you have to decompose a continuousutteranceofwhateverthingIdontknow into s-m-a-l-l / c-o-n-c-i-s-e / s-p-e-e-c-h / u-n-i-t-s. On the contrary, when speaking, you don’t need to actively pause between every word in your sentence, even if you think you do. You would most likely only pause between sentences. You also have to have everyone in your clan agree to your arbitrary assignment of symbols despite the differences in accents and dialects. The easiest and most convincing way of doing so is to, quite literally, “draw a picture”. Our ancestors drew pictograms to represent a direct image of an object. Once a pictogram was generally accepted, its meaning was extended to attributes of that particular object.

Early Sumerian Pictograms

Pictograms would later begin to represent ideas and become “ideograms”. One example that best illustrates this process is the emoji symbol “:)”. It was created for the purpose of representing a smile, which is an object, and was later derived into referring to happiness or contentment. In fact, there is not much innate distinction between the emojis or even memes we use today, and the ideograms found on cave walls some millennia ago. As Noam Chomsky would put it, there’s always an underlying universality of human creativity.

Ultimately ideograms ended up highly stylised and entrenched in a language system which could not be interpreted with sufficient knowledge of the language itself. The once-recognisable symbols became directly associated with the words for the concepts they signify and would evolve into being a consistent writing system. We call it "word writing" or “logograms”. Again, we will illustrate this process using the example of the emoticon “:)”.

:) “smile”

Becomes → “happiness”

Becomes → the word for “happiness”

The oldest and most prominent example of a logographic writing system is that of Sumerian writing. The first Sumerian signs were not so different from the object they refer to, with the word for “fish” being literally drawn as a fish and the word for “bird”, a bird. They then gradually became abstract and evolved into a system what we now know as the “cuneiform”. One important technological development was the use of clay tablets as writing surfaces, with wedged-shaped stylus used as pens to press marks onto them. The word “cuneiform” literally means “wedged-shape”. In this way, the cuneiform script came to represent the meaning of words directly and consistently for the Sumerians. A similar development can be found in China, where pictographic drawings came to be recorded on animal bones and later bamboo sticks (as was different than clay tablets in Mesopotamia). Even though the Chinese have never met the Sumerians, the universality of human creativity has inspired them into producing some very similar innovations under similar timeframes.

Evolution of Sumerian Cuneiforms

However, things then started to differ! Chinese characters had barely any systematic change to their structures and forms since the time of the Qin dynasty 2000 years ago. The Emperor united all of the Chinese lands under the same banner and, subsequently, institutionalised the writing system used within his realm. Chinese people today can therefore, theoretically, interpret any literature produced 2000 years ago with little annotations. It’s as astonishing as if a contemporary American highschooler can understand the type of ancient Greek written by Socrates. Chinese people also have no difficulty communicating with people speaking a different dialect (language, really, in a linguistic sense) to themselves, despite their staggering divergence (comparable to as if an Italian speaker can understand French).

Quite contrary to its Chinese counterpart, Sumerian writing was not confined to purely logographic symbols. They added in phonetic symbols to “spell out” words rather than just picturing them. One reason why this would happen can be explained by the Rebus Principle. For example, the symbol “8” stands for “eight” in standard English, but when texting to a friend you could easily use it as a shortcut for any sound to do with the syllable “ayt”. “Late” can be abbreviated as “L8” and “create” as “cre8”. And voilà, a new letter has been cre8ed.

The cuneiform spread throughout the Middle East and was adopted by many languages in this region. Foreign peoples like Babylonians could not understand all the ambiguous and somewhat awkward symbols used by Sumerians, so they discarded the purely logographic ones like the one used to represent a “late.” Instead, they kept only those that could represent sounds of syllables in their languages, like how “8” can be for “ayt,” thereby spelling out “late” with, say, an “l” and an “8”. In this way a syllabic writing system is invented, where each syllable in a language is represented by a symbol and words are written syllable by syllable. As what we might expect, the letters appear in many cases to have been the logograms of the object it refers to, just like the “8 - eight” example. Many Indian languages, as well as the “kanas” in Japanese, are syllabaries.

Persian Syllabaries under Darius I

Some syllabaries, like the one used by the Phoenician (who lived in modern-day Lebanon, a Middle Eastern nation where the catastrophic chemical explosion took place), dropped the vowels in the characters altogether and spelt out only consonants. I know that this might seem weird at first glance, but considering all the texting abbreviations used in English (imo, lmao, tbh, FYI, wtf, wdym), a consonantal alphabet (also known as an “abjad”) wouldn’t be so arduous to understand for its fluent users. Examples of abjads include languages like Arabic and Hebrew. (Interestingly, despite their historic hostility, not only do the Jews and the Arabs conform to similar writing systems, but their languages are also closely related, both belonging to the Semitic family.)

Another reason why abjads were found useful by the Middle Easterns was that they had a simple syllable structure. Why bother creating separate letters for vowels if there really aren’t many of them? This issue was finally addressed by the Greeks when they borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Erudite Greeks who had a complex vowel system were unsatisfied with the consonant-only alphabet and, on the other hand, didn’t have as many consonants as the Phoenicians. A middle ground was reached when they happily and handily recycled a few letters for unneeded consonants to make them represent vowels, namely, α, ε, η, ο, and υ, corresponding to the Roman “a, e, i, o, u,” respectively.

Early Greek Alphabet on Pottery

It would take another few millennia before the ancient Etruscans borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks, the Romans from the Greeks and, eventually, the Anglo-Saxons from the Romans... and that’s how our ABC had come into being.

Just to wrap up this article and refresh your memory,...

Here is a nicely arranged timeline that displays the development of writing, from the very beginning of cave drawings to the modern Roman alphabet:

• 15000 BCE: Cave drawings (pictograms)

• 4000 BCE: Sumerian cuneiform (logograms)

• 3000 BCE: Egyptian Hieroglyphics (ideograms)

• 1500 BCE: Phoenician Syllabary (syllabaries)

• 1000 BCE: Greek alphabet (alphabet)

• 750 BCE: Etruscan alphabet

• 500 BCE: Roman alphabet

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in the English variation of the Latin alphabet

Some questions, though, are still left unanswered. Why is it that writing was invented in Iraq, one of the most illiterate countries in the 21st century, and later spread to Europe but not the other way around? What caused the writing systems to change, innovate, and develop at these specific times in history? And finally, how does all of this relate to the bigger picture of human history? Stay tuned, I’ll see you next week with my next article on the diffusion and evolution of writing systems!

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Bibliography

1. Wikipedia. “维基百科：自由个百科全书.” Wikipedia, 2021, wuu.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%81%E9%9D%A2.

2. Fromkin, Victoria, et al. “Writing: The ABCs of a Language.” An Introduction to Language, 10th ed., Cengage Learning, 2013, pp. 527–49.

3. Diamond, Jared. “Blueprints and Borrowed Letters.” Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 20th Anniversary, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 206–28.

4. Diamond, Jared. “Necessity’s Mother.” Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 20th Anniversary, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 229–253.