Where did writing come from?

09 June 2005

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There are dozens of writing systems in the world, in a bewildering variety. They're written from left to right or right to left and even from top to bottom. Their symbols come in all shapes and sizes. Unlike spoken language, which started many thousands of years before writing and whose origins are cloudy, we have a very good idea of how and when writing began. Because fragments of some of the earliest writing still exist, carved on rocks, we can trace its evolution through time.

The discovery of writing was almost inevitable when a society grew complex enough to need it. As long as people are in small groups, everyone knows who did what for whom. But when people settle in towns, commerce becomes more complicated. A potter makes pots, a weaver makes cloth, an administration collects taxes. At some point, there's a need to keep track of everyone's contributions. Records might be kept with knots in string, or with notched sticks. And everywhere, people draw pictures to represent things. In Stone Age caverns, we drew pictures of prey animals. In modern times, we make pictures of things we want people to buy.

A second condition for discovering writing is a certain kind of language, ones in which words are likely to consist of only one syllable. It happened at least three times that we know of, and probably more: it happened over 5000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, with a language known as Sumerian. And in ancient China over four thousand years ago. And in Middle America, with the Mayan languages. The Mayan writing system, which seems to have originated around the fourth century A.D., died with the Mayan empire. So all the writing systems in the world today can be traced back to just two places: China and Ancient Iraq.

Writing turns out to be a pretty useful thing to have. And once it's discovered, nearby peoples tend to adopt it too. Japan adopted Chinese characters and started writing Japanese words with them. On the other side of the world, Sumerian writing was adopted for many languages between about 2500 and 1000 BC -- and it gradually moved away from being pictures. Sumerian inspired the Egyptian hieroglyphs we know from temples and tombs. And hieroglyphs became the raw material for Phoenician writing that gave the world its alphabets.

There are dozens of alphabets in use today. In addition to Europe and the western hemisphere, they're used across southern and southeastern Asia and on into Oceania. Most of them use 20-30 symbols. But they range in size from a language of the Solomon Islands with 11 letters, to the Khmer alphabet of Cambodia, with 74. They look as different as English, Russian or Hebrew, but it's fairly easy to show that every alphabet—the ones I named and many more—have a common origin: ancient Phoenicia on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians brought their alphabet to the Greeks, who passed it to the Romans, who gave our letters the shapes they have to this day. Greek was also the model for alphabets in Eastern Europe, such as the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian and other tongues. Another descendant of Phoenician was the Aramaic alphabet, from which came writing as different-looking as Hebrew and Arabic -- and all the writings of India and beyond.

Writing originated from some pretty basic characteristics of human beings and human society. And yet, it is not found everywhere. Did you know that, despite its obvious uses, fewer than half of the world's languages even have a writing system? Most languages are only spoken. But that's changing. And as more languages become written, it's the Roman alphabet, brought to the less-developed world by missionaries and linguists, that's spreading writing across the globe.

Where would we be without writing? It's an extraordinary part of language -- and of human history. Without writing, you could reasonably ask, would history even exist?

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Peter T. Daniels, author of The World's Writing Systems. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Ron Wolf at June 16, 2005 06:04 AM

Posted by: Webmaster at June 16, 2005 09:13 AM