Mary E. Brown, Ph.D., Professor
Information Science

Southern Connecticut State University
501 Crescent Street, New Haven, CT 06515

Department of Information and Library Science
Fax: 1.203.392-5780 / Phone: 1.203.392-5781
Toll Free: 1-888-500-SCSU, then press 4

Before people could write, they could draw or paint. Drawings are used to record something, to communicate or leave a message. As we can observe in looking at drawings by young children, however, the reader of the drawing may not understand or may misinterpret what the drawing represents. Pictures, therefore, as a means of communications, can be problematic. Drawings of animals painted 50,000 years ago have been found on cave walls. While we do not know why cave paintings were made (some believe they were associated with religion or magic), we do know that alphabets gradually develped from early picture-writings.

Pictures were simplified to symbols to represent concrete objects and concepts. For example, parallel wavy lines represented water. The symbol for water then was used to represent the initial sound in the spoken word for water. Symbols were then sequenced to form a phonetic representation of spoken words. Using English words as an example, the spoken word toad might be represented by the symbols for tree - orange - deer. The problem, however, was that other words began with the same initial sound and, therefore, many different symbols might be used to represent the some sound. The spoken word toad might, therefore, also be represented by the symbols for toe - orange - dog.

Symbols of abstract concepts were represented by symbols for related concrete ideas. For example, an ear might be used for hearing or a bent leg to convey swiftness. Some abstract concepts needed a combination of symbols. Thirst, for example, could be represented with the symbol for water over the symbol for mouth. Egyptians wrote in a combination of picture-writing and phonetic-symbol-writing. A spoken word, however, might represent more than one concept. A picture clarifying which meaning was intended, then, followed where the phonetic word.

"Almost from their very beginnings, systems of writing tended to become phonetic‹that is, capable of representing the sounds of spoken languages. But if writing was to become truly useful to mankind, it was necessary that the complicated systems of phonograms be simplified so that the art of writing could be acquired and used by the ordinary man. The process of simplification has resulted in the relatively small group of written and printed characters which make up what we today call the alphabet" (McMurtrie, 1943, p. 20).

Alphabetic writing was the last major form of writing to appear; it is also the most highly developed, the most convenient, and the most easily adaptable of all known writing systems.

While the broader trend across history has been for writing to evolve in the direction of simplicity and utility, there are example of more primitive writing systems developing after more refined ones and there have been some, for example Chinese writing, that have move in a direction contrary to simplicity and utility.

The alphabet has its origins in a single point in history and in a specific place, likely Palestine or Syria. The alphabet became the basis for all Semitic, Indian, Greek, Latin, Slavonic and modern Western Scripts. (Diringer, 1962).

There are five classifications of scripts (of true writing): pictography or picture writing, ideographic writing, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic writing (Diringer, 1962).

Embryo-writing (not true writing) is the composed of single and disconnected images. Picture writing is the most rudimentary stage of true writing, is capable of representing the sequential stages or ideas of a simple narrative, and is the first important step beyond embryo-writing. Picture writing can be expressed orally in any language, as pictures do not stand for a specific sound. Picture writing was used by many prehistoric peoples including in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Crete, Spain, southern France, China, America, and Africa (Diringer, 1962).

Ideographic writing was a highly-developed form of picture-writing capable of conveying abstractions, subtleties and multiple associations, through not a complete writing system. Individual symbols are called ideograms. Where a pictogram of a circle might represent the sun, an ideogram of a circle might stand for heat or light or a sun g-d or the concept day. 'Pure' ideographic writing has "no connection between the depicted symbol and the spoken name for it; the symbols can be read with equal facility in any language." Ideographic writing has been found among the indigenous peoples of North America, Central America, Africa, Polynesia, Australia, and the Yukaghirs of northeastern Siberia (Diringer, 1962).

Analytic transitional scripts of the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Cretans, and Hittites stand somewhere between pure ideographic and pure phonetic writing. While the scripts may had been ideographic in origin, they had a phonetic element with the two forms combined in various ways. Some analytic transitional scripts lasted for 3000 years or more. The basic units of these scripts are words (Diringer, 1962).

Phonetic scripts are a graphic counterpart of speech: each symbol corresponds to a sound or sounds in the language. "The single signs used in phonetic writing may be of any shape, and there need be no connection between the external form of the symbol and the sound it represents." (Diringer, 1962).

Alphabetic writing. "Though technically a subdivision of phonetic writing, alphabetic writing has within the past three thousand years assumed such importance as to deserve a category of its own. [There are] enormous advantages implicit in using letters to represent single sounds (rather than ideas or even syllables)....With its 22 or 24 or 26 signs, the Alphabet is the most flexible and useful method of writing ever invented, and, from its origins in the Near East, has become the nearly universal basis for the scripts employed by civilized peoples, passing from language to language with a minimum of difficulty. No other system of writing has had so extensive, so intricate and so interesting a history" (Diringer, 1962, p. 24).

The letter forms we use today originate from lapidary Roman capitals. "To understand the development of the Latin alphabet up to the invention of type, it is enough to know that the Romans derived their alphabet from the Greeks. They in turn borrowed from the PhoeniciansŠ.By the ninth century B.C. the Greeks had learned to write. First they carried their lines from right to left. Then for a time a method called Boustrophedon was used, in which lines were alternated right to left, then left to right. Finally, the line flowed from left to right, as it does today....Square capitals are not easy to write, and this limited their wide usage. The story of writing can be told in terms of the search for simpler forms, requiring fewer strokes and pen lifts and providing their own beat or rhythm to such an extent that spacing for color and legibility could be more easily controlled....By the fourth century, there developed a style of writing that had as its chief characteristic the rounding off of certain angles and joints....called uncials...used chiefly to increase speed, since the curves reduced the number of strokes necessary to shape the letters....Early in the sixth century, the half-uncial, or semi-uncial, came to use. This marked a change to a true variant on capitals, and was the beginning of what we think of as lower case." (Chappel, 1970).

²The livelihood of the first printers depended upon their being able to reproduce by movable types a fair imitation of the manuscript books of their generation and locality² (Morison & Jackson, 1923, p. 47). In many places printing was strongly resisted, particularly by scribes, who saw this as an economic threat, and their patrons, who viewed the printed texts as ³crude and vulgar imitations of good manuscripts² (Chappel, 1970).

References

Allen, A. (1952). The story of the book (pp. 13-23). New York: Roy Publishers.

Chappell, W. (1970). A short history of the printed word (pp. 20-37). New York: Knopf.

Diringer, D. (1962). Writing (pp. 13-24). New York: Praeger.

McMurtrie, D. C. (1943). The book: The story of printing and bookmaking (3rd rev. ed.) (pp. 20-39). New York: Oxford University Press.

Morison, S., & Jackson, H. (1923). A brief survey of printing history and practice (pp. 47-62). New York: Knopf.