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The development of writing
There are differing opinions as to why people felt the need to write. Some think that religion was the motivating force while other think that it was the need to keep business records and keep track of inventories. .
About one-third of the world's 6,912 languages have writing systems. Below are brief descriptions of the major writing systems of the world, some of which are now extinct.
- Cuneiform
Early shipping records kept on clay tablets gave rise to cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia in 3,100 BC. Symbols were scratched on flat clay tablets with a squared-off stick which left wedge-shaped marks in the clay. The name cuneiform comes from Latin cuneus 'wedge.' By the 26th century BC, the cuneiform script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hittite (Turkey). Ugaritic (Syria) and Old Persian (Iran) scripts have a similar appearance.
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Akkadian syllable consisting of Consonant + vowel [a] |
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Ugaritic symbol for [a]. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provided the first evidence of the ordering of letters in an alphabet. |
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Old Persian symbol for the vowel [a]. It was a syllabic script. |
- Egyptian hieroglyphs
This system was developed about the same time as cuneiform. Scholars tried to figure out this writing system after it had been dead for 1,500 years. It was finally deciphered In 1822 by a French scholar Jean François Champollion.
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Egyptian glyph for [m]. |
- Phoenician alphabet
When Phoenicia became a cultural and commercial crossroads of the ancient Western world, there arose a need for an easier way of writing. As a result, the first true alphabet was developed by the Semitic people of the Sinai peninsula some time between 1,500 and 1,000 BC. This system used symbols to represent discrete speech sounds.
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Phoenician letter for [a] |
- Greek alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet contained symbols for consonants only which suited Semitic languages but not Greek. The Greeks felt that they needed symbols for vowels. So they chose some Semitic consonants to represent Greek consonants and then used the extra Semitic consonant symbols for Greek vowels. Thus, the Greek alphabet was the first alphabet that included symbols to represent vowels.
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Greek alpha which represented the vowel [a]. |
- Roman alphabet
The Roman alphabet was developed by the Etruscans who inhabited the Italian peninsula before the Romans. The Etruscans chose certain letter shapes of the Greek alphabet and changed a few sound values of the letters to better represent their own language. The Romans took over the Etruscan alphabet for writing Latin and passed it on to all Western European languages.
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Ancient Etruscan letter representing the vowel [a]. |
- Armenian alphabet
Mesrop Mashtots, a cleric in the Armenian royal court, invented the Armenian alphabet in order to translate the Bible into Armenian. He losely modelled the Armenian alphabet on the Greek alphabet.
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Armenian letter "ayb" representing the sound [a]. |
- Cyrillic alphabet
Two Greek brother, Cyrill and Methodius developed two alphabets for writing the Slavic language spoken in Moravia. One of the alphabets (Glagolitic) fell into disuse, but the other one (Cyrillic) is used today for writing more than 100 languages, among them Russian. The alphabet was based on the Latin script with additional letters taken from the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. The script had undergone several changes over time.
- Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets
The Early Aramaic alphabet is an extremely ancient writing system derived from the Phoenician alphabet, a consonant-based writing system, during the 10th or 9th centuries BC. In time, Aramaic developed its distinctive 'square' style. The use of Aramaic as a lingua franca throughout the Middle East from the 8th century BC resulted in the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. At the end of the 6th century BC, the Early Aramaic alphabet was replaced by the Hebrew Square Script. Thus, it is better known today as the Hebrew alphabet.
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Aramaic letter representing the syllable [kaf] |
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First letter of the Hebrew "square" alphabet "alep" |
- Arabic alphabet
The Arabic script is based on the Nabataean alphabet which was used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. Nabateans added 6 symbols to the Aramaic alphabet to represent sounds that did not occur in Aramaic. The Nabataean alphabet contained only symbols for consonants. The Arabs added dots above and below the consonant to represent vowels.
The earliest Arabic inscription dates to 512 AD. Since then, the script has undergone several modifications. Its present form (Naskh) first appeared in the 11th century AD, and has been used ever since, especially for print.
Several other unrelated languages use the Arabic script including Persian, Pashto, and Urdu who use an adapted version of the Arabic script, called Perso-Arabic. Turkish, Swahili, Hausa, and Uzbek are among languages that used the Arabic script, before they adopted the Latin or Cyrillic script. It is estimated that it is used by close to 1 billion people worldwide.
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Arabic symbol representing the syllable [baa] |
- Brāhmī script
The Brahmi script is the ancestor to many of scripts found in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Some scholars feel that it developed from the Aramaic alphabet as a result of sea trade between Babylon and India. The Brahmi alphabet makers analyzed their spoken language by charting the way speech sounds were articulated. They assigned a letter to each sound.
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Brahmi symbol representing the syllable [ka] |
- Devanagari script
The Devanāgarī script is a descendant of the Brāhmī script. The Devanāgarī script is used for writing Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. It is a syllable-based writing system in which each syllable consists of a consonant plus an inherent vowel. Vowels are written differently, depending on whether they are independent or following a consonant. Devanāgarī is written from left to right.
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Devanagari symbol representing the syllable [ka] |
- Chinese characters
Chinese writing is the oldest system in the world that has hardly changed in the last 4,000 years. It is thought to have originated as pictures around 2,000 BC. The earliest logographs known were on oracle bones. Some of them resembled the objects they attempted to represent. But even so, it was a real writing system and not just a series of pictures.
The Chinese writing system is well-suited for the language because the same words are pronounced quite differently in different parts of China. For instance, the word for man is pronounced as ren, yen, nyin, or len in different regions of China, but it is written everywhere as  . This symbol can be understood by speakers of all Chinese dialects regardless of how they may pronounce it. In this way, the Chinese writing system is a unifying factor for all speakers of this largest language community in the world.
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Traditional Chinese character for 'bird' |
- Hangul
Hangul is used to write Korean. It is an alphabet that consists of 24 letters. Korean letters are formed with strokes from top to bottom and left to right. Vowels and consonants combine into syllables that consist of letters arranged in a square block, rather than linearly. Thus, the syllable han ([h] + [a] +[n]) is written as  .
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| Different types of writing systems
There are several basic types of writing systems.
- Alphabet-based
In alphabetic systems, there is usually some type of correspondence between graphic symbols and sounds. Languages vary in their symbol-to-sound regularity. At one extreme is Spanish which has a very regular system. At the other extreme, there are languages such as English and French that exhibit a great degree of irregularity. Alphabet-based systems are used by languages all over the world. Here are a few samples of some of the world's alphabets.
- Consonant-based
Consonant-based alphabets (or abjads) represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. Full vowel indication can be added by means of diacritics. Most consonant-based alphabets are written from right to left.
- Syllable-based
Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugidas consist of symbols for consonants and vowels. The consonants each have an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own. Syllable-based systems are common for the languages of India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
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Complex systems
Complex scripts consist of symbols that often represent both sound and meaning. Such scripts usually contain a arge number of symbols. Chinese characters are an example of a complext script. They consist of the following:
- Pictographs
Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictographs. They are stylized depictions of objects in the real world and are among the oldest characters in Chinese. They were originally inscribed on stone tablets, bones, and tortoise shells. evolved from a pictograph of a bird.
- Ideographs
Ideographs are characters derived from symbols representing ideas or abstractions. For example, the symbols for 'above' and 'below' have become characters  'above' and  'below'.
- Compound Ideograms
Ideograms are designed to represent relatively abstract ideas, usually by combining several pictograms into a compound whose meaning can be rather arbitrary, as in the example below.
- Phonetic compounds
Over 90% of Chinese characters were created by combining a character with a related meaning with another character that indicates its pronunciation. This practice appeared relatively late in the development of Chinese writing as the number of homophones (words pronounced identically) uncreased. Phonetic compounding is the standard method for creating new characters today.
Meaning |
Pronunciation |
Character |
 xǔi 'water' |
 mù 'tree' |
mù 'wash one's hair |
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