[This is the seventh of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We will be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. Links to all the previous posts are listed at the end of this one. This was originally published on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

The Japanese writing system, which migrated from China to Japan during the 5th century CE, is notable for its interesting history. It is a complex logosyllabic system, featuring a combination of Chinese logograms, two Chinese-derived syllabaries, and Japanese innovations to meet the language’s own unique needs. The first Japanese texts were written in Chinese characters (kanji), using a system called kanbun (which simply means “Chinese writing”). This was not tremendously successful, as Japanese grammatical syntax differs considerably from that of the Chinese. The Japanese solved this problem by keeping the Chinese characters but using their own grammar instead. [1]

Another problem that occurred in the transition was that, as we saw in the last post, Chinese is an isolating language (i.e., nouns and verbs don’t change structure – the words around them indicate the needed change of structure and meaning); this led to a writing system where each individual sign represented a morpheme. The Japanese language, on the other hand, has inflected verbs and postpositions; these require the addition of suffixes and particles to words and clauses.

To represent these extra grammatical units, Japanese scribes used specific Chinese characters that indicated sound values. This system was ambiguous – it was difficult to tell whether a character should be interpreted as a logogram or as a phonetic sign, and the difficulty led to a change in how the syllabograms were graphically indicated. The Japanese took the Chinese characters used to indicate sounds and visually simplified them, making them distinct from the Chinese characters used as logograms.

The Japanese syllabic grapheme is referred to as a kana. There are two sets of kanas: hiragana, and katakana.

Hiragana came into use in the 8th century CE, where the Chinese characters were used only for their phonetic values. This system was known as the manyogana, taken from the name of the anthological work “Manyoshu.” Eventually, the original signs were reduced in number and simplified into sogana, finally arriving at the hiragana form. At first, literate men scorned the hiragana since Chinese was considered the “cultured” language. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed to learn the Chinese characters, and so they relied on the hiragana. “The Tale of Genji,” the world’s first novel, was written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu in hiragana. Over time, the gender-based segregation of literacy dissolved, and hiragana became an accepted literary script. Today, hiragana is used to write native Japanese words.

The following is the hiragana syllabary:

The second Japanese syllabary is called katakana, and it was originally used as a pronunciation aid for Chinese Buddhist scriptures. However, over time, it became a way to write grammatical suffixes and particles, while kanji remained the root of the word. Today, katakana is often used to write non-Chinese loan words.

Katakana syllabary

Some special syllabograms in both hiragana and katakana reflect Japanese allophones, which are different physical sounds perceived as the same sound by native speakers. Typically the position of a kana in the grid (such as the one above) determines its pronunciation, but these special signs are pronounced differently. For instance, the hiragana sign し is located in the s column and i row, which means it should have the phonetic value of /si/. But instead it is pronounced as /ši/ (like the English she). As a result, /s/ and /š/ before the vowel /i/ are allophones and are perceived as the same consonant.

Japanese allophones

In addition to the kanas, modern Japanese writing contains about a thousand Chinese characters, or kanji, used to write words that are either native Japanese or Chinese loans. Often times, Japanese names (personal, geographical, etc.) are written completely in kanji, and some words (both Japanese and Chinese loans) would be written as kanji as well.

If you look a Japanese newspaper, you’ll probably see representations of all three of these writing systems.

Next up: The Olmecs of Mesoamerica

 

Citation:

[1] Lo, Lawrence. (2012). “Japanese.” AncientScripts.com. Retrieved from http://www.ancientscripts.com/japanese.html

 

To read Part 1 (Sumerians), click here.

To read Part 2 (Egyptian hieroglyphs), click here.

To read Part 3A (Indo-European languages part 1), click here.

To read Part 3B (Indo-European languages part 2), click here.

To read Part 4 (Rosetta Stone), click here.

To read Part 5 (Chinese writing), click here.

 

[This is the sixth of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We will be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. Links to all the previous posts are listed at the end of this one. It was originally published on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

Somewhere between 3000-2500 BCE, at the same time the Semitic alphabet arose in the West, the Chinese were developing a very different writing system in the East, one that better suited their language. In fact, until quite recently, Chinese character writing was more widely used than alphabetic writing systems, and until the 18th century, more than half of the world’s books were written in Chinese. These included works of speculative thought, historical writings, novels, and writings about government and law.[1]

The Chinese language contains clearly distinguished syllables, each of which corresponds to a meaningful unit known as a morpheme. The language is isolating rather than inflected like Latin or, to a lesser degree, English; that means each morpheme is represented separately.

In English, a single word (for example, make), when inflected, creates an entire family of related words (make, makes, making, made, etc.). In Chinese, though, there is a one-to-one correlation between character and morpheme – one character (a logogram) represents only one morpheme (e.g., make). You need to add additional characters to create each of the inflected words. Since the number of morphemes in a language far exceeds the number of syllables, such a writing system requires an extremely large number of characters or graphs.

As mentioned above, the Chinese written language system is logographic, where symbols represent meaningful units. As in cuneiform writing, simple signs based on pictures (e.g. the graph for man resembled a standing figure, the graph for woman was a kneeling figure) soon gave way to more complex signs that included reference to sound. Even so, a very large number of characters was needed to express the different words, and by 1400 BCE, the script included some 2,500 to 3,000 characters; most of these can be read to this day.

To resolve any remaining word ambiguity, the written characters were modified so that sounds and meaning together could differentiate them. Spoken Chinese continued (and still continues) to include many possible meanings for a given syllable, but the written form became unambiguous. The existing written system has endured intelligibly through many changes in the spoken language. The script was fixed in its present form during the Qin period (221–207 BCE).[1]

Let’s look at some of the specifics on how the clarity of meaning was achieved. Simple signs to represent common objects were easy to achieve, but many words did not lend themselves to simple forms. To represent difficult words or words referring to intangibles, the Chinese borrowed a simple graph that pictured some object, using it as a second part of the character to denote a word similar in sound but different in meaning – that is, the first graph indicated the sound of the word, and the second, added, graph indicated the word’s meaning. With this invention, the Chinese approached the writing system invented by the Sumerians.

The system was then standardized to approach the ideal of using one distinctive graph to represent each morpheme in the written language. The limitation of this system is that a language that has thousands of morphemes would require thousands of characters. In truth, the number and complexity needed to contain a correspondence between each morpheme and graph in the Chinese script gave rise to about 40,000 different characters; a literate Chinese person needs to know perhaps 4,000 of those. Attempts have been made to simplify the written form, but these tend to re-introduce ambiguity, and they ultimately make the language more difficult to read.

The relationship between the written Chinese language and its oral form is very different from the analogous relation between written and spoken English due to the large number of homophones in the former. In Chinese, no less than 188 different words are expressed orally by the syllable /yi/, but each one of those words is expressed in writing by a distinctive graphical pattern. A piece of written text read orally may actually be incomprehensible to a listener because of the homophones that have no spoken “meaning marker.”

In conversation, literate Chinese speakers frequently draw characters in the air to allow the listener to distinguish between homophones. Written text, on the other hand, is completely unambiguous. English, by contrast, reflects almost the opposite situation – writing is often thought of as a reflection, though somewhat imperfect, of speech.

Not only did the principle of the how the Chinese script was written change with time, so too did the form of the graphs. The earliest writing consisted of carved inscriptions. Near the turn of the first millennium, however, the script came to be written with brush and ink on paper. As a result, the shapes of the graphs lost their pictorial quality, while the brushwork allowed a great deal of latitude for the writer’s aesthetic considerations.

In 1958, as a means of making the script easier to read, a system of transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet was adopted. This system was not intended to replace the logographic script, but rather to indicate the sounds of graphs in dictionaries and to supplement the meaning of graphs on such things as road signs and posters.

A second reform simplified the characters by reducing the number of strokes used to write them. However, such simplification tends to make the characters appear more similar to each other, and thus more easily confused. The value of such reform is therefore limited.

Next up: Japanese writing

 

Citation:

[1] Olson, David R. (nd.) “Chinese Writing.” Brittanica.com. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-writing

 

To read Part 1 (Sumerians), click here.

To read Part 2 (Egyptian hieroglyphs), click here.

To read Part 3A (Indo-European languages part 1), click here.

To read Part 3B (Indo-European languages part 2), click here.

To read Part 4 (Rosetta Stone), click here.

 

[This is the fifth of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We will be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. Links to all previous posts are located at the end of this one. This was originally posted on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the beginnings of humans’ use of written language, both the Sumerians’ use of cuneiform, a syllabic representation of their oral language, and the Egyptians’ use of hieroglyphs, a consonant-only system for conveying both objects and ideas. How do we know about these languages and the cultures that developed them? Much of that information has come from a single object known as the Rosetta Stone, an ancient artifact that is, in its way, the ultimate dictionary and translation machine.

The Rosetta Stone is a partial piece of a larger stone created in 196 BCE that contains writing in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), and in three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek). The writing is an official message, called a decree, about Ptolemy V, the king who ruled from 204–181 BCE. The decree was copied on to large stone slabs called stelae, which were put in every temple in Egypt, and it says that the priests of a temple in Memphis, Egypt, supported the king.

The Rosetta Stone is only one of these copies, so it’s not particularly important in its own right. What is important, however, is that the decree is inscribed three times, in hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native Egyptian script meaning ‘language of the people’ and used for daily purposes), and Ancient Greek (the language of the region’s rulers and administration at the time –Greco-Macedonian following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt).

Once the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, hieroglyphs fell into disuse, and their meaning was lost, remaining a mystery for the next 1,800 years. In the late 1700s, Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to create his own great empire, and he campaigned in Egypt from 1798 to 1801 with the intention of dominating the East Mediterranean and removing the British stranglehold on India.

While accounts of the exact discovery remain somewhat sketchy, the prevailing view is that soldiers in Napoleon’s army, trying to build an addition to a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta, discovered the Stone by accident on July 15, 1799. It had apparently been built into an old wall then covered by the debris of time. Pierre-François Bouchard (1771–1822), the officer in charge, realized the importance of the discovery and brought it to the attention of the scientific community. When Napoleon was defeated, the Stone became British property under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) and was shipped to England, arriving in Portsmouth in February 1802, where it has remained ever since.

As many scholars in the early years of the 19th century understood ancient Greek, this provided them with a starting point to decipher the other two texts. Thomas Young (1773–1829), an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy.

In this portion of the ancient Stone’s Greek section, you can make out Ptolemy’s name six lines down in the center of the text.

It was French scholar and Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), though, who made the biggest breakthrough in the translation and became the first person in modern times to learn to read hieroglyphs. Champollion could read both Greek and Coptic, a descendent of ancient demotic. Examining the texts, he figured out what seven of the demotic signs were in Coptic, and, knowing how these signs were used in Coptic, he worked out what they stood for in the ancient demotic. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic ones.

Other scholars noted that certain groups of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone were surrounded by a carved oblong loop, called a cartouche; these separated the names of kings and queens from large bodies of text. Champollion understood enough of hieroglyphs at this point to confirm that the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone contained the name of one of the Greek rulers of Egypt, Ptolemy V, as Young had determined was present in the Greek section.

A portion of the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphic section with a cartouche that matches the ancient Greek spelling of Ptolemy

As Champollion examined more cartouches, he observed that some of the glyphs matched between the one found for Ptolemy’s name and the ones in the other cartouches. Champollion determined that these glyphs phonetically spelled out the names of certain Greek rulers of Egypt, and this led to the realization that the hieroglyphs contained an alphabet and a record of the sound of the Egyptian language.

There were two categories of glyphs, phonograms (sound symbols) and ideograms (object or idea symbols); this knowledge helped him decipher additional hieroglyphs on Egyptian objects that had made their way to Europe. Champollion announced his discovery, which had been based on analysis of the Rosetta Stone and other texts, in a paper at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres at Paris on Friday, September 27, 1822. The audience included his English rival Thomas Young. Work continued on hieroglyphic translation following Chapollion’s death.

Next up: The development of the Chinese writing system

 

References:

British Museum, (14 July 2017.) “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Rosetta Stone.” Retrieved from https://blog.britishmuseum.org/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-rosetta-stone/

International World History Project (http://history-world.org/)

http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html

 

To read Part 1 (Sumerians), click here.

To read Part 2 (Egyptian hieroglyphs), click here.

To read Part 3A (Indo-European languages part 1), click here.

To read Part 3B (Indo-European languages part 2), click here.

 

[This is the fourth of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. It is also the second part in our discussion of Indo-European languages. Links to all the previous posts in this series are listed at the end of this one. This was originally published on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

Last time, we discussed how Proto-Indo-European branched off into many descendant Indo-European languages, a number of which developed written forms that we can now translate, giving us clues to the people who spoke them and how they lived. We described several important languages that developed over the centuries, up through the Phoenician alphabetic writings. Today we’re going to look at two major descendants of the Phoenician language, Greek and Latin, which are important precursors to many of the languages spoken and written around the world today.

Greek

The earliest surviving written evidence of a Greek language is Mycenaean, one of the over 3,000 dialects of ancient Greek. We find it primarily on the clay tablets and ceramic vessels discovered on the isle of Crete. Mycenaean did not have an alphabetic written system; instead, it had a syllabic script known as the Linear B script. The Greek phonetic alphabet evolved sometime after the fall of the Mycenaean civilization in 1200 BCE and prior to the rise of Ancient Greece in 800 BCE.[1]

Researchers have dated the first alphabetic Greek inscriptions to the early 8th century BCE, about the time when Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, reached their present forms. By the 5th century BCE (from 480–323 BCE, known as the Classical period), Athens had risen to cultural supremacy. As a result, despite the many Greek dialects, only the Athenian dialect, known as Attic, became the standard literary (written) language. The most famous works of poetry and prose that have survived until the present time – penned by writers such as Aristotle, Euripides, and Plato – were written in Attic.

The Greek alphabet went through a number of revisions early in its history, but it’s been in continuous use in some form since its inception. In fact, it’s considered to be the precursor of all European alphabets. In adapting the Phoenician alphabet, the Greeks kept most of the letters’ names and sounds, but they also made several critical modifications and created additional letters necessary for the Greek phonology.

As we’ve seen, the Phoenician script contained only consonants, but the Greek alphabet contained both consonants and vowels. The Greeks therefore used some of the not-required consonants to represent the required vowel sounds. As an example, the Phoenician consonants aleph, he, yodh, ayin, and waw changed to the Greek vowels alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon, respectively. The Greeks also added three new consonant letters – phi, chi, and psi – to the end of their alphabet.

All of the Phoenician letters had specific meanings – aleph meant ox, bet meant house, etc. But while the Greeks adapted the names of the letters,  those letters didn’t represent any specific meaning to them. The only exceptions are that o micron and o mega mean small o and big o, respectively, and e psilon and u psilon mean plain e and plain u, respectively.

A Comparison of the Phoenician and Ancient Greek alphabets

Many local variants of the Greek alphabet developed, individualized according to the new letters added to the original Phoenician script. The two main subdivisions were the Western (Chalcidian) and the Eastern (Ionic). The Western alphabet eventually gave rise to the Old Italic and then the Latin alphabets, while the Eastern became the basis of the Modern Greek alphabet.

During the Hellenistic period, the time of Alexander the Great’s empire building, the Greek language spread throughout the conquered territories. Of necessity, it adapted and incorporated the various local dialects; linguistic changes gave rise to a new language form called Hellenistic Koine, a simplified language used by the common people from 300 BCE to 300 CE.

Greek was originally written right to left and vice versa in the boustrophedon (literally, “ox turns”) manner; successive lines moved in alternate directions. By the Classical period, though, it was written left to right and top to bottom. Lowercase letters first appeared after 800 CE, developing from Byzantine script, which developed, in turn, from cursive writing. Capital letters of Modern Greek are almost identical to those of the Ionic alphabet.

The Greek alphabet gave rise to the Latin, Gothic, Glagolotic, and Cyrillic alphabets; probably influenced the Armenian and Georgian alphabets; and donated some letters to the Bactrian, Coptic, and Nubian alphabets. Greek symbols are used in the modern world in both mathematics and science.

Italic

This branch of the Indo-European languages was predominant in the Italian peninsula. The Italic people were not natives of Italy, however; instead, they migrated to Italy by crossing the through Alps around 1000 BCE and gradually moving southward. Latin is the most famous language within this language group. It was originally a small local tongue spoken by tribes living within small agricultural settlements in the center of the Italian peninsula. The first inscriptions we have found in Latin date back to the 7th century BCE; by the 6th century BCE, the language had spread significantly.[1]

Evolution of Early Alphabets through Latin

Rome was responsible for the major growth of Latin in ancient times. Classical Latin is the form of Latin used in the most famous works of Roman authors like Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, and Marcus Aurelius. Today, Romance languages are the only surviving descendants of the Italic branch; all other offshoots, such as Faliscan, Sabellic, Umbrian, South Picene, and Oscan, are extinct.

Next up: The Rosetta Stone

 

Citation:

[1] Panse, Sonal. (January 5, 2012.) Development of the Greek Alphabet. Retrieved from https://www.brighthubeducation.com/history-homework-help/21831-where-did-the-greek-alphabet-come-from/

 

To read Part 1 (Sumerians), click here.

To read Part 2 (Egyptian hieroglyphics), click here.

To read Part 3A (Indo-European languages Part 1), click here.

 

[This is the third of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We’ll be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. Links to the previous posts are listed at the end of this one. This was previously posted on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

The Indo-European languages are a very large family of related tongues spoken widely in the Americas, Europe, and Western and Southern Asia. Whereas Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian are all descended from Latin and are known together as the “Romance languages,” today’s Indo-European languages (Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian) are all believed to have derived from Proto-Indo-European, a hypothetical language no longer in existence.

Research indicates that the earliest speakers of this language originally lived around Ukraine and neighboring regions in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, spreading later to most of the rest of Europe and down into India. The earliest possible end of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) linguistic unity is thought to be around 3400 BCE.[1]

The speakers of this PIE language didn’t develop a writing system, which means we have no physical evidence of how it looked or sounded. Linguists have been trying to reconstruct it using several different methods; while an accurate reconstruction of it seems impossible, we’ve gained some general knowledge of what PIE speakers had in common, both linguistically and culturally, from studies based on the comparison of myths, laws, and social institutions.

Anatolian

This branch of languages was found in the Asian portion of Turkey and some regions of northern Syria, and the most famous of the languages is Hittite, with Luvian, Palaic, Lycian, and Lydian being some other examples. In 1906, archaeologists discovered a large cache of Hittite material in Hattusas, which had been the capital of the Hittite Kingdom. There, in the remains of a royal archive, researchers found about 10,000 cuneiform tablets and various other fragments that could be translated. The texts date back to the mid- to late second millennium BCE.

All languages of this branch are currently extinct, but it’s here we find the oldest surviving evidence of an Indo-European language, dated about 1800 BCE.

Indo-Iranian

This branch includes two sub-branches: Indic and Iranian. Today these languages are spoken in India, Pakistan, and Iran, as well as in areas from the Black Sea to western China.

Sanskrit, which belongs to the Indic sub-branch, is the best known among the early languages of this branch of PIE. The oldest variety, known as Vedic Sanskrit, has been preserved in the Vedas, a collection of hymns and other religious texts from ancient India. Indic speakers came to the Indian subcontinent from central Asia around 1500 BCE. Hymn 1.131 of the Rig-Veda tells of a legendary journey, and it may be a recollection of a distant memory from that migration.

Avestan belongs to the Iranian sub-group. Old Avestan (also known as Gathic Avestan), the oldest preserved language of this sub-branch is the “sister” of Sanskrit, and it is the language used in the early Zoroastrian religious texts. Another important language of this sub-branch is Old Persian, found in the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid dynasty starting in the late 6th century BCE. The earliest confirmed evidence of this branch dates back to about 1300 BCE.

The Indic and Iranian sub-branches have survived until today. Many Indic languages, such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali, are spoken in India and Pakistan. Iranian languages, such as Farsi (modern Persian), Pashto, and Kurdish, are spoken in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

Phoenician

The Phoenician script, which is a direct descendant of the Proto-Sinaitic script, is an important “trunk” in the alphabet tree – many modern scripts can be traced through it. Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek scripts are all descended from the Phoenician. It was a “consonantal alphabet” meaning that it only contained letters representing consonants (vowels were generally omitted), and it was written from right to left. The major change between Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician is graphical – the Phoenician letter shapes became more linear and abstract, while the Proto-Sinaitic letters were more “pictographic.” It appears that Phoenician language, culture, and writing were all strongly influenced by Egypt (which controlled Phoenicia for a long time).[2]

Our knowledge of the Phoenician language’s development is based on the few written texts we have found. Before about 1000 BCE, Phoenician was written using cuneiform symbols that were like the ones the Sumerians used and that were common across Mesopotamia. The first signs of the Phoenician alphabet as a separate entity, however, were found at Byblos, and they are clearly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, not from cuneiform. The 22 Phoenician letters are simplified Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols, and they became standardized at the end of the 12th century BCE. By 1000 BCE, the Phoenician and Hebrew languages had become distinct from Aramaic, which was spoken in Canaan.

Phoenician Alphabet

Because it used an alphabet, the Phoenician writing system was simple and easy to learn, as well as being very adaptable to other languages. That made it quite distinct from cuneiform or hieroglyphics. In the 9th century BCE, the Aramaeans adopted the Phoenician alphabet, adding in symbols for the initial “aleph” and for long vowel sounds; this Aramaic alphabet eventually turned into modern Arabic. By the 8th century BCE, texts written in the Phoenician alphabet but whose authors were most likely not Phoenician showed up in Cilicia in southern Asia Minor and in northern Syria. Eventually the Greeks, who were close traders with these societies, adopted the Phoenician alphabet, added additional vowel sounds, and thus created the Greek alphabet (upon which our modern Latin alphabet is based). We’ll discuss the Greek and Latin alphabets in Part 2 of our discussion of the Indo-European languages.

Next up:  The Rise of Indo-European Languages (Part 2 of 2)

 

Citations:

[1] Violatti, Cristian. (May 5, 2014.) “Indo-European Languages.” Retrieved from https://www.ancient.eu/Indo-European_Languages/

[2] Thamis. (January 18, 2012.) “The Phoenician Alphabet & Language.” The Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.ancient.eu/article/17/the-phoenician-alphabet–language/

To read Part 1 click here.

To read Part 2 click here.

 

[This is the second of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We will be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. This was originally posted on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the very beginnings of humans’ use of written language, transitioning from the pictographs of cave art to the Sumerians’ use of cuneiform, a syllabic representation of their oral language. Today, we’re going to look at another ancient civilization’s move to true writing – the Egyptians – and the very different path they took to achieve the same end.

Instead of cuneiform, the Egyptians developed hieroglyphs, defined as characters in a system of writing in which symbols represent both objects and ideas (intangibles, such as life, joy, and movement). The ancient Greeks were the first to use the term hieroglyph (two words that together meant “sacred carving”) to describe the characters they observed carved on Egyptian monuments.

The earliest evidence of an Egyptian hieroglyphic system dates back to about 3300 or 3200 BCE, which puts it right about the same time the Sumerians developed their cuneiform system. Scientists continue to debate which of the written forms is older, as archaeological evidence can’t narrow down the time frame further. It’s quite possible that both forms developed independently at the same time; they’re different enough in structure that it’s clear they didn’t develop from a common ancestor.

Other ancient cultures, such as those in China and even the Americas, used similar writing systems at later times, but, again, there was no common ancestor language, and none of those systems descended from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only a small portion of the Egyptian population – mostly royalty, priests, and civil officials – used hieroglyphs as a matter of course, because they were difficult to learn and time consuming to create. As the ancient Egyptian word for hieroglyphs translates literally to the “language of the gods,” students of history can fully understand their importance in this society, whether for religious purposes or for the recording of important civil documents.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic system contained between 700 and 800 basic symbols, known as glyphs. This number grew to about 1,500 in the twilight days of the civilization, primarily because the priests became more interested in writing religious texts. They wrote the hieroglyphs in long lines that moved from right to left or left to right and from top to bottom, using no spaces or punctuation. You can tell the direction of the writing, though, by looking at the way the animals and people face – they always look toward the beginning of the line.

The glyphs are divided into two groups: phonograms, ones that represent sounds, and ideograms, ones that represent objects or ideas. The Egyptians constructed words using the two types in combination. Readers need to recognize both phonograms and ideograms and understand how they relate to each other to determine the significance of a word or phrase within the lines.

Phonograms represented the sounds of single consonants and of combinations of consonants; the writers included no vowels, so it’s impossible for us to know exactly how hieroglyphic texts were pronounced. When speaking the words, people may have added vowel sounds to distinguish words that, in written form, appeared identical.

Ideograms represented one of two things: either the specific object written or something closely related to it. These were referred to as determinatives because their position in combination with the phonograms could change the meaning of what was written. As an example, the glyph of a pair of legs might represent the idea of movement, a noun. Combined with a second glyph, though, the meaning could change so that it represented the verb to approach, or combined with still another glyph, it could convey the concept of giving directions. Using the phonogram-determinative combinations allowed the Egyptians to develop thousands of written words without having to create a single distinct glyph for each thing, action, or concept.

Glyphs combined with determinatives convey different meanings

As we’ve mentioned, hieroglyphs were very time consuming to create, so the Egyptians developed a cursive script called hieratic in the early years of hieroglyphic use. The characters of the hieratic script were based on hieroglyphic symbols, but they were simplified to the point that they were quite dissimilar to the original glyphs. Hieratic was used for most of the writing done with reed pens and ink on papyrus paper and showed up primarily in religious texts.

In the 7th century BCE, the Egyptians began using a script called demotic, one that was even more simplified than the hieratic. This popular script, whose name originated with Herodotus, developed from a northern variant of the hieratic script. It was used for writing business, legal, scientific, literary, and some religious documents, and it was written almost exclusively from right to left in horizontal lines.

After 2,600 years of reasonable stability, the hieroglyphs underwent a major change between 305–30 BCE as Egypt was conquered by the Greeks and entered Ptolemaic Dynasty. During this time, the Egyptians created many new glyphs, primarily due to the priests who became interested in writing religious texts in a more obscure and secretive manner. They often used the new glyphs to form specialized codes and puns that could only be understood by a group of religious initiates.

Then, after the Greeks – and the Egyptians under their rule – fell to the Romans in 30 BCE, the use of hieroglyphs declined. The last hieroglyphic inscription that can be dated specifically was written in 394 CE. For approximately 1,800 years, the once-dominant hieroglyphs became obscure and untranslatable, until the Rosetta Stone was found and decoded. We’ll be discussing the Stone in more detail later on in this series, so stay tuned.

Next up: Indo-European languages

 

References:

International World History Project (http://history-world.org/)

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm

 

[This is the first of an ongoing series that examines the rise of writing – and therefore reading – around the world. We will be looking at the major developments and forces that shaped the written languages we use today. This was originally posted on the AceReader, Inc. blog.]

Today, we take reading and writing for granted – we look at the newspaper in the morning, we peruse a good book during our commute to and from work or while relaxing on the sofa, and we hit the textbooks when we’re in school. But this has not always been the case. While human beings are hard-wired for oral language, our neural circuitry had to change and adapt in order to allow us to read and write [to read our blog post on this topic, click here]. This means someone, somewhere, had to develop a system of codifying information so that another person could read and understand what was written, providing individual access to accumulated cultural experiences, knowledge and information.[1]

We know that the most primitive examples of writing, pictographs painted on the walls of caves and on rocks, arose about 40,000 years ago in numerous parts of the world. Scientists have carbon dated these paintings in southwest Africa, Australia, and southwest Europe to that early time period. Cave art was a simple way of describing an object by drawing a picture that everyone could recognize as that object; however, it had no basis in the oral language of the people creating it. True writing, where symbols denoted a complex idea and where they also reflected spoken sounds and words, developed much later.

True writing arose independently at least three – and maybe four – times throughout history. These were in Mesopotamia somewhere around 3300 BCE, where the Sumerian people created a type of writing called cuneiform; in ancient Egypt either at the same time as the Sumarians or slightly later, where hieroglyphs were mixed with “common” scripts; in ancient Mexico sometime before 400 BCE by the Olmec people, whose script became a precursor to the Maya glyphs used between 200 and 1500 CE; and in North China around 1200 BCE, where the symbols eventually became what we know as modern Chinese characters. These are all examples of true writing because in each archaeologists believe that the pictures used began to denote syllables of sound instead of just conveying a straightforward meaning.

The Sumerians lived in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where they built city-states sometime after 3500 BCE.  Their language was neither Indo-European nor Semitic, and it is not known to be related to any other language. The “proto-literate” period of Sumerian writing spans the time from 3300 to 3000 BCE. Records from this time (the oldest object is known as the Kish tablet) are purely logographic (an abbreviated symbol for a frequently recurring word or phrase, such as the modern &, which denotes “and”) with phonological content. Tokens with a pictographic image were used well before true writing developed (at least 9,000 years ago) to label produce and other goods.

From there the Sumerians progressed to creating impressions with the tokens on clay tablets, and, finally, they used a blunt reed called a stylus to draw the tokens’ images on those tablets. As the impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, this type of writing was called cuneiform, wedge-writing.  It flourished between 3100 and 2000 BCE then fell into disuse. It wasn’t until the last century or so that scholars were able to decode and read the cuneiform writing on the tablets.

The first proven use of cuneiform to denote the sounds of the Sumerian language and not just an object appears in clay tablets found at Jemdet Nasr in present-day Iraq, dating back to around 3100 BCE. As an example, on one of these tablets the Sumerian symbol for arrow was used to convey the word meaning “life.” There is no logical connection between the image of an arrow and the concept of life, but when you look at the language’s sound, the reason for using the arrow pictograph here becomes understandable.

The Sumerian word for arrow was “ti,” while the word for life was “til,” a near homonym.  The concept of life is a difficult thing to draw, so some scribe took advantage of similarity in the words’ sounds (their homonymy) and used an existing pictograph to denote the sound of the syllable ti independent of the pictograph’s original meaning.  Similarly, the pictogram for “reed” was used to convey the unrelated concept of “reimburse;” in the Sumerian language, both were pronounced something like “gi.”  In this way, pictograms began to be used as sound symbols.

The transition to full writing in Sumeria occurred sometime between 3500 and 3000 BCE, as more signs came to be used as representations of sounds.  And, as they became sound symbols, most pictographs were stylized and eventually lost their iconographic form altogether. When the transition was complete, it became possible to symbolize all the syllables of the Sumerian language and to construct written words, no matter how abstract their meaning. It was at this time that true writing was born.

The morphological structure of the Sumerian language, where many single syllables were separate words or at least separate morphemes, undoubtedly made the process of creating a writing form much easier; it also undoubtedly facilitated the transfer of pictograms into sound symbols, or graphemes. A language like English, which contains a complicated syllable structure as a result of its very convoluted origins, would have been nearly impossible to create using pictures for each syllable. Before we take up the history of how written English did come about, though, we need to understand more about how the earliest forms of writing developed.

Next up: Egyptian hieroglyphics

 

Citation:

Johnson, Genevieve Marie. (May 2015). “The Invention of Reading and the Evolution of Text.” Journal of Literacy and Technology. Volume 16, Number 1.

 

I’ve been testing out the new Draftsmith 2.0 software from Intelligent Editing, the makers of PerfectIt, which I use and love, and I’ve been impressed with its capabilities. If you’re just getting started with it, do what I should have done in the first place: view the tutorial so you know just what’s available for you to play with.

It works seamlessly with Microsoft Word, and you can launch it at any time during the writing process from the menu. It works one sentence at a time, offering multi-colored changes so you can see what it’s deleted, added, or changed.

The program is robust. You can use it to:

• Level your writing to specific grades or audiences
• Convert your lengthy words or phrases into plain English for better readability
• Trim your word count without losing your meaning
• Make the text “punchier” with the Engagement Tuner
• Edit your work (or someone else’s) once you’re finished with Track Changes

You can work in Editing, Suggesting, or Reviewing modes, just as with Google Docs, you can add comments to the document for the receiver to see, and you can share it with others through the Share button at the top.

As with PerfectIt, you can preview each change the program suggests and decide if you want to keep it or if your work is better served with the original wording. It’s a sophisticated AI, but it’s still an AI, so it’s best not to just “Accept All.”

Draftsmith 2.0 makes for a sophisticated but easy-to-use writing tool. There’s no steep learning curve, and you always have access to support. If you do a lot of writing for multiple audiences, I highly recommend the program to accelerate and enhance the writing process.

#amwriting #amediting