[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

You’ve got a full life — a demanding job, the role of full-time soccer mom/dinner cook/babysitter/homework helper, and you’re constantly sleep-deprived. But you’ve got ideas, poems, stories to tell. When do you find the time to write?

The answer may well lie partly in creative time management, squeezing in opportunities between other scheduled tasks. It may also lie partly in examining your life and determining if your writing needs are being met, and if they’re important enough to you to ensure they are.

To be a writer, you have to write, not just aspire to it, so you have to make the time. Some early birds enjoy the peacefulness of the pre-dawn period, the one or two hours before the alarm clock would go off.

Many night owls opt for the stroke of midnight, when everyone’s asleep in their beds, and the house is quiet enough for their thoughts to jump to the page (or screen).

The important thing is, you have to know what works for you and make it happen.

Start by taking out your calendar and looking where everything’s scheduled — you, kids, husband, dog. Then question it. Is everything efficiently organized so each task is completed in its allotted time-slot? Can you pick up the kids and make dinner and get to a writers’ group all in the same evening? If not, see what you can move.

And if something scheduled isn’t really that important, you can use that time to fit your writing in.

Make a plan.

Look into yourself to determine when your most productive time of day is. If it’s midday, no, you can’t get out of work, but you can use your lunch hour to sit by yourself quietly and work on the outline, synopsis, or first chapter. Just let others know you’re not to be disturbed.

Discover how many hours of sleep you need to be alert and productive. Taking away precious hours is only going to add more stress to your life, so don’t schedule writing during your downtime. But do keep a pen and paper by the bedside to jot ideas and dialogue down if you happen to wake up with a brilliant idea, because you won’t remember it in the morning.

I find that I’m very alert when I’m in the shower, that my thoughts travel down various paths, and I can hit on solutions to writing problems when the creativity flows with the water. Keep a waterproof pen and pad just outside so you can get everything down when it comes to you.

Put your writing time on the family schedule and explain its importance, so everyone knows when you need to be alone. Call it your “homework,” if you like.

You’ve got a plan? Now stick to it!

Writing only happens when you sit down and do it, over and over and over again. Maybe not the same place, but definitely the same time. Be as regular as a clock to build in preparedness. If you start to find excuses for not writing at your designated times, you’re not sticking to your plan, and that’s a waste of precious time.

Ultimately, the ball’s in your court. Writers write; it’s in the job description. Now make the time and discover all the stories you have to tell.