Writing

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The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) bears writing in three different scripts. Hieroglyphs (top) and Demotic (middle) record the same text in the Egyptian language, while an equivalent passage in Greek uses the Greek alphabet (bottom). These correspondences were key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early 19th century.

Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols that are called a script, as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language arises from a corresponding spoken language; while the use of language is universal across human societies, most spoken languages are not written.Template:Sfnp

Writing is a cognitive and social activity involving neuropsychological and physical processes. The outcome of this activity, also called writing (or a text) is a series of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Reading is the corresponding process of interpreting a written text, with the interpreter referred to as a reader.Template:Sfnp

In general, writing systems do not constitute languages in and of themselves, but rather a means of encoding language such that it can be read by others across time and space.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp While not all languages use a writing system, those that do can complement and extend the capacities of spoken language by creating durable forms of language that can be transmitted across space (e.g. written correspondence) and stored over time (e.g. libraries).Template:Sfnp Writing can also impact what knowledge people acquire, since it allows humans to externalize their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, elaborate on, reconsider, and revise.Template:SfnpTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

Tools, materials, and motivations to write

Any instance of writing involves a complex interaction among available tools, intentions, cultural customs, cognitive routines, genres, tacit and explicit knowledge, and the constraints and limitations of the systems used.Template:Sfnp Writing implements used to make physical inscriptions include fingers, styluses, ink brushes, pencils, pens, and many styles of lithography; writing surfaces on which inscriptions may be made include stone tablets, clay tablets, bamboo slips, papyrus, wax tablets, vellum, parchment, paper, copperplate, and slate.Template:Sfnpm

The typewriter, as well as the digital word processor, allow individual writers to produce visually consistent text mechanically via a keyboard.Template:Sfnp

Advancements in natural language processing and natural language generation have resulted in software capable of producing certain forms of formulaic writing (e.g. weather forecasts and sports reporting) without the direct involvement of humansTemplate:Sfnp after initial configuration or, more commonly, to be used to support writing processes such as generating initial drafts, producing feedback with the help of a rubric, copy-editing, and helping translation.Template:Sfnp

Motivations and purposes

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Bronze tympanum featuring the personification of WritingTemplate:SndThomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

Historically, writing emerged to address the needs of societies growing in economic and social complexity. Once developed, potential applications included tracking produce and other wealth, recording history, maintaining culture, codifying knowledge through curricula as well as lists of texts deemed to contain foundational knowledge (e.g. The Canon of Medicine) or artistic value (e.g. the literary canon). Aids to administration included legal codes, census records, contracts, deeds of ownership, taxation, trade agreements, and treaties. As Charles Bazerman explains, the "marking of signs on stones, clay, paper, and now digital memories—each more portable and rapidly traveling than the previous—provided means for increasingly coordinated and extended action as well as memory across larger groups of people over time and space."Template:Sfnp Further innovations included more uniform, predictable, and widely dispersed legal systems, the distribution of accessible versions of sacred texts, and furthering practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge management, all of which were largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of inscribed language. The history of writing is co-extensive with uses of writing and the elaboration of activity systems that give rise to and circulate writing.Template:Sfnp

Individual motivations for writing include the ability to operate beyond the limitations of one's own memoryTemplate:Sfnp (e.g. to-do lists, recipes, reminders, logbooks, maps, directions for complicated tasks or rituals), dissemination of ideas and coordination (e.g. essays, monographs, broadsides, plans, petitions, manifestos), creativity and storytelling, maintaining kinship and other social networks,Template:Sfnp business correspondence regarding goods and services, and life writing (e.g. a diary or journal).Template:Sfnp

The global spread of digital communication systems such as email and social media has made writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, where these systems mix with older technologies like paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers.Template:Sfnp Substantial amounts of everyday writing characterize most workplaces in developed countries.Template:Sfnp In many occupations (e.g. law, accounting, software design, human resources), written documentation is not only the main deliverable but also the mode of work itself.Template:Sfnp Even in occupations not typically associated with writing, routine records management has most employees writing at least some of the time.Template:Sfnp

Contemporary uses

Some professions are typically associated with writing, such as literary authors, journalists, and technical writers, but writing is pervasive in most modern forms of work, civic participation, household management, and leisure activities.Template:Sfnp

Business and finance

Writing permeates everyday commerce. For example, in the course of an afternoon, a wholesaler might receive a written inquiry about the availability of a product line, then communicate with suppliers and fabricators through work orders and purchase agreements, correspond via email to affirm shipping availability with a drayage company, write an invoice, and request proof of receipt in the form of a written signature. At a larger scale, modern systems of finances, banking, and business rest on written documentsTemplate:Sndincluding regulations, policies, and procedures; the creation of reports and other monitoring documents to make, evaluate, and provide accountability for decisions and operations; the creation and maintenance of records; internal written communications within departments to coordinate work; written communications that comprise work products presented to other departments and to clients; and external communications to clients and the public.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp Business and financial organizations also rely on many written legal documents, such as contracts, reports to government agencies, tax records, and accounting reports.Template:Sfnp Financial institutions and markets that hold, transmit, trade, insure, or regulate holdings for clients or other institutions are particularly dependent on written records (though now often in digital form) to maintain the integrity of their roles.Template:Sfnp

Governance and law

Many modern systems of government are organized and sanctified through written constitutions at the national and sometimes state or other organizational levels. Written rules and procedures typically guide the operations of the various branches, departments, and other bodies of government, which regularly produce reports and other documents as work products and to account for their actions. In addition to legislatures that draft and pass laws, these laws are administered by an executive branch, which can present further written regulations specifying the laws and how they are carried out.Template:Sfnp Governments at different levels also typically maintain written records on citizens concerning identities, life events such as births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, the granting of licenses for controlled activities, criminal charges, traffic offences, and other penalties small and large, and tax liability and payments.Template:Sfnp

Science and scholarship

Research undertaken in academic disciplines is typically published as articles in journals or within book-length monographs. Arguments, experiments, observational data, and other evidence collated in the course of research is represented in writing, and serves as the basis for later work. Data collection and drafting of manuscripts may be supported by grants, which usually require proposals establishing the value of such work and the need for funding.Template:Sfnp The data and procedures are also typically collected in lab notebooks or other preliminary files.Template:Sfnp Preprints of potential publications may also be presented at academic or disciplinary conferences or on publicly accessible web servers to gain peer feedback and build interest in the work. Prior to official publication, these documents are typically read and evaluated by peer review from appropriate experts, who determine whether the work is of sufficient value and quality to be published.Template:Sfnp

Publication does not establish the claims or findings of work as being authoritatively true, only that they are worth the attention of other specialists. As the work appears in review articles, handbooks, textbooks, or other aggregations, and others cite it in the advancement of their own research, does it become codified as contingently reliable knowledge.Template:Sfnp

Journalism

News and news reporting are central to citizen engagement and knowledge of many spheres of activity people may be interested in about the state of their community, including the actions and integrity of their governments and government officials, economic trends, natural disasters and responses to them, international geopolitical events, including conflicts, but also sports, entertainment, books, and other leisure activities. While news and newspapers have grown rapidly from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the changing economics and ability to produce and distribute news have brought about radical and rapid challenges to journalism and the consequent organization of citizen knowledge and engagement.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp These changes have also created challenges for journalism ethics that have been developed over the past century.Template:Sfnp

Education and educational institutions

Formal education is the social context most strongly associated with the learning of writing, and students may carry these particular associations long after leaving school.Template:Sfnp Alongside the writing that students read (in the forms of textbooks, assigned books, and other instructional materials as well as self-selected books) students do much writing within schools at all levels, on subject exams, in essays, in taking notes, in doing homework, and in formative and summative assessments. Some of this is explicitly directed toward the learning of writing, but much is focused more on subject learning.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

Writing systems

Writing systems may be broadly classified according to what units of language are generally represented by its symbols:Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

• Phonographies represent sounds of speechTemplate:Sndwith alphabets and syllabaries using symbols for phonemes and syllables respectively.
• Logographies represent a language's units of meaning (words or morphemes), though still associated by readers with their given pronunciations in the corresponding spoken language.

Logographies

File:Comparative evolution of Cuneiform, Egyptian and Chinese characters.svg

Comparative evolution from pictograms to abstract character shapes, in Mesopotamian cuneiforms, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters

A logography is written using logogramsTemplate:Sndwritten characters which represent individual words or morphemes.Template:Sfnp Many logograms have internal structures, with components potentially representing both phonographic and ideographic (e.g. Chinese character radicals, hieroglyphic determinatives) aspects of the morpheme.Template:Sfnp

The main logographic system in use is Chinese characters, used primarily to write the Chinese languages and Japanese, and historically others from regions influenced by Chinese culture, such as Korean and Vietnamese. Other logographic systems include cuneiform and Maya script.Template:Sfnpm

Syllabaries

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables,Template:Sfnp typically a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone. In some scripts more complex syllables (e.g. consonant–vowel–consonant or consonant–consonant–vowel) may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically similar syllables are not written similarly.Template:Sfnp

Syllabaries are best suited to languages with a relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other syllabic scripts include Linear B and the Cherokee syllabary.Template:Sfnp

Alphabets

An alphabet is a set of written symbols that represent consonants and vowels.Template:Sfnp

Abjads

Alphabets that generally only have letters for consonants are called abjads or consonantaries; though optional, abjads may also use diacritical marks to specify which vowels follow each consonant. The earliest alphabets were abjads, influenced by symbols representing specific consonants that originated in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most abjads are likewise native to the Middle East, reflecting the relatively limited variation of vowels in the morphology of the Semitic languages spoken in the region.Template:Sfnp

Abugidas

In most of the alphabets of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are indicated through diacritics or modification of the shape of the consonant. These are called abugidas or alphasyllabaries.Template:Sfnp The term abugida is derived from the names of the initial letters in the Geʽez script, another prominent abugida used to write several languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea.Template:Sfnp

History and origins

Writing first emerged in the Early Bronze Age to meet the growing economic needs of the city-states of Sumeria, located in southern Mesopotamia. During this time, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, with Sumerian cuneiform serving as a reliable means for recording transactions, maintaining financial accounts, and keeping historical records, among similar activities.Template:Sfnp

Cuneiform, used to write the Sumerian language, was followed relatively quickly by Egyptian hieroglyphs, with both emerging from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3100 BC, with the earliest coherent texts from Template:Cx.Template:Sfnp The Indus script (Template:Cx), found on different types of artefacts produced by the Indus Valley Civilization on the Indian subcontinent, remains undeciphered, and whether it functioned as true writing is not agreed upon.Template:Sfnmp While its origins are not visually obvious, the opportunity for Mesopotamian cultural diffusion to have introduced the concept of writing to the Indus peoples is clear.Template:Sfnp

Mesopotamia

File:Accountancy clay envelope Louvre Sb1932.jpg

Globular envelope with a cluster of accountancy tokens, Uruk period, from SusaTemplate:SndLouvre Museum

In the 1970s, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat presented a theory establishing a link between cuneiform and previously uncategorized clay "tokens", the oldest of which have been found in the Zagros region of Iran. Around 8000 BC, Mesopotamians began using clay tokens to count their agricultural and manufactured goods. Later they began placing these tokens inside large, hollow clay containers (bulla, or globular envelopes) which were then sealed. The quantity of tokens in each container came to be expressed by impressing, on the container's surface, one picture for each instance of the token inside. They next dispensed with the tokens, relying solely on symbols for the tokens, drawn on clay surfaces. To avoid making a picture for each instance of the same object (for example: 100 pictures of a hat to represent 100 hats), they counted the objects by using various small marks.Template:Sfnp

Cuneiform (from Latin , Template:Lit.) emerged Template:Cx in the context of this technology for keeping accounts. By the end of the 4th millennium BC,Template:Sfnp the Mesopotamians were using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay to record numbers. This system was gradually augmented with using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted by means of pictographs. Round and sharp styluses were gradually replaced with wedge-shaped styluses, at first only recording logogramsTemplate:Sndwith phonetic elements introduced by the 29th century BC to represent syllables in Sumerian, resulting in a general purpose writing system.Template:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

From the 26th century BC, cuneiform was adapted to write the East Semitic Akkadian language (Assyrian and Babylonian) which had spread across southern MesopotamiaTemplate:Sndand then to others such as Elamite, Hattian, Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian. With the adoption of Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC), Old Aramaic was also adapted to Mesopotamian cuneiform. The latest cuneiform texts in Akkadian discovered thus far date from the 1st century AD.Template:Sfnp

Egypt

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The Narmer Palette, depicting two monstrous serpopards representing unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, Template:Cx

The earliest known hieroglyphs (from Greek, Template:Lit.) are clay labels for the Predynastic ruler "Scorpion I", dated Template:Cx and recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab)Template:Sndor otherwise the Narmer Palette, dated Template:Cx.Template:Sfnp The hieroglyphic script was logographic, with phonetic adjuncts that included an effective alphabet. The oldest deciphered sentence is attested on a seal impression from the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Abydos, dating to the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). Around 800 hieroglyphs were used during the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom periods (2686–1077 BC); by the Greco-Roman period (30 BCTemplate:Snd642 AD), more than 5,000 distinct glyphs are attested.Template:Sfnp

Writing was important in maintaining the Egyptian empire, and literacy in the difficult system of hieroglyphs was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes serving temple, pharaonic, and military authorities.Template:Sfnmp

Mesoamerica

Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and the only one to be deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscription identified as Maya dates to the 3rd century BC.Template:Sfnp Maya writing used around 800 distinct symbolsTemplate:Sndmainly logograms, complemented by a set of syllabograms used for affixes, disambiguation between different readings of a logogram, or the substitution of certain logograms entirely.Template:Sfnp

China

The earliest surviving examples of writing in ChinaTemplate:Sndinscriptions on oracle bones, usually tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae which were used for divinationTemplate:Snddate from Template:Cx, during the Late Shang period. A small number of bronze inscriptions from the same period have also survived.Template:Sfnp

Elamite scripts

The Proto-Elamite script, in use Template:Cx, is attested on clay tablets found at different sites across modern-day Iran, with the majority having been excavated at Susa, an ancient city located east of the Tigris.Template:Sfnp The script is thought to have been partly logographic, to have developed from early cuneiform, and to have used more than 1,000 signsTemplate:Sndthough its inscriptions "have been, and will remain, highly problematic in a discussion of writing because they represent a very unclear period of literacy".Template:Sfnp

The Elamite cuneiform script, used Template:CxTemplate:Snd331 BC, was adapted from cuneiform as was used to write Akkadian. At any given point during this period, Elamite cuneiform used around 130 symbolsTemplate:Sndwith a total of 206 used across its entire lifespan, far fewer than in most other cuneiform scripts.Template:Sfnp

Aegean systems

Prior to the invention of the Greek alphabet during the Iron Age, Cretan hieroglyphs are attested on artefacts from Crete during the early-to-mid 2nd millennium BC. Linear B, the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks, was used in Knossos on Crete as well as the Greek mainland Template:Cx.Template:Sfnp Linear A, yet to be deciphered, was used in the Aegean Islands and the mainland Template:Cx.Template:Sfnp

Development of the alphabet

The alphabet is only known to have been invented once in human history, by a community of Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula Template:Cx to write West Semitic languages,Template:Sfnp "in the context of cultural exchanges between Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and communities in Egypt".Template:Sfnp This earliest attested form is known as the Proto-Sinaitic script, and it adapted concepts and at least some of its written letterforms from Egyptian hieroglyphic writing; it adopted wholly West Semitic sound values for its letters, as opposed to adapting existing Egyptian ones.Template:Sfnpm Precise dating of its origin, as well as the graphical origins of many letterforms (if any) remain unclear, and the script remains undeciphered.Template:Sfnpm Around 30 crude inscriptions have been found at a mountainous Egyptian mining site known as Serabit el-Khadem, with symbols that stood for single consonant sounds rather than whole words or conceptsTemplate:Sndthe basis of an alphabetic system. It was not until between the 12th and 9th centuries BC that use of the alphabet became widespread.Template:Sfnp

The Phoenician alphabet (Template:Circa) is a direct descendant of Proto-Sinaitic. Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician were abjads which only had letters representing consonantal sounds; Phoenician was ultimately adapted into the Greek alphabet (Template:Cx), the first to represent vowel sounds, which it did by re-purposing unused Phoenician consonantal signs.Template:Sfnp The Cumae alphabet, a variant of the early Greek alphabet, gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet.Template:Sfnp Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include Cyrillic, used to write languages such as Bulgarian and Russian.Template:Sfnp The Phoenician alphabet was also adapted into the Aramaic script, from which the West Asian Square Hebrew, Arabic,Template:Sfnp and South Asian Brahmic scripts are descended.Template:Sfnpm

Religious texts

In the history of writing, religious texts or writing have played a special role. For example, some religious text compilations have been some of the earliest popular texts, or even the only written texts in some languages, and in some cases are still highly popular around the world.Template:SfnpTemplate:SfnpTemplate:Sfnp

See also

• Collaborative writing
• Graphonomics
• Writer's block
• Writing circle
• Writing slate

References

Works cited

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Further reading

• On ERIC Digests: Template:Multiref

External links

• Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico Damqatum 3 (2007)
• "Signs – Books – Networks", virtual exhibition of the German Museum of Books and Writing i.a. with a thematic module on sounds, symbols and script
• Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse – open access books, journals, teaching resources on research and practice.