Writing
While people remained illiterate, they got no further
than scratching signs and simple pictures onto stones and clay. Writing proper developed independently in
China, Egypt and the Indus Valley in India.
It began as picture-writing. In
time the pictures became stylized and some signs began to be used in
combination to represent ideas, or other objects.
Chinese has crystallized at this stage. The Japanese
Kanji script is in a similar position, having developed from the Chinese system
of writing, although for a totally unrelated language.
Our alphabet owes its origin, ultimately, to Egyptian
hieroglyphics, (meaning "priestly writing") the system of pictures
used on their monuments and sacred buildings. A simplified form of this, called
hieratic, was used by the armies of scribes needed by the burocracy to
administer the country. It was written
in ink on papyrus, a form of paper made from the papyrus reed.
In hieroglyphics, and hieratic, 25 of the simpler
signs were also used alongside other picture-signs to indicate a sound (always
a consonant) or to convey a different meaning.
A break-through
Around 2000 BC something simple but with profound
significance occurred in Egypt that, after many centuries, triggered the spread
of writing around the world. A few
quick-witted foreign workers, perhaps employed in mining or in the army, who
spoke a semitic language totally unrelated to Egyptian, had learnt some
Egyptian and could understand some of the hieroglyphs and hieratic script.
It occurred to them that the signs which Egyptians
used to help determine the meaning of a picture and which represented a
consonantal sound, could also be used to write sounds in their own semitic
language - just as West Europeans learning Greek or Russian today, find that
they can write their own name using the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet.
The idea was very simple, but ground-breaking: to use
a sign to represent just one single sound, totally unrelated to the
meaning. By writing several signs
together they could "spell" a word, any word, in their own
language.
At first the signs used were copied from the Egyptian
ones, but over time they gradually changed, becoming less and less like the
Egyptian originals.
The phoenicians
By 1000 BC this system of sound-signs had become
crystallized and was being used to write Phoenician, the semitic language used
by people living in what is now the Lebanon.
Phoenician was descended from a semitic language similar to the one
spoken by those early people who had had the original bright idea. Phoenician is the oldest alphabetic language
that we know of.
Many of the letters in our present-day alphabet reveal
not only their Phoenician parentage, but even their Egyptian origin. A (now inverted) has the horns of an ox. K
has the spread fingers of the hand and the o is the Egyptian eye. P is the
human face and neck, in profile.
The shape of M has developed from the squiggly line
that denoted waves and meant water. The
Phoenicians called the letter "mem".
In the Phoenician alphabet each letter, being in the
shape of a common object, had the name (in Phoenician) of that object. And the
initial sound of its name was the sound that the letter represented. Their
letter K was called "kaph" meaning "hand" and had the shape
of a hand with its fingers spread.
Their "A" was called "Alef" meaning "ox"
and had the shape of an ox's head with horns.
The Phoenicians were a great sea power. They set up
trading stations all round the Mediterranean coast, even venturing out into the
Atlantic founding what was to become Cadiz in SW Spain. Carthage in present-day
Tunisia was founded by them as early as 800 BC. It was eventually to become more important than Phoenicia, only
to be destroyed in 146 BC by the Romans during the Punic wars.
Wherever the Phoenicians went they took their language
with them. Their illiterate trading partners must have been intrigued to learn
about the system of writing that they used. Some of them copied it and used the
letters to write their own language.
The Greeks
Around 800 BC the Greeks, who had no method of writing
their own language, borrowed the Phoenician script and adapted it for their own
use. They changed some of the shapes and allotted different sounds to them. In
doing so they added 5 extra signs to represent the vowel sounds, since
Phoenician did not indicate vowels.
Hebrew and Arabic, which are related semitic
languages, do not use vowels in their traditional writing. Most words start and
end with a consonant. Longer words have
a consonant in the middle, so it is relatively easy to read without the need
for the intervening vowels to be indicated.
So a second transfer was taking place. It had gone from Egyptian to an early
Semitic language (which developed into Phoenician) and now it was going from
Phoenician to Greek.
The Greeks also became a great sea pwer and they too
founded colonies and trading posts over much of the Eastern Mediterranean. They
too took their writing system with them, modified now to suit their own
language.
Etruscans
The Greek colonies in Italy came into contact with the
Etruscans, a people living in the area of Tuscany. The Etruscans.in turn
borrowed the Greek alphabet and used it to write their own Etruscan language -
that was totally unrelated to Greek. In doing so they again adapted some of the
letters to suit their sounds.
As an interesting side-line, when the Romans arrived
in Gaul they found that some members of the local tribes were already literate
and were using Greek to write their Gallic language. They had borrowed it from
the Greeks who had founded Marseilles.
The Romans
In the 400s BC another transfer took place, and a most
significant one. The people of Latium,
who spoke Latin, and occupied the area south of Tuscany, borrowed the Etruscan
alphabet and started using it to write Latin.
And from there it spread throughout the Roman world. And from its use for Latin comes its use for
all the languages of Western Europe.
Cyrillic
The exception is the Slav world. In the late 8th century two Greek monks,
later to become St Cyril and St Methodius, travelled north into present-day
Bulgaria to convert to Christianity the illiterate, Slav-speaking peoples. In order to write the Slavic languages they
adapted the Greek alphabet to handle the different sounds. The alphabet that
resulted became known as Cyrillic. It
is used today to write Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belorussian, Macedonian
and Serbian.
The Serbs and the Croats speak the same language
(Serbo-Croat), but the Croats (mostly Catholic) use the Latin alphabet while
the Serbs (mostly Orthodox) use Cyrillic.
Since the break-up of Yugoslavia the Croats have been making an effort
to differentiate their language from Serbian, mainly by reviving old words.
In Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, street-signs
nowadays are written in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. Street-signs in the bigger cities in Greece
also have the street signs in two alphabets - written in Greek and Latin
characters.
A few languages have arrived at a half-way stage
between pictograms and ideograms (typified by Egyptian hieroglyphics and
Chinese) and an alphabet proper. It is called a syllabery. In a syllabery each sign represents not a
single sound, nor a complete concept, but a syllable, consisting of a consonant
followed by a vowel.
The Japanase Katakana is one such syllabery. It is used for writing foreign names.
Another is the Japanese Hiragana.
Cuneiform, the ancient writing system used in Mesopotamia and
surrounding areas for over 3000 years, is another syllabery. It was used for writing many unrelated
languages including Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Hittite. It
consisted of wedge-shaped indentations in clay or cut into stone. Sumerian is the oldest known language in
written form, with inscriptions dating from 3100 BC.