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Writing

Ch. 1 of 8
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Contents

Writing

8 sections

  • Writing is the act of creating a persistent, usually visual representation of language on a surface. Yet most spoken languages on Earth are never written at all. Language is universal across human societies, but the marks that fix it in place are not. A particular set of symbols, called a script, together with the rules that encode a spoken language, forms a writing system. In rare cases, writing is tactile rather than visual. The ancient Mesopotamian poem about putting words on clay frames a deeper puzzle. How did marks on a surface come to carry speech across centuries? Why did this happen independently in a handful of places and not everywhere? And what did it do to the people who learned to read?

  • Fingers, styluses, ink brushes, pencils, pens, and many styles of lithography are the implements that press language into the world. The surfaces are just as varied: stone tablets, clay tablets, bamboo slips, papyrus, wax tablets, vellum, parchment, paper, copperplate, and slate. Every instance of writing is a complex interaction among available tools, intentions, cultural customs, cognitive routines, genres, and the limits of the systems used. The typewriter, and later the digital word processor, let an individual writer produce visually consistent text mechanically through a keyboard. Early work in natural language processing and natural language generation produced software that could write highly formulaic texts on its own after initial setup, such as weather forecasts, brief summaries of sporting events, and financial-market overviews. Later tools moved into writing support: generating initial drafts, producing feedback with the help of a rubric, copy-editing, and helping translation. Software such as generative pre-trained transformers can now take a prompt and produce longer, register-appropriate texts without further human input.

  • Tracking produce and other wealth was among the first jobs writing was asked to do, as societies grew in economic and social complexity. From there the applications multiplied: recording history, maintaining culture, codifying knowledge through curricula and through lists of foundational texts like The Canon of Medicine or the literary canon. Charles Bazerman describes the "marking of signs on stones, clay, paper, and now digital memories" as providing means for increasingly coordinated and extended action and memory across larger groups of people over time and space. Legal codes, census records, contracts, deeds of ownership, taxation, trade agreements, and treaties all became aids to administration. Individual motivations run alongside the institutional ones. People write to operate beyond the limits of their own memory, through to-do lists, recipes, reminders, logbooks, maps, and directions for complicated tasks or rituals. They write to disseminate ideas through essays, monographs, broadsides, plans, petitions, and manifestos. They write for creativity and storytelling, to maintain kinship and social networks, for business correspondence, and for life writing such as a diary or journal. The global spread of email and social media has made writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, mixing with paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers.

  • In law, accounting, software design, and human resources, written documentation is not only the main deliverable but also the mode of work itself. Even occupations not usually associated with writing involve routine records management, leaving most employees writing at least some of the time. A wholesaler in the course of an afternoon might receive a written inquiry about a product line, send work orders and purchase agreements to suppliers, email a drayage company to confirm shipping, write an invoice, and request proof of receipt as a written signature. Modern finance, banking, and business rest on written documents: regulations, policies, and procedures, monitoring reports, records, internal communications, and external communications to clients and the public. Financial institutions that hold, transmit, trade, insure, or regulate holdings are particularly dependent on written records, though now often in digital form. Many modern governments are organized and sanctified through written constitutions at national and sometimes state levels. Governments maintain written records on citizens covering births, deaths, marriages, divorces, licenses, criminal charges, traffic offences, and tax liability. In academic disciplines, research is typically published as journal articles or book-length monographs, and publication does not establish a claim as authoritatively true. It marks the work only as worth the attention of other specialists, after peer review by appropriate experts.

  • Writing, speech, and signing are three distinct modalities of language, each with its own characteristics and conventions. Spoken and signed language is typically more immediate, reflecting the local context of a conversation and the emotions of those involved, often through paralinguistic cues like body language. Utterances tend to be less premeditated, with informal vocabulary, shorter sentences, and features that facilitate turn-taking, such as trailing off and fillers. Written language, by contrast, is more structured and formal. Speech and signing are transient while writing is permanent, allowing planning, revision, and editing that lead to more complex sentences and a more extensive vocabulary. Lacking tone of voice, facial expression, or body language, written language often grows more explicit and detailed. A speaker can usually be identified by the quality of their voice, but the author of a text is often not obvious from the text alone, though handwriting can mark identity. Written languages generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts, so a written form may retain archaic features or spellings, which over time can contribute to a dynamic of diglossia. The grammar diverges too. Written language is predominantly declarative, with fewer imperatives, interrogatives, and exclamatives, and it carries higher lexical density, meaning a wider range of vocabulary and less repetition of individual words.

  • Writing systems can be classified by what units of language their symbols represent. Phonographies represent sounds of speech, with alphabets and syllabaries using symbols for phonemes and syllables. Logographies represent units of meaning, words or morphemes, still associated by readers with their spoken pronunciations. A logography is written using logograms, characters that represent individual words or morphemes, many with internal structures carrying both phonographic and ideographic aspects, such as Chinese character radicals and hieroglyphic determinatives. The main logographic system in use is Chinese characters, used to write the Chinese languages and Japanese, and historically Korean and Vietnamese; other logographic systems include cuneiform and Maya script. A syllabary is a set of symbols representing syllables, best suited to languages with simple syllable structure, such as Japanese; Linear B and the Cherokee syllabary are other examples. An alphabet represents consonants and vowels. Alphabets with letters only for consonants are called abjads or consonantaries, and most are native to the Middle East, reflecting the limited vowel variation in Semitic languages. In most alphabets of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are indicated through diacritics or modification of the consonant; these are called abugidas or alphasyllabaries. The term abugida comes from the names of the initial letters in the Geʽez script, used to write several languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

  • At the Sumerian city of Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BC, the first example of written language appears. Writing developed independently in a handful of places during the Early Bronze Age: Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt around 3200, Ancient China, and Mesoamerica. Scholars mark the boundary between prehistory and history with the invention of the first written languages, and the first writing dates to the Neolithic era, when clay tablets tracked livestock and commodities. In the 1970s, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat linked cuneiform to previously uncategorized clay tokens, the oldest found in the Zagros region of Iran. Around 8000 BC, Mesopotamians began using clay tokens to count agricultural and manufactured goods, later sealing them inside hollow clay containers called bullae, then impressing one picture on the surface for each token inside. Eventually they dispensed with the tokens and relied on the symbols alone. Cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, emerged from this accounting technology, with phonetic elements introduced by the 29th century BC to represent syllables in Sumerian. From the 26th century BC it was adapted to Akkadian, and then to Elamite, Hattian, Hurrian, and Hittite. The latest cuneiform texts in Akkadian discovered so far date from the 1st century AD.

  • A community of Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula invented the alphabet, the only time it is known to have happened in human history, to write West Semitic languages. This earliest form is the Proto-Sinaitic script, which adapted concepts and some letterforms from Egyptian hieroglyphic writing but gave them wholly West Semitic sound values. Around 30 crude inscriptions have been found at the mining site of Serabit el-Khadem, with symbols standing for single consonant sounds rather than whole words. It was not until between the 12th and 9th centuries BC that the alphabet became widespread. The Phoenician alphabet, around 1050 BC, is a direct descendant of Proto-Sinaitic, and like its parent it was an abjad with letters only for consonants. Phoenician was adapted into the Greek alphabet, the first to represent vowel sounds, which it did by re-purposing unused Phoenician consonantal signs. The Cumae alphabet, a variant of the early Greek alphabet, gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and its descendants, including the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic, used for Bulgarian and Russian, also descends from Greek. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted into the Aramaic script too, from which the Square Hebrew, Arabic, and Brahmic scripts descend.

    Plato, through the voice of Socrates in the dialogue Phaedrus, warned that reliance on writing would weaken memory and understanding, because written words would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls." He argued that written words, unable to answer questions or clarify themselves, are inferior to living, interactive discourse. The invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia nonetheless enabled detailed legal codes like the Code of Hammurabi. The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who lived from 1911 to 1980, presented his ideas about written language in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. He argued that the printing press and the shift from oral tradition to written culture fundamentally changed human society, contributing to the rise of individualism and nationalism. He proposed that mass-printed writing encouraged a linear and sequential mode of thinking, as opposed to the holistic thinking of oral cultures, and he famously asserted that "the medium is the message." Critics charged that he overemphasized the medium at the expense of content and that his theories were overly deterministic. Literacy, the ability to read and write, remains a key driver of social mobility, yet socio-economic status, race, gender, and geographic location all shape access to quality literacy instruction. The divergence McLuhan and Plato studied still plays out in living languages, where Modern Standard Arabic coexists as a high variety with the low regional varieties spoken across the Arab world.

Updated

Common questions

What is writing and how is it defined?

Writing is the act of creating a persistent, usually visual representation of language on a surface. As a structured system of communication it is also known as written language, and in rare cases it may be tactile rather than visual. Historically, written languages emerged as a way to record corresponding spoken languages.

Where and when did writing first appear?

The first example of written language can be dated to the Sumerian city of Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BC. Writing developed independently in a handful of locations in the Early Bronze Age, namely Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt around 3200, Ancient China, and Mesoamerica.

How are writing systems classified?

Writing systems are broadly classified by the units of language their symbols represent: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic. Phonographies represent sounds of speech through alphabets and syllabaries, while logographies represent units of meaning such as words or morphemes.

Who invented the alphabet?

The alphabet is only known to have been invented once, by a community of Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula to write West Semitic languages. This earliest form is the Proto-Sinaitic script, and the Phoenician alphabet of around 1050 BC is a direct descendant.

How does written language differ from spoken language?

Written language is typically more structured and formal, and while speech and signing are transient, writing is permanent and allows planning, revision, and editing. It has higher lexical density and is predominantly declarative, with fewer imperatives, interrogatives, and exclamatives than spoken or signed language.

What did Marshall McLuhan say about writing?

Marshall McLuhan argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, that the printing press and the shift from oral tradition to written culture fundamentally changed human society and contributed to the rise of individualism and nationalism. He famously asserted that "the medium is the message."

All sources

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