This presentation draws heavily on

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, London, Vintage: 1997

Chapter 12 ‘Blueprints and Borrowed Letters

Three types of writing systems

• 1) An Alphabet which uses phonemes

• 2) Logograms

• 3) Syllabaries

An Alphabet which uses phonemes

• An Alphabet which uses phonemes – a written sound which denotes a basic sound of the language... In English, we get 40 sounds out of only 26 letters through the use of two letter combinations like sh and th.

Logograms • logograms – a written sound stands for a

whole word - eg. Chinese, Kanji (Japanese), Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, Sumerian cuneiform

Syllabaries• Syllabaries – use a written sign for each syllable

in the language, eg. Linear B in Mycenean Greece, the Japanese kana syllabary

Think about the difficulty of inventing a writing system... What

would you have to do???

Think about the difficulty of inventing a writing system

• How to turn an utterance into a speech unit?• Had to learn to recognise the same speech unit

despite variations in volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, phrase grouping and pronunciation.

• Or out another way, they had to decide that a writing system should ignore all that variation.

• They then had to devise ways to represent sounds with symbols.

Only two indisputably independent inventions of writing...

Only two indisputably independent inventions of writing...

• Sumerians of Mesopotamia some time before 3000 B.C.

Only two indisputably independent inventions of writing...

• Mexican Indians before 600 B.C.

Only two indisputably independent inventions of writing...

• Egyptian writing (3000 B.C.)

• and Chinese writing (1300 B.C.)

May also have arisen independently.

The origins of Sumerian cuneiform

• For thousands of years prior to 3000 B.C., people had been using clay tokens of various shapes, to record things like numbers of sheep and amounts of grain.

• Use of clay tablets as a writing surface• Clay scratched with pointed tools that evolved

into reed styluses• Development of conventions: horizontal rows,

writing from left to right, to be read from top to bottom.

The origin of phonemes in cuneiform• We have evidence in the form of thousands of

clay tablets, evidenced from Uruk.

The origin of phonemes in cuneiform

. • Started with logograms, eg. a picture of a fish or

a bird.• Numerals plus nouns would make up accounting

reports• Gradually, signs became more abstract

(especially with the introduction of reed styluses).

• New signs were created by combining old signs, eg. combining signs for head and bread came to mean eat.

How do you represent an abstract noun (like ‘life’)?

• This is an example of what the Sumerians did: the word for ‘arrow’ in Sumerian was

pronounced ti. Ti was also the sound for ‘life’. Thus, the Sumerians used the easy-to-draw arrow symbol for ‘life’.

• The resulting ambiguity was resolved by a silent sign called a determinative (which told readers what kind of noun it was).

• In linguistics, the using existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words, is known as the rebus principle.

Expanding the use of the rebus principle

• Logograms were used for to make grammatical endings. So, in English, it would be pretty hard to depict –tion so a solution would be to use the sign for shun.

• Longer words were made by a series of pictures representing each syllable. So, in English we might combine the logograms for ‘bee’ and ‘leaf’ to create a sign for ‘believe’.

• Additionally the same logogram – eg, a picture of a tooth - could be used for a number of words – eg, ‘tooth’, ‘speech’, ‘speaker’ but the ambiguity would be resolved by adding a phonetically appropriate sign – eg, ‘two’, ‘each’, or ‘peak’.

Sumerian Cuneiform in summary

• Logograms• Phonetic signs for spelling syllables, letters,

grammatical elements or parts of words• Determinatives