The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by letters or other marks[1] and also the studies and descriptions of these developments.
In the history of how writing systems have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols. True writing, in which the content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development. It is distinguished from proto-writing, which typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it more difficult or impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance. One of the earliest forms of written expression is cuneiform.[2]
Inventions of writing
Writing systems
Recorded history
Developmental stages Edit
A conventional "proto-writing to true writing" system follows a general series of developmental stages:
Picture writing system: glyphs (simplified pictures) directly represent objects and concepts. In connection with this, the following substages may be distinguished:
Mnemonic: glyphs primarily as a reminder.
Pictographic: glyphs directly represent an object or a concept such as (A) chronological, (B) notices, (C) communications, (D) totems, titles, and names, (E) religious, (F) customs, (G) historical, and (H) biographical.
Ideographic: graphemes are abstract symbols that directly represent an idea or concept.
Transitional system: graphemes refer not only to the object or idea that it represents but to its name as well.
Phonetic system: graphemes refer to sounds or spoken symbols, and the form of the grapheme is not related to its meanings. This resolves itself into the following substages:
Verbal: grapheme (logogram) represents a whole word.
Syllabic: grapheme represents a syllable.
Alphabetic: grapheme represents an elementary sound.
The best known picture writing system of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols are:
Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BC
Vinča signs (Tărtăria tablets), c. 5300 BC[13]
Early Indus script, c. 3100 BC
In the Old World, true writing systems developed from neolithic writing in the Early Bronze Age (4th millennium BC). The Sumerian archaic (pre-cuneiform) writing and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest true writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3100 BC, with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.
