Essay
Essay
Essay
It is not obvious to a modern person why are the letters of the English
alphabet shaped the way they are. What was the main mind shifts that leaded to
invention of different writing systems? And why some writing systems occurred to be
used widespread till now and another died?
Before answering these questions, it is necessary to focus on the history of the
first writing tries and its motivation.
millennium BC, before Egypt was unified under the first dynasty. While the idea of
writing may have been borrowed from Mesopotamia (where it had been developed
centuries earlier), the hieroglyphic system was distinctively Egyptian. Still, different
versions are being argued on whether Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian
Cuneiform were invented independently.[3][5][6][7]
Hieroglyphic script was the oldest in the evaluation of Egyptian writing. Each
hieroglyph was a picture of a thing that existed in the world or imagination of the
ancient Egyptians, for instance, the ground plan of a simple house , a human
mouth , or a pair of legs in motion . These could be used to write the words
to convey both sound and meaning (sound and meaning signs). For example
depicts a house (in plan) and represents the sound combination of p + r = pr. The sign
is used in the word pr = house. Phonograms were used to indicate the sounds of
signs (sound signs). The sign Dw represents a sand hill and is used as a sound sign
in which means evil. The sound of these signs is in Latin letters, known as
transliteration. We shall start with unilateral signs which could be identified as
"Alphabet".
As Egyptian writing progressed, different versions of the hieroglyphic script
emerged, including hieratic and demotic, so called Cursive hieroglyphs used for
religious literature on papyrus and wood. Hieratic, a stylized form of hieroglyphs, was
used for religious, public, commercial, and private documents, while demotic, an even
more condensed script, eventually replaced hieratic for most purposes, while hieratic
was mostly used by priests for religious writing. [8]
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capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the
expression of a great many of the functions served by speech.
The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its
orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and
permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper
names (a problem that is formidable for nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its
explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp distinction between the
tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies require the
reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which
of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents. [10]
Figure 1.Evoluation of letter A shape from the earliest writing systems to nowadays
Analyzing the motivation that leaded people from ancient times to change
their writing systems, I assume there was some overall trends of writing evolution and
reasons for each of the trends:
Simplification. Most, if not all, writing systems that we know have evolved towards
the overall reduction of the stroke count and the drop of most complex sub-elements.
Indeed, it is much simpler, faster and cheaper to write the “A” letter, than to draw a
bull head. The simplification had boosted the speed of writing, entailed the spread of
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writing into less educated majorities, and allowed kings and librarians to save gold on
salaries for professional painters to have their stuff written.
Variation. More often than not, while letters evolve to consist from a limited set of
radicals, they also evolve to utilize it in the most diverse way. For example, English
alphabet starts like this: A, B, C, D, E, F, G… Not like this:
That’s a rare occurrence in writing system evolution, because every letter starts
from different pictures, but occasionally one can see a stroke popping up to enhance
the difference between two letters. It’s a contribution to legibility and ease of mastery:
it’s easier to pick a system when each element is different from each other as much as
the system allows.
Literature:
1. Before Writing: Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform Hardcover – May 1, 1992
2. Cuneiform /anglais Paperback – May 1, 2015by FINKEL IRVING
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3. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/arts/design/20writing.html
4. Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995), p. 12.
5. Geoffrey Sampson (1990). Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction. Stanford University
Press. pp. 78–. ISBN 978-0-8047-1756-4. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
6. Simson Najovits, Egypt, Trunk of the Tree: A Modern Survey of an Ancient Land, Algora
Publishing, 2004, pp. 55–56.
7. David, Rosalie (2002). The Experience of Ancient Egypt. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-96799-5.
Retrieved 18 April 2022.
8. https://www.worldhistory.org/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs/
9. https://wiki.alquds.edu/?query=Phoenician_alphabet
10. https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing/History-of-writing-systems