Bethany Baker, age 14, of E1 Paso, Texas, for her question:
WHEN DID WE TAKE UP WRITING?
Writing is a method of communication by means of arbitrary visual marks forming a system. The earliest known writing dates from shortly before 3000 B.C. and is attributed to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
Because this earliest Sumerian writing is logographic, or made up of abbreviated symbols, it can be read only in vague terms, but the principle of phonetic transfer is apparent and was well on its way to becoming logo syllabic.
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is known from about 100 years later and it is also the earliest authentication of the principle of phonetic transfer. It is possible that the development of Egyptian writing came as a result of Sumerian stimulus.
At about the same time, so called Proto Elamite writing developed in Elam. This system has yet to be deciphered and nothing can be said of its nature at the present time except that, from the number of signs used, it is logo syllabic.
Logo syllabic systems of writing also developed, at a later date, in the Aegean, in Anatolia, in the Indus Valley and China. From these logo syllabic systems, syllabaries were borrowed by other peoples to write their own languages.
The syllabary in its simplest and most reduced form (that is, signs for consonant plus any vowel) was borrowed by the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria from the Egyptians, leaving behind the logograms and more complex syllables of the Egyptian system, during the seond millennium B.C. This syllabary was almost ready made because Egyptian writing had never expressed vowels.
The earliest such semialphabetic writing is found in the so called Proto Sinaitic inscriptions, which date back to about 1500 B.C.
It was from the Phoenicians that the Greeks borrowed their writing system.
The Greeks took the final step of separating the consonants from the vowels and writing each separately, thus arriving at full alphabetic writing about 800 B.C. Alphabetic writing has yet to be improved upon in terms of the definition of a full writing system.
A full writing system is capable of expressing any concept that can be formulated in language. Therefore, full writing systems are characterized by a more or less fixed correspondence between the signs of the writing system and elements of the language the writing represents.
The elements of the language represented, then, can be words, syllables or phonemes (the smallest units of speech that distinguish two different utterances in a language.) Thus writing systems can be categorized as word (or iogographic), syllabic or alphabetic.
Because full writing systems represent elements of language, knowledge of the language written is required to understand the meaning intended by the writer. This does not mean that a writing system is tied to one language. In fact, writing systems are rather easily transferred from one language to another. This means that, unlike a pictographic system, a full system conveys no meaning to the reader without a knowledge of the underlying language.