INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

Language can be defined as purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating the
ideas, believe, emotion, by the means of a system voluntarily produced symbol. (Sapir, 1921)
there are two keywords that are prominent in this definition which are “purely human” and “non-
instinctive”. Language is purely human means that it is only human being that have the ability to
articulate words, and when language is non-instinctive simply means language is not
transferable, likewise not an in-built, it rather means that language can only be studied or learn in
the society.
Language is a cognitive process by which we communicate our thoughts and feelings to others.
When we think of language and school, most of us think about reading. But language skills
encompass more than reading. We talk, we listen, we read, and we write with words. Language
skills, then, include reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
Reading, writing, speaking and listening play crucial roles in school, and all four are interrelated
and affect one another. There is a fundamental and reciprocal relationship among oral language
(listening and speaking), written language, and reading. Initially, reading and writing are
dependent on oral language skills. Eventually, reading and writing extend oral language. Young
children use oral language skills to learn how to read. Older children use reading to broaden their
learning.
Language and writing are interwoven in the sense language is like a proto to writing system,
because a language is seen as an institution whereby people interact or communicate orally, and
under the skills of language, it encompasses different skills which are: reading, listening,
speaking, and writing.

WHAT IS WRITING?

Writing can be defined as any conventional system of marks or sign that represent the utterances
of a language. It is also any conventional method of virtually representing verbal
communication. It is a way we put our feelings or ideas using conventional visible mark or
symbol.
Both writing and Speech are used in conveying message. Writing is differs and also be a reliable
form of information, storage, and transfer. The process of encoding and decoding of writing
system requires mutual understanding between the writers and the readers (consumer) of the
meaning set of characters that makes up a script.
Writing is the expressive mode of written language and involves using written symbols of
language to communicate. Writing not only includes the ability to accurately represent the
graphic form of speech (letters and words) but also the ability to develop and express one’s
thoughts in a cohesive, structured manner. The skills required for effective writing include
knowledge of spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar, an understanding of how word
order in sentences affects meaning, and the ability to distinguish main ideas from supporting
ideas or details in a language.
Writing is not language. Language is a complex system residing in our brain which allows us to
produce and interpret utterances. Writing involves making an utterance visible. Our cultural
tradition does not make this distinction clearly. We sometimes hear statements such as Hebrew
has no vowels; this statement is roughly true for the Hebrew writing system, but it is definitely
not true for the Hebrew language. Readers should constantly check that they are not confusing
language and writing.
(Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell, 2005)

WHAT IS SYSTEM
System can be defined as a set of things working together as part of a mechanism or an
interconnecting network or a set of principles or procedures according to which something is
done or an organized scheme method. When we refer something as a system, it means it follows
some scientific method to form word either syntactically or Phonologically.

WRITING SYSTEMS
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script
and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying
messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer.
Writing systems require shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning
behind the sets of characters that make up a script. Writing is usually recorded onto a durable
medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may also be used,
such as writing on a computer display, on a blackboard, in sand, or by skywriting. Reading a text
can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, or expressed orally.

HISTORY OF WRITING SYSTEM

Writing system can be traced back to at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia
(present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, and shortly afterwards
in Egypt at around 3200 BC. By 1300 BC we have evidence of a fully operational writing system
in late Shang-dynasty China. Sometime between 900 and 600 BC writing also appears in the
cultures of Mesoamerica. The invention of first Writing System is contemporarily (co-exist in
time) with the beginning of bronze age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC.
It is taught that the first consonantal alphabetical writing appeared for 2000 BC as a
representation of language by Semitic tribe in the Sinai-peninsula.
Most of other alphabets in the world today, either invented from this or another innovation
mainly the phonetician alphabets is a Greek script, which consistently represent vowel since 800
BC. The Latin alphabet, a direct descendant by far the most common writing system in use. The
development of writing was one of the greatest inventions of man,
This is because writing allow human knowledge to transcend time and space. Writing began at
the time when man learn how to communicate his thought and his feelings by the means of
visible signs and symbol. We should bear it in mind that very large number of languages found
in the world.

Cuneiform is a writing style that developed in the Middle East among the Sumerian and
Babylonian people and used symbols to represent sounds rather than the things they were
describing. There are still examples of this script today, one of which was found to feature a tale
remarkably similar to that of Noah and the Ark in the Bible. George Smith, who translated the
Flood Tablet and its story of Utnapishtim – who survived a great flood by building a huge boat –
was so excited when he realized what it said he ran screaming out of the building, peeling his
clothes off as he went.

Other early writing systems included Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were only translated
following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Elsewhere, a stone tablet covered in script
discovered in Mexico is estimated to date back 3,000 years.

The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique; the
alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model
of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more
basic constituents. And because it is 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.

It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the writing
system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are invented to
serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to satisfy one purpose
may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to
serve mnemonic purposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and
archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms, but, once invented, they could
serve aesthetic functions.

The outline of the development of the Sumerian writing system has been worked out by
paleographers. It has long been known that the earliest writing system in the world was Sumerian
script, which in its later stages was known as cuneiform. The earliest stages of development are
still a matter of much speculation based on fragmentary evidence. The French American
archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, building on a hypothesis advanced by the Assyriologist
Pierre Amiet of the Louvre, demonstrated a series of small steps leading from the use of tokens
for simple bookkeeping purposes to the development of written tablets on which graphs of the
script stand for morphemes of spoken Sumerian. Archaeologists have discovered in lower
Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) large numbers of small, distinctively shaped clay objects.
These are thought to date back to as early as 8000 BCE, about the time that hunter-gatherer
societies were giving way to an agricultural way of life. A greatly elaborated set of these clay
shapes—some shaped like jars and some like various animals and occasionally inserted in clay
envelopes—dates from 3500 BCE, about the time of the rise of cities. Some of the envelopes
have markings that correspond to the clay shapes inside. Moreover, these markings are more or
less similar to the shapes drawn on clay tablets that date back to about 3100 BCE and that are
unambiguously related to the Sumerian language. These markings are thought to constitute a
logographic form of writing consisting of some 1,200 different characters representing numerals,
names, and such material objects as cloth avnd cow.

CLASSES OF WRITING SYSTEM

This is where it all starts. Writing systems are the most visual part of linguistics, and their beauty
is what draws many linguistics geeks to neography.
Writing systems are fascinating on their own, but knowing all the different types opens new
doors for neographers.

1. Cuneiform
2. Alphabetic
3. Syllabic writing

CUNEIFORM:

Cuneiform is a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia c.

3500-3000 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of
the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the Sumerian city of Uruk which advanced the
writing of cuneiform c. 3200 BCE.
The name comes from the Latin word cuneus for 'wedge' owing to the wedge-shaped style of
writing. In cuneiform, a carefully cut writing implement known as a stylus is pressed into soft
clay to produce wedge-like impressions that represent word-signs (pictographs) and, later,
phonograms or `word-concepts' (closer to a modern-day understanding of a `word'). All of the
great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform until it was abandoned in favor of the
alphabetic script at some point after 100 BCE, including:

• Sumerians
• Akkadians
• Babylonians
• Elamites
• Hatti
• Hittites
• Assyrians
• Hurrians

When the ancient cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia were discovered and deciphered in the late
19th century CE, they would literally transform human understanding of history. Prior to their
discovery, the Bible was considered the oldest and most authoritative book in the world. The
brilliant scholar and translator George Smith (l.1840-1876 CE) changed the understanding of
history with his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 CE. This translation allowed other
cuneiform tablets to be interpreted which overturned the traditional understanding of the biblical
version of history and made room for scholarly, objective explorations of history to move
forward.
Early Cuneiform

The earliest cuneiform tablets, known as proto-cuneiform, were pictorial, as the subjects they
addressed were more concrete and visible (a king, a battle, a flood) but developed in complexity
as the subject matter became more intangible (the will of the gods, the quest for immortality). By
3000 BCE the representations were more simplified and the strokes of the stylus conveyed word-
concepts (honor) rather than word-signs (an honorable man). The written language was further
refined through the rebus which isolated the phonetic value of a certain sign so as to express
grammatical relationships and syntax to determine meaning. In clarifying this, the scholar Ira
Spar writes:
This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the
earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic
writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system
characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and
syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the Third Millennium B.C.,
cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political,
literary, and scholarly documents. (1)

ALPHABETIC:

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of
some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language,
plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as
pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe
loan words and foreign names.
However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a
system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze
Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to
have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one
of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.
Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.
This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined
into the Phoenician alphabet. It also developed into the South Arabian alphabet, from which the
Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not
considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowels
less alphabets are called abjads and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.
Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely used writing
systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen
distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage
of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages since it recorded
words phonemically.

SYLLABIC:

As logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, a syllabary is a set of
written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a
syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel
alone.
In a "true syllabary", there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related
characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for
/ke/, /ka/ and /ko/ have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound
(voiceless velar plosive). More recent creations such as the Cree syllabary embody a system of
varying signs, which can best be seen when arranging the syllabogram set in an onset–coda or
onset–rime table.

Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as
Japanese. The English language, on the other hand, allows complex syllable structures, with a
relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, making it cumbersome to
write English words with a syllabary. To write English using a syllabary, every possible syllable
in English would have to have a separate symbol, and whereas the number of possible syllables
in Japanese is around 100, in English there are approximately 15,000 to 16,000.

However, syllabaries with much larger inventories do exist. The Yi script, for example, contains
756 different symbols (or 1,164, if symbols with a particular tone diacritic are counted as
separate syllables, as in Unicode). The Chinese script, when used to write Middle Chinese and
the modern varieties of Chinese, also represents syllables, and includes separate glyphs for
nearly all of the many thousands of syllables in Middle Chinese; however, because it primarily
represents morphemes and includes different characters to represent homophonous morphemes
with different meanings, it is normally considered a logographic script rather than a syllabary.

Other languages that use true syllabaries include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Indigenous
languages of the Americas such as Cherokee. Several languages of the Ancient Near East used
forms of cuneiform, which is a syllabary with some non-syllabic elements.

REQUIREMENT OF WRITING SYSTEM

Writing requires shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the
sets of characters that make up a script.

All writing system requires:

1. One language: every writing system required one language which is generally spoken by
some set of people
2. One set of design base element: every writing required one set of base element or symbol
which can be referred to as sign and can also called script.
3. One orthography: every writing system required rules and convention understood and
shared a community which assign meaning to the base element.
4. At least one language [generally spoken] whose construction are represented and can be
recalled by the interpretation of these element and rules.
5. Some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a
permanent or semi-permanent medium as they may be interpreted (usually visually but
tactile system have also been derived).
6. At least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understand and shared by a
community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and
relations to one another.
7. At least one set of defined base elements or symbols individually termed signs and
collectively called a script.
 8. At least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understood and shared by a
community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes) their ordering and
relations to one another.

CONCLUSION
In recent years writing systems has emerged as a distinct area of research, driven by cross-
linguistic studies of the acquisition or use of literacy and its cognitive repercussions, by the novel
forms of language use developing in computer-mediated communication, and by sociolinguistic
explorations of written language as a marker of identity, among other reasons. But these
developments have spanned several different academic disciplines – education, psychology,
linguistics, sociolinguistics, typography and many more. They are hard to follow without
browsing a range of publications, and will probably miss something, say an important paper on
American and British spelling styles in a source such as Business Communication Quarterly
(2004). This new journal Writing Systems Research (WSR) provides a forum for bringing
together the diverse strands involved in the study of writing systems to allow work carried out in
a particular discipline to be informed by the discoveries in related disciplines. It aims to provide
a global forum for multi- facetted discussion of writing systems from a cross- disciplinary
perspective.
A writing system, also referred to as script or orthography, is a convention for representing the
units of a spoken language by making marks on rocks, leaves, clay, bark, metal, or paper. The
study of writing systems, to a large extent, consists of establishing correspondences between
these marks, or symbols, and units of the spoken language such as individual sounds, syllables,
morphemes (smallest units of meaning), or words. Whereas speech is ephemeral, writing leaves a
permanent record of a language. The invention of writing some 5,000 years ago is probably one
of the greatest achievements of humankind. Without writing, human history and man’s
knowledge of the world would not have been possible. There are differing opinions as to why
people felt the need to write. Some think that religion was the motivating force, while others
suggest that it was motivated by the need to keep business records. Curiously, only about one-
third of the world’s 6,912 languages have writing systems.
REFERENCES

• Coulmas, F. (1999) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers
• Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell, 2005
• Edward Sapir 1921 in Language
• Hall 1969
• http://wikipedia
• Coulmas, Florian. 2003. Writing systems. An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Daniels, Peter T, and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford
University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
•
UNIVERSTY OF ILORIN, ILORIN

LEVEL:
200 LEVEL

COURSE TITLE:
WRITING AND GRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS

COURSE CODE:
LIN207

QUESTION:
CLASSES OF WRITING AND THE REQUIREMENT

LECTURER-IN-CHARGE:
MRS EWEAMA
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