early forms of writing
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Early Forms of Writing. History of Writing. Many legends associated with the inventions of writing. Greek legend – Prince of Phonecia, Cadmus Chinese Fable – their 4-eyed dragon god, Cang Jie did it. Babylonian God Nebo gave it to the Egyptians. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Many legends associated with the inventions of writing.
Greek legend – Prince of Phonecia, Cadmus Chinese Fable – their 4-eyed dragon god,
Cang Jie did it. Babylonian God Nebo gave it to the
Egyptians. In Islam – the alphabet was invented by Allah
and presented to humans, but not the angels.
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Began with PETROGLYPHS – or cave drawings 20,000 yrs ago in Spain
PICTOGRAMS – pix drawings Represent direct objects Once it was accepted as representing
an object – then it was extended to representing ideas associated with the objects, thus Ideograms.
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Some common examples
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Cuneiform – latin words ‘wedge’ and ‘shape’.
Originated in Sumeria More than 6,000 years ago The oldest known writing system On clay slabs – writing about prayers,
epics, poems, docs, etc.
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It evolved and later became known as logographic, or word writing
Each symbol represents both word and concept – like ideograms
Later borrowed by the Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians – spread thruout Asia Minor
They used them to represent the sounds in their language
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Cuneiform later evolved into syllabic writing
The Persians greatly simplified the original cuneiform writing.
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Modern pictographic system Similar to cuneiform – many symbols
are combined to form meanings /concepts
:-) :’-( B-(
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When a graphic symbol no longer has a visual relationship to the word it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, standing for the sounds that represent the word.
A single sign can represent all words with the same sound – eg. means ‘sun’ and ‘son’.
An advert which uses this principle – ‘31wonderful flavours’
This is not an efficient system, why?
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At the same time as the Sumerian’s cuneiform – 4000BC – Egyptians using same form of writing
Greeks term it as Hieroglyphs This system represents both concept
and word for the concept. So – became logographic writing system.
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A majority of the alphabets of today’s modern writing system comes from the Greeks.
Word Writing – or logographic writing system A written character represents both the
meaning and pronunciation of each word or morpheme(smallest meaningful unit of language).
English words – 26 words and symbols Chinese and Japanese – many characters that
represent sounds or words – an exception.
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A system without consonant clusters (-ght, -ng)
more efficient than word-writing systems, but has many variation of sounds – in the Jap lang all words can be phonologically represented in 100 syllables.
Cherokee people also adopted the syllabic writing system but only recently invented in 1821.
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Hebrew and Arabic are languages with alphabets that consist of only consonants.
Eg Arabic consonant ktb forms the root words for kitab (book), katab (write), etc.
Compared to English, I like to eat out. = LK T T T.
Works well with person who knows the spoken language.
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Chap 12 – Fromkin et al. The end