Introduction To Education EDF 1005 Unit I Lesson II THE ORIGINS OF TEACHING -- J. McNair |
Writing Systems
Study Notes
Tuesday, December 15, 1998 Published at 19:38 GMT
Were Egyptians the first scribes?
The earliest writing ever seen may have been discovered in southern Egypt. The hieroglyphics record linen and oil deliveries made over 5,000 years ago. The find challenges the widely-held belief that the first people to write were the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) sometime before 3000 BC.
The exact date of Sumerian writing remains in doubt but the new Egyptian discoveries have been confidently dated to between 3300 BC and 3200 BC using carbon isotopes.
Ancient Egyptians developed writing to develop trade." It was thought that Sumerians were earlier in writing than Egypt," said Gunter Dreyer, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Egypt.
"With our findings, we now see it's on the same level and this is an open question: was writing invented here or there?" It was possible that Sumerians who traded with Egypt copied their inscriptions, Dr Dreyer said. "But we have to wait for further evidence," he warned, saying publication of his results would appear in early 1999.
Archaeological experts hailed the find as momentous. "This would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of writing and ancient Egyptian culture," said Kent Weeks, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo.
Describing Mr. Dreyer as a "very meticulous scholar," Professor Weeks said the German archaeologist would not have disclosed his findings without being "absolutely certain."
The writings are line drawings of animals, plants and mountains and came mainly from the tomb of a king called Scorpion in a cemetery at Abydos, about 400 km (250 miles) south of Cairo.
Since 1985, Mr. Dreyer and his team have unearthed about 300 pieces of written material on clay tablets barely bigger than postage stamps.
Clay jars and vases also display the documentary records of linen and oil delivered to King Scorpion I as taxes. Two-thirds of the hieroglyphics have been deciphered, including short notes, numbers, lists of kings' names and names of institutions. The newly discovered Egyptian writings also show that the society then was far more developed than previously thought, Dreyer said.
He said man's first writings were not a creative outpouring but the result of economics: when chieftains expanded their areas of control they needed to keep a record of taxes. Although the Egyptian writings are made up of symbols, they can be called true writing because each symbol stands for a consonant and makes up syllables.
What is Writing?
1. Writing is a form of human communication in which a set of visible marks are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language.
This definition underscores several facts about writing:
2. Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system of visible marks or signs that represent these symbols. Put another way, a writing system can be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents the speech sounds of a language.
3. Both speaking and writing depend upon the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by someone not familiar with the linguistic structure of oral language.
4. Writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, which would not be produced orally.
5. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect. Scholars account for these facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms and functions.
6. Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs. Gestures-such as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreement-are visible signs but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures, similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of writing.
7. Language has two primary levels of structure: the meaning structures and the sound patterns .
8. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a word. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning. Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less well-defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.
9. The basic linguistic unit of the sound system is called a phoneme; it is a minimal, contrastive sound unit that distinguishes one utterance from another. Phonemes may be further analyzed in terms of a set of underlying distinctive features, features specifying the ways the sound is physically produced by passing breath through the throat and positioning the tongue and lips.
10. Phonemes may be thought of as roughly equivalent to the sound segments known as consonants and vowels, and combinations of these segments make up syllables.
11. Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by some writing system or other.
12. Writing systems, consequently, fall into two large general classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable or phoneme.
Links to the Invention of Writing and the Training of Scribes