- Pictographic and logographic signs at airports and beside highways are a limited language of universal communication, which belongs to proto-writing, not full writing. Mathematics, too, is a universal language, but it is no use for most purposes of written communication. Painting and music communicate powerfully across cultures, but their meaning is diffuse and ambiguous. To communicate any and all thought always requires phonetic symbols. Wikipedia may have started in English, but it subsequently evolved versions written in over two dozen languages, including Esperanto. Full writing and reading depend on knowing a spoken language. This fact has not been altered by the internet—however many computer icons (and emoticons) we may encounter online.
- Until the last few decades, it was generally agreed that over the centuries western civilisation had tried to make writing a closer and closer representation of speech. The alphabet was naturally regarded as the pinnacle of this conscious search; the Chinese script, conversely, was widely thought of as hopelessly defective. The corollary was the belief that as the alphabet spread through the world, so eventually would mass literacy and democracy. Surely, one might think, if a script is easy to learn, then more people will grasp it; and if they come to understand public affairs better, they will be more likely to take part in them and indeed demand a part in them. Scholars thus had a clear conception of writing progressing from cumbersome ancient scripts with multiple signs to simple and superior modern alphabets.
- Few are now quite as confident. The superiority of alphabets is no longer taken for granted. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an ‘alphabet’ of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but apparently chose not to use it alone, and instead developed a logo-consonantal system with over 700 signs in regular use. The Japanese, rather than using their simple syllabic kana more and more frequently, chose to import more and more kanji from the Chinese script, creating a writing system of unrivalled complexity. Mayan glyphs show that the Maya could have used far more purely syllabic spellings, if they had wished, instead of their elaborate logographic and logo-syllabic equivalents.
- The reason why scripts flourish or vanish has more to do with political and cultural considerations than purely linguistic ones. Literacy concerns far more than merely learning how to read and write. A Japanese physics student once outlined for me the genuine linguistic disadvantages of writing only in kana, without kanji, and then added: ‘After all, a long tradition cannot change like that. It will NEVER happen!!’ In other words, writing Japanese in kanji is a key part of Japanese identity.
- Many scholars of writing today have an increasing respect for the intelligence behind ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic and phonetic signs. Their conviction has in turn nurtured a new awareness of writing systems as being enmeshed within societies, rather than viewing them somewhat aridly as different kinds of technical solution to the problem of efficient visual representation of a particular language.
- While I personally remain sceptical about the expressive virtues of pictograms and logograms, this growing holistic view of writing systems strikes me as a healthy development that reflects the real relationship between writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. The transmission of my intimate thoughts to the minds of others in many cultures via intricate marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen, continues to amaze me as a kind of barely explicable magic.
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f22ism reblogged this from ledgergermane
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voltaicblueapples reblogged this from ledgergermane and added:
linguistics major. Answer: no.
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reclusland reblogged this from ledgergermane and added:
globalization. Once we can all communicate equally, our new global culture can hopefully develop
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