ШЯjፕjИG ΣγΣፕЄᛗΣ

Alright, a fun educational post.

I want to start off with a call to reverence, think about the concept of writing for a second.

We as humans have developed hundreds of sets of symbols that represent sounds and concepts that are understood mainstream.

You have a keyboard of these symbols and people can gather meaning from and translate to sounds based on order.

Think about it

Now, let's get into the history: If you ask a historian, (or linguist) they'll tell you writing was invented independently six times (this number being based on the number of instances a society develops what we can say with surefire confidence is a fully functional writing system, with most proto writing systems and what might be a writing system (symbols with unatributed meaning) not being counted.)

These six developments (in order, by name, with civilization/location and date listed) are:

Cuneiform, Mesopotamia/Assyria, 3400-3100BC. Oldest writing system, no descendents survive.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Egypt, 3200BC. Originally identification signs on pottery and the such, now the largest ancestor to modern writing. (Including the Latin alphabet, which of which you are reading right now unless you translated this article into a non-Latin script written language.)

Indus Valley Script, Indus Valley (Pakistan/India) 2600BC. Remains undeciphered.

Oracle Bone Script, Ancient China, 1250-1200BC. Originally written on cattle and turtle skeletons to make requests and ask questions to the "gods", the only one of the original writing systems with a direct living descendent (Chinese Jangul)

Mayan Glyphs and Phonetics, Gulf of Mexico, 600-500BC. Killed off after the introduction and enforcement of Spanish Latin-based orthographies.

Rongorongo Script, Easter Island, date unknown. Status as independently invented debated, remains undiciphered.

Bonus: potential early writing systems: Mi'kmaq Pictograms, (Ancient East Canada, date unknown, first recorded by the French in the 1600s.) Nahuatl and Zapotec Scripts, (Ancient Mexico, 500-600 and 1400-1600BC respectively, killed off by the Spanish.) Vinča Symbols (Europe's only potential independent writing system, most often classified as ritual markings due to it's lack of long manuscripts or use outside ritual sites, date uncertain.)

Well that got dark, so much pagan ritual use. Anyways...

Have you ever heard someone say "The Chinese alphabet", "The Arabic alphabet", or something along those lines? (Are you yourself one to do this?)

That's because the monolingual mind can't seem to comprehend the idea of a non-alphabetic writing system. You may notice I'm using the word "script" a lot, that's because that's generally the neutral term for any kind of writing system.

Want to know how to classify writing systems correctly? I don't know if you do, but I'm going to write it anyway, because I find enjoyment in getting this nerdy stuff out, and maybe you're genuinely interested. (Don't worry, I'll try and explain it as simply as I can.)

1: Alphabet: an alphabet is a writing system that incorporates strings of consonant clusters, the word is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (the first dictionary standard "alphabet"); "Alpha" (Α/α) and "Beta" (Β/β) look familiar? That's because the Latin alphabet is derived from the ancient Greek alphabet (as are the modern Greek and Cyrillic scripts) however, font changes, sound changes, character adjustments, and other factors resulted in the separate scripts.

Though not all "alphabets" are built the same way, take Hangul (한글) for example, instead of featuring letters in a continuous line with spaces for word separation, 2-4 (theoretically as much as 5, but that never occurs naturally in Hangul using languages) characters are systematically arranged in a block, with each block building a consonant.

I didn't do a whole lot of explaining here, but that's mostly because I expect you to know what an alphabet is (leaving some extra time for history)

2: Syllabary: You may or may not be familiar with what this is, but it's really easy to explain.

As the root intells, it's a syllable based writing system where each character represents a syllable sound. Example: take Japanese "アメリカ" (America) four characters, eight sounds, four syllables ("ah-me-ri-ka") though the use of single sound and syllable characters in this particular Japanese writing system does make it's status somewhat gray.

3: Abjad: The meaning of this one's a little less obvious from first glance, but it's derived from the sounds of the first characters of the Arabic Abjad.

So what is it? It's a writing system featuring a body of consonants, with vowels as a bonus (in many cases, even optional.) Abjads are most common among Semitic languages due to their heavy consonant focus which eliminates the necessity for vowels, and the lack of full vowels at the time they adopted writing. (Greek vowels are actually repurposed heavy Phoenician consonants which saw no practicality in their original form when writing Greek.)

BUT WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?...

For reference, I'll use the only abjad I know how to write; The Aramaic Script (Most notorious for writing post-Paleo Hebrew) in this writing system, vowel free is common practice (the Samsung Hebrew keyboard doesn't even give you the option to use them in it's form with vowels as default)

So I can write "ישוע" (YS(H)W'') and be perfectly understood (Though I do lose all vowel and aone consonant distinction) or, I can write "יֵשׁוּעַ" (Yeshua) with vowels and pronunciation distinction between "ש" or "ו" as "ʃ/š" vs "s" or "u" vs "o" (respectively)

Often times, vowels are directly left off sacred names like "יהוה" (YHWH) as a sign of reverence to the name or what it represents.

Though you're not completely oblivious to the content of vowels as "א", "ע", "ו", and "ה" can act as "vowel holders" making "YS(H)'' look less like "YS(H)". (If that makes sense) plus, the meaning of many undistinguished words can be determined through context.

And... I'm trying not to spend too much time talking about abjads, but I just have to mention the Ge'ez script. The Ge'ez (Ancient Semitic Ethiopians) had their own Abjad (which stays alive in liturgy and in use with modern Ethiopian languages like Amharic)

What's so cool about it is that is has the base characters, with the vowels being represented by offshoots from the consonant characters.

Many abjads also change which character/the look of a character based on where it is in the word, making it more specifically: an Abugida. (And I'm leaving the abjad section at that, hope you learned something you found interesting)

4: Logography: The meaning of this one is also fairly predictable from the roots (logo + graph) The most famous example (which we referenced before) The Chinese Script (Jangul) this writing system uses a wide range of characters (50,000+) each representing a word or root meaning. Demonstration:

"美" (Mĕi (Beautiful))

"国" (Guó (Country))

"人" (Rén (Person))

美国人 (Mĕiguó Rén (American))

So "American" is literally written as "Beautiful Country Person" and I've head of several others like of how "电脑" (Diànnăo (Computer)) is "电" (Diàn (Electricity)) + "脑" (Năo (Brain))

While a sophisticated and beautiful script, I can't seem to get over the origins of Jangul.

5: Hieroglyphs:

Hieroglyphs are quite interesting, they're essentially every form of writing rolled into one complex system.

The term is largely exclusive to that of Egyptian Hieroglyphics (which I'm sure you’re all familiar with)

There's logographic characters that represent full words, roots, syllables, single sounds, all the lot of it.

They even used the Rebus principle where two or more logographic characters would be put together and said out loud to where it would sound like a longer word.

Think of it like spelling out words with emojis like "👁⚽️" (eyeball) or more clever like "🧨🪁" (Dinosaur("dyna-soar"?))

Something else you also see in usage is using a logographic character followed by phonetic ones, a specific example being their word for "meow" featuring a pictographic cat glyph followed by characters representing "m", "i", and "w". Like using an emoji to convey meaning in a word without requiring preknown pronunciation. It'd look something like "🐈MIW" (Using Latin letters for reference, though they are technically a descendents of Egyptian Hieroglyphs🤔)

Anyways, last one: 6: Pictogram: I already referenced them a few times in this article, a pictogram is a borderline writing system featuring drawings of sorts.

Like playing pictonary.

I'm sure you can grasp the concept, but I'm going to teach you something cool.

You know the Mexican Flag? The emblem in the middle (minus the Laurel and Oak branches) is actually a piece of writing (if you'd call it that) from the Nahuatl script I mentioned in my history section.

The cactus, eagle, rock, and water droplet, come together in their systematic positions as a description of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan translating roughly as "At the place of the cactus growing from the stone in the water, the eagle triumphs"

The more you know,

And that concludes it, did I miss something? Did you learn something? Was this actually a fun read? Is there something I can improve on? Feedback welcome.

Have a wonderful day, all you beautiful people👉 (respectfully)

Regards,