So let’s talk about sharing. Sometimes,
you want to share all the ideas in your head
with other people, and unless they happen
to be within shouting distance, you’ve got
to find some way to get those ideas over to them. People have come up with lots of ways
to write down our important thoughts, from
clay tablets and papyrus to email and instant
messaging. But what do we know about how writing
came to be, and all the different ways we
can use it to pester our chums? I’m Moti
Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So, writing is important. For most of us,
it’s a big part of our lives. We use it
to have arguments on the internet, plan out
recipes, or learn new jokes. But fundamentally,
written language is totally weird! It’s
different from anything else that we do with our
words, and we need to be taught how
to do it, unlike speaking and listening. If
you’ve watched any of our other videos about
phonology, morphology, neurolinguistics, or
the rest, you've probably noticed that we 
don’t really talk about writing.
That’s because linguists usually care about
what’s going on in your brain, and mental
grammars aren’t written down. We have a
set of principles and parameters in our minds
that determines what we can and do say, and
those rules don’t always correspond to the
rules of reading and writing. Essentially,
linguistics builds descriptive models of language
- the way things really happen, not the rules that you learn at school. And in a lot
of cases, writing is prescriptive: it tells
you what you should and shouldn’t do.
Which is great, but that doesn’t mean that writing
isn’t this really fundamental cultural thing that humans
figured out how to do at some point. From a historical
perspective, you need to know about writing
to understand the human story. You need it to chronicle the human story,
given that we don't exactly live for thousands of years. The origin of writing is usually traced back to the third
millennium BCE, around the end of the Neolithic era.
That’s also when our ancestors were just
figuring out earthshaking innovations in agriculture,
urban planning, religion, and art. Even before
that, though, people were expressing their
thoughts and feelings by leaving traces on
the world around them. The earliest graphic
art turns up at least 40,000 years ago, and
we find symbolic proto-writing systems about a couple thousand
years before full-fledged writing 
starts showing up.
Like the Vinča symbols, present on the ancient
pottery all over the Balkans and Southeastern
Europe. So writing is this thing that we have an
urge to do, although if you think
that we invented it to pen epics longer than
War and Peace, you're not gonna be quite be on
the mark. Actually, a lot of the records that
have survived from the early days of written
language are lists and transactions.
Which, I mean, makes sense, because that’s
the kind of thing that you’d want to make official
by etching it in stone or pressing it into
a clay tablet. But the potential of writing
was always greater than just accounting, and
people soon wanted a more flexible system,
one that could capture a greater range of
human experience than remembering how many
goats somebody owed you. And that meant a change
to how writing systems were used.
So, there’s a bunch of different ways that you can
write down your words. English and other European
languages use different alphabets to get the
job done. Whether you’re writing in Portuguese,
Russian, Greek or Armenian, the idea is to
have one symbol per consonant or vowel
in your language. This is called an alphabet
because of the first two letters of the Greek
system, which are Alpha and Beta.
Well, okay, but maybe you don't want an alphabet.
Maybe you want to group your speech
sounds together into little bunches, and depict each
of those with one symbol. Now there's a
few different ways you can go about this. If you’re
a language like Japanese or Inuktitut, maybe
you want to stick together your consonants and vowels into pairs and string them together.
So, take the Japanese word for crab, [kani].
Now those are two syllables, [ka] and [ni], and
Japanese represents them with one character
each. This is called a syllabic
writing system, and it’s especially convenient
for languages that don't have very complex syllables.
But imagine what that would be like for a language like English, which allows big consonant clusters
even within a single syllable?
We would need like a billion different characters
just to capture all of our
monosyllabic words! We have stuff like sick,
and stick, and strict, and even sixths. And
that’s before you even get into words with
more than one syllable! Another way to group your
sounds is to focus on the consonants, and just worry about the vowels for later.
There are two different main ways to do this, and neither
of them use alphabets.
You could have what’s called an abugida
instead, so named after the first four letters
of the Ge’ez script. A lot of the languages
of the Indian subcontinent, like Hindi and
Bengali, use this kind of system, as do Ethiopic languages like Amharic and Tigrinya. In abugidas, the primary
focus of your writing is the consonant, but then the
consonant symbols then get modified with little
vowely bits later on. So take a look at the Amharic
word for train, ባቡር [babur].
Syllables that start with [b] get this upside
down “U” shape, and then the [b] base
gets modified to have the [a] by shortening
the left leg, and to have the [u] by writing this line off the
right middle. You can see the
same pattern in letters starting with
[ʃ], like for [ʃa] ሻ and [ʃu] ሹ. The
alternative to the abugida is the abjad. Now, if
I tell you that one of the major languages that uses this kind of system is Arabic, you can probably guess where
that word comes from - that’s
right, it’s the name of the first few letters
in that language.
Sometimes things do turn up in nice little
patterns. So, in an abjad, your vowels almost
disappear completely. What you get instead
are just strings of consonants, and then it’s
up to the reader to fill in the blanks based
on the patterns from the language’s vocabulary
and grammar. There are extra little symbols
to mark for vowels, but texts written for
adults pretty much always omit them.
So, for example, in Hebrew, the word for sword,
חרב, just has the three consonants [x],
[ʁ], and [v], and the vowels are nowhere
to be seen. But if you’re reading about
fighting, you can infer what the vowels should
be. But maybe this one-sound-one-symbol thing
doesn't work for you. Maybe you don't want
to break things up into segments or syllables.
Meanings are way better than sounds!
So you want to use the morpheme as the basic
unit of writing, rather than the phoneme.
Well, if you're Chinese or Mayan, you've got
a handy logographic system to do that
for you. In the Chinese script, each character
stands for a particular nugget of meaning.
So say you want to write the Chinese word
for stairs.
The first character, 楼, means a floor or
story, while the second, 梯, means a ladder.
So stairs, 楼梯, are ladders made out of
floors. Your ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
would be a logographic system too, although
this one was a little bit special, because each each of the individual symbols
could be used as sounds as well. So this was
pronounced mi-i-u. With a little picture of
a cat next to it, so that everybody would know exactly what kind of mew we mean!
Now, of course logograms exist outside of
language, too. A lot of road signs and other
symbols count as logograms. And, if you want,
you could think about the emoji and emoticons
that we use to season our chats and texts like they're a
logographic auxiliary writing system! After
all, they’re a conventionalized system of
symbols that we use to communicate, right?
Works for me.
Another cool thing about writing systems is
that they can really get around. So the
world has a bunch of big language families,
and a lot of languages that are related have
the same or similar writing systems. And the same
goes for cultures that were in contact,
through commerce, conflict, or colonization.
So, the English alphabet as we know it derives
from ancient Semitic writing systems, like
Phoenician and Aramaic.
The ancient Greeks were the first to make
a full-on alphabet, though,
since the Semitic scripts were usually abjads.
But here’s the really cool thing. That Greek
alphabet became so popular and it got spread
around so much of Europe and the Near East,
that a whole bunch of different alphabets
evolved from it.
Three big ones are the Latin alphabet, which
we use in English, the Cyrillic alphabet,
which gets used in Russian, and the modern
Greek alphabet. So the Latin letter D comes
from the Greek Δ, but so does the letter Д in Cyrillic. You get similar stuff with
L and S sounds. Another really influential
writing system are Chinese characters. These
have been around for thousands
of years, and they've spread through most of Asia through
the influence of Chinese culture.
Today, in mainland China, people use a simplified
character system, while an unsimplified one
is still used in Taiwan, for example. And Japanese
uses a different simplification for its kanji.
Let’s take a look at “turtle.” The traditional
Chinese character for turtle is this, and it
does kind of look like a turtle. But it also looks really complex,
and it is: that character takes 16 strokes
to write.
In the simplified Japanese form, that’s this, which gets it down to 11 strokes. And
the simplified Chinese letter is this one, which gets it all the way down to 7. Those are more abstract,
but they do still look kind of turtle-y. So
we’ve got lots of ways to write, intricate,
varied, and connected. And we’ve come a
long way from record-keeping! But whatever system
you use, however you encode your sounds, we’ve
got a lot to share.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space
for this week. If you took the ladder to the
next floor, you learned that writing systems
date back about 5,000 years; that people have
devised a number of kinds of systems, including alphabets, syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and logograms;
and that just as spoken languages spread and
change, written languages do too.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman.
It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music and sound
design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics
team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you
can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we have some extra material
on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter
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your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe.
And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Awar!
