How Do You Write a Word With a Picture of Something Else? Use the Sound

A picture of a bee can mean an insect, which is straightforward, or it can mean the sound of the word, which allows it to write part of any word containing that sound regardless of meaning. That shift from picture to sound is the whole device. Combining several such pictures spells out a word or phrase that could not be drawn, and adding conventions for removing or substituting letters extends the range further. The result is a puzzle in modern use and was something far more consequential historically, since it is the step that allows a system of pictures to write abstract words, names and grammatical endings.

The same mechanism appears in several quite different contexts:

• •Puzzles in newspapers, children's books and advertisements
• •Heraldry, where arms pun on the bearer's name
• •Egyptian hieroglyphs, where signs frequently record sound rather than meaning
• •Early Mesopotamian writing, which developed the same way
• •Chinese characters, a majority of which contain a sound component
• •Informal writing using numerals and letters for syllables

Every writing system that began with pictures faced the same obstacle, namely that a great many words cannot be drawn, including abstractions, names, verbs and grammatical elements. The solution reached independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica was to use a sign for the sound of its name and then to use that sound wherever it occurs, which converts a limited set of pictures into a system capable of writing anything the language can say. The transition is visible in the archaeological record of each system, and it is why the earliest texts are administrative lists of things that can be drawn while later ones record speech. The device was therefore the decisive step in the invention of writing.

Modern puzzles of this kind use a set of conventions that a solver learns and that make quite complicated phrases possible. Pictures supply syllables. Letters supply their own names as sounds. Numerals supply the sounds of the words for them. Position carries meaning, so one element above another may indicate the word over or under. Repetition indicates a plural or a repeated syllable. A crossed-out letter indicates removal, and a letter placed beside another with an arrow indicates substitution. Size, colour and orientation are all used. Constructing a good one requires finding a phrase whose syllables happen to be depictable, which is the real constraint and is why the same puzzles recur.

Coats of arms punning on the bearer's name are a recognised and very common convention, and they are useful historically. A family called by a word resembling a bird, a tool or an animal frequently bears exactly that object in its arms, which made the arms memorable and identifiable in a period when most people could not read. The device is found across European heraldry from the earliest period, and it is frequent enough that heralds treated it as a standard approach rather than as a joke. It occasionally preserves the pronunciation of a name at the time the arms were granted, which is evidence about how that name sounded and which has been used to date linguistic changes.

Using a picture for the sound of its name rather than for the thing lets pictures spell words that cannot be drawn, which is the device behind the puzzle. Every early writing system reached the same solution independently, and it is the step that converted lists of drawable objects into systems capable of recording speech. Heraldic arms punning on a bearer's name are the same device and occasionally record how that name was pronounced.