What Is a Writing System? Three Ways of Attaching Marks to Speech

The classification is about what a single symbol corresponds to:

• •Logographic systems, where a symbol represents a word or meaningful unit, as in Chinese characters, which require thousands of symbols for literacy and have the advantage that speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties can read the same text
• •Syllabic systems, where each symbol represents a syllable, as in Japanese kana and Cherokee, which typically need several dozen to a couple of hundred symbols and suit languages with simple syllable structure
• •Alphabetic systems, where symbols represent individual consonants and vowels, needing only a few dozen symbols
• •Abjads, a variant in which only consonants are written and vowels are inferred or marked optionally, as in Arabic and Hebrew, which works well for Semitic languages where consonants carry the root meaning
• •Abugidas, where a consonant symbol carries an inherent vowel that is modified by marks, as in the Indic scripts and Ethiopic
• •Most real systems are mixed, since Japanese combines logographic characters with two syllabaries and Latin letters, and English uses logographic elements for numerals and symbols

Full writing appears to have been invented independently only a small number of times, with Mesopotamian cuneiform around 3200 BCE and Chinese characters by around 1200 BCE being the clearest cases, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesoamerican scripts also strong candidates, and everything else descending from or inspired by one of those. The Mesopotamian sequence is the best documented and is instructive: it begins with clay tokens representing quantities of goods, moves to impressions of those tokens on clay envelopes, then to marks replacing the tokens entirely, then to signs standing for words, and finally to signs used for their sound value regardless of meaning, which is the rebus principle and is the step that makes writing capable of recording anything rather than only accounts. Every early system went through something like that transition, and the earliest substantial texts everywhere are administrative rather than literary, because writing was invented to keep track of goods and obligations.

Scripts are almost always adopted for a language other than the one they were designed for, and the fit is never good. The alphabet's ancestry runs from Egyptian signs through a Semitic consonantal script to Phoenician, which the Greeks borrowed and adapted by repurposing letters for consonants their language did not use as vowels, producing the first full alphabet, from which Latin, Cyrillic and others descend. Each adoption leaves residue: English uses a Latin alphabet designed for a language with different sounds, which is part of why its spelling is irregular, compounded by sound changes after spellings were fixed and by importing words with their original spellings. Japanese adopted Chinese characters for a completely unrelated language, which required inventing syllabaries to write grammatical endings the characters could not represent, producing a mixed system of unusual complexity. Vietnamese used Chinese characters for centuries and now uses a Latin alphabet with extensive diacritics devised by missionaries.

Writing direction varies more than most people notice, running right to left in Arabic and Hebrew, left to right in most others, top to bottom in traditional Chinese and Japanese, and boustrophedon, alternating direction line by line as an ox ploughs, in some early Greek inscriptions. Scripts die when the communities using them shift, and decipherment of a dead script generally requires either a bilingual text, as the Rosetta Stone provided for Egyptian, or a known related language, as Ventris used for Linear B on the hypothesis that it recorded Greek. Several remain undeciphered, including Linear A, the Indus Valley script, which may not be full writing at all, and Rongorongo from Easter Island. Living scripts continue to be created, with Cherokee devised by Sequoyah in the 1820s and several African and Asian scripts invented in the last two centuries, and digital encoding has become the decisive factor in whether a minority script survives, since a script that cannot be typed is effectively excluded from modern life.

Writing systems attach symbols to words, to syllables or to individual sounds, with abjads writing consonants only and abugidas modifying an inherent vowel, and most real systems mix several. Full writing was invented independently only a few times, and the Mesopotamian sequence ran from accounting tokens to word signs to signs used for sound. Every script has been borrowed for languages it was not designed for, which is a major source of irregular spelling, and digital encoding now determines whether a minority script survives.