writing, the visible recording of language peculiar to the human species. Writing enables the transmission of ideas over vast distances of time and space and is a prerequisite of complex civilization. Where, and by whom writing was first developed remains unknown, but scholars place the beginning of writing at 6,000 B.C. The norm of writing is phonemic; i.e., it attempts to symbolize all significant sounds of the language and no others (see phonetics). When the goal is established as one letter for one phoneme (and vice versa), the result is a complete alphabet. Few alphabets attain this phonemic ideal, but some ancient ones (e.g., Sanskrit) and some modern new ones (e.g., Finnish) have been very successful. The contemporary important writing not of alphabetic type is that in Chinese characters, in which thousands of symbols are used, each representing a word or concept, and Japanese, where each character represents a syllable. The Chinese system is so distant from the language that the same characters are used in writing mutually unintelligible dialects, e.g., Cantonese and Mandarin. In some languages, as in English and French, the modern freezing of spelling has removed the writing more and more from pronunciation and has resulted in the need to teach spelling and the growth of fallacies like the "silent" letter (a letter is really either the symbol of a sound or it is unnecessary). Writing was developed independently in Egypt (see hieroglyphic), Mesopotamia (see cuneiform), China, and among the Zapotec, Olmec, and Maya in Central America. There are some areas where the question as to whether writing was adopted or independently developed is in doubt, as at Easter Island. Ancient writing, at first pictographic in nature, is best known from stone and clay inscriptions, but the use of perishable materials, mainly palm leaf, papyrus, and paper, began in ancient times. See accent; calligraphy; punctuation; paleography.

System of human visual communication using signs or symbols associated by convention with units of language—meanings or sounds—and recorded on materials such as paper, stone, or clay. Its precursor was pictography. Logography, in which symbols stand for individual words, typically develops from pictography. Logography requires thousands of symbols for all possible words and names. In phonographic systems, the symbol associated with a word also stands for similar- or identical-sounding words. Phonographic systems may evolve to the point where symbols represent syllables, constituting a syllabary. An alphabet provides symbols for all the consonants and vowels.

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or futhark

Writing system used by Germanic peoples of northern Europe, Britain, Scandinavia, and Iceland from roughly the 3rd to the 16th or 17th century AD. Of uncertain origins, it is clearly derived from one of the alphabets of the Mediterranean area. Three main varieties were used in different regions and time periods: Early, or Common Germanic (Teutonic); Anglo-Saxon, or Anglian; and Nordic, or Scandinavian. More than 4,000 runic inscriptions and several runic manuscripts are extant, of which about 2,500 come from Sweden.

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or ogam writing or ogum writing

Alphabetic script used for writing the Irish and Pictish (see Picts) languages on stone monuments, mostly circa AD 400–600. In its simplest form, it consists of four sets of strokes, or notches, each set containing five letters composed of from one to five strokes, thus creating 20 letters. A fifth set of five symbols, called forfeda (“extra letters”), was probably a later development. Most inscriptions are short and consist only of names. Of the more than 400 inscriptions known, about 330 are from Ireland.

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System of writing employed in ancient times to write a number of languages of the Middle East. The original and primary writing material for cuneiform texts was a damp clay tablet, into which the scribe would press a wedge-shaped stroke with a reed stylus. A configuration of such impressions constituted a character, or sign. Proto-cuneiform signs dating from circa 3200–3000 BC were drawn rather than impressed and were largely pictographic (see pictography), though these features were lost as the script evolved. A single cuneiform sign could be a logogram (an arbitrary representation of a word) or a syllabogram (a representation of the sound of a syllable). The first language to be written in cuneiform was Sumerian (see Sumer). Akkadian began to be written in cuneiform circa 2350 BC. Later the script was adapted to other South Asian languages. Cuneiform was slowly displaced in the first millennium BC by the rise of Aramaic, written in an alphabet script of Phoenician origin. Knowledge of the value of cuneiform signs was lost until the mid-19th century, when European scholars deciphered the script.

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