Writing Systems

Watch

• The secret behind how Chinese characters work - Gina Marie Elia ↗TED-Ed
• Threads That Speak: How The Inca Used Strings to Communicate | National Geographic ↗National Geographic
• Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel ↗The Royal Institution

Read

• The Story of Writing ↗An engaging and visually rich primer, this volume offers a concise yet comprehensive journey through the evolution of scripts, from cuneiform to code.Andrew Robinson
• A History of Writing ↗A scholarly yet readable chronicle, tracing the global development of written communication, revealing its profound impact on human civilisation.Steven Roger Fischer
• The Invention of WritingA seminal article challenging conventional wisdom, arguing for the origins of writing in ancient accounting practices using clay tokens.Denise Schmandt-Besserat
• Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach ↗An analytical exploration of writing systems through a linguistic lens, elucidating their structural principles and relationship to spoken language.Henry Rogers
• The World's Writing Systems ↗The definitive academic compendium, offering unparalleled depth and detail on virtually every known writing system, indispensable for serious scholars.Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (Editors)

Voices to follow

• Steven Pinker ↗His accessible yet rigorous explorations of language's innate structures and its cultural manifestations offer profound insights into how humans encode and decode meaning, including through written forms.Cognitive psychologist, linguist, popular science author
• Maryanne Wolf ↗Her seminal work illuminates the intricate neurological processes underlying reading and the profound impact of literacy on the developing brain, offering a unique perspective on the human engagement with written language.Cognitive neuroscientist, author, advocate for literacy
• David Crystal ↗A pre-eminent authority on the English language, his extensive body of work provides comprehensive and accessible insights into the evolution, diversity, and practical application of language, including its written forms.Linguist, academic, author, broadcaster
• Nicholas Ostler ↗His sweeping historical narratives trace the rise and fall of languages and their associated writing systems across millennia, offering a grand perspective on their role in human civilisation.Linguist, historian of languages, author

Glossary

• AlphabetAn alphabet is a writing system where each symbol, called a letter, mainly represents a single sound. By combining these letters, you can write almost any word. For example, the English alphabet has 26 letters, like 'a', 'b', 'c', each standing for a basic sound.
• CalligraphyCalligraphy is the art of beautiful handwriting. It focuses on the artistic and decorative aspects of forming characters and words, often using special pens or brushes. For example, creating an elegant wedding invitation with carefully drawn, flowing letters is an act of calligraphy.
• CharacterA character is any single symbol or mark used in a writing system. It could be a letter, a number, a punctuation mark, or a symbol representing a whole word. For example, the letter 'A', the number '7', and the question mark '?' are all characters.
• LetterA letter is a basic character in an alphabet that stands for a specific sound or group of sounds. Letters are combined to form words. For example, 'P', 'E', 'N' are letters that combine to form the word "pen".
• LogogramA logogram is a single character that represents a whole word or a complete idea, rather than just a sound or a syllable. These systems often have many more characters than alphabets. For example, in Chinese, the character '人' (rén) means "person", and the character '山' (shān) means "mountain".
• PunctuationPunctuation refers to special marks used in writing to make sentences clear and easy to understand. These marks show pauses, questions, or the end of a thought. For example, a comma (,) tells you to pause, and a question mark (?) tells you it's a question.
• ScriptA script is the specific set of visual shapes and styles used in a writing system. Different languages might use the same script, or one language might be written in multiple scripts. For example, Hindi uses the Devanagari script, while English uses the Latin script.
• SentenceA sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought or idea. It usually starts with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark like a period, question mark, or exclamation mark. For example, "The dog barked loudly." is a complete sentence.
• SyllabaryA syllabary is a writing system where each symbol represents an entire syllable (a unit of sound with a vowel, like "ba" or "ko"). This is different from an alphabet where symbols represent single sounds. For example, the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries, where one symbol might stand for "ka" or "shi".
• WordA word is a single unit of language that carries meaning and can be spoken or written. Words are usually separated by spaces in writing. For example, "cat", "run", and "happy" are all words.
• Writing SystemA writing system is a way to visually represent spoken language using symbols or marks. It allows us to record thoughts and communicate across time and distance without speaking. For example, English uses the Latin alphabet as its writing system.

Threads 6

Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Typography & Graphic Communication Arts & Design

  In the 1920s Turkey's leader Ataturk swapped the country's Arabic letters for Latin ones, almost overnight. Just like that, every kid could read the new signs, but nobody could read grandma's old books anymore. Changing the alphabet quietly cut a whole nation off from its own past, on purpose.

• The First Cities & States History

  The oldest writing we've dug up isn't poetry or prayers; it's receipts, like 'so-and-so owes this much grain.' People invented written symbols to keep track of taxes and storehouses. In other words, boring bureaucracy, not storytelling, is what first taught humans to write.

• Computing Fundamentals Technology

  Older writing had a different symbol for every word, thousands to memorize. The alphabet was a genius shortcut: a couple dozen letters can spell any word that exists. That's compression, squeezing endless things into a few reusable pieces, and it's the exact same idea behind how computers encode everything, from text to video, using just 0s and 1s.

• Religion in History History

  Monks copying a holy book couldn't change a single word, or it wasn't sacred anymore. That fear of getting it wrong forced people to lock down spelling and grammar, and it kept ancient languages breathing for centuries. Faith basically became a preservation machine for writing.

• Taxation Economics

  Writing wasn't born to tell stories, it was born to tax. The oldest cuneiform tablets are lists of grain and cattle the state wanted to count and collect. So writing itself started as a tool for the government to track what it could take.

• Prime Numbers Mathematics

  Cracking a lost ancient script and cracking a secret code are the same puzzle: hunt for patterns in symbols. That's why Champollion decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs and Turing breaking Nazi codes were really doing one craft, two centuries apart.