2.  Many legends associated with the inventions of writing.  Greek legend – Prince of Phonecia, Cadmus  Chinese Fable – their 4-eyed dragon god, Cang Jie did it.  Babylonian God Nebo gave it to the Egyptians.  In Islam – the alphabet was invented by Allah and presented to humans, but not the angels.

3.  Began with PETROGLYPHS – or cave drawings 20,000 yrs ago in Spain  PICTOGRAMS – pix drawings  Represent direct objects  Once it was accepted as representing an object – then it was extended to representing ideas associated with the objects, thus Ideograms.

4.  Some common examples

5.  Cuneiform – latin words ‘wedge’ and ‘shape’.  Originated in Sumeria  More than 6,000 years ago  The oldest known writing system  On clay slabs – writing about prayers, epics, poems, docs, etc.

6.  It evolved and later became known as logographic, or word writing  Each symbol represents both word and concept – like ideograms  Later borrowed by the Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians – spread thruout Asia Minor  They used them to represent the sounds in their language

7.  Cuneiform later evolved into syllabic writing  The Persians greatly simplified the original cuneiform writing.

9.  Modern pictographic system  Similar to cuneiform – many symbols are combined to form meanings /concepts  :-) :’-( B-(

10.  When a graphic symbol no longer has a visual relationship to the word it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, standing for the sounds that represent the word.  A single sign can represent all words with the same sound – eg.  means ‘sun’ and ‘son’.  An advert which uses this principle – ‘31wonderful flavours’  This is not an efficient system, why?

11.  At the same time as the Sumerian’s cuneiform – 4000BC – Egyptians using same form of writing  Greeks term it as Hieroglyphs  This system represents both concept and word for the concept. So – became logographic writing system.

12.  A majority of the alphabets of today’s modern writing system comes from the Greeks.  Word Writing – or logographic writing system  A written character represents both the meaning and pronunciation of each word or morpheme(smallest meaningful unit of language).  English words – 26 words and symbols  Chinese and Japanese – many characters that represent sounds or words – an exception.

13.  A system without consonant clusters (-ght, -ng)  more efficient than word-writing systems, but has many variation of sounds – in the Jap lang all words can be phonologically represented in 100 syllables.  Cherokee people also adopted the syllabic writing system but only recently invented in 1821.

14.  Hebrew and Arabic are languages with alphabets that consist of only consonants.  Eg Arabic consonant ktb forms the root words for kitab (book), katab (write), etc.  Compared to English, I like to eat out. = LK T T T.  Works well with person who knows the spoken language.

15.  Chap 12 – Fromkin et al.  The end