Language is one of the phenomena that stand at the core of what makes us human, and it could be quite acceptably argued that language is primarily speech (or signing, in case of a change in modality).

Yet, does the string of characters in front of you feel like speech or sign in any way? One may argue for the sign, but it is as distinct a form as speech is from what is written. Writing if put simply is a technology developed by us humans as a community to encode and preserve our utterances in a form that can stand the test of time, which could allow our expressions to transcend time, and at times space.

First Traces

There are many theories on the origin and evolution of language, from gestural foundation to the development of speech, on this evolutionary timescale of language, writing is a very recent phenomenon. The origin of writing can be traced back to Mesopotamia, in the form of the Sumerian script, as early as 3400 BCE.

Though writing is a rather sophisticated representation of language in the form of symbols, the symbolic representation of thoughts and ideas could be traced back to tens of thousands of years, in the form of ‘Cave arts’. It could be quite easily interpreted as the origin of modern writing.

Various Systems

A systematic developmental pattern could be quite easily observed if one were to look at different systems of symbols from the perspective of Diringer’s approach. This approach classifies the symbol systems as:

I would also like to add the logographic form in between the ideographic and phonetic forms.

Pictographs as the name suggests are the representation of an object or idea in a pictured representation, such as in the case of Cave art. Ideographs as symbolic representations of an idea or an object, which could be language-independent, such as in the case of road signs.

Logographic forms use individual symbols to represent an object or an idea, these symbols can at times hold a minor resemblance in a symbolic form to what they refer to. The primary distinction at this level and the level above it lies in the fact that Logograms, when used in a language are associated with their corresponding sounds. This is the point when the speech and writing converge.

Signifier and Signified

Though this relationship between the sounds and the symbols is completely abstract (open to debate), it isn’t at its core a constructivist system, though many of the modern languages using these logographic scripts have developed efficient strategies to overcome this issue. The further development is in the form of the phonetic and the alphabetic forms of writing, these systems have a relationship between the sound and the symbols, excluding the meaning.

That is, the symbols represent sounds, not objects or ideas, these sounds combine to give rise to a string of sounds, and corresponding symbols, these strings of sounds and symbols are used to refer to the object, idea, or meaning. This is a clear contrast from the logographic form of writing.

If observed carefully, a somewhat vague developmental pathway could be traced from the pictographic form (less abstract) to the alphabetical or phonetic forms (more abstract) of writing.

Well, eventually this all revolves around one of the fundamental relationships that make language possible, the relationship between the signifier and the signified.