WRITING. – The invention of writing occupies a pre-eminent place in the development of human civilization: by means of it, man has succeeded in materially fixing language, thus initiating historical documentation.
The origins of writing are connected with pictography (attested from the end of the Paleolithic period), consisting in the figurative representation of objects, mostly animate, with a magical-evocative intent. Also considered as forerunners of writing are mnemonic systems consisting either of variously colored and knotted cords (e.g., the Peruvian quipus) or of sticks with notches and incised lines.
I. IDEOGRAPHIC AND SYLLABIC WRITING
Proper writing came into being only when pictographic signs, more or less stylized, acquired phonetic value through the so-called ideographic phase, consisting in linking to a given figurative sign (ideogram) the sound of a word. Verbs of action were expressed with ideograms depicting the action in progress, while for some words recourse was had to symbolic analogy (e.g., a star indicated the word “night”). With this procedure, writing remained in a rudimentary phase, still unable to express abstract ideas and grammatical notations (endings, prepositions, pronouns, etc.). The difficulty was overcome by using the ideogram with phonetic value independently of its ideographic meaning, so as to be able to express other words or parts of other words (rebus form of writing). The ideogram thus became a pure phonogram, giving rise to ideographic-politicist writing (through a process of simplification some writings came to use only biliteral signs, and thus to syllabic writing), with an ever-increasing predominance of the phonetic element at the expense of the ideographic. A fundamental characteristic of ideographic and syllabic writing is the large number of sign-sounds.Among ideographic writings, the Egyptian, which offers a copious documentation of its historical development, is the one that best illustrates this. It also reached, through the process of acrophony, the formation of 24 monoconsonantal signs, used, to avoid reading ambiguity (amphibology), as phonetic complements to ideograms. Other notable ideographic writings are: a) the Chinese, which did not even reach the syllabic stage until it was adopted by the Japanese; b) the Babylonian-Assyrian cuneiform, in which the ideograms, because of the material on which they were traced (clay), took on the linear schematic form of small wedges variously arranged; c) the Hittite hieroglyphs (not entirely deciphered); d) the Cretan scripts (undeciphered); e) the American scripts (Maya and Aztec). Only syllabic were the Cypriot and the Indian Devanagari scripts.
II. ALPHABETIC WRITING
The transition from ideographic and syllabic systems to the monoliteral alphabetic system, which represents the final evolutionary phase of writing in a simplificatory sense, has been variously explained owing to the lack of precise documentation (v. ALPHABET). The process was most probably that of acrophony (reduction of the phonetic value of the ideogram to the initial consonant alone), while the specific derivation was variously deduced from Egyptian writing (hieratic and demotic), from the Cypriot script, from the Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform, without any positive result being reached. The signs of the Sinaitic scripts (discovered by the Egyptologist F. Petrie in the ancient mines of the Sinai peninsula and dating back to 1500 B.C.) are by many considered as prototypes of the Semitic alphabet: however, the writing expressed with these signs (ca. 25) remains undeciphered. In any case, the reduced number of signs is significant. It is nevertheless probable that the alphabetic writing system was born in a Semitic environment antecedent to the Sinaitic inscriptions, around the 18th century B.C.The Semitic alphabets can be reduced to two groups: a) North-Semitic, including the Canaanite and Aramaic alphabets. The former include Phoenician and Old Hebrew, the latter Northern Arabic, Palmyrene, and Square Hebrew.
Of fundamental importance was the alphabet spread by the Phoenicians, which gave rise to the Punic and Greek alphabets: from the latter, in turn, were derived the Greek, the Slavic group (Glagolitic and Cyrillic), and the Western group (Etruscan, Italic, and Latin); b) South-Semitic, including the South Arabic alphabet, which gave rise to the Ethiopic alphabet.
For the scripts derived from the Greek and Latin alphabets V. PALEOGRAPHY.
III. MATERIALS AND GRAPHIC TRAJECTORIES
Every writing presupposes two essential elements: the writing material and the graphic trajectory. The material varied according to the nature of the writing, contingent availability, and the times. Thus for monumental (epigraphic) writing intended to survive for a long time, stone and metals were used; for writing of lesser bulk, papyrus (v.), ostraca (potsherds), parchment (v.), wax tablets (v.), paper (v.). To each material there corresponded a related instrument (v. WRITING IMPLEMENTS). The invention of printing marked the gradual replacement of writing with mechanical systems.As for the graphic trajectory, three fundamental patterns are noted: a) vertical sinistrorse writing, i.e., from top to bottom and from right to left (e.g., Chinese writing and in some cases Egyptian hieroglyphs); b) horizontal sinistrorse (common to the writing of Semitic languages); c) horizontal dextrorse (common to the writing of Indo-European languages), derived from the sinistrorse through the boustrophedon phase (one sinistrorse line and one dextrorse line alternately). The need to simplify and speed up writing has at all times led to the formation of cursive and tachygraphic systems.
PRIVATE WRITING, PUBLIC WRITING, etc.: V. DOCUMENT.