TEC154 2010S, Class 11: The Development of Writing (2)

Overview:

Admin:
*  Thanks to BD to taking and to GT for transcribing these notes.

Writing

* Cuneiform
  * Sumarian language
  * Hettite
    * We have a famous tablet in Grinnell thought lost for 100 years
* Hieroglyphics
  * Only write consonants
  * Could have developed before Sumarian
    * Considered to be pre-writing
  * Greek word meaning “sacred carvings”
* Determinative helped to distinguish consonant sets from each other (especially same sets that have different vowels).
  * Used from 3100 B.C. to 400 A.D.
    * Longest used writing
  * Cursive hieroglyphics used for sacred tasks
  * Special type of writing for officials
  * Demotic form of writing also developed (more common form)
* Rosetta Stone
  * Allowed for deciphering of Egyptian writing
  * Writings were in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek
  * Given to the English after they beat Napoleon 
  * Found by Napoleon’s army
  * Helped to read hieroglyphics of any age
* Proto-semitic
  * Write without vowels (consonantal syllabary)
  * Ancestor of almost all modern forms of writing
  * Used cuneiform
* Phoenicians
  * Used new types of signs (acrometic type)
    * Signs stand for the first sound in a word
      * alpha (word for ox started with an “a” sound)
  * In 900, Greece came into contact with the Phoenicians and took their writing system
    * Greeks added vowels
    * Made it the most efficient system of writing
    * A grapheme for every phoneme
      * a symbol for every sound
    * Have to make compromises
      * the letters “ough” have many different ways of pronunciation
* Greece
  * Circa 730 B.C. - earliest writing in Greek we know of
  * There was writing before this in a different language though
  * Greeks wrote everything down
  * Writing was right to left
    * With ink, people had to change to left-to-right
  * They did not care what direction they wrote in
    * Would write “as the ox plows” (left to right, right to left, left to right etc…) 
  * No spaces or punctuations 
    * Cannot do rapid reading
  * We cannot tell how literate people were
    * There were the high elite (philosophers, tragedians etc…)
  * Greek can portray/convey nuances in language 
    * Past tense, present tense etc…
    * Is the reason for the development of philosophy etc…
  * Early stages of writing speak in the first person
    * Was confusing when writing first began
  * Byzantine period – punctuation starts
  * 4th century B.C. - lower case and cursive develop
  * Consistent spelling is a modern development
  * Special texts kept in sanctuaries 
  * Most texts and documents still around are in stone 
  * Greek spread due to colonization
    * Etruscans adopted Greek alphabet from Greeks
    * Romans got their alphabet from Etruscans
    * Modern alphabet comes from the Romans
* Turkey
  * Politically manipulate writing systems
  * Did not have the nationalism tied to Arabic that Arabic speaking countries had
  * Allowed for changing of writing system
* Future of writing
  * Artistic and ingrained so we resist change in the alphabet
  * Unlikely to have a world alphabet