What is writing ? meaning and what is it all about.

Like we all know the general meaning of writing which is the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text its can also be a way of recording language in visible form and giving it relative permanence. Until the invention of audio recording, speech was limited to those within earshot or on the other end of a telephone, and it faded away immediately, except in the memories of speaker and hearer. Writing overcomes this limitation and allows not only the storage of immense amounts of information but its transmission to wherever a written message may be conveyed.

Most of us dairy which is in a written form dont think people will prefer audio dairy to written dairy so most of cant be without writing.So Writing is, therefore, a powerful instrument for transmitting culture from generation to generation. It plays a crucial role in the development and continuation of complex civilizations, with their elaborate technologies and economies, bodies of literature, codes of law, and other specializations, each with its own body of knowledge to be preserved and transmitted. Some civilizations, such as that of ancient India and of Viking Scandinavia, preserved amazing quantities of verbal material with remarkably little change over long periods of time through sheer painstaking memorization. But such a process has severe limitations, and the expenditure of human energy is immense

Despite its advantages, writing was a very long time in being invented. Humans have written for about 5,300 years, a very short time in the span of human history and also before the development of writing, many people drew pictures to convey messages or to serve as reminders for one thing or another. This was not writing, however, because it did not portray language. It only portrayed things and ideas. Writing comes only when the words that stand for things and ideas are set down on paper, or clay, or stone, or parchment. The meanings of all common words are generally known; the meanings of pictures can only be guessed by the viewer, unless people sit down beforehand and agree on the meanings

When used for communication, pictures of things are called pictographs. Pictures of ideas or emotions, such as a picture of the sun for the idea of “warmth” or “day,” or of a hand pointing to the mouth for “hungry,” are called ideographs. The two devices have often been used together. The picture writing of the Plains Indians of North America and the sand or bark drawings of the Aboriginal Australians are of such a mixed, or picto-ideographic, type. Pictographs and ideographs often become highly conventionalized and stylized, losing much of their obvious representative appearance and forming a quite complex system of signs. But no matter how sophisticated they become, pictographs and ideographs are not regarded as writing.

Writing systems always tended to change slowly, and people often attributed their origins to divine sources. Any change or modification was met with great hesitation, and even today, attempts to reform spelling or eliminate inconsistencies in writing conventions meet with strong resistance. Because of this conservatism major innovations in the structure of a writing system occurred primarily when one people borrowed a system from another people. The Akkadians, for example, adapted the syllabic portion of the Sumerian logo-syllabic system to their own language, but retained the logograms, and used them regularly as a type of shorthand. When the Hittites borrowed the system from the Akkadians for their own language, they eliminated most of the syllabic signs that represented sounds as well as many of the Sumerian logograms, but they used a number of Akkadian syllabic spellings as logograms.

(see Sumerian Language)

Linguists continue to debate which writing system came first: the Egyptian or Sumerian. In recent decades, however, an increasing number of scholars have supported the theory that the Sumerian writing system is older, although its origin is unknown, and that Egypt gained the notion of writing through trade with the Sumerians.

Some scholars long supported a belief that Egyptian writing was based on a syllabic system and that the Egyptians borrowed their syllabary from the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria. These scholars regarded the hieroglyphic signs as symbols and interpreted them accordingly. For example, they assumed that the ancient Egyptians wrote their word for “son” with a picture of a goose as the result of a belief that the goose loves its offspring more than any other animal does. However, Egyptologists now know that hieroglyphics are phonetic and that the ancient Egyptian words for “son” and “goose” sounded alike.

Sometime after the Sumerians and Egyptians developed writing systems, so-called Proto-Elamite writing developed in Elam. This system has yet to be deciphered, and nothing can be said of its nature at the present time except that, from the number of signs used, it is logo-syllabic. Logo-syllabic systems of writing also developed, at a later date, in the Aegean, in Anatolia, in the Indus Valley, and in Chinasee(see Chinese Language 批把). From these logo-syllabic systems, syllabaries were borrowed by other peoples to write their own languages.

One of the earliest examples of semialphabetic writing is found in the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, which date back to about 1500 bc. Another such system, dated to about 1300 bc, was found at Ugarit on the northern Syrian coast, but in this case the writing was inscribed on clay in the manner of Mesopotamian cuneiform. Similar writing systems were developed by the other peoples of this region, and it was from the Phoenicians that the Greeks borrowed their writing system. The Greeks took the final step of separating the consonants from the vowels and writing each separately, thus arriving at full alphabetic writing about 800 bc. Many people regard the alphabet as the best possible system of writing, although this belief may simply represent a cultural prejudice on the part of alphabet users: It is “best” because it is “mine.” However, each type of writing demands a similar amount of effort to record similar amounts of information.

see Greek Language ΑΛΦΑΚΑΙΒΕΤΑΚΑΙΓΑΜΜΑ