英语语言学Chapter 2 The Development of Writing

1、 Very large number of languages used in spoken form; Development of writinga recent thing; Cave drawings 20,000 years ago; Clay tokens 10,000 years ago; Alphabetic script inscriptions 3,000 years ago. Ancient writing system found on stone or tablets in ruined cities. Cave drawings serve to record so

2、me event, not any type of specifically linguistic message; Some of the “pictures” came to represent particular images in a consistent way, Picture-writing, or Pictograms; A conventional relationship must exist btwn the symbol and its interpretation; The more fixed symbolic form, the more abstract, d

3、erived forms are Ideograms; Difference btwn Pictograms and Ideograms: symbol and entity it represents, picture-like; abstract,derived forms Relation btwn symbol and entity/idea sufficiently abstract, symbol represent words in a language; examples of word writing, or “logograms”; Cuneiform writing by

4、 Sumerians 5,000 and 6,000 years ago in modern Iraq. Relationship btwn written form and the object has become arbitrary; By Sumerians, word-based writing system has come into existence Sumerian Cuneiform inscriptions: the earliest known writing system” Chinese characters are representations as of th

5、e meaning of words and not of the sounds of the spoken language. One of the advantages is tow speakers of very different dialects of Chinese can both read the same written text. Chinese Writing: the longest continuous history of use, i.e. 3,000 years The symbol for one entity is taken over as the sy

6、mbol for the sound of the spoken word used to refer to that entity. That symbol then comes to be used whenever that sound occurs in any word. Example to be found on P12. Advantage: reduction of symbols needed in a writing system When a writing system employs a set of symbols which represent the pron

7、unciations of syllables, it is described as No purely syllabic writing system in use today Japanese: partially syllabic writing system Basis of alphabetic writing: the symbols used to represent single sounds types in a language Alphabet: a set of written symbols which each represent a single type of

8、 sound Semitic languages: Arabic and Hebrew originated in the writing system of Phoenicians Early Greeks took the alphabetizing process a stage further by also using separate symbols to represent the vowel sounds as distinct entities, a remodeled alphabet was created to include these. Greeks: single

9、-symbol to single-sound correspondence Cyrillic alphabet is the basis of Russian writing system Why there are so many mismatch btwn the forms of written English and the sounds of spoken English? Printing was introduced in 15th Century Conventions regarding written representation of words derived from Latin and French Early