Writing Systems

Socrates against writing in Plato’s

Phaedrus
• Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts
to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human
mind into mere objects in the physical world. By
causing people to rely on what is written rather
than what they are able to think, it weakens the
powers of the mind and of memory. True
knowledge can only emerge from a relationship
between active human minds. And unlike a
person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will
just keep saying the same thing over and over
again, no matter how often it is refuted.
 Writing Systems: Context
• In the background; what we have looked at
– Questions about whether SPOKEN language is an
innate capacity of humans or a useful invention
– Investigation of aspects of linguistic structure
(sound, syntax, meaning)
– How languages vary across time (historical
linguistics)
 The Place of Writing
• Writing is an addition in some sense
Writing is not language, but merely a way of
recording language by visible marks.
(Representation) (Bloomfield, 1933)
• Writing systems are distinguished from other
symbolic communication systems in that the
reader must understand something of the
associated spoken language to comprehend the
text. In contrast, other possible symbolic systems
such as information signs, painting, maps and
mathematics often do not require prior
knowledge of a spoken language.
 But…
• Claiming that writing is not primary like spoken
language is important; no cultures with writing
but no speech; but…
– Writing is an enormously important development in
the history of human culture
– Studying writing reveals much about some of the
relatively abstract linguistic categories we have seen
earlier in the course (particularly in phonology)
– Studying reading also tell us about how linguistic
information is processed by the brain
• Writing may lead a life of its own – it develops
in a direction that can be independent of
speech
• Writing can also influence speech – often ~
of(t)en
• The speech of those who write extensively is
often stylistically closer to the written/formal
styles
• Written vs Oral cultures
 Key Differences
SPEECH WRITING
Present in all societies Present in few, recent
Learned before writing Learned after speech, if at all
Acquired without explicit Requires instruction
instruction
Evanescent Permanent
Innvovation Fossilization
Nuance of tone and voice Time to conceptualize/argue
Monologic Dialogic
 Basic components of the discussion
• Outline of the history of writing as currently
understood, with reference to how early writing
emerged
• Illustration of the distinct types of writing systems that
are found, concentrating how elements of the writing
system relate to different linguistic objects
• Objects of analysis:
• What are the basic units of the writing system?
• What linguistic objects do they pick out?
Morphemes? Syllables? Phonemes?
• How direct is the mapping between symbol and
what it connects with?
Origins of Writing?
 Different Places/Times of Origin
• Four different times and cultures in which
writing was invented (question about
contact in the Egyptian/Mesopotamian
case)
Pictogram/Neolithic: 6000 years
Sumerian: 3200 BCE (Cuneiform)
Egyptian: 3250-3050 BCE (Hieroglyphics)
Chinese: 1200 BCE (?)
Maya: 292 CE
Indus Valley: 3500 BCE(?)
 Other developments
1500 BC: West Semitic Syllabary (Phonecians)
1000 BC: Ancient Greeks Borrow the
Phoenician Consonantal Alphabet
750 BC: Etruscans Borrow the Greek Alphabet
500 BC: Romans Adapt the Etruscan/Greco
Alphabet to Latin
900AD: TheologiansCyrus and Methodius and
their disciples invented the Cyrillic Alphabet
taking some symbols from the Greek Alphabet,
some from the Roman Alphabet and inventing
some of the own. (1st Bulgarian empire)
 Example: Sumerian
• Early Development: A set of icons inscribed on
clay, used for temple economic records:

Meaning : Two sheep received from temple of Inanna;

or Two sheep delivered to temple of Inanna; or …
Denise Schmandt-Besserat,
Archaeologoist
 Information in these inscriptions
• Note that only certain types of information–
nouns, numbers - appear here
• Such tablets are difficult to interpret for this
reason; they do not contain a full indication of
grammatical structure and other aspects crucial
to the spoken language
• Given certain conventions such tablets could be
understood, but the system falls short of a full
writing system
• Thus these marks constituted a limited notation system,
which in the beginning may only have served as a reminder
to the writer (a mnemonic). Another person could also read
the record in the same way, if this was conventionalized.
• These early documents were similar to many systems for
record-keeping, developed in many cultures - marks on
stone or bone, clay figurines, even knots in cords. As
civilizations become more complex, record-keeping needs
become complex as well. The ability of trained third parties
to read such records in a consistent way becomes
increasingly important for mediating or adjudicating
disputes in non-violent ways.
• In the case of the Sumerian record-keeping system, two
crucial innovations led (over a few hundred years) to a full
writing system, capable of expressing anything that could be
expressed in the (written) words of the Sumerian language.
 Developmental principles
• Two principles in the developing system allow it
to extend beyond the kind of notation seen
above:
– Charades Principle: Hint at the meaning or sound of
a new symbol by making it look like an existing
symbol. If you combine an ambiguous or vague
picture of the meaning of a word, with a little
information about what the word sounds like, you
can get a more effective communication of the
identity of the word.
KA "mouth."

augmented with augmented

the phonetic me with nun
to create EME to create
"tongue" NUNDUM
"lip".
• a Sumerian reader was in effect being asked to
play a sort of game of charades:
• what word has something to do with "mouth"
and sounds like [me]? -- why of course, that's
EME, "tongue"!
• These combinations became conventionalised
over time.
 Charades: Illustration

Process
1) SAG ‘head’ begins as a drawing of a head
2) KA ‘mouth’ involves arbitrary marks at the position the mouth
3) GU ‘eat’ adds a bowl to the previous
 Developmental principle 2
– Rebus Principle: When a picture won’t work (for e.g. an
abstract concept or a suffix), use a symbol that is associated
with a homophone (or something that sounds similar). If
you combine an ambiguous or vague picture of the
meaning of a word, with a little information about what the
word sounds like, you can get a more effective
communication of the identity of the word than if you tried
to use only imperfect information about meaning, or
imperfect information about sound.
 Rebus: Illustration

• The sign for a ‘water’ developed as shown

above
• Sumerian also had a suffix [a] which meant ‘in’
• The same sign for water was then used for this
suffix (homophone)
• In a more general development, the sign for
water was then used for the phonetic value [a]
more generally: so NIN-ANI ‘his lady’:
 Another example

Bee + Leaf
Belief
 Another example from sumer
This is the world's first clear
example of rebus, in a tablet from
Jemdet Nasr, dated to ca 2900BCE.
Such rebus extensions solve the
problem of writing words for
gi: reed abstract concepts, though they
(concrete also create a new problem of
object) ambiguity -- but no more so than
gi: reimburse any phonetic writing system that
(abstract writes homophonous words
verb) identically.
• Temple
transactions
, economic
records of
income and
dis/reim-
bursements.
 Again sumer
• the sign for arrow (pronounced as “ti”) also
used for the word meaning life.
• The total number of cuneiform signs is limited
by polyphony, the case that a single sign may be
read in different ways. Thus, the sign picturing a
human foot could be read in Sumerian
• +gin (to walk), +gub (to stand), +tum (to bring)
• pictogram for plough+ wood (plough)
• Pictogram for plough +man (ploughman)
• Writing seems to have started with pictograms for
mnemonic aids in record keeping, or as vehicles of
insight in divination (Chinese). As the inventory of
signs increases, the possibility of using some of
the signs as rebuses or as phonological/semantic
combinations also arises. This is much more
efficient than trying to design a new symbol for
every word or morpheme. Once this meaning-
plus-sound process begins, it can develop into a
full (if complex and inefficient) writing system,
able to encode any passage in the language. This
development seems to have occurred
independently at least three times: in
Mesopotamia; in China; and in Mesoamerica.
 What writing systems need - 1

• at least one set of defined base

elements/symbols/glyphs, individually termed
characters and collectively called a script;
 What writing systems need - 2
• at least one set of rules and conventions
(orthography) understood and shared by a
community, which arbitrarily pairs meaning to
the base elements (graphemes), their ordering
and relations to one another, including
direction of writing
 What writing systems need - 3
• at least one language (generally spoken)
whose constructions are represented and
recalled by the interpretation of these
elements and rules;
 What writing systems need - 4

• some physical means of distinctly representing

the symbols by application to a permanent or
semi-permanent medium, so they may be
interpreted
 Classification
• Traditional Terms:
• Pictographic (pictures, pictogram)
– Ideographic: Sign refers to an idea or general concept,
not an actual word (in this sense not ‘true’ writing),
language independent
– Logographic: Each sign refers to a specific word
– Syllabic: Each sign refers to a syllable (e.g. CV)
– Alphabetic: Each sign refers to a single sound
(consonant or vowel)
• In practice these terms refer to symbols rather
than systems, as systems may make use of more
than one (example later)
 Writing direction –
Left to right, horizontal
 Right to left, horizontal
• Ancient Berber, Ancient Egyptian (Demotic), Ancient
Egyptian (Hieratic), Ancient Egyptian (Hieroglyphic),
Aramaic, Arabic, Avestan, Chinese, Cypriot, Enochian,
Etruscan, Hebrew, Iberian (Northern), Kharosthi,
Linear B, Old Italic, Orkhon, Mende, Middle Persian,
Nabataean, N'Ko, Parthian, Phoenician, Proto-
Elamite, Psalter, Sabaean, Samaritan, Sogdian, Syriac,
South Arabian, Thaana
Left to right, vertical, top to bottom
• The following writing systems are written from left to
right in vertical lines running from top to bottom:
• Old Elamite,
• Manchu,
• Mongolian,
• Oirat Clear Script,
• Phags-pa,
• Sogdian,
• Sutton SignWriting,
• Uyghur
Right to left, vertical, top to
bottom
• The following writing systems are written from right to
left in vertical lines running from top to bottom:
• Chinese, Chữ-nôm,Japanese, Nushu, Tangut (Hsihsia),
Korean, Kulitan, Meroïtic (hieroglyphic)
• Until the 1980s Korean was usually written from right to
left in vertical columns. Since then writing from left to
right in horizontal lines has become popular, and today
the majority of texts are written horizontally.
• Chinese is often written vertically in Taiwan, while in
China and Singapore it is usually written horizontally.
 Left to right, vertical, bottom to top

• The following writing systems are

written from right to left in
vertical lines running from
bottom to top:
• Batak,
• Hanuno'o,
• Tagbanwa
 Right to left, vertical, bottom to top

• Ancient Berber developed

from the Phoenician script
and like Phoenician, was
originally written from right to
left in horizontal lines, but
became more commonly
written from bottom to top in
vertical columns running from
right to left.
 Boustrophedon
• The following writing systems are written
in horizontal lines running alternatively
from right to left then left to right. This is
called Boustrophedon, which comes from
the Greek βους (bous) "ox" + στρεφειν
(strefein) "to turn", because it resembles
the path an ox makes when plowing field,
turning at the end of each row to return in
the opposite direction.
• Székely-Hungarian Rovás (Hungarian
Runes),
• Linear B,
• Rongo Rongo,
• Sabaean
• Ancient Greek and Etruscan inscriptions
 variable
• Ancient Egyptian (Hieroglyphic)
• The Ancient Egytian Hieroglyphic script was written in
any direction that was convenient: horizontally from
right to left or left to right or vertically from top to
bottom. The arrangement of the glyphs was partly
determined by aesthetic considerations. When written
horizontally, you can tell the direction of a piece of
writing by looking at the way the animals and people are
facing: they look towards the beginning of the line.
 SUMMARY

Types Writing Systems

(Note: No system is purely any of the types listed)

Symbols Represent Symbols Represent

Words or Concepts Sound

Pictographs Ideographs/ Syllabaries Alphabets

Logographs
Meaning is (meaning by convention)
Symbols=Syllables Symbols=Phonemes
Supposed to
be Obvious examples: examples: examples:
Chinese, Japanese (kanji), Japanese (kana) English, many
Dead Some symbols used in Korean, Inuit, others
End English (! @ # $ % 1 2 3 …) Cherokee
 Ideographic: Example
• Winter count, recording significant event, kept by
Yankton band of Dakota Indians from 1800-1871.
Pictorial calendars or histories in which tribal records and
events were recorded by Native Americans

Example: Record of
White soldiers
attacking a
Fort.
 Ideographs Used in Chinese Writing
• Any iconic elements are probably lost on most readers
• Symbols represent whole words or concepts
• No clues to pronunciation (usually)
• Both concrete (sun, river) & abstract words (strength, good,
peaceful) are represented
Chinese writing is not purely ideographic. Some
characters represent broad semantic categories (e.g.,
person, insect, metal) and others provide pronunciation
clues.
 Ideographic writing: CONS
1. Representation is (mostly) at the word level; character
set is really huge. The number of symbols is in the many
thousands (compare this number to the 26 Roman
letters).
2. Clues are not provided to pronunciation (though
Chinese is not purely ideographic). Encounter a new
symbol? Not true of alphabetic writing. What happened
the 1st time you encountered the word “bombastic”?
3. Place names, proper names, foreign words, etc. can be a
headache.
4. Keyboard?
 Ideographic Writing: pros
The writing system is language independent; anyone who
knows what the ideographs mean can understand what is
written – no matter what language they speak.
This is important in China.
“Standard” Chinese: Mandarin, but a large number of
“dialects” which are more properly viewed as separate
languages. Some of the mutually unintelligible “dialects”:
Shanghainese, Cantonese, Southern Min, Hunanese,
Northern Min, Eastern Min, Central Min, Dungan, …
several others.
 Ideographic Writing: pros
A newspaper article or book can be read equally
well by speakers of all of these
languages/varieties.
This would not be true with an alphabetic writing
system, or any other system that conveyed sound
rather than meaning.
This explains why China – with many mutually
unintelligible languages – will probably never
move to alphabetic writing.
 Egyptian ideographs
Egyptian Hieroglyphs:
It is a complex system,
writing figurative,
symbolic, and phonetic all
at once, in the same text,
the same phrase, I would
almost say in the same
word.
--Jean-Francois
Champollion
 Egyptologists
• The Last Man Who Knew
Everything, Thomas Young
(1773-1829): polymath,
physician; contributions to solid
mechanics, light and vision,
musical harmony, egyptology etc.
• Founder and Father of
Egyptology, Jean-Francois
Champollion (1790-1832),
philologist and orientalist
 English ideographs !
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, @, #, $, %, &, =, +,
etc.
 Logographic (word-writing)
• Each sign stands for a word (maybe better, a
morpheme)
(From Greek “logos” = word, “graphos”=
writing)
 Chinese

Examples from Chinese; characters with the

phonology of the words that they stand for
(numbers indicate tones)
 Logographic, cont.
• Development of symbols: Individual symbols
in this system may
be logographic, but
Ma3 ‘horse’ for the majority of
cases the signs use
Derived from: an indication of
how the sign is
pronounced.
Egyptian logograph
For example, this
depiction of a scribe's
tools stands for the
Egyptian word originally
pronounced something
like ziçiR, meaning "write"
(Some details of Egyptian pronunciation
are subject to debate.)
 Extensions
• As noted on the last slide, not all signs in
the Chinese system are logographic
• Many symbols have two parts
– One indicates something about meaning
– One indicates something about sound
• Example:

Ma1 ‘Mother’
 Example, Cont.
• Remember that we also saw:

Ma3 ‘horse’ Ma1 ‘Mother’

When we look at the way of writing Ma1 closely, we see:

•The left side means
‘female’
•The right side, the sign for
‘horse’, functions as a
phonetic indicator
mare: 母 马 [mŭmă]
The phonetic component of the character is an
imperfect reflection of the pronunciation
sometimes the tone is different, sometimes the
consonant or vowel, sometimes all of them

nu 3 nu 2 nu 3 nu 4
"female" "servant" "work“ "anger"
(with With (with
HAND) strength HEART)
Ideographic - Logographic
Sound meaning
 Mayan Hieroglyphs (500BC-1200AD)

• The writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of

Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system
that has been substantially deciphered (Zapotec, Olmec, Isthmian
etc.). The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably Maya
date to the 3rd century BCE in San Bartolo, Guatemala, and writing
was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadors in the 16th century CE (and even later in isolated
areas such as Tayasal).
• The Mayan script is logosyllabic combining about 550
logograms (which represent whole words) and 150
syllabograms (which represent syllables). There were
also about 100 glyphs representing place names and
the names of gods. About 300 glyphs were commonly
used.
• Examples of the script have been found carved in stone
and written on bark, wood, jade, ceramics, and a few
manuscripts in Mexico, Guatemala and northern Belize.
• Many syllables can be represented by more than one
glyph The script was usually written in paired vertical
columns reading from left to right and top to bottom in
a zigzag pattern. (Michael Coe’s book)
Mesoamerican Scripts
 Syllabic: Example
• Syllabic systems employ symbols that stand for
whole syllables; thus compare the following from
Japanese hiragana with the English equivalent
for the same pronunciation (meaning ‘I’ (polite
form)):
 Hiragana (native words, 46 symbols)

Notes: The voiced obstruents g, z, d, b are indicated by

adding two small strokes to the symbol for the
corresponding voiceless consonant (dakuten marker); and
for historical reasons the /p/ symbols are derived from /h/
by adding a small circle. The N symbol is used when /n/
occurs in the coda of a syllable.
Katakana foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia,
scientific names, emphasis
 Complex writing system
• Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture
of kanji and kana
• Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use. Each
has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and more
than one pronunciation, choice based on context.
• Japanese primary and secondary school students are
required to learn 2,136 characters. The total > 50,000.
• 消しゴム keshigomu ‘eraser’ has kanji+hiragana+ 2
katakana in a single word!
• Many Chinese words have been borrowed into Japanese.
Same characters get used for both Kun yomi - Japanese
reading On yomi - Sino-Japanese reading
 For example

Native Japanese (kun’yomi): water = mizu

Sino- Japanese (on’yomi) : water = sui
 Logographic vs syllabic
• Syllabic symbols represent sound, not whole
words.
• Symbol set for a syllable-based writing system
is called a syllabary.
• Syllabaries are in use for several languages,
including Japanese (two, in fact: katakana and
hiragana), Korean (hangul), Inuit, & Cherokee.
• Syllabaries are a good choice for languages with
a fairly small number of unique syllable types.
• Japanese has a small number of unique syllable
types (around 50) because:
(1) it has a small phonemic inventory, and
(2) it has many constraints on permissible
syllable types.
• Phonotactic constraints: Japanese has just 5
vowels, a little over a dozen consonants; no
consonant clusters; syllable types restricted to V
and CV; only [n] permitted in coda.
English: Many thousands of syllable types (~3
times as many vowels as Japanese, ~twice the
number of consonants, many permissible
consonant clusters. For example, a separate
syllabic symbol would be needed just to represent
the word sphinx or sixths. That symbol would have
no other use (not repeatable elsewhere).

Syllabic writing for English is not impossible, but it

would be cumbersome.
 Cherokee Syllabary

Invented by a Cherokee silversmith called

Sequoyah in the 1820s; 85 symbols
Linear B oldest Linear B Syllabary
surviving record of
the Greek dialect Mycenaean
known as
Mycenaean, named
after the great site of
Mycenae where the
legendary
Agamemnon ruled.
Date of use:1500
BCE to 1200 BCE ,
geographically
covered the island of
Crete, as well as the
southern part of the
Greek Mainland.
Linear B logograms
 Alphabetic
• Basic Principle: each sign refers to a single
sound
• This is of course familiar from English,
although there are many deviations from the
one-to-one pattern (Alphabetic-Consonantal
etc.)
• In spite of the deviations, the underlying logic
of the system is still alphabetic, as opposed to
being syllabic or something else
 Roman alphabet
English (+ many other languages) is written using the Roman
alphabet.
Lineage (i.e., where the alphabet come from):
(1) Hieroglyphics -> West Semitic Syllabary (Phoenicians)
(2) Hieroglyphics was a mix of ideographs & syllabic symbols;
Phoenicians dropped the ideographs and kept a 22-
symbol syllabary.
(3) West Semitic Syllabary -> Greek Alphabet
Greeks added some vowel symbols and turned the
syllabary into an alphabet.
(4) Romans added a few symbols and redefined others to
suit the phonetic inventory of Latin.
 Phoenician to Greek:
Vowels Added
• The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted
into Greek with much the same sounds. Phoenician gutturals did not
exist in Greek: ’āleph [ʔ], hē [h, e, a], ḥēth [ħ], and ‘ayin [ʕ]. Only
ḥēth was retained in Greek as a consonant, eta, representing the [h]
sound in those dialects that had an [h], while the consonants ’āleph,
hē and ‘ayin became the vowels alpha [a], e [e] and o [o],
respectively.
• The two letters wāw and yōdh stood for [w] and [j], and the long
vowels [u] and [i] in Phoenician. Greek had lost its [j] sound, so
Phoenician yōdh was used only for its vocalic value Greek vowel
letter iota [i]. However, several Greek dialects still had a [w] sound,
and here wāw was used for both of its Phoenician values, but with
different forms: as the Greek letter digamma for the consonant [w],
and as the letter upsilon for the vowel [u].
Greek to romans
Consonantal Alphabets -
Abjads
Abjad - ambiguity

Kataba
"he wrote"
kutiba
"it was written"
kattaba
"he caused to
write"
kutub
"books"
Abugida/Alphasyllabary

Largest
family of
Abugida
scripts:
Brahmi
 Some exceptions to the one symbol-
one sound mapping
• Digraphs: Two letters for one sound
– Fish
– See, too, saw
– (and trigraphs: watch, sixth)
• Silent letters (i.e. present but do not
contribute to the sound (gate, slight, cough)
• Same letters, different pronunciation (heat,
great, bread; ether - either)
• Different letters, same pronunciation (meat,
meet, mete; off - cough)
 English spelling is morphophonemic

It represents both the sounds and the meanings of

words.
A morphophonemic spelling system will spell different
words differently although they are pronounced the
same: their, there, they’re
A morphophonemic spelling will spell words in the same
family the same even though they are pronounced
differently: go, gone
A morphophonemic spelling will spell a particular suffix
the same regardless of how it is pronounced: cats,
dogs, horses

85
 Features
The English alphabet has only 26 letters to
represent 45 different sounds
Some of the letters (like c, q, h, and x) aren’t
very useful
There are 5 vowel letters to represent 13 vowel
sounds, used up for the short vowels, as in:
pat, pet, pit, pot, and put
No letters left for the long vowels, yielding
chaos…
86
 The chaos?
A: He ate the freight. It was his fate.
E: Did he believe that Caesar could see the people?
I: I write eye-rhyme, like “She cited the sight of the
site.”
O: Our chauffeur, although he stubbed his toe,
yeomanly towed four more boards through the
open door of the depot.
U: blue, blew, gnu, Hugh, new, Pooh, Sioux, through,
two

87
 VIOLATIONS OF THE PHONEMIC
PRINCIPLE
• Same pronunciation but different spellings (different
meanings):
cite-sight-site, pair-pare-pear, there-their-they're, bare-
bear, pore-pour-poor
• Same spellings but different pronunciations (same
word families):
nation-national, obscene-obscenity, sign-signature, go-
gone, ct. origin-original-originality
acknowledge-knowledge; amnesia-mnemonic; though,
thought, through, thumb-thimble-Thumbelina

38 88
Gnus and gnomes and gnats and such
Gnouns with just one G too much.
Pseudonym and psychedelic
P becomes a psurplus relic.
Knit and knack and knife and knocked
Kneedless Ks are overstocked.
Rhubarb, rhetoric and rhyme
Should lose an H from thyme to time.
-- from Robert Feinstein’s “Gnormal
Pspelling.”)
38 89
 Undeciphered Scripts
• The Phaistos Disk was found in the Minoan
Palace of Phaistos on Crete in 1908 and is
thought to date from the 17th century BC. On
it is inscribed an unknown script using pre-
fabricated seals.
 Proto Elamite
first appeared in about 3100 BC in Suse (Susa), the
capital of Elam, in south-western Persia (modern
Iran). The Proto-Elamite script is thought to have
been developed from an early Sumerian script and
consists of about 1,000 signs and is therefore
thought to be partly logographic. It has yet to be
deciphered, and the language it represents is
unknown.
 Old Elamite
• Old Elamite was a syllabic script
derived from Proto-Elamite and
was used between about 2250
and 2220 BC, though was
probably invented are an earlier
date. Old Elamite has only been
partially deciphered, mainly by
Walter Hinz.
• Old Elamite consisted of about
80 symbols and was written in
vertical columns running from
top to bottom and left to right.
 Indus Valley/ Harappa
The term Indus script (also Harappan script) refers
to short strings of symbols in use during the Early
Harappan and Mature Harappan period, between
the 3500-2000BC.
The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to
1873, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since
then, over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been
discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. In
the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a
corpus and concordance of Indus writing listing
about 3700 seals and about 417 distinct signs in
specific patterns. The average inscription contains
five signs, and the longest inscription is only 17 signs
long. He also established the direction of writing as
right to left.
Rongorongo – Easter Island

Pteroglyphs
Indian Languages and Writing
 Kharosthi
• The Kharoṣṭhī script, is an ancient abugida (or
"alphasyllabary") used by the Gandhara culture ancient
South Asia to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages
( Tocharian and some Prakrts also). In use from the
middle of the 3rd century BCE until it died out in its
homeland around the 3rd century CE. (Afghanistan and
Pakistan)
• It was also in use along the Silk Road where it may have
survived until the 7th century.
• Deciphered by James Prinsep using the bilingual coins of
the Indo-Greek Kingdom (obverse in Greek, reverse in
Pali, using the Kharosthi script) leading to the reading of
the Edicts of Ashoka.
• The study of the Kharosthi script was recently
invigorated by the discovery of the Gandhāran
Buddhist texts, a set of birch bark manuscripts
written in Kharosthi, discovered near the Afghan
city of Hadda.
• The manuscripts were donated to the British
Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are
dated to the 1st century CE, making them the
oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered.
 Brāhmī
• The modern name given to the oldest members
of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best-known
Brāhmī inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of
Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd
century BCE. These are traditionally considered
to be early known examples of Brāhmī writing.
• Recent discoveries have revealed earlier epigraphy
in Tamil-Brahmi, a Southern Brahmic alphabet
found on pottery in South India and Sri Lanka
dating from before the 6th century BCE Sangam
period.
• Southern Brahmi gave rise to Tamil Brahmi,
Vatteluttu and Pallava Grantha scripts that
diversified into many South East Asian scripts like
the Mon script in Burma, the Javanese script in
Indonesia and the Khmer script in Cambodia.
• Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during
the Gupta period, which in turn diversified into a
number of cursives during the Middle Ages, including
Siddham, Sharada and Nagari. The script was
deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist,
philologist, and official of the British East India
Company. Brāhmī was an abugida.
• Brāhmī was ancestral to most of the scripts of South
Asia and Southeast Asia, several Central Asian scripts
such as Tibetan and Khotanese, and possibly, in part,
Korean Hangul.
 Evidence of script
• The earliest likely contact of the Hindu Kush region with
the Aramaic script occurred in the 6th century BCE with
the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire under Darius the
Great to the Indus Valley. It appears that no use of any
script to write an Indo-Aryan languages occurred before
the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE,
despite the evident example of Aramaic.
• Megasthenes, an ambassador to the Mauryan court only a
quarter century before Ashoka, noted explicitly that the
Indians "have no knowledge of written letters" (Indica).
This might be explained by the cultural importance at the
time (and indeed to some extent today) of oral literature
for history and Hindu scripture.
Flexibility of writing