1 Writing is a way of communication that

1. Writing is a way of communication that represents language through the inscription of signs and symbols.

2. Earliest known examples of writings are Dispilio Tablet (Greece) and Tărtăria tablets (Romania)/on the picture/, carbon dated to 8 thousand years ago.

3. Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from Iran. /Proto-Elamite economic tablet with text /

4. A writing system is an organized method of putting ideas into writing, which has special set characters, collectively called script /Bulgarian script/

1. What writing systems do you know? 2. Which writing system do we use? 3. What is vowel and what is consonant? 4. What is alphabet? What does it consist of? 5. What is language family?

I. Logographic – or ideographic - writing systems. A logogram (ideogram) is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Chinese character meaning Sun and Day 1. A lot of Asian writing systems are logographic (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) 2. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs 3. Mayan writing system

II. Syllabic writing systems. Syllabary is set of symbols or a symbol that represents a syllable Mayan writing system based on syllables (the table) 1. Cherokee language 2. African language Vai 3. Japanese kana 4. Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiforms

III. Segmental writing systems Abjad – the writing system in which only consonants are used. The reader adds the vowels as he reads. All known abjads belong to the Semitic family of scripts. These scripts come from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet (dated to about 1500 BC), which comes from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

III. Segmental writing systems An abugida /ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə/ - is a system where the consonant is represented with the same letter, which differs a little depending on a vowel that follows it /Siddham Script/ 1. Brahmic family of India and Southeast Asia 2. Ethiopic family 3. Cree family

III. Segmental writing systems Alphabet - a small set of letters, each of which represents a phoneme of a spoken language. /Alpha+beta/

IV. Featural writing systems In featural script each letter or symbol represent not even a phoneme but its parts, such as articulation or voicing. The only prominent system is the Korean Hangul /word Hangul/ (한글)

Types of scripts which are being used in the world now

1. What writing systems do you use (other than alphabet)? 2. What system would you like to learn in the future? 3. What system is the most widespread in the world? 4. What system is the most important for the development of the current world?

1. Do you prefer writing or typing? 2. Do you like your handwriting? How would you describe it? 3. What are your biggest problems with writing? 4. When do you need to write in your everyday life? 5. What writing skills do you need to be able to write well? 6. Do you think creative writing is good for you? 7. Poet William Wordsworth said: "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. " Can you do this?

Topic II History of Writing. Hieroglyphs. Ancient writings, language families

Origins of writing. 1. What do you think the people invented the writing for? 2. What places are the most probable to find the ancient writings in? 3. What professions required people to write in ancient times? 4. Have you ever seen the ancient writings with your own eyes?

1. During the upper Palaeolithic, 30 -40, 000 years ago, people started by drawing graffiti and paintings on rocks and walls of caves. The exact reasons of it are yet unknown.

2. The transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments made it necessary to count ones property. People had what to own and what to count; the first such clay counters showed up around 9000 years ago (these are Syrian examples): - a token with a shape of a coin and with a cross carved on it indicated a sheep - a conical-shaped token meant a measure of corn

3. Around 6100 -5800 years ago people began to use symbols in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle. The written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.

4. The pictures began as representing what they were, pictographs, and eventually, certain pictures represented an idea or concept, ideographs, and finally to represent sounds. head foot sun "day" hand woman

5. If it was comparatively easy to mean agricultural products with a drawing or with a conventional symbol, it was more difficult to write the name of a person. To solve this problem, somebody thought of using short words, mono or bi-syllabic, and to unite them in the same way we are doing today with the rebus. So, around 3000 BC, other signs were introduced which were not used to mean an object, but rather a sound (phonograms). For example, in Sumerian the head was named "lu" and the mouth "ka". By reading one after the other as phonograms the drawing of the head and that of the mouth, it was possible to obtain the name of "Luka" ("Luke").

6. Written language was the product of an agrarian society. These societies were centered around the cultivation of grain. A natural result of the cultivation and storage of grain is the production of beer. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the very oldest written inscriptions concern the celebration of beer and the daily ration allotted to each citizen.

7. The Egyptian syllabic system had no definitive vowels. Some hieroglyphs were biliteral, some triliteral. Certain Egyptian hieroglyphs such as which was pronounced r'i meaning "mouth" became the pictograph for the sound of R with any vowel. The pictograph for "water" pronounced /nu/ became the symbol for the consonantal sound of N. This practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an alphabet.

Б W Г Д Ж З Й Ї K Q alef M H П Р С T Ф Х Х Х Ч Ш The Egyptians used the acrophones as a consonantal system along with their syllabic and idiographic system, therefore the alphabet was not yet born. This is the alphabet that was the precursor to Phoenician, Greek and Roman.

The term hieroglyph is Greek and it means sacred writing, in fact for the Egyptians the writing was divine. If you think that when we are reading we hear a voice in our mind, you can well imagine how this surprising phenomenon could be considered divine in those times. For the Egyptians, the hieroglyphic scripts was sacred and its symbols kept the properties of the objects that they refer to, so they were alive, magical, they exerted an influence and a power of their own.

8. Cuneiform is one of the earliest known systems of writing, distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made with a stylus. The term cuneiform writing comes from the fact it is composed of signs that look like small wedges, in Latin: cuneus.

At first people drew with a stylus on the clay tablet, but it caused stylus to break and clay to fall on the floor, then replace the tablets, etc. Instead, later they started to use the special pointed stylus sides to print lines on clay, thus the cuneiforms changed as well. Curves were replaced with straight marks, and the figures lost their realism.

Cuneiform writing spread to a good part of the ancient Middle East and was used by many different peoples such as the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. the words - I am Darius the King – in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian

Proto-Sinaitic alphabet

Alef (bull) A He (window) E Gimel (stick) Г (G) Waw (spear) Y У Dalet (door) D Д Zayin (sword) Z Or Ziqq (cuffs) Qoph (eye of needle) Q Resh (head) R Р

1. How did writing develop? 2. What was the writing necessary for in the course of history? 3. How has it helped the ancient civilizations? 4. Do you think the more advanced civilizations had better writing, or in the opposite – the better writing helped civilizations to become better? 5. How did the cuneiforms appear? Why did they change? 6. How has the Senaitic alphabet gotten to Greece? 7. How was the Russian/Ukrainian alphabet developed? 8. Do you know many civilizations that used or still use hieroglyphs?