writing

writing, form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language.

This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought and the fact that spoken language has a number of levels of structure, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest units of speech used to distinguish one word or morpheme from another), any one of which a writing system can “map onto” or represent. Indeed, the history of writing is in part a matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in the attempt to construct an efficient, general, and economical writing system capable of serving a range of socially valuable functions. Literacy is a matter of competence with a writing system and with the specialized functions that written language serves in a particular society.

For discussion of the study of writing as a tool of historical research, see epigraphy and paleography. For more on particular systems not treated below, see hieroglyphic writing and pictography.

Writing as a system of signs

Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system for symbolizing these symbols. A writing system may be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents the utterances of a language. Writing renders language visible; while speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparison, permanent. Both speaking and writing depend upon the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by someone not familiar with the linguistic structure underlying the oral form of the language. Yet writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, that would not be produced orally. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect. Scholars account for these facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms and functions. These alternative relations may be depicted as follows:

It is the fact that writing is an expression of language rather than simply a way of transcribing speech that gives to writing, and hence to written language and to literacy, its special properties. As long as writing was seen merely as transcription, as it was by such pioneering linguists as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield earlier in the 20th century, its conceptual significance was seriously underestimated. Once writing was seen as providing a new medium for linguistic expression, its distinctness from speech was more clearly grasped. Scholars such as Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong were among the first to analyze the conceptual and social implications of using written as opposed to oral forms of communication.

Britannica Quiz

Commonly Misspelled Words Vol. 2 Quiz

Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs. Gestures—such as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreement—are visible signs, but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures, similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of writing.

But the boundary between pictures and writing becomes less clear when pictures are used conventionally to convey particular meanings. In order to distinguish pictures from pictorial signs, it is necessary to notice that language has two primary levels of structure, which the French linguist André Martinet referred to as the “double articulation” of language: the meaning structures on one hand and the sound patterns on the other. Indeed, linguists define grammar as a system for mapping—establishing a system of relations between—sound and meaning. These levels of structure admit of several subdivisions, any one of which may be captured in a writing system. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a word. Thus, the word boys is composed of two morphemes, boy and plurality. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning. Still-larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less well-defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

The basic linguistic unit of the sound system is called a phoneme; it is a minimal, contrastive sound unit that distinguishes one utterance from another. Phonemes may be further analyzed in terms of a set of underlying distinctive features, features specifying the ways the sound is physically produced by passing breath through the throat and positioning the tongue and lips. Phonemes may be thought of as roughly equivalent to the sound segments known as consonants and vowels, and combinations of these segments make up syllables.

Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by some writing system or other. Writing systems consequently fall into two large general classes: those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or a morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable or the phoneme.

The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented to express thought directly, bypassing language altogether. The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect writing system, which would reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be readable by all human beings regardless of their mother tongues. It is now known that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too intimately related to language to be represented independently of it.

More recently there have been attempts to invent forms for communicating explicit messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such messages are communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus, the skirted human figure painted on the door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on the Pioneer spacecraft, the Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside down painted on a rock near a precipitous trail, and the visual patterns branded on range cattle are all attempts to use visual marks to communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular language.

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet door is an elliptical way of writing “women’s washroom,” just as the word “women” had been earlier. The plaque on the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader already knows how to express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider expressed the message that horses and riders should avoid the trail. And the brand can be read as the name of the owner’s ranch.

Such signs therefore express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by representing meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word. They do so by expressing these meanings elliptically. Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a restricted set of possible meanings. While such pictorial signs could not be turned into a general writing system, they can be extremely efficient in serving a restricted set of functions.

The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are sufficiently great for some scholars to maintain that they are not legitimate types of writing. These differences are that pictorial signs are “motivated”—that is, they visually suggest their meanings—and that they express whole propositions rather than single words. Other scholars would include such signs as a form of writing because they are a conventional means for expressing a particular linguistic meaning. However, scholars agree that such a collection of signs could express only an extremely limited set of meanings.

A similar case is the ancient mosaic found at the entrance of a house in Pompeii, depicting a snarling dog on a chain and bearing the inscription “Cave canem” (“Beware of the dog”). Even nonreaders could “read” the message; the picture is therefore a form of writing rather than of picture making. Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read them. Such reading ability is described as “environmental” literacy, not associated with books and schooling.

Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such symbols as the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many languages, appear to express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic structure. However, it is more useful to think of these numerals as a particular orthography for representing the meaning structure of these numbers rather than their sound structures. The advantages of this orthography are that the orthography permits the user to carry out mathematical operations, such as carrying, borrowing, and the like, and that the same orthography may be assigned different phonological equivalents in different languages using the same number system. Thus, the numeral 2 is named “two” in English, “deux” in French, “zwei” in German, and so on. Yet it represents not a thought but the word, a piece of language.

It is for these reasons that writing is said to be a system for transcribing language, not for representing thought directly. There are of course other systems for representing thought, including such activities as picture making, dance, and mime. These, however, are not representations of ordinary language; rather, they constitute what the American philosopher Nelson Goodman has called the “languages of art.” These “languages,” or semiotic systems, are systems of signs that are used for expressive and representational purposes. Each of these semiotic systems may in turn be represented by a notational system, a system for representing the semiotic system. Thus, writing can be defined formally as a notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form.

Writing is so pervasive in everyday life that many people take it to be synonymous with language, and this confusion affects their understanding of language. The word word denotes ambiguously both the oral form and the written form, and so people may confuse them. This occurs, for example, when people think that the sounds of language are made up of letters. Even Aristotle used the same word, gramma, to refer to the basic units of both speech and writing. Yet it is important to distinguish them. People may have competence in a language and yet know nothing about its written form. Similarly, writing is so fundamental to a modern, literate society that its significance has often been overestimated. Since the 18th century it has been common to identify literacy with civilization, indeed with all civil virtues. When European countries colonized other regions, they thought it as important to teach “savages” to read and write as to convert them to Christianity. Modern anthropology has helped to revise what now seems a quaint set of priorities by showing not only that there are no genuinely primitive languages but that differing languages mask no unbridgeable differences between human beings. All humans are rational, speak a language of enormous expressive power, and live in, maintain, and transmit to their young a complex social and moral order.

Scholars of literature have in the past half-century amassed compelling evidence to demonstrate that a complex social order and a rich verbal culture can exist in nonliterate societies. The American scholar Milman Parry, writing in the 1920s, showed that the Homeric epic poems, long regarded as models of literary virtuosity, were in fact the product not of a literate but of an oral tradition. These poems were produced by bards who could not write and were delivered in recitals to audiences who could not read. Writing made possible the recording of these poems, not their composition. The hard and fast dividing line that put civilization and literacy on one side and savagery and irrationality on the other has been abandoned. To be unlettered is no longer confused with being ignorant.

Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet. The accepted view today is that all writing systems represent relatively optimal solutions to a large and unique set of constraints, including the structure of the language represented, the functions that the system serves, and the balance of advantages to the reader as opposed to the writer. Consequently, while there are important differences between speaking and writing and between various forms of writing, these differences vary in importance and in effect from language to language and from society to society.