Cultural Works

Writing is the art of recording information on a material (paper, stone, clay, animal skins) so that others who look at the material can discern its meaning. The earliest form of writing was "pictography," in which the writer draws little pictures representing the subject matter. This may work adequately for very simple subjects, but other methods become necessary when more esoteric topics are discussed. (Drawing a picture of a sheep may be easy, but how about a picture of a thousand sheep, or a picture of the sound a sheep makes when it falls off of a pyramid? Not so easy.)   Logography probably came after pictography. In logography, symbols stand for individual words. There's a symbol for sheep, and another symbol for a thousand sheep, and yet another symbol for the sound a sheep makes when falling off of a pyramid. However, a full language may have tens of thousands of words in it, and learning the symbol for each word may be problematic.   A phonographic system provides a unique symbol for each different-sounding word. "Sheep" would have a unique symbol, but "there," "their," and "they're" would all share the same symbol. This results in a smaller number of symbols to memorize, but also in greater chances of misunderstanding.   In an alphabetic system, the language provides a set of symbols (the alphabet) which represent the various sounds that may occur in a language. These symbols can be strung together to replicate any spoken word in the language. Theoretically, anybody who can spell should be able to accurately "sound out" any written word.