LANGUAGE VS. WRITING SYSTEM
By Hunter Rawlings
Guest Cont5ibuto
Do you know the difference between speaking and writing your own language? That is, in the case of English, the difference between speaking it and writing it using an alphabet. Have you thought about where your language came from vs. whence your alphabet derived? Probably not much. This is one of the fascinating differences we take for granted, as though our language is more or less the same as our writing method. But they are different, way different, in their histories as well as in their practicalities. Sit up and pay attention to the following brief explanation. If you don’t open your mind up to this distinction, you will not get it because you have spent your whole life oblivious to it.
The first thing to appreciate is that language is derived and produced naturally, while the alphabet is an artificial construct. That is, human beings invented and transmitted languages in daily “transactions” we call verbal communication, but they invented writing systems by self-conscious work, using symbols that bore no particular relationship to the languages they were recording. Languages change slowly, minutely, with usage in everyday speech, but over time they do change noticeably. That is why modern Greek is different from ancient Greek, and why Italian is different from Latin, even though the languages are still spoken in the same places by descendants of the same peoples.
Writing systems are more stable since they are artificial constructs. Take Chinese characters, for example, or Egyptian hieroglyphs, both of which were very early writing systems. They were pictures standing for words in the two languages, thousands of them because one had to represent almost every word in the language with a different picture. Hieroglyphics died out long ago, of course, but Chinese characters continue to exist as the writing system learned by kids in China, who have to keep learning hundreds and hundreds more as they get older. That is why other countries have not adopted the Chinese method of writing: it is cumbersome and wildly impractical.
Alphabets (the word is a combination of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha-beta), on the other hand, are streamlined writing systems that require learners to know just 22 to 29 “characters,” each one standing for a single sound in the language. This makes alphabets easily adaptable to new languages, even to languages radically different from the source of the alphabet they are “borrowing.” St. Cyril in the 9th century AD went to Russia to proselytize and took the Greek alphabet with him. As a result, Russians, who speak a Slavic language, have used a modified Greek alphabet ever since, appropriately named Cyrillic. Russians did not change their language at all, they adopted a system of writing that had been used to write a different language. People do not “pass around” languages from one country to another, but they do pass around alphabets, even relatively recently. In about 1860 Romania decided to change its alphabet from the Cyrillic to the Roman because the country did not like being in the Russian sphere of influence, preferring the West for its partners. So the Romanian government simply announced that, from that point on, every Romanian would need to learn the Roman alphabet and use it in place of the Cyrillic. Imagine a government’s telling its people they needed to start using a new language? I don’t think so.
Here is a condensed history of the alphabets used in the world today, all of which, remarkably, have a common source. Scholars believe that the first alphabet was invented by some Semitic speakers living in Egypt around the year 2000 BCE. Archaeologists found inscriptions on rocks in a remote Egyptian valley written in Semitic at about that time, words that are delineated not in pictures or syllabic script, one sign for each syllable, but clearly in an alphabet. From that early beginning Semitic peoples used derivative alphabetic scripts for their own related languages. The crucial step for subsequent history was taken by the Phoenicians, a Semitic people who made great trading voyages throughout the Mediterranean Sea and came into frequent contact with Greeks, who noted the advantages of alphabetic writing for keeping commercial records. The Phoenicians had developed their own form of alphabetic writing inherited from the earlier Semitic scripts, which the Greeks, around 800 BCE adapted to write their Indo-European language, quite different from Semitic. The Phoenicians did not use vowels in their alphabet because they were not necessary to make their words clear in writing, but the Greeks did because their language required written vowels to properly convey the words of their language. From the Greeks, in turn, the Etruscans in Italy, who spoke a language neither Semitic nor Indo-European, borrowed the alphabet, then the Romans, who did speak an Indo-European language, borrowed the Etruscan system to write their language, and, given the great expanse of Roman power, the Roman alphabet was gradually transmitted across most of Europe.
The takeaway from all of this: it was not hard for peoples to borrow alphabetic script from others speaking entirely different languages, with the result that today millions of individuals use the Roman alphabet to write their languages. The alphabet is a crucial asset in human culture, often compared to the wheel as a fundamental tool of civilization. Most countries in the world now use the Roman script, with some variation, so that it has become a core reason for the world becoming smaller. To finish as we began, most countries do NOT change their language to English because it is hard to learn a new language and have it forced on everyone, but countries DO change their writing systems to the Roman alphabet. That alphabet is the great uniter across the globe. Almost everywhere now children learn their ABC’s, and their grades in school start with A, B, C, D. Nothing could be more fundamental than those two things!
Hunter Rawlings
By Hunter Rawlings
Guest Cont5ibuto
Do you know the difference between speaking and writing your own language? That is, in the case of English, the difference between speaking it and writing it using an alphabet. Have you thought about where your language came from vs. whence your alphabet derived? Probably not much. This is one of the fascinating differences we take for granted, as though our language is more or less the same as our writing method. But they are different, way different, in their histories as well as in their practicalities. Sit up and pay attention to the following brief explanation. If you don’t open your mind up to this distinction, you will not get it because you have spent your whole life oblivious to it.
The first thing to appreciate is that language is derived and produced naturally, while the alphabet is an artificial construct. That is, human beings invented and transmitted languages in daily “transactions” we call verbal communication, but they invented writing systems by self-conscious work, using symbols that bore no particular relationship to the languages they were recording. Languages change slowly, minutely, with usage in everyday speech, but over time they do change noticeably. That is why modern Greek is different from ancient Greek, and why Italian is different from Latin, even though the languages are still spoken in the same places by descendants of the same peoples.
Writing systems are more stable since they are artificial constructs. Take Chinese characters, for example, or Egyptian hieroglyphs, both of which were very early writing systems. They were pictures standing for words in the two languages, thousands of them because one had to represent almost every word in the language with a different picture. Hieroglyphics died out long ago, of course, but Chinese characters continue to exist as the writing system learned by kids in China, who have to keep learning hundreds and hundreds more as they get older. That is why other countries have not adopted the Chinese method of writing: it is cumbersome and wildly impractical.
Alphabets (the word is a combination of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha-beta), on the other hand, are streamlined writing systems that require learners to know just 22 to 29 “characters,” each one standing for a single sound in the language. This makes alphabets easily adaptable to new languages, even to languages radically different from the source of the alphabet they are “borrowing.” St. Cyril in the 9th century AD went to Russia to proselytize and took the Greek alphabet with him. As a result, Russians, who speak a Slavic language, have used a modified Greek alphabet ever since, appropriately named Cyrillic. Russians did not change their language at all, they adopted a system of writing that had been used to write a different language. People do not “pass around” languages from one country to another, but they do pass around alphabets, even relatively recently. In about 1860 Romania decided to change its alphabet from the Cyrillic to the Roman because the country did not like being in the Russian sphere of influence, preferring the West for its partners. So the Romanian government simply announced that, from that point on, every Romanian would need to learn the Roman alphabet and use it in place of the Cyrillic. Imagine a government’s telling its people they needed to start using a new language? I don’t think so.
Here is a condensed history of the alphabets used in the world today, all of which, remarkably, have a common source. Scholars believe that the first alphabet was invented by some Semitic speakers living in Egypt around the year 2000 BCE. Archaeologists found inscriptions on rocks in a remote Egyptian valley written in Semitic at about that time, words that are delineated not in pictures or syllabic script, one sign for each syllable, but clearly in an alphabet. From that early beginning Semitic peoples used derivative alphabetic scripts for their own related languages. The crucial step for subsequent history was taken by the Phoenicians, a Semitic people who made great trading voyages throughout the Mediterranean Sea and came into frequent contact with Greeks, who noted the advantages of alphabetic writing for keeping commercial records. The Phoenicians had developed their own form of alphabetic writing inherited from the earlier Semitic scripts, which the Greeks, around 800 BCE adapted to write their Indo-European language, quite different from Semitic. The Phoenicians did not use vowels in their alphabet because they were not necessary to make their words clear in writing, but the Greeks did because their language required written vowels to properly convey the words of their language. From the Greeks, in turn, the Etruscans in Italy, who spoke a language neither Semitic nor Indo-European, borrowed the alphabet, then the Romans, who did speak an Indo-European language, borrowed the Etruscan system to write their language, and, given the great expanse of Roman power, the Roman alphabet was gradually transmitted across most of Europe.
The takeaway from all of this: it was not hard for peoples to borrow alphabetic script from others speaking entirely different languages, with the result that today millions of individuals use the Roman alphabet to write their languages. The alphabet is a crucial asset in human culture, often compared to the wheel as a fundamental tool of civilization. Most countries in the world now use the Roman script, with some variation, so that it has become a core reason for the world becoming smaller. To finish as we began, most countries do NOT change their language to English because it is hard to learn a new language and have it forced on everyone, but countries DO change their writing systems to the Roman alphabet. That alphabet is the great uniter across the globe. Almost everywhere now children learn their ABC’s, and their grades in school start with A, B, C, D. Nothing could be more fundamental than those two things!
Hunter Rawlings