The history of the alphabet (continued)

Our continuing history of the alphabet – like any history of alphabets – will now be dominated by a very important factor: the available writing materials.

Let’s look back five and a half thousand years to the great civilization of Sumer, flourishing in ‘The Land Between Rivers’ or Mesopotamia, roughly where Iraq is today.

Sumerian civilization involved lots of beer, lots of bread, lots of efficient local government, a strong cash economy and an astonishing quantity of administration and business records. A bit like Germany with no engineering but better weather.

Business records in any culture have to be cheap and durable so you can make lots and then keep copies for the tax office. Fortunately for the history of the alphabet, the cheapest thing in the ‘Land Between Rivers’ was mud.

It was good mud; you could pat it into thin rectangular blocks and poke marks in it with a stick. When baked, these clay tablets became very durable indeed. Those tax records are still sitting around. All that’s changed is that now people find them interesting.

By contrast, the Egyptians were simultaneously inventing writing which consisted of complicated pictures painted with brushes on paper. It was easy to use paper and ink, so they never really had to simplify their writing system. Even when progressive Egyptians came up with simpler writing systems than hieroglyphs, the conservative establishment kept on with the old ways.

Back to Mesopotamia. What sort of marks were the Sumerians poking into their rectangular mud tablets?

Records of ownership, time-periods, money lent at interest, etc. The details were all shown using little stick-pictures called ‘cuneiform’.

History of the alphabet: cuneiform

Cuneiform symbols were essentially small line pictures made of multiple wedge impressions, which were quite detailed to start with. But, as mentioned above, clay and sticks are rather clumsy to work with, so the pictures gradually simplified. Such a simplified picture of an object is called a ‘pictogram’ (‘picture-symbol’). Simplification is crucial in the history of alphabets, wherever they develop in the world.

In Sumer, as elsewhere, many of the pictograms were used to mean not only the physical items they represented but also other things associated with those items. So a pictogram of the sun could also mean ‘day’ and ‘time’. A pictogram used like this to mean other associated ideas is called an ‘ideogram’ (‘idea-symbol’). But the spoken word for each symbol was still the name of the thing it originally represented: the symbol meaning ‘day’ would still be pronounced ‘sun’.

The Sumerians ended up with a written repertoire of perhaps about 2,000 pictograms and ideograms. Then ... well ... it was quite an effort to remember these detailed patterns and stamp them in clay, especially if you had to go fast; so the system simplified again.

Get ready for one of the biggest single developments in the history of the alphabet: symbolising the sounds of the words instead of what their meaning.

History of the alphabet: the invention of a sound-system

Nearly always, one of the similar-sounding Sumerian pictograms would be easier to write than the other. In our example, let’s say ‘sun’ is a circle but ‘son’ is a stick-figure. The Sumerian scribes would tend to use the circle to mean both ‘sun’ and ‘son’, because the circle was easier and quicker to write in cuneiform. Since it had the same sound when you said it aloud, you could see what was really meant ... so ... who cared if it was the ‘wrong’ symbol?

(Texters do this 2day, by writing ‘2’ instead of ‘to’ or ‘too’. Nobody actually thinks that ‘2’ means the same as ‘to’ or ‘too’; it’s just easier to write.)

Gradually, the symbol for ‘sun’ would be used more and more to mean ‘son’ and maybe even ‘soon’ or ‘sum’ and ‘some’ wherever possible. The more flexible and convenient Sumerian written symbols thus started to be used to mean a pure sound of one syllable, separately from the particular object and ideas which it still represented.

When you start using a symbol to represent a particular sound, it’s called a ‘phonogram’ (‘sound-symbol’).

Developing phonograms was a REVOLUTIONARY idea in the history of alphabets and the evolution of writing. It made it much easier to write, because the simple sound-symbols didn’t have to look like real objects anymore (unlike pictograms or ideograms). Phonograms became more and more stylised and simplified and moved further and further away from the original pictures.

So read on – the astounding history of alphabets continues here ...

Living at this end of the history of the alphabet, we tend to overlook the fact that we are still surrounded by non-alphabetical visual symbols – pictograms and ideograms which stand for objects and actions, not sounds. The invention of writing continues all the time.

Do you know anyone who signs instead of speaks? When you can’t hear sounds, it doesn’t make much sense to spell out a word using letters which represent sounds. Most of the time, you just sign the object or action directly and leave spelling for names, clarification etc. Signing is a very rapid way of communicating visually without using an alphabet.

How about emoticons? They communicate a definite concept without using any letters of the alphabet. Because they don’t use letters, they can cross languages. A smiley in an Arabic forum means the same as a smiley in a Thai blog.

Numerals (1, 2, 3) and mathematical signs such as =, +, and - are yet more examples of symbols which don’t have to be spelt out.

And then there are traffic-lights, road-signs meaning ‘deer crossing’ or ‘no entry’ and rude gestures of road-rage. Airports and railway stations are full of friendly little pictograms for ‘stairs’, ‘telephone’ and ‘Ladies’ or ‘Gents’. We have national flags, currency symbols and the ♥ of “I ♥ calligraphy”. These are all examples of the changing history of writing: non-alphabetical visual symbols for actual (or abstract) experiences, locations, identities and motions.