The origin of writing occurred several thousand years ago. Her story begins with the first cave paintings. And the more successfully it developed, the higher a particular nation had a level of spiritual and material culture. Modern writing is no longer like the original signs and symbols.
Historical background
Ideographic writing is a kind of writing, the symbols of which indicate not so much an object as an abstract event.
An important difference from its pictography is that the sign is not read in form, but in meaning, and denotes a single word or its significant part. That is why ideographic writing conveys what has been said more accurately.
At the initial stage of the development of ideographic writing, pictograms depicted visual objects, and everything that had an abstract meaning was already indicated by ideograms. That is, the same character in one text could carry both a direct meaning and a figurative one. The first ideographic symbols in fact remained simple drawings, a little later they began to be combined with each other. For example, the image of the eye, as a symbol of pictographic writing, carries information that it is the “eye”, while in the ideographic letter the same “eye” plus the symbol “water” means “tear” or “cry”.
For a long time, the signs of ideographic writing have become more stable and generally understood.
Exceptional Feature
A special quality possessed by ideographic writing was the ability to consolidate abstract images and concepts that were expressed in words. The signs of this record differed in that they were tied to a specific word. Each symbol of the ideographic record showed not grammatical or phonetic meaning, but conveyed the content and meaning of a particular word. This feature destroyed the language barrier between people with different dialects.
The pros and cons of ideographic writing can be listed for a long time. The most important thing is that this type of writing has an almost literal orderly fixation of the composition of the word. Another uniqueness of ideographic writing is the stabilization of the forms of graphic symbols and their quantity. This led to the fact that the writer chose the right characters from the ready-made set, rather than inventing them. However, there are several negative nuances. The brightest of them are:
- difficult to convey grammatical forms;
- many signs;
- words with an abstract meaning are not transferable.
Rapid evolution
The formation of ideographic writing fell on the spurt in the development of trade, the emergence of the concept of statehood and the birth of production of the creation of public material goods. At this time, there is a need for the transfer of large amounts of information. Therefore, it was necessary not only to correctly recognize the characters, but also to play them faster. This has led to significant changes. Ideographic writing was transformed from a simple schematic hieroglyph to a symbol, meaning a part of the word that is understandable to everyone, or even a turn. His signs remained in use for a long time, because they could convey not only visual meaning, but also abstract.
The beginnings of sound marks
Studying the types of ideographic writing, you can notice the first elements of signs denoting sounds. This is the beginnings of phonography. Such changes have occurred due to the increasing displacement of people and the development of trade relations. For the same reason, several attempts have been made to simplify the way of writing hieroglyphs.
One of them was to combine two signs, for example, a tear - “water” and a number of “eyes”. Another suggested adding affix hieroglyphs to hieroglyphic roots. Both turned out to be unproductive.
The development of a writing system that conveys the spoken phrase not only in a grammatical way, but also in phonetic. Complex or large words began to be divided into parts, so a syllable appeared, which accounted for one character.
Varieties
Quite widely used was ideographic writing. Examples there is in the modern world. And in the era of ideography, a vivid example was the writing of Ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians were among the first to use symbols that have a figurative, abstract meaning. But words became more and more, and the number of ideograms did not increase. The time has come to expand the letter. Noticing that speech is the same elements that make up the words, the Egyptians began to designate individual syllables with hieroglyphs, and then sounds. So they came to the alphabet, even if it was a one-consonant (due to the peculiarities of the language, vowels are not particularly important). There were still qualifiers for writing. They explained homonyms, that is, words with different meanings, but pronounced the same way.
Another common form is cuneiform ideographic writing. It was used by the Assyro-Babylonians and Sumerians (peoples of the Ancient Mesopotamia). “They wrote” here with a finely sharpened reed cutter on clay tiles. Vertical columns went one after another from right to left, less often the other way around. Later, due to the need to transfer a large amount of information, the plate had to be turned 90 ° to the left. Thus, the former was right upper edge, and the former upper left was left. A column flipped to a horizontal line, and they began to write from left to right. Along with this, a simplification of the picture, which gradually turned into a symbol, took place.
There are examples in the modern world. A modern example of ideographic writing is China. The written language of this nation contains about 60,000 hieroglyphs. But in everyday life, for reading and writing, the average Chinese uses no more than two or three thousand.
There is ideographic writing today
A striking example of an ideogram are arithmetic signs. Each symbol denotes an abstract concept: division, addition, multiplication, equalities, etc. The same can be said of numbers. The arithmetic expression 4: 2 = 2 Chinese, American or Russian will understand the same, although they will pronounce it differently.
Or, for example, the word "man." The Shanghai will pronounce it “Ning,” the Catonian will say “Yang,” and the Beijinger will pronounce “Zhen.” But it is written in all three cases will be one symbol. Because ideographic writing conveys a concept, not sound.