SCRIPTS

(A Synopsis for the subject of Business Communication & Ethics)

Dhanashri Joshi
Tushar Joshi
Suyash Kale
Chaitanya Keer

By
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Introduction
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While
both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable
form of information storage and transfer. The processes of encoding and decoding, writing systems
involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of
characters that make up a script.
The purposes and reasons for a writing system can involve cultural and social aspects as well as the
need to communicate visually. Since a writing system should fit the particular surrounding societys
culture & language, certain scripts were deemed more optimal than others.
Objective & Scope
The report wishes to highlight the constant evolution and development of various scripts across the
world, over the years. It also studies various modifications which scripts underwent owing to external
factors, leading to phenomenal growth of some scripts; and their lasting influence on languages &
dialects.

Work plan & methodology

Basic Concept & Reasons:
Writing provides a way of extending human memory by imprinting information into media less fickle
than the human brain. Writing was a very useful invention for complex and high-population cultures.
Writing was used for record keeping to correctly count agricultural products, for keeping the calendar
to plant crops at the correct time. And writing was used for religious purpose (divination and
communicating with the supernatural world) and socio-political functions (reinforcing the power of the
ruling elite). Most early writing systems begin with small images used as words, literally depicting the
thing in question. But pictograms of this kind are limited. Some physical objects are too difficult to
depict. And many words are concepts rather than objects.
There are several ways in which early writing evolves beyond the pictorial stage.
History:
Writing was invented independently in at least three places, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica.
Recent discoveries might also provide evidence that writing was invented in Egypt and Indus
independently of Mesopotamia.
In about 3200 BC temple officials in Sumer developed a reliable and lasting method of keeping track
of the animals and other goods which are the temple's wealth. The second civilization to develop
writing, shortly after the Sumerians, is Egypt. The Egyptian characters are much more directly
pictorial in kind than the Sumerian, but the system of suggesting objects and concepts is similar. The
Indus script, which has not yet been deciphered, is known from thousands of seals, carved in steatite
or soapstone. The last of the early civilizations to develop writing is China, in about 1600 BC. But
China outdoes the others in devising a system which has evolved, as a working script, from that day
to this.
Evolution:
Pictographs (c.3500 - 3000 B.C.E.).
Ideographs (c.3000 - 2100 B.C.E.).
Rebus writing (c.2100 - 1000 B.C.E.).
Phonetic alphabet (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present).
Significance:
The invention and spread of the much simpler alphabet meant that more people could learn to read.
As a result society was less dependent on scribes, whose status declined accordingly. The alphabet
also meant the uses of writing could expand to such things as literature, poetry, and history. Before
the alphabet the small number of scribes had to devote most of their energies to running government
and business. With the alphabet, more people were literate and free to pursue more cultural
applications of writing.
The importance of writing to history is hard to overestimate. Without it, kings, priests, and
businessmen would not be able to keep track of anything beyond their immediate surroundings. With
it, trade routes could expand and kings could keep the tax and census records necessary for
expanding their city-states into empires. Two subsequent inventions have built upon writing and
expanded our capabilities as a species by quantum leaps beyond what they had been before: the
printing press and the computer. Today, with the computer, we are witnessing a revolution every bit
as dramatic as writing was 5000 years ago.

Types of scripts:
1. Abjad: A type of writing system where only consonants are generally written. Some Abjads
have signs for vowels, but use them only in special cases, such as loanwords or special
kinds of texts. The name itself comes from the first three letters of the Arabic script.
Types of Scripts here are some instances: Arabic script, Berber script, Classical Syriac,
Early cursive Pahlavi, Hebrew, Mandaic script, Nabatean script, Phoenician script, Sogdian,
Tifinagh, Uighur.
Language: Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, others
Writing styles: Right to left
Origin & growth: The first Abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician Abjad. Unlike
other contemporary scripts, such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician
script consisted of only about two dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and
Phoenician seafaring merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave way to
a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, a widely used
Abjad.
2. Abugida
A type of writing system in which each character represents a consonant followed by a
specific vowel, and the other vowels are represented by a consistent modification of the
consonant symbols.
Types of Scripts:
Some instances: Amharic script, Bengali script, Brahmi, Champa, Devanagari, Gujarati,
Kannada, Lao script, Malayalam script, Nagari, Oriya script, Pallava grantha, Rong,
Sinhalese, Tamil script, Tibetan script.
Languages associated:
Ahom, Bengali, Assamese, Devanagari Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, and many other languages
of India.
Writing styles: Left to right
Origin & growth: Abugida scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia. All
surviving Indic scripts are descendants of the Brahmi alphabet. Most North Indic scripts' full
letters incorporate a horizontal line at the top, with Gujarati and Oriya script as exceptions;
South Indic scripts do not.
3. Alphabet:
A type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels with separate characters.
Types of Scripts: Here are some instances: Armenian, Buryat, Cyrillic, Dania, Ewellic,
Georgian script, Greek, Latin script, Mongolian script, Sarati, Theban alphabet, Utopian.
Language: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, German, Turkish,
Vietnamese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Latin and others.
Writing styles: Left to right
Origin & growth: Origin of alphabet lies within ancient Greek and Latin. The Greek alphabet,
in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it
gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became
the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire.
Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious
works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance
languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe.
4. Logosyllabary:
A type of writing system whose characters denote morphemes, and a subset of whose
characters can be used for their phonetic syllabic values without regard to their semantic
values.
Types of Scripts: Here are a few instances: Chinese script, Egyptian hieratic, Nushu, Tangut,
Wei writing.
Language: Chinese, Japanese (Kanji), etc.
Writing styles: Top to bottom

Origin & growth: Logographic systems, or logographies, include the earliest true writing
systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, and Central America
used some form of logographic writing. A purely logographic script would be impractical for
most languages, and none are known, apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki
Pona, which is a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes.
Some trivia:
In Hunan, a province in Southern China, a unique script called Nushu has been in use since
the 12th century which is solely used by women and girls only.
In some variations of Judaism and Islam, images of living things are prohibited. A clever way
that artists got around this tenet was to use calligrams, a visual image that is formed entirely
out of small words.
Tifinagh alphabets of northern Africa composed of right angles, dots, and perfect circles
made it unique as compare to normal horizontal/vertical writing system.
Talking knots (knots tied into strings) is writing system used by Inca civilization.
In ancient Egypt, the invention of writing is attributed to the god Thoth (Dhwty in Egyptian),
who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented
art and science.
Fictional scripts and languages were created for Star Wars movie series.
Future prospects:
According to some scholars, due to digitalization and computerization some styles of writing may get
extinct. On similar lines, many western countries are feared by extinction of cursive style of writing.
According to some others, modernization can result in the gradual fading away of the original script
for some language. But globalization and internet can also play main role in revival of scripts which
are verge of being lost to the world (like few Russian scripts). Development of writing system is
constant and it continues with time as language.
Conclusion
Communication techniques demanded written styles to improve, since relying only on verbal
communication had its own problems associated. As a result, pictorial & sign languages grew and
gave way to more complex and sophisticated scripts. Scripts increased to be more localized and
specific. Thus came the rise in interactions between people from different regions and led to literary
development. Globalization has since contributed to make certain scripts widely popular across the
world.