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Montserrat Mojarro Rios

Development of writing
Writing

Writing is a system of graphical representation of a language, through signs that are

recorded in some kind of support like paper, big tables, stones or caves. The principal
intention of writing is to communicate information. This system is conventional because
the people that used the system are the ones who decides how is going to be used, what
kind of signs are they going to use, etc.
So, each language uses what its speakers think are the best and that is because there are
many different methods of writing. The first method known is the pictograms, in this
system people uses pictures to represent particular images in a consistent way. For example,
a form such as is used for the sun, everyone has to use this symbol and know the
particular meaning, in that way it exist a conventional relationship between the symbol and
the representation. The best examples of this kind of writing are Egyptian, Maya and some
American Indian groups. From pictograms we moved to ideograms, in this system the
pictures develop a concept, it gets more like a symbolic form and it becomes part of a
system of idea-writing. This type of writing is characteristic of Eastern societies, especially
Japan and China. After that, the logograms take place: in this system the symbols are
representations of the meaning of word or part of words, they are examples or wordwriting. Going through the process of Rebus writing in which the symbol used to represent
a word is taken to represent the sound of the spoken word. In this way the syllabic writing
was created, this system has a set of symbols using each one of them to represent a syllable;
examples of this system in languages are the ancient Egyptian and the Sumerian writing.
After that, when you have a set of symbols used to represent syllables, then it gets a very
close situation in which the symbols represent single sound types in a language. This is the
basic idea of the alphabetic writing. There are different types of alphabets, for example the
consonantal alphabet, in this one the consonant sounds in the word are represented by
specific symbols. The early version of Semitic alphabetic script, originating in the writing
system of the Phoenicians is the basic source of most of the other alphabets of the world. It
was the Greeks that took the alphabetizing process and made a one more complete,
separating the symbols to represent the vowel sounds as distinct bodies. From the Greeks,
the alphabet they remodeled passed to the rest of Western Europe and it got several
modifications to fit the language that have found in the road. Because of this long journey
the alphabet as we known in Spanish is a system where each sound has a representative
symbol. Actually, this kind of writing is that most Western societies used to communicate.