Quick review of chapter 16

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Quick review of chapter 16

• Animal communication

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Quick review of chapter 16

• Human language is one communication system
  ___________ that life forms on this planet employ

• Communication can be described with reference the
  ________

• A sign has a ________ and a ________

• Signs can be _______, _______, or ________

• Experiments with non-human primates have created
  controversy over whether they have shown
  __________ and a capacity for _________ behaviour

• Many researchers have dismissed the work as an
  example of dressage or ___________ phenomenon.

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Quick review of chapter 16

• Human language and systems of animal
  communication share certain ________

• Humans lack many ________ that _______ possess
• we cannot _______ trails
• we cannot ________ for communication purposes
• we are not as gifted as horses for example at
  ________ and _________ subtle _______

• Humans, however, possess an ability to _________
  which far exceeds that of animals and insects

• Humans language also is more _________ and
  _________ in manipulating these symbols.

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Chapter 15

• Writing and language

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Types of writing

• Logographic writing
• A type of writing in which symbols represent part
  of words or even the entire word ( logograms)
• For example

• Ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform inscriptions

• Egyptian hieroglyphics

• Primordial Chinese characters

• Conventional abbreviations such as , , , and _at_

• Arabic numerals such as 1, 2, 10, 159, etc.

• They can, in principle, be read independently of
  its language of origin.

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Types of writing

• Phonographic writing
• A type of writing in which symbols represent
  syllables or segments

• There are 2 types

• Syllabic

• Alphabetic.

• Syllabic writing systems

• Employ signs to represent syllables

• A set of syllabic signs is called a syllabary.

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Types of writing
record

• Alphabetic writing systems

• Employ signs to represent segments such as
  consonants (e.g., p, t, k) and vowels (e.g., a,
  e, u)

• A set of syllabic signs is called a alphabet

• Graphemes (i.e., symbols) can correspond to one
  or many sounds

f
One of the earliest (if not the very first)
phonemic scripts
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The early history of writing

• Pre-writing

• Figures and scenes on cave walls and rock faces
  12,000 years ago may have been forerunners of
  writing

• These petroglyphs ( scenes painted on stone) may
  have been intended for purposes of linguistic
  communication

• It has been suggested that writing had its origin
  in small clay tokens and counters used for record
  keeping in the ancient Middle East.

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The early history of writing

• Pictograms

• Pictograms ( picture writing) were among the
  precursors of writing

• Each pictogram was an image of what it
  represented

• They seemingly do not offer clues to their
  pronounciation

• Pictograms are still used today.

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The evolution of writing

• Earliest know pictographic writing came from
  Sumeria, about 5,000 years ago

• Over time, some pictograms came to be used to
  represent related abstract notions

• Once pictures began to be read as words, the
  stage was set for the evolution of phonographic
  writing

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Rebuses and the emergence of writing

• Phonographic writing made its appearance around
  3000 BC

• Symbols represented sound rather than meaning

• This was made possible by the use of the rebus
  principle

• Now, concepts that could not be directly depicted
  by a picture could be represented in writing

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Towards syllabic writing

• Within about 500-600 years, signs came to
  represent parts of words specifically,
  syllables

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Cuneiform

• Sumerian writing was simplified and came to be
  produced with a wedge-shaped stylus pressed in
  soft clay tablets

• It has come to be known as cuneiform (from Latin
  cuneus wedge

• Appeared around 400 BC

• Signs ended up bearing less and less resemblance
  to their pictographic origins

• Persisted until the first few centuries of the
  Christian era

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Another Middle Eastern writing system
Hieroglyphic

• When Sumerian writing was flourishing, Egyptian
  pictograms known as hieroglyphs ( sacred
  writing in Greek) was in use

• Like Sumerian pictograms, at first they
  represented objects, but later became logographic

• Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mixed
  system of both words writing and phonographic
  writing

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The emergence of alphabets

• Alphabetic writing emerged from mixed writing
  systems over a long period of time in the Middle
  East

• The Phoenicians (Modern Lebanon) devised an
  alphabet of 22 consonantal signs in 1000 BC

• The Phoenicians were a trading people and their
  alphabet eventually the Greeks acquired it.

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The Greek alphabet

• The Greeks developed the Phoenician alphabet into
  a full alphabet ( vowels and consonants)

• each sign represented one phoneme ( abstract
  mental representation of speech sounds)

• all phonemes were represented by a sign

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The Roman alphabet

• The Etruscans (non-Latin people in southern
  Italy) took the Greek alphabet in the 8th ans 7th
  centuries BC and made it their own

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The Roman alphabet

• The Romans acquired their alphabet through the
  Etruscans and it was then spread throughout the
  world.

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A quick review of the evolution of the alphabet
From Phoenicians to todays alphabet
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Some non-European writing systems Chinese

• The Chinese writing system developed out of
  pictograms

• The oldest inscriptions date back to 1200 BC

• Most often than not, contemporary Chinese
  characters have a radical ( a key to their
  meaning, a categorizer)

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Some non-European writing systems Japanese

• The Japanese writing system uses 4 distinct
  scripts (potentially all mixed together)

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Some non-European writing systems Korean

• Korean uses an alphabetic script was created
  called hangul

• Its symbols are grouped together into
  syllable-sized clusters

• Korean also makes use of Chinese characters,
  called hanja

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Some non-European writing systems Cree

• The syllabic script of the Cree Indians was the
  creation of a missionary, J. Evans, in the 1800s

• It was employed for religious literature

• By 1861, the entire Bilbe appeared in Cree
  syllabary

• A striking feature of the Cree syllabary is that
  vowels are indicated by the direction in which a
  syllabic symbols faces

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English orthography

• Irregularities

• Orthography set of conventions for representing
  language in written form

• Some letters do not represent any segments in a
  particular word

throu gh

• English uses an alphabetic orthography

• A group of 2 or more letters can be used to
  represent a single segment

• Symbols are used to represent individual
  consonants and vowels

th ink

• The same letter can represent different segments
  in different words

• The same segment can be represented by different
  letters in different words.

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English orthography Historical factors

• The relationship between symbol and sound was not
  always so indirect

i
hid
hide
Symbol
Sound
Sound
i
hid
Symbol
hide
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English orthography Historical factors

• Around 1000-1100 AC, the use of English in
  official documents began to decline and regional
  orthographies developed in the absence of a
  national stadard

• French and Latin conventions were introduced

• 1400 AC, a trend developed where words were
  spelled according to their etymological origin

• 1500 AC there were many different spellings for
  the same word

• With print, a more or less fixed writing system
  emerged

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Summing up
Pictographic

• Writing has first developed from pictographic to
  logographic writing

Logographic

• Then, from logograms, writing has developed into
  syllabic writing

Syllabic

• And finally syllabic writing has developed to
  aphabetic writing

alphabetic

• Many of the writing systems found throughout the
  modern world directly or indirectly come from
  Semitic writing systems such as Cuneiform

• In any case, a later writing system has never
  developed into an earlier one

alphabetic
Syllabic

• Last but not least, no forms of writing are
  inferior to alphabetic writing or any other.

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Thats all for today

• See you tomorrow