Writing and Communication

A way of denoting meaning and communicating via shapes or figures, writing is a technology which allows humans to communicate across vast distances, record information for extremely long periods of time and spread information across wide populations extremely quickly. Writing comes in very many forms, each being unique and differently suited to the language and cultures which use it.

Writing will typically have its own rules about how it translates from spoken to written. Such as punctuation marks to indicate the things like: lists, names, possessions, specific nouns, verbs, and other forms of expressive information, and emotions. Typically, things like sentence and word order and structure are going to be the same in both the written, and spoken language. However how it is read can vary, from different alphabets, sounds, other forms of structure for the sentences, varied tenses, possessives, and many other elements that make up written language. Translation is the most difficult part of the process of writing. Without any information on the writing system, how to read it, which way to read it (written languages can be read in any way so long as it remains consistent as a rule.), and how it’s meaning changes.

Non-Phonetic Writing

Proto-Writing

Used before and after more regularized writing was invented, proto-writing is a way of conveying information physically by many different means. This can come in the form of pictures or drawings of events to communicate ideas without the use of words or grammar, it can also be constructed out of any material so long as there is some way of interpreting the writing. An example of this flexibility would be the Quipu which is a set of attached ropes where the individual knots denote information about what is being recorded.

Pictographic

Characterized as a drawing or visual representation of real world objects and ideas, this type of writing is very useful for situations where basic information needs to be conveyed without the barrier of literacy or language comprehension. These are often used in infrastructure or left behind on signs to convey different types of danger, directions or markings for where construction must occur. This system can be very flexible as it is also used to convey emotions and basic objects via emoticons or emoji.

Logographic

Logographic writing is similar to pictographic systems in that the writing represents meaning directly, however logographic systems do not always have the characters and symbols visually resemble or look like the meaning they represent. This type of writing often starts as pictographic systems that need to communicate more complex meaning so gain regularity in meaning and lose resemblence with objects. Logographic systems are very well suited in areas where language varies between people as writing only represents meaning rather than very varying sound. An example of a system like this may be Traditional Chinese which used across a linguistically diverse area with some changes in usage but basic comprehensibility almost everywhere. Another benefit to using logographs is that some languages have many homophones, so very different meanings would have the same spelling creating ambiguity: an example of this in English would be "sun" and "son" however in other languages, homophones are much more common and much harder to understand even with context.

Phonetic

Alphabetic

In this system each character makes a designated sound, or sounds which when sounded out in order becomes the spoken form of the language.

Abjads

Words in abjads are represented by their consonantal roots, this means that only consonants are written. This creates ambiguity in languages like English where vowels are the distinguishing factor between words of different meaning, "bt" could represent bat, bit, beat, bot, bet, but or boot. However this is ideal for many languages like Arabic and Hebrew as they use vowels for grammar and gender agreement which can be redundant.

Syllabic

Syllabaries are ways of writing where every individual syllable used in a language has a marking. This is easy and useful when a language has very few syllables and homophones like the Cherokee Script as writing is kept better packed together for reading phonetically and there is little ambiguity in meaning.

Abugidas or Alphasyllabaries

Abuguidas are similar to alphabets in that they have individual characters for consonants and vowels, however abuguidas emphasize consonants and use vowels as additional marks. This is helpful as it makes readers read syllable by syllable even in languages like English with far more syllables than a person could remember.