The origin of writing took place several thousand years ago. Its history begins with the first rock paintings. And the more successfully it developed, the higher the level of spiritual and material culture of a particular nation was. Modern writing is no longer similar to the original signs and symbols.
Historical Background
Ideographic writing is a kind of writing, the symbols of which denote not so much an object as an abstract event.
An important difference from its pictography is that the sign is read not in form, but in meaning, and denotes a separate word or its significant part. That is why ideographic writing conveys what is 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 indicated by ideograms. That is, the same sign 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 combine with each other. For example, the image of an eye as a symbol of pictographic writing carries the information that it is an "eye", while in ideographic writing the same "eye" plus the symbol for "water" means "tear" or "cry".
For a long time, the signs of ideographic writing have become more stable and generally understandable.
Exceptional Feature
A special quality possessed by ideographic writing was the ability to fix 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 an ideographic record did not show a grammatical or phonetic meaning, but conveyed the content and meaning of a particular word. This feature eliminated 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 ordered fixation of the composition of the word. Another uniqueness of ideographic writing is the stabilization of the forms of graphic symbols and their number. This led to the fact that the writer chose the desired characters from a ready-made set, and did not invent them. However, there are several negative nuances. The brightest of them are:
- it is quite difficult to convey grammatical forms;
- many characters;
- words that have an abstract meaning are not transferable.
Rapid evolution
The formation of ideographic writing took place during the period of a breakthrough in the development of trade, the emergence of the concept of statehood and the emergence of the production of creating public material goods. At this time, there is a need to transfer information of a large volume. And consequently, it was necessary not only to correctly recognize the characters, but also to reproduce them faster. This has led to significant changes. Ideographic writing was transformed from a simple schematic hieroglyph into a symbol, meaning a part of a word or even a turnover that is understandable to everyone. His signs remained in use for a long time, because they could convey not only a visual meaning, but also an abstract one.
The beginnings of sound marks
Studying the types of ideographic writing, one can notice the first elements of signs denoting sounds. These are the beginnings of phonography. Such changes have occurred due to the increasing movement of people and the development of trade relations. For the same reason, several attempts have been made to simplify the ways of writing hieroglyphs.
One of them was to combine two signs, for example, a tear - “water” and next to it is “eye”. Another suggested adding hieroglyphic affixes to the hieroglyphic roots. Both turned out to be unproductive.
The writing system has developed, conveying the spoken phrase not only grammatically, but also phonetically. Complex or large words began to be divided into parts, so a syllable appeared, which accounted for one hieroglyph.
Varieties
Quite wideapplication received ideographic writing. There are examples in the modern world. And in the era of ideography, a striking example was the writing of Ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians were among the first to use symbols that have a figurative, abstract meaning. But there were more and more words, and the number of ideograms did not increase. It is time to expand the letter. Noticing that speech is the same elements that make up words, the Egyptians began to denote individual syllables with hieroglyphs, and then sounds. So they came to the alphabet, even if it was one-sided (due to the peculiarities of the language, vowels are not particularly important). There were also determinants for writing. They explained homonyms, that is, words with different meanings, but pronounced the same way.
Another common type is cuneiform ideographic writing. It was used by the Assyro-Babylonians and the Sumerians (the peoples of the Ancient Mesopotamia). They “wrote” here with a finely sharpened reed chisel on clay tiles. Vertical columns went one after the other from right to left, less often vice versa. Later, due to the need to convey a large amount of information, the plate had to be turned 90 ° to the left. Thus, the former right became the upper edge, and the former upper became the left. There was a coup of the column into a horizontal line, and they began to write from left to right. At the same time, the drawing was simplified and gradually turned into a symbol.
There are examples in the modern world. A modern example of ideographic writing is China. In the writing of this people - about 60,000 hieroglyphs. But inthe average Chinese uses no more than two or three thousand for reading and writing.
Ideographic writing still exists today
Arithmetic signs are a striking example of an ideogram. Each symbol denotes an abstract concept: division, addition, multiplication, equalities, and so on. The same can be said about numbers. The arithmetic expression 4: 2=2 will be understood by a Chinese, an American or a Russian in the same way, although they will pronounce it differently.
Or, for example, the word "man". The Shanghainese will pronounce it "ning", the Catanese - "yang", and the Pekingese - "zhen". But it is written in all three cases will be one character. Because ideographic writing conveys a concept, not a sound.
