Студопедия — WRITING AS A SYSTEM OF SIGNS
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WRITING AS A SYSTEM OF SIGNS






 

Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system for symbolizing these symbols. A writing system may be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents the utterances of a language. Writing renders language visible; while speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparison, permanent.

Both speaking and writing depend upon the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by someone not familiar with the linguistic structure underlying the oral form of the language. Yet writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, which would not be produced orally. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect.

Scholars account for these facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms and functions. Once writing was seen as providing a new medium for linguistic expression, its distinctness from speech was more clearly grasped. Scholars such as Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong were among the first to analyze the conceptual and social implications of using written as opposed to oral forms of communication.

Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs. Gestures–such as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreement–are visible signs but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures, similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of writing.

But the boundary between pictures and writing becomes less clear when pictures are used conventionally to convey particular meanings. In order to distinguish pictures from pictorial signs it is necessary to notice that language has two primary levels of structure: the meaning structures on one hand and the sound patterns on the other. Indeed, linguists define grammar as a system for mapping–establishing a system of relations between–sound and meaning. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a word. Thus the word boys is composed of two morphemes, boy and plurality. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning.

Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less well defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.

Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by some writing system or other. Writing systems, consequently, fall into two large general classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable or phoneme.

The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented to express thought directly, by passing language altogether. The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect writing system, which would reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be readable by all human beings regardless of their mother tongues. We now know that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too intimately related to language to be represented independently of it.

More recently there have been attempts to invent forms of communicating explicit messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such messages are communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus the skirted human figure painted on the door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on the Pioneer spacecraft, and the Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside down painted on a rock near a dangerous trail, are all attempts to use visual marks to communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular language.

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet door is an elliptical way of writing “women's washroom,” just as the word “women” had been earlier. The plaque on the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader already knows how to express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider expressed the message that horses and riders should avoid the trail.

Such signs, therefore, express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by representing meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word. Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a restricted set of possible meanings.

The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are great. These differences are that pictorial signs are “motivated,” that is, they visually suggest their meanings, and that they express whole propositions rather than single words. But such a collection of signs could express only an extremely limited set of meanings.

Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read them. Such reading ability is described as “environmental” literacy, not associated with books and schooling.

Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such symbols as the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many languages, appear to express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic structure. However, it is more useful to think of these numerals as a particular orthography for representing the meaning structure of these numbers rather than their sound structures. The advantages of this orthography are that the orthography permits the user to carry out mathematical operations, and that the same orthography may be assigned different phonological equivalents in different languages using the same number system. Thus, the numeral 2 is pronounced “two” in English, “deux” in French, “zwei” in German, and so on. Yet it represents not a thought but the word, a piece of language.

It is for these reasons that writing is said to be a system for transcribing language, not for representing thought directly. Thus writing can be defined formally as a notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form.

Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet. The accepted view today is that all writing systems represent relatively optimal solutions to a large and unique set of constraints, including the structure of the language represented, the functions that the system serves, and the balance of advantages to the reader as opposed to the writer. Consequently, while there are important differences between speaking and writing and between various forms of writing, these differences vary in importance and in effect from language to language and from society to society.

 


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