A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

156 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
The Egyptians used papyrus (a type of early paper made from reeds) to
record their hymns and prayers, the names and titles of individuals and deities,
and various community activities-hieroglyphic derives from Greek hieros
“holy” and glyphein “to carve.” Indeed, in their origins most scripts were
deemed to have sacred or divine power, and the myths of many cultures confii
this by attributing the origin of writing to deities-the Cretans to Zeus, the
Sumerians to Nabu, the Egyptians to Toth, the Greeks to Hermes, and so on.
The hieroglyphic system eventually developed phonographic elements withm
it-phonographs are forms standing for parts of words, such as syllables or
individual sounds. The first true syllabaries-systems of signs for representing
syllables-were developed by the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria from
the Egyptian hieroglyphs during the last half of the second millennium BC.
Syllabaries are still used in some cultures. Japanese, for example, is still written
with two complete syllabaries-the hiragana and the kutakana-devised to
supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese.
A phonographic system for representing single sounds is called alphabetic.
The first alphabetic system emerged in the Middle East, and was transported
by the Phoenicians (a people from a territory on the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean, located largely in modern-day Lebanon) to Greece. It contained
symbols for consonant sounds only. When it reached Greece, symbols for
vowel sounds were added to it, makmg the Greek system the first full-fledged
alphabetic one.
The transition from pictorial to sound representation came about to make
writing rapid and efficient. It reflects, therefore, the operation of Zipf’s Law
in linguistic matters. Take, for example, the development of the alphabet
character A. It started out as a pictograph of the head of an ox. The full head
of the ox came to be drawn soon after in its bare outline. This came eventually
to stand for the word for ox (aleph in Hebrew). The Phoenician scribes, who
wrote from right to left, drew the ox figure sideways (probably because it was
quicker for them to do so). This slanted figure came to stand just for the first
sound in the word (a for aleph). The Greeks, who wrote from left to right,
turned the Phoenician figure around the other way. Around 500 BC, as alphabetic
writing became more standardized and letters stopped changing directions,
the A assumed the upright position it has today-the ox had finally settled on
its horns! The five-stage evolution of A, from pictograph to alphabet character
(in Phoenician then Greek and finally Latin) can be shown as follows: