What is writing?

Few subjects have acquired such a variable collection of prejudices and confusing terminologies as has the subject of writing. A good many studies start with the words 'writing was the greatest invention ever made by mankind' — but was it an invention? 'Since the time of Aristotle it has been assumed that writing is a graphic device for transcribing speech' — but why credit a Greek philosopher, living over two millennia ago, with an insight into the needs of a past civilisation he did not know and a future he could never visualise? 'Writing is visible speech' (DeFrancis, 1989) — in some cases, perhaps, but why has this assumption been made by English-speaking scholars when the Roman alphabet is demonstratively ill-suited for representing their own mother tongue? One has only to remember that there are at least five different ways of pronouncing the vowel sign 'a' by looking at such words as 'drought', 'love', draft', 'shut' or asking oneself why the 'g' in 'George' should stand for a different sound than the 'g' in 'grey'.

The material and political advantages brought about by the Industrial Revolution, Western colonial and economic expansion, produced a grossly Euro-centric outlook which eventually felt justified to call the alphabet 'the key to the history of mankind' (Diringer, 1968). Biblical traditions, as well as the promises of the Enlightenment, conspired in insisting that writing as such was invented only once by just one — divinely or otherwise — inspired human being. Post-colonial guilt censors us for calling the Chinese system of writing basically pictographic, since only the alphabet made Plato, and with it Western scientific thinking, possible (Olson, 1985; McLuhan, 1985; Goody, 1987; Ong, 1982) — in other words, to be our equals the Chinese have to be 'just like us'.

With writing itself having 'dwindled to microchip dimensions' (Harris, 1986), we should perhaps stop talking about the history of writing altogether since the term 'history' is too closely linked with a predominately linear, and as such wholly Western concept of evolution that moves towards one final, and by implication achievable, goal. In the same way, terms which have over the past centuries established themselves in this context like 'literacy', 'invention', 'text' , 'oral traditions', etc. may bear reexamination.

We should at least try to look at them, not as universal abstracts but as complex phenomena, which at different times, under different situations, fulfilled some basic but finally variable needs.

What then exactly is writing? How did it come about?

Why did some forms of writing successfully adapt themselves to various uses, even to languages for which they were singularly ill-suited, whereas others restricted themselves to one particular level, one particular period, one particular civilisation?

Should we perhaps not so much ask 'what is writing?', rather 'what is the purpose of writing?'

The purpose of writing

Writing (preferably in the alphabet) is not a magic wand which, by its very existence, 'transforms the savage mind' (Goody, 1977). The sole purpose of writing is to store information essential to the survival and development of a particular society (see Plate 1). The amount of information and the way a particular society stores it depend largely on its needs. It is not the form of writing (be it pictographic or phonetic) that is decisive but the prevailing needs of a particular social group. In other words, what information is stored, and in what manner, depends largely on the needs of a particular society. Sometimes the essential information required may simply have been the ability to record numbers, either for commercial purposes (Mesopotamia) or astronomical/dynastic (Mesoamerica) ones; sometimes the core of a particular community may rest on religion or magic. It is in the end irrelevant what form of writing existed and how it appears to us today, as long it fulfilled the purpose for which it was designed.

Writing is, as such, an essential form of the infrastructure and infrastructures evolve differently in different places, in answer to different communal needs and problems. We could say, if we wanted to retain the concept of history, that there is not one history of writing but different histories, reflecting different forms of information storage, answering different needs. At the same time, the phenomenon of writing as such does not automatically go from cave painting to the alphabet (Weule, 1915; Sethe, 1939), nor are cave paintings inferior to the alphabet since they quite obviously effectively supported the needs of the cave dwellers.

Without writing there would be no history — but what about oral history? Oral recordings, the reciting of (sometimes mythologised) historical facts, existed long before the words were committed to writing: the Vedic literature of ancient India, the Hebrew Bible, the Koran, Homer, the New Testament, the stories told by Celtic bards, folk poems, family histories — the story teller pre-dates the scribe in nearly all civilisations.

The main, and original, purpose of writing is not the recording of sounds but the ability to record facts and ideas. It is only because of the fact that ideas ('the king's brother must be killed') have to be expressed in what we now call a sentence that words ('king', 'brother', 'killed') come into the equation: in order to express or represent these words, first perhaps in the mind, then verbally, and eventually (making it an order) in writing, there arises a need for sounds. Saying that the main purpose of writing is the expression of language is to start at the end, not at the beginning of the actual phenomenon — turn the effect into the cause. Political power is embedded in the idea. It is not the group of phonemes in the word 'killed' that kill the king's brother.

Invention or evolution?

Theories about the origin of writing fall basically into two different, and one is often tempted to say, opposing camps: biblical or Darwinian — invention or evolution. But on closer examination the difference is perhaps more one of style than of substance. Both theories employ a basically linear way of reasoning which invariably leads towards one final goal: 'proper writing' — the alphabet, here often identified with all scripts representing sound elements be they syllabic, alphabetic or consonantal. The decisive step from thought writing (picture) to sound (phonetic) writing, the Urerfindung (Schmitt 1940/1980) is supposed to have been made only once, by just one human being, in one particular place. It will not...