The letter is greatest invention humanity. Developing ancient civilizations inevitably needed the means to record and fix sounding speech in order to transmit information in time and space. Many peoples know proverbs that emphasize the advantages of writing over oral speech: “Verba volant - scripta manent” (“Words fly - inscriptions remain”) or “What is written with a pen cannot be cut down with an axe.”

The desired message can be conveyed with the help of objects. This so-called "subject" letter. For example, the presentation of a symbolic gift - an engagement ring - testifies to the intentions of the giver. However, we do not always understand the situation with a gift so unambiguously, sometimes we can interpret various objects in our own way. This way of exchanging information can hardly be called a letter proper, and the “reading” of such a message is always arbitrary.

Sample of modern pictography

The next stage in the development of information transfer methods is the replacement of an object with its image. In ancient times, people painted the most important events of their lives: scenes of hunting and battles. Such rock carvings, made by people of the Stone Age, are found in the caves of Spain, Southern France, America and Africa. Writing with drawings is called pictography(from Latin pictum - "painted" and Greek grapho - “inscription, letter”). The language of drawings is still practiced today. For example, we see an image of a pretzel over a bakery, a boot over a shoe store or shoe shop. snake and bowl poison symbolize the pharmacy. Some road signs are icons. This type of writing has an important advantage: pictures can be understood, that is, "read" by people of different nationalities speaking different languages. When understanding such "texts" there is no language barrier.

However, even the simplest picture allows for many interpretations and readings.

With development abstract thinking there are concepts that do not lend themselves to a pictorial representation, since they do not have visibility. For example, "vigilance" you cannot draw, but you can convey this concept through the image of the eye. The drawing can thus act as direct meaning, that is, to designate the organ of vision, and in a figurative, conventional meaning. This makes it difficult to decipher monuments of this type of writing, since it is not clear exactly what meaning in this case has an image. The gradual schematization of drawings turns them into hieroglyphs (gr. « sacred" and Greek « thread" ).

HIEROGLYPHIC LETTER

The most famous systems of hieroglyphic writing originated in Ancient Egypt and China. Chinese character writing conveys with a special sign not the sound of the word, but its meaning. That is, such a letter is not phonetic. The same hieroglyph will be read differently by the Chinese, who speak different dialects and do not understand each other, but they will understand the same. Homonyms that coincide during pronunciation in Chinese writing are transmitted by different hieroglyphs.

The meaning of each hieroglyph must be remembered, and the concepts that must be expressed in hieroglyphs, great multitude. To read a text in Chinese, you need to know a large number of characters. Not surprisingly, such writing systems did not become widespread.

Gradually, attempts were made to simplify this way of writing. Chinese writing went by combining different hieroglyphs to denote new concepts. For example, to denote the concept "a tear" it was necessary to put next to the hieroglyph for the eye, and the hieroglyph for water. Thus, it increased combination value, combining hieroglyphs, the dependence of the hieroglyph on the context increased. Experts who speak Chinese say what to learn Chinese- it means to remember great amount hieroglyphs and their combinations. This way of simplifying the hieroglyphic writing, which can hardly be called a simplification, turned out to be unproductive.

Often the roots carrying the main lexical meaning were expressed by the hieroglyphs themselves, and the additional meaning by special signs (determinatives). There were a great many such determinants in ancient Egyptian writing. They only accompanied the hieroglyph, were not pronounced when reading, but helped to correctly understand the meaning of what was written, that is, they served as a sure help when reading texts. For example, a sign depicting two legs was placed after all verbs of motion. Yes, the word "house" in Egyptian writing is conveyed by hieroglyph . However, when accompanied with a verbal determiner, it has the meaning of the verb "leave the house" . The same sign can be a dumb determinative in the designation of various buildings.

PHONOGRAPHIC LETTER

As already mentioned, hieroglyphic writing was very difficult to learn and use. Therefore, a few representatives of the priests and nobility were literate. Gradually writing systems evolved along the lines of simplifying them to make writing more accessible. This was required by the interests of developing states.

At the same time, different civilizations are on the path of inventing new ways of writing. Researchers of the history of writing adhere to the point of view that new types of writing developed simultaneously in several ancient cultures, since the principle that this new writing used was literally in the air. Humanity has come close to the idea of ​​conveying in writing not meaning, but sounding speech. This way of writing is called phonography(Greek phono- sound and grapho- "writing").

Even the Egyptians and the Assyro-Babylonians made attempts to convey sound speech in writing. Phonetization of writing occurs gradually. Ancient writing systems, as a rule, are mixed: some characters convey whole words, others are syllables, others are “indicators”, that is, they indicate the belonging of a word to a certain class and are usually not pronounced. Such are the hieroglyphic writing systems of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites and other peoples of the Ancient East.

syllable

The Sumerian language was arranged in such a way that almost every word was a syllable, that is, it was monosyllabic. The Sumerians invented special hieroglyphs to represent their words. The Assyro-Babylonians adopted a writing system from Sumerian. They began to decompose into parts (syllables) Difficult words of your language. These pieces of the word denoted on writing in Sumerian characters, used by the Sumerians to express monosyllabic words of your language. To explain this decomposition of the word, the following example can be given: if the Russian name "Shura" we would decompose into syllables and render these syllables according to their meaning in French "shu" – chou(cabbage) and pa – rat(rat), then we would convey the name "Shura" using two hieroglyphs "cabbage" and "rat". Thus, a separate hieroglyph began to denote a syllable. It is a syllabic or syllabic phonography. The Russian alphabet also uses syllabems (graphic icons denoting a syllable) these are letters i, yo, yu in cases me, her, her etc.

In the literature on grammar (the science of writing systems), as classic example syllabaries are often given ancient Indian Devanagari script. Indeed, in this writing system, each sign depicted a syllable, but not any syllable, namely, a combination of a consonant sound with the sound [a]. If the consonant sound was combined with another vowel (of which there were a huge number in Indian languages), then special superscript or subscript signs were used. Also, a special subscript sign indicated the absence of a vowel sound in a word, that is write a syllable with a vowel "a" was easier than writing one consonant. For example, to denote a collection consonants ligatures are used.

CONSONANT-SOUND LETTER

The next step in the development of phonography was ancient writing systems of the Phoenicians and Jews. These were consonant sound systems, those. special signs (letters) denoted only consonants. This type of writing was due to the peculiarities of the language itself, since the letter was invented for a specific language. In Semitic languages, the role of vowels is much less than that of consonants. As a rule, there are few vowels in such languages ​​(for example, in Arabic there are only three vowel sounds). Basic, lexical meaning root was transmitted by a combination of consonants, which were reflected in the letter, vowels were not needed to understand the main meaning of the word, they performed additional function, indicating a grammatical meaning that is easily determined by the context and is not transmitted in writing.

The Russian language also belongs to the languages ​​of the consonant type in the sense that there are much more consonant sounds in Russian than vowels. Therefore, in Russian we can use consonant abbreviations: point, fri, mon, fri(days of the week), etc. If we are trying to guess a word, it is easier for us to pick up a few vowels and substitute them in the basis of consonants. However, the Russian writing system could not do without the designation of vowels in writing, since in Russian, as in any other language Indo-European family, vowels have always played an extremely important role (ladies, house, smoke, doom, Dim!) etc. Significant difficulties are experienced by languages ​​that, as a result of cultural and religious influence, have adopted the Arabic writing system, but the type of language itself does not fit this writing system. Such a situation, for example, with the Persian language.

The Semitic languages, as already mentioned, could easily do without the designation of vowels in writing, which is reflected in the writing systems used by these languages ​​(for example, ancient Egyptian writing, Hebrew writing, Arabic writing).

Aramaic writing, which originated from ancient Semitic writing systems, spread east to the Uighurs and further to the Mongols and Manchus. To the south, the Aramaic letter passed to the Arabs and the peoples they conquered. All the peoples who converted to Islam wrote in the Arabic alphabet: Turks, Persians, Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, Turkmens, Dagestanis, Abkhazians, etc. In the 1920s, the Turks, some Iranian and Caucasian peoples changed the Arabic script to Latin. Turkey officially switched to the Latin alphabet in 1929.

Arabic script

Arabic became (and has remained since then) the official and native language of North Africa and all Arab countries Middle East. Many peoples who converted to Islam, but did not adopt the Arabic language as their everyday language, borrowed the Arabic alphabet for their own languages.

The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 letters (additional letters are also added in the languages ​​of Iran and Pakistan, which use Arabic script), each of which can have up to four distinct graphic forms. All these letters are consonants, the lines are written from right to left.

Another significant difference is that the Arabic script was much more widely used in decorative arts and in art.

In countries using the Arabic alphabet, calligraphy continues to be used not only in special documents, but also in many other artistic purposes. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the handwritten nature of the Arabic script. This and other characteristics made it difficult to adapt to printed forms and delayed the introduction of printing presses for several centuries after the time of Gutenberg, during which the Arab world continued to rely on handwritten forms of writing for books (especially the Koran), legal and other documents. The main directions in the development of Arabic writing were calligraphy and artistic forms of hand writing, including the development of ornamental types of fonts. Calligraphy began to be used not only when making copies of the Koran, but also when decorating buildings with items made of porcelain, metal, in carpets, coins, etc.

GREEK LETTER IS THE BASIS OF ALL BASICS

The last step on the path of phonography was taken by the ancient Greeks, who borrowed graphic signs, judging by the names of the letters, from the Phoenicians, but began to designate with letters not only consonants, but also vowels, that is, they created an alphabet. After all, the Phoenicians used a syllabary, in which a whole syllable was indicated by a graphic icon. For the consonant, the Phoenicians used a special grapheme, and vowels, if necessary, were indicated by an additional icon. The Greeks introduced special letters to represent vowel sounds. Sometimes for this purpose the Greeks used the extra consonants of the Phoenician script ( "aleph" in Phoenician it denoted a consonant, and in Greek a vowel - "alpha"). In addition, the Greeks came up with special letters to denote deaf occlusive aspirated sounds. Thus, the Greek alphabet was the first alphabetic-sound alphabet and served as the basis for the Latin, Slavic and other alphabets.

The inscription on ancient Greek

For example, the Gothic bishop Wulfila in the 4th century. AD translated into Gothic (Old Germanic) the text of the Bible. To record the translation, the bishop created a Gothic script based on the Greek alphabet. He added 5–6 Latin letters and two letters, probably invented by himself. The most famous manuscript in the Gothic language is the Silver Codex, 186 sheets of purple-red parchment, on which the text from the Bible is inscribed in silver and gold letters. After the Goths disappeared from the historical arena in the Middle Ages, their language and writing disappeared.

The Greek alphabet also served as the basis for the creation of Coptic and Etruscan writing. To the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, the Copts added 8 letters from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Coptic script, like the Gothic one, was originally used to record the translation of the Bible into Coptic, but gradually the famous Coptic literature began to be created in the Coptic monasteries - the earliest monasteries in the world. There were various lives of saints and hermits, fairy tales, historical novels and church hymns, legends and songs. Subsequently, the Coptic language was supplanted by Arabic.

The Etruscan alphabet served as the basis for several alphabets of the inhabitants of ancient Italy, but they all disappeared along with their "parent" - the Etruscan letter. Only one descendant of the Etruscan alphabet not only survived, but became the most common type of writing in modern world. It's about about the Latin alphabet.

LATIN ALPHABET

The oldest inscriptions made in Latin date back to the 6th century. BC. The Romans somewhat modified the Etruscan letters, but we can easily recognize them in the Latin script, and in the Etruscan letters - Greek. The styles of some letters have hardly changed for three thousand years. However, this only applies to uppercase letters. Lowercase letters (minuscules) changed significantly as cursive Latin writing became widespread in the Middle Ages. This was due to the fact that the writing technique has changed. Instead of stone or wood, they began to use paper invented in China, instead of a cutter, a pen. AT different time in various parts of Europe, their own peculiarities of writing letters appeared.

The culture of the young Romanesque and Germanic peoples took shape on the ruins of the Roman Empire. These peoples adopted not only Latin as the language of religion, science, and literature, but also the Latin alphabet as the basis for creating national writing systems. Modern national writing systems of the peoples of Western Europe have been developed only since the 8th-13th centuries.

The formation of writing systems based on the Latin proceeded differently from the formation of the Slavic writing that arose on the Greek basis. A special alphabet was created for the Slavic language, which correctly conveyed the peculiar sound composition of the Slavic language. Modern European languages, despite the different sound composition, use almost the same alphabets, reproducing the Latin alphabet without significant changes. The construction of writing systems of different languages ​​on the Latin basis ensured the graphic unity of the alphabets, which facilitated the international economic and cultural relations of the peoples of Europe. However, as a result of such mechanical borrowing, a gap arose between the sound composition of Western European languages ​​and the letters of their alphabets.

Gothic

24 letters of the Latin alphabet could not reflect the diversity of the phonetics of the Romance and Germanic languages. In French, there are usually 17 vowels and 18 consonant phonemes, in German - 16 and 21, in English - 15 and 25, not counting a large number diphthongs. In the realm of consonants, most languages ​​required special letters to represent the many sibilants and affricates that were not available in Latin. Five Latin vowels did not reflect the rich vocalism of, for example, French or English. This led to the widespread use in Western European writing systems of various diacritics (in French, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, etc.) or letter combinations (in English, German, French, etc.). In English, for 40 sounds, up to 658 graphic combinations of letters.

For example, the French alphabet has five different characters to convey different sounds. e: . Russian sch in modern English is conveyed by a combination shch, in French - chtch, in German, a combination of seven letters - Schtsch. The number of additional letters of the Latin script today exceeds one and a half hundred (counting all additional characters in all alphabets on the Latin basis). latin letter about, combined with various diacritical marks, gave 16 new characters: etc.

Since writing systems developed historically and many elements are relics of the past, there are no ideal alphabets, but there are more or less successfully reflecting the features of a particular language. Alphabets must be reformed from time to time, adapting themselves to the most accurate reflection of the ever-changing sounding speech. If the alphabet long time has not been reformed, then the writing breaks away from real-sounding speech and becomes more and more conditional.

The gap between writing and language in the majority of Western European nations due to the fact that writing systems have not undergone spelling reforms for a long time. There has been no change in French since the 13th century, and in English since the 14th century. Many letters have different sound depending on their place in the word (for example, French with ), some letters are written but not pronounced; they are used to convey the same sounds different letters and letter combinations. When reading French and English texts literally, they are incomprehensible to modern French and English and sound like foreign. The main orthographic principle of these languages ​​has become historical and traditional.

The joke is widely known: "The English write London, but they read Constantinople." Bernard Shaw came up with his own playful example, reflecting the paradoxes of English orthography. How to read a word ghotio? Answer: fish [fish]. Why? The combination of the first two letters gh can be read as f [f], because this is how this combination sounds in the word enough [inaf]. vowel about read as i [and], because this is how it is read in the word women [uimin]. Three letter combination tio should be read as sh [w], because this is how this combination is pronounced in words like revolution. Therefore, we write ghotio, but we read fish [fish].

Such "monsters" of English spelling are explained by the conservative state policy regarding writing, which is especially characteristic of England. In addition, in order to eliminate the gap between writing and language, a radical revolutionary restructuring of writing is necessary, and this always proceeds very painfully. In addition, if a radical reform of English writing is carried out, bringing it closer to “live pronunciation”, it turns out that the spelling of any English word will change beyond recognition. The richest literature of past eras will become incomprehensible to modern Englishmen.

The English have particular difficulties in transcribing "foreign" proper names. Relatively recently, general rules for the transliteration of Slavic surnames in Latin letters have been adopted. Until now, there are variations when recording in foreign documents the names of residents of some Asian and African countries.

More close to modern pronunciation the spelling of German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian and some other writing systems that survived major reforms that were associated with religious reform and national liberation movements. The peoples who have recently adopted the Latin script have found themselves in a better position. The writing systems of such languages ​​were built in relation to modern literary languages, however, even here there were numerous diacritics and multi-letter combinations due to the limited character of letters. sound composition Latin writing.

More than thirty percent of the world's population uses the Latin-based script. The Latin alphabet is used by most European peoples, all the peoples of America and Australia, and most Africans. In Asia, Turkey, Indonesia and partly the Philippines switched to the Latin basis.

CYRILLIC

In the ninth century in the territory from Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and Mediterranean and from the Elbe and Oder in the west and to the Volga in the east, mighty Slavic states: Kievan Rus, Great Moravia, Bulgarian kingdom, Poland, Serbian and Croatian states. The Great Moravian Principality, seeking to protect itself from the expansion of the Holy Roman Empire and the Latin-German clergy, decided to find support in an alliance with Byzantium. The Moravian prince Rostislav converted to Christianity in its eastern, Byzantine variety.

Christianity, as is known, represented two branches in the 9th-10th centuries: Western and Eastern. The Greco-Byzantine Church was tolerant of the language in which worship was conducted. Roman adhered to the trilingual dogma: worship could only be conducted in Hebrew, Ancient Greek or Latin. Worship in any other language was considered heresy. The Laurentian Chronicle described this situation in the following way: “No language is worthy of having its own letters, except Jews and Greek and Latin.” The Eastern Church allowed services to be held in the native language of the people who converted to Christianity. Services were conducted in Armenian, Georgian, Coptic and Syriac.

In 862 or 863, an embassy from Prince Rostislav arrived in Constantinople with a request to send preachers to Moravia who would teach the Slavs to conduct church services in their native language. Two brothers Konstantin the Philosopher (after becoming a monk Cyril) and Methodius went on a mission to Slavic lands. They began to compile Slavic letters on the basis of the Greek alphabet, began to translate sacred Christian texts into Slavic.

The basis of the created Slavic literary language was the native dialect of the brothers-first teachers - Slavic-Macedonian. Initially, Cyril and Methodius compiled the Glagolitic alphabet, consisting of 38 letters. The question of the origin and use of the Glagolitic is still controversial among scholars. The verbal letters are similar to some of the letters in the Byzantine (Minuscular), Hebrew, and Coptic alphabets. A number of Glagolitic letters do not show any visible resemblance to any of the alphabets known to us, perhaps the Glagolitic alphabet is based on the signs of some kind of disappeared writing. Most scientists are of the opinion that the Glagolitic is first alphabet, which was created by Cyril for the Slavs. In favor of the fact that the Glagolitic alphabet was an artificially created alphabet for Christian missionary activity, is evidenced by the fact that the first letter of the Glagolitic alphabet has the shape of a cross - the main symbol of the Christian religion. The Glagolitic was originally widely used precisely south slavs. Currently, the Croatians are trying to partially use the Glagolitic alphabet, but this experiment can hardly be considered successful, since the Glagolitic alphabet is an archaic and complex writing system.

Another, most common, writing system created by Cyril for the Slavs is called Cyrillic after its creator. No one doubts the source of the Cyrillic alphabet: this alphabet is based on the Byzantine universal (a solemn, statutory letter in which liturgical books were written). Cyrillic uses almost all the letters of the Greek universal, including those that were not necessary to convey the sounds of Slavic speech. To indicate special Slavic sounds, which had no analogue in the Greek language, special letters were invented or borrowed from other writing systems (including from the Glagolitic alphabet). The following fact speaks of the amazing linguistic instinct of the creator of the Slavic alphabet: over the past centuries, only two new letters have been introduced into the Russian language: th and e.

Unlike Western European writing, Russian writing has been continuously changing in accordance with the development of the living Russian language. At the same time, up to early XVIII century, the development of Russian writing proceeded spontaneously, and from the beginning of the 18th century - in the order of state reforms (Peter's reform of 1707–1710, the reforms of the Academy of Sciences of 1735, 1738 and 1758, the Soviet reform of 1917). The letter composition of the alphabet, graphics and spelling changed.

When making the first set of Russian civil font, Peter I threw out the letters borrowed from the Greek alphabet, but unnecessary for the transmission of Russian speech: psi, xi, omega, izhitsa, fert(left fitu ), "Earth"(left "green" ), "like"(left "and" ). However, later Peter I restored some of these letters. From 1711 to 1735, books were typed in different ways, either by one or the other composition of the alphabet. The reform of 1735 was finally excluded "Xi", "Izhitsa", "zelo". The 1917 reform finally ruled out "Izhitsu", "and with a dot » and "fitu".

The names of the obscure letters of the Old Russian alphabet

In addition, letters that became unnecessary due to the historical change in the phonetics of Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian languages. It's four yusa and - "yat". First, the yusy disappeared from the Russian letter, sometimes it was used (yus small) instead of a letter I. Peter I, when introducing the civil alphabet, removed this yus. The reform of 1917 abolished letters that no longer denoted special sounds of Russian speech: the letter ("yat") denoted special type sound [e], letters "er" and "er" denoted long-vanished super-short vowels.

In addition, new letters were introduced into the Russian alphabet: th and e. Letter yo was finally introduced only in 1956 as a result of the approval of the "Rules of Russian Spelling and Punctuation" by the Academy of Sciences.

Changing the graphics of Russian writing, as well as any other type of writing, is aimed at simplifying, facilitating the process of writing.

Charter

The oldest Russian handwriting - the charter - arose under the influence of the Greek charter and was used until the 15th-16th centuries. The charter was distinguished by a clear, calligraphic style of letters; each was written separately, placed perpendicular to the line and had shapes close to geometric. Words in the charter were usually not separated by spaces. The charter was easy to read, but difficult to write.

From the middle of the XIV century. along with the statute, semi-statutes are spreading, which are distinguished by the lesser severity of letters, their oblique position, the use of a large number of titles, i.e. abbreviations. The semi-ustav was written more fluently, but was less clear in reading. From manuscripts, he moved to printed books and was used before the reforms of Peter the Great. With late XVIII centuries in diplomatic, clerical and trade correspondence, an even more fluent handwriting - cursive - is becoming widespread. It is connected, connected writing letters, a large number of abbreviations and flourishes that go beyond the line. On the basis of cursive writing, handwriting developed close to modern writing.

Semi-charter

A special kind of Russian handwriting was ligature. She appeared with late XIV century in connection with the desire of Russian scribes to decorate the book. Elm- decorative letter, which was used in the titles. Words and letters in a line were knitted into a continuous ornament; for this, the letters were connected to each other or fit into each other, and the voids were filled with decorations.

Elm (decorative writing)

Based on the Cyrillic alphabet, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian letters developed. Until 1970 XIX century. it was also used in Romania.

Slavic writing, adopted by almost all Slavic peoples, did not last long among the Western Slavs. In 890, Pope Stephen IV anathematized Slavic worship and banned books in the Slavic language. In Moravia and the Czech Republic, Slavic writing was banned. The influence of Catholicism on the countries of the Western Slavs contributed to the fact that modern Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenes use the Latin alphabet.

cursive (fluent handwriting)

The difference in the historical destinies of individual western and southern Slavic lands, their division into spheres of influence of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, the Turkish invasion - all this was reflected in the history of writing and culture of the Western and South Slavic peoples. As one of the manifestations of Western influence, already in the 14th century, liturgical texts appeared in the Croatian coast, written in the Latin alphabet, adapted for the Slavic language. Therefore, three graphic systems were used in worship for a long time: Cyrillic, Glagolitic and Latin.

Currently, Serbo-Croatian has two alphabets: Cyrillic (Serbia and Montenegro) and Latin (Croatia, Muslims in Bosnia).

An example from A.A. Reformatsky "Introduction to Linguistics", M., 1996)

O.A. VOLOSHINA,
Moscow State University
Moscow

Incredible Facts

10. Braille

Braille stands out from the list because it is the only tactile font featured here. It was invented in 1821 by a blind Frenchman, Louis Braille, who was inspired by the "night records" of the embossed dot code used by the French military. Up to this point, he could read books with raised letters, but that was not at all practical, especially when it came to writing such books. Obviously, the world needed a better system, but because he thought "night writing" was too complicated (it took about 12 dots to write one letter), Braille invented his own system using only 6 dots. The system did not gain popularity during the life of its author, however, after his death, it turned into a language of communication for blind and visually impaired people. Today it has been adapted for a large number of languages ​​around the world.

9. Cyrillic

In the 9th century AD, Saints Cyril and Methodius created two alphabets, Glagolitic and Cyrillic, for writing Old Church Slavonic. Cyrillic, based on the Glagolitic and Greek alphabets, eventually became the preferred writing system for the Slavic languages. It is widely used today in Slavic writing (Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Serbian), as well as in a number of non-Slavic languages ​​that fell under the influence of the Soviet Union. Throughout history, Cyrillic has been adapted to write more than 50 languages.

8. Cuneiform

The importance of cuneiform is that it is the most early language writing, known today in the world. It first appeared in the 34th century BC among the Sumerians, who lived on the territory of modern Iraq. It was adapted to write several languages ​​(including Akkadian, Hittite, and Hurrian), and also served as an inspiration for the Ugaritic and Old Persian alphabets. For more than 3,000 years, this type of writing was the most important in the Middle East, but the cuneiform was gradually replaced by Aramaic alphabet until it finally disappeared in 100 AD.

7. Ancient Egyptian script

Egyptian hieroglyphs are believed to have originated shortly after Sumerian cuneiform, around 3200 BC. Along with the known hieroglyphs, there are two other ancient Egyptian scripts: hieratic (used mainly for religious purposes) and demotic (for all other purposes). Regardless of their impact on the creation of a mass writing system, the most important role of the ancient Egyptian script was to serve as inspiration for the first alphabet.

6. Chinese script

The Chinese script, in addition to being used by a huge number of people, is also notable for being one of the oldest regularly used writing systems, because it began to exist as early as the 2nd millennium BC. Initially, the letters were pictograms (each was similar to what it means and represented a whole word. Chinese characters were adapted to write other languages ​​due to huge influence China to the countries of East Asia. So the Koreans and Japanese adopted the hieroglyphs (based on the meaning of the symbols), as well as the Vietnamese (based on the sound and meaning). Koreans and Vietnamese have since replaced Chinese characters different writing system, but the characters still exist as part of written Japanese. In the 20th century, Chinese split into two main forms, Traditional and Simplified, as part of the Chinese government's fight against illiteracy.

5. Brahmi

The ancestor of numerous writing systems used in South Asia today is Brahmi. This abugida (a writing system in which syllables with the same consonants but different vowels are denoted by altered forms of the same basic sign) appeared in the 5th century BC. and was used for writing in Prakrit and Sanskrit. Over the next millennia, Brahmi branched out into dozens of regional systems, which later became associated with the languages ​​of their regions. All "descendants" could be divided into northern and southern, later with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism, southern group penetrated into South East Asia, and the northern one to Tibet. Today, Brahmi-based systems are widely used in many countries in Asia (especially in India), as well as for religious purposes in places where Buddhism is prevalent.

4. Arabic

Due to the large number of people who speak the language, as well as the widespread influence of Islam, the Arabic alphabet is the second most commonly used in the world. It is found mainly in North Africa and in Central and Western Asia. Technically, it's a consonantal script (a writing system in which all letters are consonants). The alphabet originated around 400 AD. (about 200 years before the advent of Islam), however, the emergence of Islam and the writing of the Koran led to significant changes in the writing system, for example, vowels appeared. The close relationship with religion is another reason for the widespread adoption of the Arabic alphabet and its adoption by non-Arabic Islamic populations, including Farsi, Urud, Panjabi, Pashto, and dozens of others in the past and present.

3. Greek

The appearance of the Greek alphabet was a huge leap in the development of alphabets, because for the first time vowels were included as separate letters. It has existed since 800 BC. and for my long history used to write Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Gaulish, Albanian and other languages. Written Greek was first seen in Mycenaean Greece, but the alphabet as we know it today was the first successful attempt that came to fruition shortly after the rise of Ancient Greece. Apart from the obvious influence that the language had on literature and other aspects of Greek life, its impact on other writing systems was enormous. First of all, it was thanks to the Greek alphabet that the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets appeared. The meaning of the alphabet has since decreased significantly, today it is used to denote mathematical symbols and for writing in Greek, however, if not for him, then many writing systems that are well known in the world today would hardly be similar to what we know now.

2. Latin

Latin made this list for obvious reasons. In addition to being the alphabet of the global lingua franca, English, it is the most widely used alphabet of all time. Based on a variant of the Greek alphabet around 700 BC, it quickly spread first across Europe and then throughout the world. He followed the expansion of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and then to Central and Northern Europe where Christianity was spreading. Some Slavic languages ​​also started using this alphabet when people adopted the Catholic faith. European colonization then brought the Latin alphabet into South America, Africa, Oceania, Asia. It was widely adopted and began to be used, both in those languages ​​that did not yet have a written language, and in those in which it already was.

1. Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician scripts

Proto-Sinaitic script was the first alphabet, so it is the parent of almost all alphabetic systems letters that appeared after it. He spawned in Egypt and Sinai in 1900 BC, and as already mentioned, was inspired Egyptian hieroglyphs. His influence is extraordinary: everything from Hebrew, the Latin alphabet and ending with the Ethiopian syllable, originates from him. The Phoenician script is a direct descendant of Proto-Sinaitic and differs little from it, it was spread by Phoenician merchants throughout the Mediterranean, and it became widely used as the alphabet of several languages. In this regard, Phoenician branches are present in many of the largest writing systems.

A writing system (writing) is an organized method of storing and transmitting messages based on language. Most often, a letter is visual (less often tactile), consists of a set of signs or symbols known as a grapheme (in the alphabet - a letter, in non-alphabetic writing systems - a hieroglyph, an ideogram, etc.).

Classification

In general, there are three main types of writing:

• alphabets
• syllabary (syllabic)
• logographic writing

Alphabets use a standard set of letters to represent consonants and vowels of speech. Letters correspond to sounds almost one to one. Usually several different letters represent the same phoneme and/or several phonemes are represented by the same letter. Or a sequence of two or more letters may represent a single phoneme.

Relations between letters and phonemes in alphabetical writing. Note the unpronounceable "s" and "t".

A syllabic script consists of symbols representing syllables (they are considered base blocks the words).

The relationship between grapheme and syllable in syllabic writing. Pay attention to the image of the only consonant [n]. (Name dwarf planet 90377 Sedna in Inuktitut).

Logographic writing is based on a logogram (logograph) - a grapheme (graphic image) corresponding to a word, morpheme or other semantic units.

Esperanto = "universe" + language = (generation/world/era + border/territory) + language

Relations between graphemes and morphemes in logographic writing. “世界” is a borrowing from Sanskrit, its meaning is vague to modern speakers.

The division here is not always clear: there are types of writing that have the characteristics of other categories. For example, the English character & means the word (semantic unit) and (conjunction "and"), and not a vowel or consonant sound.

There are some types of writing that are variants of others. For example, consonant writing is an alphabet where consonants (consonants) are written, but most vowels are not. Typical example- Arabic script and Hebrew. In consonantal types of writing, consonants have full forms, while vowels are indicated by modifications or additions to consonants. A striking example- writing of the Amharic language in Ethiopia or the Devangari writing system (and related ones) in India (writing of the Hindi language, etc.).

Ways of writing

Usually, people write by drawing distinguishing characters in a two-dimensional image of a special shape. The materials on which they write can (and have been) various, including paper (the most common now), stone, clay, sand, animal skin, birch bark, and even air can act as a symbolic function (performed (fictitiously) by Kurt Vonnegut's character in the novel Galapagos) and on a variety of other materials.

Signs can be applied with paint, carved, burned out, obtained by pressure, printing, and in many other ways.

Modern writing in the form of a tattoo (Latin alphabet) on the skin of a living person.

Writing is an abstract concept. Letters can take on different forms (like the Latin a and a ) and still be recognized as the same letter, or they can look the same (like the Latin c and c in Cyrillic), but represent different sounds.

Various non-visual images of letters are not considered separate types of writing, the most famous of them is Braille, which is a tactile letter consisting of relief dots that are perceived by touch (used blind people); international maritime signals with flags (semaphore alphabet, flag signaling); alphabet (code) Morse code (Morse code), where letters are represented by a sequence of signals, for example, long and short: "dots" and "dashes", or computer encoding, in which graphemes are represented in a purely abstract way as a bit frequency.

Direction of writing

The usual direction of writing is left-to-right, then top-to-bottom, with the text arranged in lines. Sometimes the text can be written vertically (due to limited space, as on street signs and signs) and even directions can go from bottom to top, and then from left to right.

The notable exceptions are the Arabic script and writing system Hebrew, where they write from right to left, and then from top to bottom.

Reading direction, modern Arabic writing

The Chinese and Japanese can also write from left to right and then from top to bottom, but the traditional way of writing was vertical, from top to bottom, and then from right to left (column distribution). Both of these languages ​​often use this way of writing.

In traditional Mongolian writing (still used in Inner Mongolia- the territory of China) are written vertically from top to bottom, and then from left to right.

Letter in Europe

Most major languages ​​in Europe use the Latin alphabet. Many of them add diacritics or additional letters ((like Icelandic ð, þ). Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian use the Cyrillic alphabet, each with its own variations of specific letters. Serbian also uses the Latin alphabet. writing) usually uses the writing of those peoples among whom the gypsies live. It can be Cyrillic (as in the former USSR) or a Latin-based alphabet (as in the former Yugoslavia).

Greek is now only language, using the Greek alphabet. Likewise, common on the border between Europe and Asia, Georgian and Armenian both use their own particular alphabets.

The modern writing systems of the majority of the peoples of the former USSR are also built on the Slavic-Cyrillic basis.

The October Revolution found the writing systems of the peoples of Russia at various stages of development. Many peoples of Russia - Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian and others - had developed writing systems corresponding to their languages ​​by the time of the October Revolution; alphabets were created on the Slavic Cyrillic basis for some small peoples of Russia, for example, for the Yakuts and Chuvashs. Other peoples - Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, although they had a written language, but built on a consonant Arabic basis alien to their languages. More than fifty nationalities of Russia, in particular, almost all the peoples of the North, did not have a written language at all.

In accordance with the Leninist national policy, work on the creation of new writing systems for the peoples of the USSR began already in the 1920s, i.e. almost immediately after the end of the civil war. New writing systems were created for all the peoples of the USSR, who did not have a written language at all or had a written language built on an Arabic basis alien to their languages.

Work on the creation of new alphabets was based on the following principles:

1) on the basis of maximum consideration of the peculiar phonemic-sound composition of each national language, while observing the necessary unity of the alphabets of the USSR;

2) bringing the letter closer to the living literary language subject to a single spelling system based, as a rule, on the phonemic-morphological principle;

3) designation of special sounds (phonemes) of national languages, as a rule, by creating additional and accented letters, and not by using two- and three-letter combinations.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, most of the new alphabets were built not on the Cyrillic, but on the Latin basis. Meanwhile, the Latin alphabet is poorer than the Russian one in terms of sound composition. The Latin alphabet consists of 26 letters, many of which partially duplicate each other in Western European writing systems. The Russian alphabet includes 33 letters, that is, 25% more than the Latin one, and none of the letters duplicates the other.

Therefore, the use of the Latin alphabet as the basis for new alphabets required the introduction of more additional letters and diacritics. In addition, the use of the Latin stem created a gap between these new alphabets and the alphabets largest nations USSR - Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian. This also contradicted the established pre-revolutionary practice of developing new alphabets, which (for example, Yakut, Khakass, Chuvash) were built on the Cyrillic basis.

Since the mid-30s, at the suggestion of the national republics themselves, it was decided to abandon the romanization. Following this, the alphabets of all the peoples of the USSR, who did not have their own written language before the revolution, or who had a written language built on the Arabic basis, were transferred to the Cyrillic basis.

Most of the alphabets of the peoples of the USSR were built on the Cyrillic basis. Only the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian alphabets retained the Latin basis, while the Armenian and Georgian alphabets, in accordance with the centuries-old tradition, have their own special national basis corresponding to their languages.

When constructing new alphabets of the peoples of the USSR, the peculiarity of the sound composition of national languages ​​was carefully taken into account. For all sounds (more precisely, phonemes) that were available in these languages, but were absent in Russian, additional and accented letters were created. Depending on the peculiarity of the sound composition of the language, the number of such additional accented letters ranges from one or two to eight or nine (Tatar, Kazakh, Bashkir and other alphabets).

In all the alphabets of the peoples of the USSR that switched to the Cyrillic basis, a total of about 50 additional and accented letters are used (except for 33 letters of the Russian alphabet). At the same time, as a rule, the same letters are used to convey close sounds in various writing systems of the USSR; in turn, the same letter is used to denote close sounds.

The spellings of the peoples of the USSR were built on the same fundamental basis as modern Russian spelling. This basis consists in the maximum approximation of writing to the literary language, but in compliance with the phonemic-morphological principle; however, in some writing systems (for example, in Belarusian, to a lesser extent in Russian), the phonemic-morphological principle is not applied consistently enough.

Cyrillic-based writing is now used by peoples who speak more than 60 languages ​​and make up about 10% of the world's population.

For comparison, we point out that writing systems built on the Latin basis are now used by peoples who speak more than 70 languages ​​and make up about 30% of the world's population. Writing systems built on the Arabic consonant-sound basis are used by peoples who speak 12-15 languages ​​and make up about 10%, on the Indian syllabic basis - about 20%, on the Chinese logographic basis - about 25% of the world's population. The share of all other writing systems (Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopian, etc.) accounts for only a little more than 5% of the world's population.

Apparently, the Latin and Cyrillic groups of writing systems have the greatest vitality. This is confirmed by the fact that more and more peoples are gradually moving to the Latin and Cyrillic basis of writing.

Thus, the foundations laid by Constantine and Methodius more than 1100 years ago continue to be continuously improved and successfully developed up to the present time.

Writing, this great achievement of mankind, had a long history of formation. This process has been going on for thousands of years.

With the advent of writing, people could no longer only communicate, but also store and transmit speech information using certain descriptive characters.
It is no longer possible to completely restore a consistent picture of the emergence and development of writing - the path was too long, and the origins of this path are hidden from us by time. But nonetheless, individual stages historians are tracing the path. For example, it is known that writing began with subject writing. What it is?

subject writing

Subject writing is symbolic objects (notches on a tree, stones arranged in a certain order, patterns on a smooth surface, smoke from a fire, etc.) that a person used to convey some necessary information. Of course, the person "reading" this information had to know the meaning of the items used, otherwise there was a danger of misreading.

Legend of Darius

Image of Darius I on an ancient Greek vase. The work of the vase painter Darius
The ancient Persian king Darius, who went on a campaign to Scythia, received a message from the Scythians. It consisted of several items: frogs, birds, mice and 5 arrows. King Darius decided that the Scythians, as a sign of obedience, brought him earth, water and sky (a mouse means earth, a frog - water, a bird - sky, arrows - refusal to resist). But one wise man did not agree with Darius. He deciphered the message of the Scythians in a different way: “If you, Persians, do not fly into the sky like birds, or, like mice, do not burrow into the ground, or, like frogs, do not jump into the swamp, then you will not come back, struck by these arrows” . This sage turned out to be right, Darius was forced to retreat, and this message will forever remain in history as a model of subject writing.
By the way, subject writing, with all the achievements of civilization, has survived in some places to this day: the peoples of Sumatra still use salt and pepper to denote love or hate.
The North American Indians had their own subject letter - wampum.

Wampum - Cylindrical shell beads strung on cords. These beads were multifunctional: they decorated clothes, served as currency, but their main purpose was to convey important messages. Wampums among the Iroquois tribes were usually delivered by special messengers - wampumons. For a long time, agreements between whites and Indians were formalized through wampums.
Subject writing, of course, was not the most convenient means of conveying information, so the search for more universal ways began. And it was found - this is a pictographic letter.

Pictographic letter

Eskimo pictographic story about a successful hunt

In pictographic writing, signs (pictograms) already designate a specific object. Pictograms were used by many cultures: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Aztec, etc. Pictographic writing is semantic, it denotes the simplest international concepts, real items, phenomena, actions, the meaning of these actions, conveyed with the help of drawings. Pictographic writing could be understood by people who spoke different languages. Of course, pictographic writing could not form text, because it did not have developed rules of the language.
Pictograms are also in demand in the modern world: a graphical user interface for a computer, a red cross (hospital or first-aid post), a parking lot (letter P) and other signs, including road signs. In pictographic writing, the written sign is tied to a specific object.

Hieroglyphic writing

The hieroglyph could already mean individual sounds and syllables, morphemes, whole words and concepts (ideograms). A feature of Chinese characters is the use of compound characters representing a combination of ideograms. An ideographic written sign is tied to a specific meaning.
But hieroglyphic writing had a significant drawback: it had no connection with the pronunciation of the word. As a result, written and oral speech existed separately, and in languages ​​that are characterized by a change in the form of a word depending on its syntactic role, it was necessary to supplement hieroglyphs with special designations for word forms.

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing

Chinese character writing

syllabary

This letter is also called syllabic (from the French syllabe - syllable). The signs of this letter designate individual syllables. Typically, a character in a syllabary is a consonant followed by a vowel.
On average, syllabaries (syllabaries) have 80-120 characters.

The syllabary was a step towards the convergence of oral and writing, as well as the formation of syllabic writing. The most famous syllabaries are cuneiform (ancient Persian, Akkadian and other heirs of the Sumerian script), West Semitic (Phoenician, Arabic and other heirs of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics) and Japanese syllabic systems. The Phoenician letter played in the life of mankind essential role: it was it that formed the basis of the Greek script, from which the Latin, Cyrillic and most modern scripts. In a syllabary, each sign stands for a specific syllable.

Alphabetical letter

The Greeks, having started using the Phoenician script, faced the problem of fully conveying the sound of words. The Phoenician syllabic system lacked letters to represent vowel sounds. For the Greeks, this proved inconvenient. Therefore, special characters appeared to denote vowels. Thus, the letter moved to an even more universal level. Now, with the help of 30 signs that anyone could easily learn, it was possible to convey almost any word of oral speech.
Alphabetical writing turned out to be simple, so it quickly spread throughout the world. After all, it is not in vain that they say that everything ingenious is simple. But you have to grow up to genius. Although in some civilizations the transition to alphabetical writing did not occur.
Alphabets are phonetic scripts that have a standard alphabet order signs. The characters of the alphabets are called letters.

The path to the Russian alphabet

This journey was also long.

Greek alphabet

So the Greek alphabet was invented. It has been in continuous use since the end of the 9th or beginning of the 8th century. BC e. The Greek alphabet is considered the first alphabet to contain consonants and vowels and use separate characters for them. There are 24 letters in the alphabet (in the preclassical era, several more letters were used in some dialects of Greek).

Etruscan alphabet

Based on the Western Greek alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was created - a set of characters characteristic of the written Etruscan language. The Etruscan alphabet belongs to the Italic alphabets.

Most famous monuments Etruscan writing - tombstones and ceramics. There are about 9 thousand known inscriptions made using the Etruscan alphabet - on tombstones, vases, statues, mirrors and jewelry. Fragments of the Etruscan linen book Liber Linteus were also found.
Etruscan writing is directed mainly from right to left, occasionally from left to right and boustrophedon: one line is written from left to right, the second line from right to left, the third from left to right, etc. The words were not always separated from each other.

Reconstruction of Etruscan alphabets
The Etruscan inscriptions were already incomprehensible to the Romans, who had a proverb “etruscum non legitur” (“Etruscan is not readable”). All later attempts to read the Etruscan inscriptions on the basis of any of the known languages ​​were unsuccessful. It is believed that the Etruscan language is not related to the known European languages and is isolated.

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet also goes back to the Greek alphabet. Letter writing, which arose in Latin in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e., subsequently spread throughout the world. The modern Latin alphabet is the basis for writing most Romance, Germanic and many other languages. Basic option The Latin alphabet consists of 26 letters. Letters are called differently in different languages.
Writing based on the Latin alphabet is used mainly by all languages ​​of the Romance group, except for a few languages; Germanic group (except for Yiddish); Celtic and Baltic groups, as well as some languages ​​​​of the Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Semitic and Iranian groups; Albanian, Basque languages; some languages ​​of Indochina ( Vietnamese language), Myanmar, most of the languages ​​of the Sunda Archipelago and the Philippines; Africa (South of the Sahara), America, Australia and Oceania, as well as artificial languages(for example, Esperanto).

Coptic script

Coptic alphabet

The Coptic alphabet has been common since the 4th century BC. It is based on the Greek alphabet, with the addition of a few letters from the ancient Egyptian Demotic script to represent consonants not found in Greek.
Coptic writing was one of the sources of Old Nubian writing.

Gothic letter

Gothic alphabet

The Gothic alphabet was created on the basis of Greek with borrowings from Latin. The names of the letters come from the names of the runes. The creation of the alphabet is attributed to Bishop Wulfila (Ulfila), who created in the middle of the 4th century. translation of the Bible into Gothic. Prior to this, the Goths used runic writing (the writing of the ancient Germans). The Goths are an ancient Germanic union of tribes.

Cyrillic

Cyrillic - Old Slavonic alphabet(Old Bulgarian alphabet); alphabet: one of two (along with Glagolitic) ancient alphabets for the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Russian language goes back to the Cyrillic alphabet.

Cyrillic-based alphabets are or were the writing systems for 108 natural languages, including the following Slavic languages:
Belarusian language (Belarusian alphabet)
Bulgarian language (Bulgarian alphabet)
Macedonian language (Macedonian alphabet)
Rusyn language/dialect (Rusyn alphabet)
Russian language (Russian alphabet)
Serbian language (Serbian Cyrillic alphabet)
Ukrainian language (Ukrainian alphabet)
Montenegrin language (Montenegrin alphabet).
AT Soviet time on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet, almost all non-Slavic peoples of the USSR (with the exception of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians and Armenians) and Mongols were built. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, peoples speaking more than 60 languages ​​​​and making up about 10% of the world's population used the Cyrillic script.