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Article In:
Written Language & Literacy
Vol. 26:2 (2023) ► pp.188–237

When is non-writing writing? or, when is writing non-writing?

It was easy to say that writing was invented out of nothing three times (that we can be sure of), in Sumer, China, and Mesoamerica. That syllables were important in those inventions emerged from attention to modern inventions of writing. But in recent years, specialists in Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican texts have been uncovering details about the development of cuneiform and glyphs that, perhaps surprisingly, prove to be comparable and mutually illuminating. In both cases, it seems legitimate to say that the earliest forms did not yet represent the actual writing of specific languages ( Writing : A system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer. Chinese writing, even though we cannot observe any essential changes in the system from its earliest known examples to the present day, also proves to have something to contribute, in the wake of a comparative study of how Chinese writing was adapted for writing neighboring (and unrelated) languages. And even half a century of experience with a semiotic system designed to be alinguistic, “Blissymbolics,” has something to tell us about non-writing turning into writing.
Article outline
  • 1.Prelude
    • 1.1Forerunners of writing
    • 1.2Writing defined
      • 1.2.1Pre-graphonomy discussions
      • 1.2.2Pre–modern graphonomic definitions
      • 1.2.3Modern definitions
    • 1.3Definitions of non-writing and writing related to early grammatogeny
  • 2.Mesopotamia
    • 2.1Tokens
    • 2.2Cylinder seals
    • 2.3Pre-cuneiform
    • 2.4Early cuneiform
  • 3.Interlude
    • 3.1China
    • 3.2Shanghai and Sydney
  • 4.Mesoamerica
    • 4.1Maya script
    • 4.2Other scripts
      • 4.2.1Olmec
      • 4.2.2Zapotec
      • 4.2.3Isthmian (“Epi-Olmec”)
      • 4.2.4Mixtec
      • 4.2.5Aztec
  • 5.Postlude
  • Notes
  • References
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