Writing across the borders

The writing system is a very basic core part of any literate culture. Some cultures develop writings systems of their own, but indigenous development is relatively rare; rather clear cases are the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, Chinese and Mesoamerican writing. Even for the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is not completely excluded that they owe some inspiration to cuneiform writing. Other cultures tend to take over writing systems originally devised for different languages and adapted them to their own needs. There is very much flow in the spread of writing systems, normally in an asymmetric way from cultures with writing systems to others who do not have it but have reached a stage of development where it becomes a real need. This flow is, of course, not working in the abstract, but always in form of real men carrying artefacts and knowledge.

The process of taking over foreign scripts can show highly divergent features, depending on the individual cases. Often recurring phenomena are a re-contextualisation and reinterpretation of the system. Thus, for example, the Northwest Semitic writing system was probably influenced by Egyptian writing (shape of signs, disregard of vowels in writing, predominant direction from right to left) but made a fundamental change by being purely phonetic and operating with a set of less than 30 simple-value signs which could represent every non-vocalic phoneme of the language, thus making writing much easier to learn. The Greeks again, based on the Semitic writing system, re-interpreted some of their signs to stand for vowels and thus created a new type, alphabetic writing (the Semitic writing system itself is, in accordance with Daniels, to be understood not as an alphabet but as the specific category of abgad). On the other side of the area of Semitic writing, in India a new form was devised which used quite different methods (adding marks to the signs themselves) for the notation also of the vowels.

A special phenomenon is the importation of a new writing system into an area where another one is also working. We can see this e.g. in ancient Anatolia where cuneiform writing (taken over from Syria, and ultimately Mesopotamia) became much better attested than the indigenous Luvian hieroglyphs. The modern spread of Latin alphabetic script (often in the process of colonisation) towards areas with indigenous (mostly Asiatic) writing system and the way they interacted is of serious, still actual political relevance.

Once fully assimilated, a writing system can tend to become part of the cultural identity of a person or group. Thus, not only orthographic innovations are normally quite controversial affairs, but even more so, the abandonment of your own script to the benefit of a supposedly superior foreign one can raise hot debates. Sometimes, it is supported by groups for the sake of perceived “modernity” and innovation, but more often, where there is a free choice, there is a remarkable tenacity of preserving traditional writing systems.

Often, changes in writing system can be shown to go concomitant with political power relations and/or major cultural breaks. For example, in Egypt the demise of the traditional writing systems seems to be connected both to political-economic factors dictated by the ruling Roman empire as well as to the religious change to Christianity which, being a staunch adversary of the traditional cults, did not chose to continue indigenous writing systems even if the need arose to translate its texts into the native language.

Depending very much not only on power relations but also on the sense of the culture in question, cultures can be more or less resistant to such efforts. Also the question of which language has which phonetic structure can prove to be of importance; especially languages with tones as relevant phonematic factor have show resistance to Latinisation – the best-know case probably Chinese where, in spite of long efforts at Romanisation people still carry on which their own traditional writing system, however complicated it might seem to outsiders. Also Japanese clings strongly to a system of seeming complexity even though Europeans have always considered the Japanese writing with its mixture of phonetic and logographic/morphographic compounds as highly cumbersome – but the very fact that Japan is a thriving modern nation should show that the writing system is not a hindrance for the members of its culture.

The question of writing systems has proofed to be, in a process of long durée, one of the main themes of the asymmetrical flows which characterise the relations between Asia and Europe. From the very beginning, probably at least as old as the concept of Europe (as opposed to Asia) itself, is the fact that the Greek alphabet (from which in turn, all other European alphabets, like the Etruscan, Latin, Runes and Cyrillic are derived) was taken over from the northwest-Semitic writing systems. The Greeks, in terming it as “Cadmean letters”, were highly conscious of its foreign origin, still considered it as part of their own culture; within a line of interpretation where they thought that whatever they took over from other people, they themselves perfected.

Such a European feeling of superiority might still stand behind many efforts in more recent times to impose the supposedly superior Latin alphabet on foreign cultures; plus some even quite recent theories by scholars who postulated a strong superiority to the Greek and Latin alphabet, compared to the Near Eastern writing systems. More recent research has cast strong doubts on such modern hypotheses.

Also within Asia, asymmetric flows of scripts are quite visible, especially the spread of south-Asian writing from India and the spread of Chinese systems to Korea and Japan (which many changes in how the system finally worked).

While there have been many “technical” studies on the derivation of one script from the other, much works remains to be done in order to put these phenomena firstly into their proper context by not only looking myopically at the functioning of the writing, but more broadly on the cultural and social circumstances of change, take-over and resistance. All these questions shall be discussed by a group of leading international specialist working in many different specialities, often involving little-studied languages and writing systems. One of the main aims is to understand writing not simply as a medium for conveying messages but as a cultural factor in its own right.

Kontakt:
Prof. Joachim Friedrich Quack
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Ägyptologisches Institut
Marstallhof 4, 69117 Heidelberg
Tel. 06221 542532, Fax 06221 5425551
joachim_friedrich.quack@urz.uni-heidelberg.de