SCRIPTS

A Synopsis for the subject of Business Communication & Ethics

Introduction
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication.
While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a
reliable form of information storage and transfer. The processes of encoding and decoding,
writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning
behind the sets of characters that make up a script.
The purposes and reasons for a writing system can involve cultural and social aspects as well
as the need to communicate visually. Since a writing system should fit the particular surrounding
societys culture & language, certain scripts were deemed more optimal than others.
Objective & Scope
The report wishes to highlight the constant evolution and development of various scripts across
the world, over the years. It also studies various modifications which scripts underwent owing to
external factors, leading to phenomenal growth of some scripts; and their lasting influence on
languages & dialects.
Work plan & methodology
What are scripts?
Basic cause:
Writing provides a way of extending human memory by imprinting
information into media less fickle than the human brain. writing was a very useful
invention for complex and high-population cultures. Writing was used for record
keeping to correctly count agricultural products, for keeping the calendar to plant
crops at the correct time. And writing was used for religious purpose (divination
and communicating with the supernatural world) and socio-political functions
(reinforcing the power of the ruling elite).
Most early writing systems begin with small images used as words, literally
depicting the thing in question. But pictograms of this kind are limited. Some
physical objects are too difficult to depict. And many words are concepts rather
than objects.
There are several ways in which early writing evolves beyond the pictorial
stage. One is by combining pictures to suggest a concept. Another is by a form of
pun, in which a pictorial version of one object is modified to suggest another quite
different object which sounds the same when spoken.
History
: writing was invented independently in at least three places, Mesopotamia,
China, and Mesoamerica. Recent discoveries might also provide evidence that
writing was invented in Egypt and Indus independently of Mesopotamia.

In about 3200 BC temple officials inSumerdevelop a reliable and lasting

method of keeping track of the animals and other goods which are the temple's
wealth. On lumps of wet clay the scribes draw a simpified picture of the item in
question. They then make a similar mark in the clay for the number counted and

recorded. When allowed to bake hard in the sun, the clay tablet becomes a
permanent document The second civilization to develop writing, shortly after the
Sumerians, is Egypt. The Egyptian characters are much more directly pictorial in
kind than the Sumerian, but the system of suggesting objects and concepts is
similar. As in the other great early civilizations, the bureaucrats of the Indus
valley have the benefit of writing to help them in their administration. The Indus
script, which has not yet been deciphered, is known from thousands of seals,
carved in steatite or soapstone.
The last of the early civilizations to develop writing is China, in about 1600 BC.
But China outdoes the others in devising a system which has evolved, as a
working script, from that day to this.
Pictographs(c.3500 - 3000 B.C.E.). In this stage, one pictograph or
symbol means what it looks like. For example, a picture of the sun means the "sun".
This stage was well suited for straight record keeping, but little else.
Ideographs(c.3000 - 2100 B.C.E.). Here the symbols can also mean
something a bit more abstract than their literal meaning. A sun can mean "day" as
well as "sun". A picture of legs can mean "legs" or "walk". Thus the uses of writing
were greatly expanded, although there are severe limits on what one can write this
way.
Rebus writing (c.2100 - 1000 B.C.E.). This was a critical turning point.
Up till now, one related to what the symbols looked like to tell the meaning. With
rebus writing, one used the phonetic sounds of words created by symbols to create
new words. For example, a word like "Neilson" would be very difficult to write with
pictographs unless everyone knew what Neilson looked like as distinguished from
other people. However, with rebus writing, one could use the sounds suggested by a
picture of a man kneeling plus a sun to build the word "Neilson". Rebus writing, by
making the reader relate to the ears, not the eyes, made it possible to write just about
anything. It was a complex system, however, since it required hundreds of symbols,
one for each syllable used in a language. Both Mesopotamian cuneiform and
Egyptian hieroglyphics used about 700 symbols.
Phonetic alphabet (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present). This system is
based on the fact that we can only make about twenty-five or so different sounds,
while we can combine those individual sounds into hundreds of symbols, each
requiring a different rebus. The alphabet simplifies the process vastly by using just
one symbol for each individual sound we make (e.g.--B, D, K, etc.). Although we
generally give credit for the alphabet to the Phoenicians (thus the term "phonetics"),
it seems the Egyptians also had an alphabet of sorts that the Phoenicians drew upon.
The Greeks completed the process by adding vowels, which the Egyptian and
Phoenician systems lacked.
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Significance:

The invention and spread of the much simpler alphabet meant that more people
could learn to read. As a result society was less dependent on scribes, whose status
declined accordingly. The alphabet also meant the uses of writing could expand to
such things as literature, poetry, and history. Before the alphabet the small number
of scribes had to devote most of their energies to running government and business.
With the alphabet, more people were literate and free to pursue more cultural
applications of writing. We should keep in mind that the vast majority of people,
especially the lower classes, remained illiterate until about a century ago.
The importance of writing to history is hard to overestimate. Without it,
kings, priests, and businessmen would not be able to keep track of anything beyond
their immediate surroundings. With it, trade routes could expand and kings could
keep the tax and census records necessary for expanding their city-states into
empires. Two subsequent inventions have built upon writing and expanded our
capabilities as a species by quantum leaps beyond what they had been before: the
printing press and the computer. Today, with the computer, we are witnessing a
revolution every bit as dramatic as writing was 5000 years ago. But it is important
that we keep in mind that the computer traces its lineage back to those first clay
tokens used to keep rudimentary records.

Types of scripts
Categories:
Abjad: A type of writing system where only consonants are generally
written. Some abjads have signs for vowels, but use them only in special cases,
such as loanwords or special kinds of texts. The name itself comes from the first
three letters of the Arabic script.
Types of Scripts
here are 30 instances: Arabic script, Aramaic script, Berber script,
Classical syriac, Early Sogdian, Early cursive Pahlavi, Edessan script, Elymaic
script, Hatran script, Hebrew, Hebrew linear, Himyarite, Mandaic script,
Manichaean, Nabatean script, Northern Linear, Old North Arabic scripts, Orkhon,
Pahlavi, Palmyrene, Parthian, Phoenician script, Psalter script, Punic script,
Samaritan script, Sogdian, Southern Linear, Tifinagh, Ugaritic, Uighur
Language:
Aramaic, Syriac, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew, Ladino, Bukhari, Yiddish,
Judeo-Arabic Arabic, Bosnian,Kashmiri, Kurdish, Kyrghyz, Malay,
Persian/Farsi, Pashto, Balochi, Turkish, Urdu, Uyghur, others
Writing styles :Right to left
Origin & growth:
The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike
other contemporary scripts, such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the
Phoenician script consisted of only about two dozen symbols. This made the script
easy to learn, and Phoenician seafaring merchants took the script wherever they
went.

Phoenician gave way to a number of new writing systems, including the

Greek alphabet and Aramaic, a widely used abjad. The Greek alphabet evolved
into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic
became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia..

Categories:
Abugida: A type of writing system in which each character represents a
consonant followed by a specific vowel, and the other vowels are represented by
a consistent modification of the consonant symbols.
Types of Scripts:
There are 55 instances: Amharic script, Batak, Baybayin, Bengali script,
Brahmi, Buhid, Burmese script, Calukya, Cham, Champa, Cree, Devanagari,
Dives akuru, Evela, Grantha, Gujarati, Gupta, Gurmukhi, Kadamba, Kaganga,
Kaithi, Kalinga, Kannada, Kharoshthi, Khmer script, Landa, Lanna script, Lao
script, Liek, Lontara, Malayalam script, Mangyan, Meroitic, Mon script, Nagari,
Old Javanese, Old kannada, Oriya script, Oromo script, Pallava grantha, 'Phags
pa, Proto-bengali, Ranjana, Rong, Sharada, Siddham, Sinhalese, Sukhothai,
Syloti Nagri, Tagbanwa, Tamil script, Telugu script, Thai script, Tibetan script,
Tjarakan.
Language: Ahom,BrahmiSan,skrit,Prakrit,Balines,Bengali, Assamese, Meithei,
Bishnupriya Manipuri,Bhaiksuki,Buhid,Burmese, Karen languages, Mon, and
Shan,Cham,Devanagari Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and many other
languages of northern India,Dhives Akuru,Sanskrit,Gujarti,
Kachchi,Punjabi,Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Kodava,Marathi,Malayalam
Writing styles :left to right

Origin & growth:

Abugida scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia. All
surviving Indic scripts are descendants of the Brahmi alphabet. Today
they are used in most languages of South Asia (although replaced by
Perso-Arabic in Urdu, Kashmiri and some other languages of Pakistan
and India) and mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Laos,
Cambodia; but not Malaysia or Vietnam). The primary division is into
North Indic scripts used in Northern India, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, and
Southern Indic scripts used in South India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
South Indic letter forms are very rounded; North Indic less so, though
Oriya, Golmol and Litumol of Nepal script are rounded.
Most North Indic scripts' full letters incorporate a horizontal line at the top,
with Gujarati and Oriya script as exceptions; South Indic scripts do not.

Categories:
Alphabet:

A type of writing system that denotes consonants and vowels with

separate characters.
Types of Scripts:
There are 44 instances: Armenian, Avestan, Beitha Kukju, Buryat, Carian,
Cirth, Coptic script, Cyrillic, Dania, Deseret, Elbasan, Etruscan script,
Ewellic, Georgian script, Geyinzi, Glagolithic, Gothic script, Greek,
Hungarian runes, Kutxovani, Latin script, Lycian, Lydian, Manchu, Modern
syriac, Mongolian clear script, Mongolian script, Mrglovani, N'ko, Ogham,
Ol, Osmanya, Read alphabet, Runic, Sarati, Shavian, Sidetic, Sorang
Sompeng, Tai Lue, Thaana, Theban alphabet, Utopian, Varang Kshiti,
Wawa writing.
Language:
English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, German,
Turkish, Vietnamese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Latin, others
Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Macedonian,

Writing styles :left to right

Origin & growth:

Origin of alphabet lies within ancient greek and latin
The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek
colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of
alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the
Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans
expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the
alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became
used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages)
and then for most of the other languages of Europe.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures,
such as in Danish and Icelandic and in Algonquian; by borrowings
from other alphabets, such as the thorn in Old English and Icelandic,
which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters,
such as the eth of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d.
Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as
Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign
words.

Categories:

Logosyllabary:.
A type of writing system whose characters denote morphemes,
and a subset of whose characters can be used for their phonetic syllabic
values without regard to their semantic values.
Types of Scripts:
here are 22 instances: Chinese script, Chu-nm, Cretan
hieroglyhpic, Cypro-minoan, Egyptian demotic, Egyptian hieratic,

Egyptian hieroglyphic, Elamite cuneiform, Hittite hieroglyphics,

Indus script, Jurchin script, Kitan large script, Kitan small script,
Linear A, Linear B, Maya hieroglyphs, Nushu, Proto-Elamite,
Proto-cuneiform, Sumero-akkadian cuneiform, Tangut, Wei writing.

Language:

Chinese, Japanese (Kanji), Korean (Hanja),[5]Vietnamese (Chu

Nom obsolete), Zhuang (Sawndip)
Writing styles :Top to bottom

Origin & growth:

Logographic systems, or logographies, include the earliest true writing
systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China,
and Central America used some form of logographic writing.
A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and
none are known, apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki
Pona, which is a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes. A
more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging,
currently including around 300 "icons." All logographic scripts ever used
for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively
limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic
values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to
emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the
phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and
in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such
phonetic elements with determinatives; such "radical and phonetic"
characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated
simple rebuses to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from nonstandard dialects.

Rise & fall of scripts:

Rise and fall of scripts depends on various factors like popularity of language,
literacy of population ,use of particular script in day-to-day life, government
policies etc. for eg Script of tulu extinct because british made kannada as state
language for all documentation purpose in Mhaisur state.
Some trivia:
- In Hunan, a province in Southern China, a unique script called Nushu has
been in use since the 12th century which is solely used by women and girls
only.
- In some variations of Judaism and Islam, images of living things are
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prohibited. A clever way that artists got around this tenet was to
use calligrams, a visual image that is formed entirely out of small
words.

Tifinagh alphabets of northern Africa composed of right angles, dots,

and perfect circles made it unique as compare to normal

horizontal/vertical writing system

Talking knots(knots tied into strings) is writing system used by inca

civilization
In ancient Egypt, the invention of writing is attributed to the god Thoth
(Dhwty in Egyptian), who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods
but also kept the calendar and invented art and science.
- Fictional scripts and languages were created for starwars movie
o Future prospects:
According to some scholars, due to digitalization ,computerization some styles of
writing may get extinct (Many western countries are feared by extinction of
cursive ) .According to some other scholars ,modernization can result in
extinction of original script for some language. But globalization and internet can
also play main role in revival of scripts which are verge of extinction (like few
Russian scripts).Development of writing system is constant and it continues with
time as language. people , Community evolves
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Conclusion
Communication techniques demanded written styles to improve, since relying only on verbal
communication had its own problems associated. As a result, pictorial & sign languages grew
and gave way to more complex and sophisticated scripts. Scripts increased to be more localized
and specific. Thus came the rise in interactions between people from different regions and led to
literary development. Globalisation has since contributed to make certain scripts widely popular
across the world.