Writing -a system of making permanent marks to represent

speech in awaysthe it can be retrieved / recalled exactly as it was said or

originally sent out. It was therefore a form / means of communication.
The invention of the 1st writing system is ,,, to the beginning of the bronze
age in the Neolithec age, around 14th BC). The oldest form of comm apart
from speech were the paintings surfaces, dating to the upper paleolithic
period,next came the engravings / petroglyphs on rock dated to around
10, 0000 bc.

Pictography is a form of proto – writing whereby ideas are transmitted via

drawing. The most important diff bet petroglyphs and pictograph are”
simply showing an event and pictogram are telling a story about the
event., hence can be in chronological order. both petroglyphs and
pictograph are basis for cuineif orm script and hierography and started to
evolve into logographic writing at about the 5,000 BC. Hence the earliest
form of writing was logograghic in nature. One of the earliest form or
writing was the summarian cuineiform script. Pictograph dev into
idealogram (graphical symbols tha rep an idea) eg two skicks= legs/
wa;lking . eye with tears crying/ sadness

Idealograph is a proto writing and evolved into logographic writng.

Most writing can be divided into 3- logograghic , syllabic writing and
alphabetic…

I INTRODUCTION

Calligraphy Student
A child learns to write his characters in calligraphy school in Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Japanese students take
calligraphy classes to learn the art of fine handwriting.
J.Corash/United Nations

Writing, a way of recording language in visible form and giving it relative permanence. Until the
invention of audio recording, speech was limited to those within earshot or on the other end of a
telephone, and it faded away immediately, except in the memories of speaker and hearer. Writing
overcomes this limitation and allows not only the storage of immense amounts of information but
its transmission to wherever a written message may be conveyed.

Writing is, therefore, a powerful instrument for transmitting culture from generation to generation.
It plays a crucial role in the development and continuation of complex civilizations, with their
elaborate technologies and economies, bodies of literature, codes of law, and other specializations,
each with its own body of knowledge to be preserved and transmitted. Some civilizations, such as
that of ancient India and of Viking Scandinavia, preserved amazing quantities of verbal material
with remarkably little change over long periods of time through sheer painstaking memorization.
But such a process has severe limitations, and the expenditure of human energy is immense.

Despite its advantages, writing was a very long time in being invented. Humans have written for
about 5,300 years, a very short time in the span of human history.

II PICTOGRAPHS AND IDEOGRAPHS

Stone Tablets from Mohenjo-Daro

These stone tablets were found at Mohenjo-Daro, an archaeological site in modern Pakistan. The city of
Mohenjo-Daro flourished during the Indus Valley civilization (2500?-1700 bc). Merchants used the stone tablets,
which show examples of pictographic writing, to mark their goods.
Charles and Josette Lenars/Corbis

Before the development of writing, many people drew pictures to convey messages or to serve as
reminders for one thing or another. This was not writing, however, because it did not portray
language. It only portrayed things and ideas. Writing comes only when the words that stand for
things and ideas are set down on paper, or clay, or stone, or parchment. The meanings of all
common words are generally known; the meanings of pictures can only be guessed by the viewer,
unless people sit down beforehand and agree on the meanings.
When used for communication, pictures of things are called pictographs. Pictures of ideas or
emotions, such as a picture of the sun for the idea of “warmth” or “day,” or of a hand pointing to
the mouth for “hungry,” are called ideographs. The two devices have often been used together.
The picture writing of the Plains Indians of North America and the sand or bark drawings of the
Aboriginal Australians are of such a mixed, or picto-ideographic, type. Pictographs and ideographs
often become highly conventionalized and stylized, losing much of their obvious representative
appearance and forming a quite complex system of signs. But no matter how sophisticated they
become, pictographs and ideographs are not regarded as writing.

III WRITING SYSTEMS

Only when language is graphically represented, that is, when written symbols bear some set,
agreed-on relation to the spoken forms of a language, such as words, does true writing begin. Then
writing, by representing language directly, comes to share its flexibility and power. From that point
on, the users of the system are limited in what they can write only by what they can say and by
their knowledge of the conventions of the writing system.

No examples of the development of true writing from a pictographic system have been found, but
it is believed that the next stage was the use of signs that indicated not only the appearance of an
object but, more importantly, the sound of a spoken word used for it.

A Logographic Systems

Tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef

In ancient Egypt, scribes used hieroglyphs to record state documents and important historical events.
Hieroglyphs with religious purposes also were painted on tomb walls and wooden coffins, such as these
hieroglyphs from the tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef, located in the Valley of the Queens.
Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis
Suppose, for example, that the mark O were agreed upon as the symbol for the word “sun,” and
only that word, not “day” or “heat” or “light,” as might be the case with an ideograph. Such a
precise symbol might well also be given other uses. It could serve as well for the word “son,” or as
the first syllable of the word “sundry.” Likewise, the mark O—, signifying “pan,” could serve to
denote not only the cooking utensil but also the beginning of dozens of words and phrases such as
“pantry” or “Pan-American” and the ends of words such as “marzipan.” This technique is familiar to
most children as a puzzle, known as the rebus. For example, a rebus containing pictures of an eye,
a tin can, a knot, a piece of meat, and a ewe would yield in English, “I cannot meet you.”

Linguists know this system as logographic writing. The logographic symbols, or logograms, such as
the picture of an eye, are not specific to any one language. For example, if the French were to
agree that O meant “sun,” they would not say “sun”; they would use their own word, soleil, the
sound of which is something like solay.

In one form or another, logographic writing developed independently among several peoples, most
notably the ancient Egyptians, whose writing is known as hieroglyphics (see hieroglyphs), the
ancient Chinese, and, much later, the Maya peoples of Yucatan in Mexico. The ancient
Mesopotamians also developed such a system, written in wedge-shaped symbols and known as
cuneiform.

B Syllabaries and Alphabetic Systems

Logograms did a great deal to advance the cause of writing. By emphasizing sound rather than
direct pictorial representation, they made possible the writing of language units that cannot easily
be represented pictorially, such as pronouns, prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes. But there were
many problems with the system. For one thing, the reader could not always tell whether a given
picture was meant to stand for itself or for its sound (Does a picture of a bee mean “bee” or does it
mean the verb “be” or does it mean the beginning of the word “believe”?) Second, the number of
individual symbols required in a logographic system is immense. Chinese, for example, has several
thousand. Third, an excessive precision was required for the pictorial symbols. A bee had to be
drawn to look just like a bee, so that it would not mistakenly be seen as a fly or a beetle.
Conventionalizing the characters to make them distinct helped somewhat. Two simplified scripts,
hieratic and demotic, were developed by the Egyptians to represent their hieroglyphs, but many
confusions and difficulties still remained (see Egyptian language).

The big last step, when it was finally taken, was very simple. Writing was altered so that it
expressed sounds only, with absolutely no inclusion of pictures or other directly representative
symbols. The sounds represented were sometimes syllables, in which instance the system is known
as a syllabary. In most cases, the sounds were the elementary sounds of a language, those that
serve to distinguish words from each other. Two such elementary sounds in English are p and b.
(Note: Throughout this article, italics will be used to designate sounds, as distinct from letters.)
Which one is chosen will determine, for example, whether a word is “pin” or “bin”; the smallest
difference between these two words is the difference between the sounds p and b. These
elementary units of sound are called phonemes, and writing systems based on the principle of one
symbol for one phoneme are called alphabets.
Alphabets and syllabaries are much more efficient than logographic systems. The number of
symbols is much smaller, and learning the writing system is much easier. A syllabary may require
between 50 and 200 symbols, and an alphabet may require as few as 15 or 20, to represent all the
words in the language. English, which has about 33 phonemes in most dialects, would ideally
require 33 symbols.

Alphabetic and syllabary systems are rarely pure. English, for example, uses some logographs,
such as +, -, &, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and so on. Other languages use these same symbols,
with the same meanings, but with different sounds. In English 93 is ninety-three (90 + 3), but in
German it is dreiundneunzig (3 + 90), in French quatre-vingt treize ([4 × 20] + 13), and in Danish
treoghalvfems (3 + [4½ × 20]). English also makes occasional use of a syllabary system. It does so
when such abbreviations as U.S.A., UN, or TVA are pronounced. Other abbreviations, however, such
as NATO, pronounced naytow, or UNESCO, pronounced yunesco, are alphabetic.

IV HISTORY OF WRITING

Writing systems always tended to change slowly, and people often attributed their origins to divine
sources. Any change or modification was met with great hesitation, and even today, attempts to
reform spelling or eliminate inconsistencies in writing conventions meet with strong resistance.
Because of this conservatism major innovations in the structure of a writing system occurred
primarily when one people borrowed a system from another people. The Akkadians, for example,
adapted the syllabic portion of the Sumerian logo-syllabic system to their own language, but
retained the logograms, and used them regularly as a type of shorthand (see Sumerian Language).
When the Hittites borrowed the system from the Akkadians for their own language, they eliminated
most of the syllabic signs that represented sounds as well as many of the Sumerian logograms, but
they used a number of Akkadian syllabic spellings as logograms (see Hittite Language).

Linguists continue to debate which writing system came first: the Egyptian or Sumerian. In recent
decades, however, an increasing number of scholars have supported the theory that the Sumerian
writing system is older, although its origin is unknown, and that Egypt gained the notion of writing
through trade with the Sumerians.

Some scholars long supported a belief that Egyptian writing was based on a syllabic system and
that the Egyptians borrowed their syllabary from the Semitic peoples of Palestine and Syria. These
scholars regarded the hieroglyphic signs as symbols and interpreted them accordingly. For
example, they assumed that the ancient Egyptians wrote their word for “son” with a picture of a
goose as the result of a belief that the goose loves its offspring more than any other animal does.
However, Egyptologists now know that hieroglyphics are phonetic and that the ancient Egyptian
words for “son” and “goose” sounded alike.

Sometime after the Sumerians and Egyptians developed writing systems, so-called Proto-Elamite
writing developed in Elam. This system has yet to be deciphered, and nothing can be said of its
nature at the present time except that, from the number of signs used, it is logo-syllabic. Logo-
syllabic systems of writing also developed, at a later date, in the Aegean, in Anatolia, in the Indus
Valley, and in China (see Chinese Language). From these logo-syllabic systems, syllabaries were
borrowed by other peoples to write their own languages.
One of the earliest examples of semialphabetic writing is found in the so-called Proto-Sinaitic
inscriptions, which date back to about 1500 BC. Another such system, dated to about 1300 BC, was
found at Ugarit on the northern Syrian coast, but in this case the writing was inscribed on clay in
the manner of Mesopotamian cuneiform. Similar writing systems were developed by the other
peoples of this region, and it was from the Phoenicians that the Greeks borrowed their writing
system. The Greeks took the final step of separating the consonants from the vowels and writing
each separately, thus arriving at full alphabetic writing about 800 BC (see Greek Language). Many
people regard the alphabet as the best possible system of writing, although this belief may simply
represent a cultural prejudice on the part of alphabet users: It is “best” because it is “mine.”
However, each type of writing demands a similar amount of effort to record similar amounts of
information.

See also Alphabet and the separate articles on all the individual letters of the English alphabet.

Contributed By:
Ignace Jay Gelb
R. M. Whiting
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Cuneiform
I INTRODUCTION

Cuneiform (Latin cuneus, “wedge”), term applied to a mode of writing utilizing wedge-shaped
strokes, inscribed mainly on clay but also on stone, metals, wax, and other materials. This
technique was used by the ancient people of Western Asia. The earliest texts in cuneiform script
were made in about 3000 BC, having antedated the use of alphabets by some 1500 years. The
latest cuneiform inscriptions date from the 1st century AD. Cuneiform writing, which originated in
southern Mesopotamia, was invented probably by the Sumerians, who used it to inscribe the
Sumerian language; it was subsequently adapted for writing the Akkadian language, of which
Babylonian and Assyrian are dialects. Because Akkadian, the language of later inhabitants of
Sumer, became the language of international communication it was studied in schools throughout
the ancient Middle East, and the use of cuneiform spread to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and, for
diplomatic correspondence, to Egypt. It was also adapted for the writing of local languages, such as
Hurrian in northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor; Eblaite in Syria; Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, and
Hattic in Asia Minor; Urartian, known also as Vannic, in Armenia; and Elamite in Persia. New
systems of writing, using the wedge as the basic writing tool but differing from the Babylonian
system in terms of the shape and use of characters, were devised also. Such systems were
developed in Ugarit (Ra’s Shamrah, Syria) to inscribe Ugaritic, a Semitic language, and in Persia to
inscribe the Old Persian language of the Persian Empire (550-331 BC)bc.
II EARLY METHODS OF INSCRIPTION

The earliest cuneiform inscriptions were composed of pictographs. It was far easier, however, to
imprint straight lines in the soft clay with a special instrument than to draw in the irregular lines of
the pictographs. Consequently a stylus, suited to making tapered impressions, was invented, and
the outlines of the pictographs were gradually altered into patterns composed of wedge-shaped
lines, which became so stylized that they bore little resemblance to the original pictograph
characters.

Originally, each sign stood for a word. Because words that could not themselves be pictured were
expressed by pictographs of related objects (for example, god by a star, to stand and to go by a
foot), some signs stood for several different words. Because most Sumerian words are
monosyllabic, the signs were soon used as mere syllables regardless of their original meaning.
Signs that had more than one reading as word signs or logograms also acquired several syllabic
values. This multitude of readings is known as polyphony. On the other hand, Sumerian has many
words that sound alike (homonyms); syllabic values taken from such homonyms also coincide; they
are known as homophones.

The fully developed cuneiform system had more than 600 signs. About half of these could be used
as either logograms or syllables, the others as logograms only. Word signs also served as
determinatives to indicate the class (such as man, tree, stone) to which a word belonged. The
system remained a mixture of logograms and syllables throughout its existence. When it was
applied to another language, the logograms were simply read in that language. Although at times a
tendency existed to simplify the script by reducing the number of logograms and the use of
polyphony, the step to an alphabet, in which each sign stands for one sound, was never made in
standard cuneiform; only the Ugaritic and Old Persian scripts reached that stage.

III ATTEMPTS AT TRANSLATION

Cuneiform
The ancient peoples of Western Asia used cuneiform, a system of writing into clay or stone tablets that
probably originated in Sumeria. Scholars learned to decipher cuneiform after finding inscriptions on the
Behistun Rock, a cliff in western Iran. The Behistun Inscription was written in three languages: Persian,
Babylonian and Elamite, all of which used cuneiform as a system of writing. Translation of the inscription was
helped by the resemblance of Persian and Babylonian to modern languages, and by the fact that all three
inscriptions contain the same text.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

No one guessed the meaning of the wedges when early travelers found cuneiform in some of the
ruins that were discovered, especially the ruins of Persepolis, in Iran. Pietro della Valle, an Italian
traveler, in 1621 noticed the 413 lines of inscription on the mountain wall at Behistun in western
Iran (see Behistun Inscription) and copied some of the signs. In 1674 Jean Chardin, a French trader,
published complete groups of cuneiforms and noted that the inscriptions always appeared in sets
of three parallel forms. The first real progress toward reading the writing at Behistun was made by
Carsten Niebuhr, a German member of a Danish scientific expedition to the Middle East from 1761
to 1767. He correctly thought the threefold inscriptions to be transcripts of the same text in three
different kinds of unknown writing and in 1777 he published the first accurate and complete copies
of the Behistun inscriptions. These great trilingual inscriptions of Darius I, king of Persia, were
written in Persian, Elamite (formerly known as Susian), and Babylonian cuneiforms. The three
systems of writing were used by the Persian kings of the Achaemenid dynasty to make their
decrees known to three subject nations.

The Persian cuneiform was the first of the inscriptions to be deciphered.The German scholars Oluf
Gerhard Tychsen and Georg Friedrich Grotefend and the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask
each identified several signs. The French Orientalist Eugene Burnouf finally deciphered most of the
signs of the Persian cuneiform system, and the British Assyriologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson
independently interpreted the text he had copied afresh from the Behistun rock and published the
results in 1846. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform was made easier by existing
knowledge of Pahlavi, a later Persian language. The Persian is the simplest and the most recent of
all the cuneiform systems. It contains 36 characters that are almost entirely alphabetic, although
they are used also for certain simple syllables. In addition, the Persian cuneiform system has a
word divider. The use of the Persian cuneiform was confined to the period from 550 to 330 BC. The
oldest example of this cuneiform is probably an inscription of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae and
the most recent that of Artaxerxes III (reigned 358?-338 BC) at Persepolis.

The Elamite cuneiform is frequently called the language of the second form because it appears in
the second position of the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. Decipherment of it was
first undertaken by the Danish Orientalist Neils Ludvig Westergaard in 1844. The fact that the same
text is repeated word for word in each cuneiform of the trilingual inscriptions was of great
importance in translation of the Elamite, in which no modern language or hitherto known language
gave any help. This system contains 96 syllabic signs, 16 logograms, and 5 determinants. The
readings of the Elamite characters are in general fairly clear, although some words are still
uncertain. The Babylonian version of the Behistun text was deciphered through the united efforts
of the French Orientalist Jules Oppert, the Irish Orientalist Edward Hincks, the French archaeologist
Louis Frédérick Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, and Rawlinson. The similarity of the language written in
this third cuneiform system to well-known Semitic dialects was helpful in decipherment. The
Behistun records gave the first clue to deciphering it, but it is now known that the Babylonian
cuneiform was in use more than 2000 years before the Behistun records were inscribed. Many
documents of great antiquity in this cuneiform have been found in Babylon, Nineveh, and other
places near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Babylonian cuneiform was inscribed on seals,
cylinders, stone obelisks, statues, and the walls of palaces. It appears on a great many clay tablets,
some as large as 22.8 cm by 15.2 cm (9 in by 6 in) and others little more than 2.54 cm sq (little
more than 1 in sq). The writing is often very small. Some tablets carry six lines per 2.54 cm and
must be read with a magnifying glass.

IV MODERN KNOWLEDGE OF CUNEIFORM

Definite proof that the cuneiform signs were originally pictographs was lacking until early
pictographic inscriptions could be found. The German scholar Friedrich Delitzch in 1897 opposed
the view that cuneiform signs were originally pictographs, holding instead that they developed
from a comparatively small number of basic signs. Combinations of such basic signs, he held,
yielded in the course of time hundreds of cuneiform signs. The theory was received with mixed
approval, but most scholars inclined toward the theory of pictorial origin. The principle of pictorial
origin was finally established in 1913 by the American Orientalist George Aaron Bartonin The Origin
and Development of Babylonian Writing, which presented a collection of 288 pictographs found in
early cuneiform inscriptions and traced their development. According to Barton, the original signs
were modeled after the human body and its parts and after mammals, birds, insects, fishes, trees,
stars and clouds, earth and water, buildings, boats, household furniture and utensils, fire, weapons,
clothing, implements of worship, nets, traps, pottery, and musical instruments. Excavations
conducted by German archaeologists from 1928 to 1931 at Erech (Uruk), on the site of present-day
Al Warkā’, Iraq, yielded the oldest-known examples of pictograph writing on clay tablets.

The translation of cuneiform writing has contributed greatly to present knowledge of early Assyria
and Babylonia and the Middle East in general. The cuneiform Code of Hammurabi is one of the
most important documents to emerge from pre-Christian antiquity. Other tablets have helped to
clarify the history of ancient Egypt. A cuneiform script discovered in 1929 during the French
excavations of Ra’s Shamrah in North Syria has proven to be an alphabet of consonants; it was
estimated to have been in use from about 1400 to 1200 BC. The mythological texts written in this
so-called Ra’s Shamrah cuneiform alphabet have thrown light on the religious life of ancient Syria
and have bearing upon the reinterpretation of some aspects of the Bible.

Contributed By:
Hans G. Güterbock
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

....................................

Hieroglyphs
I INTRODUCTION
Tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef
In ancient Egypt, scribes used hieroglyphs to record state documents and important historical events.
Hieroglyphs with religious purposes also were painted on tomb walls and wooden coffins, such as these
hieroglyphs from the tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef, located in the Valley of the Queens.
Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis

Hieroglyphs, characters in any system of writing in which symbols represent objects (such as tools,
animals, or boats) and ideas (such as motion, time, and joy). The word comes from a Greek term
meaning 'sacred carving,' which the ancient Greeks used to describe decorative characters carved
on Egyptian monuments. The term is now mainly used to refer to the system of writing used by the
ancient Egyptians.

Archaeological discoveries suggest that Egyptian hieroglyphs may be the oldest form of writing.
The earliest evidence of an Egyptian hieroglyphic system is believed to be from about 3300 or
3200 BC, and the Egyptians used hieroglyphs for the next 3,500 years. They were most prevalent
during a 1,700-year period when the Egyptians spoke and wrote Old Egyptian (3000 BC-2200 BC)
and Middle Egyptian (about 2200 BC-1300 BC). Only a small portion of the Egyptian population,
primarily royalty, priests, and civil officials, used hieroglyphs because they were difficult to learn
and time consuming to create. Ancient cultures in China, Mesopotamia, and the Americas used
similar writing systems, but these systems were not related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

II GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND FORM

The hieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had between 700 and 800 basic symbols, called
glyphs. This number grew in the last centuries of ancient Egyptian civilization, because of an
increased interest in writing religious texts. Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in long lines from right to
left, and from top to bottom. They did not use spaces or punctuation.
Egyptian glyphs are divided into two groups: phonograms, which are glyphs that represent sounds,
and ideograms, which are glyphs that represent objects or ideas. The Egyptians constructed words
by using a combination of the two types of glyphs. Readers must generally use both phonograms
and ideograms to determine the significance of a word or phrase.

Phonograms represented the sounds of single consonants and combinations of consonants. A

phonogram that represents the two consonant sounds s (on the right) and r (on the left) is:

The Egyptians did not write vowels, so it is impossible to know exactly how they pronounced
hieroglyphic texts. When speaking, they may have expressed vowel sounds to distinguish various
words that, in writing, look identical.

Ideograms could represent either the specific object written or something closely related to it. For
example, the hieroglyphic symbol of a pair of legs might represent the noun movement. When
combined with other glyphs, the symbol could represent the verb to approach, or the concept to
give directions.

The Egyptians usually constructed their hieroglyphs by putting phonograms at the beginning of a
word, followed by an ideogram, which is called a determinative when used in this fashion. The
determinative specified the category to which the word belonged, such as motion words or animal
words, and clued the reader in on the intended meaning. Following are several examples of
hieroglyphs with the sounds s and r that combine phonograms and determinatives:
When speaking, the Egyptians might have differentiated between these words by adding vowel
sounds—for example, by saying sor, ser, or sur. Because they did not write vowels, however, they
used the determinatives that appeared to the left of the phonograms to specify each word’s
meaning. Writing phonograms and determinatives in different combinations enabled the Egyptians
to develop thousands of words without having to create a single distinct glyph for each thing,
action, or concept.

III USING HIEROGLYPHS

Section of the Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a text containing prayers, spells, and hymns, the knowledge of which was
to be used by the dead to guide and protect the soul on the hazardous journey through the afterlife. Beginning
in the 18th Dynasty, the Book of the Dead was inscribed on papyrus. This section of one such book, from the
early 19th Dynasty, shows the final judgment of the deceased (in this case Hu-Nefer, the royal scribe) before
Osiris, god of the dead. Hieroglyphs as well as illustrations portray the ritual of weighing the deceased’s heart
to determine whether he can be awarded eternal life.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The ancient Egyptian word for hieroglyphs, literally translated as “language of the gods,” indicates
their importance. Priests used hieroglyphs to write down prayers, magical texts, and texts related
to life after death and worshiping the gods. When preparing their tombs, many people had
autobiographies and hieroglyphic guides of the afterworld written on the surfaces of tomb walls
and on the insides of coffins. The Egyptians believed that these texts helped guide the dead
through the afterlife.

The use of hieroglyphic inscriptions was not limited to religious purposes. Civil officials used them
to write royal documents of long-term importance, to record historical events, and to document
calculations, such as the depth of the Nile River on a specific day of the year.

The Egyptians also used hieroglyphs to decorate jewelry and other luxury items. They carved the
symbols into stone or wood, and incised or cast them in gold, silver, and other metals. They
painted hieroglyphs on various surfaces, sometimes putting down simple figures in black ink, and
other times using detail and bright colors. Occasionally artists carved semiprecious stones or rare
woods into hieroglyphic shapes and then inlaid them into walls or pieces of furniture.

IV HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

Egyptian Relief
The ancient Egyptians decorated tombs with paintings and reliefs to ensure that the deceased spent eternity in
a comfortable and familiar environment. This relief, from the 5th Dynasty (2465 bc-2323 bc), shows the
deceased seated at a table stacked with offerings of food.
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

A standardized form of hieroglyphs developed rapidly in the earliest years of Egypt’s Early Dynastic
Period (2920 BC-2575 BC)). Little change in the system took place during the following 2,600-year
period of Egyptian civilization.
Hieroglyphs were very time consuming to create, so the Egyptians developed a cursive script
called hieratic in the early years of hieroglyphic use. The characters of the hieratic script were
based on the hieroglyphic symbols, but they were simplified and little resembled their hieroglyphic
origins. Hieratic was used for the bulk of writing done with reed pens and ink on papyrus. In the 7th
century BC the Egyptians began using a script called demotic, which was even more simplified than
hieratic. After this point hieroglyphs continued to be used in carved inscriptions on buildings,
jewelry, and furniture, but hieratic was used for religious writings, and demotic for business and
literary texts.

Hypostyle Hall, Temple of Amon at Karnak

The hypostyle hall at the Temple of Amon in Karnak, Egypt, contains more than 100 columns, each more than
20 m (70 ft) high and decorated with engraved hieroglyphs. The hall was built during the reign of Ramses II in
the 1200s bc.
SuperStock

A major change in hieroglyphs took place under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (305-30 BC), when Egypt
was ruled by a Greek dynasty. During this time the Egyptians created many new glyphs. Priests
were especially interested in writing religious texts in more mysterious and complex manners. The
priests often used new glyphs to form specialized codes and puns understood only by a group of
religious initiates. After the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BC, the use of hieroglyphs declined, and
eventually their use died out. The last firmly datable hieroglyphic inscription was written in AD 394.

V DECIPHERING HIEROGLYPHS
Rosetta Stone
A French officer of Napoleon’s engineering corps found this stone near the city of Rashîd (Rosetta), Egypt, in
1799. Known as the Rosetta Stone, it provided the key to the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The
Rosetta Stone, inscribed in 196 bc, contains the same message—a decree praising the Egyptian King Ptolemy V
—carved in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and Greek. Scholars deciphered the
hieroglyphic and demotic versions by comparing them to the Greek translation.
Bridgeman/Art Resource, NY

After the fall of ancient Egyptian civilization in 30 BC, the meaning of hieroglyphs remained a
mystery for about 1,800 years. Then, during the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801, a
group of French soldiers and engineers uncovered a large stone now known as the Rosetta Stone.
This stone bore an ancient inscription containing the same text written three different ways—in
hieroglyphs, in the demotic script, and in ancient Greek. The stone was taken to Europe, where
scholars translated the ancient Greek and used the information to decipher the other two texts.

French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion was the first modern person who was able to read
hieroglyphs. It had been noted that certain groups of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone were
surrounded by a carved oblong loop. The loop, called a cartouche, separated the names of kings
and queens from large bodies of text. Champollion knew enough of hieroglyphs to confirm that the
cartouches on the Rosetta Stone contained the name of one of the Greek rulers of Egypt, Ptolemy
V. As Champollion examined more cartouches, he observed that some of the glyphs matched
between Ptolemy’s cartouche and the other cartouches. Champollion determined that certain
glyphs in the cartouches phonetically spelled out the names of certain Greek rulers of Egypt. Using
this knowledge and an ingenious reading of ideograms in other cartouches, he deciphered the
names of the native rulers Ramses and Thutmose.

Champollion’s discovery showed him definitively that there were two categories of glyphs,
phonograms and ideograms. Champollion then began to use this information to decipher the large
body of Egyptian hieroglyphs on objects that had been taken to Europe. In 1828 he led a group of
artists and architects to Egypt with the goal of drawing pictures of tombs, temples, and
monuments and copying down as many hieroglyphic inscriptions as possible. He later translated
the hieroglyphs from the drawings. The work of deciphering the hieroglyphs went on after
Champollion’s death and continues up to the present day, continually providing new information
about life in ancient Egypt.

VI HIEROGLYPHS IN OTHER CULTURES

Madrid Codex
The Madrid Codex is one of the four preserved codices (manuscript volumes) of Maya hieroglyphs. It dates from
shortly before the arrival of Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, several centuries after the decline of the
vast Maya civilization around 900. This codex reads as a kind of prophetic almanac, predicting successful times
for such activities as hunting and idol-making.
Newberry Library, Chicago/SuperStock

People in several other ancient cultures, such as ancient China and Mesopotamia, used hieroglyphs
much like the Egyptians did. Over a long period, however, the characters used in these systems
became so stylized or simplified that the original pictorial symbols were no longer apparent. These
scripts are no longer considered hieroglyphic.

The best-known hieroglyphs outside of Egypt that retained their pictorial elements are those of the
Maya and Olmec, who inhabited areas in present-day Central and North America. Although totally
unrelated to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya and Olmec hieroglyphs bear certain similarities, such as
the use of a combination of sound and object glyphs.

The Maya were especially concerned with exactly recording time using astronomical observations.
Many Maya glyphs were part of a calendar that recorded specific days, weeks, and years, as well
as the genealogies of important families. Scribes carved hieroglyphs on stone slabs, altars, and
wooden beams and painted them on ceramic vessels and in books made of bark paper. One
characteristic that distinguishes Maya glyphs is their compact, blocklike form. While Egyptian
hieroglyphs were written in long, unpunctuated lines of individual glyphs without spaces or
punctuation, Maya ones appear in rectangles or blocks. Most Maya hieroglyphs survive as carvings
on stone structures.
Contributed By:
Thomas Hare
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Alphabet
I INTRODUCTION

Bengali Script
India developed a number of different writing systems over the course of its history. Bengali, which developed
toward the end of the 14th century, belongs to the Indo-Aryan language group. But its writing system is used
not only for Bengali, Assamese, and other Indian languages in that group, but also for writing several languages
in the Tibeto-Burman language subfamily. The photograph shows a page with letters of the Bengali alphabet
and their pronunciations in Roman letters.
V.H. Mishra/Dinodia Picture Library

Alphabet, set of letters or other symbols, each representing a distinctive sound of a language.
These letters can be combined to write all the words of a language. The letters of an alphabet
typically have names and a fixed order. Alphabets are the most common type of writing in the
world today. Only a few languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, do not use an alphabet.
Braille Alphabet
In the Braille alphabet, each letter, number, and punctuation mark consists of one to six raised dots. Blind
people can read the characters by feeling the arrangement of the raised dots with their fingers.
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

The first alphabet was probably developed at least 3,500 years ago by people who lived on the
eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and spoke a Semitic language. The earliest surviving
alphabet is that of the Phoenicians (see Phoenicia). Around 3,000 years ago the Phoenician
alphabet spread east to other Semitic peoples and west to the Greeks. The word alphabet comes
from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The Greeks helped spread
alphabetic writing to the Etruscans and the Romans and through much of the rest of the ancient
world.

There are about 50 individual alphabets in use today. They vary greatly in appearance, historical
descent, and the degree to which they conform to the ideal of one letter for one sound. Like the
Roman alphabet used for English, most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters. Languages with
comparatively few sounds require fewer letters. The sounds of the Hawaiian language, for
example, are written using only 12 letters of the Roman alphabet, the fewest letters of any
language. Other alphabets, such as Sinhalese, the alphabet of Sri Lanka, have 50 letters or more.

II BEFORE THE ALPHABET

An alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate symbol. The Romans
more or less achieved this ideal with a 21-letter alphabet, which they used for writing their Latin
language. Later European languages that adopted the Roman alphabet approached this goal with
varying success. Finnish and Turkish were highly successful, whereas English, French, and Gaelic
have strayed quite far. English, for example, can represent the long o sound with a single o (as in
go), the letters ow (as in glow), the letters oa (as in throat), and the letters ew (as in sew). The
Korean alphabet, which was invented by scholars in the mid-1400s, most completely achieves the
ideal of one symbol for one sound (see Korean Language).

Some writing systems represent a combination of sounds that form a syllable, rather than a single
sound. The syllables usually consist of a consonant and a vowel, such as su, but they can also
represent an entire word, such as sun. Such systems, called syllabaries, can come close to the
ideal of a symbol for each sound, but they are not considered true alphabets because each syllable
represents more than a single sound. Syllabic writing systems are also more difficult to learn than
alphabets, because they have so many more symbols. Written Chinese, for example, uses
thousands of symbols, or characters. Each character represents a syllable, and the syllable also is a
word that carries a meaning. Japanese has two complete syllabaries—the hiragana and the
katakana—which were devised to supplement the characters that Japanese took over from the
Chinese writing system.

A Pictographic and Ideographic Systems

Early systems of writing used pictures to represent things and then to represent the sounds of
those things. Pictographic writing, in which a simplified picture of the sun stood for the word sun,
was probably the first step toward a written language. Chinese began as a pictographic language.
To represent abstract ideas, the Chinese writing system combined pictographs. For example, the
pictographs for sun and tree were combined to represent the concept of east. This method of
combining pictographs to represent the words for ideas is known as an ideographic system. In
written Chinese today, however, most of the characters for tangible items no longer resemble
specific objects.

Pictographs and ideographs provide an inefficient system for writing: There are simply too many
things to represent. Moreover, a string of pictures cannot reproduce what language creates: a
sentence with a grammatical structure. A crucial step in the development of writing was freeing the
pictograph or ideograph from the thing it represented and linking it to a sound. The ancient
Sumerians generally receive credit for this advance.

B Phonetic Systems

The Sumerians began writing about 3200 BC by drawing pictures on tablets of wet clay. In time
they found it more efficient to press the pictures into the clay with a writing instrument made from
a reed. The wedge-shaped marks produced by the reed, which are now known as cuneiform, soon
lost their resemblance to the original pictures. Because the Sumerian language was largely
monosyllabic (consisting of single-syllable words), the sign for a word could equally well stand for
the sound of that syllable. Sumerian cuneiform was a mixture of word signs and syllables; some
symbols served both purposes, some were simply word signs.

The Akkadians, an early Semitic people, turned cuneiform into a syllabary about 2300 BC. Although
they spoke a language unrelated to Sumerian, they adopted the syllabic sound values associated
with the cuneiform wedges, without their meanings. The Akkadians then used the wedge shapes to
create a phonetic (sound-based) system for writing their own language. Whereas each symbol
carried a meaning in the Sumerian language, the symbols provided only a guide to pronunciation in
Akkadian. During the centuries after 2300 BC other Near Eastern peoples, including the Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Hittites, also began using syllabic, sound-based cuneiform for writing (see Assyro-
Babylonian Language; Hittite Language).
A phonetic, or sound, system greatly reduces the number of written characters needed, because
languages have only a limited number of sounds. The change from a pictographic-ideographic
system to a phonetic system did not happen immediately, however. Several ancient cultures
employed both the old ideographs and the new phonetic symbols. The ancient Egyptians created a
pictographic system shortly after the Sumerians, about 3100 BC, by drawing on papyrus—a
paperlike material made from the papyrus plant. Egyptian hieroglyphs represented not only entire
words but also sounds whose meanings were unrelated to the pictures. Scholars do not know
whether the Egyptians developed a phonetic system independently or borrowed the idea from the
Sumerians. Recent studies of the picture writing of the Maya of Mexico and Central America
indicate that their system also represented syllables. Such a word-based system becomes an
alphabet (single-sound based system) or syllabary (sound-group based system) when pictographs
or ideographs are used to represent a spoken sound without an associated meaning.

In many ancient cultures the symbol for a sound came from a pictograph for a common word,
signifying the word’s initial sound. In early Semitic languages, for example, the pictograph
representing the word for house, beth in the spoken language, eventually came to represent the
sound of the consonant b, the first sound in beth. This Semitic symbol, which originally stood for
the entire word beth and later for the sound b, became the β of the Greek and Roman alphabets
and finally the uppercase B of the English alphabet. If English used the system of a picture to
represent the first sound of a word, we might write the word sat by drawing sun + apple + table.
We would have to learn not to interpret those pictures as circle + fruit + furniture.

III THE EARLIEST ALPHABETS

Most scholars believe that the first known alphabet developed along the eastern Mediterranean
coast between 1700 and 1500 BC. Because this alphabet has not survived, scholars must draw
conclusions about it from surviving alphabets that developed from it. The people who developed
this alphabet, which was known as North Semitic, seem to have had some knowledge of cuneiform
and hieroglyphic symbols. Some of the alphabet’s symbols may also have been taken from related
writing systems, such as those used by the Minoans and Hittites. The sounds represented in the
North Semitic alphabet consisted exclusively of consonants. The reader had to supply the vowel
sounds of a word. As in nearly all alphabets, the letters had names and a fixed order. Nearly all the
alphabets now used in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa ultimately derive from the original
Semitic alphabet.

A North Semitic Alphabets

Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 characters, all of them consonants. Some of the characters can also
represent vowels, as can marks written above, below, or next to consonants. Five characters are written in a
different way, called a final form, when they appear at the end of a word. The Hebrew language is written from
right to left.
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

The Phoenicians, who lived in what is now Lebanon, created the earliest North Semitic alphabet
known today. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters to represent consonant sounds. Further north
on the coast of what is now Syria, another North Semitic-speaking group in the city-state of Ugarit
developed an alphabet of 30 consonants, written in cuneiform, about 1400 BC. The Ugaritic
alphabet was written in cuneiform, although its wedge shapes did not resemble Babylonian
syllables. Its letters had the same order as the Phoenician alphabet, although the precise
relationship remains unclear between the Ugaritic letters pressed into clay and the Phoenician
letters drawn on papyrus. Ugarit was destroyed in 1200 BC, and scholars today know little about
the development of its alphabet.

Other ancient Semitic groups, including the early Hebrews, the Moabites, and the Aramaeans, used
variants of Phoenician writing. Aramaic became the dominant language in the Middle East from the
6th century BC on, adopted by the Persian Empire and by the Jews of Palestine. The square letter
shapes of Aramaic diverged from the pointed Phoenician letters, and they became the basis for
several later alphabets, including Arabic and the form of written Hebrew still used today.

The present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of consonant letters only, Hebrew
having 22 letters and Arabic 28. Some of these letters, however, acquired the added function of
representing long vowels. Another method of indicating vowels in written Hebrew or Arabic is by
adding dots or dashes placed below, above, or to the side of the consonant. This system for
indicating vowels developed for Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic during the 8th and 9th centuries AD
to ensure the correct reading of sacred texts, and avoid the multiple readings possible when
vowels are missing. Bls, for example, could be read as bless, bliss, bills, or bales. Like Phoenician
and other Semitic languages, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic are written from the right to the left.
See Arabic Language; Hebrew Language; Aramaic Language; Semitic Languages.

Many scholars believe that about 1000 BC four branches developed from the original North Semitic
alphabet: South Semitic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Greek. (Other scholars, however, believe that
South Semitic developed independently from North Semitic or that both developed from a common
ancestor.) The South Semitic branch was the ancestor of the alphabets of now-extinct languages
once used in the Arabian Peninsula and of the alphabets used for the modern languages of Ethiopia
and Eritrea, in particular Amharic and Tigrinya. Canaanite was subdivided into Early Hebrew and
Phoenician, and the extremely important Aramaic branch became the basis of Semitic and non-
Semitic scripts throughout western and southern Asia. The non-Semitic group was the basis of the
alphabets of nearly all Indian and Southeast Asian scripts.

B Greek and Roman Alphabets

Greek Alphabet
Ancient and modern Greek are both written in the Greek alphabet, which consists of 24 letters. The word
alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

The Greeks adopted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, including the order of the
letters. Some scholars believe this adoption occurred as early as 1100 BC, whereas others favor a
date around 800 BC, shortly before the earliest surviving text in the Greek alphabet was written—
on a wine jug. The Greek and Phoenician languages had many of the same consonants, but Greek
was left without letters for some consonants and with letters it did not need. The Greeks, as a
result, were able to assign new sound values to the leftover Phoenician letters. Most importantly,
the Greeks let some letters represent vowel sounds, making Greek the first language to contain
letters of equal status for consonants and vowels. The Greeks also added four new letters—phi, psi,
chi, and omega—to the end of the alphabet, expanding it to 24 symbols. Although the Greeks
originally adopted the right-to-left direction of Phoenician writing, many Greek documents show
one line written from right to left and the next line written from left to right. This method is called
boustrophedon, from Greek words meaning “ox-plow turning,” because it follows the direction of
an ox in plowing. By about 500 BC left to right had become the standard direction of Greek writing.

Among the important descendants of the Greek alphabet was the Etruscan alphabet, from which
the Roman, or Latin, system was derived. The earliest known example of the Roman alphabet is an
inscription on a gold brooch from the 6th century BC. Because of Roman conquests and the spread
of the Latin language, the Roman alphabet became the basic alphabet of all the languages of
western Europe.

The Romans originally took 21 of the Greek and Etruscan letters to represent the sounds of their
language. The Greek letters upsilon (Y) and zeta (Z), unnecessary in early Latin, dropped out. But
the Romans valued Greek culture highly and borrowed many words from Greek. By the 1st century
BC they had brought back the letters Y and Z for spelling some of the borrowed words. These
letters were eventually added to the end of the alphabet. During the Middle Ages, j and u appeared
in writing as variants of i and v, respectively; they acquired the status of separate letters during
the Renaissance. In northern Europe a two-letter sequence of vv or uu became fused into the new
letter w, providing the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet used for modern English.

The Roman alphabet was adopted for use in the Germanic languages, including English and
German, and the Romance languages, including French and Spanish. It was adopted for some
Slavic languages, such as Polish and Czech, and Finno-Ugrian languages, such as Finnish and
Estonian, after their speakers accepted Christianity during the Middle Ages. Some of these
languages added letters, or added diacritical marks (accents, dots, and other signs) to certain
letters, to indicate a sound for which no symbol existed. Germanic-speaking peoples, for example,
revived the letter k, which the Romans had almost never used. People in southern Europe, who
spoke Romance languages, maintained the hard c for the k sound. Modern English, with its mixed
heritage from both Germanic and Romance languages, retains both letters for the same sound, as
in cat and kitten. The Spanish tilde, ñ, and the Czech hačcek, ň, provide a symbol for the ny sound,
as in the English word canyon. The sound is written with the letter group gn in French and Italian,
ny in Hungarian, and nj in Croatian. The hačcek turns c, s, and z into the symbols č, š, and ž in
Czech and certain other Slavic languages, sounds that are spelled ch, sh, and zh (pronounced as in
Zhivago) in English. In some languages these characters have their own place in the alphabet.

C Cyrillic Alphabet
Cyrillic Alphabet
The Cyrillic alphabet is used for writing Russian and, with modifications, for writing Bulgarian, Serbian,
Ukrainian, and other languages. It developed from the Greek alphabet but contains additional letters to
represent sounds not present in Greek.
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

About AD 860 two Greek missionaries, Constantine and his brother Methodius, from Constantinople
(present-day İstanbul) converted the Slavs to Christianity. They also devised for the Slavs a system
of writing known as Glagolitic, which was loosely based on Greek. After Constantine died he was
canonized as Saint Cyril, and Glagolitic was later replaced by an alphabet that was closely based
on Greek and named Cyrillic in his honor (see Cyrillic Alphabet). Additional characters were devised
for the alphabet to represent Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalents. The Cyrillic alphabet, in
various forms, is used currently in Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and
Macedonian—languages spoken by Eastern Orthodox Christians. Slavic languages of Roman
Catholics, including Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Croatian, and Slovenian, use the Roman alphabet. An
interesting division exists in the Balkans, where the Roman Catholic Croats use the Roman
alphabet, but the Greek Orthodox Serbs employ Cyrillic for the same language. The Turkic
languages of the Central Asian Republics—including Kazakh, Kyrghiz, and Uzbek—had been written
in the Arabic alphabet but switched to the Roman alphabet after the regions became part of the
Soviet Union in the 1920s. The Soviet government later decreed that these languages should be
written in the Cyrillic script. After gaining independence in the early 1990s, most of the republics
planned a gradual return to Roman script.

D Arabic Alphabet
Arabic Alphabet
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters and is based on 18 distinct shapes plus dots written above or below those
shapes. Arabic is written from right to left, and the letters are joined in writing.
© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

The Arabic alphabet, another offshoot of the early Semitic one, probably originated about the 4th
century AD. It spread to such languages as Persian, Pashto, and Urdu and is generally used by the
Islamic world in parts of Asia and Africa, and in southern Europe. Arabic is written in either of two
forms: Kufic, a heavy, bold, formal script, was devised at the end of the 7th century; or Naskhi, a
cursive form and the parent of modern Arabic writing. The question arises whether the various
alphabets of India and Southeast Asia are indigenous (native) developments or offshoots of early
Semitic. One of the most important Indian alphabets, the Devanagari alphabet used in the Sanskrit
language, is an ingenious combination of syllabic and true alphabetic principles (see Indian
Languages). The ancestors of the Devanagari alphabet, whether Semitic or Indian, seem also to
have given rise to the written alphabets of Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Burmese, and Thai.

IV ALPHABETS FOR UNWRITTEN LANGUAGES

Sequoyah
Native Americans did not use a written language before the immigration of Europeans to America. In the early
1820s the Cherokee leader Sequoyah developed an alphabet and written language for his native tongue. Many
Cherokee learned the new written language readily, and in 1828 they published the first Native American
newspaper, written in both Cherokee and English.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Most alphabets evolved gradually or were adapted from older prototypes. Some alphabets,
however, were constructed for languages previously unwritten, or for nations hitherto using
alphabets of foreign origin. An outstanding example is the Armenian alphabet invented by Saint
Mashtots (also called Mesrop or Mesrob) in 405 and still in use today (see Armenian Language).
Mashtots’s Armenian alphabet, like Cyril’s Glagolitic alphabet for Slavic, roughly follows Greek
alphabetic order, but the shapes of the letters resemble those of no other alphabet. Georgian also
has a unique alphabet, which was created shortly after the Armenian alphabet, although the two
languages are unrelated. Another early effort was Gothic, an alphabet devised for the now extinct
Germanic Gothic language by bishop Ulfilas in the 4th century. Also of great interest is the
Mongolian hP'ags-Pa script, which was created at the order of Mongol leader Kublai Khan about
1269 and written vertically from top to bottom.

During the 19th century Christian missionaries invented several scripts to translate the Bible into
Native American languages. They based these systems on the Roman alphabet and in the Pacific
Northwest, where Russian missionaries worked, on the Cyrillic alphabet. One script, a syllabary,
was invented for the Cree in northern Canada. It consisted of 35 main signs, arranged in groups.
Not all scripts were invented by missionaries, however. A Cherokee syllabary was invented soon
after 1820 by the Native American leader Sequoyah. Sequoyah knew very little English and could
not read it. His syllabary emerged from the idea of writing, and he freely invented its 86 characters
to represent the sounds of the Cherokee language.

Many nations of Asia and Africa gained independence in the second half of the 20th century. The
peoples of these nations, including many linguistic and ethnic minorities, had a strong sense of the
value of their own traditions and languages. They wished to perpetuate their language and literary
traditions, which had been transmitted orally for hundreds of years, through writing. In addition,
governments felt the need to establish literacy and effective communication to facilitate economic
development. An intensive effort to develop new alphabets followed. Most of the new alphabets
were based on a selection of Roman letters, heavily supplemented with other symbols to represent
special sounds. When linguists developed the alphabets, they typically drew additional characters
from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or from some variation of it. The IPA, developed in
1880, was originally intended to have a distinctive symbol for every sound made in human
language. Although such a goal was dropped as impractical, a shortened IPA continues to be widely
used.

V THE CHANGING ALPHABET

Any alphabet used by peoples speaking different languages undergoes modifications. Such is the
case with respect both to the number and form of letters used and to the subscripts and
superscripts, or diacritical marks (accents, cedillas, tildes, dots, and others), used with the basic
symbols to indicate modifications of sound. The letter c with a cedilla, for instance, appears
regularly in French, Portuguese, and Turkish, but rarely, except in borrowed words, in English. The
value of ç in French, Portuguese, and English is that of s, as in the word façade. In Turkish ç
represents the ch sound as in church. It once represented ts in Spanish, but that sound no longer
exists in standard Spanish. So, too, letters have different sound values in different languages. The
letter j, for example, as in English jam, has a y sound in German, as in the word ja, meaning “yes.”

Although alphabets develop as attempts to establish a correspondence between sound and

symbol, most alphabetically written languages are highly unphonetic, largely because the system
of writing remains static while the spoken language evolves. As the spoken language changes, the
result is nearly always a decrease in correspondence. Thus, the spelling of the English word knight
reflects the pronunciation of an earlier period of the language, when the initial k was pronounced
and the gh represented a sound, since lost, similar to the ch in the German word Ich, meaning “I,”
or the English loch. The Roman alphabet as used by English contains three totally unnecessary
consonant letters: c, q, and x. The two sounds of c, for instance, could be written with the letters k
(“kat”) and s (“sity”); qu could be written kw (“kwit”); and x could be written ks (“oks”). The
divergence between the written and spoken forms of certain languages, particularly English, has
prompted movements for spelling reform in the past.

At present, English spelling and pronunciation are only slightly related, as in the words leave, brief,
light, bomb, know, and scenery. Moreover, many words with similar spelling are pronounced
differently: tough and cough, wind and find, flood and brood. On the other hand, words with the
same pronunciation may be spelled quite differently: ate and eight, bare and bear, peace and
piece. Spelling reform would require a corresponding reform of the alphabet to achieve the ideal
relationship of one letter for each sound. Some letters would have to be added. For example, the
sound sh is written four different ways, as sh in shape, as ch in chartreuse, as ti in nation, and as s
in sugar. Spelling reform would create a single symbol for that sound. Vowels present even more
problems than consonants. The letter a, for example, is pronounced five different ways in the
words same, cat, ball, any, and star. The letter o is pronounced differently in hot, to, go, and for.
Conversely, one vowel sound may be spelled in many ways; the oo sound is written eight ways in
the words soon, chew, true, tomb, rude, suit, youth, and beauty.
A major problem in English spelling reform would be determining whose speech to use as a model.
Every language has speech varieties; some differences result from geographic region, others arise
from social class. For many speakers of American English, the words dog and fog have the same
vowel sound. But for some, the vowels differ: dog is pronounced as if it were spelled dawg and fog
as if it were spelled fahg.

VI ADOPTION OF NEW ALPHABETS

Adoption of a foreign alphabet has occurred many times in history. Generally, political domination
or the necessity of a common writing system for purposes of commerce has been responsible for
adoption of new alphabets. The rapid spread of Greek, Latin, and Arabic is traceable to such
causes. In a few instances, new alphabets have been adopted at least partially for reasons of
reform. In the most dramatic instance, Turkish, which had been written in Arabic script until 1928,
was converted to a Roman alphabet under the orders of Turkey’s president at the time, Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk’s desire to modernize and Westernize Turkey entered into the decision to
adopt Roman script, but he also wished to provide an alphabet more suitable to the Turkish
language and more easily learned than Arabic.

Other languages that have changed alphabets include Mongolian, which converted to Cyrillic in
1939, and Vietnamese, which has officially used the Roman alphabet since 1910, in place of an
alphabet based on Chinese characters. The Roman alphabet for writing Vietnamese was devised by
French and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century and was used along with the
Chinese alphabet for many years. In both cases a number of modifications were made in the
borrowed alphabet in order to make it useful and accurate. Vietnamese, for example, uses
accented forms, such as à, to denote tones.

Adoption of a completely new alphabet, for a people who already have one, is a relatively recent
idea. Although many have been invented and proposed for purposes of reform, none has yet been
adopted. British playwright George Bernard Shaw maintained that a new alphabet should be
adopted and left money in his will to develop one. The resulting alphabet of 48 letters (24 vowels
and 24 consonants) was published in 1962. Although phonetically accurate, it was so totally
different from accustomed writing that it was never adopted. Other efforts have been made to alter
English writing for the purpose of helping children and adults who cannot read learn to read, before
exposing them to the irregularities of English spelling.

See also articles on the individual letters and languages.

Reviewed By:
Robert A. Fradkin
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

..kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Type
I INTRODUCTION

Type Design
This illustration shows the complicated geometry behind what appears to be a simple, unembellished style of
type. The manufacture of individual pieces of moveable type accompanied the famous printing of Johannes
Gutenberg’s Bible about 1455. The first type designs were based on 15th-century manuscript handwriting, but
soon they evolved into a variety of national and regional styles.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE/Corbis

Type, originally, the mechanical medium by means of which written matter was composed and
transferred onto paper by printing. Each piece of type was a rectangular metal block about an inch
long and bearing on one end an individual letter or other character in relief. Lines of type were
arranged, inked, and positioned on a printing press that squeezed the type against paper or like
material, leaving readable images. Although the heyday of metal type and relief printing is long
past, the term type is still used to describe a printing character regardless of how it is stored—on
metal, film, or magnetic tape, or as a series of mathematical formulas in a computer. See Printing
Techniques.
Wood Block-Letters
Prior to the invention of movable metal type in the 15th century, European books were printed with letters cut
in relief in wood blocks. Early Chinese and Korean books also were printed using this technique.
Susan Lally/© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

A font of type traditionally consists of all of the characters of the alphabet, upper (capital) and
lowercase, in one size and design, and also includes numerals, punctuation marks, and special
characters. The term font is used today to describe all these elements plus italic and lighter or
bolder weights of the same design. A typeface consists of the character sets represented by all of
the sizes and weights of a particular type design.

The size of type is expressed by means of the vertical dimension of the type body (that is, the
distance from the bottom of a letter with a descender—g, p—to the top of a letter with an ascender
—b, h). The customary unit of measurement of type is the point. In 1886, an agreement was
reached among American foundries to fix the size of one point at 0.013837 in (0.0351 cm),
sometimes rounded off to 1/72 in. Although the American system predominates, some European
countries use the Didot system, in which the point is slightly larger (0.0376 cm / 0.0148 in). Text
types generally range from 8 to 12 points.

II HISTORY

The practice of relief printing was already known in ancient times—stamps and seals, for example.
Not until the middle of the 15th century, however, was a reliable technology perfected for the
manufacture of individual, or movable, pieces of type. Although rudimentary typecasting
techniques had been developed in China and Korea as early as the 14th century, credit for
perfecting a reliable technology is generally ascribed to a German printer, Johannes Gutenberg.
Between 1450 and 1456, when his famous 42-line Bible was completed, Gutenberg's method of
making type consisted of the following operations:

• The desired character was engraved in relief on the end of a steel bar known as a punch.
• The punch was then driven or struck into the face of a matrix, a softer piece of metal, usually
copper or brass, leaving a sunken impression of the character.
• The matrix was then placed into a hand mold, designed to cast one particular size of type, but
adjustable in its horizontal dimension to accommodate the varying widths of all the characters in a
particular font.
• The typecaster poured molten type metal, an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, into the mold,
where it solidified almost instantaneously into an oblong piece of metal having at one end an exact
replica of the character cut onto the punch.
• After various finishing touches, the type was ready for distribution into the compositor's type
cases. (The terms uppercase and lowercase are derived from the early practice of sorting the
capital letters into an upper case and the remaining letters into one below it.)

The process of making type was slow and laborious, but once cast, type could be set and printed
from repeatedly before it became too worn to produce sharply defined images. For more than 400
years all type was made by this means. The trade of manufacturing metal type came to be known
as typefounding.

III THE EVOLUTION OF TYPE DESIGN

The first type designs were closely modeled on the manuscript book hands favored in Europe
during the 15th century (see Calligraphy). As the art of printing spread rapidly throughout Europe,
the design of typefaces reflected national, and even regional, tastes and practices, but invariably
followed pen-drawn exemplars. Since dozens of ligatures (or tied letters—Æ, for example) and
contractions were in common use, it was not unusual for a font of type to contain 200-300 separate
characters. Some 299 different characters were required to compose the Gutenberg Bible.

Two main styles of handwriting had evolved in Europe by the end of the 15th century. In northern
Europe, black letter, or Gothic, letterforms were preferred; these ranged from formal Textura hands
to the less formal, more cursive Lettre Bâtardes and Fraktur forms. The other main style of
handwriting, often called Humanistic, found its greatest expression in Italy. With capitals based on
Roman inscriptional lettering and the lowercase based on Carolingian minuscule forms, this script
was used in most of the handmade books of the Italian Renaissance. Although both had their
aesthetic appeal, the Humanistic book hands were also widely admired for their legibility.
Typefaces based on these hands came to be known as roman, a term still used to describe that
great family of designs, which has predominated over five centuries of bookmaking. A
characteristic feature of roman typefaces is the serif, the small terminal stroke drawn at a right or
oblique angle across the arm, stem, or tail of a letter.

Numerous classification systems have been devised to organize typefaces according to shared
characteristics. The largest number of designs, by far, fall into the roman category, which is further
divided into several subgroups that represent evolution of certain distinctive features. The earliest
romans, often classified as Venetian old styles, were designed during the 15th century and were
among the first interpretations of Humanist book hands. The most successful of these came from
the hand of Nicolas Jenson (died about 1480), a French type designer and printer who settled in
Venice in 1470. Venetian types are characterized by the low contrast between the thick and thin
portions of their letterforms and by the slanted crossbar of the lowercase “e.”
By 1500, another variation on the Humanistic book hand began to appear in type. Classified as
Aldine-French old styles, the first of these new types was commissioned by the great Venetian
scholar and printer Aldus Manutius. The new type displayed slightly greater contrast, was more
regular in appearance, and had horizontal crossbars. Aldus also commissioned the first italic type,
first used in 1501 for a pocket-sized edition of the Roman poet Virgil. Further refinements on the
Aldine-French model followed in the 16th century with the magnificent romans designed by Claude
Garamond and related italics by Robert Granjon, both Parisian typefounders. By the end of the
century, Garamond's romans, and many versions thereof, were entrenched throughout Europe.

The dependence of type design on pen-drawn models gradually diminished in the late 16th
century. Printers no longer had reason to fear competition from scribes, while type designers were
quick to discover that the rigid metal surface of a steel punch provided an almost unlimited
opportunity for engraving letterforms that a pen could never have created. Together with the
increasing application of geometric principles, typefounding came into its own as a creative, rather
than an imitative, technology.

During the 17th century, significant modifications to old style designs were made at Dutch
foundries. Although derived from Garamond models, the Dutch types were sturdier. Dutch designs
influenced the work of the first important English typefounder, William Caslon. Caslon's types were
old style in character, readable, and pleasant in appearance, without the elegant lines of the
Garamonds, however.

The quality of printing presses and of paper so improved during the 18th century that it became
possible to cast typefaces with subtleties of design that were previously unachievable. These
typefaces possessed greater contrast and vertical stress and a correspondingly delicate serif
construction. The English printer and typefounder John Baskerville was instrumental in weaning
typeface design from old style models during this important transitional period. Although he was
not the first to exhibit these new features, Baskerville's types were beautifully proportioned and
were much admired on the Continent and in North America, where Benjamin Franklin was an early
champion. Along with similar designs, such types are classified as transitional faces.

IV MODERN TYPEFACES

By the end of the 18th century, the era of so-called modern typefaces had begun, as exemplified in
the designs of the French typefounder Firmin Didot (see Didot) and those of the Italian printer and
typefounder Giambattista Bodoni. Modern types are characterized by flat, unbracketed serifs; high,
sometimes exaggerated contrast; and uncompromising vertical stress. Throughout most of the
19th century, modern types were much in favor with most printers, almost to the exclusion of old
style faces and even transitional designs. The 19th century was also a period of extraordinary
growth in the newspaper and advertising industries. Mechanized presses, an abundant supply of
cheap paper, and rising literacy generated an enormous appetite for reading material. Type
designers responded by creating many new text faces and, more important, a vast quantity of
display types for posters and other forms of advertising, many with novel effects. It was difficult to
cast type bigger than about 96 points, so large display types were cut out of wood.

By the end of the 19th century, most typefaces no longer resembled the manuscript letterforms of
the Middle Ages. A movement to reacquire the bookmaking ideals of the early days of printing was
sparked by the English artist William Morris. In 1890 Morris established a private press where he
created books according to uncompromising standards. His type designs were deliberately
modeled on the rugged and classically proportioned types of the early printers. A number of
American and European typefoundries not only copied Morris's types but also went on to initiate
revival programs of their own, restoring to use new versions of the old style and transitional faces
so long out of favor. Leaders in this revival were the American Type Founders Company and the
American and English branches of the Monotype Corporation. The latter, under the typographic
direction of the historian and scholar Stanley Morison, was responsible for restoring to modern
usage many all-but-forgotten typefaces that today are staples of the book designer, including
Bembo, Poliphilus, Baskerville, and Fournier. The very successful revivals of Venetian types in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries included the Golden type of William Morris, Goudy Old Style by
Frederic Goudy, Cloister Old Style by Morris Fuller Benton, and the Centaur of Bruce Rogers.

The Mergenthaler Linotype Company and the Ludlow Typograph Company also marketed a wide
variety of typefaces based on Historic models. Mergenthaler took a special interest in so-called
legibility faces because Linotype machines were ideally suited to newspaper composition. These
types were specifically designed to be readable and nonfatiguing, even in the small sizes
customarily used by newspapers. The design of legibility faces was also spurred by the printing
conditions under which a newspaper was produced: high press speeds, fluid inks, and rough,
porous papers. Types such as Excelsior, Ideal, and Corona, with their open counters and sturdy
serifs, found wide use. Times Roman, the most famous legibility face of all, was issued by the
Monotype Corporation in 1923; although originally commissioned for the Times of London, it
quickly became commercially available.

A major variation in the anatomy of typefaces came with the introduction of sans serif (“without
serif”) designs. The first sans serifs, sometimes referred to as grotesques or Gothics, were
relatively monotone in character. They first appeared in an 1816 specimen book of the Caslon
Typefoundry. Sans serif designs were slow to catch on, but by the beginning of the 20th century
many interpretations were in existence. Two of the most successful were Akzidenz Grotesk and
Franklin Gothic.
With the release of the more geometrically proportioned Erbar in 1924 and Futura in 1927, sans
serifs arrived for good, held in the highest esteem by a new generation of typographers, including
those associated with the Bauhaus movement. The clean lines of these designs and their
remoteness from calligraphic forms were appealing during an age when many typographic
experiments were taking place. The most famous sans serifs of the 20th century are Helvetica,
designed by Max Meidinger, and Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger.

Another family of typefaces, first seen in the 19th century, belongs to a class known as Egyptians,
or slab serifs. They too became a powerful force in 20th century typography with the introduction
of designs such as Memphis and Stymie. Slab serifs are characterized by their monoline structure
and squared-off serifs.

V TYPE DESIGN TODAY

As phototypesetting technology became a practical reality during the 1950s, type designers were
forced to come to grips with its strengths and weaknesses and to modify their types accordingly
(see Typesetting). The image quality of photographically produced type could be superb (see
Typesetting Equipment), but little attention was paid in the beginning to the problems of optical
scaling. A type character needs subtle changes in letterform from one size to the next in order for
it to retain its apparent proportions as well as to be readable. Since early phototypesetters often
derived an entire range of sizes from a single master, very small and very large type tended to be
flawed. Moreover, the typefaces adopted for photocomposing equipment invariably were those
already popular in metal. The letterpress printing process usually resulted in a certain amount of
ink squeeze, causing a slight thickening of each character; this effect was compensated for in the
design of metal faces. Early photofaces tended to appear gray and light on the page because the
masters from which they were produced were derived from perfectly inked proofs of metal type. As
the phototypesetting industry matured in the 1960s and '70s, the use of multiple masters, optical
scaling programs, and typefaces specifically designed for offset reproduction became
commonplace. The distinctive designs produced in this era include Galliard by Matthew Carter,
Avant Garde Gothic by Herb Lubalin, and Novarese, by Aldo Novarese.

The increased use of computer storage of type designs during the 1970s, and the growth of
desktop publishing systems since, again forced type designers to cope with a new technology.
Digital interpretations of older designs required vast computer memory. Another problem was the
resolution capability of output devices. Subtly proportioned faces—Optima, for example—look
terrible when output in small sizes on low-resolution equipment. See Office Systems.

Designers have been under strong pressure, therefore, to create new faces that satisfy two criteria:
(1) reasonable computer memory requirements and (2) satisfactory appearance at both low and
high resolution. A good example of a typeface designed along these lines is the Lucida of Charles
Bigelow and Kris Holmes.

Although such criteria remain desirable, a number of developments in the late 1980s increased the
options of type designers. The reduced cost of computer memory made it possible to produce
powerful desktop terminals with ample storage capacity (see Microcomputer).

The best systems use memory-saving mathematical formulas to calculate all the straight lines and
curves that will yield a particular character's outline. These are then stored in digital form in the
computer's memory. Together with text-formatting programs and page description languages, type
can be composed, manipulated, and even distorted, and then sent for imaging on digital output
devices, from 300 dots-per-inch (dpi) laser printers to 2540 dpi high-resolution typesetters. Type
designers enjoy an unprecedented freedom to create simple or complex typefaces—both new
designs and adaptations of the classics.

VI TYPEFACE COPYRIGHT PROTECTION

The single greatest complaint of type designers from the time of Manutius to the present has been
the lack of an effective and comprehensive international legal code for the protection of typeface
design. When a design is sold directly to a typeface manufacturer, the designer is not legally
entitled to any additional financial benefits should the typeface be commercially released. Nor do
designers have any legal recourse should their types be copied by other manufacturers. The
Association Typographique Internationale has lobbied since 1957 for international typeface
copyright laws, but legislators and legal scholars have not yet been able to agree on how to define
the subtle differences that distinguish one design from another. In the absence of a copyright law
in the United States, the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) has pioneered the use of
licensing agreements; thus, type designs commissioned by ITC are licensed for use to various
manufacturers of typesetting hardware. Each font sold to users of that hardware generates a
royalty for the designer. Even as the effort in the U.S. to pass a copyright protection law for
typefaces continues, the Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to grant design patents to
certain typefaces, and Congress has extended copyright protection to computer software, the form
in which most typefaces are now delivered.

Contributed By:
David Pankow
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

;;;;;;;;; Calligraphy
I INTRODUCTION
Japanese Calligraphy
This hanging scroll is an example of Japanese calligraphy. Although calligraphy is generally considered a form
of lettering, it is also a drawing style. The lettering and figure of a sage are done in ink, using a brush. The
rectangular forms are made with stamps, using red ink.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Calligraphy, the art of fine writing or script. The term calligraphy is derived from the Greek
kalligraphia, meaning “beautiful writing,” and is applied to individual letters as well as to entire
documents; it also refers to an aesthetic branch of paleography. In Islamic countries and in India,
China, and Japan, calligraphy is done with a brush and has been a highly respected art form for
many centuries (see Chinese Art and Architecture; Japanese Art and Architecture). In the West,
calligraphy eventually evolved from the earliest cave paintings, such as those (35,000-20,000 BC)
at Lascaux, France, into the abstractions that became the familiar letterforms of the alphabet.

II CALLIGRAPHY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Chinese Script
Done with a brush, Chinese handwriting developed into an art form in its own right. Calligraphy, artistic
handwriting or lettering, was important in China before the Tang dynasty, which began in 618.
THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE/Corbis

About 3500 BC the ancient Egyptians created a form of picture writing called hieroglyphs—sacred
inscriptions—usually incised on monuments or inside tombs. Hieroglyphs were also written on
papyrus, an early form of paper made from a rushlike plant growing along the Nile; the earliest
examples date from the 5th Dynasty (2465-2323 BC). The scribes used either a brush or a flat-
edged pen cut from a river reed to write on papyrus scrolls.

In Sumeria, about the same period, people used a stylus of hard wood or bone to press wedged
shapes—cuneiform—into clay tablets, which were then baked in the sun. The writing, a complex
system of syllables and words, was adopted by their Babylonian conquerors and by neighboring
Semitic peoples.

The Phoenicians, traders and seafarers of the eastern Mediterranean, were the first to invent,
sometime before 1000 BC, a system with 24 letters, written from right to left. The word alphabet is
derived from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph and bet.
Section of the Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a text containing prayers, spells, and hymns, the knowledge of which was
to be used by the dead to guide and protect the soul on the hazardous journey through the afterlife. This
section of one such book, dating from the early 19th Dynasty, shows the final judgment of the deceased (in this
case Hu-Nefer, the royal scribe) before Osiris, the god of the dead. Hieroglyphs as well as illustrations portray
the ritual of weighing the deceased’s heart before he can be awarded eternal life.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

About 850 BC the Greeks took over alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians. The first line was
written from right to left, followed by a line written from left to right, as a farmer would plough a
field. This method is called boustrophedon. Finally they settled on left to right, as Westerners still
write today. Greek letters were carved into stone, cast in metal, painted on pottery, and written on
papyrus.

The Romans, before the end of the 2nd century BC, had adapted the Greek alphabet to the Latin
language, changing the shapes to the capital letters used today. The proportions of Roman letters
on monumental inscriptions, such as those on Trajan's Column (106-113) in Rome, have never
been surpassed. They were painted on stone with a brush and then carved with chisel and mallet.

In day-to-day use, writing was pressed with a stylus on wax tablets, which could be erased and
reused. For correspondence, a speedier script called cursive was developed. For books or scrolls, a
more lasting material was used—either parchment, made from animal skin, or vellum, a high-
quality parchment. The script called uncial, a rounded capital letter, was the book hand used
between the 4th and 9th centuries (see Parchment and Vellum).

III MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN CALLIGRAPHY

Lindisfarne Gospels
The Lindisfarne Gospels (about 698-721) are illuminated books produced by monks on an island off the coast of
Northumberland, England. The gospels are noted for their pages decorated with complex interlacing designs
intertwined with fantastic creatures. The initial letters of each gospel were especially embellished. This page
shows the decorated initials of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which in Latin begins Liber generationis
(“The book of the generation”). The Lindisfarne Gospels are now part of the collection of the British Library,
London.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

During the decline of the Roman Empire and the ensuing ages of turmoil, the Christian church was
the principal guardian of Western culture. Monasteries became centers of learning, establishing
libraries and copying chambers. Monks copied mostly religious books, as well as some ancient
texts; many produced decorated books called illuminated manuscripts.

Scribes gradually developed the first minuscules—small letters of the alphabet—most notably in
England and Ireland. Irish half-uncials were especially beautiful, as evident in the famous Book of
Kells (800?, Trinity College, Dublin).

Many obscure styles of writing had developed by the 8th century. After Charlemagne was crowned
Holy Roman emperor in 800, he asked the English scholar and ecclesiastic Alcuin of York to reform
handwriting and to have it taught to all government officials and to everyone in the monastery
schools. The new writing was slightly sloped, extremely rhythmic, and clear; by joining letters
(eliding) now and then, it could be written at greater speed. The script, which became known as
Carolingian, is the source of today's printed minuscule.

By the 12th century the merchant class had become powerful. Professional scribes set up their own
workshops, artisans worked in groups or guilds, universities were founded, and trade increased
with Islamic countries. Through the Arabs, the knowledge of papermaking came from China to
Europe, where paper replaced expensive vellum and parchment.
Between the 12th and 13th centuries Carolingian letters were turned into compressed and broken
forms. Today they are called black letter. Eventually this writing became a model for early printing.

Sometime between 1450 and 1456 Johannes Gutenberg printed the Bible on his press in Mainz,
Germany, with movable letters cast from lead; soon printing spread all over the world. The
characters used by printers copied the scribal styles of the period; for a century, nevertheless,
initial letters of major sections were still hand drawn (see Book).

A more spiky, cursive script was developed (called bâtarde, French for “bastard letter”), which
combined book hand, secretary hand, and Gothic script. In Italy and Spain a rounder form called
rotunda was preferred to the compressed Gothics; the fraktur type of black letter, half round, half
broken, was popular in Germany during the 16th and 17th centuries and continued in use there
until it was officially abolished during World War II (1939-1945). Today it has only decorative and
ornamental uses.

IV RENAISSANCE CALLIGRAPHY

About 1400 classical scholarship was revived, and the Renaissance age began, first manifesting
itself in Italy. With Carolingian and later book hands as a model, Italian scribes developed an
elegant, slightly sloped cursive style now called italic.

In 1522 Ludovici degli Arrighi, secretary at the papal offices in Rome, published the first writing
manual, a teaching guide entitled La operina. Other 16th-century writing masters followed with
their copybooks, among them Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, Giovanni Battista Palatino, and
Gianfrancesco Cresci, in Italy; Juan de Yciar in Spain; and Geofroy Tory in France. The italic style
soon spread throughout Europe.

V CALLIGRAPHY IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

In Renaissance books calligraphy was printed from woodblocks, but in the 17th century wood was
replaced by copperplates. These engravings resulted in much finer lines and increasingly elaborate
writing books. One of the finest calligraphic artists was Jan van de Velde of Holland. Maria Strick of
Rotterdam and Ester Inglis of Scotland were 17th-century professional calligraphers. In England,
Edward Cocker, Charles Snell, and John Clark and other calligraphers in France and Spain spread
the new copperplate styles.

In the 18th century, The Universal Penman (1733-1741), by the English calligrapher George
Bickham, appealed to businessmen, administrators, and schoolmasters. Calligraphic scripts
continued to serve as models for type designs. For the businessman and student it was not easy to
attain the perfection of the engraved scripts with the use of quill pens. To speed up writing, the
pen was held at a far steeper angle, hairlines were thin, and curves and downstrokes swelled with
pressure from the hand. As commerce took over, penmanship declined.

VI 19TH-CENTURY INVENTIONS AND CALLIGRAPHY

Brushwork by Yi Bingshou
Calligraphy was seen as an art form for centuries in China. The master calligrapher Yi Bingshou, who lived from
1754 to 1815, was known for his sturdy, square-shaped characters.
Asian Art and Archaeology

Two inventions of the 19th century—the steel pen (imitating the shape of the quill) and the
fountain pen—became part of daily life, but handwriting, overembellished, often vulgar, could
hardly be considered calligraphy any longer.

In mid-19th-century England, the poet and artist William Morris, engaged in a revival of arts and
crafts (see Arts and Crafts Movement), rediscovered the use of the flat-edged pen. In London, the
educator Edward Johnston carried this revival of interest in calligraphy further through research at
the British Museum, through his calligraphy classes, and with his book Writing and Illuminating,
and Lettering (1906), reprinted to this day. In 1922 his students in London founded the Society of
Scribes and Illuminators.

In the United States, the writing systems of various specialists such as Platt Rogers Spencer and
proponents of the “push-pull” Palmer Method of penmanship carried on the copperplate tradition.

VII 20TH-CENTURY REVIVAL OF CALLIGRAPHY

In the 20th century the typewriter did not replace handwriting altogether. In England Alfred
Fairbank revived italic with his teaching sets of the 1920s. Tom Gourdie brought italic to schools in
Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. Rudolf von Larisch in Austria and Rudolf Koch in
Germany taught calligraphy and design. Those who promoted calligraphy and handwriting in the
United States include William Dwiggins, Oscar Ogg, Ray DaBoll, Paul Standard, Arnold Bank, and
George Salter.

When Donald Jackson, a prominent English calligrapher, first visited the United States in 1974, he
inspired a fresh interest in calligraphy and illumination, through television interviews, lectures, and
workshops, suggesting that Americans might form their own societies for teaching and exhibitions.
More than 30 calligraphic societies currently flourish in the United States and Europe.

See also entries for individual letters of the alphabet; see Writing.

Contributed By:
Lili C. Wronker
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.