Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Writing systems have been typologically classified on the basis of various criteria reflecting theoretical differences in the analysis of how writing systems work and what they represent. The first problem is that of demarcating writing from its precursors and other visual notations. There is wide agreement in recent scholarship that the critical feature which distinguishes writing proper from other visual signs such as P etroglyphs , Q uipus , T allies and isolated P ictograms is a stable conventional relationship between written sign and language. This is generally understood to mean systematically specifiable units of language, although in at least one typology a general relationship between pictograms and narrative content is recognized as writing: Hill (1967) classifies Amerindian pictograms as ‘discourse writing’. Assuming that such a vague relationship between signs and language does not qualify as writing, the task of a typology based on grapho-linguistic relations is to determine the linguistic unit most relevant for a given writing system. There is considerable diversity in this regard between the different typologies that have been proposed. For example, Gelb (1963) classifies Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, Linear B, kana and Cherokee as syllabic, whereas in DeFrancis's (1989) typology Linear B, kana and Cherokee are identified as cases of pure syllabic systems as ... log in or subscribe to read full text