The Development of Writing

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Anglistik), course: English Words, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe the various systems employed to convey meaning in written form, their development and possible advantages or disadvantages they might imply.

According to Wallace L. Chafe (1971), language can be defined as ¿a system which mediates, in a highly complex way, between the universe of meaning and the universe of sound¿. The technology required to record the sounds of a language, however, was invented quite recently in comparison to the long history of mankind. Therefore, in order to document thoughts, ideas or experiences, humans had to fall back to other means, that is to say writing, in an attempt to record otherwise transient utterances. Nevertheless, devising as well as using a system to document language is by no means an easy task and, thus, analysing the process behind this development deserves special attention.