How Writing Represents Speech

The history of writing is interesting not just because it marks the evolution of means for preserving or communicating information but also because writing can be taken as representing aspects of language including such structural features as sentences, words, syllables and phonemes. Just how graphic symbols came to represent underlying linguistic constituents is the concern of this paper.] As we shall see, the relation betwen speech and writing may be just the opposite of that which is traditionally assumed. Making marks which can serve mnemonic and communicative purposes is as old as human culture itself. What such marks may be taken as representing by those who make and those who read those marks is the critical question. A glimpse at our own writing system suggests that what a writing system represents is what is said-an ideal writing system is a fully explicit representation of oral language. Indeed, this is the classical view developed by Aristotle and in our own time by de Saussure and Bloomfield. Aristotle wrote in De interpretatione (1.4-6): ‘Words spoken are symbols or signs of affections or impressions of the soul; written words are the signs of words spoken’ (1938, p. 115). de Saussure (1916) attacked as the ‘tyranny of writing’ the fact that linguistic theory took as its object written language rather than spoken: ‘The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: The spoken form alone constitutes the object’ (pp. 23-24.). And Bloomfield identified speech with language and saw writing as ‘a way of recording language’ (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 21). of the invention of writing. The evolution of writing systems is simply the history of the attempts to make a writing system which adequately and explicitly represents one’s speech practices. Historical developments in the evolution of writing systems-from idea-writing, to whole words, to syllables, to consonants, and finally to consonants and vowels-are seen as reflecting the progressive achievements of the goal of representing the ultimate units of speech. Rousseau’s famous claim relating writing development to historical development was among the first to offer this evolutionary perspective: