An Exploration of Writing; Peter T. Daniels

Peter T. Daniels [+–]

Independent Scholar

Peter T. Daniels, the world’s leading expert on writing systems, holds degrees in linguistics from Cornell University and the University of Chicago. His first interests were in Comparative Semitic linguistics, which built to the study of writing and decipherment. His challenge to his teacher I. J. Gelb’s influential theories of the evolution of scripts has led to a persistent search for legitimate principles of the nature and development of writing. He is co-editor (with William Bright) of and principal contributor to The World’s Writing Systems (1996) and is hte author of An Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018).

An Exploration of Writing is a book about our alphabets, our syllabaries, and all the other kinds of writing that people use and have used for 5000 years. It introduces the general public to a topic that hardly anyone has heard about, so it clarifies basic linguistic terms as they occur. For linguists exploring the growing field of graphonomy—the study of writing systems—in which the author has long been a pioneer, it weaves together the many threads of theory into a tapestry showing a fuller picture of what all our scripts are seen to share.

An Exploration of Writing begins with more familiar kinds of writing considered in unfamiliar ways—starting with English viewed syllabically—and leads the reader across the Old World and the New to less familiar kinds of writing, showing how all writings share a fundamental essence, however diverse they appear to be, because all writing represents language. The more familiar (Hebrew, Chinese, Korean) leads on to the less familiar (Udi, Pahlavi, Javanese). Featured are some of the world’s most recently elucidated scripts, and some that are long known but long neglected, such as those for Central Asian languages, and some of the most recent interpretations of long-mysterious scripts, such as Sumerian and Mesoamerican.

An Exploration of Writing is in the tradition of and in part a response to A Study of Writing (1952/1963), by I. J. Gelb. It encapsulates more than thirty years of the author’s work and his dozens of articles on writing systems, ranging from investigating the physical process of writing to bringing to light the achievements of those who had deciphered forgotten scripts to developing a theoretical approach to the origins of writing which leads to insights into the nature of writing itself.

Preliminaries

List of Illustrations [+–] vii

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

An Exploration of Writing is a book about our alphabets, our syllabaries, and all the other kinds of writing that people use and have used for 5000 years. It introduces the general public to a topic that hardly anyone has heard about, so it clarifies basic linguistic terms as they occur. For linguists exploring the growing field of graphonomy—the study of writing systems—in which the author has long been a pioneer, it weaves together the many threads of theory into a tapestry showing a fuller picture of what all our scripts are seen to share. An Exploration of Writing begins with more familiar kinds of writing considered in unfamiliar ways—starting with English viewed syllabically—and leads the reader across the Old World and the New to less familiar kinds of writing, showing how all writings share a fundamental essence, however diverse they appear to be, because all writing represents language. The more familiar (Hebrew, Chinese, Korean) leads on to the less familiar (Udi, Pahlavi, Javanese). Featured are some of the world’s most recently elucidated scripts, and some that are long known but long neglected, such as those for Central Asian languages, and some of the most recent interpretations of long-mysterious scripts, such as Sumerian and Mesoamerican. An Exploration of Writing is in the tradition of and in part a response to A Study of Writing (1952/1963), by I. J. Gelb. It encapsulates more than thirty years of the author’s work and his dozens of articles on writing systems, ranging from investigating the physical process of writing to bringing to light the achievements of those who had deciphered forgotten scripts to developing a theoretical approach to the origins of writing which leads to insights into the nature of writing itself.

Foreword by David L. Share, University of Haifa [+–] ix-xii

David L. Share

University of Haifa

David L. Share is Professor and Chair, Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa.

An Exploration of Writing is in the tradition of and in part a response to A Study of Writing , by I. J. Gelb (1952/1963). It encapsulates the author’s over thirty years of work on writing systems, which range from investigating the physical process of writing to bringing to light the achievements of those who had deciphered forgotten scripts to developing a theoretical approach to the origins of writing which lead to insights into the nature of writing itself.

Acknowledgments [+–] xiii-xv

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Introduction

Introduction [+–] 1-6

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The inferior place that the study of writing has had in linguistics; reasons why writing should be studied from a linguistic point of view, i.e. in terms of its relation to language, and not just from the historical point of view, i.e. the changes in shape of characters over the centuries; the most compact outline of the spread of writing through the world; the organization of the book and how it differs from other general treatments of writing systems. Each chapter concludes with a section entitled “Details,” which might elsewhere have borne the discouraging label “Further reading,” in which both references are given and additional information bearing obliquely on the topic of the chapter is included.

Chapter 1

Syllables and Syllabaries [+–] 7-13

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The first chapter immediately signals that something unusual is going on: it begins with English, the language most familiar to the reader, but it begins with Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, which presciently presented each word to be learned in terms of its syllabic structure. The unifying theme of the book is thus adumbrated. The best-known syllabary of the modern world, Cherokee, is presented in some detail, providing the opportunity to introduce the concept of phoneme that has proved so important in the history of writing. The syllabaries of modern West Africa are introduced, and those of the ancient Aegean and Anatolia are mentioned.

Chapter 2

Segments and Alphabets [+–] 14-36

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The chapter begins again with English, this time—bouncing off the familiar ghoti = fish example—showing some of the regularities of the supposedly chaotic English orthography and its history, and not embracing script reform proposals. It then moves back in time (i.e., more to less familiar), touching on the way the runic, Ogham, and Yiddish alphabets. The Eastern alphabets, besides the wellknown Armenian, Georgian, and Slavic ones, include two that the author believes have never before been discussed in popular treatments of writing: the Avestan, of pre-Islamic Iran, and the recently deciphered Udi of the Christian Caucasus.

Chapter 3

Consonants and Abjads [+–] 37-58

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The third chapter introduces the first of the new concepts necessary for my approach, the abjad or consonant-only writing system. It was found in pure form only in Phoenician and South Arabian, but it was from Phoenician that the other West Semitic abjads developed—most prominently, the wide variety of Aramaic scripts. Two ways of notating vowels developed for abjads. The scripts of pre-Islamic Iran, again, have never, and of Inner Asia, culminating in Mongolian and Manchu, have rarely, been presented to the general reader.

Chapter 4

Moras and Kana [+–] 59-63

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

A recent development in the theory of writing has been the recognition of the mora as a level of linguistic structure that is represented in writing, specifically in the phonetic component of Japanese writing. It is the author’s contribution that this approach is also relevant to Arabic, which has usually been treated as an abjad.

Chapter 5

Clusters and Abugidas [+–] 64-83

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The other new concept important to the author’s approach is the abugida, denoting a writing system in which each basic element of a script denotes a consonant plus a following a. It was invented in India and still prevails in the Subcontinent, whence it was taken to both Southeast and Inner Asia, and also across the Arabian Sea to Ethiopia.

Chapter 6

Morphemes and Morphograms [+–] 84-98

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The sixth chapter deals with the three oldest writing systems on earth, the three that appear to have arisen spontaneously and not by imitation or adoption of any preexisting script. Their characteristics are important for the author’s view of how writing originally came about—but presentation of that view is withheld until Chapter 11.

Chapter 7

Words and Heterogams [+–] 99-108

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Another innovative way of looking at writing systems as a whole is to take together three highly disparate writing systems (again, the Iranian has been unknown to the general reader) that share the characteristic of incorporating what appear to be words of an earlier language whose script has been adapted for the newer one. Scholars in each field have not noticed that the writing system they have mastered is not quite so unique as it appears to them to be.

Chapter 8

Hybrids and Innovations [+–] 109-117

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

When we consider scripts that did not develop organically out of earlier ones, like all those seen in the first seven chapters, we find that human ingenuity has led any number of times to writing systems that do not conform to the patterns seen in the majority of script transitions. The order of treatment continues to be from better known to less well known.

Chapter 9

Recoveries and Decipherments [+–] 118-125

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Here the author gives the merest sketch of two of the decipherments they have treated elsewhere—the most important ones—and omits the best known ones that are ably described in other books. Instead, the author devotes their limited space to the least known and the most recent decipherments.

Chapter 10

Pictograms and Mysteries [+–] 126-131

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Inevitably there must be a mention of graphic communication devices that do not qualify as true writing, both because they have sometimes been mischaracterized and because in the case of one of them (Yukaghir), the author made a discovery that has not yet been published elsewhere.

Chapter 11

Origins and Characteristics [+–] 132-154

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Chapter 11 is where the author sets forth the overall view of writing that they have developed on the basis of the highly varied data presented in the first eight chapters, as well as features that characterize all writing systems and so are better treated together rather than atomistically. In this chapter are found what the author believes to be explanations for the wide variety seen in the world’s writing systems that have usually been interpreted as evidence that writing system development has been haphazard. The older, misguided view was summarized by Florian Coulmas: “The history of writing, therefore, cannot rely much on universal tendencies, but has to investigate the spread and transmutation of every script in its own right” (Writing Systems [2003], 208).

Chapter 12

Graphonomy and Linguistics [+–] 155-187

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

The last chapter is intended more for linguists than for the general reader; in it the author has gathered accounts of the history of aspects of the field on which there has been much confusion over the past century. It also includes the author’s explanation of the prominence of syllables in the nature and history of writing, an explanation that has not yet been published elsewhere.

End Matter

Maps [+–] 189-195

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Envoi [+–] 196

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

References [+–] 197-218

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Indexes [+–] 219-236

Peter T. Daniels

Independent Scholar

Reviews

Peter Daniels has thought more and more deeply about writing than anyone else around. This very engaging book reflects both. It incorporates the taxonomy of types of writing systems that he pioneered and is organized very nicely around the various ways in which a writing system reflects its (spoken) language. The book presupposes little linguistic knowledge and is clearly written.
Professor Mark Aronoff, Stony Brook University

No student of linguistics, nor educator, psychologist, or social scientist concerned with literacy, can afford to remain ignorant of the fundamentals of writing systems. It is a great honor to commend to the reader a work of such exceptional scholarship.
Professor David L. Share, University of Haifa (from the Foreword)

Daniels’ new book has much to recommend it. In many ways it represents the culmination of a career by, as noted above, the scholar who can lay the best claim to being the world’s expert on writing. The breadth of coverage, and the organization of the material is the best that I have seen.... An Exploration of Writing will be useful to scholars and students alike, and belongs on the shelf of anyone who is interested in this rather neglected subfield of linguistics.
Written Language and Literacy

Although dealing with many different types of script (ancient and modern), a clear central concern runs through the different chapters which keeps the reader focused until the very last page. That concern is with the ways in which human language – a continuous stream of sound – has been perceived, by people of widely different times and places, as consisting of discrete phonological units, and with the ways in which such units have been represented by equally discrete graphic signs.
The range of different scripts discussed, and the languages expressed by them, is impressive.
Bibliotheca Orientalis

A veritable tour-de-force. There is no comparable survey written by a top specialist with the purpose of revealing structural similarities in language encoding by writing systems and dispelling several key misconceptions along the way. Its conclusions are thoughtprovoking and consequential. This book is a must-have, although its actual audience is somewhat narrower than intended. As a course textbook, however, it requires contextualization and extra readings.
Journal of Near Eastern Studies

This book is a remarkable achievement not only for the amount of information assembled, but even more so for a well-reflected methodological approach. Everyone who is interested in writing systems in general should consult it.
Journal of the American Oriental Society

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An Exploration of Writing

Peter T. Daniels [+–]

Independent Scholar

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