question

a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought

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writing

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the outer, physical form of a writing system, the set of signs or characters and their shapes; how you write a language; all writing systems use a mixture of phonetic and semantic signs

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script

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"whole-word" semantic symbols, e.g. =, $, #, %, &; a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word

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logogram (-graph, -graphy)

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when script symbols represent whole syllables

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syllabic

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the set of orthographic conventions used to represent a language

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writing system

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a phonetic/sound sign

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phonogram

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using pictures for how they are pronounced, instead of for their meaning. e.g. "bee" + "leaf" = belief

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rebus writing

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a logogram in which the object represented is identifiable (e.g. a heart to represent "love")

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pictogram

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studies how the speakers of a language select from all possible sounds in order to construct a system that communicates meaning; the study of the sound system of a language, or the sound systems of language in general

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phonology

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a sign that has meaning

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semantic sign

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a system using pictures, a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings

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pictography

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where speech sounds are produced

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vocal tract

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where the airstream is obstructed

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place of articulation

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how the airstream is obstructed

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manner of articulation

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the airflow stops at some point after the sound is made

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stop (plosive)

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a sound made using both lips (b, m, p)

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bilabial

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whether or not the vocal folds are vibrating

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voicing

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the soft palate, sounds include /g/ /k/

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velar (velum)

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a sound made using the teeth /th/ /v/ /f/

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dental

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a sound made when the tongue touches the alveolar ridge /t/ /d/

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alveolar

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the airflow is not stopped during production

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continuant

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air flows and resonates in the nasal cavity, /m/ /n/ /ng/

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nasal

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lots of turbulence

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fricative

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the set of symbols used to transcribe speech

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IPA (international phonetic alphabet)

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"first" writing

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proto-writing

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a knotted arrangement of rope and cords that kept track of the movement of goods, they were the sole bureaucratic recording device of the Incas

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quipu

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among the first and oldest types of proto-writing, certain notches meant certain things; can supplement literacy and fulfilled the need to keep accurate, reliable sources to be read by anyone who was capable

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tallies

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one of the earliest known forms of written expression

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cuneiform

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"first" cuneiform

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proto-cuneiform

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"land between the two rivers" aka the "fertile crescent"; the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and southwestern Iran.

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Mesopotamia

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ancient Sumerian name; is modern day Warka, city in Iraq, biblical Erech; was the biggest city until Rome in 100 AD; was the center of art; Gilgamesh was king here

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Uruk

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civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq

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Sumer

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language of Sumer

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Sumerian

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originated around 8000-1500 BCE; had different shapes and designs, probably were counting units in accountancy; according to one theory, the system was pictographic writing in embryo; the number of tokens found diminishes after writing was developed

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clay token

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based on multiples of sixty, accounting system in cuneiform

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sexagesimal

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a French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art and archaeology of the ancient Near East; she has worked on the origin of writing and counting, and her main accomplishment involves the Mesopotamian Clay Token Origin Theory

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Schmandt-Besserat

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tokens enclosed in a clay envelope, generally shaped as a ball. Its purpose was most likely to guarantee the accuracy and authenticity of stored tokens. They didn't precede writing, but accompanied its development.

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bulla(e)

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the earliest come from Uruk in Mesopotamia and were written by Sumerians; they cannot be thought of as showing full writing, they only concern calculations; most were found in the Uruk IV Period

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tablet

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Period when writing was invented, the archaeological layer where most writing specimens were found

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Uruk IV Period

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a picture that represents a word or part of a word

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rebus

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a mark or a syllable that lets you know how to read the logogram

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phonetic complement

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an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which help to disambiguate interpretation, but are not pronounced

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determinative/classifier

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cuneiform script language

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Old Persian

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what the cuneiform tablets were written with; they were usually made of reed, but occasionally made of metal or bone

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stylus

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6th king and ruler of Babylon; known for creating his "code"

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Hammurabi

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an Indo-European speaking people who appeared in Anatolia around the start of the 2nd millennium BCE; they borrowed the Sumero-Babylonian signs and syllabary.

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Hittite

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having multiple meanings

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polysemous

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Representing more than one sound

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polyphonous

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certain signs could sound the same

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homophonous

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a sign used to write the syllables of a word

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syllabogram

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a trade language; predominant language

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lingua franca

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the smallest unit of meaning, cannot be subdivided; the study of word formation and the units of meaning of a language

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morpheme (morphology)

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Semitic language, related to Hebrew; has a syllabic structure similar to Sumerian

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Akkadian

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ruled from about 1400-1200 BCE; first recorded dynasty that showed use of kanji and katakana; where Chinese writing starts; oracle bones were found here

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Shang Dynasty

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type of writing that used old turtle shells and ox scapulae; they had signs frequently scratched onto the surface and these inscriptions were the earliest known examples of Chinese writing; were possibly meant to foretell the future

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oracle bone writing

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ruled from 1045-221 BCE; lasts 800 years; during the warring states period in China; the use of writing grows a lot on all types of mediums and diversifies in each Chinese state

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Zhou Dynasty

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first stage of stylization, still used in the engraving of seals; found in bronze inscriptions from the western Zhou period

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great seal script

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tells you which group the sign belongs to

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radical

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the dialect of Chinese spoken in Beijing and adopted as the official language for all of China

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Mandarin

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(linguistics) a pitch or change in pitch of the voice that serves to distinguish words in tonal languages; they disambiguate which would otherwise be homophones; there are six in Cantonese and four in Mandarin

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tone

question

originally means "beautiful writing"

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calligraphy

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A system of spelling and writing Chinese words that uses the Roman alphabet; introduced by the government in 1958

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Pinyin

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changing Chinese scripts into the Roman alphabet

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romanization

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devised by Mao Zedong in 1958 to simplify the complex Chinese characters; more convenient as it saved time and effort in writing

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simplified character

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established in 221 BCE at the end of the Warring States Period following the decline of the Zhou dynasty; founded by Qin Shi Huangdi; reorganized China into large provinces; developed strong military; Great Wall was built; census introduced. Developed the unification of China and the standardization of writing. Ended in 206 BCE.

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Qin Dynasty

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he's the reason we can read oracle bone inscriptions; basically wrote a dictionary called the six scripts/writing principles

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Xu Shen

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a treatise on how Chinese writing works, sophisticated analysis

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six principles of writing

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the ability to write a language in two different ways with two different scripts

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digraphia

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represents complex syllables, usually a consonant plus a vowel, but sometimes just a vowel; works well to represent and write Japanese; syllabary writes moras

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syllabary

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The Chinese characters, or ideographs, used in Japanese writing

answer

kanji

question

small set of supplementary symbols which are actually simplified versions of kanji and are phonetic in nature

answer

kana

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"side kana"; originally used for more formal works, but now used in foreign names; developed by Buddhist monks as a shorthand for lecture taking

answer

katakana

question

"easy kana"; originally used for informal writing; started out as women's writing

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hiragana

question

western phonetic spelling for Japanese language; uses the Roman alphabet

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romaji

question

specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system (script) to write the language

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orthography

question

a unit of phonological length; Japanese writes the vowel to times to signify a long vowel; Japanese is said to be ____ic.

answer

mora

question

a mark added to a letter to indicate a pronunciation different from (but related to) the unmarked letter. In katakana, ["] tells you to voice the consonant

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diacritic

question

consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate

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palatalized consonant

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the smallest phonetic unit in a language that can convey a distinction in meaning. Writing systems tend to represent phonemes rather than all possible sounds of a language

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phoneme

question

pictures standing only for the sound of their beginning consonant

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logoconsonantal

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they do not appear to have evolved over centuries; they come into existence about 3100 BCE, just prior to the beginning of dynastic Egypt. They were written and read from both right to left and from left to right. They can be classified as: uniconsonantal, biconsonantal, triconsonantal, phonetic complements, and determinative/logograms. This is the earliest form, what everything else is based on.

answer

hieroglyph(ic)

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a variety of Egyptian hieroglyphs commonly used for religious documents written on papyrus; the orientation is not constant, the direction of reading depends on the context

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cursive hieroglyphics

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one of the cursive scripts, dating almost from the inventions of hieroglyphs, circa 16th century BCE, became a priestly script only after it was ousted by demotic. Before that, it was originally Egypt's everyday administrative and business script. Most of it is gone because it deteriorated on papyrus paper.

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hieratic

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"of the people"; one of the cursive scripts dating from after about 650 BCE; was the standard documentary script by the time of the Rosetta Stone; even faster than hieratic

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demotic

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the last stage of Egyptian and the only stage in which the vowels were written; it is still used in the Coptic church and is mainly written in Greek letters with 7 extra letters for other sounds

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coptic

question

consonantal signs that represented one consonant

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uni/mono

question

consonantal signs that represented two consonants

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bi

question

consonantal signs that represented three consonants

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tri

question

signs that represent a specific or multiple consonants

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consonantal (literal)

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a sort of determinative, like the capital letter used in English to mark a proper name; an oval or oblong used in Egyptian hieroglyphics for proper names or titles of monarchs

answer

cartouche

question

the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself; e.g. the Greek letter names (alpha, beta, gamma, delta); each sound is represented by a picture of an object whose name begins with that sound

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acrophonic principle

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a written out version of the alphabet (Ugaritic); an inscription consisting of the cuneiform signs (or letters of an alphabet) listed in a fixed order that resembles the modern order we have inherited nearly 3500 years later

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abecedary

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alphabetic inscriptions from the Sinai turquoise mines (ca. 1500 BCE) (aka Proto-Canaanite); was the first consonantal alphabet

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Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions

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people who came into Egypt from Sinai and spoke a Semitic language; an Asiatic people who took over the eastern Nile delta during the 12th dynasty

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Hyksos

question

a west Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews;

answer

Hebrew

question

Semitic language that grew out of the Phoenician script; was the official script of the later Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian empires (thus displacing cuneiform). It was also the vernacular language of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and probably the original language of the Gospels. It was also the principle language of traders from Egypt and Asia Minor to India.

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Aramaic

question

aka: Proto-Canaanite alphabet; hypothetical ancestor of the Phoenician script

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Old Canaanite Alphabet

question

as this alphabet evolved from Proto-Sinaitic, the shapes of the letters became less curved

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Linear Phoenician alphabet

question

an ancient writing system: having alternate lines written in opposite directions; "the plowing of the ox"; mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions

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boustrophedon

question

the study of how characters develop over time; the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing

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epigraphy

question

a person using the methods of epigraphy

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epigrapher

question

people who borrowed the alphabet of the Greeks, altered it, and transmitted it to the Romans

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Etruscans

question

traders who traveled long distances; located on eastern Mediterranean coast; invented the alphabet which used sounds rather than symbols like cuneiform

answer

Phoenicians

question

used to write Germanic languages, dates to the 2nd century and were based on the Latin alphabet; has 24 letters arranged in a peculiar order known as the "futhark"

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runes

question

the order that the letters in the runic script are arranged; based on the first 6 characters

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futhark

question

an early Medieval alphabet used primarily to writing the Old Irish language and also used for Celtic languages

answer

Ogham

question

became the script for more than 60 languages; said to be invented by St. Cyril, but Cyril seems to have actually invented the Glagolithic alphabet, while this one was created later. It had 43 letters, which appear to have been derived from the Greek scripts of the time; today's ____ scripts usually have about 30 letters and is best known for its use as the Russian alphabet

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Cyrillic

question

indicates the degree to which the alphabet deviates from simple one-to-one letter-phoneme correspondence

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orthographic depth

question

letters used to write vowels

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vowel letters

question

any of a number of diacritical marks written above or below consonants to indicate a preceding or following vowel in languages that are usually written without vowel letters, as in Hebrew and Arabic

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vowel points

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Early civilization in Arabia, before Muslims; the first independent Arab kingdom known to us, centered on Petra in modern Jordan. People here spoke a form of Arabic, but wrote in the Aramaic script. The ______ Aramaic script was the precursor of the Arabic script.

answer

Nabatean

question

the sacred script of Islam; it arose during the first half of the 1st millenium AD and replaced Aramaic

answer

Arabic

question

an empire in southern Asia created by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC and destroyed by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC

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Persian Empire

question

founder of the Persian Empire; was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire

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Cyrus

question

Persian empire (312-63 B.C.E.) founded by Seleucus after the death of Alexander the Great.

answer

Seleucids

question

c. 250 BCE - 224 CE; also known as the Arsacid Empire

answer

Parthian Empire

question

may refer to any of a group of the Indo-European Iranian languages spoken between the 4th century BCE and 9th century CE. (Parthian, Middle Persian, Bactrian, Aryan, Sogdian, Khwarezmian, Saka, and Old Ossetic)

answer

Middle Iranian

question

c. 321 BCE - 185 BCE; Ruled by the Mauryan dynasty, a geographically extensive Iron Age historical power in ancient India and was the largest and most powerful political and military empire of ancient India

answer

Mauryan Empire

question

3rd ruler of the Mauryan Empire in India (r. 270-232 B.C.E.), who converted to Buddhism. He broadcasted precepts on inscribed stones/pillars in an earliest form of Indian writing.

answer

Ashoka (Aśoka)

question

The dialect that Brahmi writes; any of the vernacular Indic languages of north and central India (as distinguished from Sanskrit) recorded from the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD; the name for a group of Middle Indo-Aryan languages, derived from dialects of Old Indo-Aryan languages

answer

Prakrit

question

a script (probably adapted from the Aramaic about the 7th century BC) from which no less than about 200 different South and Southeast Asian scripts derive, directly or indirectly

answer

Brahmi

question

"syllabic alphabet"; a mixed writing system combining aspects of an alphabet and aspects of a syllabary. In particular, individual symbols are largely used to represent syllables, but some may be used to write single consonants as well, or may be composed of elements that correspond to single sounds.

answer

alphasyllabary

question

means "letter" in Hindi, "syllable" in Sanskrit grammar, a consonant grapheme - with an inherent vowel - of a script of the Brahmic family

answer

akshara

question

occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph

answer

ligature

question

Also called Nagari (the name of its parent writing system); the alphabet used to write Sanskrit and northern Indian vernacular languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Bengali. It is written from left to right, does not have distinct letter cases, and is recognizable by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letters

answer

Devanagari

question

the first writing system of the Aryans, developed around 1000 b.c.; primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism

answer

Sanskrit

question

a scholar, teacher particularly one skilled in Sanskrit language, mastered Vedic scriptures in the four Vedas, Hindu rituals and Hindu law, religion, music, or philosophy under a Guru in a Gurukul or tutored under the vedic ancient Guru Shishya tradition of learning

answer

pandit

question

an extinct language of the Assyrians regarded as a dialect of Akkadian

answer

Assyrian

question

the ideographic and syllabic writing system in which the ancient Babylonian language was written

answer

Babylonian

question

used to seal clay bullae; first signs of cuneiform on these; first stage of stylization of the oracle bone scripts; found in Bronze inscriptions

answer

seal

question

the state of the vocal folds; vibrating/not vibrating

answer

voiced/voiceless

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