Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs from stone wall in the Village of the Great Kivas in New Mexico.
A petroglyph is an image carved or etched into rock. Essentially, a petroglyph is made by scratching away the uppermost surface of a rock to reveal rock of a different color underneath. The petroglyph is among the earliest known forms of art and record-keeping, and prehistoric petroglyph exist around the globe, some dating back as far as ten thousand years.
Hieroglyphics
A section of the Papyrus of Ani showing cursive Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphics is a system of writing which uses logograms, rather than an alphabet, to record a language. Logograms are single characters which may represent an idea, a subject, or a word; several modern languages use logograms including Chinese and Japanese.
Ideograms
Example of Chinese Ideograms.
An ideogram is a symbol, often used within a written language, which utilizes a picture, rather than letters, to represent a particular idea or concept. This type of image is usually conceptual or abstract in nature, as the image frequently represents something greater than what can be expressed through a direct representation.
One contemporary civilization which uses an ideogrammatic rather than an alphabetic written code is the Japanese.
One contemporary civilization which uses an ideogrammatic rather than an alphabetic written code is the Japanese.
Pictographs
Example of ancient pictograph.
A pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 B.C.
Alphabet
Example of the Braille alphabet.
The letters of a language, arranged in the order fixed by custom. They are many alphabets across the world. Three examples of alphabets are Greek, Arabic and Braille. The alphabet that is the Western standard today is the
Qoph
The 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
IDEOGRAMMATIC CODES
Advantages -It is closer to the representation of things: after all, you go directly from the idea to the paper, whereas in alphabetical systems, you must go through the sounds (idea-sounds-letters). -The biggest interest of an (artificial) ideographical system is that it could be read in any language. China has a huge territory, with many different cultures and many different languages. When people from different regions talk together, they don't understand each other. But because they share the same writing system all over China, and it only writes ideas and not the sounds used to communicate them, every Chinese can read a given text in his own language. For example, the ideogram for sun will be pronounced XXX by a Cantonese but ZZZ by a mandarin speaker. Yet, both would write the same text and understand it when they read it. Disadvantages -Using theses codes means that, in learning to write, there is an immense number of different signs to be learnt, not only 26 letters but there is no such thing as alphabetical order, so that dictionaries, files, catalogues, etc., are difficult to arrange and linotype is impossible; that foreign words, such as proper names and scientific terms, cannot be written down by sound, as in European languages, but have to be represented by some elaborate device. But You need to master thousands of little symbols to be able to write a language you already speak. |
ALPHABETIC CODES
Advantages -In most languages the number of phonemes (speech sounds) is only around forty, with a range of between twelve to sixty, a limit probably due to the restricted range of sounds that humans can distinguish in listening or articulate in speaking. It defines the maximum number of letters needed to represent them, which need to be learnt. Since the necessary letters are so few in number, they can be simple and distinctive, and easy to write and to copy. Disadvantages -We do not naturally consciously hear as separate elements in our speech the speech sounds that are distinguished in a language to make up its words, and which are the building blocks of alphabetic spelling. We hear them as part of the continuous sound wave. To map spelling to sound requires an explicit and abstract analysis of what we hear. |
There are two major modern communication tools that is able to combine pictographic, ideogrammatic and alphabetic codes. These devices are the computer and the ce
The Computer
Surface Materials
Difference between Papyrus and Paper
Papyrus is a product of the water reed of the same name found along the banks of the Nile River in Egypt. It was probably made from the outer skin since the center is pithy. Layers of the reed were laid on a stone slab side by side and the next layer was laid on top of the first at right angles to those on the bottom. The whole mass was then moistened with water, pressed, and dried, resulting in a laminated mass. The dried material was hammered to make it more compact and rubbed with a smooth stone to produce a writing surface. Samples of papyrus have been found dating back to 3,500 B.C. Greeks and Romans also wrote on it, and its use persisted until about the 10th century A.D. when overproduction or disease wiped out the crops.
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Paper developed separately in China around 200 BC. It differs from papyrus in that the plants have been beaten to separate the fibers, suspended evenly in water, placed on a webbing to drain off the water, and dried. The beating allows a hydrogen bonding to form between the fibers. This hydrogen bonding gives paper its cohesion and tearing strength. Paper can be made from any cellulose-containing plant such as cotton, hemp, wood chips, bagasse, straw, kenaf, etc. Paper derives its name from papyrus and is a transferred application of an old name to a new material.
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Before the advent of paper, there were many different surfaces used for writing and painting on.
Some of these surfaces are bark, stone, papyrus, clay, vellum (skin of an unborn calf), bamboo slips.
Some of these surfaces are bark, stone, papyrus, clay, vellum (skin of an unborn calf), bamboo slips.
Different tools were also used to write on each of these surfaces:
- BARK - knives, berries
- STONE - animal blood, berries, rock (berries and animal blood were used for their pigments almost like paint on the walls) (rock was used to scratch the outer layer of the stone off to reveal the under layer, normally a different colour)
- PAPYRUS - reed pens (made by cutting and shaping a single reed straw or length of bamboo)
- CLAY- stylus (reed pen)
- VELLUM - quill pen ( pen made from a bird's feather)
- BAMBOO SLIPS - writing brush and Chinese ink