On the historiography of writing systems

Abstract

There are few aspects of Western civilisation in which writing does not play a central role – from literature to law, from advertising to political control, from twitter messages to the intricacies of information technology. Its pervasiveness is seen to be the more profound if writing is considered globally, and taken to include literacy, numeracy and graphic symbolisation more generally, as in treatments such as Christin (2002) and in any number the lavishly illustrated coffee-table books aimed at a wide readership. The topic of writing systems is thus a huge area of academic study, since it necessarily involves so many different disciplines, each with its own specific applications and concerns. This themed issue on the historiography of writing systems reflects, we hope, a small measure of the richness and variety of the topic as a whole. But what unifies the papers as a collection, and we hope gives them a common focus, is that they all, in one way or another, relate to a substantial branch of the language sciences rather than being anchored in one of the other adjacent disciplines in the humanities. A political theorist might study political language as a way of investigating how politics works; but someone who studies political language as a way of finding out how language works belong to the language sciences. We use the term ‘language sciences’ here advisedly. Peter Daniels, co-author of a linguistically-oriented collection of articles on the world’s writing systems (Daniels and Bright 1996), has also produced a useful historical survey entitled The history of writing as a history of linguistics (2013). Daniels’ title is a thought-provoking one, whichever way the two component elements are put, since the study of language Western European tradition has been based on an almost paradoxical conception of the relation between speech and writing. It is a truism that speech is logically prior to writing, based on simple empirical observation. All known human societies have language of a spoken or signed variety, but there are fully functional speech communities in the world today that do not have writing; furthermore, every human being, barring medically exceptional circumstances, acquires fluency in speech before acquiring the ability to write. In both cases, speech comes first. But in the Western tradition the truism of the logical priority of speech over writing is often asserted as an ontological doctrine, that speech is what language necessarily consists in, and that writing is a secondary epiphenomenon. This is problematic as a starting point, since it conflicts with an equally important truism based on self-evident empirical evidence: in human societies which do have a writing system of some sort, writing seems inevitably to have been associated with political, legal and religious control. The relation between speech and writing is thus not a simplex but