by Walter Ong

Many scripts across the world have been developed indepen­dently of one another (Diringer 1953; Diringer 1960; Gelb 1963): Mesopotamian cuneiform 3500 BC (approximate dates here from Diringer 1962), Egyptian hieroglyphics 3000 BC (with perhaps some influence from cuneiform), Minoan or Mycenean ‘Linear B’ 1200 BC, Indus Valley script 3000—2400 BC, Chinese script 1500 BC, Mayan script AD 50, Aztec script AD 1400.
Scripts have complex antecedents. Most if not all scripts trace back directly or indirectly to some sort of picture writing, or, sometimes perhaps, at an even more elemental level, to the use of tokens. It has been suggested that the cuneiform script of the Sumerians, the first of all known scripts (c. 3500 BC), grew at least in part out of a system of recording economic transactions by using clay tokens encased in small, hollow but totally closed pod-like containers or bullae, with indentations on the outside representing the tokens inside (Schmandt-Besserat 1978). Thus the symbols on the outside of the bulla — say, seven indentations— carried with them, inside the bulla, evidence of what they represented — say, seven little clay artefacts distinctively shaped, to represent cows, or ewes or other things not yet decipherable — as though words were always proffered with their concrete significations attached. The economic setting of such prechirographic use of tokens could help associate them with writing, for the first cuneiform script, from the same region as the bullae, whatever its exact antecedents, served mostly workaday economic and administrative purposes in urban societies. Urbanization provided the incentive to develop re­cord keeping. Using writing for imaginative creations, as spoken words have been used in tales or lyric, that is, using writing to produce literature in the more specific sense of this term, comes quite late in the history of script.
Pictures can serve simply as aides-mémoire, or they can be equipped with a code enabling them to represent more or less exactly specific words in various grammatical relation to each other. Chinese character writing is still today basically made up of pictures, but pictures stylized and codified in intricate ways which make it certainly the most complex writing system the world has ever known. Pictographic communication such as found among early Native American Indians and many others (Mackay 1978, p. 32) did not develop into a true script because the code remained too unfixed. Pictographic representations of several objects served as a kind of allegorical memorandum for parties who were dealing with certain restricted subjects which helped determine in advance how these particular pictures related to each other. But often, even then, the meaning in­tended did not come entirely clear.
Out of pictographs (a picture of a tree represents the word for a tree), scripts develop other kinds of symbols. One kind is the ideograph, in which the meaning is a concept not directly represented by the picture but established by code: for example, in the Chinese pictograph a stylized picture of two trees does not represent the words ‘two trees’ but the word ‘woods’; stylized pictures of a woman and child side-by-side represent the word ‘good’, and so on. The spoken word for woman is [ny], for child [dze], for good [hau]: the pictorial etymology, as here, need have no relationship to the phonemic etymology. Writers of Chinese relate to their language quite differently from Chinese speakers who cannot write. In a special sense, numerals such as 1, 2, 3 are interlinguistic ideographs (though not pictographs): they repre­sent the same concept but not the same sound in languages which have entirely different words for 1, 2, 3. And even within the lexicon of a given language, the signs 1,2,3 and so on are in a way connected directly with the concept rather than the word: the words for 1 (‘one’) and 2 (‘two’) relate to the concepts ‘1st’ and ‘2nd’ but not to the words ‘first’ and ‘second’.
Another kind of pictograph is rebus writing (the picture of the sole of a foot could represent in English also the fish called a sole, sole in the sense of only, or soul as paired with body; pictures of a mill, a walk, and a key in that order could represent the word ‘Milwaukee’). Since at this point the symbol represents pri­marily a sound, a rebus is a kind of phonogram (sound-symbol), but only mediately: the sound is designated not by an abstract coded sign, as a letter of the alphabet, but by a picture of one of the several things the sound signifies.
All pictographic systems, even with ideographs and rebuses, require a dismaying number of symbols. Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K’anghsi dictionary of Chinese in AD 1716 lists 40,545 characters. No Chinese or Sinologist knows them all, or ever did, few Chinese who write can write all of the spoken Chinese words that they can understand. To become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some twenty years. Such a script is basically time-consuming and élitist. There can be no doubt that the characters will be replaced by the roman alphabet as soon as all the people in the People’s Republic of China master the same Chinese language (‘dialect’), the Mandarin now being taught everywhere. The loss to literature will be enormous, but not so enormous as a Chinese typewriter using over 40,000 characters.
One advantage of a basically pictographic system is that persons speaking different Chinese ‘dialects’ (really different Chinese languages, mutually incomprehensible, though basi­cally of the same structure) who are unable to understand one another’s speech can understand one another’s writing. They read off different sounds for the same character (picture), somewhat as a Frenchman and a Luba and a Vietnamese and an Englishman will know what each other means by the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, and so on, but will not recognize the numeral if pronounced by one of the others. (However, the Chinese char­acters are basically pictures, though exquisitely stylized, as 1, 2, 3 are not.)
Some languages are written in syllabaries, in which each sign represents a consonant and a following vowel sound. Thus the Japanese Katakana syllabary has five separate symbols respec­tively for ka, ke, ki, ko, ku, five others for ma, me, mi, mo, mu, and so on. The Japanese language happens to be so constituted that it can utilize a syllabary script: its words are made up of parts always consisting of a consonantal sound followed by a vowel sound (n functions as a quasi-syllable), with no consonant clusters (as in ‘pitchfork’, ‘equipment’). With its many different kinds of syllables, and its frequent consonant clusters, English could not be effectively managed in a syllabary. Some syllabar­ies are less developed than Japanese. In that of the Vai in Ligeria, for example, there is not a full one-to-one corres­pondence between the visual symbols and the units of sound. The writing provides only a kind of map to the utterance it registers, and it is very difficult to read, even for a skilled scribe (Scribner and Cole 1978, p. 456).
Many writing systems are in fact hybrid systems, mixing two or more principles. The Japanese system is hybrid (besides a syllabary, it uses Chinese characters, pronounced in its own non-Chinese way); the Korean system is hybrid (besides han­gul, a true alphabet, perhaps the most efficient of all alphabets, it uses Chinese characters pronounced its own way); the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic system was hybrid (some symbols were pictographs, some ideographs, some rebuses); Chinese charac­ter writing itself is hybrid (mixed pictographs, ideographs, rebuses, and various combinations, often of extreme complex­ity, cultural richness and poetic beauty). Indeed, because of the tendency of scripts to start with pictographs and move to ideographs and rebuses, perhaps most writing systems other than the alphabet are to some degree hybrid. And even alphabetic writing becomes hybrid when it writes 1 instead of one.
The most remarkable fact about the alphabet no doubt is that it was invented only once. It was worked up by a Semitic people or Semitic peoples around the year 1500 BC, in the same general geographic area where the first of all scripts appeared, the cuneiform, but two millennia later than the cuneiform. (Dirin­ger 1962, pp. 121—2, discusses the two variants of the original alphabet, the North Semitic and the South Semitic.) Every alphabet in the world — Hebrew, Ugaritic, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, Korean — derives in one way or another from the original Semitic development, though, as in Ugaritic and Korean script, the physical design of the letters may not always be related to the Semitic design.
Hebrew and other Semitic languages, such as Arabic, do not to this day have letters for vowels. A Hebrew newspaper or book still today prints only consonants (and so-called semi-vowels [j] and [w], which are in effect the consonantal forms of [i] and [u]): if we were to follow Hebrew usage in English we would write and print ‘cnsnts’ for ‘consonants’. The letter aleph, adapted by the ancient Greeks to indicate the vowel alpha, which became our roman ‘a’, is not a vowel but a consonant in Hebrew and other Semitic alphabets, representing a glottal stop (the sound between the two vowel sounds in the English ‘huh-uh’, meaning ‘no’). Late in the history of the Hebrew alphabet, vowel ‘points’, little dots and dashes below or above the letters to indicate the proper vowel, were added to many texts, often for the benefit of those who did not know the language very well, and today in Israel these ‘points’ are added to words for very young children learning to read — up to the third grade or so. Languages are organized in many different ways, and the Semitic languages are so constituted that they are easy to read when words are written only with consonants.
This way of writing only with consonants and semi-consonants (y as in ‘you’, w) has led some linguists (Gelb 1963; Havelock 1963, p. 129) to call what other linguists call the Hebrew alphabet a syllabary, or perhaps an unvocalized or ‘reduced’ syllabary. However, it appears somewhat awkward to think of the Hebrew letter beth (b) as a syllable when it in fact simply represents the phoneme [b], to which the reader has to add whatever vowel sound the word and context call for. Besides, when vowel points are used, they are added to the letters (above or below the line) just as vowels are added to our consonants. And modern Israelis and Arabs, who agree on so little else, both generally agree that both are writing letters in an alphabet. For an understanding of the development of writing out of orality, it appears at least unobjectionable to think of the Semitic script simply as an alphabet of consonants (and semi-vowels) for which readers, as they read, simply and easily supply the appropriate vowels.
When this is all said, however, about the Semitic alphabet, it does appear that the Greeks did something of major psycholo­gical importance when they developed the first alphabet com­plete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures. The reader of Semitic writing had to draw on non-textual as well as textual data: he had to know the language he was reading in order to know what vowels to supply between the consonants. Semitic writing was still very much immersed in the non-textual human lifeworld. The voca­lic Greek alphabet was more remote from that world (as Plato’s ideas were to be). It analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components. It could be used to write or read words even from languages one did not know (allowing for some inaccur­acies due to phonemic differences between languages). Little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were very young and their vocabulary limited. (It has just been noted that for Israeli schoolchildren to about the third grade vowel ‘points’ have to be added to the ordinary consonantal Hebrew script.) The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. It was also internationalizing in that it provided a way of processing even foreign tongues. This Greek achievement in abstractly analyzing the elusive world of sound into visual equivalents (not perfectly, of course, but in effect fully) both presaged and implemented their further analytic exploits.
It appears that the structure of the Greek language, the fact that it was not based on a system like the Semitic that was hospitable to omission of vowels from writing, turned out to be a perhaps accidental but crucial intellectual advantage. Kerckhove (1981) has suggested that, more than other writ­ing systems, the completely phonetic alphabet favors left-hemisphere activity in the brain, and thus on neurophysio­logical grounds fosters abstract, analytic thought.
The reason why the alphabet was invented so late and why it was invented only once can be sensed if we reflect on the nature of sound. For the alphabet operates more directly on sound as sound than the other scripts, reducing sound directly to spatial equivalents, and in smaller, more analytic, more manageable units than a syllabary: instead of one symbol for the sound ba, you have two, b plus a.
Sound, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is going out of existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: when I say ‘existence’, by the time I get to the ‘-tence’, the ‘exis-’ is gone. The alphabet implies that matters are otherwise, that a word is a thing, not an event, that it is present all at once, and that it can be cut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: ‘p-a-r-t’ can be pronounced ‘trap’. If you put the word ‘part’ on a sound tape and reverse the tape, you do not get ‘trap’, but a completely different sound, neither ‘part’ nor ‘trap’. A picture, say, of a bird does not reduce sound to space, for it represents an object, not a word. It will be the equivalent of any number of words, depend­ing on the language used to interpret it: oisaau, uccello, pájaro, Vogel, sae, tori, ‘bird’.
All script represents words as in some way things, quiescent objects, immobile marks for assimilation by vision. Rebuses or phonograms, which occur irregularly in some pictographic writing, represent the sound of one word by the picture of another (the ‘sole’ of a foot representing the ‘soul’ as paired with body, in the fictitious example used above). But the rebus (phonogram), though it may represent several things, is still a picture of one of the things it represents. The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all connection with things as things. It represents sound itself as a thing, transform­ing the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasi-permanent world of space.
The phonetic alphabet invented by ancient Semitics and perfected by ancient Greeks, is by far the most adaptable of all writing systems in reducing sound to visible form. It is perhaps also the least aesthetic of all major writing systems: it can be beautifully designed, but never so exquisitely as Chinese char­acters. It is a democratizing script, easy for everybody to learn. Chinese character writing, like many other writing systems, is intrinsically elitist: to master it thoroughly requires protracted leisure. The democratizing quality of the alphabet can be seen in South Korea. In Korean books and newspapers the text is a mixture of alphabetically spelt words and hundreds of different Chinese characters. But all public signs are always written in the alphabet alone, which virtually everyone can read since it is completely mastered in the lower grades of elementary school, whereas the 1800 han, or Chinese characters, minimally needed besides the alphabet for reading most literature in Korean, are not commonly all mastered before the end of secondary school.
Perhaps the most remarkable single achievement in the history of the alphabet was in Korea, where in AD 1443 King Sejong of the Yi Dynasty decreed that an alphabet should be devised for Korean. Up to that time Korean had been written only with Chinese characters, laboriously adapted to fit (and interact with) the vocabulary of Korean, a language not at all related to Chinese (though it has many Chinese loan words, mostly so Koreanized as to be incomprehensible to any Chinese). Thousands upon thousands of Koreans — all Koreans who could write — had spent or were spending the better part of their lives mastering the complicated Sino-Korean chirogra­phy. They were hardly likely to welcome a new writing system which would render their laboriously acquired skills obsolete. But the Yi Dynasty was powerful and Sejong’s decree in the face of massive anticipated resistance suggests that he had compara­bly powerful ego structures. The accommodation of the alphabet to a given language has generally taken many years, or generations. Sejong’s assembly of scholars had the Korean alphabet ready in three years, a masterful achievement, virtual­ly perfect in its accommodation to Korean phonemics and aesthetically designed to produce an alphabetic script with something of the appearance of a text in Chinese characters. But the reception of this remarkable achievement was predictable. The alphabet was used only for unscholarly, practical, vulga­rian purposes. ‘Serious’ writers continued to use the Chinese character writing in which they had so laboriously trained themselves. Serious literature was élitist and wanted to be known as elitist. Only in the twentieth century, with the greater democratization of Korea, did the alphabet achieve its present (still less than total) ascendancy.