Written language records events, ideas and feelings, requiring writing and reading skills. Scripts such as Latin, Arabic and Chinese developed from pictograms. Written language allowed for recording stories and organizing kingdoms. It was primarily used by the wealthy and educated, creating a distinction from spoken language. Modern technology has widened the gap between the two. Archaic and dead languages survive only through written documents, with incomplete dictionaries and guessed pronunciations.
Written language refers to a language that is written and used to record events, ideas and feelings. The opposite of written language is spoken language and there are a number of differences between the two. Accessing and exploiting the written word requires two key linguistic skills: writing and reading. Without these two, especially reading, it becomes nearly impossible to understand what has been written even though most of the words will be understood phonetically.
Writing has developed spontaneously in a number of cultures around the world and has spread or blended with other writing systems. In the modern world, a number of scripts have come to dominate, the most common being the Latin script which dominates Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and Oceania. There is also the Arabic script which dominates the Middle East and North Africa and the Chinese script which dominates East Asia.
Many scripts owe their existence to pictograms. These are real representations of objects, people and animals. Cave paintings such as those at the Chauvet cave in France are supposed to have been used for education. These developed into Chinese hanzi and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Arabic scripts are thought to be offshoots of Phoenician and Egyptian.
The development of a written language allowed communities and people to record stories such as Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and the Sumerian ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. It also allowed the kingdoms to interact as seen in letters between the Egyptians and the Hittites and the kingdoms to organize themselves bureaucratically. Many surviving writings and inscriptions are used to record taxes, estates, wills and burials.
Written language was primarily used by the wealthy and educated. In the early Middle Ages, it was usually the priests of the church and the odd king. This meant that the written language became the language of the educated and did not necessarily represent the way normal people speak. This means, therefore, that there is often a big distinction between written language and spoken language.
Modern technology has widened the gap between the two. In addition to mixing slang and modern terms into written lexicon, modern technology has seen a fad where people abbreviate and contradict sentences. This has seen a new written vocabulary including “laugh out loud” become “LOL”.
Archaic and dead languages survive only thanks to written documents. Some of these are written in alphabets we don’t understand; this includes Maya. As a result, the dictionaries are often incomplete and their pronunciations are guessed at best. Even in currently active languages such as English, it is impossible to know whether ordinary Anglo-Saxons spoke in the same way as their highly developed poets and writers.
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