Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Language a fundamental dimension of our existence 1.2.

. The lost paradise of the original linguistic unity. The Babel myth and subsequent nostalgia 1.3. Language as sound and meaning. The linguistic sign. Ferdi-nand de Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev 1.4. Language in the process of communication 1.5. Language and writing

1. 1.5. Language and writing The importance of language and of its study for the understanding of what essentially characterizes our very nature as human beings cannot be overestimated. By means of the language humans not only communicate in a fuller and more efficient way than any other species,1 but they are in fact the only creatures that can transmit information from a generation to the following ones. We have so far discussed linguistic communication only in its oral form (which is, of course, relevant for the study of phonetics), but for many thousands of years now human beings have communicated in a written form as well. While speech was probably an essential faculty that characterized humans from the first stages of their existence as a different species from the rest of the animal kingdom, writing certainly appeared much later in the history of mankind. The earliest records of humans trying to express their thoughts in writing date back to only several thousand years ago. Even today there are many languages that do not have a written form. The invention of writing was essential in the process of transmitting information over great distances, both in space and in time. It played a tremendous role in the development and evolution of human civilization as it is mainly through written records that information about civilizations that have long been extinct managed to reach us. Such is the importance of writing in modern times that we tend to neglect its relatively younger age. We forget that many languages in the past and even at present were (or are) exclusively spoken and that writing is, after all, a secondary and relatively less important system of symbolization in the absence of which linguistic systems can function very well.2 The prestige of writing is so great that the written form of the word influences our mental representation of the word and we often tend to reverse the natural precedent speaking has over writing and to consider writing as being primordial and speaking only secondary. This is due, as Saussure points out to the fact that graphic
Scientists have extensively studied various means through which animals communicate with one another. Though they have sometimes been loosely called languages, the different modalities used by certain species of mammals or by birds in order to communicate can in no way be compared to the complex linguistic system of communication humans use. 2 Our own language, Romanian is (somehow unfortunately) an example that illustrates this point. The earliest surviving text in Romanian dates from 1521 but the history of the language itself stretches back many centuries before that.
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symbols tend to make a more lasting impression on our intellect than the sounds we hear. They give us the illusion of solidity and permanence when, in reality, graphic conventions are by far more superficial and irrelevant for the basic features of the language.3 In spite of the apparent diversity between types of graphic symbolism used in various languages, linguists distinguish only between two different kinds of writing: ideographic and phonetic. The terminology is suggestive of their fundamental principles respectively. Ideographic writing uses ideograms or pictograms for the graphic representation of linguistic sign. The grapheme tries to represent the word in its entirety, the idea that it expresses. Ideographs in the strict interpretation of the term have no connection with the phonetic structure of the linguistic sign. They are exclusively associated with the first articulation as described above. Chinese is a classical example of a language using such writing. Linguists often quote among the advantages of ideographic writing the fact that in spite of the enormous dialectal variety displayed by a language as Chinese, writing constitutes a unifying element. People speaking different dialects of the language can communicate by referring to ideographs common to all variants of the language. Phonetic writing attempts to give a representation of the phonetic structure of the word. It is therefore linked to the second articulation as described above. Phonetic writing can, in its turn, be of two kinds: syllabic or alphabetic. In the former case we deal with conventions for representing the syllable structure of the words, while in the latter the graphic symbols tend to represent the phonemes as minimal units at the expression level. However, we will see that, for reasons that are going to be explained in the next chapter, not even in the case of the latter type of writing is there a one to one correspondence between the phonological structure of the words and the graphic signs we use to represent them. This leads us to the conclusion that no actual system of writing is an exact illustration of either of the two major classes described above. Ideographic writing can also use ideograms that lost their initial value and have acquired a phonetic character. Chinese pictograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs offer such examples.4
The example of Romanian can be again quoted. The Slavonic alphabet was used until the second half of the 19th century when the Roman alphabet was adopted. Turkish abandoned its traditional writing in the 20th century and adopted the Roman alphabet, too. These changes did not in any way modify the fundamental characteristics of the two languages. Romanian was the same Romance language even when the Cyrilic alphabet was used, while Turkish remains an Altaic language in spite of its using the Romance alphabet. An unfortunate illustration of the correctness of Saussures theory about the undeserved and deceptive preeminence of writing was the sterile debate about the spelling of the central high vowel of Romanian. A rational simplification was recently reverted and replaced in non-initial position as it was argued that the Romance character of the language is better rendered by the former sign than by the latter. One can only remember Saussures words, as an ironic and premonitory comment of such situations: Quand il y a dsaccord entre la langue et lorthographe, le dbat est toujours difficile trancher pour tout autre que le linguiste; mais comme celui-ci na pas voix au chapitre, la forme crite a presque fatalement le dessus (1965: 47) 4 Saussure speaks of the mixed character such systems of writing acquire. (1965:47)
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If we consider the chronological evolution of writing we can notice a transition from direct, more or less concrete systems of representations to increasingly abstract (though paradoxically simpler) ones. The manner in which human beings tried to convey their ideas using graphic representations was fatally very rudimentary in the beginning. The earliest systems of writing (if we can indeed speak of writing) were actually visual representations of what men saw. The scenes of hunting, for instance, painted on cave walls, are considered the first attempts of human beings to give their thoughts a graphic form. Later stages in the development of writing proper included the appearance of various systems of so called pictorial writing, in which the symbols, initially figurative representations of reality, came to display an increasingly higher degree of abstractness. Cuneiforms used in Mesopotamia illustrate a gradual transition from the direct representation of objects to the more abstract representation of words and finally syllables. Egyptian hieroglyphs constitute the most spectacular type of ideographic writing. With the transition from the earliest hieroglyphs to later variants of hieratic and demotic (popular) script we witness an effort towards simplification which is paralleled by a greater abstractness of the representation and the loss of the purely figurative character of writing. But even in the case of hieroglyphic writing proper the system interestingly and uniquely combines pictorial representations with conventions suggestive of the phonetic structure of the words. This is also the case of Chinese writing, the only surviving example of an ancient ideographic writing in the modern world. Even Chinese writing, however, makes use of many graphic symbols that have a phonetic character. (Japanese interestingly combines Chinese ideograms with graphic representations illustrating the structure of the Japanese language). As pointed out earlier all ideographic types of writing tend to acquire phonetic characteristics because of the obvious difficulties of handling a system which uneconomically represents concepts rather than a more limited number of phonological units. It was for this very reason that the invention of the alphabet by the early Semitic civilization of the Phoenicians represented an extraordinary step forward. The alphabet created by the Phoenicians was later modified by the Hebrews and the Greeks, the Greek alphabet lying in its turn at the basis of the Roman and of the Slavonic (Cyrilic) ones. Alphabetic writing had the enormous advantage of economy as it made use of a comparatively much more reduced number of symbols (about 30) by means of which practically all the words in the language could be represented. This was due to the fact that at the expression level languages are remarkably organized and economical systems as we are going to see in a subsequent chapter. The simplification of the system was paralleled by an increased abstractness as the link between the graphic representation and the linguistic sign was lost, the script rendering sounds rather than meanings. The most economical and abstract kind of writing ever invented, alphabetic writing is currently used by the overwhelming majority of present-day civilizations. Of the two essential components that constitute the linguistic sign, the present book, which analyzes different aspects of, and theories about, the production and interpretation of speech sounds will obviously deal with the signifier or the expression

level. The following chapter is devoted to a more detailed presentation of the linguistic disciplines studying speech production, transmission and perception.