John Coyne – 1/24/19 – Clst 171S – Greek Alphabet “Documentary Script” Essay

Ancient Writing and the Greek Alphabet

A. B. C. Preschool and elementary school students throughout the Western Hemisphere begin

learning these signs and sounds that many would identify as the fundamental building block of the

English language. Lurking behind these letters of the alphabet, however, is the rich and complex history

of writing systems dating back as far as the fourth millennium BC. Until relatively recently, the slow but

dogged development from the most basic ideograms to many varieties of writing systems has been

unknown to all but those on the cutting edge of linguistics and ancient history. Observe the great

diversity of our world’s scripts, whose inventions can seem a jumbled mess of borrowed features and

inadvertent adaptation, but together forged the writing system upon which ours is based: the Greek

alphabet.

From even prehistory, the human mind have been directed toward representing the world

around us. Archaeologists have uncovered countless cave paintings, drawn by some of the earliest

people on earth. They may not be much to look at, but these basic sketches firmly establish our human

penchant for storytelling. Ten thousand years ago, the Neolithic revolution brought a variety of

advancements in prehistoric mankind. Early humans developed more durable stone tools and weapons,

which influenced the beginnings of animal domestication and primitive agriculture. Most importantly,

wandering tribes came to settle down in more permanent villages, allowing for artisanry like poetry and

weaving (Britannica). With these developments came the ability to develop traditions and rich cultural

stories, which could be documented with early pictograms, as in the “picture writing” of the Ojibway

people indigenous to North America (Olson).

In the fourth millennium BC, we arrive in Mesopotamia, the region in modern-day southern Iraq

that is known as “the cradle of civilization.” Perhaps the most important example of early writing is the

use of a token system to keep track of commerce in the ancient villages and later city-states. The
development of agriculture demanded a way to track large amounts of goods, transactions, and people.

Each of token represents livestock animals like sheep and cattle, and goods such as wheat, oil, and

artisanal products. Cognitive psychologist David Olson points out that while this is a step in the

development of a coherent written script, these ancient Sumerians have yet to establish a syntax for this

writing system. In this case, it would be the representation of multiple objects by some sort of tally

system, which does arise later in the region. There are many examples of cuneiform tablets depicting

some sort of accounting of goods or people following this pattern. These advancements in written

systems are necessary to support ancient Sumer’s growing population and an increasingly complex

economic environment.

This development of writing for commercial purposes motivates the first major class of scripts:

logographic. While the concept may appear simple, the most prominent example of a logographic script,

Chinese, has a breathtaking complexity and beauty that rivals any language and script, with its over

50,000 total characters. In general, a logographic script will represent objects and ideas visually, with a

stylized icon or other character. For example, the idea of a person may be communicated through an

ideogram of a human body. While there is not necessarily a direct connection between the drawn

character and the language’s spoken word for “person,” a reader will recognize its meaning.

Over time, these logographic scripts see a move toward some phonetic representation. Two

major routes of this influence into writing systems are the acrophonic principle and the rebus principle.

In the former, the first sound of a character’s corresponding spoken word comes to be represented by

the character itself. In the case of the latter, the character is adapted as the spoken equivalent of the

entire word. Fundamentally, these situations are the result of attempting to use a script in a language

for which it was not constructed, bringing an interesting inadvertence into the development of written

language. When the Akkadian Empire and subsequently the Assyrian Empire took over large parts of

Mesopotamia, cuneiform was adapted for their own languages. The new scripts carried some elements
of the older logographic writing, but also contained characters representing sounds, and thus are called

logosyllabic. Further adaptations of logographic and logosyllabic scripts to other Semitic languages led to

a further development of syllabic scripts. This includes Linear B, the landmark script of the predecessors

of the ancient Greeks. Interestingly, Linear B was not the most influential language in the creation of the

Greek alphabet. In fact, the script of the merchants and traders known as Phoenicians became the basis

for the writing system that informs the construction of our language today.

Like many of the developments and nuances of writing systems throughout history, the Greek

alphabet was innovated through the application of a script to a language for which it was not well-

suited. The Greek language, a non-Semitic language, is well known for its words beginning with or

consisting only of vowels, and syllables with unique vocalizations among ancient languages. Phoenician

is often classified as a protoalphabetic script known as an abjad. The script has no characters for vowels,

making it particularly ill-suited to represent the Greek language. In some way, it is remarkable for the

Greek alphabet to have developed from this script. Languages like Greek and English need the minute

differences in vowel sounds to accurately distinguish between otherwise similar sounding words.

The Greek alphabet and the concept of an alphabet in general underscores several important

ideas in writing systems. A script that breaks words into such small building blocks does not accurately

represent the way language is spoken or fundamentally understand by preliterate children. It is

generally accepted that people first understand spoken language at the syllable level. Studies of a group

of fishermen in Portugal and elderly Chinese supports this idea, as without the concept of the alphabet,

the idea of a consonant or vowel never enters the mind, and language is treated as a collection of

syllables. An advantage of the Greek alphabet is in the unambiguous writing and reading it allows. This

scaffolding supports the development of concrete grammar rules, dictionaries, and other linguistic

organization. The modular construction the alphabet provides, while imperfect at representing spoken
word, is crucial to the systems of language we see in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the modern

West.

Ultimately, the history of ancient writing systems is a story of civilizations and people seeking to

communicate graphically in the way best suited to their particular language and society. While a

logographic, syllabic, or other script may serve a civilization well, the Greek alphabet accurately

represented the Greek language by design. And it is through this ancient alphabet that the Western and

English-speaking worlds derive the organization and structure that form our languages today.