История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 33 стр.

UptoLike

Составители:

Рубрика:

UNIT 5

DEVELOPMENT OF ALPHABETIC SYSTEMS

Sumerian script was adopted in the 3rd millennium BC by the Akkadians,

who greatly expanded the phonographic properties of the script and were

responsible for most of the cuneiform writing in a form known today as Akkadian

cuneiform.

While cuneiform had many graphs that represented syllables, many syllables

were not represented. The methods used for representing syllables that did not have

distinctive graphs were quite unsystematic. The first writing system consistently

based on the sound structure of a language was Linear B. Linear B was an

incomplete script for representing the phonological structures of the spoken

language. Hence, there are usually several ways of reading a series of Linear B

graphs, and a correct reading depended upon the reader's knowing what the text is

about.

The final stage in the evolution of writing systems was the discovery of the

alphabetic principle, the procedure of breaking the syllable into its constituent

consonantal and vowel sounds. According to Geoffrey Sampson, the British

linguist, “Most, and probably all, ‘alphabetic' scripts derive from a single ancestor:

the Semitic alphabet, created sometime in the 2nd millennium [BC].” Modern

versions of Semitic script include the Hebrew script and the Arabic script. Their

most prominent characteristic is that they have graphs for consonants but not for

vowels.

This fact has led some scholars, notably Gelb and Havelock, to claim that

Semitic scripts are not true alphabets but rather unvocalized syllabaries. Other

scholars, noting that the graphs represent consonants rather than syllables–for

example, pa, pe, pi, po, and pu would all be represented by the same character–

insist that the script is an alphabet.