История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 35 стр.

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system, and the addition of vowels to make a full alphabet do constitute progress

toward an efficient, economical, explicit, and complete writing system, this

progress was not simply a matter of increasing insight. Advances resulted from

attempts to apply a writing system invented for one language to another language

for which it was not completely appropriate. Yet the accumulated discoveries

yielded an analysis of deeper and deeper levels of linguistic structure of the type

associated with discoveries in the natural sciences. For this reason, writing has

almost always been the means not only for transcribing speech but also for

uncovering its underlying structure. That is, to a large extent writing is what has

made people conscious of the properties of speech.

Observation of children learning to read and write an alphabetic orthography

suggests that children pass through some of the same stages in interpreting the

code that the writing system itself passed through in the course of its development.

The youngest child's hypothesis about writing is that words must be similar in

some way to the objects they represent. Thus, at the earliest stage children think

that the word “train” must be represented by a long word because it is a long thing.

Similarly, they think that “two little pigs” must be represented by two words, one

for each pig, and so on. Later, they invent the hypotheses that writing represents

words rather than things and that these words are series of sounds. At this point

children may write the word with a series of consonants; cat becomes kt. Only later

do they recognize the alphabetic principle that words must be written with both

consonants and vowels.

Yet the evolution of the alphabet, an invention of enormous importance for

Greek and for all Indo-European languages, was of little use for Semitic languages,

in which the vowels played a smaller role than in Greek. And it was of no use at all

for Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language with a great many homophones.