История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 8 стр.

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establishing a system of relations between–sound and meaning. The basic unit of

the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a

word. Thus the word boys is composed of two morphemes, boy and plurality.

Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning.

Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less well-

defined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems.

Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of

the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have

been exploited by some writing system or other. Writing systems, consequently,

fall into two large general classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning

structure, such as a word or morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of

the sound system, such as the syllable or phoneme.

The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some

scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms,

had been invented to express thought directly, by passing language altogether. The

17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect

writing system, which would reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be

readable by all human beings regardless of their mother tongues. We now know

that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too intimately related to language to

be represented independently of it.

More recently there have been attempts to invent forms of communicating

explicit messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such

messages are communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus the skirted human

figure painted on the door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on

the Pioneer spacecraft, and the Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside

down painted on a rock near a dangerous trail, are all attempts to use visual marks

to communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular

language.

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of

linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted