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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
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