History of Writing Quiz 1 (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11)

hieroglyph

"scared carving". Used to describe many pictorial logo phonetic scripts.

Herodotus of Halicarnasses

'Father of History' Gave us cultural context Seven wonders of the ancient world The Histories

Writing

'Visible speech'. Always represents a language. All known writing systems (ancient or modern), are structurally similar in involving direct links to spoken language through: phonetic signs, logograms, and/or syntactic ordering. Regardless of number of signs, or other formal features - 'All writing represents speech'

Decipherment

A complete account of sign use in a writing system How signs collaborate to create language Includes details of sign types, orthography (spelling rules), and abbreviational conventions.

Proper Nouns

A noun that refers to a unique entity such as a person, place, or organization. From a comparative perspective, proper nouns are highly language specific and resistant to translation. Proper nouns can only be recorded with phonetic signs.

Rebus

A principle of logo phonetic scripts whereby a logogram is used for its phonetic value to signal a homophonous word.

Semogram

A semantic sign. Also known as determinative, taxon, or radical. It is an unpronounced sign that helps to disambiguate the semantics (meaning) of associated logograms and/or phonograms.

Phonogram

A sound sign; representing sound only. Signs of consonantal (p), vocalic (a), or syllabic (pa, ap, pap) can all be considered phonetic. Phonograms either spell words, or are phonetic complements to logograms.

Logogram

A word sign, also known as a logograph. A sign representing a single morpheme (smallest unit of meaning) or a single word (semantic unit composed of one or more morphemes). Denotes a specific word and its meaning in an underlying language.

cartouche

An oval encircling a group of Egyptian hieroglyphs and providing one of the names of the pharaoh.

Corpus

Body of texts. Should be large or varied enough to allow for effective comparisons. Should be atleast a few long texts. Should be clear photographs or line drawings, well distributed.

Jean-François Champollion

Deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, hieratic, and demotic scripts in 1822

Rosetta Stone

Famous example of a bilingual. Contains three different writings systems; the well-known Greek alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and demotic. Discovered in July 1799. The bilingual key helped to decipher hieroglyphics, which was done by Jean-François Champollion.

The Five Pillars of Decipherment

Script type, adequate corpus, language, cultural context, bilingual/biscript.

Language

The language must be known (or possible to reconstruct) including details of both vocabulary and grammar.

comparative method

The method by which historical linguists compare related words in several related languages in order to deduce the form and meaning of a word in their shared ancestor.

phonetic

The surface level of speech. Uttered sounds (phones) are conventionally transcribed in brackets; [p]

phonemic

The way sounds are organized in the mind of a speaker. The phoneme is a significant unit of sound traditionally enclosed in back-slashes; /p/. Phonemes can have different pronunciations (allophones) in different environments, and are defined by distribution and contrast.

Type of script

abjad, abugida, alphabet, syllabic, logophonetic. Closely linked to the number of distinct signs in a given writing system.

conventional spellings

traditional/received orthography. Can provide important evidence of earlier pronunciations.