Writing

Writing is a medium of human communication that involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols.

Writing systems are non themselves human languages with the debatable exception of computer languages; they are means of rendering a Linguistic communication into a develope that can be reconstructed by other humans separated by time and/or space. While non all languages use a writing system, those with systems of inscriptions can complement and conduct capacities of spoken language by enabling the develop of durable forms of speech that can be refers across space e.g., correspondence & stored over time e.g., libraries or other public records. It has also been observed that the activity of writing itself can make-up knowledge-transforming effects, since it provides humans to externalize their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, elaborate, reconsider, and revise. Writing relies on numerous of the same semantic managers as the speech it represents, such(a) as lexicon and syntax, with the added dependency of a system of symbols to survive that language's phonology and morphology. The calculation of the activity of writing is called a text, and the deterrent example or activator of this text is called a reader.

As human societies emerged, collective motivations for the development of writing were driven by pragmatic exigencies like keeping history, maintaining culture, codifying knowledge through curricula and lists of texts deemed to contain foundational knowledge e.g., The Canon of Medicine or to be artistically exceptional e.g., a literary canon, organizing and governing societies through the array of legal systems, census records, contracts, deeds of ownership, taxation, trade agreements, treaties, and so on. Amateur historians, including H.G. Wells, had speculated since the early 20th century on the likely correspondence between the emergence of systems of writing and the coding of city-states into empires. As Charles Bazerman explains, the "marking of signs on stones, clay, paper, and now digital memories—each more portable and rapidly traveling than the previous—provided means for increasingly coordinated and extended action as well as memory across larger groups of people over time and space." For example, around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and supervision in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. In both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, on the other hand, writing may have evolved through calendric and political necessities for recording historical and environmental events. Further innovations target more uniform, predictable, and widely dispersed legal systems, distribution and discussion of accessible versions of sacred texts, and the origins of innovative practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation, all largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of inscribed language.

Individual, as opposed to collective, motivations for writing put improvised additional capacity for the limitations of human memory e.g., to-do lists, recipes, reminders, logbooks, maps, the proper sequence for a complicated task or important ritual, dissemination of ideas as in an essay, monograph, broadside, petition, or manifesto, imaginative narratives and other forms of storytelling, maintaining kinship and other social networks, negotiating household matters with providers of goods and services and with local and regional governing bodies, and lifewriting e.g., a diary or journal.

The near global spread of digital communication systems such(a) as e-mail and social media has featured writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, where these systems mix with older technologies like paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers. Substantial amounts of everyday writing characterize almost workplaces in developed countries. In numerous occupations e.g., law, accounting, software-design, human-resources, etc. a thing that is said documentation is not only the leading deliverable but also the mode of work itself. Even in occupations not typically associated with writing, routine workflows maintaining records, reporting incidents, record-keeping, inventory-tracking, documenting sales, accounting for time, fielding inquiries from clients, etc. have most employees writing at least some of the time.

Writing systems

The major writing systems—methods of inscription—broadly fall into five categories: logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, featural, and ideographic symbols for ideas. A sixth category, pictographic or symbols, is insufficient to survive language on its own, but often forms the core of logographies.

A logogram is a written address which represents a word or morpheme. A vast number of logograms are needed to write Chinese characters, cuneiform, and Mayan, where a glyph may stand for a morpheme, a syllable, or both—"logoconsonantal" in the issue of hieroglyphs. Many logograms have an ideographic element Chinese "radicals", hieroglyphic "determiners". For example, in Mayan, the glyph for "fin", pronounced "ka", was also used to represent the syllable "ka" whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be indicated, or when there was no logogram. In Chinese, approximately 90% of characters are compounds of a semantic meaning element called a radical with an existing reference to indicate the pronunciation, called a phonetic. However, such(a) phonetic elements complement the logographic elements, rather than vice versa.

The main logographic system in ownership today is Chinese characters, used with some adjusting for the various languages or dialects of China, Japan, and sometimes in Korean despite the fact that in South and North Korea, the phonetic Hangul system is mainly used.

A syllabary is a species of written symbols that represent or approximate syllables. A glyph in a syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone, though in some scripts more complex syllables such as consonant-vowel-consonant, or consonant-consonant-vowel may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically related syllables are not so indicated in the script. For instance, the syllable "ka" may look nothing like the syllable "ki", nor will syllables with the same vowels be similar.

Syllabaries are best suited to languages with a relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other languages that use syllabic writing put the Ethiopic, though technically an abugida, has fused consonants and vowels together to the point where it is for learned as whether it were a syllabary.

An alphabet is a species of symbols, each of which represents or historically represented a phoneme of the language. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word condition its spelling.

As languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, the measure to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

In most of the writing systems of the Middle East, it is ordinarily only the consonants of a word that are written, although vowels may be indicated by the addition of various diacritical marks. Writing systems based primarily on marking the consonant phonemes alone date back to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Such systems are called abjads, derived from the Arabic word for "alphabet".

In most of the alphabets of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are indicated through diacritics or right of the shape of the consonant. These are called abugidas. Some abugidas, such as Ethiopic and Cree, are learned by children as syllabaries, and so are often called "syllabics". However, unlike true syllabaries, there is not an self-employed person glyph for each syllable.

Sometimes the term "alphabet" is restricted to systems with separate letters for consonants and vowels, such as the Latin alphabet, although abugidas and abjads may also be accepted as alphabets. Because of this use, Greek is often considered to be the number one alphabet.

A featural program notates in an internally consistent way the building blocks of the phonemes that make up a language. For instance, all sounds pronounced with the lips "labial" sounds may have some element in common. In the Latin alphabet, this is accidentally the issue with the letters "b" and "p"; however, labial "m" is totally dissimilar, and the similar-looking "q" and "d" are not labial. In Korean hangul, however, all four labial consonants are based on the same basic element, but in practice, Korean is learned by children as an ordinary alphabet, and the featural elements tend to pass unnoticed.

Another featural program is SignWriting, the most popular writing system for many sign languages, where the shapes and movements of the hands and face are represented iconically. Featural scripts are also common in fictional or invented systems, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar.

The many tools and writing materials used throughout history include stone tablets, clay tablets, bamboo slats, papyrus, wax tablets, vellum, parchment, paper, copperplate, styluses, quills, ink brushes, pencils, pens, and many styles of lithography. The Incas used knotted cords so-called as quipu or khipu for keeping records.

The typewriter and various forms of word processors have subsequently become widespread writing tools, and various studies have compared the ways in which writers have framed the experience of writing with such tools as compared with the pen or pencil. Advancements in natural language generation allow certain tools in the form of software to producekinds of highly formulaic writing e.g., weather forecasts and brief sports reporting without the direct involvement of humans.