Writing
Writing strictly speaking is a set of written and literary monuments of a nation.
About the history of writing
Pictography was the earliest for of writing or writing by pictures .The next stage of writing was an ideography or symbolic writing.
Ancient Egyptian writing is an example. At first sight it`s very similar to pictography but from the very beginning the two writings differed from each other. And if pictography as a beginning was designed to depict the whole image every element of ideographic writing — hieroglyph — depicted separate images. Chinese hieroglyphs are the most famous ones of ideographic writings and almost the only one we have now. It`s still used in the People`s Republic of China. Chinese hieroglyphs became a basis for the present system of Japanese writing. Totally there is 60 thousand hieroglyphs in Chinese writing. As a rule a Chinese person knows several thousand hieroglyphs. And with that he can read a newspaper or magazines or imaginative literature. Another ideographic writing is wedge writing spread among peoples of Mesopotamia —Sumerians and Assyrians — babylonians. There was a simplification of images unless they became symbols not an image — up to a simple scheme. Ancient Phoenicians made another important step towards the present alphabet — they started using Egyptian hieroglyphs for writing — but used only those ones that detonated separate syllables. But the Phoenician language had sounds Egyptians didn’t have. For those sounds Phoenicians made their own. The real alphabet is the one that consists of letters not of syllables — where there are signs for not only consonants but also for vowels and it emerged in ancient Greece for the first time. Greeks borrowed writings from the Phoenicians but it appeared not be suitable for using in greek language where vowels play a major role and signs for their denotation were also necessary. In this way greeks invented signs for the vowel denotation. The Greek alphabet appeared to be so easy and suitable so other nations of the ancient Mediterranean used it: the Etruscans — Lycans — Lydians —Bracians and the Carians. Many writings including the Latin alphabet emanated from the Greek one. The major part of humanity uses the Latin alphabet that has different additional signs and dual letter symbols for sound denotations missed in Latin. In the medieval times Latin became international and for many centuries it played a role of the scientific language. Theoretical dissertations were written in that language as well as results of experiments. Encyclopedists and enlighteners, naturalists, mathematics copied in Latin, letters were like scientific articles and its discussions as there were no periodically edited publications yet. Two scholar monks from the greek town Solun` (city of Saloniki in Greece now) worked out the Slavic alphabet developed on the basis of greek writing. T