The place where ancient writing originated. Abstract: The history of the development of writing

The first written language arose on Earth 5,000 years ago. It was the writing of the Sumerians.
The writing was called cuneiform after its latest form. The letter was made with a special reed stick on clay tablets. Then these tablets were dried and fired in a kiln, so they have survived to this day.

There are 2 hypotheses about the origin of writing:

• monogenesis (invented in one place)
• polygenesis (in several foci).

Writing is represented in 3 primary foci, the connection of which has not been proven:

1. Mesopotamian (Sumerians)
2. Egyptian (according to the theory of monogenesis brought from the Sumerians)
3. writing of the Far East (Chinese, according to the theory of monogenesis brought from the Sumerians).

Writing everywhere develops uniformly - from drawings to written signs. Pictography turns into a graphic system. Picture writing turns into language graphics not when pictures disappear (for example, pictures were used in Egypt, but this is not picture writing), but when we can guess what language the text is written in.
Sometimes people instead of a letter sent various objects to each other.
Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century. BC e., tells about the "letter" of the Scythians to the Persian king Darius. A Scythian messenger came to the Persian camp and placed gifts in front of the king, "consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows." The Scythians did not know how to write, so their message looked like this. Darius asked what these gifts meant. The messenger replied that he was ordered to hand them over to the king and immediately return back. And the Persians themselves must unravel the meaning of the "letter". Darius conferred with his soldiers for a long time and finally said how he understood the message: the mouse lives in the earth, the frog lives in the water, the bird is like a horse, and the arrows are the military courage of the Scythians. Thus, Darius decided, the Scythians give him their water and land and submit to the Persians, giving up their military courage.
But the commander of the Persians, Gobrius, interpreted the “letter” differently: “If you, Persians, do not fly away like birds to heaven, or like mice do not hide in the ground, or like frogs do not jump into lakes, then you will not come back and fall under the blows of our arrows ".
As you can see, subject writing can be interpreted in different ways. The history of Darius's war with the Scythians showed that Gobryas turned out to be right. The Persians could not defeat the elusive Scythians who roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region, Darius left the Scythian lands with his army.
Actually writing, descriptive writing began with drawings. Writing with drawings is called pictography (from the Latin pictus - picturesque and the Greek grapho - I write). In pictography, art and writing are inseparable, so archaeologists, ethnographers, art historians, and historians of writing are engaged in rock paintings. Everyone is interested in their own area. For the historian of writing, the information contained in the drawing is important. A pictogram usually denotes either some kind of life situation, such as hunting, or animals and people, or various objects - a boat, a house, etc.
The first inscriptions were about household chores - food, weapons, supplies - objects were simply depicted. Gradually, there is a violation of the principle of isomorphism (i.e., a reliable image of the number of objects - how many vases there are, so many we draw). The image loses its connection with the subject. Instead of 3 vases, now there is a vase and 3 dashes that convey the number of vases, i.e. quantitative and qualitative information are given separately. The first scribes had to separate and recognize the difference between qualitative and quantitative signs. Then iconicity develops, its own grammar appears.
At the turn of IV - III millennium BC. e. Pharaoh Narmer conquered Lower Egypt and ordered to perpetuate his victory. A relief drawing depicts this event. And in the upper right corner there is a pictogram that serves as a signature to the reliefs. The falcon holds a rope threaded through the nostrils of a human head, which, as it were, emerges from a strip of earth with six stems of papyrus. The falcon is a symbol of the victorious king, he keeps the head of the defeated king of the North on a leash; the land with papyri is Lower Egypt, the papyrus is its symbol. Its six stems are six thousand captives, since the papyrus sign means a thousand. But could the drawing convey the name of the king? How do you know that his name was Narmer?
It turns out that at that time the Egyptians had already begun to distinguish signs from the drawings that did not denote the drawn object, but the sounds that made up its name. The drawing of a dung beetle meant three HPR sounds, and the drawing of a basket meant two NB sounds. And although such sounds remained drawings, they have already become phonetic signs. The ancient Egyptian language had words with one-, two-, and three-letter syllables. And since the Egyptians did not write vowels, monosyllabic words depicted one sound. When the Egyptians had to write a name, they used one-letter hieroglyphs.
The transition from concrete to abstract objects that do not correspond to a visual image. Chinese characters originated from drawings (13th century BC). Until now, the characters have changed little, but the grammar of the language has changed (a modern Chinese can read texts written BC, recognize the symbols, but will not catch the meaning). The drawing is stylized, simplified, standardized.
In the end, in all centers of the globe, signs begin to display sounds. Signs were tied to the sound of the whole word. It was very difficult to use such a letter - it is an art. A very complex writing system, but it satisfied the ancients, because. it could only be used by a limited caste of people for whom this knowledge was a means of subsistence.
The need to quickly write down complex and long texts led to the fact that the drawings were simplified, they became conditional icons - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred writings).
In the 12th-13th centuries. BC. in the Middle East, the time of the appearance of the Sinai inscriptions. This is a step towards a sharp decrease in the number of written characters. Signs were developed that denoted the syllable. Writing has become syllabic. For different words, the combination of consonant and vowel is different.
Thanks to the presence of such single-syllable signs denoting one sound, the complex writing system stood out alphabet. The Phoenicians, having become acquainted with these letters, based on them created their own alphabetic letter, simplifying the signs of syllabic writing. An indifferent vowel was assigned to each sign of this writing. Arabs and Jews used a letter without vowels. There was a complex system of guessing, which nevertheless gave constant failures. Later, a system of vowels appeared, but nevertheless, in everyday life, Jews and Arabs used a letter without vowels.
The Greeks adopted the Phoenician system. Greek is Indo-European. The Greeks introduce signs for vowels - this is a coup. The Greeks invented a complete writing system. All vowels were shown. Later they began to depict stress (place and type), aspiration. We also introduced the image of prosody (analogous to notes), which is impossible in the case of Russian writing and therefore is not used by us.
Is it possible to answer the question: who, what person invented the writing system? Who was the first to use alphabetic writing? There are no answers to these questions. The emergence of writing was caused by the demand of the life of society and the state, the economic activity of people - and writing appeared. But alphabets were also created later, in the era of our new era, by educated people of their time. So, Cyril and Methodius created a letter for the Slavic languages. Mesrop Mashtots created an alphabetic script for the Armenian language. Together with his students, Mashtots went to different countries to study writing. It was “a real scientific, perhaps the first linguistic expedition in the world, which set as its goal the development of an alphabet,” wrote D. A. Olderogge, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The peoples of the Far North and Siberia had no written language before the October Revolution. Now the researchers of the Institute of the Peoples of the North have created an alphabetic letter for them.
There were many illiterates in the Tajik Republic, since the Arabic script, which was once used by Tajiks, is very complex. Now Tajiks write Tajik in Russian letters.
Scripts are also being created in the countries of modern Africa.

Photo: Vladislav StrekopytovOn the shores of Lake Orestiada in Western Macedonia(Northern Greece) city is located Kastoria, known to Russian tourists primarily for its fur centers, where specialized shopping tours are organized for inexpensive, but very high-quality fur coats made of natural fur. But there is a lot of interesting things in Western Macedonia besides fur coats, which, however, are not always told to participants in shopping tours.

One of these places "for tourist gourmets" is a museum-reconstruction of a prehistoric settlement Dispilio on the shores of Lake Orestiada. This place is known not so much for the modern reconstruction of frame adobe houses on piles, but for the so-called tablet from Dispilio, on which pictographic signs are applied, reminiscent of ancient writing. Possibly the oldest written language in the world!

For a long time, the Sumerian cuneiform was considered to be the oldest written language on Earth. As archeology developed, it became clear that it was preceded by a stage of pictographic writing. In the same Sumer, finds of tablets with pictographic writing (for example, a tablet from Kish), strikingly similar to the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt (which means they had a common source), date back to the middle of the 4th millennium BC.

However, in 1961 in Romania, near the village of Tarteria, three clay tablets with graphic writing of the “Sumerian” type were discovered, dated to the middle of the 6th millennium BC. That is, they are older than the first material evidence of writing in Mesopotamia by at least 1000 years! The time of creation of the tablets was established by an indirect method, by radiocarbon analysis of objects found with them in the same layer. Later it turned out that the writing of Terteria did not arise from scratch, but was an integral part of the widespread in the middle of the 6th - beginning of the 5th millennium BC. pictographic writing of the Balkan culture Vinci (Danubian archetype). Currently, up to a thousand objects of the Vinca culture are known, on which such pictograms are scratched. The geography of the finds covers the territory of Serbia, western Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldavia, Macedonia and Northern Greece. Despite the hundreds of kilometers separating them, the pictograms show an amazing similarity throughout the area of ​​the Vinca culture.

Similar symbols-signs are also contained in the tablet from Dispilio. Radiocarbon analysis dates the tablet to around 5260 BC.

It turns out that the pictograms of the Danubian proto-writing are the oldest form of writing in the world. In other words, the so-called "Old European writing" existed on the continent not only long before the Minoan, traditionally considered the first writing system in Europe, but also before the proto-Sumerian and proto-Chinese writing systems. This system arose in the first half of the VI millennium BC. e., spread between 5300-4300 years and disappeared by 4000 BC. e. Moreover, it is likely that the Sumerian proto-writing directly comes from the Danubian. The set of symbols and totems not only strikingly coincides, but they are also arranged in the same sequence - on sections of the surface separated by lines, the symbols should be read in a circle counterclockwise.

So, the ancient inhabitants of the Balkans wrote "in Sumerian" in the Stone Age - in the 5th millennium BC. e., when there was no mention of Sumer himself! The pictographic writing of ancient Crete also contains distant echoes of Vinci's writing, on the basis of which the most ancient Aegean letter in Europe from the time of the Minoan civilization (late III - early II millennium BC) took shape. Based on this, a number of researchers conclude that primitive writing in the Aegean countries has its roots in the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC, and did not at all arise under the influence of distant Mesopotamia, as previously believed.

And the Sumerian writing itself, most likely, arose under the influence of the Danubian proto-writing. How else to explain that the most ancient writing in Sumer, dating from the end of the 4th millennium BC, appeared quite suddenly and already in a fully developed form. The Sumerians adopted pictographic writing from the Balkan peoples, further developing it into cuneiform.

Reference
The Neolithic lake settlement of Dispilio was discovered in the dry winter of 1932, when the lake level dropped and traces of the settlement became visible. A preliminary study was carried out in 1935 by Professor Antonios Keramopoulos. Regular excavations began in 1992. It turned out that this place was inhabited by people from the end of the Middle Neolithic (5600-5000 BC) to the late Neolithic (3000 BC). A number of artifacts were found in the village, including ceramics, wooden structural elements, seeds, bones, figurines, personal jewelry, flutes. All of them belong to the Vinca culture. The tablet with signs was discovered in 1993 by the Greek archaeologist George Urmuziades.
On the shore of the lake, an exact copy of the settlement was created with huts on pile platforms, in natural sizes, made from natural materials. Tree trunks were used for the frame of the houses, and branches and ropes were used for the walls. Each hut was plastered with lake clay, the roofs of which were covered with thatch. Inside the huts are everyday items found during excavations: earthenware vessels, bowls, fruit dishes, as well as tools made of stone or bone - exact copies, the originals of which are in the Dispilio Museum itself.

TAGS:Greece,Western Macedonia

The earliest pictographic writing may have originated as early as the Mesolithic period. It is to this time that the so-called "Azilian" churingas belong. These are pebbles, on the surface of which various symbolic figures are painted or engraved. They are called "churings" by analogy with similar objects of the Australian aborigines, in whom churngs are symbolic receptacles of souls. In the Neolithic, ornamental drawings are applied to earthenware vessels. Each group of tribes had its own system of ornamentation, very stable for hundreds and even thousands of years. Among the repeated drawings about 3.5 thousand years ago, conventional signs were discovered, indicating, possibly, the appearance of logographic writing. In the East, the systems of this writing were formed no later than the 4th millennium BC. e. (Anterior Asian, Proto-Elamite, Proto-Indian, Ancient Egyptian, Cretan, Chinese).

THE ORIGIN OF WRITING

From the III millennium BC. e. Egyptian writing began to turn into a logographic-consonantal system. The spelling of letters also changed.
The most ancient monuments of logographic writing were Sumerian and Proto-Elamic writing, which arose in the 5th-4th millennium BC. e. They wrote on stone and clay tablets. However, already from the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. writing began to acquire a logographic-syllabic character. The letters lost their pictorial quality, turning into combinations of cuneiform lines. This, apparently, was due to the material on which they wrote in Mesopotamia - clay. On clay, it was easier to extrude wedge-shaped icons than to draw lines. On the basis of the Sumerian, the Urartian writing arose, which was used in the Caucasus in the 9th-4th centuries. BC e.
The writing used on the territory of Central Asia in the 6th-4th centuries had a special syllabic character. BC e. This is the so-called Persian (or Achaemenid) cuneiform. Monuments of such cuneiform writing are found even in the Southern Urals.
At the turn of II and I millennium BC. e. sound writing became widespread. It was simpler than other systems and cost only 20-30 characters-letters. It is assumed that the number of letters in the first alphabets was related to the number of days in the lunar month, with the addition of the number of signs of the zodiac. Most modern writing systems are descended from the first Phoenician sound writing.

Writing, according to archaeological excavations, arose in the period of the primitive communal system, about 15 thousand years ago. Of course, this was a primitive form of information transfer. The earliest period in the development of writing is pictography (transmission of information by drawings). It is interesting that in some tribes such writing was preserved until the end of the 19th century.

In pictography, the verb "to speak" was indicated in the form of a mouth, "to look" - in the form of eyes, etc. It is curious that when illiterate people try to write down their thoughts at the present time, they also denote similar verbs.

But it was quite difficult to convey information using drawings, so they were gradually simplified, turning into diagrams and signs; this is how ideographic writing arose (Greek “idea” - a concept, “grapho” - I write). In the end, the sign that denoted the concept or, later, the word, turned into a letter that was part of the word.

History of writing

Thus, from individual letters it became possible to compose any word. And so the alphabet was born.

The oldest ideographic writings date back to the 4th millennium BC. In Egypt, the walls of magnificent buildings were painted with hieroglyphs (Greek "hieros" - sacred, from "glufo" - I cut out). Each sign denoted a separate word, but over time, hieroglyphs in Egypt began to denote syllables and even sounds, becoming the prototype of alphabetic alphabets.

Egyptian writing was first deciphered at the beginning of the 19th century. This was done by the French scientist Jean-Francois Champollion. Among the trophies of the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte was the famous Rosetta stone with identical inscriptions in three languages. The very first consisted of hieroglyphs, the second was a demotic (public cursive) script, and the last one was a Greek script. Champollion completely deciphered the text and concluded that in the 1st c. BC. Egyptian writing has already acquired a mixed character - ideographic, syllabic and partly phonetic.

In the IV century. The Sumerians, who lived in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates, also acquire their own written language. Sumerian writing was a mixture of pictographic and hieroglyphic characters. Perhaps it is somehow connected with Egyptian writing, but it is impossible to say for sure.

Completely independently from the middle of the III millennium BC. developed hieroglyphic Chinese writing, which exists to this day. While the number of ideographic signs in other languages ​​was declining, in Chinese, with the formation of new words, it grew. Therefore, in modern Chinese there are about 50 thousand ideographic signs, and ancient Chinese writing in the I-II centuries. BC. consisted of only 2,500-3,000 hieroglyphs.

Alphabet - a set of symbols, letters (or other graphemes) arranged in a rigid order and designed to reproduce certain sounds. Modern European alphabets developed from Greek, which was passed to the Greeks by the Phoenicians - the inhabitants of an ancient country on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In the VI century. BC. Phoenicia was conquered by the Persians, in 332 BC. e. - Alexander the Great. The Phoenician alphabet did not have vowels (this is the so-called consonantal letter - consonants were combined with arbitrary vowels), it had 22 simple characters. The origin of the Phoenician script is still the subject of scientific disputes, but, probably, with minor changes, it goes back to the consonantal Ugaritic script, and the Ugaritic language belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasian languages.

The invention of the Slavic alphabet is associated with the names of two enlightening brothers Cyril (c. 827-869) and Methodius (815-885).

They came from the family of a Greek military leader and were born in the city of Thessalonica (modern Thessaloniki in Greece). The elder brother, Methodius, entered the military service in his youth. For ten years he was the manager of one of the Slavic regions of Byzantium, and then left his post and retired to a monastery. In the late 860s, he became abbot of the Greek monastery of Polychron on Mount Olympus in Asia Minor.

Unlike his brother, Cyril from childhood was distinguished by a craving for knowledge and as a boy he was sent to Constantinople to the court of the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. There he received an excellent education, studied not only Slavic, but also Greek, Latin, Hebrew and even Arabic. Subsequently, he refused public service and was tonsured a monk.

In 863, when the Byzantine emperor, at the request of the Moravian prince Rostislav, sent the brothers to Moravia, they had just begun translating the main liturgical books. Naturally, such a grandiose work would have dragged on for many years if a circle of translators had not formed around Cyril and Methodius.

In the summer of 863, Cyril and Methodius arrived in Moravia, already in possession of the first Slavonic texts. However, their activities immediately aroused the discontent of the Bavarian Catholic clergy, who did not want to cede their influence over Moravia to anyone.

In addition, the appearance of Slavic translations of the Bible contradicted the establishment of the Catholic Church, according to which the church service had to be held in Latin, and the text of the Holy Scriptures should not be translated into any languages ​​​​except Latin at all.

To this day, the disputes of scientists about what kind of alphabet Cyril created - Cyrillic or Glagolitic - do not subside. The difference between them is that Glagolitic is more archaic in lettering, while Cyrillic turned out to be more convenient for conveying the sound features of the Slavic language. It is known that in the IX century. both alphabets were in use, and only at the turn of the 10th-11th centuries. Glagolitic has practically fallen out of use.

After the death of Cyril, the alphabet invented by him got its current name. Over time, the Cyrillic alphabet became the basis of all Slavic alphabets, including Russian.

Publication date: 2014-10-25; Read: 390 | Page copyright infringement

1 Rock carvings are otherwise called petroglyphs or petroglyphs (from the Greek petros - stone and glyphe - carving). They depict animals, household items. They could also serve to mark the boundaries of the tribe's possessions, hunting grounds, and give an idea of ​​the environment. They also allowed information to be transmitted and stored for centuries.

2 Proper letter. When using it, household items, tools were endowed with a certain meaning, known to the sender and recipient. Elements of real writing have survived to this day.

3 Knot letter is a mnemonic way of storing thoughts, messages. On ropes painted in different colors, knots were tied in predetermined places. Their location and information was transmitted.

4 Pictographic writing or pictography (from Latin pictus - drawn and Greek grapho - I write). Objects began to be replaced by their images. The overall content of the image was displayed as a drawing or a series of drawings. But with the help of primitive drawings it is difficult to depict actions or show the quality of objects. Appeared during the Neolithic.

5 Ideographic writing (from the Greek idea - concept, representation). For this letter, special signs are used - ideograms. With the help of them, whole concepts were designated. Ideograms are numbers, chemical signs, mathematical symbols.

6 Hieroglyphic writing, which used special. signs - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred writings). They could denote not only whole concepts, but also individual words, syllables, and even speech sounds. This type of writing was used in ancient Egypt in Sumer.

7 Cuneiform. Appeared around 3000 BC, the signs of this type of writing consisted of groups of wedge-shaped dashes that were extruded on wet clay. Originated in Sumer, then began to be used in Assyria and Babylon.

8 Phonographic letter (from grey.phone - sound). This is a sound writing with the help of signs (letters) meaning certain sound units of the language (sounds, syllables). It has been known since the 13th century BC. arose from the ideographic in Phoenicia. In the IX-VIII centuries. BC.

ancient writing

The Greek alphabet was based on the Phoenician script.

9 Slavic writing. The third written language after Greek and Latin appeared in 863. The brothers (Cyril and Methodius) took Greek as the basis of the Slavic alphabet, adding several signs to indicate hissing and some other sounds that were absent in the Greek language. There were two varieties of the Slavic alphabet - Cyrillic and Glagolitic. On the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and other writing systems arose.

Publication date: 2015-10-09; Read: 191 | Page copyright infringement

studopedia.org - Studopedia.Org - 2014-2018. (0.001 s) ...

Writing originated among the Sumerians more than five thousand years ago. Later, it became known as cuneiform.

They wrote with a pointed reed stick on clay tablets. Due to the fact that the tablets were dried and fired, they became very strong, which allowed them to survive to our times. And this is very important, because thanks to them, the history of the emergence of writing can be traced.

There are two assumptions for its appearance - this is monogenesis (origin in one place) and polygenesis (in several places).

There are three primary centers for the emergence of writing:

1. Egyptian

2. Mesopotamian

3. Far East (China)

Everywhere the development of writing took one path: first a drawing, and then written signs.

Sometimes, instead of letters, people sent different items to each other. True, such “letters” were not always correctly interpreted. A striking example is the war between the Scythians and Darius, king of Persia.

Drawing was the first step towards writing. And the image that denoted one or another object was called a pictogram. They painted, as a rule, people, animals, household utensils, etc. And if at first they depicted a reliable number of objects, that is, as much as they saw, they drew as much, then they gradually switched to a simplified version. They began to draw an object, and next to it, with dashes, they specified its quantity.

The next step was the selection of characters from the drawings. They denoted the sounds that made up the name of the objects.

A very important step was the image, not only in a concrete form, but also in an abstract one. Over time, it became necessary to write down long texts, so the drawings began to be simplified, conventional signs appeared, called hieroglyphs (from the Greek “sacred writings”).

In the XII-XIII centuries. Sinai inscriptions appeared. Due to this, the number of written characters has rapidly decreased. And syllabic writing arose. And after it came the alphabet.

Each nation created its own alphabetic letter. The Phoenicians, for example, attributed an indifferent vowel to each sign. Jews and Arabs did not use vowels.

The oldest written language.

But the Greeks, based on the Phoenician script, introduced signs for vowels, began to depict stress, and even introduced an analogue of modern notes.

Thus, writing was not invented by any particular person, it appeared as a result of a vital need. And during our era, it is actively developing. So, Cyril and Methodius created a letter for the Slavs, and Mesrop Mashtots for the Armenians. download dle 12.1
The legend of voluntary slavery

Rock paintings, known in science as petroglyphs, are found in different parts of the world and belong to different historical eras from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages. Ancient people applied them to the walls and ceilings of caves, to open rock surfaces and individual stones. The oldest Paleolithic rock paintings have been found in caves and grottoes in southern France and northern Spain. The petroglyphs are characterized by figures of animals, primarily objects of hunting of an ancient man: bison, horses, mammoths, rhinoceroses, predators are less common - bears, lions. In Russia, petroglyphs were called petroglyphs. Here, Paleolithic drawings have been discovered in the Kapova Cave in the Urals and on the rocks near the village of Shishkino on the Lena River. Already in ancient times, the style and technique of rock carvings were diverse - from contour drawing scratched on stone to polychrome painting bas-relief, for which mineral paints were used. Rock carvings had a magical meaning for ancient people.

Wampum (from the Indian wampumpeag - threads with shells strung on them), a means of memorizing and transmitting messages among the Indian tribes of the North. America. The content of the message was expressed by the color, quantity, and relative position of the shells. Wampum could also be used in place of money.

Kipu means to tie a knot or just a knot; this word is also understood as count (cuenta), because the knots contained the count of any objects. The Indians made threads of different colors: some were only of one color, others of two colors, others of three, and others of more, because the color simple and the color mixed each had its own special meaning; the thread was tightly twisted from three or four thin coils, and it was as thick as an iron spindle and about three-quarters of a vara long; each of them was attached in a special order to another thread - the base, forming, as it were, a fringe. By color, they determined what exactly such a thread contained, somehow: yellow meant gold, white meant silver, and red meant warriors.

Pictographic letter

(from Latin pictus - drawn and Greek grapho - I write, picture writing, pictography), displaying the general content of the message in the form of pictures, usually for memorization purposes. Known since the Neolithic. Pictographic writing is not a means of fixing any language, that is, writing in the proper sense. However, it is very important - people drew drawings on the surface of rocks, stones, etc. This was the starting point for the development of descriptive writing.

Conclusion. All of the above methods of recording speech were very limited in their application. Not every thought could be transmitted over long distances or “stopped in time” with their help. The main drawback of these methods is the lack of clarity, unambiguity in their reading.

The oldest writing on earth

A lot depends on the skill of the one who draws, as well as on the ingenuity of the one who reads.

Although, for example, pictography is also used in the modern world: road signs, street signs. The use of pictograms as an aid is very convenient. The meaning can be conveyed very quickly, the image is understandable to everyone: both children who cannot read, and foreigners who do not have an interpreter. Icons are very common in modern computers. By pressing the button with the image of the corresponding icon on the computer screen, you can call up your favorite game or other program you need to work.

pre-letter

Ideographic writing (from the Greek idea - an idea, an image and grapho - I write) is a writing principle that uses ideograms. To a large extent, the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and other ancient writing systems had an ideographic character. It reached its greatest development in Chinese hieroglyphics.

Many signs of ideography - ideograms - came from drawings. Moreover, among many peoples, some signs were used as pictograms (and then they depicted a specific object) and as ideograms (and then they denoted an abstract concept). The drawing in these cases appears in a figurative, i.e., in a conditional meaning.

Hieroglyphic writing. The most ancient of the varieties of ideographic writing were hieroglyphs, consisting of phonograms and ideograms. Most of the hieroglyphs were phonograms, that is, they denoted a combination of two or three consonants. Ideograms denoted individual words and concepts. The Egyptians did not designate vowels in writing. The most common were 700 hieroglyphs. The oldest hieroglyphic texts date back to the 32nd century BC. e.

"Sacred Signs"

There is a legend in Egypt about how the idea of ​​phonogram writing came about.

“About 5 thousand years ago Pharaoh Narmer ruled in Egypt. He won many victories and wanted these victories to be forever imprinted on stone. Skilled craftsmen worked day and night. They depicted the pharaoh, and the killed enemies, and captives, even showed with the help of drawings that there were 6 thousand captives. But not a single artist could convey the name of Narmer himself. And for him, that was the most important thing. This is how the Egyptian artists recorded the name of the pharaoh. They depicted a fish, because the word "nar" in Egyptian is "fish". "Mer" in the same language means "chisel". The image of a fish above the image of a chisel - this is how the artists solved the task assigned to them.

Hieroglyphic writing was not only among the Egyptians, but also among the Babylonians, Sumerians, Maya Indians, and the ancient inhabitants of the island of Crete. And in our time, the peoples of China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan write with hieroglyphs.

Conclusion. Compared with the types of written language, hieroglyphic writing has a number of advantages: an unambiguous reading of the message, the ability to convey not only everyday, but also scientific information, abstract concepts. And phonideograms (hieroglyphs containing an indication of the sound) even give an idea of ​​the sounding word.

But imagine how much you need to memorize signs with their meanings, if, for example, there are about 50 thousand of them in the Chinese language! Such a huge number is almost impossible to remember for one person, even if you learn only the actively used 4-7 thousand hieroglyphs.

Letter writing

Sound-alphabetic writing originated in the depths of ideographic writing. The idea to convey the sound of words in writing, which originated among the Sumerians, was embodied in different versions among other peoples. All methods were based on the use of simple signs denoting monosyllabic words in writing complex signs for other words. One such option is Chinese phonideograms. However, this is still very far from the designation by signs (letters) of individual speech sounds, which forms the basis of phonographic (sound-letter) writing.

Phoenician and Greek scripts. The Phoenicians, who lived about 2000 years ago, invented signs for sounds. This is how letters and the alphabet appeared. And they all agreed! Just imagine that instead of "Mom washed the frame" we would write "Mm ml rm." Fortunately, after 200 years, the Phoenician alphabet ended up in Ancient Greece. “It is not very convenient to read words from consonants alone,” the Greeks reasoned and remade some of the consonants into vowels. The Greek scientist Pelamed managed to create 16 letters. For many years, scientists of the next generations added two, some three, and one even 6 letters. Huge efforts were spent to improve the letter, to make it more understandable and convenient for people. This is how the Greek alphabet was formed. It consisted of letters that denoted both consonants and vowels. The Greek letter became the source for all European alphabets, including the Cyrillic alphabet.

Slavic alphabet. In ancient times, more than 1000 years ago, the Slavic peoples did not have their own written language. And in the second half of the 10th century, two scientists from Greece, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, arrived in Great Moravia (the territory of modern Czechoslovakia) and began to work on the creation of Slavic writing. They knew the Slavic languages ​​well, and this gave them the opportunity to compose the Slavic alphabet. Having developed this alphabet, they translated the most important Greek books into the then ancient, according to our concepts, Slavic language (it is called Old Slavonic). Their work gave the Slavic peoples the opportunity to write and read in their own language.

The Slavic alphabet existed in two versions: Glagolitic - from verb - "speech" and Cyrillic. Until now, scientists have no consensus on which of these options was created by Cyril. Most modern researchers believe that he created the Glagolitic alphabet. Later (apparently, at the cathedral in Preslav, in the capital of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon in 893), the Cyrillic alphabet appeared, which eventually replaced the Glagolitic.

Russian alphabet. With the adoption of Christianity in Rus', the Cyrillic alphabet was also borrowed, which laid the foundation for the Russian alphabet. It originally had 43 letters. Over time, some of them turned out to be superfluous because the sounds they denoted disappeared, and some were superfluous from the very beginning. The Russian alphabet in its modern form was introduced by the reforms of Peter I, as a result of which the style of the letters was changed (it approached the printed Latin alphabet) and the obsolete letters "omega", "ot", "yus big", iotated "a", "e" were excluded , "xi", "psi". During the second half of the 17th century, "e", "th", "e" were introduced. And after the October Revolution in 1918, “yat”, “fita”, “and decimal”, “Izhitsa” were excluded from the Russian alphabet. Thus, the modern alphabet has 33 letters.

Conclusion. Letter writing has given people a number of possibilities.

Above all, freedom from time and distance has become a universal means of expressing thoughts and feelings. It became possible to convey a sounding word in a letter, to fix all the words of a particular language (including abstract concepts) using the least number of characters. But the whole matter is now complicated by the need to know and be able to apply spelling and punctuation rules.

In conclusion

In the Russian alphabet, the letters of the Slavic alphabet not only changed over time, but their names also became simpler. If at the beginning of the twentieth century your great-grandmother had difficulty memorizing the beautiful “names” of letters: “az”, “beeches”, “lead”, “verb”, “good”, now you easily blurt out: “a”, “be”, "we", "ge", "de"!

So, when sitting down for lessons, do not forget to mentally thank everyone who took part in creating a simple and convenient letter.

Conclusion: For many millennia, people have sought to ensure that the letter:

1) could transmit various types of information;

2) was understandable;

3) was simple and convenient.

FIRST ALPHABET

At the beginning of the 21st century, it is unthinkable to imagine modern life without books, newspapers, indexes, and the flow of information. The appearance of writing has become one of the most important, fundamental discoveries on the long path of human evolution. In terms of significance, this step can perhaps be compared with making fire or with the transition to growing plants instead of a long time of gathering. The formation of writing is a very difficult process that lasted for millennia. Slavic writing, the heir of which is our modern writing, stood in this row more than a thousand years ago, in the 9th century AD.

The most ancient and simplest way of writing appeared, as it is believed, back in the Paleolithic - "story in pictures", the so-called pictographic writing (from the Latin pictus - drawn and from the Greek grapho - I write). That is, "I draw and write" (some American Indians still use pictographic writing in our time). This letter, of course, is very imperfect, because you can read the story in pictures in different ways. Therefore, by the way, not all experts recognize pictography as a form of writing as the beginning of writing. In addition, for the most ancient people, any such image was animated. So the "story in pictures", on the one hand, inherited these traditions, on the other hand, it required a certain abstraction from the image.

In IV-III millennia BC. e. in ancient Sumer (Anterior Asia), in ancient Egypt, and then, in II, and in ancient China, a different way of writing arose: each word was conveyed by a pattern, sometimes specific, sometimes conditional. For example, when it was about the hand, they drew the hand, and the water was depicted with a wavy line. A house, a city, a boat were also designated by a certain symbol ... The Greeks called such Egyptian drawings hieroglyphs: "hiero" - "sacred", "glyphs" - "carved in stone". The text, composed in hieroglyphs, looks like a series of drawings. This letter can be called: "I am writing a concept" or "I am writing an idea" (hence the scientific name of such a letter - "ideographic"). However, how many hieroglyphs had to be remembered!

The history of writing

The history of writing

An extraordinary achievement of human civilization was the so-called syllabary, the invention of which took place during the III-II millennium BC. e. Each stage in the formation of writing recorded a certain result in the advancement of mankind along the path of logical abstract thinking. First, this is the division of the phrase into words, then the free use of drawings-words, the next step is the division of the word into syllables. We speak in syllables, and children are taught to read in syllables. To arrange the record in syllables, it would seem that it could be more natural! Yes, and there are many fewer syllables than words composed with their help. But it took many centuries to come to such a decision. Syllabic writing was already used in the III-II millennium BC. e. in the Eastern Mediterranean. For example, the famous cuneiform script is predominantly syllabic. (They still write in a syllabic way in India, in Ethiopia.)

The history of writing

The next stage on the path of simplification of writing was the so-called sound writing, when each sound of speech has its own sign. But to think of such a simple and natural way turned out to be the most difficult. First of all, it was necessary to guess to divide the word and syllables into separate sounds. But when this finally happened, the new method showed undeniable advantages. It was necessary to memorize only two or three dozen letters, and the accuracy in reproducing speech in writing is incomparable with any other method. Over time, it was the alphabetic letter that began to be used almost everywhere.

The history of writing

FIRST ALPHABET

None of the writing systems almost never existed in its pure form and does not exist even now. For example, most of the letters of our alphabet, like a, b, c and others, correspond to one specific sound, but in the letter-signs i, u, e - there are already several sounds. We cannot do without elements of ideographic writing, say, in mathematics. Instead of writing the words "two plus two equals four", we use conventional signs to get a very short form: 2+2=4. The same - in chemical and physical formulas.

The earliest alphabetic texts were found in Byblos (Lebanon).

The history of writing

One of the first alphabetic sound letters began to be used by those peoples in whose language vowel sounds were not as important as consonants. So, at the end of the II millennium BC. e. the alphabet originated with the Phoenicians, the ancient Jews, the Arameans. For example, in Hebrew, when you add different vowels to the consonants K - T - L, you get a family of single-root words: KeToL - kill, KoTeL - killer, KaTuL - killed, etc. It is always clear by ear that we are talking about murder. Therefore, only consonants were written in the letter - the semantic meaning of the word was clear from the context. By the way, the ancient Jews and Phoenicians wrote lines from right to left, as if left-handers had come up with such a letter. This ancient way of writing is preserved among the Jews to this day, in the same way all peoples using the Arabic alphabet write today.

One of the first alphabets on Earth is Phoenician.

The history of writing

From the Phoenicians - the inhabitants of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, sea traders and travelers - the alphabetic-sound writing passed to the Greeks. From the Greeks, this principle of writing penetrated into Europe. And from Aramaic writing, according to researchers, almost all the alphabetic-sound writing systems of the peoples of Asia lead their origin.

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters. They were arranged in a certain order from `alef, bet, gimel, dalet ... to tav. Each letter had a meaningful name: ʻalef - ox, bet - house, gimel - camel, and so on. The names of the words, as it were, tell about the people who created the alphabet, reporting the most important thing about it: the people lived in houses (bet) with doors (dalet), in the construction of which nails (vav) were used. He was engaged in agriculture, using the power of oxen (`alef), cattle breeding, fishing (mem - water, nun - fish) or wandering (gimel - camel). He traded (tet - cargo) and fought (zain - weapons).
The researcher, who paid attention to this, notes: among the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, there is not a single one whose name would be associated with the sea, ships or maritime trade. It was this circumstance that prompted him to think that the letters of the first alphabet were by no means created by the Phoenicians, recognized sailors, but, most likely, by the ancient Jews, from whom the Phoenicians borrowed this alphabet. But be that as it may, the order of the letters, starting with `alef, was set.

The Greek letter, as already mentioned, came from the Phoenician. In the Greek alphabet, there are more letters that convey all the sound shades of speech. But their order and names, which often had no meaning in the Greek language, were preserved, although in a slightly modified form: alpha, beta, gamma, delta ... At first, in ancient Greek monuments, letters in inscriptions, as in Semitic languages, were located on the right- left, and then, without interruption, the line "curled" from left to right and again from right to left. Time passed until the left-to-right variant of writing was finally established, now spreading over most of the globe.

The history of writing

Latin letters originated from Greek, and their alphabetical order has not fundamentally changed. At the beginning of the first millennium A.D. e. Greek and Latin became the main languages ​​of the vast Roman Empire. All the ancient classics, to which we still turn with trepidation and respect, are written in these languages. Greek is the language of Plato, Homer, Sophocles, Archimedes, John Chrysostom... Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Virgil, Blessed Augustine and others wrote in Latin.

Meanwhile, even before the Latin alphabet spread in Europe, some European barbarians already had their own written language in one form or another. A rather original letter developed, for example, among the Germanic tribes. This is the so-called "runic" ("rune" in the Germanic language means "mystery") writing. It arose not without the influence of already existing writing. Here, too, each sound of speech corresponds to a certain sign, but these signs received a very simple, slender and strict outline - only from vertical and diagonal lines.

The history of writing

THE BIRTH OF SLAVIC WRITING

In the middle of the first millennium A.D. e. Slavs settled vast territories in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe. Their neighbors in the south were Greece, Italy, Byzantium - a kind of cultural standards of human civilization.

The oldest Slavic written monuments that have come down to us are made in two significantly different alphabets - Glagolitic and Cyrillic. The history of their origin is complex and not completely clear.
The name "Glagolitsa" is derived from the verb - "word", "speech". In terms of alphabetic composition, the Glagolitic alphabet almost completely coincided with the Cyrillic alphabet, but differed sharply from it in the shape of the letters. It has been established that by origin the letters of the Glagolitic alphabet are mostly associated with the Greek minuscule alphabet, some letters are composed on the basis of the Samaritan and Hebrew letters. There is an assumption that this alphabet was created by Constantine the Philosopher.
The Glagolitic alphabet was widely used in the 60s of the 9th century in Moravia, from where it penetrated into Bulgaria and Croatia, where it existed until the end of the 18th century. Occasionally it was also used in Ancient Rus'.
The Glagolitic alphabet corresponded well to the phonemic composition of the Old Church Slavonic language. In addition to newly invented letters, it included correspondences to Greek letters, including those that, in principle, were not needed for the Slavic language. This fact suggests that the Slavic alphabet, according to its creators, should have fully corresponded to the Greek one.

The history of writing

The history of writing

The history of writing

According to the shape of the letters, two types of Glagolitic can be distinguished. In the first of them, the so-called Bulgarian Glagolitic, the letters are rounded, and in the Croatian, also called Illyrian or Dalmatian Glagolitic, the shape of the letters is angular. Neither one nor the other type of Glagolitic has sharply defined boundaries of distribution. In later development, the Glagolitic adopted many characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. The Glagolitic alphabet of the Western Slavs (Czechs, Poles and others) did not last long and was replaced by the Latin script, and the rest of the Slavs later switched to the Cyrillic type of writing. But the Glagolitic alphabet has not completely disappeared to this day. Thus, it is used or at least was used before the outbreak of the Second World War in the Croatian settlements of Italy. Newspapers were even printed in glagolitic script.
The name of another Slavic alphabet - Cyrillic - came from the name of the Slavic educator of the 9th century Constantine (Cyril) the Philosopher. There is an assumption that it is he who is its creator, but there is no exact data on the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet.

There are 43 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. Of these, 24 were borrowed from the Byzantine statutory letter, the remaining 19 were invented anew, but in graphic design they were likened to the first ones. Not all borrowed letters retained the designation of the same sound as in the Greek language - some received new meanings in accordance with the peculiarities of Slavic phonetics.
In Rus', the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the 10th-11th centuries in connection with Christianization. Of the Slavic peoples, the Cyrillic alphabet was preserved the longest by the Bulgarians, but at present, their writing, like the writing of the Serbs, is the same as Russian, with the exception of some signs designed to indicate phonetic features.

The history of writing

The oldest form of the Cyrillic alphabet is called the charter. A distinctive feature of the charter is sufficient clarity and straightforwardness of styles. Most of the letters are angular, wide heavy character. The exceptions are narrow rounded letters with almond-shaped bends (O, S, E, R, etc.), among other letters they seem to be compressed. This letter is characterized by thin lower elongations of some letters (Р, У, 3). These extensions can also be seen in other types of Cyrillic. They act as light decorative elements in the overall picture of the letter. Diacritics are not yet known. The letters of the charter are large and stand separately from each other. The old statute knows no spaces between words.

Starting from the 13th century, a second type of writing developed - a semi-charter, which subsequently supplanted the charter. In connection with the increased need for books, it appears as a business letter from scribes who worked on order and for sale. A semi-charter combines the goals of convenience and speed of writing, is simpler than a charter, has much more abbreviations, is more often oblique - towards the beginning or end of a line, lacks calligraphic rigor.

In Rus', a semi-ustav appears at the end of the 14th century on the basis of a Russian charter; like him, it is a straight handwriting (vertical letters). Keeping the latest spelling of the charter and its handwriting, it gives them an extremely simple and less clear look, as measured craft pressures are replaced by a freer movement of the pen. The semi-ustav was used in the 14th-18th centuries along with other types of writing, mainly cursive and script.

The history of writing

In the 15th century, under the Grand Duke of Moscow Ivan III, when the unification of the Russian lands was completed, Moscow turns not only into the political, but also the cultural center of the country. First, the regional culture of Moscow begins to acquire the character of an all-Russian one. Along with the increasing needs of everyday life, a new, simplified, more comfortable writing style was needed. They became cursive.
Cursive roughly corresponds to the concept of Latin cursive. Among the ancient Greeks, cursive writing was widely used at an early stage in the development of writing, and it was also partially available among the southwestern Slavs. In Russia, cursive as an independent type of writing arose in the 15th century. The cursive letters, partly interconnected, differ from the letters of other types of writing in their light outline. But since the letters were equipped with a variety of all kinds of badges, hooks and additions, it was quite difficult to read what was written.
Although the cursive writing of the 15th century, in general, still reflects the nature of the half-charter and there are few strokes connecting the letters, but in comparison with the semi-charter this letter is more fluent.
Cursive letters were largely made with elongations. At the beginning, signs were composed mainly of straight lines, as is typical for statutes and semi-statutes. In the second half of the 16th century, and especially at the beginning of the 17th century, semicircular strokes become the main lines of writing, and some elements of Greek cursive are noticeable in the overall picture of the letter. In the second half of the 17th century, when many different variants of writing spread, the features characteristic of this time are also observed in cursive writing - less ligature and more roundness. The cursive writing of that time is gradually freed from the elements of the Greek cursive and moves away from the forms of the semi-ustav. In the later period, straight and curved lines acquire balance, and the letters become more symmetrical and rounded.
At the beginning of the 18th century, in connection with the strengthening of the Russian national state, in conditions when the church was subordinated to secular power, science and education were of particular importance. And the development of these areas is simply unthinkable without the development of book printing.
Since books of mainly ecclesiastical content were printed in the 17th century, the publication of secular books had to be started almost all over again. A big event was the publication in 1708 of "Geometry", which in manuscript form had long been known in Russia.
The creation of new books in their content required a new approach to their publication. Concern for the readability of the book and the simplicity of its design is characteristic of all publishing activities of the first quarter of the 18th century.
One of the most important events was the reform in 1708 of the Cyrillic printed semi-charter and the introduction of new editions of civil type. Of the 650 titles of books published under Peter I, about 400 were printed in the newly introduced civil type.

Under Peter I, a reform of the Cyrillic alphabet was carried out in Russia, eliminating a number of letters unnecessary for the Russian language and simplifying the outlines of the rest. This is how the Russian “citizen” arose (“civil alphabet” as opposed to “church”). In the "citizen" some letters were legalized that were not part of the original composition of the Cyrillic alphabet - "e", "ya", later "y" and then "```yo", and in 1918 the letters "i" were removed from the Russian alphabet , "" ("yat"), "" ("fita") and "" ("izhitsa") and at the same time the use of the "hard sign" at the end of words was canceled.

Over the centuries, Latin writing has also undergone various changes: “i” and “j”, “u” and “v” were delimited, separate letters were added (different for different languages).

A more significant change, affecting all modern systems, was the gradual introduction of a mandatory word division, and then punctuation marks, a functional distinction (starting from the era of the invention of printing) of uppercase and lowercase letters (however, the latter distinction is absent in some modern systems, for example, in Georgian letter).

The question of the origin of graphics has been haunting the minds of scientists and inquisitive people since the moment when attention was paid to language as such, i.e. it began to be recognized and noticed, and then studied as a separate phenomenon. However, this problem turned out to be the most difficult to resolve, if we keep in mind the origin of the letter as such (the origin of a pictogram or hieroglyph as a drawing of a situation or object is clear in itself). And the difficulty faced and faced by the solution of this problem will be understandable to some extent if we take into account the fact that the distinction between such linguistic phenomena as a letter and sound was very difficult not only for ordinary literate people, but also for professional linguists. We can say that until the end of the 19th century, the mixing of sound and letter was a mass phenomenon in the scientific works of linguists, i.e. the primary sound semiotic system of the language was mixed with its late secondary semiotic system - writing. Moreover, the colossal branch of linguistics - the comparative historical method and linguistics - is built on the a priori assumption that the ancient letter accurately conveys the sound. It can be assumed that the oldest proto-letter (the very first letter) really corresponded to the sound (although this is not at all a necessary condition), but even if this is so, we still immediately encounter spelling problems: the writing system does not have to be a transcription even in the initial the period of development of writing, from which it follows that the word sounding and written could not correspond to each other already at the time of the emergence of writing. So, for example, in the North Semitic languages, from the twenty-two-letter alphabet of which many other alphabets later originated, vowel sounds simply were not reflected in writing, but they were in the language and also sounded in speech. A similar alphabet was the Phoenician alphabet (the oldest inscription dates back to the 11th century BC) - in this alphabet there were 22 letters that convey only consonants.

I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay was the first in world linguistics to draw a clear line between a letter and sound, and then added mental correspondences to these purely material linguistic objects: a phoneme corresponded to a sound, a grapheme corresponded to a letter. Baudouin wrote about the difference between the “pronunciation-auditory and written-visual” form of speech activity in his work “On the Relationship of Russian Writing to the Russian Language”. But the matter was not reduced to one difference and opposition in Baudouin's theory, he also reasonably explained the relationship between them. Thus, he writes: “The actual connection between writing and language can be the only psychic connection. With such a formulation of the question, both writing and its elements, and language and its elements are transformed into mental quantities, into mental values. And since we must imagine both the transitory sounds of a language in all their diversity and the remaining letters as occurring and existing in the external world, when it comes to mental quantities and mental values, both letters and sounds must be replaced by their mental sources, i.e. e. representations of sounds and letters that exist and act constantly and uninterruptedly in the individual human psyche.

The purpose of this work is to consider the origin of alphabetic writing.

trace the origin of writing;

To study the origin of the Glagolitic alphabet and alphabetic (alphabetic) prayer;

Identify the stages in the formation of a letter.

The first who argued that the Slavs had an original letter in the pre-Christian period - the Glagolitic, were Czech scientists Lingardt and Anton, who believed that the Glagolitic arose as early as the 5th - 6th centuries. among the Western Slavs. Similar views were held by P. Ya. Chernykh, N. A. Konstantinov, E. M. Epshtein and some other scientists. P. Ya. Chernykh wrote: “We can talk about a continuous (since prehistoric times) written tradition on the territory of Ancient Rus'.”

In the middle of the 19th century, the Czech linguist J. Dobrovolsky suggested that Cyril created the Cyrillic alphabet, but later his students reworked the Cyrillic alphabet into Glagolitic to avoid persecution by the Catholic clergy. This hypothesis was also developed by I. I. Sreznevsky, A. I. Sobolevsky, E. F. Karsky.

At the end of the 19th century, V.F. Miller and P.V. Golubovsky put forward a hypothesis that Constantine and Methodius created the Glagolitic alphabet in Moravia, this point of view was supported by the Bulgarian academician E. Georgiev. V. A. Istrin, also a supporter of this hypothesis, cites the following as an argument: “The Cyrillic alphabet undoubtedly comes from the Byzantine statutory script and could easily develop from it in a purely evolutionary way, through graphic modifications or ligature combinations of Byzantine letters, as well as by borrowing two or three missing letters from the Hebrew alphabet. The Glagolitic, on the other hand, cannot be completely derived from any other writing system and most of all resembles an artificially created system.

1 Origin of writing

1.1 Brief history of writing

The importance of writing in the history of the development of civilization is difficult to overestimate. Language, like a mirror, reflects the whole world, our whole life. And when reading written or printed texts, we seem to sit in a time machine and can be transported both to recent times and to the distant past.

At first, picture writing (pictography) appeared: some event was depicted in the form of a drawing, then they began to depict not an event, but individual objects, first observing the similarity with the depicted, and then in the form of conventional signs (ideography, hieroglyphs), and, finally, they learned not to depict objects, but to convey their names with signs (sound writing). Initially, only consonants were used in the sound letter, and vowels were either not perceived at all, or were indicated by additional signs (syllabary). The syllabary was in use among many Semitic peoples, including the Phoenicians.

The great work of creating the Slavic alphabet was accomplished by the brothers Konstantin (who took the name Cyril at baptism) and Methodius. The main merit in this matter belongs to Cyril. Methodius was his faithful assistant. Compiling the Slavic alphabet, Cyril was able to catch in the sound of the Slavic language familiar to him from childhood (and it was probably one of the dialects of the ancient Bulgarian language) the main sounds of this language and find letter designations for each of them. When reading in Old Slavonic, we pronounce the words the way they are written. In the Old Church Slavonic language, we will not find such a discrepancy between the sound of words and their pronunciation, as, for example, in English or French.

The Slavic bookish language (Old Church Slavonic) became widespread as a common language for many Slavic peoples. It was used by the southern Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats), Western Slavs (Czechs, Slovaks), Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians).

In memory of the great feat of Cyril and Methodius, on May 24, the Day of Slavic Literature is celebrated all over the world. It is especially solemnly celebrated in Bulgaria. There are festive processions with the Slavic alphabet and icons of the holy brothers. Starting from 1987, and in our country on this day, a holiday of Slavic writing and culture began to be held.

The word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Slavic alphabet: A (az) and B (beeches):

ALPHABET: AZ + BUKI

and the word "alphabet" comes from the name of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet:

ALPHABET: ALPHA + VITA

The alphabet is much older than the alphabet. In the 9th century there was no alphabet, and the Slavs did not have their own letters. And so there was no writing. The Slavs could not write books or even letters to each other in their own language.

In the 9th century in Byzantium, in the city of Thessalonica (now the city of Thessaloniki in Greece), there lived two brothers - Constantine and Methodius. They were wise and very educated people and knew the Slavic language well. The Greek Tsar Michael sent these brothers to the Slavs in response to the request of the Slavic prince Rostislav. (Rostislav asked to send teachers who could tell the Slavs about the holy Christian books, unknown to them book words and their meaning).

And so the brothers Constantine and Methodius came to the Slavs to create the Slavic alphabet, which later became known as the Cyrillic alphabet. (In honor of Constantine, who, having taken monasticism, received the name Cyril).

Cyril and Methodius took the Greek alphabet and adapted it to the sounds of the Slavic language. Many of our letters are taken from Greek, which is why they look like them.

1.2 ABC of Constantine and Cyrillic writing

Manuscripts of the 10th and 11th centuries are written in two different alphabets. Some are written in Cyrillic, others in Glagolitic. But which of these two alphabets is older? That is, in what script were the unsurviving manuscripts of Cyril and Methodius times written?

A number of facts indicate that the Glagolitic alphabet should be considered the more ancient alphabet. The oldest monuments (including the Kyiv Leaflets) are written in the Glagolitic alphabet, and they are written in a more archaic language, similar in phonetic composition to the language of the southern Slavs. The great antiquity of the Glagolitic alphabet is also indicated by palimpsests (manuscripts on parchment in which the old text is scraped off and a new one is written on it). On all surviving palimpsests, the Glagolitic alphabet has been scraped off, and the new text is written in Cyrillic. There is not a single palimpsest in which the Cyrillic alphabet would be scraped off and the Glagolitic alphabet written on it.

There are other facts that testify to the greater antiquity of the Glagolitic. So, in modern Slavic studies, no one doubts that the pundits Konstantin the Philosopher (after becoming a monk Cyril) and his brother Methodius “translated” the sounds of the Slavic language onto parchment using the alphabet, which today is commonly called Glagolitic. Later (apparently, at the cathedral in Preslav, in the capital of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon in 893), the Cyrillic alphabet appeared, which eventually replaced the Glagolitic alphabet in all Slavic countries, with the exception of Northern Dalmatia (Adriatic coast), where Catholic Croats continued to write Glagolitic until the end of the last century.

In Cyrillic letters have a simpler and clearer form for us. What alphabet was invented by Konstantin, we do not know, but it was the Cyrillic alphabet that was the basis of our Russian alphabet. The very word "alphabet" came from the name of the first two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet: Az and Buki.

The styles of the letters of the Glagolitic alphabet are so peculiar that there is no visual resemblance between it and other alphabets. The Glagolitic alphabet was common among the Western Slavs, but gradually it was replaced by the Latin alphabet almost everywhere. The oldest books written in the Glagolitic alphabet have come down to us from the 11th century.

The characters of the Greek statutory alphabet served as a model for writing Cyrillic letters. The first books in Cyrillic were also written in the charter. A charter is such a letter when the letters are written directly at the same distance from each other, without an inclination - they are, as it were, “lined”. The letters are strictly geometric, vertical lines are usually thicker than horizontal ones, there is no gap between words. Old Russian manuscripts of the 9th - 14th centuries were written in the charter (Appendix 1).

From the middle of the 14th century, the semi-charter became widespread, which was less beautiful than the charter, but allowed you to write faster. There was a slope in the letters, their geometry is not so noticeable; the ratio of thick and thin lines is no longer maintained; the text has already been divided into words (Appendix 2).

In the 15th century, semi-ustav gave way to cursive writing (Appendix 3).

Manuscripts written in the "quick custom" are distinguished by the coherent writing of neighboring letters, the sweeping of the letter. In cursive writing, each letter had many spellings. With the development of speed, signs of individual handwriting appear.

Russian writing was adopted from neighboring Bulgaria - a country that was baptized more than a hundred years earlier than Rus'. The fact that writing penetrated into Rus' before the adoption of Christianity, that is, before 988, is evidenced by the agreements between princes Oleg and Igor with the Greeks. They mention the written testaments of Russians, texts written in two languages, the scribe Ivan, a scribe and translator.

The oldest book in Rus', written in Cyrillic, is the Ostromir Gospel of 1057. This Gospel is kept in St. Petersburg, in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Cyrillic existed almost unchanged until the time of Peter the Great, when changes were made to the styles of some letters, and 11 letters were excluded from the alphabet. The new alphabet has become poorer in content, but simpler and more adapted to printing various civil business papers. That's how he got the name "civilian".

In 1918, a new alphabet reform was carried out, and the Cyrillic alphabet lost four more letters: yat, i (I), izhitsu, fita. And as a result of this, we have somewhat lost the richness of the colors of Slavic writing, presented to us by the Thessalonica brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius - the Enlighteners of the Slavs.

One of the important sources on the history of Slavic writing is the "Legend of the Letters", written at the end of the 9th - beginning of the 10th century by a certain Chernoriz (monk) Brave. This "Tale" was quite popular in the times of medieval Rus', this is evidenced by the number of lists of "Tales" that have come down to us. Of the 73 surviving manuscript lists of the XIV-XVIII centuries, more than half are of Old Russian origin.

This work of the ancient Bulgarian scribe is written in Church Slavonic and tells about the features of the Slavic alphabet, about the conditions for its occurrence. The legend was devoted to proving that the Slavic letter created by Konstantin-Kirill is in no way inferior to the Greek and, moreover, is capable of conveying all the features of the Slavic language, in particular, there were letters in the Slavic alphabet to designate specific Slavic sounds.

The main part of the Tale showed that many writing systems, including Greek, arose and developed gradually, and their creators took into account the experience of their predecessors. The creation of the Slavic alphabet was the final stage in the centuries-old process of creating writing. Chernorizet Khrabr wrote that Cyril relied on the experience of creating world alphabets and even began his alphabet with the same letter as the earlier Hebrew and Greek alphabets, but streamlined the Slavonic letter and thereby accomplished a scientific feat.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of the Slavic alphabet, especially for the people of the Middle Ages, was that the Greek letter was created by the pagans, and the Slavic letter was created by the “holy man”.

Consider the arguments that V. A. Istrin cites in support of the fact that Cyril created the Cyrillic alphabet.

The history of writing, according to V. A. Istrin, shows that the spread of almost any religion was accompanied by the simultaneous spread of the writing system associated with this religion. “Thus, Western Christianity has always been introduced among various peoples along with the Latin script; Islam - along with the Arabic script; Buddhism in the Middle East - along with Indian writing systems (Brahmi, Devanagari, etc.), and in the Far East - along with Chinese hieroglyphics; the religion of Zoroaster - together with the alphabet of the Avesta". The Eastern Orthodox Church, which carried the word of God along with the Greek alphabet, was no exception. Let us remember at the same time that Constantine would not have agreed to go to Moravia if there had not already been an original letter there as a basis for creating alphabets.

It follows from this that Constantine took the original Glagolitic as a basis and created on its basis and the basis of the Greek alphabet a kind of synthetic script, later called Cyrillic, in which the Greek letters were adapted to convey Slavic sounds, but some of the letters were simply borrowed from the Glagolitic, which we show below.

About the creation by Constantine of the alphabet according to the Greek model, while preserving a number of the most ancient Slavic letters, Chernorizets Brave directly writes: Those who were baptized in Roman and Greek letters need to write Slovenian speech without arrangement, but how can one write good Greek letters b or belly or green or church or expectation or breadth or poison or zhdow or youth or language and otherwise and tacos besha for many years. Then chlkoliubets b strict everything and do not leave member sort of without reason, but all to reason, leading and forgiveness, have mercy on the Slovenian family of ambassadors stgo Constantine the philosopher named Cyril husband is righteous and true and do it l. writing and osmova ubo according to the order of the Greek letters, ova, according to the Slovenian speech From the right start in the Greek language, they are oubo alpha and as from aza, start both ... stoy Kiril create the first (first) letter az but as well as the right to the existing letter az and from Ba given to the Slovenian family for disgust oust ... ".

It is quite clear that Chernorizets Khrabr says here that Konstantin took part of the letters in the Greek alphabet (according to the order of Greek letters), and took part of the letters in Slavic - “ova ​​in Slovenian speech”, but Konstantin began the alphabet with the letter az, as in Greek. Moreover, in the list of the text of Chernorizets Khrabr "The Legend of the Letters", stored in the Moscow Theological Academy (list of the 15th century), there is simply an unambiguous entry: "heralds a, b, c, e, yus-big, from now the essence of cd is similar to Greek writing . The essence of si. A, c, d, d, e, h, i, i-dec., K, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, oy, f, x, omega, and ... by Slovenian language. Here we are talking about how to pronounce the letters of the new alphabet.

According to the testimony of all lists of the "Life of Cyril" without exception, Constantine, during a trip to the Khazars in Chersonese, discovered the Gospel and the Psalter, written in Russian letters. Here is how it is narrated in the “Pannonian Life”: “you will acquire that gospel and the psalter in Russian writings, and you will find a person who speaks with that conversation, and when you talk with him and receive the power of speech, your conversation is applied various writings, vowels and concords, and to making a prayer to God, soon begin to honor and say, and multiply wonders to him .. ". It is difficult to interpret this evidence somehow in two ways. Here we are talking about the fact that Constantine discovered sacred books in Russian in Chersonesos, found a person speaking that conversation (speaking in that language), compared various letters - vowels and consonants - of his own and Russian, and soon learned to read and speak Russian, which surprised many. It also follows from what has been said that the Russians adopted Christianity and translated Greek books even before 988 - there is also evidence of this from an Arabic source.

In 907, the first treaty with Byzantium was concluded, as evidenced by a contractual letter that has not come down to us, but has been preserved in the Tale of Bygone Years in retelling. Other treaties followed. It is clear that the treaty document was drawn up in Greek, on the one hand, and in Old Russian, on the other hand. It is quite clear that the Russian alphabet was used for this, which in this period could only be the Glagolitic alphabet.

The numerical system of the Glagolitic alphabet is consistent: the first letter = 1, the second letter = 2, etc., which indicates that it was the original counting system. As for the Cyrillic alphabet, everything is mixed up in it and the order of the letters does not correspond to the natural series of numbers, there are letters that are used only as numbers. This state of affairs in the Cyrillic alphabet arose because it synthesizes the Greek alphabet and the Glagolitic alphabet, that is, it includes letters from different alphabets.

The Greek letters psi and xi were almost always used as numbers, very rarely they could be found in proper names AleKhandr, KhserKh (Xerxes), sometimes in words like psalm (with the first letter psi).

The southern Slavs have a legend telling that they have had a letter since ancient times.

V.A. Istrin and P.Ya. Chernykh also give the following arguments: if we assume that writing among the Slavs did not exist long before they adopted Christianity, then the unexpectedly high flourishing of Bulgarian literature in the late 9th - early 10th century is also incomprehensible, as well as later Old Russian literature (“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, as well as “The Prayer of Daniel the Sharpener”, “Russian Truth” are written in Old Russian, and not Old Slavonic), the widespread use of writing in the everyday life of the Eastern Slavs of the X-XI centuries will also not be clear ., and high craftsmanship, which was achieved in Russia by the 11th century. the art of writing and book design (an example is the Ostromir Gospel).

2 The origin of the Glagolitic alphabet and alphabetic prayer

Everything is clear with the Cyrillic alphabet - it comes from the Greek uncial script, but how to explain the origin of the Glagolitic alphabet?

Many linguists have tried to give a more or less satisfactory answer to this question, but their attempts have not been successful. The fact is that many ancient alphabets, including Greek and Latin, were created on the model of even more ancient ones, i.e. pre-existing alphabets. The Greek alphabet, for example, was influenced by the Semitic Phoenician script, the Latin by the Greek, and so on.

In general, in science for a long time it was believed that any letter is basically a cultural borrowing. Referring to this "immutable scientific truth", scientists of the XIX and XX centuries. tried in the same way to derive the Glagolitic script from some more ancient writing: Coptic, Hebrew, Gothic, runic, Armenian, Georgian ... But all these interpretations were unconvincing and almost always accompanied by the inevitable “maybe”, “probably”, “not excluded".

Finally, scientists were forced to admit that the Glagolitic alphabet is not like any other letter and, most likely, was completely invented by the Thessalonica brothers Cyril and Methodius, as, however, the ancient Slavic list of the Russian edition of “Praise to Saints Cyril and Methodius” testifies: “Not on the same basis establishing their own business, imagining letters from anew. They did their work, relying not on someone else's basis, but reinvented the letters.

If we take the Glagolitic alphabet, then its fundamental difference from the Greek alphabet becomes noticeable: many letters in the Glagolitic alphabet are outlined from the full face position, which leads to the similarity of vowels and consonants and, in general, is a big drawback of this graphic system. In a certain historical epoch, the point of view is reversed, and the eye and the projection in profile are attracted with a schematic representation of the articulation in the form of a letter. In Cyril's new alphabet, the letters outline the organs of speech in profile, as in the Greek alphabet. In addition, part of the Glagolitic letters, which also outline the articulation in profile, like the Greek ones, were transferred to the new alphabet. And yet, the original Glagolitic letters were also transferred to the Cyrillic alphabet, which outlined the articulation from the front, but Konstantin transformed them to a large extent. This technique could have arisen at a fairly advanced stage of writing, when the letter was already turning into a sign and, to a certain extent, lost, although not completely, its motivated connection with the articulatory figure (articulation) that it depicted. In other words, a turn in the outline of letters from a full-face position to a profile position meant a turn in the development of the graphic system towards profile semantization, as well as a possible decrease in the motivation of a letter by an articulatory profile. To present the letter as an articulation in profile, an increased degree of abstraction was necessary, which also corresponded to an increase in the general level of public consciousness. Thus, the transition of Glagolitic letters was carried out mainly from the category of iconic full-face drawings (hieroglyphs of articulation) to the category of less motivated signs, which is associated with a decrease in the pictorial motivation of the Cyrillic letter for the Slavic linguistic consciousness. The new letter loses its iconicity and more and more turns from a symbol into an unmotivated sign, but then a new motivation arises, i.e. the inner gaze in the drawing of the letter represents a different type of drawing of the articulatory figure - more complex than the previous one. However, the increase in the information content of the letter in Cyrillic turned out to be a big win. It was this mission that Constantine accomplished in Moravia in 863, although the project of converting the old and creating a new Slavic alphabet in the Greek way probably arose with Constantine after he became acquainted with the Slavic script in Chersonese during the Khazar journey.

Alphabet prayer is one of the earliest or even the first of the Slavic poems. Some scholars believe that it was written by the creator of the Slavic alphabet himself - St. Cyril (before accepting monasticism, he was called Constantine the Philosopher). Other scholars attribute the authorship of this work to a disciple of St. Methodius, an outstanding writer and church leader Konstantin Preslavsky (Bishop of Preslav the Great), who lived at the turn of the 9th - 10th centuries.

“A3 IN THIS WORD I PRAY TO GOD” (found among the manuscripts of the former Patriarchal Library in a collection that once belonged to Patriarch Nikon): In this edition, the prayer is combined with the image of the corresponding letters of the Slavic alphabet and their names. The text of the prayer itself is transmitted in the usual letters of the Russian alphabet, while preserving the sound of the original text (Appendix 4).

Thus, we can say that the founders of the Glagolitic are Cyril and Methodius. The origin and authorship of the alphabetic prayer is controversial to this day.

3 Stages in the evolution of writing

There are a number of stages in the evolution of writing and language. So, the oldest version of writing - ideography arose as the very first and simplest version of writing based on the direct depiction of an object in hieroglyphic form. This form of writing, as L.R. Zinder writes, “should have been preserved, at least until that stage in the development of the language, when its sound side acquired autonomy. Naturally, while the undifferentiated sound complex was unambiguously associated with the corresponding "meaning", only the transfer of this "meaning" without taking into account its expression in speech was the goal of the initial stage of the development of writing. This stage is fully reflected by ideography, adapted only to the transfer of content. It can be said that pictography does not convey speech, but replaces it. Note, however, that ideography as a graphic system, which is a direct drawing of an object, was not an obligatory stage in the evolution of all languages ​​of the Indo-European area. Before the beginning of the “axial time”, many Indo-Europeans simply did not have any written language, which does not mean that the Indo-Europeans did not use the actual drawing to convey information. The book by I.K. Kuzmichev describes the types of "cave" drawings that have been found in the Indo-European territory since ancient times and which are not only informative, but also aesthetic.

Hieroglyphic writing corresponded to a type of language in which the word was not and could not be a derivative, decomposable into morphemes - such a word was singled out in speech as an integral independent unit. Chinese and others belong to this type of languages. This type of language can be called morphemic-intraderivative - it does not have a morphological type of word formation in the generally accepted sense of the word, however, semantic word production is represented in the widest possible way. These languages ​​are characterized by such a feature as the equality of a syllable to a word, words to a morpheme - both are presented in an isolated form of a “morpheme-phrase”. However, as abstract words such as "friendship", "relationship" and the like, which are difficult to "draw", grew in such languages, the process of transforming hieroglyphic writing began, when in many cases the hieroglyph is no longer a drawing of an object, but denotes a syllable or a sound complex, although Until now, specific objects in Chinese, for example, the language, are simply transmitted "in writing" in a schematic drawing - such hieroglyphs are the signs "man", "house" and many others. In a number of countries (primarily in Japan and China), a situation of graphic dual power has arisen, when hieroglyphics and Latin are used in parallel, while Latin most often serves as the language of commerce and international advertising) .

A qualitative leap in the development of the writing system occurred with the advent of the modern alphabetic writing system.

Let's start with the discovery of a striking similarity between the graphics of very different languages, which was made by N.S. Trubetskoy, who discovered the similarity of the Glagolitic alphabet and the ancient Georgian script "Asomtavruli". V. A. Istrin also wrote about this similarity: “There is some similarity in the general graphic nature of the Georgian, Armenian and Glagolitic writing.” Later, Academician T.V. Gamkrelidze specially analyzed the striking fact of the letter similarity of three different alphabets - the Glagolitic alphabet, the ancient Georgian alphabet Asomtavruli and the ancient Armenian alphabet Erkatagir. It is characteristic that asomtavruli and yerkatagir have not changed very much since ancient times and are the basis of the modern Georgian and Armenian alphabet. T.V. Gamkrelidze devoted a large article to the formation of some writing systems of the early Christian era, having analyzed the Coptic, Gothic, Old Slavonic, Old Georgian and Old Armenian scripts. The position of T.V. Gamkrelidze in relation to the question of the origin of these three alphabets is ambivalent from the very beginning. At first, he admits that Asomtavruli and Yerkatagir could have arisen under the influence of the Greek minuscule script. However, later T.V. Gamkrelizde claims that the graphic symbols of the ancient Armenian script “Yerkatagir”, created by the first teacher of all Armenians Mesrop Mashtots, “are invented mainly independently of the Greek graphics as a result of the original creativity of its creator using various non-Greek samples. In this regard, ancient Armenian writing typologically opposes other writing systems based on Greek writing: Coptic, Gothic and Old Slavonic Cyrillic.

N.S. Trubetskoy, V.A. Istrin, T.V. Gamkrelidze and other researchers posed the most important scientific problem: there are three alphabets that are similar to each other - this is the Glagolitic alphabet, Erkatagir and Asomtavruli (in fact, alphabets similar to each other there should be much more), but they were all very far from solving this problem.

The emergence of letter writing is the greatest information revolution in the history of mankind. It was she who made possible the emergence of Christianity and its spread as a world religion. This revolution created a new axial time and a new man, who greatly increased the volume of transmitted and accumulated information. In fact, the information age began from that moment, and the next great discovery, which marked the second stage of the information revolution, the printing press, marked what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg galaxy. At the end of the last century, the third stage of the information revolution took place, which marked the emergence of a global information Internet community. So the information subsystems have united into a global network, and information has become the most valuable commodity.

There is no doubt that the beginning of the modern information age was laid by the discovery of the letter, and the mechanism of the emergence of the letter itself is of greatest interest in this regard. The solution to the problem of the origin of the letter has advanced to a large extent, thanks to the conjecture of V.I. Rolich, who figured out how the first letter could have arisen. V.I. Rolich writes: “Analyzing the letters of the Russian alphabet (especially in its initial version), we found in the outline of all letters the image of the main point in their articulation. A similar but less strict picture in the Latin alphabet. We think that this phenomenon is explained by the involuntary (and perhaps conscious) projection of the psychophysical image of the phoneme in its symbolic image.

The context of this statement as a whole can be reduced to the absolutely true statement that the letter graphically displays some features of the articulation of the speech sound. The protoletter arose as a drawing, as a kind of hieroglyph, but not of an object or a scene from life, but of the articulation of a sound, an articulatory figure that is formed from the organs of speech at the moment the sound is pronounced.

Conclusion

The possibilities of writing are not limited by time or distance. But people have not always mastered the art of writing. This art has been developing for a long time, over many millennia.

The Greeks created their alphabet on the basis of the Phoenician script, but significantly improved it by introducing special signs for vowel sounds. The Greek alphabet formed the basis of the Latin alphabet, and in the 9th century the Slavonic alphabet was created by using the letters of the Greek alphabet.

After the adoption of Christianity, the Russians took over from the Bulgarians and all the wealth of Slavic writing. In Bulgaria there were already Slavic church books. At that time, the Old Bulgarian and Old Russian languages ​​were so close that there was no need to translate Bulgarian into Russian. Bulgarian books were simply copied and used in the churches of Kyiv and other cities of Ancient Rus'.

There are a number of stages in the evolution of writing and language. So, the oldest version of writing - ideography arose as the very first and simplest version of writing based on the direct depiction of an object in hieroglyphic form.

A qualitative leap in the development of the writing system occurred with the advent of the modern alphabetic writing system. The emergence of letter writing is the greatest information revolution in the history of mankind. It was she who made possible the emergence of Christianity and its spread as a world religion.

Bibliography

1. Volotskaya Z.M., Moloshnaya T.N., Nikolaeva T.M. The experience of describing the Russian language in its written form. M., 1964.

2. Gamkrelidze G.V. Systems of early Christian writings // Questions of linguistics. 1987. No. 6.

3. Gelb I.E. The study of writing systems among the ancient Slavs. M., 2003.

4. Zinder L.R. From the history of writing. L., 1988.

5. Istrin V.A. The origins of Russian writing. M., 1988.

6. Kirov E.F. Theoretical problems of language modeling. Kazan, 1989.

7. Kuzmichev I.K. Introduction to the aesthetics of artistic consciousness. Nizhny Novgorod, 1997.

8. Panov E.N. Signs. Symbols. Languages. M., 2000.

Tutoring

Need help learning a topic?

Our experts will advise or provide tutoring services on topics of interest to you.
Submit an application indicating the topic right now to find out about the possibility of obtaining a consultation.

It is believed that writing appeared at the end of the 4th millennium BC. in Sumer. A little later, the Egyptians began to use the letter, and by 2000 BC. it originated in China. The development of writing took place according to the following scheme: at the beginning, the meaning of certain concepts or processes was conveyed with the help of a drawing, then hieroglyphs appeared, and, finally, in the 1st millennium BC. The Phoenicians invented

It should be noted that representatives of Eastern culture have the ability to think symbolically. This was the reason for the spread and consolidation of hieroglyphic writing in many Asian countries.

The value of writing for humanity is difficult to overestimate. It is writing that is the basis for the development of any culture. Moreover, as a way of transmitting information, it directly affects the mentality and self-consciousness of representatives of individual ethnic groups. Without writing, the accumulation of knowledge would be impossible, there would be no literature, economics, mathematics, etc.

subject writing

Historians believe that from ancient times a person shared information with his relatives using subject writing. Its simplest example is a stick stuck into the ground by the road at a certain angle. Using it, the traveler could determine the length of the path and find out about the presence of various obstacles or dangers on it. - cords or belts with multi-colored shells strung on them - were used by North American Indian tribes and some peoples of Africa.

knot letter

Used by the Incas - a mysterious civilization, which is the largest in pre-Columbian America. Indian "notes" looked like woolen or cotton ropes, to which a certain number of multi-colored laces were tied. Various knots were imposed on the latter, the shape and number of which were the key to deciphering the message.

initial letter

As for writing traditional for European culture, it developed in its own way. In the middle of the 15th century, the first books appeared in Germany that were printed in typesetting. And already in the 16th century, this method of printing spread throughout the Old World. With the development of trade and commerce, literacy turned from a privilege of the nobility into an urgent need. Alphabetical writing continued to develop in two ways: in the form of typography and in the form of handwritten notes, without which it was impossible to do without correspondence, drafting business documents, etc.