Writing systems
A case study in cultural evolution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6095508 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bruce G Trigger (McGill University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 39-62 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Norwegian Archaeological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0029-3652 • E-ISSN: 1502-7678 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00293652.1998.9965618 |
| OpenAlex | W2053014522 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 28 |
| References cited | 52 |
The history of writing, which is both a technology and a symbolic system, provides an informative case study of the evolution of material culture. Writing systems in various parts of the world display a tendency to develop from a semasiographic (ideographic) form, through logography (word or morpheme signs), to increasing use of phonography (sound signs). However, not all early civilizations developed written forms of recording, and increasing technological and social complexity is not accompanied by equal abandonment of logography in favour of phonography. This suggests that the technological advantages of phonographic, and in particular of alphabetic, scripts have been ethnocentrically overrated. Furthermore, while purely phonographic scripts require the prior existence of more logo‐graphic ones, they have never evolved directly from such scripts but were created on the margins of societies that used them. There is considerable evidence that stability and change in writing systems are influenced by religious, political, ethnic, professional, class, and cultural values to a much greater extent than by practical considerations. This suggests that in order to understand change in any form of material culture it is necessary to determine empirically the relative importance of practical and cultural considerations in bringing about such change. This may vary greatly from one category of material culture to another
Abandonment (legal) · Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Scripting language · Sociology · Writing system · Anthropology · Computer Science · History · Language and cultural evolution · Law · Linguistics and language evolution · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy
Psycholinguistics of writing
History of writing
A note on fonts
Mixed systems
The basic options
Signs of segments
Sociolinguistics of writing
Vowel incorporation
Appendix
Signs of words
Analysis and interpretation
Signs of syllables
Consonants and vowels
What is writing?
Writing Systems
Writing Systems, Psychology of
Understanding Early Civilizations
Marks and Labels
Culture and Reason
Of glyphs and glottography
Literacy and Writing
Last Writing
The significance of the morphographic principle for the classification of writing systems
Emotional resemblance
Reckonings
The Beginnings of Writing on Crete
The Archaeology of Communication Technologies
Egypt and Syro-Mesopotamia in the 4th Millennium
The interface between the written and the oral
The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents
The world's writing systems
Picture writing from ancient southern Mexico; Mixtec place signs and maps.
The origin and early development of the Chinese writing system
Explanation in Archaeology
Visible Speech
The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny
The Cultures of Prehistoric Egypt
The Sources of Social Power, I, A History of Power from the Beginning to A. D. 1760
Scripts and Literacy
An archaeology of capitalism
Reading the Past
Maya Cosmos
Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben
Writing Systems
Archaeology
Mesoamerican Writing Systems
Breaking the Maya Code
In Search of the Primitive
The Urban Revolution
Anthropological Linguistics
Early Chinese writing
The Indus script
The most ancient scripts of Iran
The origin of writing systems
The emergence of writing in Egypt
The archaic texts from Uruk
Writing in Anatolia
Cretan writing in the second millennium B.C
The evidence for early writing
The Origins of Writing in the Near East
The infancy of the alphabet
Writing without letters
Ancient society, or, Researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization
Culture and Practical Reason
The Preindustrial City, Past and Present
Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society
Archaeology as Anthropology
Gender and Archaeology
Stimulus Diffusion
Archaeology and Anthropology
| Unique citing works | 28 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,08 |
| Citation span | 2000 - 2020 (21) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 13 |