The origin and main stages of the development of writing. The value of writing in the history of the development of society. The value of writing in human culture (abstract)

Language is a system of signs, which is the main means of communication.

Writing is a system of signs that fixes the language.

We know who invented the electric motor and antibiotics, the Constitution and the computer. But these inventions, which changed the life of mankind, would never have taken place if, in antiquity, someone whose names we will never know had not invented agriculture, metalworking and writing. Modern children, deducing their first scribble letters, do not think at this time about their distant ancestors. They came to a world that is impossible to imagine without means mass media, and they would not have developed without writing, without a huge amount of various textual materials. To live in this world, you need to be able to read and write, otherwise you will find yourself on the sidelines of modernity. And yet the fate of one person, if he did not know writing, would not change as dramatically as the fate of all mankind.

For almost a million years, generations of people were connected only by threads of myths and rituals, and different tribes - only by bizarre rumors. The invention of alphabetic writing was the great step that brought humanity from barbarism to civilization. When the name of the leader of the tribe or God was first carved, scrawled, we will never know for sure. It was at this time that the story began. The times when there was no written language are called prehistoric times. Previously, there were two realities for a person: an everyday, momentary one, in which events took place insofar as they can be seen, heard or remembered, and the unchanging reality of myths that reigned over time. Myths and rituals were then the only treasury of human achievement. Now a third reality has appeared - historical, it is also informational. Man was included in the flow of history. Thanks to the mass media, he now knows about events that he has never seen, with the help of other means developed on the basis of writing, he can communicate himself to posterity with whom he will never talk. Previously, only divine phenomena were timeless, now human deeds also stand the test of time. What a person does today will be remembered not only by his contemporaries, but also by distant descendants. Science could not get any significant development without relying on the work of its predecessors. A good tradition of scientific work - a thorough study of previous research, followed by isolating the crumbs of new knowledge - was formed on the basis of the opportunity to work in rich libraries and receive education with the help of textbooks, in which perhaps long-dead luminaries left their accumulated knowledge.

The myths of all civilizations tell about the divine origin of writing. People have always understood its value. And the very ability to write and read for a long time remained the lot of the elite, primarily the priesthood and government officials. It could not be otherwise, because in order to master literacy, it was necessary to remember and learn how to depict thousands of complex signs - hieroglyphs. When the Phoenicians, followed by the Greeks, created a sound-letter alphabet with a few dozen simple signs, which anyone can master in a few weeks, there was a quiet and greatest revolution in the history of mankind.

The main prerequisite for the creation of writing is the emergence of speech. When the human monkey learned to speak, it immediately became clear: sooner or later, the same monkey will learn to fix its speech manifestations. But, on the other hand, once having arisen, writing began to have the opposite effect on the language, giving it greater stability and formality. Outside of writing, it is difficult to imagine a modern national language.

II. Writing develops, evolves, but nevertheless it is somewhat incorrect to compare and evaluate which letter is the best or better. First, different types of writing may approach a particular language system in different ways. Secondly, behind the writing system are not only the sounds of the language, but also history and culture. That is why even small reforms of graphics and spelling are carried out with such difficulty. It goes without saying that they are carried out for the convenience of writing and reading consumers, but it is primarily educated native speakers who are accustomed to certain, perhaps outdated graphics and spelling, who suffer from this. Many Russian writers did not accept the reforms of 1917-1918. and in emigration they continued to publish books in the old encoding (I.A. Bunin, in particular, insisted on this).

The transformation of a deeply rooted graphics system threatens with truly catastrophic damage. So, for example, from 1930 to 1940. Tajiks and Uzbeks had to change their script twice: first, they switched from Arabic to Latin, and then, during the policy of Russification, from Latin to Cyrillic. After these reforms, a whole nation was left practically without books and lost its written culture. The British practically do not allow any graphic reforms, which is why their alphabetical writing can be considered alphabetic only with a big stretch. Indeed, how do letters and sounds correspond in the English word knight - (najt)? But do not consider the English letter hieroglyphic! All these questions are somehow taken into account by the theory of writing, which consists of two parts. Grammar studies the relationship between written characters (in 1952, this term was introduced by the American linguist Ignace Jay Gelb, who defined this area as a separate science). Actually, paleography and epigraphy are engaged in the inscription and form of signs (if the object of study is inscriptions carved on solid material). So, for example, grammatical knowledge is necessary if you need to create a written language for a non-literate people, and information about the cuneiform shape of signs, their origin and method of application belong to paleography. Some cultures attach special importance to the form of signs. In China, calligraphy is considered an art: there are many hieroglyphs, they are complex, and careless handwriting will make the text unreadable. On the contrary, someone who does not shine with a special elegance of handwriting is unlikely to suffer much from this - it is almost always easy to make out what is written in letters.

Language is the main means of communication between people and therefore always exists in society. As long as there are people who use the language as the main means of communication, the language is alive, it is constantly changing. Arising in speech (oral or written), linguistic innovations gradually find more and more use for themselves, begin to be used more and more often, thus acquiring the status of a rule. Over time, people begin to take these linguistic phenomena for granted, as a common fact of language.

If the language has ceased to be the main means of communication in any social group, it becomes dead. Three reasons may cause this situation. Firstly, the native speaker of a given language may disappear. So, the last Tasmanians died in the last century, and with them the Tasmanian languages. Secondly, people can learn a new language by forgetting the old one. Such dead languages ​​include, for example, Sumerian, Hittite and Hurrian, Gothic and Prussian. Finally, any literary language that has been preserved in some limited spheres of use can become dead, while in all other spheres a living language is used, which by origin is associated with the old literary language. Such is the relationship between the dead Latin and Romance languages, classical Mongolian and modern Mongolian, Old Church Slavonic and Bulgarian.

Some scripts were invented, while the rest - and most of them - appeared as a result of a gradual and long evolution. Among the invented, so-called author's scripts, there are Slavic writing, Armenian, Georgian and others.

The Armenian script was created at the beginning of the 5th century, during the struggle of Armenians for political and spiritual independence from Persia and Byzantium. The Armenian alphabet was developed by the educator Bishop Mesrop Mashtots (361-440).

And in the modern world, people invent writing. So, in the first half of the 19th century, the Sequoyah Cherokee Indian, being completely illiterate, invented and introduced a letter for his people. On the territory of Russia, verbal writing was invented by the Chukchi shepherd Teneville, but only his relatives and friends used it. In the former Soviet Union, scripts based on the Russian alphabet were created for many languages. A team of linguists worked on them, that is, such scripts were created artificially.

The invention of a new written language is a global undertaking, a titanic act of creativity, often determining the cultural and political development of the people (of course, if this writing has taken root, spread and survived).

Most writing systems cannot be said to have been invented by anyone. For example, no one invented a Greek or Chinese letter. They were created and improved over many centuries by different people. And the letter as a whole, as far as one can judge, did not have a single creator, like the wheel, speech and many other inventions critical for the history of mankind.

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

1. Answer the questions:

1) What is the main prerequisite for the creation of writing?

2) The main function of the language.

3) "Living" and "dead" languages.

4) The relationship of language and writing.

The invention of writing by man, as a system for fixing speech for transmitting it in space and time, was one of the most important discoveries which largely determined the progress of modern society. The main advantage of writing is that it allows you to overcome the barrier of time, makes it possible for people of different generations to communicate, to pass on their knowledge about the world to their descendants. At present, many unique technical means and devices have been invented that can be used to transmit or broadcast human speech at a distance or in time: modern man uses telephone, radio, television and a number of other mass media everywhere. However, all these technical devices were invented only in the 20th century, and before that people communicated with each other using letters - they wrote letters to each other, created various business papers (documents), recorded their knowledge and experiences in books.

The differentiation of human activity has led to the fact that at present there are texts that are designed specifically for visual perception, or reading, they contain extremely complex, systematic and logically organized information that cannot be fully mastered when listening, you must be able to read it. Despite the huge achievements, scientific and technological progress in the field of accumulation, storage and transmission of information, humanity has not yet come up with another system equal to writing and capable of performing these functions to the same extent.

Man-made texts are only one of the forms of the existence of a language, the other main form of its existence is oral speech. Oral and written speech are the embodiment, the materialization of human language - the main means of communication. However, we are aware of other means of communication that were used in the prehistoric era of the existence of mankind and continue to be used today. For example, the sign language is widely known, which is used in cases where it is impossible to speak or write. Various works of art, such as a picture drawn by an artist, a melody created by a composer, a dance staged by a choreographer, are also means of communication to a certain extent, because through them the artist tries to convey to us certain thoughts, feelings, emotions, a state of mind. Objects made by man, or used by him, can also inform us a lot. But, as it is easy to see, these methods of communication cannot in any way be compared with the language in terms of universality, accuracy and volume of transmitted information.

Written language researchers use a large number of terms to be explained. First of all, distinguish writing and writing. When talking about writing, then, first of all, they mean the totality of written monuments, texts of any language, or documents made using the writing of one or another people. Under by letter they mean a means of communication, or a means of communication; should be more precisely defined letter as a sign system for fixing speech, which allows using graphic signs to communicate at a distance and in time. Sometimes, as a synonym for the word letter, the term is used. graphic arts, they are extremely similar in meaning, but the latter has a narrower meaning: the word graphics comes from the Greek grapho > "I write" and means a set of descriptive means of a particular language , letters, or graphemes, punctuation marks, and also this term means a science that studies the relationship between the signs of writing and the elements of the sound structure of a language . Grapheme name the minimum sign of the written system of the language, denoting one or another unit of the language phoneme, morpheme, word . Usually, a grapheme is associated with a letter in alphabetical writing, with a hieroglyph in hieroglyphic, with a syllabeme in syllabic, but this is not always the case, this issue will be discussed in more detail below. The ambiguity of the ratio of sound - grapheme for alphabetic writing is very typical for the alphabets known to us, for example, digraph - a written sign consisting of two letters and denoting one phoneme - ch in English language denotes the sound [w], and in German [x].

In addition to graphics, there are usually two more components in a letter: alphabet and spelling . Word alphabet came from Greek: "alpha" and "vita" - the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, "vita" was formerly called "beta", hence the word alphabet in other modern European languages. Any alphabet is an ordered system of written signs that convey the sound composition of the words of the language through symbols - graphemes, depicting individual sound elements. The invention of the alphabet allowed people to write down any, even the most complex texts on their own. mother tongue, store them, transmit them at a distance, this, in turn, contributed to the widespread spread of literacy, made education one of the most important discoveries of civilization. However, the discovery of the alphabet would not have led to such results if orthography, a historically established system of rules that ensured the uniformity of spellings, had not simultaneously developed. No one will argue that the same word can be written in different ways, but in order for what is written to be clear to everyone, a whole set of rules is needed, thanks to which any text would be understandable different people. The term orthography also comes from Greek and literally means "correct spelling" from Greek. orthos - "correct" and grapho - "I write".

Writing on earth has existed for about three millennia, so many sciences study it. So, paleography- a historical and linguistic discipline that studies the history of the creation of written characters; explores written monuments in order to identify patterns in the development of written systems of various peoples; describes the process of creating signs of writing and their development; establishes patterns, according to which the letter changes; practical and descriptive paleography examines the individual characteristics of scribes and the ancient manuscripts themselves in order to determine their authenticity, time and place of creation. This is a very serious science, to which such prominent Russian scientists as V.N. Shchepkin, I.I. Sreznevsky, I.V. Yagich, P.A. Lavrov, who studied the monuments of ancient Slavic and Russian writing. Palaeography is primarily concerned with the study of handwritten texts. The origin of scientific paleography is closely connected with the name of the Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon, who introduced the term itself into scientific use. Based on dated manuscripts, he compiled illustrative tables showing the history of the change in time of individual Greek letters, and on the basis of these tables he compiled the first scientific description of the manuscripts. The main task of paleography is to establish and systematize the chronological and local features of the writing of dated manuscripts with the aim of subsequently evaluating others that have neither a direct date nor an indication of the place of writing in their text. The object of paleography is written signs, mainly letters and their constituent elements, as well as superscript, separating signs, abbreviated writing techniques, writing tools and materials. Achievements of paleographic analysis of manuscripts are used in historical linguistics, literary criticism, art history and history. Epigraphy - a discipline that studies the oldest inscriptions preserved on stones, metal and ceramics, etc., found during archaeological excavations. Its main tasks are to establish the time and place where the inscription was made, its decoding, the establishment of the type of writing, the meaning of written characters. Written texts are studied and cultural studies, which is more interested in their content, since the main goal of this science is to trace how human knowledge about the world has changed, assessments of certain phenomena of reality over time. Relatively new science is grammar, which set itself the goal of establishing, on the basis of a comparison of various systems and types of writing, the general principles governing its development. The term grammatology also comes from the Greek language - gramma(tos) "letter" and logos "word, judgment, science". Literally, it can be understood as "the science of letters", and indeed, the main subject of study of this science is a written sign denoting a particular unit of language, a word, a morpheme, a syllable, a sound, a phoneme, etc. Grammar studies the external form of a written sign, that is, the history of its inscription, origin, evolution of its appearance, as well as the internal form of the written sign, that is, with which unit of the language it correlates, correlated earlier, in which direction its semantic evolution took place. In this way, grammar – it is a science that studies the history of writing, the logic of the development of types of writing, the history of writing individual signs, their internal form; and also engaged in a comparative analysis of the graphics of various peoples. The first serious studies in this area appeared only in the middle of our century, they include the monographs of I. Gelb, D. Deeringer, J. Friedrich and a number of other works.

So, the written text is one of the forms of existence of the language, it has its own specifics and is currently autonomous. The outstanding German scientist W. Humboldt wrote: “Only a sounding word is, as it were, the embodiment of thought, a letter is the embodiment of sound. Its most general meaning is that it fixes speech and thereby makes possible a completely different reflection on it than an outspoken word that only finds a place in memory. "Comparing the features of oral and written forms of speech, all scientists emphasize secondary, inferiority written speech. So, in the work "On the relationship of Russian writing to the Russian language" I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay distinguishes two types of speech activity - "pronunciation-auditory and written-visual". "The articulatory-auditory can arise and be thought completely independently of the written-visual: the written-visual has a meaning, it is comprehended only in connection with the pronunciation-auditory."

However, the secondary nature of written speech does not at all mean its secondary importance, lack of independence. There are serious differences between oral and written speech, which are associated with the peculiarities of their generation and perception. So, oral speech is spontaneous, saying smth. we pronounce the sounds that make up sentences and words unconsciously, in other words, oral speech is not discrete, it is not divided into the smallest components. Written speech is discrete, since creating some kind of text, we consciously write letter by letter, for which we first divide the word into sounds. When perceiving speech, this ratio changes, so, listening to some. passage, we perceive separately sound by sound, and only then we identify this set of sounds with some kind of meaning, while the sophisticated reader can read whole words or phrases.

So, a letter is a kind of code that translates the sound stream of speech into linear system optical signals perceived by the organs of vision. Repeatedly pointing out the secondary nature of writing in comparison with oral speech, one should also note the fact that people who read a lot do it without mental pronunciation of the text, and experienced typists type the text spontaneously, mechanically, that is, also without internal pronunciation. In other words, with the passage of time and the acquisition of sufficient experience, reading and writing become more autonomous, independent of listening and speaking. Approximately the same thing happens with written speech, it is more and more isolated from oral speech, and even has a strong influence on it.

With the development of writing, each nation develops a literary language, language norms. We say "speaks like it's written", "speaks like he writes" when we want to emphasize the correct glib speech of the speaker. L.V. Shcherba wrote: “Undoubtedly, under certain conditions of life, a written language develops to one degree or another, not designed for pronunciation, and I am deeply convinced that the emergence of certain phenomena of literary languages, such as well-known complex syntactic constructions and many other phenomena, are explained just in that way." The written form of the language is gradually becoming more and more independent of the oral one, its elements, graphic signs, begin to function on a par with phonetic ones as various forms of materialization of meanings. A special book style of the language is emerging, the texts of which are designed not for pronunciation, but for reading, which makes it possible to operate with more complex logical concepts, abstract meanings. Nevertheless, one should not imagine that oral and written speech, being autonomized, move away from each other. The laws on the basis of which written and oral texts are organized and built are common to both forms of language. J. Vahek makes the following remark: "The oral and written norm should be considered coordinated values ​​that are not subject to a higher norm and whose belonging should be attributed only to the fact that they are used in the same language community in complementary functions." In other words, the norms of book speech regulate the text intended for reading, they differ from the norms of colloquial speech, first of all, in this, and secondly, they are repelled from them, since colloquial and book speech should differ from each other to the extent that they differ and situations in which they are used. Note that it is necessary to distinguish between the terms written and book speech , as well as oral and Speaking . The second terms from each pair (bookish and colloquial) primarily characterize the styles of the language, the first - the material form of fixing the text. So, a conversational passage can be written, that is, it can be written, recorded, for example, the text of the dialogue of the heroes of a work of art - a story, a novel, a drama, but at the same time it is designed either for oral reproduction (dramatic passage) or for its imitation (an excerpt from a novel). ), the book text can be spoken, however, in order for it to be adequately assimilated, it must either be modified in some way or supported by its additional reading.

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 the alphabet.

The emergence of speech is the main prerequisite for the emergence of writing. After all, having barely learned to speak, the primitive man was faced with the need to fix his thoughts or words in order to convey information to his relatives or to preserve the already accumulated knowledge for future generations. In turn, writing has a fairly strong influence on the language itself. It makes it more stable and formalized, and also expands and strengthens the range of concepts and categories that surround a person in everyday life.

The importance of writing in the history of the development of human civilization cannot be overestimated. The external world, everyday life, inner experiences - all this is reflected in the language. And writing becomes one of the most important forms of existence of the latter, since it is only with the help of records that any information can be stored outside of human memory. So, archaeologists still find ancient writing samples, according to which the picture of the development of a particular culture is restored, and the characteristic features of the ethnic groups living in certain territories are determined.

It is known that the emergence of writing has become a very energetic impulse in the development of human civilization. Moreover, history begins precisely from the moment when our ancestors first tried to capture their ideas about the world around them. The main prerequisite for the emergence of writing was the development of oral speech.

The civilization of the ancient Incas was the largest in the Americas. And pretty long time historians were surprised that not a single hint of writing was found on the territory of Indian settlements. Only one thing was clear - such a large state could not do without a letter. Indeed, with its help, agreements and alliances were to be concluded, trade was conducted, and even in a simple economy it would be a very useful tool.

“The knot of fate” is what they say when they mean some difficult period in a person’s life. And few people think about where this expression came from. It should be noted here that knots have been accompanying a person since the most ancient times - hunters, fishermen, farmers, merchants, soldiers, etc. could not do without them. Moreover, history testifies that even a letter was once nodular - with its help, a wide variety of information was transmitted in an encoded form.

Chinese knot writing is one of the most unusual phenomena in the history of human civilization. Beautiful and complex patterns, which today only a master can try to repeat, and even then only with the help of special devices, the Chinese wove back in the 3rd millennium BC.

With the development of speech and intellect, a person realized that not all knowledge can be stored in memory - passing from generation to generation, they will inevitably be distorted and lost. It was then that writing arose, which made it possible to record various information for relatives and descendants.

Pictography is the oldest type of writing, which has been preserved among some peoples of the world to this day. It should be noted that this type of writing is not phonetic, that is, it does not convey the sound of words. It is a set of images of objects, events or any actions. For example, with the help of pictography, it was possible to capture hunting successes, convey a warning to fellow tribesmen about warlike neighbors, or talk about natural phenomena characteristic of a certain season or a certain area.

Ideography is a separate type of writing, the signs of which denote a certain idea. This is a fundamental difference from pictography, the images of which convey the meaning of specific objects or objects. The emergence of ideographic writing is directly related to the development of thinking and, consequently, language, when a person learned to divide speech into separate elements - words.

The development of writing is directly related to the evolution of human intelligence. AT ancient times primitive subject or pictographic writing was used to convey the simplest concepts and designate visual objects or things. But with the course of history, an intensive development of thinking and language was noted and, as a result, the need arose to designate individual words or phrases. Their combination made it possible to fix various abstract concepts.

Hierographic writing is one of the most unusual types of writing. The fact is that any hieroglyph does not convey the phonetic sound of a word or phrase. Depending on the context, it has a certain meaning, figuratively describing individual objects, phenomena, concepts or categories. Hierographic writing is typical mainly for the peoples of the East, although in other parts of the world there is sometimes evidence that our ancestors transmitted information to the next generations using hieroglyphs.

Chinese calligraphy is the art of depicting...words. It is a cross between ordinary writing and drawing - hieroglyphs written by calligraphy not only convey a certain meaning to the reader, but also give him aesthetic pleasure. The key feature of calligraphy is the presence of harmony of spirit and movement. This means that the image of the thought that the writer wants to convey in writing must be designed in such a way that the reader understands not only the meaning of what is written, but also the mood or state of mind caused by it.

Writing is feature our civilization. Its appearance is directly associated with the development of human intelligence. The improvement of the writing system became the basis for the emergence of political, economic and social relations. But if no modern person no longer thinks of himself and the world around him without writing, then in old times it was available only to a select few. Only persons close to a deity or ruler had the right to receive knowledge about writing - this is how the most important information regarding beliefs, rituals and scientific knowledge was protected from the attention of ill-wishers.

The syllabary is a phonetic system. Its simplest elements are individual signs or a set of symbols denoting certain syllables, which consist of a consonant sound with a vowel or one vowel. Syllabic systems arose on the basis of logography, and the next stage in the development of writing is letter-phonetic writing, which is used almost everywhere today.

Federal Agency for Education

State educational institution of higher professional education

VOLGOGRAD STATE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Department of History, Culture and Sociology.

Essay on cultural studies on the topic:

"The Significance of Writing in Human Culture"

Completed:

student of group E-158

Kovaleva Yu.D.

Work manager:

Introduction

We know very well who invented the first printing press, radio, TV. But these undoubtedly important inventions that turned people's lives around would never have taken place without the invention of writing - the most, in my opinion, the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.

Writing made human thought immortal, by inventing writing, a person began to communicate not only with his contemporaries, but also with distant ancestors. Before us opened a whole picture of the life of past generations with their views, ideas, aspirations.

Only two centuries ago our history began with Homer and the traditions of the Old Testament. And today, thanks to the colossal work done by scientists, our history has lengthened, at least twice. And this is largely the "merit" of the surviving written sources. The fact that writing is of great importance can already be seen from these lines. But what exactly? Finding an answer to this question will be the goal of my essay.

In order to perform such a difficult task, it is necessary to trace the path of writing throughout the history of mankind: from primitive graphic to verbal-syllabic, syllabic and alphabetic writing systems, determine the factors that influenced the evolution of writing, identify the features of each of its stages, and also find out whether it is development at the present stage.

Trying to reveal the topic of the essay, I read a lot of interesting literature, learned a lot of new things that I had not even thought about before. For example, everyone knows that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, but hardly anyone thought about who invented the Glagolitic alphabet and why it did not take root in the ancient Slavic society.

I will try to cover all this in the abstract, as well as touch on many other interesting issues.

The origin and evolution of writing

Mankind did not know writing for most of its existence. For a long time it went to him, and only a few millennia ago, signs began to be used to record speech.

As a person accumulated experience and knowledge, it became necessary to store and transmit information. At first, this was done through communication, but due to the imperfection of human memory, much knowledge was lost.

The first step towards writing was the use of objects. First, as a reminder. They did not convey the thought, but only reminded of it. Until now, we tie knots for memory.

Later, specific meanings were assigned to objects. This type of writing is called subject. For example, counting cords were used for correct calculation. They can be seen in the Peruvian shepherds and in some other peoples of Africa and Latin America. The number of heads in the herd corresponds to the number of knots on the cord. In ancient Europe, ancient China, the Australian and African tribes had a "baton of messengers" - a kind of document confirming the authority of the arrived messenger. Of great interest to historians are the pile of the Incas. “Kipu is a thick rope or stick, on which cords with knots and plexuses are strung. Semantic meaning was attached to the number of cords and knots, their size, location and color.

Despite the prevalence of subject writing, it could not solve the most important task - the storage of information.

The next step towards modern writing was pictography-image of objects, events and actions with the help of drawings. Pictography is an extralinguistic sign system (any person can read a pictogram, regardless of the language in which he speaks), since it directly expresses thoughts, not words and sentences. Its disadvantage was that the drawings conveyed the whole idea, without highlighting any components parts.

Pictography arose in the era of the late Paleolithic - 40-10 thousand years ago. At first, people imprinted animals and people on the walls of their caves, then episodes from life, various events. Compositions became more and more complex, symbols began to be used. The final formation of pictography, according to scientists, took place "in the Neolithic era, when disparate tribal groups began to unite into tribes" . It is believed that pictography is the first way to express a person's thoughts. It is convenient because it is not associated with a specific language and is understandable to everyone.

While the records were rare and random flaws in the pictograms (the impossibility of accurately conveying information) were not noticed. However, with the development of statehood, when writing is firmly included in people's lives, becomes an integral part of it, there is a need to speed up records, to accurately transmit them. As a result, "the drawing of each image is gradually simplified and more and more distinctly divided into separate graphic signs." For each object and concept, only the corresponding image is assigned to it.

Thus, the next step in the development of writing was ideography. In a number of countries (Egypt, China, Crete, Sumer), ideography arises together with the slave state. The formation of signs-ideograms proceeded along the line of simplification of the graphic style.

Sometimes one sign denoted several concepts (for example, the sign of the sun also denoted the words day, light, whiteness). Often complex concepts were transmitted using a combination of several characters. Later, in order to get a new meaning of the word, they resorted to changing the shape or position of the sign.

It was quite difficult to convey proper names with an ideogram. For this, a “rebus” way of writing was invented: the names were broken into parts that sounded the same as any words. Such a recording reflects the sound side of the language and is called logogram(as opposed to an ideogram, which is associated with a meaning). The big disadvantage of ideographic writing is that it takes great amount time.

The next step was the invention syllabic letters. This was a very difficult step for mankind, since it was necessary to separate the sound shell of the word from its meaning. This took almost two thousand years, it arose only in the second or first millennium BC. The syllabic system existed in ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese and other writing systems. And yet she had a drawback: with a developed language, with a large vocabulary the letter became unwieldy.

The further development of writing went along the path of crushing the sound stream into the smallest particles-sounds. Consonants were the first to be identified in ancient Egyptian writing, since it had logograms consisting of one sound.

Alphabetical letter

So, I settled on how sound was extracted from the audio stream. This undoubtedly entailed the creation of the alphabet. The first "alphabet" was created by the Phoenicians in the second millennium BC. It consisted of 22 letters denoting consonants or syllables, since the Phoenician language belonged to the Semitic family, in which consonants played the main role. In connection with this fact, scientists assign the Phoenician alphabet "an intermediate position between the syllabic and letter-sound systems of the language."

The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by Greek and Aramaic scripts. Aramaic gave rise to Eastern letter-sound systems, and all Western letter-syllabic systems of writing originated from Greek. The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the Greeks in the first millennium BC. It was there that the first real, in the full sense of the word, alphabet appeared. The great merit of the Greeks was that they introduced symbols denoting vowel sounds into the alphabet. In this form, the Greek alphabet exists to this day.

With the advent of the alphabet, writing no longer tried to directly convey meaning, like pictography or hieroglyphics, it simply fixed the sound stream, and this way turned out to be the most effective.
Alphabetic, or alphabetic, writing has become the crowning achievement of graphic evolution. It is the most economical (there are fewer sounds in the language than syllables, and there are fewer syllables than words) and is suitable for languages ​​of all types, which cannot be said about other types of writing.

"The invention of alphabetical writing was that great step which brought humanity from barbarism to civilization".

Slavic writing

Existing opinions about the stages of development of writing in Russia are quite contradictory. Some scholars believe that Slavic writing has gone through all the stages of its development, from drawing to sounds. Others argue that ideographic writing could not have existed among the Slavs, since the Slavic languages ​​have many grammatical forms requiring changes in words. Syllabic writing was also not suitable - Slavic languages ​​had too many syllables. Only the letter system could be suitable for speech transmission.

Time of occurrence Slavic writing Scientists have not yet determined exactly. According to some data, this is 11 thousand BC. e., according to others 1 thousand BC. e., according to the third 6th century AD. e.

Indications of Slavic writing that existed before Cyril and Methodius are found in written sources of the 9th-10th centuries. The legend of Chernorizets the Brave says that before the adoption of Christianity, the Slavs did not have books, but used “features and cuts”. After the adoption of Christianity, records were kept in Latin and Greek letters. One of the earliest chronicles - "The Tale of Bygone Years" - testifies to the presence of writing in Kievan Rus in the 9th century. Academician B.A. Rybakov relates its emergence to the reign of the Kyiv prince Oskold. The clearest evidence can be considered the records of treaties with Byzantium (10th century).

So, it is precisely established that on the eve of the activities of Cyril and Methodius, the Slavs used three types of writing: pictography, “features and cuts”, which by that time had received an alpha-semantic meaning, and, finally, they used Latin and Greek letters in writing words.

The turning point in the history of Russia was the activity of the brothers Cyril and Methodius. Cyril and Methodius were born in the Macedonian city of Thessalonica. Methodius in 820, Cyril in 826. The brothers spoke Slavonic fluently and were very educated people. Interesting figure Cyril. At the turn of the 60s of the 9th century, he made a missionary trip. In the city of Chersonese (formerly the city of Korsun), he met a man with a Gospel written in the “proto-Cyrillic” language, that is, in Greek letters adapted to the transmission of Slavic speech. This prompted him to create the Slavic alphabet. As early as 863, all divine services began to be conducted in their native language, books were translated from Greek into Slavonic. Cyrillic quickly entered the life of the Slavic people. But it is wrong to think that the brothers created writing from scratch, they relied on the Greek writing that already existed by that time. Greek letters were used to designate sounds inherent in both Greek and Slavic. For sounds found only in Slavic speech, 19 new letters were invented. Thus, it consisted of 43 letters. “Cyrillic took into account and correctly conveyed the phonetic composition of the Old Slavonic language,” but it had a drawback: it included 6 Greek letters that were not needed to convey Slavic speech. In parallel with the Cyrillic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet existed in the 10th century. It was shorter than the Cyrillic alphabet by 3 letters, it coincided with it in terms of sound, arrangement and names of letters, but differed in their rather complex style. There are several versions of its origin. Some scientists are inclined to believe that both Cyrillic and Glagolitic were created by Cyril, but at different times. Other scientists are of the opinion that the Cyrillic alphabet was created in Bulgaria in order to bring the Slavonic writing closer to the Byzantine one, and the Glagolitic alphabet is the result of Cyril's painstaking work. Whether scientists will find out the truth, time will tell, but for now we can only speculate.

For quite a long time, Russian and foreign historians thought that writing in Russia was the lot of only priests. However, a birch-bark document, which was found in 1951 by a member of the Novgorod expedition, refuted these beliefs. On birch bark letters (about 900 of them were found in total), ordinary messages, notes, letters were contained, which proves that the letter in Russia was popular among the general population.

Proof of the widespread use of writing are numerous inscriptions (an inscription made on the Tmutarakan stone in 1068), graffiti (St. Sophia of Kyiv), the first libraries (Yaroslav's library).

The emergence of the Old Slavonic language was of great importance in the cultural development of the Slavic peoples. Thanks to the creation of the alphabet, it became possible to develop knowledge, accumulate the cultural experience of the people, for its subsequent transfer to new generations. This was a huge event not only in the history of the Russian people, but also in world history: “new nationalities entered the path of civilization, which had a glorious future ahead.”

Calligraphy and shorthand

People tend to strive to improve everything that surrounds them, that which they create. Since the inception of writing, people have sought to improve it in two directions: to learn to write, firstly, more beautifully and, secondly, faster. This is how calligraphy (from the Greek "kalligraphia" - "beautiful handwriting") - the art of beautiful writing, and cursive - the skill of quick writing arose.

Calligraphy makes writing akin to art. Over the years, prominent scribes developed special handwriting, on the basis of which well-known fonts gradually developed. The peoples of the East, especially the Arabs, are considered masters beyond competition in the art of calligraphy. For the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, the hieroglyph was not only a written sign, but also a work of art. The text, written ugly, could not be considered perfect in content.

Unchanged for millennia, Egyptian hieroglyphics is undeniably the most beautiful writing system in the ancient world. The Egyptians perfected their writing in another direction. Along with hieroglyphics, they also invented systems of cursive writing: first, hieratics (from the Greek "hieratikos" - "sacred"), the letter of the priests, then demotic (from the Greek "demotikos" - "folk") - folk writing. After all, speed is a necessary quality of a good scribe. This is what the Sumerian proverb says: "Only that real scribe whose hand does not lag behind his mouth."

In cursive writing, techniques were developed for simplified writing of characters, their combination into ligatures (from the Latin “ligatura” - “connection”), i.e. fused spellings; certain abbreviations of words and phrases were allowed.

From here came the system of abbreviated speech recording - shorthand (from the Greek "stenos" - "narrow", "cramped", and "grapho" - "I write").

The first proper alphabetic shorthand system was invented in England by John Willis, who published in 1602 the book The Art of Cursive Writing, or Shorthand. Since then, the term "shorthand" has appeared. In the future, many different shorthand systems arose for recording speeches in courts, debates in parliament. They increased the speed several times, but it was more difficult to master them than to learn a few foreign languages. The Guinness Book of World Records record for shorthand was set in New York in 1922 at 350 words per minute—perhaps it is simply impossible to speak faster.

Modern shorthand systems are based on the phonographic principle, i.e. on the recording of speech sounds, so they are easy to adapt to different languages. Thus, Pitman's system, invented by him in 1837, can be used for 20 languages, including Japanese; to this day they record reports on the meetings of the English Parliament. This is the unified state system of shorthand, which is still used with some improvements.

The future of writing

If you carefully study the evolution of writing, you will notice that the impetus for a new stage in the development of writing is accuracy. For ancient people, four notches were enough to navigate in time: winter, spring, summer, autumn. Now not only the day is important to us, but also the hour, minute, second. The need for ever-increasing precision (and not just time) is a characteristic feature of our times.

What allows us to accurately convey the intonation of speech? Of course, punctuation marks. They appeared relatively recently. In the 17th century, a dot appeared - the first of the signs, the rest are even younger. In Russian grammar, the punctuation system begins to take shape in the 18th century. Modern rules formulated in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Our writing, no matter how perfect it is, continues to develop. And it is possible that a person of the future, looking at our letter, will find it as inconvenient as we consider Glagolitic.

At the end of the century before last, the Esperanto language was created - the first international language. It is designed to facilitate communication between people of different nationalities, since learning a living language is very difficult. The natural language is difficult, because it has a lot of specifics associated with the mentality and history of the people. Esperanto is graphically simple. It has only 16 rules and no exceptions.

Esperanto is not the only artificial language, there are about 300 of them. Many projects for the phonetic recording of the language have also been proposed. For example, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of signs for recording the sounds of any language. However, writing with IFA signs is very difficult.

There is a rather unusual system for recording sounds called "visible speech". Its essence lies in the fact that not the sounds themselves are recorded, but the position of the organs of speech during its pronunciation.

The goal that modern creators of writing systems have tried to achieve is the desire to find universal way speech recordings suitable for any language. I have no doubt that someday it will be sure to be found.

The rapid growth of the volume of information has become a characteristic feature of our time. Scientists called it "information explosion". In the eighties, the volume of information was so great that it was easier to conduct any research than to look for similar results. Computers were used to organize the available information. The creators of those first computers faced the difficult task of creating a computer language. Now I can safely say that they did their job perfectly well. In the 21st century, we still live in the information age. But thanks to the created computer network Internet, the search for any information is not difficult and does not require much time, the world is becoming more interconnected, whole. The possibilities of people in familiarizing themselves with cultural values ​​are being leveled.

So, we live in an age when humanity is strenuously looking for ways to overcome language barriers. Some scientists see the future of the language in the gradual merger of the existing ones. Others hold the opposite point of view, and talk about the strengthening of national languages.

And one more important point. I am very worried about the fate of books. Nowadays, people are increasingly replacing them with television, computer games, Internet. In particular, chats, it seems to me, are a surrogate for personal communication. Which greatly affects the personality of a person.

But despite this, we still lean over the book to comprehend the basics of knowledge. The book brings the joy of meeting literary heroes, and nothing can compare with the feeling that you experience holding it in your hands. It gives people happy moments of communication with the spiritual heritage of mankind.

I don't want to believe that books are destined to die. After all, they have come such a long way from clay tablets to modern volumes.

Conclusion. The meaning of the letter

D. Breasted, an American historian, once said: “The invention of writing and a convenient system for writing on paper had greater value for the further development of the human race than any other intellectual achievement in the history of mankind.

And I dare not disagree with him. The invention of writing marked the true beginning of human civilization, and therefore everything connected with it.

Modern children, deducing their first scribble letters, are unlikely to think at this moment about their ancestors. They came to a world that is impossible to imagine without writing. To live in this world, you need to be able to read and write, otherwise you will find yourself outside of civilization, outside of society. I think it is clear to everyone that without writing, the foundation of education collapses, and without the latter, the person himself remains only a weak-willed chip, forced to dangle at the will of the waves, since there is no way to count on the productive experience of previous generations. Thus, the invention of writing is a necessary step towards an increase in the social organization of a living being, which makes it possible for further progress and improvement on the way up from monkey to Man.

In pre-literate times, mankind lived in the unknown. Tribes appeared and disappeared leaving nothing behind. But the moment a man scratched out the first inscription, history appeared. With the advent of writing, man became part of it. So, the second thing humanity owes to writing is history, and with it a new significance for all events and actions. He now knows about events that he has never seen, can tell about himself to descendants with whom he will never talk.

Literature also played an important role in the development of science. The ancient Babylonians spent a lot of time studying the heavenly bodies. Astronomy evolved over the centuries, data accumulated, refined, passed down from generation to generation. The information they accumulated allowed the Greeks to build the first scientific picture of the world, to lay the foundations of natural science. None of this could have happened without writing. Science is, first of all, a dialogue; in order to take a step, a scientist must build on what his predecessors have done, subject to critical rethinking everything that, it would seem, cannot be doubted. Therefore, writing is the basis of technological progress.

I will draw your attention to another meaning of writing - in religion. The faith of the ancient people was based on oral myths and legends that brook no doubt. The recorded text of the legend could already be criticized, which gave reason to think about the texts and analyze their meaning. The right of religion to single-handedly, monopolistically decide questions about the meaning of life, the essence of man, the principles of morality is a thing of the past. Writing became a step towards freedom of thought, freedom of conscience.

And now let's try to imagine that the concept of a documented agreement has disappeared in the modern world.

It seems to me that civilization would instantly crumble. Economics, politics, laws - everything would lose its meaning. The reliability and reliability of information and, as a result, a developed economy and legal system are also the fruits of writing.

Just think how with a large number of people you can manage a country, a city. It is no longer possible to do this as in the old days in a general gathering on the square, the times when leaders, kings or dictators decided for everyone have also passed. The most important decisions must be made by universal suffrage, which today is impossible to imagine without writing. Thus, the ability of citizens to influence decisions that concern them, i.e. democracy is also the fruit of writing.

Of course, this is not all that writing has given mankind. You can remember the great literature, the letters that connect people separated by thousands of kilometers, the many lives saved thanks to a note in a bottle. But all the various gifts of writing have something in common. This is freedom. Freedom from time and distance, from ignorance and deceit, freedom to make decisions, communicate, believe, create. And the very path of development of writing is the path of freedom. More recently, by historical standards, writing was esoteric in nature, and books were an inaccessible treasure. Today the world stands on the threshold of universal literacy. Millions of books, the wealth of the Internet - everything is at the disposal of a person who is ready to accept the priceless gift of his ancestors - writing.

Bibliography

1. Vlasov V.G. Slavic alphabet and Slavic enlighteners. - M., 1989.

2. Gelb. I. The experience of studying writing. - M., 1982.

3. Drachuk. V. Roads of millennia. - M .: "Young Guard", 1977.

4. Children's encyclopedia. Volume 11.- M.: "Enlightenment", 1968.

5. Taylor. E. Primitive culture. - M., 1989

6. Encyclopedia for children. Linguistics. Russian language. T. 10. - M..

Introduction

For my work, I chose the topic “The Significance of Writing in Human Culture” because I consider this issue to be very important and relevant. For many centuries, people have been using writing to communicate with each other, but hardly anyone other than specialists seriously thought about how important writing is for each individual person on the one hand and for the entire human civilization on the other.

I think that the importance of writing can hardly be overestimated. Without writing, civilizations would never have arisen, and it would simply be impossible to talk about development. It seems to me that writing is very important for human society, since it is it that helps to partly connect people of different races and nationalities, people who are from each other on long distance. It was after the appearance of writing that the first codes of laws were created, which connected the separate and disparate parts of the states to each other.

It is believed that writing arose a very long time ago, in the Ancient East, but the exact age of occurrence is still unknown. Many thousands of years passed from obscure drawings and hieroglyphs to the appearance of real cursive writing. For many centuries, people have been creating writing, the art of which for a long time only a few managed to master, so that we, the descendants, can now perfectly use writing. Therefore, in my work I am going not only to reveal the topic of the meaning of writing in human culture, but also to highlight such an important point as the emergence and development of writing, dwell in detail on the development of writing among the Slavic peoples, including the meaning of writing in their lives, since This question, in my opinion, is very interesting and has not yet been fully studied.

“The turning point in the scientific understanding of the theory of writing and its emergence was the appearance of the book by I.E. Gelb "Experience in the study of writing (Fundamentals of Grammar)". Until then, there were either private studies on individual scripts (sometimes with certain genetic constructions), or comprehensive reviews, if possible, of all or at least the most important types of writing. In the work of I.E. Gelba for the first time, writing as a specific type of sign system with its own special tasks and laws, as a special branch of world culture appeared as a subject of independent science.

Sources of information about the letter

When scientists study the origin and development of writing, they first of all turn to the sources ancient east. It is believed that it was there that writing first appeared, and in addition, the oldest documents found by archaeologists were found there.

“The written heritage of such primitive peoples as the American Indians, the African Bushmen or the Aborigines of Australia provides a valuable basis for understanding how people learned to communicate with each other using visible marks. In our research, we should not neglect the artificial scripts created by the native population under the influence of Europeans, most often missionaries. The history of these scripts, the most interesting of which are the systems of the Eskimos of Alaska, the African Bamum tribe and the Cherokee Indians, allows us to see the different stages through which they passed before reaching their final form. The sequence of these steps is in many respects similar to that which is observed in the history of writing in its natural development.

Another very fruitful method of study may be suggested by the study of child psychology. It has been repeatedly observed that there is a similarity between the way of thinking of infants and children and the way of thinking of entire societies that stood at the most primitive stages of development. One of the most important points this similarity is the tendency towards concreteness. Just as a child draws a vertical line and explains that it is a tree that grows in front of the house, primitive man often associated his drawings with specific objects and events in the world around him. This tendency, which manifests itself in writing and drawing, stems from the very nature of the language of primitive people, which was characterized by a tendency to extremely specific and narrow designations. Another interesting point of contact can be identified by studying the direction and orientation of signs in children's drawings and in primitive writing. It has been observed that children depict objects by distorting the proportions existing between them, without observing any order and without showing any noticeable sense of direction. Even a child who is already being taught to write often depicts letters from left to right, then from right to left, without realizing that there is any difference between the two directions. A similar attitude towards the direction and orientation of signs is observed in almost all primitive writing systems.

The tendency towards concreteness and detail noted in children and among primitive peoples has recently been revealed also in adults suffering from an intellectual disability, manifesting itself in the form of amnestic aphasia. The way in which such individuals learn language anew is similar to the way children naturally develop language. Thus, a detailed study of patients with amnestic aphasia may contribute to the study of the origin of language and writing.

The evolution of writing

“Pictography, that is, pictorial writing, as a way of fixing and transmitting this or that information, was used by many peoples at the stage of tribal society. At the same time, each drawing - a pictogram - denoted only the object that it depicted. “It is assumed that pictography was widespread among various peoples at the last stage of the Stone Age. This letter is very visual, and therefore it does not need to be specially studied. It is quite suitable for transmitting small messages and for recording simple stories. But when there was a need to convey some complex abstract thought or concept, the limited possibilities of the pictogram were immediately felt, which is completely unsuitable for recording what is not amenable to a picturesque image (for example, such concepts as cheerfulness, courage, vigilance, good sleep, heavenly azure, etc.)”. Gelb, studying the history of the development of writing, assumed that drawings were the first step in the emergence of writing.

Prescription

“The “prescriptions” include a variety of techniques with which a person first tried to convey his thoughts and feelings. All these techniques, taken together, are referred to as “sekhmasiography”. According to the words that make up the term, drawings can, at a given stage in the development of writing, convey the general meaning intended by the writer. At the same time, visible pictorial forms express meaning directly, without the intervention of linguistic forms, just as it happens in sign language.

The most primitive methods of communication with the help of visible symbols were achieved through the use of descriptive-pictorial and identifying-mnemonic techniques. Since both of these methods are often intertwined, a strict definition of the belonging of individual primitive writing systems to one of these categories causes difficulties.

Descriptive and pictorial techniques include such means of communication that are similar to drawings made for artistic and aesthetic motives, but in contrast to them contain only elements that are essential for conveying a message; moreover, the drawing as a means of communication is devoid of aesthetic design, which is an essential part of the drawing or painting as a work of art.

However, the use of a descriptive-pictorial device has nothing to do with the development of writing in the proper sense of the word. Drawings made using this technique follow the conventional principles of art, which limit their possibilities as a means of mutual communication between people. The fettering traditions of art, which had developed hundreds and even thousands of years before man made the first attempt to communicate through conventional signs, were too strong to allow the development of a descriptive and pictorial device in the right direction.

When using an identifying-mnemonic technique, as well as when using a descriptive-pictorial technique, drawings are also made, but their purpose is not to describe the event, but to help in remembering it, in identifying an object or being.

A device that provides for the transmission of individual words should naturally lead to the development of a complete system of verbal signs, that is, to verbal writing, or logography. Primitive logographic writing can only develop into a proper writing system if its signs acquire a phonetic reading independent of the meaning they have as words. This is phonetization - the most important, exceptional step in the history of writing.

Verbal syllabary systems

“The earliest of all ancient Eastern writing systems is Sumerian, attested in southern Mesopotamia around 3100 BC. From here, the basic principles of Sumerian writing may have spread eastward, first in the neighborhood to the Proto-Elamites, and then, perhaps through the Proto-Elamites, to the Proto-Indians in the Indus Valley. Further, one of the Near Eastern scripts could in turn be the stimulus that led to the creation of Chinese writing: Around 3000 BC. e. Sumerian influence presumably also penetrated westward into Egypt. Egyptian influence, in turn, spread to the Aegean regions, where around 2000 BC. e. Cretan writing arose, and a few "centuries later, in Anatolia, Hittite hieroglyphic writing.

Since three of the seven systems - proto-Elamite, proto-Indian and Cretan - are not deciphered or only partially deciphered, we can consider the principles of writing only in the form in which we find them in the other four systems - Sumerian, Egyptian Hittite and Chinese.

The formation of word signs in all four systems is identical or very similar. One character or one combination of characters expresses one word or one combination of words. The principles of the use of auxiliary signs, such as determinatives, separators and punctuation marks, are also identical, although there may be discrepancies in external form between different systems. It is only with regard to the use of syllabic signs that the discrepancies are so significant that they allow us to make a precise division into types.

Type I - Sumerian

Type II - Egyptian

Type III - Hittite

Type IV - Chinese.

Syllabic systems

Of the four verbal-syllabic systems, four syllabaries developed over time, reaching varying degrees of simplification.

Type I - Elamite cuneiform

Type II - West Semitic

Type III - Cypriot

Type IV - Japanese

An interesting observation can be made about the new syllabic scripts: they were all created by non-native peoples alien to the original script.

alphabetic systems.

“If by the word “alphabet” we mean a letter that expresses the individual sounds of a language, then the first alphabet was created by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who, having fully adopted the forms of signs of the West Semitic syllabary, created a system of vowels which, being attached to syllabic signs, turned them simply into signs for consonants.

“The invention of writing is often spoken of in both scientific and popular books. Any so-called "invention" is in fact nothing more than an improvement on something previously known. Letter like money steam engine, was not invented by a specific person in certain place and in certain time. The history and prehistory of writing last as long as civilization itself lasts. Of course, in all great cultural achievements, one should always take into account the decisive contribution of men of genius who either managed to break with sacred traditions or to give practical form to what others could only talk about. Unfortunately, we do not know of any of the geniuses to whom we owe the most important reforms in the history of writing. Their names, like the names of other great men, those who own decisive improvements in the practical use of the wheel, or the bow, or the arrow, or the sail, have disappeared into the darkness of antiquity and are lost to us forever.

A review of the development of writing proves that in the progressive movement from primitive steps to the proper alphabet, writing has passed three milestones; in chronological order, these were: (1) the Sumerian principle of phonetization, (2) the Western Semitic syllabary, and (3) the Greek alphabet.

Thus, writing developed over a very long time, from primitive drawings to true alphabetic systems, which first appeared among the Greeks. None of the stages in the development of writing was sharply different from the previous one: the development proceeded smoothly from one stage to another. It seems to me that it is for this reason that the intervals between the stages are quite large. In addition, the study of the writings of various peoples showed that they all developed along a similar path. Therefore, based on the results obtained in the study of one of the systems, one can get some idea of ​​the development of all the others.

Slavic writing

Prehistory of Slavic writing

“Cultural scientists, both domestic and foreign, in relation to writing, often divide peoples into two categories: written and non-written. A.A. Formozov believed that some kind of writing, consisting of conventional signs, arranged in lines, existed in the steppe zone of Russia already in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. A.S. Lvov and N.A. Konstantinov dated the origin of Slavic writing to the end of the 1st millennium BC. e., and the first one deduced it from cuneiform, the second through the Black Sea signs from the Cypriot syllabary. What are these statements based on? There is a whole group of archaeological sites containing signs of fragments of texts of an ancient letter that has not yet been read. These are, first of all, the monuments of the Russian Black Sea region (Chersonese, Kerch, Olbia) - stone slabs, tombstones, amphorae, coins, etc. Indications of the Slavic writing that existed before Constantine and Methodius are contained in chronicles and other literary sources of the 9th-10th centuries. The most important of them is the legend of the Chernorizet the Brave "On the Tribes", concerning a number of Slavic tribes, including, possibly, the eastern ones. It is indicated here that the Slavs did not have books before they adopted Christianity, but used “features and cuts” for divination and counting. The accuracy of this observation is confirmed by the fact that traces of divination by “cuts” (cutting known signs) survived at a later time, for example, they are mentioned in epics. After the adoption of Christianity, Khrabr continues, the Slavs wrote down their speech in Latin and Greek letters, however, inaccurately, since Latin and Greek letters could not convey many Slavic sounds. It is significant that Brave attributes the initiative to master the ancient alphabets to the Slavs themselves, and not to Christian missionaries who came to the Slavic countries. One of the early Russian chronicles, The Tale of Bygone Years, documented that Kievan Rus at the beginning of the 10th century. had writing. According to Academician B.A. Rybakov, the first real traces of the Kyiv chronicle date back to the 60s of the 9th century. and are associated with the activities of the Kyiv prince Oskolda. A striking evidence of the presence of writing in Russia even before the adoption of Christianity are the texts of treaties between Russian princes and Byzantium in the 10th century.

Reflecting on the evolution of Slavic writing, L.V. Cherepnin suggested that it went "a path common to all peoples - from a drawing depicting a certain image or concept, through images corresponding to words, to syllabic and, finally, sound (or phonetic) writing" - that is, in the first steps he was characterized by both pictographic and ideographic (symbolic) signs. V.A. Istrin expressed doubt that one nation could go through all these stages on its own, without borrowing from neighbors, since in this case the history of writing would have to stretch for centuries and even millennia. Rybakov remove this objection: clear traces of the Proto-Slavic culture are visible from the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e., Proto-Slavic - the middle of the II millennium BC. So unconditional historical fact is that on the eve of the activities of Constantine and Methodius, the Slavs had and simultaneously used three types of writing. It follows from this that the feat of Constantine and Methodius, which consists in “creating Slavic writing”, cannot be understood in such a way that they created it from scratch, “from scratch”, turning the Slavs from an unwritten people into a written people. But they really “created writing” - one that immediately entered the cultural fund of most Slavic peoples, the one that we now use a developed version of (Slavic alphabet).

"AT medieval Russia The main centers for the development of writing and the spread of literacy were still the largest church parishes and monasteries, where various chronicles, books of church and even secular content, various letters, collections of church law, all kinds of petitions and much more were created. The development of writing was naturally accompanied by a change in writing technique. In the XIV century. the charter was replaced by a semi-charter. Largely due to the South Slavic influence, all the letters of the Russian alphabet lost their former harmony and geometry, became uneven and more elongated, a large number of portable letters appeared, and the words themselves began to be written separately. In addition to purely graphic features, a distinctive feature of the semi-ustav was the presence of a wide variety of word abbreviation techniques themselves, when a so-called title was placed over a well-known and often repeated word.

Somewhat later, at the beginning of the XV century. along with the semi-charter, cursive writing began to come into use, which gradually took a leading position in official office work. A semi-ustav retained its position as a predominantly bookish letter.

In the context of the formation of a unified Russian state, the need for literate and knowledgeable people has increased significantly. It was associated with the development feudal economy, urban crafts and trade, and especially with the development of the apparatus of central and local government, the active development of international relations and the strengthening of the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in society and the state. In the XVI century. the technique and graphics of writing have changed significantly. From now on, cursive writing has completely supplanted the semi-ustav not only in state offices, but also in monasteries. Where the majority of secular and liturgical books were still created.

In the 17th century the bulk of the country's population still remained illiterate, however, it was during this period that the number of literate people increased significantly, especially among the urban population of large administrative and shopping centers. The reason for this state of affairs was not only a significantly increased need for the development of administrative office work, but also significant changes in the socio-economic development of the country, in particular, a noticeable increase in the turnover of domestic and foreign trade. The wide distribution of handwritten and printed books gave a positive impetus to the further development of the education system in the country, and, above all, teaching literacy and writing. Of paramount importance in this was the publication of a number of teaching aids and, in particular, the famous "ABC" of the patriarchal deacon Vasily Burtsev (1634), "Grammar" Melenty Smotrytsky (1648), "Lexicon of sayings of the Slavonic and Greek languages ​​with other languages ​​... for the learning and understanding of students" (1650) Epiphany Slavenetsky and numerous educational "Psalters" and "Books of Hours" (history of Russian culture)"

The value of writing in the history of the Slavic peoples

“Cyril and Methodius writing was destined to play a significant cultural and political role. The writing they created is regarded as the foundation of a new Slavic culture - the culture that brings the Slavs to the level of "great" peoples. Thus, Constantine and Methodius, laying the foundation for the Christian education of the Slavs, giving a Christian impetus to their national spiritual development, thereby predetermined their special cultural and historical role among other European peoples. Through all the monuments that have come down to us, the idea that all peoples are equal among themselves and that they all have the right to draw the best values ​​from the treasury of world culture runs like a red thread - an idea that gives the feat of the First Teachers a high humanistic sound. The emergence of the Old Slavonic language was a huge event in world history: new peoples entered the path of civilization, which had a glorious future.

The value of writing for humanity

“James G. Breasted, the famous Chicago historian and orientalist, once said: “The invention of writing and a convenient system for writing on paper was of greater importance for the further development of the human race than any other intellectual achievement in the history of man.” To this statement one can add the opinion of many other great people, among them Carlyle, Cant, Mirabeau and Renan, who believed that the invention of writing marked the true beginning of human civilization. Views of this kind have received the support of ethnographers, who have repeatedly argued that, just as language distinguishes man from animal, so writing distinguishes civilized man from the barbarian.

“It is impossible to even imagine what path the development of civilization could have taken if, at a certain stage of their development, people had not learned to fix the information they needed with the help of certain symbols and thus transmit and store it. It is obvious that human society in the form in which it exists today simply could not have appeared.

“In our modern society, it is difficult to imagine an intelligent and cultured person who would not be able to read and write. The art of writing has become so widespread that it now forms an organic and indispensable part of our culture. We have come a long way since the proud but illiterate kings of the Middle Ages put a cross instead of their name. Nowadays, an illiterate person cannot count on successful participation in the progress of mankind, and this applies to both individuals and any groups of individuals, as well as entire social strata or ethnic units. The meaning of writing is not difficult to understand if we try to imagine our world without writing. What would we do without books, newspapers, letters? What would happen to our means of communication if we suddenly lost the ability to write, or to our knowledge if we could not read about the achievements of the past? Writing is so important in our daily life that I am ready to say that our civilization could rather exist without money, metals, radio, steam engine or electricity, than without writing.

In my opinion, the importance of writing lies also in the fact that today each of us has the opportunity to learn not only about the traditions of his nation, but also to read about the life and traditions of almost any people in the world. Reading books about other states can broaden a person's horizons. Thanks to writing, we can read the books that interest us without distortion (which would certainly have appeared if information was transmitted from person to person in words).

However, due to the widespread use of writing, oral tradition has been irreparably damaged. If we compare the knowledge of a modern person about his ancestors with the knowledge about the ancestors of a people who do not have a written language, then we will see a big difference. Peoples who do not have a written language do not have the ability to record information, so they simply remember it. It seems to me that because of this, peoples without writing have much more developed memory and more opportunities to memorize various things and texts.

Writing is also very closely related to language. Without language, writing simply could not exist. But language is also inseparable from writing. I believe that, for example, currently modern man it will be very difficult to learn a foreign language for him without written sources.

In addition, writing has a direct impact on the language itself. It partly slows down its development, since many words that have appeared in the language are simply not used in writing. This is proved by the fact that we can easily read documents of a century and even two hundred years ago.

Writing as art

“The study of writing from an artistic point of view has hitherto been greatly neglected. Although the main purpose of writing is not to achieve an artistic effect, but to record and transmit a message, nevertheless, writing at all times included elements of aesthetic impact. Writing in this respect is similar to photography, since both of them are primarily practical tasks, but they can also have an aesthetic impact. The aesthetic side of writing is sometimes so exaggerated that writing begins to serve only the purposes of ornamentation to the detriment of its main purpose as a means of communication: it is enough, for example, to look at Arabic ornamental writing, so beautiful, but so difficult to read, or at the elaborate inscriptions of some signs and advertisements of our time. Writing in its aesthetic and not utilitarian aspect is one of the art forms in general. In this capacity, it shares the general laws of the development of art and often exhibits properties that are inherent in other forms of the latter.

Writing and religion

“The notion of the divine origin of writing is attested everywhere, both in antiquity and in our time, both among civilized and primitive peoples. It is connected mainly with the widespread belief in the magical power of writing. Everywhere, both in the East and in the West, the introduction of writing is attributed to a deity. Among the Babylonians, writing was invented by the god Nabu, the patron of sciences and the scribe of the gods, who thereby took the place assigned in the older Mesopotamian tradition partly to the goddess

Nisabe The Egyptians believed that the god Thoth was the inventor of writing. Belief in the sacred character of writing is especially strong in countries where knowledge of writing is the privilege of a special class or caste of scribes. The ancient Near East, where only scribe-priests usually knew how to write, is especially rich in all sorts of mystical legends about the origin of writing. On the other hand, Greece, where the knowledge of writing was not the privilege of the priests, but was the property of all citizens, is almost completely ignorant of myths of this kind. Among primitive peoples, writing and books arouse astonishment and become the occasion for the most fantastic conjectures. You can guess from books. The book can predict the future and reveal the secret, it can show the way and give advice, and generally has mystical power. Learning to read and write for primitive man is tantamount to initiation into a new religious ritual, conversion to a new religion. The book is seen as a living being that can "speak. A primitive person is afraid of the magical power of its" words ". Belief in universal symbols in the form in which it is confessed by the Pythagoreans, Gnostics, astrologers, warlocks and cabalists, goes back to the mystical interpretation of the alphabet.

I believe that this belief in the divine origin of writing, which exists to this day, served as a source for the creation of many legends, myths and stories, which, in turn, enriched the culture of mankind.

Writing and science

I think that the advent of writing had a decisive influence on the development of science. It is difficult to imagine the development of such scientific disciplines as chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, etc. without writing. If there were no written language, the exchange of information between different scientists would be very difficult, since with the development of science, the volume of knowledge also increases. If there were no writing at all, it would be impossible to talk about science as such, there would be separate, fragmentary knowledge. And without science, the progress of mankind would simply be impossible. And in my opinion, this means that there would not be those conditions in which most of the peoples of the world now live. There would be no electricity, heating, multi-storey buildings, medicine as we know it now.

Thus, the importance of writing in human culture is very great. Thanks to a combination of factors - geographical, social and economic and the emergence of writing, the first civilizations appeared. Moreover, in these conditions, a person could no longer do without writing. It seems to me that writing can exist only in the conditions of civilization, while civilization also cannot exist without writing.

The importance of the invention of writing cannot be overestimated. Since the whole culture is built on the ability to read and write, and knowledge is not lost in time. Thanks to this, they reach future generations through centuries and millennia. As a result, humanity accumulates experience, knowledge grows.

I think that even the writings that have now disappeared from the face of the Earth are of great importance for mankind. Partly because they once influenced the development of culture, and also because they served as the basis for subsequent writings. Thanks to writing, we have the opportunity to "look" into ancient times and learn about the life of people in the very first states, about what their laws and understanding of life were. While without writing, most of the achievements of human thought and almost all of the life experience of previous generations would have disappeared without a trace.

List of used literature

1. Gelb I.E. The experience of studying writing M.: Raduga, 1982. - p. 30-223.

2. Zhirinovsky V., Sinitsin E. History of Russian culture of the 9th - 19th centuries,

2004. - p.92 - 191.

3. Vlasov V.G. Slavic alphabet and Slavic enlighteners. M.: Knowledge, 1989. - p. 6 - 62.

4. Social cultural research, 2004. - p. 51-54.

Tutoring

Need help learning a topic?

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