Rebus Writing

1- Introduction

The following work will be about different writing systems that occurred in the humans’ history, from the rebus writing system to the orthography of English language (the one in case). Although there are arguments to be made in support of origins of writing symbols in representation of a sound or a part of a word, there is perhaps a stronger point that indicates that the development of existing things or written words to create sound took thousands of years to become what we know nowadays, as will now be discussed in the pages that follow.

2- Rebus Writing

It is a process of using existing symbols to represent sounds of language. The symbol of one entity is taken over as the symbol for the sound of the spoken word used to refer to the entity.

An example of rebus writing is working with the sound of the English word eye.

The pictogram could have developed into the logogram and is pronounced as eye and with the rebus principle work you could then refer to yourself as (“I”).

The sound of the word or part of words, such as “nd2spk2unite” ((I) need to speak to you tonight) of the letter “u” also illustrate the process of rebus writing. It is the symbol for the sound of spoken word “you”. Another non-English example in which the ideogram became the logogram for the word pronounced ba(meaning boat)

3- Syllabic Writing

It is a set of symbols each one representing the pronunciation of syllables. The symbol that is used for the pronunciation of part of a word represent a unit (ba) that consists of a consonant sound (b) and a vowel sound (a).

There are no purely syllabic writing systems in use today, but modern Japanese can be written with a set of single symbols representing spoken syllables and is consequently often described as having a (partially) syllabic writing system. Egyptian and the Sumerian writing systems involved to the point where some of the earlier logographic symbols were being used to represent spoken syllables. However, it is not until the time of the Phoenicians, inhabiting what is modern Lebanon between 3.000 and 4.000 years ago that we find the full use of a syllabic writing. Many of the symbols that the Phoenicians used were taken from earlier Egyptian writing. The Egyptian form (meaning house) was adopted in a slightly reoriented form as . By about 3000 years ago, the Phoenicians had stopped using logograms and had a fully developed syllabic writing system.

4- Alphabetic writing

The basis of alphabetic writing is a set of symbols being used to represent syllables beginning with, for example, a b sound or an m sound. This occurred in the development of the writing system of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. An alphabetic writing system is a set of written symbols each one representing a single type of sound or phoneme. Words written in Semitic language largely consist of symbols for the consonant sound in the word, with the appropriate vowel sound being supplied by the reader or (rdr), and we call it Consonantal Alphabet.

The early version of Semitic alphabet script originating in the writing system of the Phoenicians is the basic source of most other alphabets to be found in the world. The basic order of letter symbols, with “A” representing a consonant in the first “ABCD…”was created about 3000 years ago by the Phoenicians and continues to be used as our primary ordering device for lists in everything from dictionaries to telephone books.

The early Greeks took the alphabetizing process a stage further by also using separate symbols to represent the vowel sound as distinct entities, and so created a remodeled system that included vowels. This change resulted in the Phoenicians consonant “alep” becoming a symbol for a vowel sound as A (called “alpha”) to go with existing symbols for consonant sounds such as B (called “beta”) giving us single sound writing or an “alphabet”

From the Greeks this revised alphabet passed to the rest of Western Europe through the Romans and, along the way underwent several modifications to fit the requirements of the spoken languages encountered. As a result, we talk about the Roman alphabet the writing system used for English.

The actual form of a number of letters in modern European alphabet can be traced from their origins in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

5- Written English

There is a frequent mismatch between the forms of written English (you know) and the sounds of spoken English (“yu no/ju nou”). Other languages likes ( Italian, Spanish) have writing