While it can perhaps be argued that you can have a civilization without
writing, few would try to make the argument that you can develop a
_technological_ civilization without it. But writing comes in many
forms. This post is a brief discussion of the various types, and should
be noted to be drastically oversimplified in some - likely most -
explanation.

A good starting point to follow up on this post is Omniglot.com. It has
many articles about and examples of writing systems, both attested in
the real world and created for fiction, for conlangs, or for "encoding"
natural languages, and will generally be more accurate and elaborate
than what is written here. Wikipedia, naturally, is also a good starting
point.

For the purposes of discussion, I will lump together pictographic (for
example, Egyptian hieroglyphics or Mayan writing), logographic (for
example, cuneiform or Egyptian hieratic or demotic script), and
ideographic (such as Chinese). In all of these, one symbol generally
represented a single word, or sometimes a phoneme cluster whose meaning
would be clarified by an additional symbol. (This would be conceptually
similar to the idea of writing "pen" and then having an additional mark
that would tell you whether it was referring to an enclosure for animals
or a writing implement.) With this type of writing system, one learns a
new symbol for essentially every word in one's vocabulary.

Syllabaries (example: Japanese kana, both katakana and hiragana) may
have arisen from older picto/logo/ideographic scripts, through
simplification and increasingly using them to represent phoneme
clusters. By limiting those clusters to combinations that occur in the
spoken language, one represents the sounds of the latter, rather than
the meanings, and reduces the number of symbols that must be learned as
one's vocabulary grows. In the case of Japanese, the older Chinese
ideographic script is adapted to occasionally select among possible
meanings of a written word (but also see furigana/ruby). Other
syllabaric writing systems are Cherokee and Inuktitut. Syllabaries
almost universally require fewer distinct symbols to represent a greater
number of words than picto/logo/ideograms, and in that sense represent
the spoken language "more efficiently" than picto/logo/ideographic
scripts.

Abugidas are somewhere between an alphabet and a syllabary. In an
abugida, written symbols represent a single consonant and an "inherent"
vowel; to modify or remove the vowel, one adds additional indicators.
Hindi and Bengali are probably the most immediately recognized abugidas,
but most other Indian (subcontinent, not Native American) languages
follow similar patterns, as do some languages on the Malay peninsula and
throughout Malaysia and Indonesia. Abugidas are more efficient (by the
definition above) than syllabaries in representing the sounds of
language where the number of possible syllables in a language is large.
(There are only about 125 katakana.)

Abjads can be viewed as an intermediate step between abugidas and
alphabets. The primary difference between abugidas and abjads is that in
an abjad, the unmodified symbol represents a consonant _without_ an
"inherent" vowel; the difference between an abjad and an alphabet is
that in an alphabet, vowels receive their own letters, while in an
abjad, vowels are indicated by diacritics. Arabic and Hebrew are
probably the best-known abjads; when used in traditional Quenya mode,
Tolkien's Tengwar could be considered an abjad. Abjads and abugidas
appear to be nearly the same in terms of "efficiently" representing the
sounds of written language, and in learning to read and write.

Inuktitut is formally classified as a syllabary, but there are
characteristics that could allow it to alternatively have been
classified as either an abugida or an abjad.

Alphabets represent consonants and vowels separately, on an "equal"
footing. Depending on the language and the development of the writing
system, each letter can represent a single phoneme, or perhaps a limited
set of phonemes. Alphabets may be slightly more "efficient" at
representing the spoken language than abjads or abugidas, but the
difference is likely to be small. Most European languages are
alphabetic, with variations on Latin and Cyrillic being most common; the
vast majority of languages that did not gain a written form until after
European contact use variations on those two alphabets as well. The
best-known (and longest-lived) example of a conscript for a natural
language, Korean Hangul, is actually alphabetic, in spite of the general
European perception that it's more like Chinese than anything else. In
the mode of the Sindar (in Beleriand), Tolkien's Tengwar is definitely
alphabetic.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported
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