Origins Of Language: Written Forms Essay, Research Paper

When you go home, you walk in your door and if you live with someone, you usually say hello and talk about your day. However, what if you could not talk? How would you convey your messages, by writing them on a piece of paper? I would but you might be different. The shapes you are making on the paper while you write mean something just like how when the Cavemen, the Indians and the Egyptians wrote. However, they used pictures instead of letters and words to represent their objects and actions.

Cavemen went out on hunts to get food for families and if they wanted to tell the story how were they supposed to do this, they did not have written language like the kind I’m using to write this paper. These Cave people had to draw what happened. They had to use blood from the animals, mud or clay if it had been wet, and other colors that they could make. They used to draw animal figures and little pictures of people with spear or other weapons to depict a hunt.

Indians had a very similar way to communicate ideas. They would draw on hides from the animals that they kill. They used the same types of pictures to represent the flow of ideas except the Indians would sometimes draw lines pointing the reader in the correct direction of the next picture.

The Egyptians had a more advanced picture writing system called hieroglyphics.

This type of picture writing had a specific way to be read, similar the way we always read left to right. This type of writing used not only pictures of animals but also signs that represented the actions of what the people were actually doing.

As the various cultures evolved it is clear that the sophistication level of their graphic language evolved with them, starting from crude sketches and progressing into advanced hieroglyphic symbols and eventually into written languages. This ability to communicate was a key to the success of these civilizations in being able to keep track of history and records. In addition, the ability of these cultures to expand and improve upon the preceding one s system of writing, to make it clearer and more effective, was a basis for how modern language was created.