The Development of Writing

Pictograms
Pictogram picture writing Modern forms of pictograms lead you to the phone booth, bus stop, coffee shop and to the restrooms at the airport (even if you don't speak and read the particular language).

Pictograms

Ideograms
When a pictogram takes a more fixed symbolic form and comes to be used for instance not only to represent 'sun' but also 'heat' and 'daytime', it is considered as part of a system of idea-writing or ideograms.

 A key property of both pictograms and ideograms is that they do not represent words or sounds in a particular language.

Logograms
A large number of symbols in later writing systems are thought to have pictographic or ideographic origins. When the symbols come to represent words in a language, they are described as examples of word-writing or logograms.

Logograms
In Egyptian hieroglyphics means 'house'(and derives from a diagram representing the floor-plan of a house.) In Chinese writing means 'river'(and derives from the pictural description of a stream flowing between two banks.)

Cuneiform

Cuneiform

Chinese

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

Rebus Writing
This, of course, establishes a sizeable reduction of the number of symbols needed in a writing system. /ba/ means 'boat '/baba/ means 'father'

Modern Rebus Writing

Modern Rebus Writing

Syllabic Writing
When a writing system employs a set of symbols which represent the pronunciation of syllables, it is described as syllabic writing. There do not seem to be any purely syllabic writing systems in use today, but Japanese can be described as having an at least partly syllabic writing system.

Syllabic Writing
In the 19th century Cherokee Indians invented and used a syllabic writing system to produce written from spoken language. The first fully developed syllabic writing system was used by the Phoenicians at around 1000 B.C..

Alphabetic Writing
An alphabet is essentially a set of written symbols which each represent a single type of sound. This is what seems to have occurred in languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Alphabetic Writing
The early Greeks included symbols for vowels in their alphabet, and the modern European alphabet can be traced from Egyptian to Phoenician then to Early Greek and finally to the Roman alphabet.