130. Kinds of Writing: Pictographic and Mixed Phonetic
Three stages are logically distinguishable in the development of writing. The first is the use of pictures of things and symbols of ideas: the pictographic method. In the second stage the representation of sounds begins, but is made through pictures or abbreviations of pictures: and pictures or ideographs as such continue to be used alongside the pictures whose value is phonetic. This may be called the mixed or transitional or rebus stage. Third is the phonetic phase. In this, the symbols used, whatever their origin may have been, no longer denote objects or ideas but are merely signs for sounds—words, syllables, or the elemental letter-sounds.
The first of these stages, the pictographic, and the degree to which it flows, or rather fails to flow spontaneously out of the human mind, have already been discussed (§ [105]). The second or transitional stage makes use of the principle that pictures may either be interpreted directly as pictures or can be named. A picture or suggestive sketch of the organ of sight may stand for the thing itself, the eye. Or, the emphasis may be on the word eye, its sound; then the picture can be made with the purpose of representing that sound when it has a different meaning, as in the pronoun “I.” The method is familiar to us in the form of the game which we call “rebus,” that is, a method of writing “with things” or pictures of objects. The insect bee stands for the abstract verb “be,” two strokes or the figure 2 for the preposition “to,” a picture of a house with the sign of a tavern, that is an inn, for the prefix “in-,” and so on. This charade-like method is cumbersome and indirect enough to provide the difficulty of interpretation that makes it fit for a game or puzzle. But what to us, who have a system of writing, is a mere sport or occasional toy, is also the method by which peoples without writing other than pure pictography made their first steps toward the writing of words and sounds. The principle of reading the name instead of the idea of the thing pictured is therefore a most important invention. It made possible the writing of pronouns, prepositions, prefixes and suffixes, grammatical endings, articles, and the like, which are incapable of representation by pictography alone. There is no difficulty drawing a recognizable picture of a man, and two or three such pictures might give the idea of men. But no picture system can express the difference between “a man” and “the man.” Nor can relational or abstract ideas like those of “here,” “that,” “by,” “of,” “you,” “why,” be expressed by pictures.