132. Abbreviation and Conventionalization
This mixture of pictographic and ideographic with phonetic characters, and its long retention, were substantially as characteristic of Sumerian or Babylonian Cuneiform, of Chinese, and of Maya and Aztec writing, as of Egyptian. In all of these systems there was more or less tendency to abbreviate the pictures, to contract them to a few strokes, to reduce the original representations to conventional characters. Cuneiform and presumably Chinese underwent this process early and profoundly. In Egyptian it also set in and led to Hieratic and later to Demotic cursive script, which consist of signs that are meaningless to the eye, although they resolve into standardized reductions of the pictures which during the same period continued to be made in the monumental and religious Hieroglyphic. Such conventional abbreviations made possible a certain speed of production, rendered writing of use in business and daily life, and thereby contributed to the spread of literacy. In themselves, however, they introduced no new principle.
In addition to this conventionality of form of characters, there is to be distinguished also a conventionalization of meaning which is inherent in the nature of writing. Conventionalization of form accompanies frequency or rapidity of writing, conventionalization of meaning must occur if there is to be any writing at all. It develops in pure non-phonetic pictography if this is to be able to express any considerable range of meaning. An outstretched hand may well be used with the sense of “give.” But the beholder of the picture-writing is likely to interpret it as “take.” Here is where conventionalization is necessary: it must be understood by writers and readers alike that such a hand means “give” and not “take,” or perhaps the reverse, or perhaps that if the palm is up and the fingers flat the meaning is “give” whereas the palm below or the fingers half closed means “take.” Whatever the choice, it must be adhered to; the standardized, conventional element has entered. That is why one customarily speaks of “systems” of writing. Without the system, there can be not even picture-writing, but only pictures, whose range of power of communication is far more limited.
When the phonetic phase begins to be entered, conventionalization of meaning is even more important. An inn must be distinguished from a house by its shield, a house from a barn by its chimney, and so on. The shield will perhaps have to be exaggerated to be visible at all, be heart-shaped or circular to distinguish it from windows; and so forth. So with the phonetic values. A syllable like English “per” might be represented by one scribe by means of a cat with a wavy line issuing from its mouth to denote its purr; by another by a pear; by a third, by something that habitually came as a pair, such as earrings. Any of these combined with a “sieve” symbol would approximately render the work “per-ceive.” But some one else might hit upon the combination of a purse and the setting sun at eve. Obviously there has got to be a concordance of method if any one but the writer is to read his inscription readily. This correspondence of representation and interpretation is precisely what constitutes a set of figures into a system of writing instead of a puzzle.