The Metaphor of Written Language | The Linguistic Traveler

In our daily lives, we don’t often think about the concept of written language and what it actually means for us as humans. We don’t ever consider the fact that it’s basically a giant metaphor, a stand-in for the sounds we make and the meanings behind them.

Why Language is A Metaphor

Language began as a way of assigning meaning to a specific sound. When we say tree, others with the same language understand what we’re referring to.

Our ability to associate a sound with an object is founded in our ability to comprehend a metaphor. The sound and the object have no direct connection to each other besides the one we assigned to them.

Written language adds an additional layer to this. By writing the word tree in this post, I’m using a visual symbol to represent a sound that represents an actual object.

But then, each of the letters in tree represent separate sounds that can be used for other things, too. The letter T represents a sound made by tapping our tongue against the top of our mouth.

And that, my dear reader, is my reason for writing this post. Different languages have different ways to put these various meanings together in writing, and there are so many ways to do it!

Writing Systems

In English, our writing system, which comes from Latin, is called an alphabet.

This means that we assign each symbol to one sound that we use in our language.

T represents one sound, while r represents another, and e represents another. This might seem, to an English speaker, like the right way to do it. That way, you have enough symbols for every sound you could possibly need to write. Any other system might make it hard to keep track of.

But, here’s the caveat: we actually don’t have enough symbols for all of the sounds in our language. Vowels, especially, are too few in number. E and a, for example, represent several sounds each.

Think about it. E sounds different in tree, epic, taken, and cake. It’s silent in that last one. And yet without it, we would pronounce the a differently, too.

See what I mean? We think that each letter is one sound, but it’s not always true. Sometimes we pronounce a t like a d, like in the word butter.

The International Phonetic Alphabet

Now, we could solve this problem by assigning a special symbol to every sound we could possibly make, right?

We’ve done that exact thing with the International Phonetic Alphabet (usually shortened to IPA)!

But if you look at the IPA Chart, you’ll realize how many symbols that leads to.

Also, if a language adopted this alphabet as its writing system, it would be near impossible to learn. Children learning to read and write would have to learn a lot about phonology and linguistics, which is already complicated as-is. Or, at the very least, they would have to distinguish between a lot of very similar sounds in order to write accurately.

(Although, to be honest, it’s usually easier for children to tell the difference between a bunch of similar sounds.)

Syllabary

Some languages decide to use what’s called a syllabary instead of an alphabet.

It’s similar to an alphabet, but the main difference is that the symbols usually represent a full syllable.

I’m sure you know what a syllable is. Every little chunk of a word, usually in consonant-vowel combinations, is a syllable.

It’s usually the easiest to implement in languages that have simpler syllable structures, as words can be constructed to follow an easy pattern.

So, to give an example, we might assign ka-, na-, and la- to three separate symbols.

Japanese hiragana is a good real-world example, but still uses quite a few symbols, as it needs to cover a lot of consonant-vowel combinations.

Logograms

The name logograms might sound unfamiliar, but you’ve definitely seen one before.

Mandarin, Ancient Egyptian, and Mayan are a few examples of languages that use this. (Mayan uses a syllabary as well. I’ll get into that.)

In these languages, each word/ meaning has its own symbol, like if our word for tree looked somewhat like a tree. Or maybe that word looked the way it does now, but every other word was also entirely unique without anything representing individual sounds.

These writing systems, obviously, have the most symbols/ letters by far, since we can’t break the written words up into smaller pieces.

Mandarin, for example, has thousands of written symbols, with most people knowing roughly 4,000. That makes our 26 seem like nothing.

However, while that sounds incredibly inefficient, it does make it easier to differentiate words. With our limited characters, we have a lot of words like through, thorough, and though that look really similar.

Combined Writing Systems

When it comes to humans, nothing is going to follow a consistent pattern. It’s part of our nature.

So it should come as no surprise that many languages actually combine multiple systems.

Mayan

Mayan, for example, was so difficult to decipher because of the strange number of symbols it had.

287 symbols was twice as many as a syllabary would realistically use. It made sense for an alphabet, but attempts to decipher the language as an alphabet didn’t work. And if it were a logogram, then there should be thousands more written symbols.

Eventually, linguists discovered why this was the case:

The Mayan language was a syllabary, but also employed some logographic symbols. These were often names of cities or kings.

Of course, they also sometimes wrote the names of kings or cities using the syllabary instead of the normal symbol, or some combination of both.

As another way to complicate matters, the Mayans sometimes did what I talked about with English above, where one symbol could unintentionally represent multiple sounds.

Japanese

I talked about Japanese hiragana above, but Japanese also employs two other writing systems.

Hiragana is used mainly to show grammatical features like verb tense alongside Kanji words.

Kanji is a logographic writing system used very commonly in Japanese. It’s also used for words they borrowed from Chinese, as they could simply carry the symbol over without trying to rewrite it. (In fact, the whole Japanese writing system evolved out of the Chinese script).

They also use katakana, another syllabary that they use for loanwords from languages like English, as it can cover a wider range of the sounds from such languages.

Conclusion

I didn’t even talk about the idea of different reading directions. We read left to right, but other languages read right to left or even top to bottom.

But that’ll have to be a topic for a separate post, as it leads to a whole host of other changes in our perception.

Writing is an incredibly complicated system, more so than we probably realize since we use it so much! It took humans many generations to ever discover that it was even a possibility, and it’s gone through all manner of changes since its inception.

And yet, still, even after all this time, we don’t seem to have perfected it. We probably never will, and that’s okay!

I hope this was an informative, enjoyable read. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, let me know below!

Thanks for reading!