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The history of writing traces the development of writing systems [1] and how their use transformed and was transformed by different societies. The use of writing prefigures various social and psychological consequences associated with literacy and literary culture.
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying ...
A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. [13] All writing systems require a set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script. [14]
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
Writing first appeared in the Near East at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. [citation needed] A very limited number of languages are attested in the area from before the Bronze Age collapse and the rise of alphabetic writing: the Sumerian, Hattic and Elamite language isolates, Hurrian from the small Hurro-Urartian family,
The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet , which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today, including English .
Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems, which record the language of the writer. [3]
Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system [1] and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of ...