La socialisation a l'origine des inegalites homme/femme

« America and the sand or bark drawings of the Aboriginal Australians are of such a mixed, or picto-ideographic, type.

Pictographs and ideographs often become highlyconventionalized and stylized, losing much of their obvious representative appearance and forming a quite complex system of signs.

But no matter how sophisticatedthey become, pictographs and ideographs are not regarded as writing. III WRITING SYSTEMS Only when language is graphically represented, that is, when written symbols bear some set, agreed-on relation to the spoken forms of a language, such as words,does true writing begin.

Then writing, by representing language directly, comes to share its flexibility and power.

From that point on, the users of the system are limitedin what they can write only by what they can say and by their knowledge of the conventions of the writing system. No examples of the development of true writing from a pictographic system have been found, but it is believed that the next stage was the use of signs that indicatednot only the appearance of an object but, more importantly, the sound of a spoken word used for it. A Logographic Systems Tomb of Queen AmonherkhepsefIn ancient Egypt, scribes used hieroglyphs to record state documents and important historical events.

Hieroglyphs withreligious purposes also were painted on tomb walls and wooden coffins, such as these hieroglyphs from the tomb of QueenAmonherkhepsef, located in the Valley of the Queens.Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis Suppose, for example, that the mark O were agreed upon as the symbol for the word “sun,” and only that word, not “day” or “heat” or “light,” as might be the casewith an ideograph.

Such a precise symbol might well also be given other uses.

It could serve as well for the word “son,” or as the first syllable of the word “sundry.”Likewise, the mark O—, signifying “pan,” could serve to denote not only the cooking utensil but also the beginning of dozens of words and phrases such as “pantry” or“Pan-American” and the ends of words such as “marzipan.” This technique is familiar to most children as a puzzle, known as the rebus.

For example, a rebus containingpictures of an eye, a tin can, a knot, a piece of meat, and a ewe would yield in English, “I cannot meet you.” Linguists know this system as logographic writing.

The logographic symbols, or logograms, such as the picture of an eye, are not specific to any one language.

Forexample, if the French were to agree that O meant “sun,” they would not say “sun”; they would use their own word, soleil , the sound of which is something like solay . In one form or another, logographic writing developed independently among several peoples, most notably the ancient Egyptians, whose writing is known ashieroglyphics ( see hieroglyphs), the ancient Chinese, and, much later, the Maya peoples of Yucatan in Mexico.

The ancient Mesopotamians also developed such a system, written in wedge-shaped symbols and known as cuneiform. B Syllabaries and Alphabetic Systems Logograms did a great deal to advance the cause of writing.

By emphasizing sound rather than direct pictorial representation, they made possible the writing oflanguage units that cannot easily be represented pictorially, such as pronouns, prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes.

But there were many problems with the system.

Forone thing, the reader could not always tell whether a given picture was meant to stand for itself or for its sound (Does a picture of a bee mean “bee” or does it meanthe verb “be” or does it mean the beginning of the word “believe”?) Second, the number of individual symbols required in a logographic system is immense.

Chinese, forexample, has several thousand.

Third, an excessive precision was required for the pictorial symbols.

A bee had to be drawn to look just like a bee, so that it would notmistakenly be seen as a fly or a beetle.

Conventionalizing the characters to make them distinct helped somewhat.

Two simplified scripts, hieratic and demotic, weredeveloped by the Egyptians to represent their hieroglyphs, but many confusions and difficulties still remained ( see Egyptian language). The big last step, when it was finally taken, was very simple.

Writing was altered so that it expressed sounds only, with absolutely no inclusion of pictures or otherdirectly representative symbols.

The sounds represented were sometimes syllables, in which instance the system is known as a syllabary.

In most cases, the soundswere the elementary sounds of a language, those that serve to distinguish words from each other.

Two such elementary sounds in English are p and b.

(Note: Throughout this article, italics will be used to designate sounds, as distinct from letters.) Which one is chosen will determine, for example, whether a word is “pin” or“bin”; the smallest difference between these two words is the difference between the sounds p and b.

These elementary units of sound are called phonemes, and writing systems based on the principle of one symbol for one phoneme are called alphabets. Alphabets and syllabaries are much more efficient than logographic systems.

The number of symbols is much smaller, and learning the writing system is much easier.

Asyllabary may require between 50 and 200 symbols, and an alphabet may require as few as 15 or 20, to represent all the words in the language.

English, which hasabout 33 phonemes in most dialects, would ideally require 33 symbols. Alphabetic and syllabary systems are rarely pure.

English, for example, uses some logographs, such as +, -, &, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Other languagesuse these same symbols, with the same meanings, but with different sounds.

In English 93 is ninety-three (90 + 3), but in German it is dreiundneunzig (3 + 90), in French quatre-vingt treize ([4 × 20] + 13), and in Danish treoghalvfems (3 + [4½ × 20]).

English also makes occasional use of a syllabary system.

It does so when such abbreviations as U.S.A., UN, or TVA are pronounced.

Other abbreviations, however, such as NATO, pronounced naytow , or UNESCO, pronounced yunesco , are. »