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Language Change and the History of the English Language
Written language has been a preserver - and a changer in its own right - of language. It has preserved human history and science from the ravages of time, but it has also introduced changes to the language. As language changes, the writing may or may not change. In Hong Kong, one will often see two people speaking and drawing Chinese characters in the air at the same time, because the characters (pictographs) do not change as often as the pronunciations of the language do. Even the spelling of some English words reflect older spellings prior to the Great Vowel Shift, causing great problems in ensuring accurate spelling of words [Fromkin and Rodman, 327, 372-373].
There are generally three systems of writing in use in the world today: word writing (pictographs), syllabic, and alphabetic. Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic writing systems are not in use today because of the difficulty in adding new concepts to them, and the amount of time it takes to write even the simplest of concepts (although pictographic and alphabetic writing systems were developed from hieroglyphic and cuneiform writings). Pictographic writing is used primarily in China, where the written language remains the same while the dialects and spoken languages change. Japan uses a combination of pictographics (Kanji) and syllabic writings (Kana). The Kana are specifically simplified pictographs assigned to specific syllables of the Japanese language (phonemes, actually). Alphabetic writings tend to be phonemic rather than phonetic in nature, and are only approximations of the "sound" of the word. All systems of writing, however, are arbitrary in the way that they have assigned signs to words [Fromkin and Rodman, 363-385].
Language Change and the History of the English Language
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