Verbal Communication

Terry Joyce

15Writing systems and scripts

Abstract: Rather paradoxically, given the immense significance of writing for our modern societies, as Powell (2009) astutely declares, writing is generally “poorly understood” and, lamentably, enduring misconceptions about writing systems only obfuscate. Taking the development of a coherent and consistent typology of writing systems to be an essential task for researching and comprehending writing systems and writing, this chapter focuses primarily on some of the persistent misconceptions and problematic inconsistencies concerning writing systems. More specifically, after considering the relationship between language and writing, much of Section 2 discusses some of the various typological categories ...