Old ways to write one spoken language

[The idea]

If you look back in time far enough, you will find people speaking the same language and living not far from each other, but using different systems of weights and measures. Given the need to measure things, it would not have been practical to wait until a broadly accepted standard was agreed upon.

Given the usefulness of written language, one would think that, before a given spoken language had any generally accepted writing system, various people would develop various ways of writing the language.

Does anyone know of a spoken language for which there are a variety of manuscripts written in a variety of different writing systems?

 

[Dancing David]

Ifind little empirical reason to believe that people around the world ever spoke one language. there is reason to believe that the indo-european language spread out of Anatolia but it does not encompass the african language groups.

What kind of situation are hypothesizing?

 

[The idea]

I find little empirical reason to believe that people around the world ever spoke one language.

Nor do I. I was just imagining that, long ago, people who lived near each other typically spoke the same language.

What kind of situation are hypothesizing?

I'm wondering whether there is a spoken language for which several quite different writing systems were independently created.

 

[Dancing David]

Well Japanese has three or four ways of representing spoken language.

However the dispersal of archaic homo sapiens is guessed to be around 100,000 to 60,000 BP, and so language groups have had at least that long to diversify. Written laguages are considerably younger, there may be some really old ones that we don't have, due to preservation. But even assuming that homo sap arrived in the 'new world' at 18,000 BP , there wass a tremendous diversity of language that arose in that time.

I think if you look at the regional dialects of even American english prior to the advent of radio, it seems that language fractures quickly.

 

[drkitten]

Does anyone know of a spoken language for which there are a variety of manuscripts written in a variety of different writing systems?

Yeah. Serbo-Croat. The differences in spoken language between Serbian and Croatian are almost negligible, to the point where most linguists, before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, called them by the same name. However, Croatian is written with the Latin script, while Serbian is written in Cyrillic.

 

[sackett]

Turkish

was first written using a script described (I don't know how suitably) as runic. Then, ca. 700, the Turks started using Arabic script, and finally in modern times switched to the Roman alphabet. No doubt there were transitional periods when runic and Arabic were used simultaneously, and later Arabic and Roman, but not by choice and certainly not for convenience.

The same situation applies to Korean: first it was written using Chinese characters, then hangul was invented to replace characters, iow ideograms were superceded by a syllabary -- and a rather nifty one, although it's only suited to modern Korean.

 

[H3LL]

...Does anyone know of a spoken language for which there are a variety of manuscripts written in a variety of different writing systems?

How about the opposite. Mainland China has over 200 dialects, many considered to be almost separate languages of their own, but only one style/type of writing is needed.

 

[epepke]

If you look back in time far enough, you will find people speaking the same language and living not far from each other, but using different systems of weights and measures. Given the need to measure things, it would not have been practical to wait until a broadly accepted standard was agreed upon.

Given the usefulness of written language, one would think that, before a given spoken language had any generally accepted writing system, various people would develop various ways of writing the language.

Does anyone know of a spoken language for which there are a variety of manuscripts written in a variety of different writing systems?

Certainly. Yiddish can be written in Hebrew or Roman alphabets. Turkish can be written using Arabic script or an extended Roman alphabet (the latter was put in place by Attaturk). Japanese can be written in Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana, or even Roman.

Check out http://www.omniglot.com

 

[olympiad]

Turkish: modern Turkish could probably be transcribed using Arabic script, but the approximations that already existed for Osmanli would be even more pronounced in modern times. This is not to say that Turkish can only be written in Roman script. However, it raises another question: to what extent is modern standard Turkish shaped by the way it is represented in print? I would guess the answer is quite considerably.

Maltese: developed from Arabic and appears particularly unsuited to the Roman alphabet now applied. As do Basque and Albanian.

ol

 

[Powa]

Re: Re: Old ways to write one spoken language

Yeah. Serbo-Croat. The differences in spoken language between Serbian and Croatian are almost negligible, to the point where most linguists, before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, called them by the same name. However, Croatian is written with the Latin script, while Serbian is written in Cyrillic.

True, the languages were quite similar until the Croats started changing their language after the independence of Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 (to try and put as much "distance" between the Croatian and Serbian language as possible). A lot of new words were invented and they also "borrowed" some of them from us Slovenians. The new words provided amusement for us for years, because they were, in most cases, just silly.


No offence, Tanja.

 

[Iconoclast]

Does anyone know of a spoken language for which there are a variety of manuscripts written in a variety of different writing systems?

Gibberish?

 

[Dorman]

Punjabi documents are written in four scripts: Roman, Devanagri, Gurumukhi and Arabic.

Hindi and Urdu are almost the same while spoken, but Hindi is written in Devanagri and Urdu in Arabic. So one may say there is only one spoken language: Hindi-Urdu, which then satisfies the OP condition.

 

[davefoc]

A lot of good examples have been put forth that address The ideas question but not what I interpretted the intent of the question to be.

I think the question dealt with whether peoples speaking similar languages had ever independently developed multiple written languages. In most of the examples given, people speaking a similar language have adopted, not developed, multiple ways of representing their language.

I think if the question is restricted to people speaking similar languages who independently develop different written forms for it there aren't a lot of examples.

I think ancient Egyptian might be one example. The Egyptians developed hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic. By the time of Cleopatra and the end of the Egyptian dynasties the hieratic (which had replaced hieroglyphics for most purposes) had been replaced by demotic for most purposes. I think the Egyptians independently developed these written languages.

 

[drkitten]

I think the question dealt with whether peoples speaking similar languages had ever independently developed multiple written languages. In most of the examples given, people speaking a similar language have adopted, not developed, multiple ways of representing their language.

I think if the question is restricted to people speaking similar languages who independently develop different written forms for it there aren't a lot of examples.

This may be a much more difficult concept to work with than you think, since there are very few examples of "independent" development of written forms out there. Using just the most obvious example, written English was developed from the written form of Latin, which in turn was developed from the written form of Greek, which in turn was developed from the written form of Phoenician, and so on back to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Written French also developed from Latin, but with some minor changes (mostly in accents and diacritics) of its own. The English alphabet, in turn, became the basis (with modification) for the Cherokee alphabet. Examples of someone creating an alphabet literally out of thin air, instead of borrowing and adapting existing alphabets, are extremely rare.

Is it "independent" when two different people independently borrow from the same source?

 

[diomedes]

English

Until about the 17th century there were wide regional variations in the way that words were spelled, even though the same alphabet was used. Words were spelled phonetically and therefore more closely reflected regional dialects.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing was true for other Eurpean languages.

The English language was not standardized in terms of grammar and spelling until the 17th and 18th centuries.

I do have a vague memory that there are spelling dictionaries dating from the 16th century.

The standarization of vernacular languages in Eurpoe is considered to be an effect of the invention and introduction of the printing press.

 

[The idea]

Re: English

Until about the 17th century there were wide regional variations in the way that words were spelled, even though the same alphabet was used. Words were spelled phonetically and therefore more closely reflected regional dialects.

English had different writing systems?

That different pronunciations were encoded differently is consistent with the assumption that there was a single encoding system.

If we are going to lump together different ways of speaking as being dialects of the same language, then perhaps we should lump together different ways of writing as being dialects of the same writing system.

It's simply not clear why "same communication system" or "same language" should be weakly demanding when considering speech but strongly demanding when considering writing.