Chapter XIX: Conventionalizing

Before writing was invented by a people there were attempts in its direction which are mentioned in other chapters of this paper. Human forms were drawn pictorially in the act of making gesture signs and in significant actions and attitudes and combinations of them. Other natural objects, as well as those purely artificial, which represented work or the result of work, were also drawn with many differing significations. When any of these designs had become commonly adopted on account of its striking fitness or even from frequent repetition with a special signification, it became a conventional term of thought-writing, with substantially the same use as when, afterward, the combinations of letters of an alphabet into words became the arbitrary signs of sound-writing. While the designs thus became conventional terms, their forms became more and more abbreviated or cursive until in many cases the original concept or likeness was lost. Sometimes when a specimen of the original form is preserved, its identity in meaning with the current form can be ascertained by correlation of the intermediate shapes.

The original ideography is often exhibited by exaggeration. For instance, a loud voice has been sometimes indicated by a human face with an enormous mouth. Hearing, among the Peruvians, was early expressed by a man with very large ears; then by a head with such ears, and afterwards by the form of the ears without the head. Soon such forms became so conventionalized as to be practically ideographic writing. In the same manner a numeral cipher has become the representation of a mathematical quantity, a written musical note shows a kind and degree of sound, and other pictured signs give values of weights and measures. All of these signs express ideas independent of any language and may be understood by peoples speaking all diversities of language.

So also the idea of smallness and subjection may be conveyed by drawing an object in an obviously diminished size, of which examples are given in this chapter. Another expedient, illustrations of which also appear, is by repetition and combination, with reference to which the following condensed remarks of James Summers (_a_) are in point:

The earliest Chinese characters were pictorial; but pictures
could not be made which would clearly express all ideas. One of the
means devised to express concepts that could not be indicated by a
simple sketch, was to combine two or more familiar pictures. For
instance, a man with a large eye represents “seeing;” two men, “to
follow;” three men, “many;” two men on the ground, “sitting.”

All other means failing, the present great mass of characters
was formed by a principle from which the class is called “phonetic;”
because in the characters classed under it, while one part (called
the “radical”) preserves its meaning, the other part (called the
“phonetic” or “primitive”) is used to give its own sound to the
whole figure. This part does sometimes, however, convey also its
symbolic meaning as well as its sound.

But while the original mode of expressing ideas required various devices, when an idea had become established in pictography there always appeared an attempt to simplify the figure and reduce it in size, so as to require less space in the drafting surface and also to lessen the draftsman’s labor. This was more obvious in the degree in which the figure was complicated and of frequent employment.

For convenience the subject is divided into: 1. Conventional devices. 2. Syllabaries and alphabets.