What Even Is Writing?
Wait what do you mean what is writing?
I know it sounds like a weird question but it's a really important one. Historically the concept of writing/lack of writing has been used to undermine the intellectual traditions of other cultures. This is kinda weird though right? Writing is what I'm doing right now it's when a person uses symbols to transcribe language.
And listen while we can all agree that is Writing™ it begs the questions about where we draw certain lines. Are tally marks the same as numbers? When do pictures become hieroglyphs? How can we tell that Mexica glyphs arent just pretty pictures?
Linguists, anthropologists, and historians have long understood that there exists things that are kinda writing but not quite. This is where the catergory of "proto-writing" comes in, a handy catch all the can encompass everything from paleolithic cave art to modern day religious symbols.
This is weird though right? Theres scholarly agreement that there are things that are "almost writing but not quite" but they are lumped into one big group? Meanwhile "true writing" has all kinds of catergories - logograms, ideograms, syllabaries, alphabets, abjads etc etc. But proto-writing is just proto-writing, this becomes an issue when looking at the indigenous cultures of the western hemisphere.
Looking at the literture on these indigenous cultures you find a tendency to label seemingly very "writing like" systems as mnemonic devices. And look far be it from me to hate on a good mnemonic but I feel that describing these incredibly complicated and diverse systems as just mnemonic devices is at best a huge diservice to the creators of these traditions and at worst just fully out of touch with reality.
But there is still the problem of classification. How do we categorize these different systems if we conclude that proto-writing is insufficient? Well for my own purposes I combine and modifiy the works of Dr. David Charles Wright-Carr in his essay "On the Classification of Graphs in Central Mexican Pictorial Writing" and James Elkins in his book "The Domain of Images" these modified scheme is present below.
- You can make an <ol> like this!
- <ol> stands for "Ordered List"
- That means that the list is numbered!
- Or how about a <ul>, know what that stands for?
- That's right! <ul> is "Unordered List"
- That means that the list uses bullets.
This is an image caption! Huh? It's just a <p> tag! Ah, but we have added the class "caption"! "Classes" allow us to set special styles for certain elements.
Ahhh, back to a regular paragraph. All of that italicized text was making me a bit hoarse.
Wow, that image is smaller and aligned to the right. This text is flowing around it!
Oh, I see... we added two classes to it... small and right! Marina must have set special styles in the CSS file for images with the small and right classes. Goodness gracious, what will she think of next?
You might be confused if you're viewing this on a phone. When the screen gets really small, then the small class images just revert to taking up the whole width (responsive design). Otherwise they'd just be too ridiculously small! But I bet if you rotate your phone to wide view, you'll be able to see the effects of the small and right classes on images...
Hmmm... there's something strange about this image...
Yikes! It's a link!! I guess you can put an <img> tag inside an <a> tag to create an image link!
If you've been following along inside the HTML editor, you might be wondering, what are all those weird codes with stuff in-between & and ;? Those are called escape characters. < means "less than" symbol and > means "greater than" symbol. Those symbols are used in HTML tags. But if I try to write actual HTML tags to talk to you about them, then the computer will get confused. So somtimes we need to speak, quite literally, in code, to get around this. Maybe you are like... a math blogger so I thought I'd just let you know ahead of time. If you get unexpected results, check back over your writing. You might have typed something that to a human is normal but to a computer is confusing!
Well, that's all for now. Keep this file around and use it for reference if you'd like. Happy blogging!
~Marina