Written language  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Tumblr
Wikisource
YouTube
Shop


Featured:
A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
Enlarge
A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system.

Written language is an invention, in the sense that it must be taught to children, whereas spoken language has evolved along with homo sapiens. Children will instinctively learn or create spoken (or gestural) languages.

Written language always appears as a complement to a specific natural language (English, French, American Sign Language, etc.) and no purely written languages (with the exception of computer languages, which are not natural languages) exist. Nevertheless many extinct languages are in effect purely written, since the written form is all that survives.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Written language" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools