Three Models of Script Transfer

Abstract

When a writing system is adapted to a previously unwritten language, it can happen that the deviser(s) of the new writing system do not fully understand the way the system worked in the donor language; they then, probably accidentally, create a writing system that operates on a different principle. Writing systems are invented ex nihilo only for mono-syllabically organized languages; an example is Sumerian cuneiform, but Egyptian is not such a language, so its script poses a problem for the hypothesis. The deviser(s) of Egyptian hieroglyphs may have known only that Sumerian cuneiform used one character per morpheme, and in attempting to apply the same principle to their own language, using existing pictographic traditions, found themselves recording only the consonants of morphemes, because Egyptian morphemes undergo internal inflection, so the vowels are unconstant. Thus where Sumerian, Chinese, and Mayan characters notate, for the most part, CV(C) syllables (also VC in Sumerian), Egyptian characters notate C(C(C)) sequences.