Writing is a tough concept to define. The recording of our thoughts is a creative endeavor in a way and one that has become hard to define as art and writing sometimes intertwine in interesting ways. Pre-Columbian American cultures developed systems of communication that are not tied to a language. Some scholars refer to these systems as non-writing and demote them to a beginning stage in an evolutionary diagram of writing due to their inability to capture speech. In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Elizabeth Boone says, “in these views, the most developed writing systems replicate speech the most efficiently and completely.”
It becomes important to recognize, then, that any writing system has limitations and inefficiencies and the efficiencies of these Pre-Columbian American writing systems highlight other advantages of the technology of writing as a whole. Boone promotes a more inclusive definition of writing: “the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks,” which has its merits and shortcomings. The notion of convention and the nature of the marks can still be expanded to fully describe the potential of the technology of writing and the limitations some systems alone can have.
Margaret Jackson provides insight into the idea of convention in a semasiographic system in the example of a road sign. When we picture a road sign, it is placed in a context where certain assumptions are clear. As she writes in her chapter Agency in Writing,
“It is assumed that the viewer is engaged in a particular activity (driving a moving vehicle) whose parameters are generally known to the creator of the visual signs. In this regard, the creator of the signs and the person driving on the road share a common narrative attached to a sequence of actions – essentially, a shared meta-narrative.”
The 'curves ahead' road sign derives its meaning from the shared narrative of driving and the shape of the road. The key concept is that convention is not necessarily social convention, meaning is not necessarily developed over time and so can be situational, as in the case of driving signs. The implication is that as long as a semasiographic system is able to trigger that shared space and refer to elements in it, it will be able to communicate, just as the alphabet and words are the shared space in phonetic writing.
This expansion of convention to a meta-narrative, which is lacking in Boone's 1995 definition, can be improved by the two that Jackson references in her piece Agency in Writing, one from Brian Rotman: shared meta-narrative as creating or triggering sites of interpretation, in the definition “any systematized graphic activity that creates sites of interpretation and facilitates communication and sense making” (Rotman, Thinking Dia-Grams, 1995) and the other from Roy Harris with the shared meta-narrative as a “set of practices… associated with an inventory of written forms” (Harris, Signs of Writing, 1995). Rotman's definition is broader, as the shared narratives or context could be potentially created in the moment as in the road sign example, and are not necessarily an established set, which Harris's definition is unambiguous about. In that case, Rotman's definition still needs to be tweaked to account for this referential aspect of phonetic writing. I would add “creates or references sites of interpretation…” to the definition.
There is a lot of merit to Boone's work, as she saw that “alphabetic writing… is not the best form for recording certain kinds of information. Graphic systems work much better than speech writing at showing structures.” Semasiographic systems are at ease when communicating spatial relations as these are more immediate to humans as visual creatures, while phonetic writing relies on building the picture with words, sometimes quite ambiguously. Geoffrey Sampson talks about how the English script does not transmit every intonation of words, making it an incomplete script as it leaves parts of the spoken language out. This is a tradeoff for economy of symbols and effort when writing:
“… the relative extreme incompleteness of some early scripts may not always be merely a flaw of immaturity; if a script is used only for highly specific purposes, so that much of any utterance is predictable from context, a highly incomplete script might actually be the best script since the balance of advantage would tip away from completeness towards economy.”
(Writing systems: a linguistic introduction, 1985)
Economy and completeness might be a tradeoff in writing systems, where phonetic writing requires a lot of words and description to be able to build a visual representation that a semasiographic system might communicate more precisely and succinctly. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? In this sense phonetic writing is uneconomical and incomplete when describing images.
Mentioning the idea of economy and completeness (or put differently, limitations) in the definition of writing would clear the bias towards the apparent higher flexibility and completeness of phonetic writing in a compelling way. I would add to the definition the detail that the nature of the marks makes certain thoughts more economical and unambiguous (complete) to describe than others.
One nuance of completeness is in fact described in Boone's definition of writing. The ambiguity detail which Sampson describes — “A script can be 'incomplete' not only by failing to provide any representation for some linguistic units but also, or alternatively, by providing representations that are ambiguous” — is conveyed in Boone's definition by “relatively specific ideas,” which means unambiguous to an extent. There is a lot of merit in getting this right.
Roy Harris writes about the three stages of writing societies seem to progress through. In the first stage, called a “crypto-literacy,” writing has a divine status where “everything surrounding writing is still regarded as a form of magic or secret knowledge, reinforced by various superstitions and shibboleths” (Rethinking Writing, 2000). The second stage involves a “utilitarian literacy” where writing is “a practical tool or technique for doing what would otherwise have to be done by means of speech, or left undone.” The third stage is something labeled as “full literacy,” reportedly not achieved yet by any society but where writing is beyond its practical knowledge-recording and dissemination uses, and it is “a particular mode of operation of the human mind and the key to a new concept of language.” Harris claims Western society is in the second stage.
Looking at this spectrum of progress, the ignored practical uses of semasiography may complement the current "second stage" Harris describes, and help on the path towards “full literacy”. I find it encouraging to explore the wide variety of “contexts”, “sites of interpretation”, and “shared meta-narratives” that could allow us to better communicate and articulate thoughts.
These insights show that there might be limitations to what some writing systems can easily express, and if added to the definition, they might help better understand them and not leave us to speculate about some of their implications. The main aspects I would add to the definition are the idea of the triggered or created shared-meta narrative, also conceptualized as sites of interpretation, and that a tradeoff exists between economy and completeness in writing systems due to the nature of the marks, and what they convey with ease and not.
With this tradeoff in mind we as humans might want to go out and explore old systems, or design new systems with differing bias in order to more easily and concretely see the invisible.
Notes: This strikes me as a fundamental epistemological limit, the more you know in some particular regard, the less you know about another. In order to see you have to stop seeing. Similar to position and momentum in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to bias and variance in the Bias-Variance tradeoff, and even to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem with the hard tradeoff of consistency and completeness. I'll attempt to formalize this further in a future essay.