Before this class, my understanding of the different types of writing systems was very limited. The documentary that we watched in class was my first introduction to syllabary writing systems. I had never considered the relationship between writing systems and the representation of abstract ideas. I had always assumed that all languages functioned in the same cognitive manner (which is a very ethnocentric sort of view) and the documentary was interesting in how it went through hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and the logographic Chinese characters. This was incredibly illuminating, because I had never considered the variety of how writing systems are conceived and structured.
The Schmandt-Besserat article on the invention of writing through the tokens used by the early Mesopotamians revealed how writing is born out of an economic need. Schmandt-Besserat wrote that the tokens used by early Mesopotamians “were small clay artifacts modelled in various geometric shapes which Amiet rightly interpreted as standing for goods and services” (3) Oftentimes, I view writing as independent or influential to my professional life, but the use of these tokens shows how writing is a tool that was created to facilitate social action. This is helpful to understand in the study of rhetoric and discourse, because it changes my understanding of how language is socially situated and contextualized.
