1 Introduction

We communicate because we need to. All of our social and economic structures depend on it. Our spoken languages are very powerful and flexible: before people invented writing, speech was the only way to pass on wisdom, history, stories, skills and ideas from one generation to the next. Human societies managed with speech alone for thousands of years.

Spoken language has its limits, however. As soon as humans got involved in large-scale activities, including business, they found they needed something more.

Suppose you have made a contract with a farmer to buy 20 pigs in six months' time, providing 100 lengths of timber in payment. How do you record the details that you have agreed? If there was only one such contract, you would probably state the terms in front of witnesses, so that everyone concerned would remember them. The room for disputes about what precisely was agreed would then be small.

But no-one would trust human memory to recall the exact details of 20, or 100, contracts.

That seems to be why writing was first invented, about 8000 years ago in the Middle East.

2 Writing versus Speech

There are three main methods of communication visual, spoken and written written communication is the one we acquired most recently. It's still the one we need to work hardest at. Children learn to use their eyes and to speak their language without any difficulty, but learning to write is always a struggle. That's why people, in most...