Studying the history of the written language

Studying the Written Language

            The history of the written language is an important part of our past that can be beneficial to a designer.  Similar to learning the history of our country, learning about the past helps to prevent us from making the same mistakes.  Many early languages are not spoken or written anymore; they are just studied.  We can learn from this in two ways.  One way is to figure out why these languages are obsolete, and the other, is to create connections between the old and the modern languages.  Latin, for example, is a language that many other languages are based off of, one of which is English.  Learning about this helps to improve our understanding of our own words and also the other languages based off of Latin.  Written language has a lot of information to offer from a design prospective because it is the prime example of visual art.  Any mark made, whether it is on wood, on parchment or on stone is a visual element. 

            Written language, when translated, often times lose its true meaning.  Knowing this can happens, makes the visual part of designing that much more important to communicating an idea.  Many languages began as simple drawings of the things they were representing.  Images from ancient times can be more easily understood than the letterforms.  This is because people in different cultures have the same needs and similar wants.  Water, people, and most animals will translate the same between different cultures because we share these elements. 

Learning about these, connects our past markings with our modern ones.  We can understand the evolution of our own alphabet, and even our numeric system.  The Phoenicians created the first phonetic alphabet; this development made writing styles easier to learn and understand.  It condensed the large picture alphabets into 22 sounds with symbols to match.  The Greeks borrowed this system and added vowels to make certain sounds they required.  This is the process that created our modern day alphabet.

            Not only does this help with our communication of language, it also helps with our communication through the visual elements.  Images and even typefaces can evoke a certain era or manner in the way it is displayed.  If we know what past languages or markings looked like we can use them to our advantage to portray this feeling of prehistoric time, or a prehistoric place.  Also, knowing where these markings came from give us the benefit of using them to illustrate a culture or region of the world.  The wedges added to the strokes define the Sumerian writing style.  Therefore, a mark similar to this creates an ancient feel or look to the design.  Languages are from all over the world, and so studying or just being familiar with them benefits our universal perspective.  Some images might be translated differently depending on where they are being seen, and so having prior knowledge of that country or culture’s language could potentially help make the message clearer.  A more complicated concept could be mistranslated when being seen in different cultures.  A bigger issue of this could be cultures religious views or even their morals.  In other countries such as Australia, some designs would seem extremely inappropriate if brought to the United States. 

            The purpose of design is to communicate through visual elements and therefore studying the history of writing systems is very beneficial when the message needs to be clear.