While all human cultures have spoken language, writing systems are not ubiquitous to all cultures or all individuals, and written language developed much later in human history than speech. It is a particularly human challenge to distill spoken language into aspects that can be captured with visual symbols; this challenge has been met in different ways across different periods and different cultures for different languages. This entry provides a description and examples of the major types of writing systems as well as a clear and compelling consideration of the categorization and development of both writing systems in general and of conventionalized orthographies specifically.
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