This document summarizes a lecture on writing systems. It discusses how writing allows communication across time and space and enables the study of history. It contrasts morphemic writing systems like Chinese characters that represent concepts directly with alphabetic systems like Roman letters that represent sounds. The document uses Chinese script as an example of a morphemic system and explains how characters can be combined or modified over time. It also defines terms like allographs, which are variant forms of the same written character.

1. Lecturer: Mr. Hong Kiseng
Students:
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1. Mr. Leang Channy
2. Miss Seng Saksreyney
3. Mr. Pha Rakim
4. Miss Phien Davy

2. 1. Communication across Time and Space?
2. Morphemic and Phonetic Script
3. Chinese Script – A Morphemic System
4. Roman Script – An Alphabetic System
5. Allographs
6. Conclusion
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3.  Do you know any country has no writing
system?
 Can you develop one nation without written
language?
 How can you study a history of one country?
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4.  Some societies have no writing system and
no society has developed a written language
and only subsequently decided to transmit
the utterances orally.
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5.  Writing has played an important part in the
development of society.
 Our society requires communication to be
made across space and time.
 Writing is allowing you to study the subject
of language without having to travel to a
particular place at a particular time.
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6. 6
 Rival means of communication or bridging
space and time (TV, Phone, Tape recorder,
or Video…), but writing still develops.

7. The written representation of an object, of a
concept, of an action, and so on may be a
direct representation of the object itself or a
representation of the word that represents
the object.
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8.  Morphemic are the characters or graphs <1>
and <5> represent a concept directly.
 Phonetic are the written words <one> and
<five> or symbols of symbols represent the
sounds that represent the concept.
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9. 9
<Seven> is generally called Phonetic systems
but <Seven> /sevәn/ is called an Alphabetic
system.
Alphabetic are character for each sound
segment or symbols represent individual
speech sounds.

10. 10
 Syllabic refer to symbols represent syllables.
(Mostly, in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
symbols)
 好 吃  好吃
Hǎo Chī  Hǎo chī
Good Eat  Delicious
 好 看  好看
Hǎo Kàn  Hǎo kàn
Good Look  Attractive

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12. Ex: “4” is morphemic symbol that represent:
“quatre in French”
“four in English”
“si ‘四’ in Chinese”
is internationally understood !
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Symbols that represent an object, a concept, an
action, and so on without the intermediate element of
the spoken word, they are called “Morphemic
Symbols”.

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Advantage:
It is a written
communication which
can be understood by
people who speak so
differently that they
would not understand
each other’s spoken
language.
Disadvantage:
Morphemic symbols
do, however, present
problems in the
modern age. Having a
different graph for each
morpheme clearly
means that thousands
of graphs must be used.

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Generally speaking Phonetic systems develop out
of Morphemic systems. When humans first wanted
to convey or express visually the idea of an object it
was natural that they should draw an image of that
object rather than attempt to represent the sound
of whatever word they used to denote or represent
that object.
Ex:
semi-circle represented full-circle
represented
moon sun

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Morphemic symbols can be
Pictogram or Ideogram
If we want to consider pictograms or ideograms
to be different:
1. One, stylized
visual, is more
about image or
picture is called
“pictogram”.
2. And the other one
is more about
idea is called
“ideogram”.

16. 3 Chinese Script- A Morphemic
As we have seen, the Chinese system of
writing is primarily morphemic, the
characters being associated directly with the
object or concept that they denote rather
than with the sound of a spoken word.
Images become more stylized and more
angular, but in some cases one can still see a
resemblance between character and the
objective denoted.

18.  As with the digraph for China , concepts
may be represented by combining or
reduplicating characters.
 The characters for the sun and the moon
together (明), denote the concept of
brightness.

19. The characters for women together with that
for child (好), denotes goodness and love.
 These may be referred to as symbolic
compound.
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20. The Chinese characters representing one
concept may also come to be used to denote
another concept that is denoted by a words
that sound similar. Thus it may be sound
rather than concept that is the common
thread linking different use of character.

21.  The semantic element, the radical, is
supplemented by a phonetic element that
indicate the spoken word. This specifying
the sense of the semantic element.
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22. For example, the character for a woman can
be accompanied by another indicating the
sound /ma/ to denote the particular kind of
woman indicated by these sounds, a mother.

23.  The writing system that we use came to us
from the Middle East by way of the Greeks
and the Romans.
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25. 25
The script has been modified for over 10 times.
Here is some example of Khmer script:
Pre-Angkorian Script

26. 26
Angkorian Script

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Post-Angkorian Script

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Modern Script

29.  Allograph is a member of grapheme or the
variant forms of a written character (grapheme
is a fundamental unit in a written language: alphabet,
punctuation, number, signature, and any other individual
symbol in a writing system).
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30.  A and a are Allographs of the grapheme A in
that replacing them does not alter the
meaning of the word, as calm, CALM and
cAlm, except oddness.
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31. As we know, writing system can help our
communication to transcend time and space.
But the development of writing system will help
us better.
However, in order to develop writing system
successfully we need to understand each
concept in this unit.
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32. Thanks for your
attention!
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