Did Orthographies Evolve?

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Abstract
According to Gelb (1963), writing has “evolved” from picture writing to logography to syllabic writing to alphabetic writing. It is argued here that this widely accepted theory of orthographic evolution does not accurately fit the historical facts, and that the variety of orthographies is better explained on linguistic grounds. Orthographies have to be productive, and they can manage this only by providing devices for transcribing the possible words in the lexicon. The very limited number of different ways in which this is accomplished in different orthographies is accounted for by the structural peculiarities of the languages that the orthographies transcribe.

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