THE BASICS

Cuneiform is the first known form

of written language, but spoken

language predates writing by at least

tens of thousands of years

Languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs with particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances   

75–80,000-year-old artefacts from Blombos cave,

South Africa, including a piece of ochre engraved

with diagonal cross-hatch patterns, perhaps the

oldest known example of symbols.

 The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic period of the late 4^th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

A writing system is an organized regular method (typically standardized) of information storage and transfer for the communication of messages (expressing thoughts or ideas) in a language by encoding and decoding (known as writing and reading) with a set of signs or symbols (with the set collective referred to as a 'script' or ‘text’) often including letters and numbers. These texts are displayed in any number of ways, in any number of places.

Even more basic