Category Communication

Every morning, without fail, the newspaper arrives at your home. But 400 years ago, there were no newspapers at all. During the Middle Ages in Europe, handwritten newsletters were circulated privately among merchants, passing along information about everything from wars and economic conditions to social customs and human interest The first printed forerunners of the newspaper appeared in Germany in the late 1400’s in the form of news pamphlets or broadsides. They often had highly sensational content. It was between 1605 and 1610 that publications with topical information began appearing on a fairly regular basis. These publications appeared first in Europe, and were the first true newspapers.  In the English – speaking world, the earliest predecessors of the newspaper were ‘corantos’, small news pamphlets produced only when some event worthy of notice occurred. The first successively published title was ‘The Weekly News’ of 1622.

When you started learning the alphabet, do you remember your teacher telling you how each letter should be pronounced? Alphabets are different from pictograms in that an alphabet consists of different letters, with each letter representing a sound in a language.  Words are made of different letters put together.An alphabet is the quickest and most efficient way to write. Just imagine… with only 26 letters you can write all the words in the English language! Of course, different languages have their own alphabets. The Greek alphabet is different from the Hebrew alphabet, just as the Hindi alphabet is different from the Malayalam one! The Roman alphabet, which is widely used to this day, was derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. The letters of an alphabet are written in different ways in different languages too. Some are round, while some have square, or even triangular shapes. With some alphabets, the words and sentences are written from left to right, while, with others, they are written from right to left!

It is not known who invented the first pencil. The pencil was first documented in 1565 by Conrad Gesner, and it consisted of a piece of graphite inserted into a wood shaft. European craftsmen (woodworkers) were the first known pencil manufactures, and it wasn’t until the late 1700’s that manufacturing techniques similar to those practiced today were developed

Almost 2000 years ago, in 105AD, a Chinese court official named Cai Lun watched a wasp making its nest. He saw the insect chew up pieces of bamboo, and then mix it with its own saliva to produce a pulp. The pulp was next flattened into a sheet by the wasp, by using its legs. This sheet was used to line the wasp’s nest. Cai Lun copied the wasp, and made a paste of bamboo and water. He then flattened the paste into a thin sheet, dried the sheet in the sun… and paper was invented! Paper soon replaced papyrus and parchment as the most popular writing material. The Chinese used mulberry bark and bamboo to make paper, while the Europeans preferred linen and cotton rags. Nowadays, paper is made from the wood of fast growing trees such as pines, fir and spruce. Paper mills have sprung up wherever there is a good supply of water and wood, producing paper of every colour and texture imaginable. Today, the ever increasing demand for forests into pulp to feed the paper mills. So it is very important that we do not waste paper, and also that we learn to recycle and reuse it

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the greatest civilizations of ancient times. We get much of our knowledge about this civilization from over 2000 inscribed seals that have been discovered in good condition. The Indus people did not engrave inscriptions on stones or place papyrus scrolls in the tombs of their dead. All we know of their writing is derived from the simple inscriptions on their seals. The inscriptions are in the form of some 400 signs. The signs are the written language of these people.These seals tell us a lot about the way the people lived, the gods and goddesses they worshipped, the animals they reared and, other interesting bits of information about their culture

The people in the countries around the Mediterranean and the Chinese all started using signs as a means of writing at about the same time. the people of the island of Crete developed a script known as Linear B which has ideograms, numbers and signs.  The Chinese way of writing was very complex, and has over 50,000 signs! Fortunately, only a few thousand are needed for everyday life, but Chinese is still a difficult language to learn. It has changed very little during the last 4000 years, which means that modern scholars can still read the ancient texts.  The Chinese characters are made up of 26 different strokes, and the Chinese place a lot of importance on the art of fine handwriting. In fact, Chinese children spend a lot of time copying characters before they can write quickly and correctly!

We know that the first form of writing was in the form of pictures of animals, people and objects. These were called pictograms, and they first appeared about 3000 BC. It was easy to read this type of writing since it was easy to recognize the symbols. But it was also a little confusing, because these pictures could not always express ideas or actions fully. So, ideograms or symbols to express thoughts and actions were developed. For example, a picture of a pair of legs walking can mean ‘go’.In time, these symbols changed their shape into signs that did not look much like the real thing… but they kept their meaning. In ancient Indian civilization for example, there were over 400 signs that represented things, and names of people and places

Can you imagine what it would be like if there was no writing? We would have to pass on information only through spoken words, and remember everything in our heads! There would be no books from which we could learn, and we would not be able to communicate with people far way.Writing is a method of putting down information so that it can be stored, and passed on to others. No one person invented writing. It evolved gradually from the need to keep accounts or record events. Writing took many different forms over the ages, from simple picture writing to modern scripts. It was done on different types of materials too… on rocks, clay, pottery… and of course, paper.

The ding-dong theory holds that speech arose because there is a mysterious connection between sound and our senses. People react to stimuli in the world around them by spontaneously producing sounds. For example, a nursing baby produces a sound similar to ‘mmmmm’ as it drinks milk, and this sound eventually became the word ‘mama’!

When you are surprised or hurt you make sounds like ‘OH!’ or ‘OUCH’. Some people believe that the sounds we make when we are angry, frustrated, sad or happy were the starting point for the development of language. This is called the ‘pooh-pooh’ theory about how language began… but to be frank, many people ‘pooh-pooh’ this theory!