From Proto-Sinaitic to emoticons: how have writing styles changed?

PalmIf someone had told Paleolithic humans that one day we would send messages with yellow faces, the reaction would surely have been one of bewilderment. However, the mechanism itself wouldn't have seemed entirely foreign to them. The paintings of Altamira or Lascaux, with their animals and hunting scenes, weren't texts, but rather a form of visual communication shared within the group. This is, according to some, the oldest antecedent of writing: not because there was a written language, but because there were signs with intentionality. This visual communication became more complex with the first cities of Mesopotamia. Clay tablets were used to record sacks of grain, animals, wages, or taxes. Initially, pictograms were used—that is, signs that represented objects. However, the administration of a state required distinguishing nuances (actions, quantities, functions), and pictograms were transformed into ideograms. The need to go further finally led to the appearance of phonograms, which represented sounds and were an essential step toward being able to write real languages.

The Egyptian system

Something similar was happening in Egypt, but with its own organization. Hieroglyphs combined logograms (a sign representing an object or idea), phonograms (a sign representing a sound), and determinatives (added signs that clarified the meaning of a word). This mixed system was very rich but demanding: mastering it required memorizing hundreds of signs, and most of the population did not have access to this training.

It is at this point that we can consider one of the most remarkable 'surprises' of this entire process to emerge. Research suggests that the first phonetic alphabet did not arise from a grand court but from a practical context: the Sinai mines, in the second millennium BCE. Semitic workers, exposed to hieroglyphs but without the training to use them, repurposed some iconic signs, assigning them phonetic values based on the initial sound of the word in their language. Thus, the drawing of a house (an Egyptian logogram) came to represent the sound 'b' (the first sound of bayt(, 'house'). This system is what we now call Proto-Sinaitic and is considered the direct ancestor of all Semitic alphabets.

From this Proto-Sinaitic and other local variants, the Phoenician alphabet was born, a system of just over twenty consonantal signs. It was practical, easy to learn, and perfectly functional for commercial communication. The Phoenicians spread it throughout the Mediterranean thanks to their maritime activity.

When the Greeks adopted it, they made a decisive contribution: the introduction of vowels. That change transformed the alphabet into a much more precise phonetic system, capable of representing any word unambiguously. Latin later adapted Greek and eventually spread it throughout Europe—and, with modern colonization, across much of the world. All of this might suggest that the history of writing naturally leads to the Latin alphabet. But if we look at the world, the opposite is true. Today, hundreds of writing systems coexist, some of which use very different principles. In East Asia, Chinese writing still primarily uses logograms: each character represents a morpheme or a word. The character for 'sun,' for example, derives from an ancient drawing of the sun itself. In Japan, three systems are used simultaneously: kanji (logograms), hiragana, and katakana (two phonetic syllabaries). In India and South Asia, Brahmi-derived scripts use consonants that incorporate an inherent vowel modified with diacritics. In Ethiopia, the Amharic alphabet combines consonant and vowel within a single sign.

On a global scale, initiatives such as the web The World's Writing Systems They catalog more than 300 systems, both ancient and modern, active and historical. The atlas reveals the variety of solutions humanity has found to represent language: alphabets, like Latin or Greek; abjads, like Arabic (in which each symbol represents a consonant phoneme); abugidas, like Amharic; syllabaries, like Japanese; logographic systems, like Chinese; and mixed systems.

Current graphic systems

Modern daily life also offers a set of graphic systems that we don't always consider "writing," but which function similarly. This is the case, for example, with emoticons. They often have Unicode encoding, meaning they are integrated into a universal digital writing system. Some are clearly pictographic (like the sun emoticon), and others can function as modern logograms. Certainly, the interpretation can vary depending on the context (a thumbs-up emoticon can mean 'perfect' or 'let's leave it at that, I don't feel like arguing'), but this also happens with words in natural languages. Interpretive variability doesn't prevent them from acting as functional signs.

In this sense, digital communication incorporates textual and visual elements that coexist naturally. This is not a historically unknown phenomenon: Proto-Sinaitic itself arose from a reinterpretation of existing images, and many other systems have been hybrids from the beginning. Flexibility is a documented constant.

The global landscape of writing is therefore very broad and demonstrates that the ways of representing languages have never been unique or homogeneous. What we have today is the result of an accumulation of practical solutions, cross-influences, simplifications, and local innovations. And although each system has its own internal logic, they all serve the same function: to give more permanence—or at least greater durability and transmissibility—to a spoken language that, by its very nature, is ephemeral.