 Hello again. As pointed out in the evolution of writing, the first video of this short series about writing, not all modern writing systems encode information in the same way. They emerge from symbols that represented animals and other images and can be divided into two central branches. Into logographic writing systems whose symbols represent words or concepts where the shape of the symbol employed is often closely related to the meaning of the respective concept. And into phonographic writing systems which establish some sort of relationship between the written symbol and its pronunciation. Let us look at logographic writing systems first. They make use of symbols that represent words or concepts where Greek logos means word or idea. The shape of the symbol employed is often closely related to the meaning of the respective concept. There are three variants of logographic writing systems. Pictographic systems, idiographic systems and abstract logographic writing systems. In the earliest logographic writing systems, the relationship between symbol and object is clearly visible. Such variants of logographic writing systems are referred to as pictographic, where pictographs are pictorial symbols that directly represent the object to which they refer. One of the earliest examples of a pictographic writing system is the system of simple Sumerian pictographs from around 3000 before Christ. Well, and here are some pictograms used today. Another way of relating logographic symbols to concepts is the use of idiographic systems. Here is an example. The dog illustration is a pictogram. The red circle and the bar is an idiogram representing the idea of no or not allowed. Thus, unlike pictographs, the shape of idiographic symbols is not a direct representation, but an associative representation of a concept. Idiographs are often mixed up with pictographs. For example, in the Egyptian hieroglyphic system of around 3000 before Christ, typical for idiographs is their additional customary use. Examples of modern idiograms are traffic signs, those without additional writing. The symbols found on the control buttons of high-five systems and other technical equipment. Often, logographic writing systems make use of abstract logographic symbols whose meaning is no longer identifiable from their shape. Such symbols, for example, the percent symbol or the ampersump symbol used for AND are even employed in phonographic writing systems. In Chinese, the most well-known logographic writing system, the symbol for human, Ren, is relatively clearly identifiable and even more so the historical predecessors of this symbol. To understand the compound symbols, Na Ren and Nu Ren for man and woman, however, that requires some sort of fantasy. Let's now turn our attention to the phonographic writing systems. As already said, phonographic systems establish some sort of relationship between the written symbols and their pronunciation. There are three possible systems of realising the sound-symbol relationship. Segmental systems, syllabic systems and phonographic alphabetic systems. The oldest way of showing the pronunciation of words is the segmental method where only selected phonetic aspects, primarily the consonants, are represented by orthographic symbols. Here is the example of the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs where a symbol stood for a consonantal skeleton. Vowels were not represented in writing. They had to be added during the reading process by reference to syntax and semantics. A modern system is the Arabic abyad, where abyad means alphabet, which is used in the Semitic languages. It is written from right to left and its characters exhibit consonantal values. The syllabic phonographic writing system represents the pronunciation of entire syllables by specific symbols. Syllabic writing systems are relatively old. One of the oldest syllabic writing systems is the Crete linear B system. More modern ones are, for example, the Devanagiri alphabet used in Hindi, the GAS alphabet used in languages spoken in Ethiopia, or the Khmer alphabet used in Cambodian. The most advanced and historically the most recent technique makes use of a limited inventory of symbols, where ideally one symbol stands for one sound. The first of these alphabetic systems was the Phoenician alphabet, which developed during the 15th century before Christ. Before then, the Phoenicians wrote with a cuneiform script. Like the Arabic abyad, the Phoenician alphabet did not represent vowels and it was written from right to left in horizontal lines. The origin of most modern alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet. Here are some examples, the Roman or Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet used in some of the Balthoslavonic languages, for example in Russian, the Greek alphabet, the Creduli alphabet used in Georgian, or the Hangul system used in Korean. Some languages use combinations of several writing systems. The most well-known example is perhaps Japanese, where a set of logographic characters, the Kanji, is supplemented by two types of syllabic characters. One is known as Katakana and is generally reserved for loanwords. The second system, the Hiragana, is employed for grammatical formatives. Despite their goal to represent the pronunciation of their words, the alphabets of most languages exhibit at least some discrepancies between sound and spelling. Take present-day English OUGH as an example. This character combination can be pronounced in several ways, for example as tough, though, cough, plough, through, thorough and some more examples. To overcome these discrepancies, the International Phonetic Alphabet was introduced in the late 19th century. Here you find a selection of the symbols used in this alphabet. Until today, it is the only alphabet that exhibits a one-to-one correlation between sound and spelling. The most widely used alphabets are the Latin or Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet. They have been adapted to write hundreds of different languages and are used on every continent. So many people think that logographics writing systems such as the one used in Chinese are too complicated and should be given up in favor of an alphabetic system. However, the advantage of logograms such as the one used for book in Chinese is that everyone can read and understand them, irrespective of dialectal variation, such as the variants here. So all these are variants. The symbol remains the same. In a language such as German, with an alphabetic system, by contrast, the spelling of book is related to the standard only. In a dialect where you have variants such as Buch, Buch, Buch, Buch, you either have to respell the word to avoid confusion or the relationship between standard writing and pronunciation in a dialect becomes completely void. So we should leave the situation as it is. Alright, so much for modern writing systems. I hope that my short two-video series about writing was informative enough to provide you with an overview of the historical development, the classification and the use of writing systems in the languages of the world. Thanks for your attention. Have a nice time.