I’m not sure if this actually makes sense, but it’s a thought that’s been kind of bouncing around in my head. Ashley’s presentation on symbiosis got me thinking about the relationship between language and writing.
First off, most writing systems originated as pictographic at one time or another: that is, they started out as rather rough drawings of whatever it was the symbol was to represent. This means that originally, the symbol had more to do with the idea behind the word than the word itself. Since they were not related to the sound of the word in their correspondent language, the symbols could not reflect affixes or other morphology, and therefore any interpretation would have been based entirely on connecting words and word order. This means that reading pictograms would have originally been much more of an art than the pretty straightforward “sound it out” method that we get away with today.
But the really important bit is that reading the pictograms aloud would have not made any sense because of the lack of morphology and proper formations. At best, it would have sounded stilted and forced.
What this means, in short, is that orthography would have had little to do with the language to which it was linked, simply because it was in no way phonetic. If written and spoken language were originally separate and then became merged, it looks a bit – not a lot, mind, but a bit – like a form of symbiosis.
Over time, the common thread of meaning between symbol and sound becomes overwhelming, and the writing takes on features of the spoken language; in the case of the Phoenician alphabet, a phonetic resemblance was required in order to make the symbols match the syntax. In the case of Chinese, none of the languages have much on the way of morphology, so it was enough to stick to more-or-less pictographic representations.
Eventually, the reverse also happens: people mispronounce words based on their spelling and that becomes a largely attested phenomenon in a particular dialect of the language as a whole.
The last point I wanted to make, going back on the “symbiosis” note, was that having a system of writing dramatically improves the chances a language has of a) remaining unchanged, since there’s a constant record to which debates may be referred, and b) spreading, since a language that has a writing system, being more solidified, will tend to resist change more than a language without one.