Martha Harper’s Haint
Avant-garde, revolutionary, even touted as a miracle worker, Mother Ann, an illiterate factory worker from Manchester formed the Shaking Quakers, better known as The Shakers. Their utopian, strictly celibate, and self-sufficient communities grew from a small group that immigrated to America in 1774 into flourishing communities, the southernmost of which was formed where I sat swatting mosquitoes in the humid night air. At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages from New England to Ohio and Kentucky, and there were twenty thousand members over a century.
The most eccentric and defining aspect of the Shakers was their form of dance, the earliest of which was spontaneous. They whirled themselves around, trembling and shaking ecstatically until they fell to the floor in a trance.
In the early 1800s choreography entered the worship service. An anonymous visitor described the preparation:
"At half past seven p.m. on the dancing days, all the members retired to their separate rooms, where they sat in solemn silence, just gazing at the stove, until the silver tones of the small tea-bell gave the signal for them to assemble in the large hall.”
They believed the dance kindled the fire of truth and the shaking warded off evil. As described in an article in The Telescope in 1909, the choreography became ritualistic and stylized.
“A number of singers, probably a dozen or so, both sexes, would take their position in the middle of the room, half of them facing the other half, and begin a kind of song or chant. While doing so they would step back and forth in a fashion resembling a double shuffle. If the spirit seemed to move the watchers, they would rise and, two abreast, would begin marching round the singers in the center. Soon the march would turn into a dancing step, the faces would be uplifted, and the hands outstretched, palms upward, with a gesticulation as if the worshipers were grasping for blessing falling down from heaven. This would be continued indefinitely, sometimes the marchers and dancers falling from sheer exhaustion."
All of their hymns, songs and music were composed and written by their members, generally, under ‘divine inspiration’. They developed their own form of music notation known as the "letteral system" using letters of the alphabet rather than conventional notes.
In 1944 one of those tunes was resurrected and hit the world stage. Aaron Copland said he was thinking neither of Appalachia nor Spring when composing his now iconic ballet. Martha Graham renamed Ballet for Martha by using a line from a Hart Crane poem. Spring represents a body of water, not the season.
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Copland, who was known for using folk music in his ballets, steered away from this habit in Appalachian Spring with the exception, ironically, of one obscure Shaker tune – “Simple Gifts” – which he used as the basis of the finale and which then went on to become the most famous melody of the ballet. "Simple Gifts" was composed by Elder Joseph Brackett and originated in the Shaker community at Alfred, Maine in 1848. It was not a hymn, or song of worship; it was written specifically as a Shaker dance song.
A century after the queer Shaker dances were formalized and the lyrics ‘Tis a gift to be simple were penned, the collaboration between Copland and Graham was born and lauded as groundbreaking. One wonders if she studied their movements for the similarity is striking.
By 1911 that last of the original Shakers were dying. To attend a funeral of a Shaker one would think it was anything but. The funeral was an important religious service in their community and they looked upon death as a joyful occasion. Funerals were attended happily and with smiles. The women wore white along with their strange, tight-fitting bonnets with a frill at the back.
In the former Shaker community in Harvard, Massachusetts lies a unique, one acre burial ground. The tombstone markers of individual Shakers including their death dates have been preserved. Created in 1792 using stone markers, a few of which are still in place today, approximately three hundred Shakers are buried here. In 1879, the town removed most of the stone markers and replaced them with cast iron markers in the unusual shape resembling a lollipop.
Whenever I’m asked where I’m from I always say, ‘Originally’, pause for originally to sink in, ‘from Kentucky’. Compelled to further qualify the answer I add that I’m not from that part of the state - not those eastern mountains where the hillbillies live. The barefoot, gun toting, moonshining, coal dusted people from the hollows - that wasn’t, that isn’t, me.
Then I feel badly about working so hard to convey that not all Kentuckians are the same. Truth is though, there is a sizeable difference in the section of the state where I grew up that lies within a kiss of Tennessee, and the eastern half that borders the Virginias.
The Scots-Irish influence in the Appalachians was prominent in the 1770s when the first flow of settlers blazed across the Wilderness Road, over the Cumberland Mountains and into a region that was too dangerous for most to conquer.
But by the late 1780s the eastern region of Kentucky could be considered a Little Europe where the Ulster-Scots, English, Scottish Highlanders, German Lutherans and the French Huguenots settled.
Eastern Kentuckians have always suffered from dialect prejudice. The twang is strong, and the dialect is a-prefixing heavy. “I’ll come a-moaning and a-crying.” One might hear, “He clomb a tree,” and “I’m agin that idea.”
I’ve scratched my head several times trying to understand this older form of their language, still spoken today. Hilarious really, given that my Southern accent was once as deep as the yellow loam of Mississippi.
It is true that there is a darkness, a bleakness to the mountains raped of their coal.
The most isolated families somehow survive an incredibly harsh life. But from the depths of the desolation rises the beauty of the old bluegrass music, their gift for storytelling and a poignant tradition that is still honoured – a home wake.
This is ‘Home Funeral’, a photo taken by Shelby Lee Adams in 1990.
At a home wake in the mountains, friends and families would file into the home of the deceased from the coal mines, the farms and the factories to pay their respects, and then gathered in the kitchen for sandwiches and coffee. A country wake in the mountains might last days as opposed to what was then the normal practice of a two-night maximum at our funeral home on the other side of the state. In our town, my father was responsible for turning the tide in the length of visitations by encouraging people to sit for one night instead of two. Even though he was heavy on the charm, I’m not sure how he managed that, come to think of it.
I remember only one family that chose to hold a home wake instead of settling down in one of the dark, cool rooms in our funeral parlour. There may have been a few more, but it was very rare by the time I came along. I thought it would require less work for my father, but instead, there seemed to be an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing and detailed organization. The phone rang constantly with calls from the townspeople who were unused to home wakes. Aggravated and confused, ‘Where the hell is he, Frank?’ It came to that.
Mr. Watson died of a heart attack at a frightfully young age. Not yet fifty the day he fell to the floor in a silent heap, our community was shocked by the news. First, my father collected him, brought him to the funeral home and prepared him, then carted him back to his home. The Watsons (not their real name) lived just up the street from us, but my father couldn’t exactly wheel him across Main Street, so the hearse was employed to transport Mr. Watson back and forth. After he was laid out in his living room in a casket, the Watson’s home was open for visitation for a few days until the funeral. During the unusually long wake I pestered my father with questions. Why so young? Why no warning? What is heart disease? And most doggedly, why wasn’t he here with us? Mr. Watson’s family wanted him near, he told me. Couldn’t bear to part with him, not yet.
Because he was fairly well known and suffered a particularly tragic death, Mr. Watson’s family decided to hold the funeral service in the church, a space large enough to deal with the overflow. My father drove to their house once again to transport him to the church, also on Main Street, and then, finally, to the cemetery.
Mr. Watson was the father of a girl who was only a year younger than me and this made his death more memorable to me than his age, or his home wake. She and her older sister were father-less before they graduated high school. After Mr. Watson was buried, the grief took hold of them like a grief I’d never seen.
Mrs. Watson and her daughters were always late to church on Sunday mornings. No matter what time they arrived for the service, they walked the long aisle all the way down to the front, everyone’s eyes upon them, and sat in the second row from the front, which was always, without fail, empty.
When our hell fire and damnation preacher got going, the three females huddled closely together. They inched towards each other, leaving a long empty space at both ends of the pew. Then my friend placed her head on her mother’s shoulder and soon her little body trembled. The shiver turned into silent convulsions. The harder she tried not to make a sound, the more violently her body shook. She remained silent and animated, lost in her grief throughout the service. Their Sunday ritual did not end in just a few weeks; their grief rode them for a very long time.
Both of Mr. Watson’s daughters were brilliant and eventually thrived…until one day the girl who was my friend fell to the floor in a silent heap. Dead. Heart attack. Before she was fifty.
Funerals used to be so simple. They were never called a Celebration of Life, or a memorial service. Just funerals. Tom’s funeral. Jane’s funeral. As a child I never said, "You can’t come over to play today because we’re having a celebration of Mr. Slater’s life."
It never looked like a celebration and it never sounded like a celebration.
In 1888, when the successful novelist and phenomenal social reformist Mary Ward buried her mother in the Lake District, she called upon a group in Ambleside ‘who form a little society for performing music at funerals’ to play a hymn, some organ music and the ‘Death March’. She thought the ceremony was beautiful, simple and peaceful.
For the sixteen years I lived in our funeral home the soft tones of the Hammond organ rose above the quiet chatter and hypnotized me and whatever audience the day brought. From that efficient music box poured the notes of one hymn after another.
Our town was seeped in religion. A plethora of Southern Baptist churches outnumbered the one Presbyterian, the one Catholic, and the one Episcopalian church and thus defined the region.
Holy Roller churches and their glittery loud services sprang up overnight.
Tent revivals dotted the fields in the summer.
I always thought it might be nice to change the repertoire. I wondered how my father would have reacted if a widow insisted that he use Chattanooga Choo Choo to open the service because it was her husband’s favourite. Or, could he substitute That Old Black Magic for The Old Rugged Cross? But there was no chance that a funeral service in our town would host anything other than a hymn played simply.
The melodies of How Great Thou Art, Shall We Gather at the River and When the Roll is Called Up Yonder were played on the smooth keys of that organ over and over… And over. So I’m sure I’ll be forgiven for a certain numbness that washed over me when after a few years I no longer heard them. They remained in the background like a ghost sound and one refrain dissolved into another, into another.
When I moved away, returning only for short spurts, then not at all, the world changed and funerals and their music changed with it.
In 2006 a survey of five thousand Britains revealed their vote for the year’s
Top 10 Requested Funeral Songs:
Goodbye My Lover - James Blunt
Angels - Robbie Williams
I’ve Had the Time of My Life - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
Pie Jesu - Requiem
Candle in the Wind - Elton John
With or Without You - U2
Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton
Every Breath You Take - The Police
Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers
Moving right along to the
Top Country Funeral Songs of 2011
Dancing with the Angels - Monk and Neagel
Angels Among Us - Alabama
I Can Only Imagine - Mercy Me
There You’ll Be - Faith Hill
When I Get Where I’m Going - Brad Paisley
Go Rest High on that Mountain - Vince Gill
Daddy’s Hands - Holly Dunn
Holes in the Floor of Heaven - Steve Wariner
If I Had Only Known - Reba McEntire
My Wish - Rascal Flatts
‘Glee’ Season 2 Episode 21, Funeral Song List
Try A Little Tenderness - Otis Redding
My Man – Barbra Streisand
Pure Imagination - from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Some People - Gypsy
Back to Black - Amy Winehouse Death makes its own music.
Once a piece of music is heard at a funeral, whatever the tune may be, is it ever heard in quite the same way again?
“She’s the one with the bun who looks like a grandma,” said the manicurist of the St. Regis hotel in Manhattan. The jaded employees of the grand hotel barely noticed the train of celebrities who normally paraded through reception and they were blasé about the international heads of states who’d slept there. But when Pauline Tabor waddled in on a bright March day, the manicurist and bellhop bounded up the stairs to catch a glimpse of one of the South’s most famous madams.
Pauline’s story began sixty-eight years before her trip to New York. Roughly thirty miles north of the small community where we lived in my father’s funeral home, a two-lane road stretched past tobacco farms, cow pastures, a slew of churches, and the surviving buildings that the Shakers once owned, to Bowling Green, Kentucky, a sleepy little university town.
Pauline was born to strict church-going parents in 1905. They made sure her virginity remained intact until her marriage at the age of 18 to a rogue who gave her two sons and nothing more except headaches and heartache from his carousing. Soon she was a divorced woman, a Sunday school teacher no less, with no means of support. She and her two children moved back into her childhood home. With her parents’ business swiftly failing thanks to the trickle down effect of the 1929 stock market crash, Pauline needed to contribute.
She knocked on the doors of the few commercial streets in Bowling Green, but faced the prospect of no work as the Great Depression deepened. She tried door-to-door selling, but housewives tried to steal her merchandise, dogs bit her, lonely men at home propositioned her, and the commission checks were always late.
With the help of an older man with whom she had a longstanding platonic relationship, she found her way to Louisville, Kentucky where she worked in a tobacco company until she was stricken with typhoid. For six months she languished and recovered so slowly that she had to call upon her parents to take her back to Bowling Green. Due to “damaged glands” she ballooned to two hundred and fifteen pounds, (15 5/14 stone) a burden upon her 5-foot, 6-inch frame.
Almost penniless, again Pauline slogged along with samples of cosmetics and silk stockings to the doors of Bowling Green’s residents. One day while tired and hungry she decided to treat herself to lunch in a downtown hotel. After she dined, the bellhop slipped her a note from a gentleman who had noticed her arrival. Pauline met him in his room and asked him for ten dollars. He responded, “Honey, I don’t want to buy you. I just want to rent you for a while. Five bucks and nothing more.” The deal was agreed and thirty minutes later she left the hotel “not feeling a bit unclean or guilty” and realized there was money to be made.
Miss May, the madam of a brothel in Clarksville, Tennessee kindly gave Pauline a two day crash course in whorehouse etiquette, health and safety, and how and when to grease palms of the people who ran the town. In addition, for the very short time Pauline remained a prostitute, Miss May taught her how to attract men in spite of her girth and lack of beauty.
Bad luck followed her in her first attempts to set up a brothel. One house was destroyed by fire, another by a flood from which she was rescued by a man who floated by her house in a raft. Finally, in 1944 she settled into her most famous home, a red brick house on Clay Street located daringly close to downtown Bowling Green.
When the house opened at six o’clock each evening Pauline expected routine. She inspected the girls’ grooming, cranked up the jukebox and opened the door. She required the girls to be flirtatious, seductive and to attract as many men as possible. If any one of the girls couldn’t muster enough bravado on a regular basis, she was out.
The turnover for each client was about twenty to thirty minutes. Money was collected first and stored safely away. The prostitute then carefully washed the man with soap and water. A certain amount of foreplay was included, the job was performed, the girl washed the man again, and herself, then they both dressed and went back downstairs.
A prostitute could service two to three men an hour. On busy nights, and most of them were, she could turn twenty to thirty tricks. When moralists accused prostitutes of being lazy, Pauline responded with, “Try working a twelve-hour shift in a busy house sometime.” No matter how busy the evening, Pauline knew exactly how much she was due. She split the proceeds fifty-fifty with each girl and any who tried to cheat her were swiftly kicked out the door, no second chances.
Every man who appeared at her door was screened before they entered and before they left. She measured drunkenness, meanness and mental illness; apparently she could tell by the look in their eyes. She owned revolvers and shotguns and threatened a deserving man if he was unarmed. If he was carrying and robbed her, she waited until he was in his car, then shot up his car aiming to damage.
Her clients were millionaires, politicians, policemen, lawmakers, teachers from the university, students and countless husbands whose marriages Pauline is certain she saved. One of her clients was known as the Peeping Tom Judge who paid Pauline for wardrobe space. For two years one of the prostitutes agreed to let him spy on her while he sat folded up in the chifforobe. One night, in a moment of excitement, he almost fell out. Pauline was furious and revoked his privilege forever.
Pauline’s girls were given beautiful clothes, health checks once a week and allowed one week off a month as long as they didn’t flaunt or haunt the downtown area. They were housewives looking to earn enough to feed their children, students paying their way through college, women earning seed money to set up legitimate businesses, and beauties from all corners of the South. Her rules included no lesbians, because in her experience they were jealous and fought too much, and no falling in love with clients. She offered personal advice, foremost of which was to make as much money as quickly as possible, save it, and then get out of the business before it was too late, before they became too old and the job “damaged their souls”. She was a strong advocate for legalizing and regulating prostitution.
Pregnancies occurred no matter the diligence in preventing them. Pauline’s best and most trusted abortionist was a black woman who used a bit of proper medicine, but relied most heavily on the folk cures handed down to her from her ancestors who were slaves.
Pauline was perhaps the only madam of her era who was required to end a strike of prostitutes. She hired a new girl who was homely. This flat-chested woman braided her hair in long plaits, and did nothing to hide her freckles, relying instead on a clean, scrubbed look. She felt that to compete with Pauline’s beautiful and seductive women she had to maximize her Lolita image. Customers flocked to her and virtually ignored the others. The girls went on strike until Pauline fired the woman to keep the peace.
Pauline particularly enjoyed the wealthy and lusty oilmen who reserved the house for a couple of days when they were in town. They spent freely and enjoyed themselves, unlike the politicians of which she said ‘didn’t know how to have a good time’. She allowed a few customers to fulfil their desire to be whipped and closed the house to other clients during marathon nights of screaming. A well-known Kentucky horse trainer requested an evening of horseplay, tied to the bedposts. At his command, he was whipped into such a violent frenzy that he broke free. When he got out of hand Pauline ran in and smashed him over the head with a heavy water pitcher. She charged him a fortune.
The madam indulged her love of antiques and decorated with Tiffany lamps, chandeliers, Gallé cameo glass and heavy ornate furniture. Her most valuable piece was a cabinet made by two brothers in Ohio County, KY in the mid 1700’s. Her beautiful bedrooms were always freshly wallpapered, every room a different colour and each room was meticulously colour coordinated, including the sheets. She created lush lawns and gardens. In the 1970s her antiques were valued at $500,000.
So it was all good, dirty fun and games. No. Not quite. You can’t run a notorious house of prostitution in the town in which you were born without tears and suffering. Bowling Green was only about 20,000 people strong in the 1940s. Downtown was merely more than a pretty park square with a smattering of shops lining a few blocks. Any friendships from her childhood, marriage, or life as a young woman were over. Her sons were sent to their grandparents for extended stays and suffered ridicule and embarrassment. Pauline Tabor couldn’t walk down the street without people pointing, staring, hissing and being subjected to punishing remarks from the group she called the ”Holy Joes”.
Money helped. When the hypocrites came to her in secret and asked for cash handouts she never rebuked them. Her charity knew no colour boundaries. Black families were grateful for the food, clothing and toys she provided at Christmas. Her own family members were not shy of asking favours. “When I first when into the business I would meet some of my family on the street and they would duck into a door to keep from speaking to me. But when I started making a little money they would go out of their way to see how sweet they could say, ‘Hi Pauline’. That’s when I started ducking in doors.”
Pauline retired a wealthy woman in 1968. She bought a 148-acre farm and became one of the nation’s first organic farmers. She even married again for a short time and after his death said that her bookmaker husband was “marvellous” and spoiled her.
Law enforcement and Holy Joes had tried to run her out of business for ages, but it was urban renewal that tore down the red brick house. When Pauline found out that a few men were selling the bricks, her anger led her to action. “If a couple of shrewdies figure to make a killing on the bricks of my house, by God I’ll not be upstaged. I’ll tell stories that bricks can’t voice.”
She did just that in her book, PAULINE’S – MEMOIRS OF THE MADAM ON CLAY STREET. She never named names, but told the truth, sometimes brutally, in a jolly and entertaining voice. The book was published in 1971 in a regular hardback edition. Also published was a special numbered edition covered in red velvet and enhanced with a brass lock and key. Years later I found a dusty old copy of the velvet book and read it in one sitting, drop-jawed and blushing.
After the publication of her book, the producers of The Dick Cavett Show flew Pauline to New York for an appearance on his nation wide television show. The staff at the St. Regis said she wasn’t famous - she was infamous. The producers settled her now 240 pound frame in a rocking chair, which suggested to the audience that a sweet old grandmother was going to entertain them with a few homespun tales of the South. Imagine the crew's, guests' and television audience’s reactions when Pauline frankly and explicitly described her forty-year career as a madam.
If there was one thing my father taught me it was that it doesn’t matter how big your life has been, or how small, how celebrated, or quiet. It comes to this.


What’s Greek history without distortions, inaccuracies, and falsehoods?
In the western Aegean, in a narrow pass by the Gulf of Malis, 300 Spartans and their Hellenic allies, led by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), stand defiantly against the invading armies of King Xerxes, circa 480 BC. As wave after wave of wrathful invaders attack Leonidas’ stubborn hoplites,1 the Spartans hold their ground and grind their enemies. After a few days of gory, grimy fighting, the Spartans are betrayed, overwhelmed, and slaughtered.
With 300, director/co-writer Zack Snyder portrays the battle of Thermopylae in horrific, gruesome fashion. But rather than use a historical approach to tell this story, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, Snyder opts for two poetic genres — allegory and heroic epic — to frame his film. Though 300 has been popularly received, academic critics, particularly historians, have decried Snyder’s embellishments and his omission of certain historical facts, challenging his perspective of Spartan life and questioning his depiction of the battle. They argue that Snyder’s use of historical materials to construct a periodic narrative is illegitimate because “history” neither supports nor authorizes his interpretation.2
The problem with this perspective is the lack of literary contextualization. Film and literature are different kinds of texts in relation to historical writing, and these historians clearly wish to rescue history from foolish storytellers. The problem is that historical events do not stand free from human narratives. In fact, oral poetry’s role in the creation of historiography is quite profound. In early antiquity, poetry met both artistic and intellectual needs to preserve knowledge, and the rhythmic patterns and other mnemonic systems made knowledge fixed (in stories) and easier to recall because they were often cast in poetic narratives.
Though oral knowledge represents a culture’s effort to preserve its traditions, this knowledge was also vulnerable to revision or loss. No doubt, historians are concerned about the veracity of historical claims, but they often fail to affirm the role poetry and sophistic rhetoric played in the creation of the historiography of Hellas, for without poetic structures or rhetorical techniques, vast amounts of knowledge would have been lost.3
Snyder frames 300 within the ancient poetic tradition, one in which a bard allegorizes a story of Leonidas, his life, and the battle itself. Here, the narrator is the poet Dilios (David Wenham), and he is one of Leonidas’ hoplites. His narrative is expository and dramatic, but, most of all, highly rhetorical. His verse-making is a blending of prose and poetry meant to penetrate the hearts of his audience and galvanize their passions, for his listeners are an army of pan-Hellenic warriors ready to charge the Persian perimeter at Plataea a year after Leonidas’ defeat.
This war poet-as-teacher makes a number of arguments about civic responsibility, pride, and ethics.4 He even makes a fortiori arguments using patriotic themes and ancient oaths to illustrate the importance of sacrifice and justice.5
This poetic tale — even with the embellishments — is what is called an epideicticportrait, one in which an audience learns of the virtues of a person and his life. One probable reason why Snyder chose a poet to tell this story is because the poet was a potent persuader, a credible authority, and a moral guide to warriors in early antiquity.6
In this heroic narrative, Dilios employs a range of tropes (particularly metonymy) to simplify yet illustrate the political, cultural, and moral contrasts between the west and the east. Here, we must remember that Sparta was an oral society that relied heavily on the memories of its citizens to communicate its traditions and histories. Particularly, right before battle, troops would be reminded of their previous fights to rouse their passions.
However, modern historians often find this part of the ancient world deeply problematic. Why? For one, academic historians try to portray history from a value-neutral viewpoint, so ancient oral accounts (that were later transcribed) are too subjective for their standards. But too often we forget that our modern notions of historiography are the offspring of an ancient Hellenic culture in which philosophy, poetics, and rhetoric constituted important social activities. The dynamic tension created among the ancient interplay of emotive speaking, narrative-making, and history scripting represents the norms of another culture, norms that are often at odds with modern standards for historiography.
As we listen to our bardic storyteller, the film unfolds in allegorical and heroic fashion. In this soldier’s tale, the world is dichotomized between heroes and monsters — between the hypermasculinized Spartans, with their echoing voices and intense stares, and the heavily gothicized and imperious Persians. Like most allegories, both the heroes and enemies are idealized and caricaturized. Snyder contextualizes this allegory with modern perspectives, all in a baroque mixture that pits civilization against its zombified enemies. Within these contrasts are some potential problems with the narrative, but more on that later.
Dilios portrays the Persian army, led by the goliath-sized but svelte Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), as an exotically multicultural yet highly grotesque array of animals who are enslaved by Xerxes’ realpolitik. While the God-on-this-Earth Xerxes prostrates his slaves and sits in the rear, his soldiers charge the phalanx’s whirlwind of swords and spears. By sharp contrast, Leonidas fights alongside his troops because he is grounded by many ethical beliefs and civic codes, one of which is that battlefield conduct brings judgment on the entire city-state. Because Spartan citizens closely identify with their polis, or city-state, their ethos is collective, an ethos engrained in the lockstep formations of the phalanx and the chain of command that orders the battlefield.
Within this disciplinary sphere is knowledge of how a group of warriors hang together against overwhelming forces. The film explains the importance of the phalanx and illustrates compellingly some of its martial strategies. Because each soldier relies on the other for his life, he must willingly transform his individual skills to create and maintain group cohesion in the killing zone. In a key scene, the importance of this belief is emphasized when Leonidas, who believes that one weak member weakens the entire group, rejects the help of a Spartan outcast because of his physical limitations and lack of battlefield experience. Despondent, this disfigured outcast is then seduced and bribed by Xerxes into betraying the Spartans.
In many ways, this sequence portrays Spartan culture as an exclusive society, open only to its citizens, in which social power flows from group dynamics. For Snyder, the phalanx is emblematic of Spartan life, but we begin to see this life as something more than a construct for the privileged when we see Xerxes and his army in less than human terms. Grotesque in their makeup and swarmish in their movements, the Persians do not merely want to preserve their own traditions; they wish to devour people and consume cultures. The garish and ghoulish Xerxes doesn’t desire to persuade a hostile audience — he hungers for their servitude or death.
300‘s allegorical universe is simple, even oversimplified. Snyder celebrates certain western values and condemns eastern hegemony because he wants his audience to understand what’s at stake — the fate of western civilization. His sympathies are clear because the Spartans, even with their overdetermined masculinity, look more human and act more human than their serpentine enemies. This portrait illustrates how Spartan heroes prosper in a variety of western virtues — civic, moral, physical — while Xerxes bewitches his followers with his exotic mysticism.
Although Spartan culture esteems public honor and civic service as its noblest of virtues, there are severities in Spartan communal life that are dramatized early: they practiced infanticide, as imperfect infants were routinely killed as a matter of policy, and boys had to survive the wild alone to earn their promotions. Although these points stress the draconian nature of life in an armed camp of professional soldiers, they become concessions (and thematically ancillary) to Snyder’s larger argument regarding the greatness of the public sphere in which Spartan life is conducted. Through conversations, meetings, and councils, warriors and their leaders compete to give good advice and compose persuasive speeches on how to live their lives.
In addition, Snyder couches his themes in an epic manner. Certainly, the battles are grand in shape and scope, and the consequences of this invasion are significant. But Snyder is also interested in illustrating a conflict between competing definitions of battlefield valor. True to historical accounts, Spartans based their strength on the phalanx. At their most effective, the phalanx easily plowed its enemies, piling up the dead quickly.
Quite interestingly, Snyder organically contrasts the phalanx with the one-on-one Achillean fighting style his audiences are used to seeing. For instance, when Spartan soldiers break the rank-and-file and charge ahead, they expose themselves and endanger others. Although their individual fighting skills are quite remarkable, the Spartans begin to fall when they fight outside of the phalanx. The manner in which they perish may go unnoticed to the causal observer until the Captain’s son is beheaded when he stands apart from the group.
I don’t know if this thematic point is Snyder or Miller’s, but 300 chooses the Spartan method of combat over the Achillean method as the means by which valor is earned. For the Spartans, personal arête (the goodness or excellence of a thing or person) must be subsumed to the greater excellence and honor of the group. However, the final image of the Spartans is as a wave of sword-wielding individuals and not as a phalanx. Unfortunately, this lasting portrait undercuts Snyder’s argument that the phalanx is emblematic of Spartan life.
Nevertheless, 300‘s epic approach emphasizes the best possible ideals of Spartan life. We see soldiers sacrificing their lives to defend their land; we see a classical culture that allows women (or a noble woman) a public voice; we see the free inquiry of debate in council and even witness the problems associated with political sophistry. Because Snyder uses allegory to create thematic clarity, his poetic choices mean he will distort and even omit bleaker and significant historical truisms.7
But what is pan-Hellenic history without distortions and inaccuracies? Most modern historians have a deeply ambivalent understanding of classical narratives. In this era, the emerging art of historiography has been influenced by two traditions — poetics and rhetoric — both of which are steeped in oral systems of memorization and communication. For Hellenic storytellers, the choice to rely on poetic embellishment or rhetorical training was a learned one, for the accumulated tradition of myths, legends, and speeches was all that the early Greeks had. Homeric bards, for instance, used poetry to sing heroic tales not so much to preserve historical facts but to teach cultural values. Herodotus walked the fault line between fact and fiction to create his version of reality, and even the empiricist Thucydides (student of the rhetorician Antiphon) warned his audiences about his historical embellishments.
This juxtaposition of fact and fiction was part of the norm of early Hellenic historiography. As Sylvie Honigman noted, “Chronological and factual inaccuracies, the blending of fact and fiction — none of these would have undermined the reliability of the narrative in the eyes of the author’s contemporary readers” (Honigman 66). Early historiographers relied on a creative and dialectical synthesis of fact and fiction to weave their narratives because historical storytelling was meant to entertain and persuade. Because of these circumstances, when modern historians focus on early antiquity, they encounter a confusing and ambiguous world characterized by mysticism and legend, prophecy and drama, gossip and truth, fact and fiction, advocacy and argument.
But the reason why the poet-at-heart Snyder embraces allegory is because he is trying to evoke the pathos of his audience, so he never lets us forget we are watching a quasi-poetic narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He uses allegory to put into narrative form some artistic and political truths that were never fully meant to demonstrate pan-Hellenic history and its conflicts with the east because his goal is to persuade his audience to the virtues of western civic life. Snyder’s approach is, of course, more comic book poetics than a documentary of early Hellas, but he does make some interesting points about ancient historiography.
One problem with the narrative is that Leonidas sends Dilios away (to communicate messages to Sparta and his wife, Queen Gorgo) before the decisive battle ever occurs. However, Dilios manages to retell Leonidas’ death in clear fashion. This blunder would seem to undermine the credibility of the narrative, but Snyder’s point is that this kind of transition between the facts at hand and a poetic retelling of events serves to underscore a larger point that the poetic oratory, and language itself, enacts history not just as a fact-based compendium but as a highly instructive and persuasive enterprise — one in which fact and fiction (or rhetoric and poetics) exist dialectically. In this sense, Snyder is honoring a classical approach to historiography.
The film also tries to come to terms with this tension (the blending of fact and fiction) by identifying oral memory and history as two converging sources of valid knowledge. In this sense, oral history can present valid arguments about episteme, but this historical knowledge is prone to amplification and fallacy because of its oral nature. In300, Dilios’ verses are distilled from the spirit of poetic storytelling and rhetorical techniques, both of which are legitimate and important parts of Hellenic historiography. And this perspective is the basis of the narrative of 300, one that critics and historians have grossly overlooked or purposely ignored.
Complimenting this poetic perspective is Snyder’s baroque approach to dramatically blending illustration or “painterly effects,” CGI and live action. This baroqueness is a prominent part of the film’s style, a style with highly idealized details. What makes his aesthetic approach baroque is his synthesis of classical if not rhetorical ideas with the modern effects of cinematic artistry. Interestingly, though Snyder seems to develop an empathic understanding of Spartan culture, his approach to filmmaking is not at all Spartan-like.
Lavish, excessive, and often self-indulgent, 300‘s moral universe embraces a highly elaborative aesthetic style to make simple ethical arguments, yet this baroqueness does compliment Snyder’s more interesting scenes regarding collective action. For many critics, Snyder’s historical distortions and allegorical embellishments create aesthetic dissonance; however, I find Snyder’s baroque view of classical storytelling rhetorically appealing — and persuasive.
Borza, Eugene N. “Spartans Overwhelmed at Thermopylae, Again.” Archeology: A Publication of the Archeological Foundation of America. 22 March 2007. 11 April 2007.http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/300.html.
Finley, M.I. The World of Odysseus. Intro. Bernard Knox. New York: Viking, 1982.
Hanson, Victor David. “History and the Movie ‘300.’” Private Papers. 11 October 2006. 23 June 2007. http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101106.html.
Honigman, Sylvie. The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: A Study in the Narrative of the ‘Letter of Aristeas.’ London: Routledge, 2003.
Lendon, J. E. Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Lytle, Ephraim. “Sparta? No. This Is Madness: An Expert Assesses the Gruesome New Epic.” 11 March 2007. 15 April 2007. Toronto Star.http://www.thestar.com/article/190493.
- A heavily armed infantry soldier of ancient Greece. [↩]
- Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto, in his “Sparta? No. This Is Madness,” attacks 300 for its idealization of Spartan life. Strangely, Lytle criticizes the caricaturized characters but doesn’t mention the allegorical framework of the narrative. Remarkably, he concedes that stories often make liberal use of the facts, but he goes on to discuss how 300 abuses history. In an equally problematic analysis of the film, Eugene N. Borza, professor emeritus of ancient history at Penn State, also doesn’t address the poetic narrative. Although he concedes that judging the film based on a historical analysis would do the film a disservice (because the film is more interested in promoting comic book heroics than adhering to the known facts), he goes on to point out historical and geographical inaccuracies of the script and production anyway. Furthermore, he acknowledges the caricaturizing, but he does not explicitly affirm the film’s allegorical framework. He then addresses the speaking style of the characters but does so in a somewhat decontextualized or anachronistic fashion. Rather than critique the narration in relation to known poetic and rhetorical narratives of early antiquity, he situates 300‘s rhetorical style with the Graeco-Roman Plutarch. Finally, even the usually alert Victor David Hanson fails to inspire in his defense of Snyder, praising the film for honoring the spirit of Hellas rather than focusing on a defense that contextualizes the narrative (important, since the Greeks invented narratives). [↩]
- In our era, many historians are still caught between the binary that history is “objective” and historical literature is “subjective.” [↩]
- We can be certain that Dilios, with his poetic omniscience, represents Snyder. [↩]
- Snyder’s a fortiori arguments are directed at us. [↩]
- M. I. Finley makes this point in The World of Odysseus. [↩]
- Historians and critics have gleaned 300 for inaccuracies and glaring omissions. And there are plenty. For instance, Sparta wasn’t a free society in the modern sense, for Spartans did have helots, serfs who were neither slaves nor free men. Initially, the Hellenic soldiers under Leonidas numbered more in the thousands than 300 to 600 as the film portrays. Leonidas, by historical accounts, probably died much sooner in battle than portrayed. There is also some debate regarding Spartan helmets. The historian J. E. Lendon, in his excellent Soldiers and Ghosts,argues that Spartan hoplites in the fifth century were known to have preferred conic helmets (pilos) that didn’t cover their faces. Literally, the soldiers wished to fight their foes face-to-face. In 300, their helmets are more Corinthian. Why? Though the Spartans may not have switched to conic helmets until later in the century, I suspect such helmets crowning masculine warriors may provoke unintended laughter. But we must also contend with any number of titanic statues of Leonidas donning a Corinthian helmet. There are, of course, linguistic anachronisms, such as use of the words hell and the term Greece itself. Never mind the British and Australian accents of these English-speaking Grecians and Persians. These particular artistic choices speak more to the needs of contemporary western audiences than to a director’s commitment to authentically recreating a historical period, more recently attempted in The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. These embellishments, which exist in relation to many of the historical truisms in the film, serve to illustrate how literary or cinematic history works as a partner to historiography. For historians, I suspect their ire is stoked because literary history merely stands in for the real thing itself — history. Much worse, these kinds of representations are often false or illusory substitutes for the truth that historical writing rather than literary history can best represent. [↩]


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|Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts|
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script. Writing is usually recorded onto a durable medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may also be used, such as writing on a computer display, on a blackboard, in sand, or by skywriting.
The general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category. In the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters (or letter pair/groups) represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora. In a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and abugidas or alphasyllabaries, with each character representing a consonant–vowel pairing. Alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols.
Most systems will typically have an ordering of its symbol elements so that groups of them can be coded into larger clusters like words or acronyms (generally lexemes), giving rise to many more possibilities (permutations) in meanings than the symbols can convey by themselves. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these smaller groupings (sometimes referred to by the generic term 'character strings') in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, or expressed orally. A special set of symbols known as punctuation is used to aid in structure and organization of many writing systems and can be used to help capture nuances and variations in the message's meaning that are communicated verbally by cues in timing, tone, accent, inflection or intonation. A writing system will also typically have a method for formatting recorded messages that follows the spoken version's rules like its grammar and syntax so that the reader will have the meaning of the intended message accurately preserved.
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a full range of thoughts and ideas. The invention of writing systems, which dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic Era of the late 4th millennium BC, enabled the accurate durable recording of human history in a manner that was not prone to the same types of error to which oral history is vulnerable. Soon after, writing provided a reliable form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for an early form of mass communication.
The creation of a new alphabetic writing system for a language with an existing logographic writing system is called alphabetization, as when the People's Republic of China studied the prospect of alphabetizing the Chinese languages with Latin script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script, and even numbers, although the most common instance of it, converting to Latin script, is usually called romanization.
- 1 General properties
- 2 Basic terminology
- 3 History
- 4 Functional classification
- 5 Graphic classification
- 6 Directionality
- 7 On computers
- 8 See also
- 9 References
- 10 External links
Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a writing system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some symbols on information signs, such as the symbols for male and female, are also not language related, but can grow to become part of language if they are often used in conjunction with other language elements. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, but are often used in writing and thus must be considered part of writing systems.
Every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven and slow. Once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. One of the great benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language.
All writing systems require:
- at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script;
- at least one set of rules and conventions (orthography) understood and shared by a community, which assigns meaning to the base elements (graphemes), their ordering and relations to one another;
- at least one language (generally spoken) whose constructions are represented and can be recalled by the interpretation of these elements and rules;
- some physical means of distinctly representing the symbols by application to a permanent or semi-permanent medium, so they may be interpreted (usually visually, but tactile systems have also been devised).
In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines. Thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field.
Text, writing, reading and orthography
The generic term text refers to an instance of written or spoken material with the latter having been transcribed in some way. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing, and the act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading. Orthography refers to the method and rules of observed writing structure (literal meaning, "correct writing"), and particularly for alphabetic systems, includes the concept of spelling.
Grapheme and phoneme
A grapheme is a specific base unit of a writing system. Graphemes are the minimally significant elements which taken together comprise the set of "building blocks" out of which texts made up of one or more writing systems may be constructed, along with rules of correspondence and use. The concept is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. For example, in the Latin-based writing system of standard contemporary English, examples of graphemes include the majuscule and minuscule forms of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet (corresponding to various phonemes), marks of punctuation (mostly non-phonemic), and a few other symbols such as those for numerals (logograms for numbers).
An individual grapheme may be represented in a wide variety of ways, where each variation is visually distinct in some regard, but all are interpreted as representing the "same" grapheme. These individual variations are known as allographs of a grapheme (compare with the term allophone used in linguistic study). For example, the minuscule letter a has different allographs when written as a cursive, block, or typed letter. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and following graphemes in the text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting.
Glyph, sign and character
The terms glyph, sign and character are sometimes used to refer to a grapheme. Common usage varies from discipline to discipline; compare cuneiform sign, Maya glyph, Chinese character. The glyphs of most writing systems are made up of lines (or strokes) and are therefore called linear, but there are glyphs in non-linear writing systems made up of other types of marks, such as Cuneiform and Braille.
Complete and partial writing systems
Writing systems may be regarded as complete according to the extent to which they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system is limited in what it can convey.
Writing systems, languages and conceptual systems
Writing systems can be independent from languages, one can have multiple writing systems for a language, e.g., Hindi and Urdu; and one can also have one writing system for multiple languages, e.g., the Arabic script. Chinese characters were also borrowed by variant countries as their early writing systems, e.g., the early writing systems of Vietnamese language until the beginning of the 20th century.
- Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BC
- Vinča symbols (Tărtăria tablets), c.5300 BC
- Early Indus script, c. 3500 BC.
- Nsibidi script, c. before 500 AD
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic[dubious ] of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with 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. Chinese script are probably an independent invention, because there is no evidence of contact between China and the literate civilizations of the Near East, and because of the distinct differences between the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to logography and phonetic representation.
A hieroglyphic writing system used by pre-colonial Mi'kmaq, that was observed by missionaries from the 17th to 19th centuries, is thought to have developed independently. Although, there is some debate over whether or not this was a fully formed system or just a series of mnemonic pictographs.
It is thought that the first consonantal alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed by Semitic tribes in the Sinai-peninsula (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, the most common and basic one is a broad division into three categories: logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely. The term complex system is sometimes used to describe those where the admixture makes classification problematic. Modern linguists regard such approaches, including Diringer's
- pictographic script
- ideographic script
- analytic transitional script
- phonetic script
- alphabetic script
as too simplistic, often considering the categories to be incomparable. Hill split writing into three major categories of linguistic analysis, one of which covers discourses and is not usually considered writing proper:
- discourse system
- morphemic writing system, e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Maya, Chinese
- phonemic writing system
Sampson draws a distinction between semasiography and glottography
- semasiography, relating visible marks to meaning directly without reference to any specific spoken language
- glottography, using visible marks to represent forms of a spoken language
- logography, representing a spoken language by assigning distinctive visible marks to linguistic elements of André Martinet's "first articulation" (Martinet 1949), i.e. morphemes or words
- phonography, achieving the same goal by assigning marks to elements of the "second articulation", e.g. phonemes, syllables
- syllabic systems
- pure syllabic, e.g. Linear B, Yi, Kana, Cherokee
- morpho-syllabic, e.g. Sumerian, Chinese, Mayan
- morpho-consonantal, e.g. Egyptian
- pure consonantal, e.g. Phoenician
- pure phonemic, e.g. Greek
- morpho-phonemic, e.g. English
- syllabic systems
Faber categorizes phonographic writing by two levels, linearity and coding:
- logographic, e.g. Chinese, Ancient Egyptian
|Type||Each symbol represents||Example|
|Syllabic||syllable or mora||Japanese kana|
|Alphabetic||phoneme (consonant or vowel)||Latin alphabet|
|Abugida||phoneme (consonant+vowel)||Indian Devanāgarī|
|Abjad||phoneme (consonant)||Arabic alphabet|
|Featural||phonetic feature||Korean hangul|
A logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most traditional Chinese characters are classified as logograms.
As each character represents a single word (or, more precisely, a morpheme), many logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are major disadvantages of logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, the ability to communicate across languages only works for the closely related varieties of Chinese, as differences in syntax reduce the crosslinguistic portability of a given logographic system. Japanese uses Chinese logograms extensively in its writing systems, with most of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings. However, the grammatical differences between Japanese and Chinese are significant enough that a long Chinese text is not readily understandable to a Japanese reader without any knowledge of basic Chinese grammar, though short and concise phrases such as those on signs and newspaper headlines are much easier to comprehend.
While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems, many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the Hindu-Arabic numerals: everyone who uses those symbols understands what 1 means whether they call it one, eins, uno, yi, ichi, ehad, ena, or jedan. Other western logograms include the ampersand &, used for and, the at sign @, used in many contexts for at, the percent sign % and the many signs representing units of currency ($, ¢, €, £, ¥ and so on.)
Logograms are sometimes called ideograms, a word that refers to symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas, but linguists avoid this use, as Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and a phonetic complement element that represents the pronunciation. Some nonlinguists distinguish between lexigraphy and ideography, where symbols in lexigraphies represent words and symbols in ideographies represent words or morphemes.
The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters have been used with varying degrees of modification in varieties of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mayan writing system are also systems with certain logographic features, although they have marked phonetic features as well and are no longer in current use. Vietnamese speakers switched to the Latin alphabet in the 20th century and the use of Chinese characters in Korean is increasingly rare. The Japanese writing system includes several distinct forms of writing including logography.
Syllabic systems: syllabary
Another type of writing system with systematic syllabic linear symbols, the abugidas, is discussed below as well.
As logographic writing systems use a single symbol for an entire word, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, or just a vowel alone.
In a "true syllabary", there is no systematic graphic similarity between phonetically related characters (though some do have graphic similarity for the vowels). That is, the characters for /ke/, /ka/ and /ko/ have no similarity to indicate their common "k" sound (voiceless velar plosive). More recent creations such as the Cree syllabary embody a system of varying signs, which can best be seen when arranging the syllabogram set in an onset–coda or onset–rime table.
Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. The English language, on the other hand, allows complex syllable structures, with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, making it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. To write English using a syllabary, every possible syllable in English would have to have a separate symbol, and whereas the number of possible syllables in Japanese is around 100, in English there are approximately 15,000 to 16,000.
However, syllabaries with much larger inventories do exist. The Yi script, for example, contains 756 different symbols (or 1,164, if symbols with a particular tone diacritic are counted as separate syllables, as in Unicode). The Chinese script, when used to write Middle Chinese and the modern varieties of Chinese, also represents syllables, and includes separate glyphs for nearly all of the many thousands of syllables in Middle Chinese; however, because it primarily represents morphemes and includes different characters to represent homophonous morphemes with different meanings, it is normally considered a logographic script rather than a syllabary.
Other languages that use true syllabaries include Mycenaean Greek (Linear B) and Indigenous languages of the Americas such as Cherokee. Several languages of the Ancient Near East used forms of cuneiform, which is a syllabary with some non-syllabic elements.
Segmental systems: Alphabets
An alphabet is a small set of letters (basic written symbols), each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet.
The first type of alphabet that was developed was the abjad. An abjad is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant. Abjads differ from other alphabets in that they have characters only for consonantal sounds. Vowels are not usually marked in abjads.
All known abjads (except maybe Tifinagh) belong to the Semitic family of scripts, and derive from the original Northern Linear Abjad. The reason for this is that Semitic languages and the related Berber languages have a morphemic structure which makes the denotation of vowels redundant in most cases.
Some abjads, like Arabic and Hebrew, have markings for vowels as well. However, they use them only in special contexts, such as for teaching. Many scripts derived from abjads have been extended with vowel symbols to become full alphabets. Of these, the most famous example is the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician abjad. This has mostly happened when the script was adapted to a non-Semitic language.
The term abjad takes its name from the old order of the Arabic alphabet's consonants 'alif, bā', jīm, dāl, though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic. "Abjad" is still the word for alphabet in Arabic, Malay and Indonesian.
An abugida is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.
Thus, in an abugida there may or may not be a sign for "k" with no vowel, but also one for "ka" (if "a" is the inherent vowel), and "ke" is written by modifying the "ka" sign in a way that is consistent with how one would modify "la" to get "le". In many abugidas the modification is the addition of a vowel sign, but other possibilities are imaginable (and used), such as rotation of the basic sign, addition of diacritical marks and so on.
The contrast with "true syllabaries" is that the latter have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity. The graphic similarity of most abugidas comes from the fact that they are derived from abjads, and the consonants make up the symbols with the inherent vowel and the new vowel symbols are markings added on to the base symbol.
In the Ge'ez script, for which the linguistic term abugida was named, the vowel modifications do not always appear systematic, although they originally were more so. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics can be considered abugidas, although they are rarely thought of in those terms. The largest single group of abugidas is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia.
The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Ge'ez script used in some contexts. It was borrowed from Ethiopian languages as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels.
A featural script represents finer detail than an alphabet. Here symbols do not represent whole phonemes, but rather the elements (features) that make up the phonemes, such as voicing or its place of articulation. Theoretically, each feature could be written with a separate letter; and abjads or abugidas, or indeed syllabaries, could be featural, but the only prominent system of this sort is Korean hangul. In hangul, the featural symbols are combined into alphabetic letters, and these letters are in turn joined into syllabic blocks, so that the system combines three levels of phonological representation.
Many scholars, e.g. John DeFrancis, reject this class or at least labeling hangul as such. The Korean script is a conscious script creation by literate experts, which Daniels calls a "sophisticated grammatogeny". These include stenographies and constructed scripts of hobbyists and fiction writers (such as Tengwar), many of which feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonologic properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character "features".
Most writing systems are not purely one type. The English writing system, for example, includes numerals and other logograms such as #, $, and &, and the written language often does not match well with the spoken one. As mentioned above, all logographic systems have phonetic components as well, whether along the lines of a syllabary, such as Chinese ("logo-syllabic"), or an abjad, as in Egyptian ("logo-consonantal").
Some scripts, however, are truly ambiguous. The semi-syllabaries of ancient Spain were syllabic for plosives such as p, t, k, but alphabetic for other consonants. In some versions, vowels were written redundantly after syllabic letters, conforming to an alphabetic orthography. Old Persian cuneiform was similar. Of 23 consonants (including null), seven were fully syllabic, thirteen were purely alphabetic, and for the other three, there was one letter for /Cu/ and another for both /Ca/ and /Ci/. However, all vowels were written overtly regardless; as in the Brahmic abugidas, the /Ca/ letter was used for a bare consonant.
The zhuyin phonetic glossing script for Chinese divides syllables in two or three, but into onset, medial, and rime rather than consonant and vowel. Pahawh Hmong is similar, but can be considered to divide syllables into either onset-rime or consonant-vowel (all consonant clusters and diphthongs are written with single letters); as the latter, it is equivalent to an abugida but with the roles of consonant and vowel reversed. Other scripts are intermediate between the categories of alphabet, abjad and abugida, so there may be disagreement on how they should be classified.
Perhaps the primary graphic distinction made in classifications is that of linearity. Linear writing systems are those in which the characters are composed of lines, such as the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters. Chinese characters are considered linear whether they are written with a ball-point pen or a calligraphic brush, or cast in bronze. Similarly, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief. The earliest examples of writing are linear: the Sumerian script of c. 3300 BC was linear, though its cuneiform descendants were not. Non-linear systems, on the other hand, such as braille, are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them.
Cuneiform was probably the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of the script.
Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate, which can be leather (Louis Braille's original material), stiff paper, plastic or metal.
There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code, the manual alphabets of various sign languages, and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing" is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. (Instead, these transient systems serve as signals.)
Scripts are also graphically characterized by the direction in which they are written. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally (side to side), or vertically (up or down). Prior to standardization, alphabetical writing was done both left-to-right (LTR or sinistrodextrally) and right-to-left (RTL or dextrosinistrally). It was most commonly written boustrophedonically: starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction.
The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, came to be written right-to-left. Scripts that incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page, but nowadays are frequently written left-to-right, top-to-bottom, due to Western influence, a growing need to accommodate terms in the Latin script, and technical limitations in popular electronic document formats. Chinese characters sometimes, as in signage, especially when signifying something old or traditional, may also be written from right to left. The Old Uyghur alphabet and its descendants are unique in being written top-to-bottom, left-to-right; this direction originated from an ancestral Semitic direction by rotating the page 90° counter-clockwise to conform to the appearance of vertical Chinese writing. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunó'o, are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan, another Philippine script, is written top to bottom and right to left. Ogham is written bottom to top and read vertically, commonly on the corner of a stone.
In computers and telecommunication systems, writing systems are generally not codified as such,[clarification needed] but graphemes and other grapheme-like units that are required for text processing are represented by "characters" that typically manifest in encoded form. There are many character encoding standards and related technologies, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 (a character repertoire and encoding scheme oriented toward the Latin script), CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and bi-directional text. Today, many such standards are re-defined in a collective standard, the ISO/IEC 10646 "Universal Character Set", and a parallel, closely related expanded work, The Unicode Standard. Both are generally encompassed by the term Unicode. In Unicode, each character, in every language's writing system, is (simplifying slightly) given a unique identification number, known as its code point. Computer operating systems use code points to look up characters in the font file, so the characters can be displayed on the page or screen.
A keyboard is the device most commonly used for writing via computer. Each key is associated with a standard code which the keyboard sends to the computer when it is pressed. By using a combination of alphabetic keys with modifier keys such as Ctrl, Alt, Shift and AltGr, various character codes are generated and sent to the CPU. The operating system intercepts and converts those signals to the appropriate characters based on the keyboard layout and input method, and then delivers those converted codes and characters to the running application software, which in turn looks up the appropriate glyph in the currently used font file, and requests the operating system to draw these on the screen.
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- See Primus, Beatrice (2004), "A featural analysis of the Modern Roman Alphabet" (PDF), Written Language and Literacy, 7 (2): 235–274, retrieved 2015-12-05.
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GradesK to 12
tag(s): reading lists (79)
In the ClassroomThis is a great starting point for reluctant readers. Provide this list (or link) to parents to use during the summer months to help with the "I'm bored" days. Why not challenge your students to read their way through the list during the school year by setting a personal goal and documenting their reading journey in a reading journal, blog, or class wiki with one page per student? They will enjoy looking back over their reading year!
Grades1 to 12
In the ClassroomMark this in your Favorites as a professional reference. You may even want to assign students to create their own webquests following these guidelines. If you mentor new teachers, share this resource when they are designing their first web-based projects.
Grades2 to 12
In the ClassroomUse this resource as a way to practice material and improve students' scores in preparation for an actual test. Use this resource to practice involved questions that like those found on the state tests. Practicing with various question formats builds confidence and improves performance. Create quizzes and tests that students must pass before moving on to other content or other harder tests. Use these as progress steps along the way to help students learn the content as they progress through a unit. Learning support teachers may want to work together with small groups to create their own "practice" quizzes before major tests.
Everyone can create, publish, share and take tests of any subject or syllabus on this site. Kudos!John, , Grades: 0 - 12
GradesK to 12
In the ClassroomUse this site as a guide when lesson planning. Demonstrate to older students how different types of questions will lead to further learning and strengthen critical thinking skills. Display the diagrams and information on the site on your interactive whiteboard to help students explore different questioning techniques. When studying a particular unit, challenge cooperative groups to create their own essential questions (and other types of questions) and create electronic "posters" or word graphics using tools such as Piclits (reviewed here) or Typogenerator (reviewed here).
Grades1 to 12
In the ClassroomUse Speakit as your teacher's helper. Be sure to test it out on classroom computers and devices before using it with students. During research or computer explorations, allow students to use this read aloud feature. Honor the students who heavily rely on hearing as their preferred form of comprehending material. In lower grades, research on computers now becomes an easier task. This extension is perfect for ESL/ELL or learning support students to help with vocabulary development, comprehension, fluency, and repetitions.
Grades2 to 6
tag(s): myths and legends (25)
In the ClassroomEnable every student to be successful in creating a new myth. Never again, hear, "I do not know what to do!" Mythmaker is interactive whiteboard Ready! Use this tool to help reluctant writers, ESL/ELL, or SPED students have extra support to allow them to become independent. Gifted students can study societies who generated myths, and make further myths for further explanations. Create your own classroom myths!
Grades2 to 5
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In the ClassroomSpellaRoo can be used in the classroom or a link on your class website for extra enrichment and practice. Use as a center activity, interactive white board game, or offer as reward time. Challenge your students to create their own "spellaroo" challenge to share with the class. How about an online poster creator, such as Padlet (reviewed here).
GradesK to 5
In the ClassroomEducators new to teaching or changing grade levels will find a wealth of useful advice such as; on how to build a chart stand with PCV pipes, use Elkonian boxes, and develop reading fluency. Veteran teachers, literacy coaches, and school leaders will find Mrs. Waltke's site a model to emulate in their own school. An impressive part of this site is the Excel template weekly lesson plan that integrates a drop down menu of state standards Tennessee. This is a great way help educators target specific subsets of skill while creating curriculum, documenting, and sharing lesson plans. Share a link or two at time with parents for at home practice or extra help for individual students.
Grades3 to 12
This tool also has a "read" section where you can see what others have written. Since this section is unmoderated and open to the public, it could contain writings not appropriate for the classroom. Stick with the writing prompts page to avoid this issue or prescreen before sharing.
In the ClassroomOneword can easily be displayed on your interactive classroom whiteboard at the front of class or as an inspirational "sidebar" as students enter class. Preview that day if you plan to display the public submissions, since they are unmoderated! Teachers may use their school email (or free gmail account) address for submissions. When working on individual computers, you may want your students to write their entries offline and save them for the class to submit to a single account. The whole tedious task of entering student names and email addresses can be alleviated by the teacher signing up and creating a free account. This will also provide you with a continually expanding list of more "oneword" features and give you access to all of your entries in one place. Another option of course is keep it old school; students open their journals and just write. Like many other familiar writing prompts, they can be used in a number of ways, including daily warm-up activities, journal entries, free-writing, or as an "anytime" or "when you're finished" activity. The element of surprise is inherent in Oneword, which provides built in motivation, as students, ready-to-write, wait for the word to appear on the screen and then, without hesitation... Go! This is a spontaneous exercise in flow; therefore you may want to revisit these one minute entries and choose some for revising and editing into a cohesive piece at the end of a week or other designated time period. You can also use the prompts for student volunteers to model writing techniques on your interactive whiteboard. Have students brainstorm lists of words that would be good writing prompts that are only "one word." ESL/ELL students will improve vocabulary with such brainstorms. Teenagers can try something new by creating an interactive book online with the collection of various different entries for one word. Not sure how to do it? Create an online book using a tool such as Bookemon, reviewed here.
Because the site is not moderated, any unsavory or objectionable entries are on full display. I did not request a membership so I don't know if there is a way for members to flag inappropriate comments. Not for my upper elementary kids, though I may use the idea off line.Ann, PA, Grades: 1 - 5
Grades1 to 9
In the ClassroomCreate your puzzles by following the simple directions. These can be used both online and in print form. You or your students can create games for use on an interactive whiteboard (students highlight the answers in different colors). Have students create their own to challenge classmates! If you have kinesthetic learners or those with weak fine motor skills who have trouble with pencils, the whiteboard is a real help. Make it a center. Build a class collection of student-made games and puzzles for use over and over. Tip: If you take a screenshot of a word search or print it to a pdf, you can save it electronically. Screenshots: Prtscrn key on a Windows machine, then PASTE into a document; Command+shift+4 on a Mac; press both buttons at once on an iPad to save a screenshot to the camera roll.
GradesK to 4
tag(s): native americans (80)
In the ClassroomSome arts & crafts materials are needed for these lessons. This would be a great option to accompany the study of Native Americans in an elementary classroo, drawing in your language arts time for story writing and telling.
Grades2 to 12
In the ClassroomUse these tools for any subject area and for any content. Be sure to look at the sample activities that are great to use as is or can stimulate thinking into your own projects. Use the timeline as an introduction to the first year by discussing their summer activities, major events in a students life, inventions or technology that made a difference in their life, events in their favorite book, and more. To understand content in perspective, create a timeline to be sure students understand why some events happen at particular times. For example, our understanding about biology greatly changes after the invention of the microscope. A great sample activity to Create your own Museum is the celebration of neighborhoods which can create a greater understanding about different people. Create a museum for each different kind of biome that showcases what would be found there. Create a museum for a time period in history but created by a specific group of people. View each of the museums and note the differences in what is portrayed using the lens of that various segment of the population. Create writings or blog posts portraying the differences in the museums and why these differences exist. Even young students can make a simple timeline of their own life of the life cycle of a butterfly to build the concept of linear representation of time.
GradesK to 12
In the ClassroomUse this great resource to create Jeopardy games for any content area. This resource is perfect for use on an interactive whiteboard or projector with a student emcee. Use for vocabulary/terms, identifying parts of anything, and reviewing for any curriculum topic. Use as an opener to a unit to determine what students already know. Play as a review game to assist learning for all students. Encourage students to create the clues and answers to their own Jeopardy review games as a creative way to review and reinforce. Learning support teachers may want to have students create review games together.
You or your students can copy and paste the HTML code for any game on your web page, wiki, or blog for easy access to any Flash Jeopardy Game.
Grades1 to 9
Editor's note: There is one group of links (to sites that start with "hometown.aol") that no longer work. Since this is only a small portion of the site, TeachersFirst continues to list the resource for its many GOOD links. Roll your mouse over the links before clicking and check the address in the gray bar at the bottom left of your screen. Don't bother with the hometown.aol links.
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tag(s): readers theater (13)
In the ClassroomMark this one in your favorites, then let student groups select from scripts to record their own audio podcasts or create a Thinglink, reviewed here, of a tale, illustrated with a selection of copyright-safe images or student drawings. Or have students make a high-tech excerpt from a reader's theater script by creating avatars to read each part using Voki, reviewed here. Sequence the embedded conversation bits on a class wiki so viewers can enjoy the performance by clicking through them in order. These wiki excerpts could be used to "advertise" an upcoming performance or a featured literary piece.
GradesK to 12
After you save and publish the work, share the URL so people can read the entire book online, either among an audience of "just my friends" or publicly. They also offer the embed code to place your books on a class or school web page, wiki, or blog. The easiest option is to copy the address of the new window displaying the interactive book. There is an option to have the book printed for a fee, but this is not required. You can also read books created by others (if they make them public). Use the fully-public option to create learning materials for classes to access year to year for at-home review or reading practice.
This site requires a simple registration. Teachers can set up an edCenter for their school or class in accordance with school policies. See more detailed suggestions "In the Classroom" below and in our sample book! Newer mobile device options include players to view your books on iPads and more.
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In the ClassroomSKIP the profile and friends areas to get to the book creator to play with the tools a bit. Before you get too involved, create an edCenter to minimize advertising and create books in your own teacher-friendly class environment. Use the edCenter to register students and establish privacy settings for your class. No student emails are required.
On the Create Books page, choose from using a blank book, starting from a file, or using a template. Choose "school" to see projects from other classes or a sample created by you or a student team working in advance along with you. Explore ready-made themes (seasonal, topical, etc.) or use "open theme." Choose book dimensions (match layout shape to any uploaded files, such as PowerPoint slides). Enter settings and description of your book (editable later), including who is allowed to "see" it: everyone, just friends, or private. Again choose a "theme" - more of a category where Bookemon will list your completed book. A logical option is "school." Experiment with tools to upload files (within file limits), add images, add text, etc. Written help is offered as you go, but there is no video demo. SAVE often. Turn margins on to avoid chopping content. To share the book, you must "publish" it (i.e. finalize).
Once published, locate the book under "My Books" and use options to share (by email--and see the URL to copy from there), "Make a new edition" to create a new version--also useful for treating the original as a template for later books), Post to Other Sites offers embed codes. The BEST option is to click the book COVER which opens a new window without ads or "stuff," and copy the ADDRESS of that window to paste into email, etc. You can also mark that clean window view as a Favorite on a classroom computer!
Use your edCenter settings to manage social networking features. This will avoid the "public" Bookemon features such as opportunities to share address books, use social tools such as Facebook to share your books, etc. Teacher-controlled edCenter accounts are probably the easiest option for managing within school policies.
With younger students, have them begin their work in PowerPoint then upload for whole-class books. See an example, created by the TeachersFirst Edge editors . The example is full of ideas for classroom use from Kindergarten to high school, including science concept tales, poetry books, general writing, math problem solve-its, and more. ANY grade can use this tool, depending on the amount of direction by the teacher. (By the way, the correct answer to the problem in the sample book is c. 27.) Another idea: have students create personalized books for their parents or grandparents for special occasions (Mother's Day, Father's Day, or Grandparent's Day).
Use the mobile device features offered in your BYOD classroom to make and share books, PDF's, and more. Tip: Use this site for a guided introduction to social networking as a class, an excellent teaching opportunity for digital citizenship in the context of a project.
This is one of the best creative tools for gifted students to go above and beyond regular curriculum. Don't let the "juvenile" appearance fool you. Even older students can write and include images to create and share books of any length. Any independent research or writing project can become an interactive book. Even advanced science experiments and lab reports can be shared online using this tool. Once you have one book, you can use that as a template for others. Inspire your gifted students to create literary magazine or even a personal online "portfolio" of writing, artwork, or photography presented in interactive book form.
Includes an education-only area for teachers and students
Parent permission advised before posting student work created using this tool
Includes Interaction w general public/ public galleries with unmoderated content
Includes social features, such as "friends," comments, ratings by others
Requires registration/log in (NO email)
Premium version (not free) includes additional features or storage
Products can be shared by URL
Includes teacher tools for registering and/or monitoring students
This is one of my all time favorite creative tools. Very versatile. Great for making "buddy books" or for teacher-created learning "books." Make one as a whole class to summarize a science unit in primary grades. I even use it personally to make fee online "gifts" for children I know. I did purchase one print version, and it looked great.Thinking, PA, Grades: 5 - 10
GradesK to 12
See a sample PocketMod checklist, notes, and calendar booklet (with a separate page of folding directions) and one made from a PDF of the Pennsylvania Science and Technology Standards, converted using the free downloadable software.
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tag(s): organizational skills (122)
In the ClassroomGo to PocketMod and follow the simple drag-and-drop visual screen to create the PocketMod from their many organizer options. Print and fold (NO Acrobat Reader required). More skilled users should consider downloading the free "PDF to PocketMod" converter that will take any pdf document and format it to the small, foldable format. If you have handouts in pdf format or can make them from your scanner/copier, you can make ANYTHING into a PocketMod. The converter assumes you have Acrobat Reader.
Have students design their own study guides before a chapter test or maintain a project checklist to be submitted along with the completed project to build better organizational skills. Warning: Students will quickly learn that PocketMod is a great way to make CHEAT SHEETS. Be forewarned of student cleverness!
Grades2 to 8
In the ClassroomThis site is perfect for interactive whiteboards or projectors. Display the site on your board when discussing current events, use as a learning center for students to read and journal, or have students look up vocabulary words featured on the site. Practice with Main Idea or summarizing using these interesting informational texts. ESL/ELL learners can also find accessible news stories here. Provide this link for students to use at home to keep up with current events.
Grades1 to 4
In the ClassroomTake advantage of the free lesson plans and activities offered on this site - a great resource for a Social Studies class.
Grades4 to 8
In the ClassroomIn your classroom, use Clockwords as a center activity, reward activity, or team game with your interactive whiteboard or projector. Challenge your students by using vocabulary words from science, math, or language arts. Within your class, look for high scores among students or teams. Be sure to provide this link on your class website. Incorrectly spelled words are not counted as valid words. Help this by supplying a dictionary or an online dictionary link.
Grades3 to 12
tag(s): timelines (57)
In the ClassroomCreate an ever-growing timeline throughout the school year by adding events discussed in class so students understand where events relate to each other in history. Create a timeline with events in American History and add a layer of authors' works to connect literature's time periods to history.
Have your students use Preceden to create a timeline of their life and their family's life. Then use events from their life for writing a memoir, poetry, etc. Science students could create a timeline for the stages of mitosis for a cell or the life cycle of a forest or an animal. Have students in government or history create timelines related to topics you are learning about in class.