Of glyphs and glottography

The term glottography is familiar from Pulgram [Pulgram, E., 1976. The typologies of writing-systems. In: Haas, 1976a, pp. 1–28] and is equivalent to Gelb’s [Gelb, I.J., 1952. A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatalogy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago] phonography. The term is problematic, since it is rarely made clear how a writing system is held to represent a spoken language, and how glottographic systems exist alongside non-glottographic ones. This paper examines glottography from the particular perspective of archaic or proto-cuneiform (first attested ca. 3300 B.C.E.). After clearing up some fundamental confusions, we offer four symptoms of glottographic writing. We then consider the relation between glottographic and non-glottographic writing, associate the former with the act of reading and the latter with verbalizing, and conclude by suggesting that glottography is best viewed as a single subsystem of written language.