visual representation of language using persistent marks on a surface
types:
- alphabetic: one symbol per phoneme (alphabet): Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew
- syllabic: one symbol per syllable: Japanese kana, Cherokee, Ge'ez
- logographic: one symbol per morpheme or word: Chinese hanzi, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian cuneiform
- abugida: consonant base with vowel diacritics: Devanagari, Thai, Tibetan
evolved from the writing (invention) in Mesopotamia ~3400 BCE
each writing system encodes the phonology and structure of its language differently
Unicode: modern universal encoding standard, 150,000+ characters across all living scripts
the shift from analog to digital writing systems is a defining feature of the Information Age