Digraphia

Translations

Digrafia | digraphie | Digraphie

Article

The concept of digraphia, first attested in works from the XIX century (Pierides 1975; cf. Elti di Rodeano 2019), refers to the presence, within a cultural and lingiuistic community, of two different writing systems used to record the language (or one of the languages) employed in an area. The study of the concept has received increasing attention during the XX century (Dale 1980; Elti di Rodeano 2019).

In the ancient world, digraphia was not unfrequent, although generally it occurred in areas in which more languages were used by different groups, and each writing system was associated to one script. Digraphia is of extreme imoportance for the study of ancient linguistic and cultural contact, because it immediately testifies to the existence of different linguistic and epigraphic traditions in a given region.

Example

The most typical example of digraphia in the Ancient Anatolian area is represented by the existence of two scripts for the recording of the Luwian language in the Late Hittite Empire, the cuneiform script and the Anatolian hieroglyphic system.

As a matter of fact, however, the two scripts developed in different ways. Cuneiform was inherited from the Mesopotamian and Syrian traditions and adapted to the writing of Hittite and the other languages present in the Hittite archives, including Luwian. The origin of the Anatolian hieroglyphs remains controversial, but the communis opinio is that the system was developped in Anatolia at some point during the Late Bronze Age. The two systems were both employed during the Hittite imperial age, and it is possible that the Cuneiform system influenced the Hieroglyphic one, that moved from a more logographic to a more syllabic system over time.

However, while some degree of digraphia must hence have existed in the Late Hittite culture, it must be stressed that truly digraphic documents are limited to seal impressions, in which the comparable sequences of signs in cuneiform and hieroglyphs are generally personal names, e.g. cun. ^mku-zi-^dte-šub vs hier. ku-zi/a-TEŠUB-pa for /Kunzi-Tešov/, the Hurrian name of a XII century ruler of Karkemiš (cf. Giusfredi and Pisaniello in press).

References

Dale, I.R.H. 1980. Digraphia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 26. Elti di Rodeano, S. 2019. Digraphia: The story of a sociolinguistic term. In: Graphemics in the 21st century—From graphemes to knowledge. Giusfredi F. and Pisaniello, V. in press. Foreigners and foreign names in Anatolian hieroglyphs. Pierides, D. 1875. On a digraphic inscription found in Larnaca. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 4.