At a Glance
Devanagari writing in the Bhagavata Purana
Page from a dispersed Bhagavata Purana, ink and opaque watercolor on paper, from Mewar, Rajasthan, India, c. 1630–50; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
writing
communication
writing, form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language. This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought and the fact that spoken language has a number of levels of structure, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest units of speech used to distinguish one word...