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As we observed in Chapter 1, not all languages have a written modality, but those that do use a host of different writing systems (ORTHOGRAPHY). These systems differ in what their symbols encode. English, along with many other languages of European origin, uses ALPHABETIC writing, in which letters roughly represent individual speech sounds. The word bat, for instance, is spelled with three letters, each standing for a different discrete sound. This is how our Roman alphabet works, as do the Greek, Cyrillic (for Russian and some other Slavic languages), and Hebrew systems. In another type of encoding, symbols stand for individual syllables, or for a combination of syllables and discrete sounds. Hangul (for Korean) and Devanagari (for Hindi) fit this category.

In contrast to systems that encode sound, Chinese writing, Japanese Kanji, and ancient Mayan script are examples of LOGOGRAPHIC systems, in which characters stand for entire words. Because a particular logograph has no fixed connection with sound, a single set of symbols can be used to write many different languages. However, readers of these languages have to learn the correct character for every word. Examples of different writing systems are given in Table 3.1.