How were writting systems developed? How we decided the characters and their meanings?
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The very earliest writing systems were not complete writing systems which recorded the spoken language, they were ideographic – where a symbol ($) represents an idea (the notion of money or dollars). You’re probably familiar with this idea if you’ve heard of how traditional Chinese characters work, or how Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs worked. There is also a theory that some early writing systems were mnemonic – similar to how shorthand or some kinds of musical notation work. If you need to memorize a super long chant for religious purposes, for example, you might develop a kind of writing that uses symbols to remind yourself of the sequence of words or sounds.
If you combine the two ideas together, you can start to see how writing developed. Some guys name is Khaleth so to remind himself, a scribe writes down the symbol for a cat (pronounced Kha) next to the symbol for rain (pronounced Lethe). Keep doing that for hundreds of years and you will have either developed a system where every word has a symbol (often as combinations of multiple symbols, like Chinese) or a system where symbols represent sounds instead of ideas
There’s still other evidence, though, that some cultures might have first invented writing for recording numbers – South American cultures, for example, had the Quipu system for encoding numbers, but no writing for recording their language.
We should also note here that inventing writing seems to be relatively difficult. It is known to have happened independently only four times – Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. As far as we can tell, all other writing systems were developed with the knowledge of one of those four. Either most ancient cultures either didn’t have the socio-economic development that made writing necessary or apparent, or it’s that the chances of somebody developing writing in a world where no writing exists are just very very small.
Imagine you are a Middle Eastern government official before the invention of writing. Your duties include counting things of value (so you know how much you can tax or how much people already paid). You already have a system of lines and dashes to record numbers. So you draw a cattle head and inscribe a certain number, you count the houses in a village and a certain number and the number of camels. Now you realise that those symbols are read in your language something like:
Cattle head – Aleph
House – Bet
Camel – Gamla
Hmm, maybe you can write your name “Gab” as Camel-Cow-House (basically using the first sound of what the images depict). That’s neat and other people use other symbols for other sounds and now every government official can sign their name and even the name of the village, that’s cool!
After some time people no longer draw detailed images, they try to write faster and faster and the symbols do not really look like their original images, but that’s ok because the writers are trained government officials so they know all the shorthand’s.
Some foreigners come to your land after some time and see this newfangled writing stuff, so they go back to their land and show their own people the shorthand’s they saw. They didn’t really hear the right sounds because foreigners have funny accents so they call them:
Alpha
Betta
Gamma
Now the traders don’t really know what images mean, or what the letter names mean, but they like this writing thing and start using it. After millennia’s of this “telephone” game, you get our own modern writing system used to write English.
Writing appears to have been developed separately multiple times and since the people who started the whole thing didn’t have writing to write down what happened, we don’t know for sure.
It appears that things started out with pictures that represented things, which over time evolved into more and more abstract symbols.
Some writing systems like Chinese still use the method of symbols having meaning today.
Others eventually evolved to have symbols represent the sounds associated with the word in a spoken language and you get syllabries and abjads and alaphabets, were symbols represent sallable, just consonants or consonants and vowels.
With Chinese characters you can sometimes still see the thing they represent.
With our modern alphabet, you have to trace the characters a long way back before they look like anything. For example the letter A can be traced back the the greek Alpha and the Hebrew Aleph and it older and older languages until you end up going from what looks like a sideways A to something that looks like an Ox head.
Charcters just got adapted to be easier to write over time and as new people adopted it with different languages they repurposed some, modified others and added new ones to fit their need.
From symbols.
Aleph was the word for ox. The symbol for aleph was a simple ox head with horns. This simplified until it looked like an upside down A, then it became rotated 90 degrees, and later turned again to look like A.
Other letters have similar histories.
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