Based on this idea, I propose that semiotic writing strategies are possible, and that writing should not be seen as a mere surrogate of phonetics: this vision could solve the long-standing question of why writing systems that developed phoneticism seem to start in a non-phonetic stage that is still treated, in an unclear way, as ‘proto-writing’.ĭans cet article on voudrait proposer les fondements d’une nouvelle théorie des systèmes d’écriture et de l’écriture en général. After exposing the history of this controversy and the problematic elements in contemporary grammatological and semasiographic visions, I propose to treat Aztec and Mixtec writing as complex systems which depict language through bottom-up strategies (logograms and/or syllabograms, which are signs that try to represent the morphological and phonological levels of language), and top-down strategies (pictography, which is a semantic depiction aided by contextual inferences grounded in pragmatics), strategies that roughly correspond to the bottom-up and top-down language processing operations. It concentrates on the decades-long controversy about whether to consider the highly pictorial communication system present in Aztec, Mixtec and other non-Maya Mesoamerican pictorial codices as writing. The aim of this paper is to propose the elements of a new theory of writing and writing systems.
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