Abstract

Writing is an only seemingly self-explanatory everyday term. In the ancient Egyptian culture, for example, no distinction was made between “writing” and “drawing/painting,” and we know this terminology similarly from the Greek culture. Exactly this terminological width was also practiced in the Mayan culture. If the substantial difference between writing and painting was not terminologically expressed, this could mean that in this cultural perspective, the emblematic was in focus as the common denominator. We can operate with the differentiation between writing in a narrower sense and writing in a broader sense. Specific to writing in a narrower sense is a certain phonetic dimension of coding. The meaning of the language contacts for the phonetization of the signs, and thus the development of writing in a narrower sense, is an example of the high culture-poetical meaning of cultural diversity.