Language The origin of language is subject to considerable speculation. Some words may be imitative of natural sounds. Others may have come from expressions of emotion, such as laughter or crying. Language, some theorists believe, is an outgrowth of group activities, such as working together or dancing. Another theory holds that language developed from basic sounds that accompanied gestures. Although it is difficult to quantify the world’s languages, it is estimated that almost 7,000 are spoken in the world today, most of them grouped in families. As some languages grow, others decline and disappear. The changes in language reflect class, gender, profession, age group, and other social forces, such as the effects of technology on everyday life. Symbols and Alphabets Early peoples sought the means by which to record language. They drew and painted on cave walls to convey messages and they used signs and symbols to designate tribe or ownership. As human knowledge expanded, writing became necessary in order to transmit information. The earliest writing was pictographic, with symbols representing objects. The first pictographic writing was cuneiform, by which wedge-shaped characters were inscribed with a stylus on a clay tablet. Cuneiform later developed ideographic elements; the symbol came to represent not only the object but also ideas and qualities associated with it. Writing, however, continued to convey only the meaning, not the sound, of words. Eventually, cuneiform incorporated phonetic elements, that is, signs that represented certain sounds. Egyptian hieroglyphs underwent a similar development. This system progressed from pictograms to ideograms; it incorporated signs for consonants, but it never developed into an alphabet. The alphabet, invented in the Middle East, was carried by the Phoenicians to Greece, where vowel sounds were added to it. The Cyrillic alphabet was adapted from the Greek; the Latin alphabet developed in countries farther to the west where the Roman culture was dominant. Paper and Printing The Egyptians discovered that a kind of writing material could be made from strips of the stem of the papyrus plant. A later discovery was parchment, which was made by preparing both sides of a sheet of animal tissue for writing uses. Meanwhile in China, about 105 ad, the method of papermaking was discovered. It took over 1,000 years for the technique to travel to Europe, and it came at a time when a great demand for books began to appear. In the middle of the 15th century the German printer Johann Gutenberg used movable type for the first time in Europe to print the Bible. This technique expanded the opportunities for learning and led to radical changes in the way people lived. It contributed to the growth of individualism, the Reformation, rationalism, scientific inquiry, and regional literatures that reflected the rise of nationalism. Newssheets called corantos began to appear in Europe in the 17th century. At first devoted to trade and other business news, they eventually developed into the first true newspapers and magazines providing the dissemination of current information to the public at large. Telephone Although telegraphy marked a great advance in rapid long-distance communication, early telegraph systems could convey messages only letter by letter. The search was therefore also on for some means of voice communication by electricity as well. Early devices that appeared in the 1850s and 1860s were capable of transmitting sound vibrations but not true human speech. The first person to patent an electric telephone in the modern sense was the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell, in 1876. At the same time, Edison was also in the process of finding a way to record and then reproduce sound waves, paving the way for the invention of the record player. By the late 20th century, such developments as transoceanic cable, fibre-optics, and satellite technology had revolutionized use of the telephone. Mobile telephones (see Cellular Radio) are increasingly in use. Television The system of transmitting moving images has many roots. One is the invention of a scanning disc by the German television pioneer Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884. Another landmark in the development of television was the invention in 1923 by the Russian-American electronics engineer Vladimir Kosma Zworykin of the iconoscope for transmitting and the kinescope for receiving images over a distance. In 1926 John Logie Baird used this system to demonstrate the first electrical transmission of moving images. This stimulated further developments in the United States, Britain, and Germany. In Britain, the BBC began television broadcasts in 1927, using Baird's system, and by 1937 had begun the world's first high-quality public broadcasting service. Television has expanded worldwide; the communications satellite makes possible the transmitting of programmes between continents and events can be shown simultaneously as they happen in most parts of the world. Closed-circuit television is used by banks to identify cheques, by airlines to present flight information, by doctors to study techniques used in operations, and in numerous other ways. The development of video recording has also revolutionized the capacity to store, retrieve, and transmit information.