Portal:Writing

Writing is the act of creating a persistent, usually visual representation of language on a surface. As a structured system of communication, writing is also known as written language. Historically, written languages have emerged as a way to record corresponding spoken languages. While the use of language is universal across human societies, most spoken languages are not written. A particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language, is known as a writing system. In some rare cases, writing may be tactile rather than visual.

The cognitive and social activity of writing involves neuropsychological and physical processes whose physical output is also called writing (or a text): a series of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Reading is the activity of encountering a text and construing its symbols.

In general, writing systems do not constitute languages in and of themselves, but rather a durable means of representing language such that it can be understood by people at a later time. While not all languages use a writing system, those that do can complement and extend the capacities of spoken language, transmitting it across space (e.g. written correspondence) and storing it for future reading (e.g. libraries). Writing can also change people's relationships with the knowledge they acquire, since it allows humans to externalize their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, process more slowly, elaborate on, reconsider, and revise. (Full article...)

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice.

From a linguistic point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word. Transliteration attempts to be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this objective transliteration may define complex conventions for dealing with letters in a source script which do not correspond with letters in a goal script.

Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the goal script, for some specific pair of source and goal language. (Full article...)

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject: