Written language in the context of "Vocabulary"

A natural language or ordinary language is any spoken language or signed language used organically in a human community, first emerging without conscious premeditation and subject to: replication across generations of people in the community, regional expansion or contraction, and gradual internal and structural changes. The vast majority of languages in the world are natural languages. As a category, natural language includes both standard dialects (ones with high social prestige) as well as nonstandard or vernacular dialects. Even an official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the Académie Française, is still classified as a natural language (e.g. in the field of natural language processing), as its prescriptive aspects do not make it regulated enough to be considered a constructed or controlled natural language. Linguists broadly consider writing to be a static visual representation of a particular natural language, though, in many cases in highly literate modern societies, writing itself can also be considered natural language.

Excluded from the definition of natural language are: artificial and constructed languages, such as those developed for works of fiction; languages of formal logic, such as those in computer programming; and non-human communication systems in nature, such as whale vocalizations or honey bees' waggle dance. The academic consensus is that particular key features prevent animal communication systems from being classified as languages at all. Certain human communication or linguistic systems with no native speakers, as sometimes used in cross-cultural contexts, are also not natural languages.

In linguistics, transcription is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form. The source can either be utterances (speech or sign language) or preexisting text in another writing system.

Transcription should not be confused with translation, which means representing the meaning of text from a source-language in a target language, (e.g. Los Angeles (from source-language Spanish) means The Angels in the target language English); or with transliteration, which means representing the spelling of a text from one script to another.

In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of spoken languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. In written language, utterances only exist indirectly, through their representations or portrayals. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways.

In spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced or unvoiced pauses (e.g. "umm"), tag questions, and false starts, or when someone begins uttering again to correct themselves. Other features include fillers (e.g. "and stuff"), accent/dialect, deictic expressions (utterances such as "over there!" that need further explanation to be understood), simple conjunctions ("and", "but", etc.), and colloquial lexis (everyday informal words).

Writing is the act of creating a persistent, visual, static representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols that are called a script, as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language arises from a corresponding spoken language; while the use of language is universal across human societies, most spoken languages are not written.

Writing is a cognitive and social activity involving neuropsychological and physical processes. The outcome of this activity, also called writing (or a text) is a series of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Reading is the corresponding process of interpreting a written text, with the interpreter referred to as a reader.

In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) morae which make up words.

A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries.

A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages are produced with the body and hands.

In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.

Typography is also the work of graphic designers, art directors, manga artists, comic book artists, and, now, anyone who arranges words, letters, numbers, and symbols for publication, display, or distribution, from clerical workers and newsletter writers to anyone self-publishing materials. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Personal computers opened up typography to new generations of previously unrelated designers and lay users. As the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished.