Rebus and acrophony in invented writing

Rebus and acrophony are crucial in the development of ancient invented scripts from Mesopotamia (cuneiform), China, Mesoamerica (Maya), Egypt, and scripts which may have been created through exposure to literate cultures (Anatolian Hieroglyphic and Nahuatl). Yet, these two linguistic mechanisms have been understudied from a terminological, contextual and comparative perspective. This article aims to address issues regarding their definition, development and application in script formation. The scope of our study is all attested writing systems that are largely iconic in their sign repertoire, and whose phonetic values were generated anew based on an underlying language (hence ‘invented’). This allows us to chart how writing systems are created ex novo and what trajectories of development are put into practice when phonetisation takes place. We show some reliable patterns of universal mechanisms, observable from a comparative perspective. We also demonstrate that these patterns attest to a verifiable degree of phonological awareness that ties the process of phonetisation to the path to script formation. We further highlight that the tendencies discerned from deciphered writing systems provide ways to test hypotheses in the study of iconic writing systems which are undeciphered, such as the Indus Valley script and the Rongorongo of Easter Island.