Writing Systems Books

The World's Writing Systems

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to modern Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this is the only available work in English to cover all of the world's writing systems from ancient times to the present. Describing scores of scripts in use now or in the past around the world, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of writing systems. More than eighty articles by scholars from over a dozen countries explain and document how a vast array of writing systems work--how alphabets, ideograms, pictographs, and hieroglyphics convey meaning in graphic form.
The work is organized in thirteen parts, each dealing with a particular group of writing systems defined historically, geographically, or conceptually. Arranged according to the chronological development of writing systems and their historical relationships within geographical areas, the scripts are divided into the following sections: the ancient Near East, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Additional parts address the ongoing process of decipherment of ancient writing systems; the adaptation of traditional scripts to new languages; new scripts invented in modern times; and graphic symbols for numerical, music, and movement notation.
Each part begins with an introductory article providing the social and cultural context in which the group of writing systems was developed. Articles on individual scripts detail the historical origin of the writing system, its structure (with tables showing the forms of the written symbols), and its relationship to the phonology of the corresponding spoken language. Each writing system is illustrated by a passage of text, and accompanied by a romanized version, a phonetic transcription, and a modern English translation. A bibliography suggesting further reading concludes each entry.
Matched by no other work in English, The World's Writing Systems is the only comprehensive resource covering every major writing system. Unparalleled in its scope and unique in its coverage of the way scripts relate to the languages they represent, this is a resource that anyone with an interest in language will want to own, and one that should be a part of every library's reference collection.

Celtic Alphabets (Celtic Design)

Aidan Meehan

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Celtic Alphabets, is right. 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for some great examples on celtic alphabets then look no further. This book contains pages of colorful, inventive celtic lettering and design. Very little history but if what you want some of the most beautiful writing in the world then this book is the one for you.

Nice, useful, but not well documented 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 12 people found this review helpful.

The book is much larger than Meehan's usual Celtic Design books, and he makes good use of the space, providing sample alphabets to copy in many different styles (humans, rabbits, dogs...). However, as always, he's rather light on sources, which makes it hard to be sure he's right. A skilled artist who was looking at it with me spotted at least one point where the arrangement looked too modern; our best guess was that, where he couldn't find an example of the particular letter in the particular style he wanted, he made it up.

Editorial Review:

Of all the ornamental applications of Celtic art, the decorated letter is perhaps the richest. Aidan Meehan's brilliantly creative study of the great Celtic manuscripts underpins this wonderful collection of sixteen alphabets. From sixth-century birds to late medieval Celtic dragons, from early Celtic spirals to the later Tree of Life, more than four hundred drawings cover the whole spectrum of Celtic ornament in its most useful form, as well as the fascinating evolution of the letterforms themselves, from Roman to Irish Gothic. Celtic artists, designers, calligraphers, and craftspeople will find it an invaluable work of reference and inspiration.

A History of Writing

Albertine Gaur

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An Excellent History of Writing 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Of the books suitable for the amateur (me) which survey the history of writing and scripts I liked this one the best. It is as complete a survey as is practicable, and includes a wonderful section showing examples of many, many scripts which have been in common use.

303 Dumb Spelling Misstakes...and What You Can Do About Them

David C. Downing

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

303 Dumb Spelling Mistakes 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I'm using this book with a person I'm tutoring and it's working out very well. Whenever we come across "abundance" I wiggle in my chair. We are both certain now about how it is spelled. This book is very helpful. The association of the clues are humorous, clever and successful in triggering the correct spelling of some difficult to spell words. My only complaint is that some of the words are dated; they have fallen out of general use. I would encourage Mr. Downing to go forward with a new and updated release. Cyber-communications have made us sloppy with spelling, grammar, and all instruments of polished writing. Perhaps the re-publication of this book would be a welcome to those who hunt & peck & link their way through and around the world. Anyway, it works for me and my student. I am older than 12. I'm 2 blocks from Borders and I'll see if I can get a second copy of it there tomorrow.

Editorial Review:

This book is a collection of some of those commonly misspelled words, along with mnemonic patterns and pictures. Some of these memory devices are logical and some are not. Some are humorous and some are not. But all of them should help you lock the correct spelling into your visual memory. I've had students laugh or groan when I drew one of these on the blackboard, but they have come back years later to tell me that they have never had trouble spelling the word after seeing my illustration.

The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script

Maurice Pope

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Speculation about Egyptian hieroglyphs began in the Renaissance; though sometimes fantastic, much of it was fascinating and fruitful. During the next two centuries European travelers in the Near East came home with increasingly accurate copies of the strange inscriptions to be found there. The great age of decipherment dawned in the mid-eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment, with the Abb Barthlemy's solution of the Palmyra script. The author discusses the contributions to the science of decipherment made by theorists and practitioners, examining the intellectual developments that led to their outstanding achievements. He explains the process of decipherment largely from the point of view of the practitioners themselves, but in a way that laypeople can follow. Among the scripts analyzed are the Palmyra script, Sassanid Persian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Persian cuneiform, Akkadian cuneiform, the Cypriot syllabary, Hittite hieroglyphs, the Ugaritic alphabet, and Mycenaean Linear B. For this revised edition, the text has been brought up to date and a new section added on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs.

Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing

Marc-Alain Ouaknin

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Learning and extreme ignorance. 2 out of 5 stars.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful.

The book explains the evolution of standard 26-letter Latin alphabet focussing mostly on the early evolution of the letters from proto-Sinaitic through Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Latin and also looking very closely at the Aramaic stream which produced modern Hebrew characters.

It is lavishly and beautifully printed in black and red on very heavy (almost carboard) stock with the various letter shapes appearing in the text in red. There are a large number of clear hand drawings and a few very clear photographs of important early inscriptions. To some Ouaknin may seem too concerned that every shape that every letter ever took should be shown and explained. But far better a reference book that contains too much rather than not enough.

If you want to learn to read some of these early scripts and became familiar with ancient letter form this book provides lots of genuine material to practice on, especially if you know Hebrew or Greek and can read many of these inscriptions. If you can't they will mostly just be pretty pictures.

But there are some serious downsides to this book if you want to use it for anything but epigraphical reference.

Ouaknin pushes hard a dubious and undemonstrable hypothesis that the alphabet was invented by Israelites in Egypt but provides no evidence whatsover, just quotations from another writer Gérard Pommier. Ouaknin associates the original pictograph for G with the meaning "camel" rather than "throw stick" for no other reason than he wishes to believe despite archaelogical evidence that camels were associated with Hebrews in the patriarchal period. Maybe they were and the evidence just hasn't yet been found. But that's a bad reason to favor one interpretation over another when neither says anything about the independant issue of when domestication of the camel first occurred.

Israelites are as likely a candidate for inventing the alphabetas any other Semites. But they are no more so. It is special pleading to argue that the reason later forms of the writing system lost the original pictorial quality was because they passed through the hands of a people opposed to graven images! We have other scripts that began as pictorial images which also later became abstract shapes where no such reason could involved. The explanation is redundant.

Such special pleading is disturbing.

Ouaknin mangles the pronunciations of the characters. What kind of professor and teacher specializing in Hebrew and Jewish studies doesn't know that the sounds of modern Hebrew and modern Greek were not always the same as the sounds of their ancient counterparts (and in the case of Hebrew not the same as the Hebrew used by Jews who have continued to dwell in Arabic countries for centuries).

Every time a character's modern pronunciation differs from an older pronunciation Ouaknin gets it wrong.

One example of many: in his discussion on F Ouknin explains that the letter vav is pronounced as v. In fact in ancient texts it was pronounced w and the letter should probably be called waw in those contexts.

Then Ouaknin compounds his error by claiming the diagamma character which came from waw in Greek was also pronounced v. It wasn't.

Yet two paragraphs later (correctly but in contradiction) Ouaknin mentions that there was no "v" sound in ancient Greek. (Does he not read what he himself writes? Is he just copying material he doesn't understand?)

Also in an aside here Ouaknin mentions the introduction of the new Greek letter phi which he claims was pronounced like "f". In fact in Classical Greek the letter phi was pronounced like p followed by h.

Not only are many of the pronunciations wrong but also the diacritics on some of the tables, especially the table for Ugaritic.

On page 106 the five addtional Greek letters are given instead as four and identified as "Y, then F, X, and finally W". Seemingly F here means Phi, Psi has been forgotten altogether, and W is an error of Omega. Is the writer of this passage who apparently doesn't know the Greek alphabet the same who covers Greek epigraphy elsewhere in the book?

On page 267 though the letter O is being discussed the inscriptions have instead the letter theta rendered in red.

The book feels as though it might have been expanded from a draft originally intended to treat mainly the Hebrew alphabet. Ouaknin carefully and consistantly matches up Hebrew letters to Latin letters as much as he can and for Latin letters which contain no match Ouaknin refers the reader to a Latin letter which he considers to be the main match.

Y is listed three times in the book. The last reference which is the place where a reader would naturally look for it wrongly refers the reader to the section on K. Y is actually officially mentioned under I where it wrongly said to derive from Hebrew Yod rather than Wav/Waw. But Y also appears under F under the name "Greek I" presumably a translation error from the original French as the French word for Y is I-Grec 'Greek I'.

I will stop pointing out such confusions now. But there are others.

Ouaknin also includes discussion of meanings of the letters, based on their original forms and on their names and on who knows what. Sometimes he mentions the Kabalah but not often. For the letter resh (R) he obtains further derived meanings by replace aleph in the three letter root Resh-aleph-shin and yet further meanings by replacing aleph instead by yod, presumably because these substitutions make no difference in modern standard Israeli Hebrew pronunciation.

It's as bad as equating English _through_ with _threw_. It is just crank linguistics.

And that leads to the final short section in the book pretentiously explaining the new concept of archaeography which is what Ouaknin is really interested in, mystical divination based on the meanings he ascribes to words in languages spelled with the proto-Sinaitic forms of the alphabet according to his equations of forms.

Yet another New Age mystical system!

Editorial Review:

Why is A the first letter of the alphabet? Why is O round? This work tells how Protosinaic pictograms - derived from Egyptian heiroglyphics and discovered in the Sinai only at the beginning of the 20th century - changed throughout the millennia and left their trace on our alphabet.

Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z

David Sacks

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Letters are tangible language. Joining together in endless combinations to actually show speech, letters convey our messages and tell our stories. While we encounter these tiny shapes hundreds of times a day, we take for granted the long, fascinating history behind one of the most fundamental of human inventions -- the alphabet.

The heart of the book is the 26 fact-filled “biographies” of letters A through Z, each one identifying the letter’s particular significance for modern readers, tracing its development from ancient forms, and discussing its noteworthy role in literature and other media. We learn, for example, why the letter X has a sinister and sexual aura, how B came to signify second best, why the word “mother” in many languages starts with M, and what is the story of O.

Packed with information and lavishly illustrated, Language Visible is not only accessible and entertaining, but essential to the appreciation of our own language.

The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization

Robert K. Logan

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

History of the Alphabet 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I enjoy history, but I don't often seek it out. My knowledge base of ancient history is really lacking, but this book piqued my interest to find out more. The basic idea of the book is that there is a connection between the use of the phonetic alphabet and the development of monotheism, codified law, and abstract science. I found the section on the inclusion of the zero in math to be particularly interesting. My only criticims are that he seems to make a soft case, that is he goes out of his way to point out that he's not making a causal connection, and the final chapter (on computers), at this point, is more than a little dated.

Excellent work which offers interesting insight on language 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is a great book which offers an interesting view on the role played by the type of language in shaping the kind of thinking an individual/culture carries out -- and determining, to some extent, what an individual/culture can accomplish.

It's interesting, Jim, but it's not science 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

While browsing through the Linguistics section of local book store, I came across The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization by Robert K. Logan. The book appeared to be a history of the alphabet and a discussion on its indirect effects on Western society. Now, this doesn't sound like exciting reading for most people, but the history of literacy is a small passion of mine, so I picked up the book without a second thought. Since then, I've learned that a second thought, valuable as it may seem, would still be two thoughts too many for this particular book.

First, Robert K. Logan is not a linguist, nor a historian, nor even an otherwise unemployable English major. No, our distinguished author got his front-cover Ph.D. credentials in the field of Physics. That would have been my first warning sign, but the publisher (William Morrow) neglected to mention this, though they did spring to have a quick and sloppy photo added to the back cover.

After the publisher's bait and switch, I began to realize that not only is Logan a scientist in the wrong field, he doesn't seem to be that good of a scientist to begin with. Take this quote, which summarizes part of Logan's thesis:
"The alphabet is a natural classification scheme for words as anyone who has used a dictionary or a filing system is well aware. What distinguishes science, a term derived from the Latin word scire "to know," from knowledge is the organization of that knowledge."
Maybe the use of the word thesis is too strong for an author who apparently hasn't heard of hypothesis. Ironically, the only true statement Logan makes here is that science is a derivative of scire, which though good etymology is completely unrelated to the point he is making. Science is not organization; science is the experimental examination of natural phenomena. The order of letters in the alphabet is random (if static); other writing systems have organizational schemes that work just as well for them.

In an early chapter, Logan compares the alphabet with the Chinese writing system:
"An examination of this table reveals that even the most abstract scientific term must be rendered in a concrete form when it is written. This no doubt has a subliminal effect on Chinese thinking."
Never mind that there are scientific ways to test this hypothesis that are completely ignored, Logan's table gives us such "scientific" terms as begin, stop, sun, light, snow, life, fire, and count. I'm not an expert on Chinese, but in English, these words are among the oldest native words in the language. I imagine their correspondents are among the oldest words of any language. No one except maybe historical linguists or medieval researchers thinks of the Old English word beginnan whenever they say or read begin. I find it very hard to believe that Chinese speakers think of a woman and a fetus whenever they say or write the Chinese equivalent.

Logan uses his untested theory to account for a wide array of cultural differences. Because Chinese characters can be read by people with radically different dialects, Logan asserts that it was the ideograms alone that had a "unifying and preserving effect on culture" and not geography, government, or religion that had the same effect or which led to the broad acceptance of single written Chinese. Nonlinguists may want to note that it was the cost of a printing press and combined with the wealth of Renaissance London that gave English many of its current spelling "rules." Perhaps land owning Londoners can write phonetically, but the rest of us have to do a great deal of memorizing. Logan does his best to promote the phonetic alphabet, but the truly phonetic alphabet employed in phonetics is not only impractical for day-to-day purposes (see http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/images/ipachart.gif), it would also make written exchanges between the Hebrides and the hills of Kentucky a near impossibility.

Although I wouldn't call Logan a racist as he does try to give credit where credit is due, his compliments to the Chinese have the same sideways compliment tone of many "my black friend" statements. For example:
"Chinese technological inventiveness is unparalleled by that of any other culture, yet China never exploited its technology in a systematic manner as was done in the West during the Industrial Revolution."
Again, all other explanations are thrown aside. It was the alphabet that led the West to exploit technology, invent Monotheism, invent the printing press, invent the number zero, logic, and science. Logan's definition of "The West" is subject to change. Some times it includes Hindu India, the Persian Empire, or medieval Arab states. Other times it excludes any number of European or American nations, past and present, that don't fit Logan's limited view of Western cultural heritage.

There is a great deal of actual history in Logan's book, but he has made it unreadable by his constant rehashing of his thesis without providing any substantial evidence outside of coincidence and quotes from like-minded researchers. The alphabet is a fascinating topic; I can imagine that someone would be able to write a wonderful introduction to the topic for lay readers, but that book is not The Alphabet Effect.

The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination

Johanna Drucker

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Poetic, mystical, and literary associations of the alphabet 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This book on the history of the alphabet is focused on Western and Semitic scripts; it pays little heed to the alphabetic scripts of South Asia. This book seems more concerned with mystical and artistic elaborations of the alphabetic symbols than with its actual use as a writing system. It focuses on things like the Kabbalah, calligraphic styles, and the changes wrought on attitudes to the alphabet wrought by the invention of printing. Parts of it seem a history of concepts used by other scholars attempting to determine the history and origin of the alphabet, rather than a new contribution to the alphabet's history.

Those who wish a more sober account of the alphabet's history, and tracing the family tree of the various alphabetic scripts, will get more mileage out of David Diringer's -The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind-. The information presented in this book, however, is interesting, if only for the fanciful ideas various people have devised around the alphabet.

My copy seems to have a number of typographical errors and other mistakes in it. A long passage discusses the thought of "Marcos the Gnostic." From the context I am reasonably certain that Marcion, not "Marcos," was intended. The people of Mount Seir in the Bible are identified in the book with Kenites and Midianites; if my memory serves me, the inhabitants of Mount Seir were Edomites and Horites. These mistakes tend to make me less inclined to trust the many passages that present data that is entirely new to me.

Editorial Review:

The alphabet is at once familiar and mysterious. Its letters have been the object of speculation since their invention almost four thousand years ago; the symbols represent sounds, yet they exist in their own right, often invested with quasi-magical power. Johanna Drucker, who teaches art history at Yale University, examines the imaginative and idiosyncratic ways in which the letters of the alphabet have been assigned value in political, spiritual, or religious belief systems over two millennia. The first book to explore fully this colorful, poetic, and frequently eccentric realm, The Alphabetic Labyrinth is richly complemented by images that have rarely or never before been reproduced. Drawing on a wide variety of little-known sources, both literary and artistic, the author adds a new and exciting chapter to the history of ideas which will prove fascinating to cultural historians, art historians, and anyone interested in the history of writing.

Compendium for Literates

Karl Gerstner

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