A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 PDF Author: Michelle P. Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 PDF Author: Michelle P. Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description


Historical Scripts

Historical Scripts PDF Author: Stan Knight
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Revised and expanded, this book is an excellent survey of bookhands with its full-page, enlarged illustrations and solidly researched sources. It is a useful text for studying the history of manuscripts as well as the details of letter construction. This work also helps one make judgments about the technical condition of letter writing and its qualities of rhythm and movement, possible only when consulting an original manuscript. The author has gone to considerable lengths to obtain photographs that are well-focused and lit so that the tactile qualities of surfaces, ink tone, and flow are revealed. The author has chosen examples of formal writing that show a coherent and reasonably consistent relationship between methods of tool use and letter formation, making the construction of a script much easier to grasp in practice. He has also made the effort of selecting writing without idiosyncrasies of style."--

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600

A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 PDF Author: Michelle P. Brown
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802072061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Brown provides a synopsis of each of the major phases of development, a bibliography at the beginning of each section, and comments on regional and chronological diffusion where appropriate.

Ancient Scripts and Phonological Knowledge

Ancient Scripts and Phonological Knowledge PDF Author: D. Gary Miller
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027236194
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
This study investigates the properties of several ancient syllabic and linear segmental scripts to make explicit the aspects of linguistic knowledge they attempt to represent. Some recent experimental work suggests that nonliterate speakers do not have segmental knowledge and that only syllabic knowledge is 'real' or accessible, whence the ubiquity of syllabaries. Miller disputes this by showing that such tests do not distinguish relevant types of knowledge, and that linguistic analysis of the ordering and writing conventions of early Western scripts corroborates the evidence from language acquisition, use, and change for segment awareness. By coding segments, the ancient syllabaries represented more phonological knowledge than the alphabet, which was a poor compromise between the vowelless West Semitic scripts and the vowel-redundant syllabic scripts. A wide range of information about early scripts and their development is combined with a new theory of the syllable as 'Sonority Phrase'. The book's value is further enhanced by thorough discussion of the issues from a broad range of theoretical and applied viewpoints, including language play and change, cognition, literacy, and cultural history.

The Greatest Invention

The Greatest Invention PDF Author: Silvia Ferrara
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374601631
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.

Cuneiform

Cuneiform PDF Author: Irving L. Finkel
Publisher: British museum Press
ISBN: 9780714111889
Category : Cuneiform inscriptions
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilization, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these tablets we can understand not only the history and economics of the time but also the beliefs, ideas and superstitions. This new book will bring the world in which the cuneiform was written to life for the non-expert reader, revealing how ancient inscriptions can lead to a new way of thinking about the past. It will explain how this pre-alphabetic writing really worked and how it was possible to use cuneiform signs to record so many different languages so long ago. Richly illustrated with a wealth of fresh examples ranging from elementary school exercises to revealing private letters or beautifully calligraphic literature for the royal library, we will meet people that arent so very different from ourselves. We will read the work of many scribes from mundane record keepers to state fortune tellers, using tricks from puns to cryptography. For the first time cuneiform tablets and their messages are not remote and inaccessible, but wonderfully human documents that resonate today.

Historical Scripts

Historical Scripts PDF Author: Stan Knight
Publisher: Taplinger Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780800838478
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description


The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts

The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts PDF Author: Michelle P. Brown
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802081728
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
An introduction to the history and techniques of writing that offers a thorough and accessible historical overview of techniques and processes, illustrated with examples, diagrams, and photographs of crafts people at work.

The Calligraphic State

The Calligraphic State PDF Author: Brinkley Messick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520205154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
"Throws completely fresh light on non-colonial yet modern systems of legality and moral power. . . . The picture given of Islamic legal education and practice is one of the best available . . . a compelling read and a fine book for teaching."—Paul Dresch, Oxford University

The World's Writing Systems

The World's Writing Systems PDF Author: Peter T. Daniels
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195079930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 970

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Book Description
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.