Non-Latin Scripts

Non-Latin Scripts PDF Author: Fiona Ross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780950416182
Category : Type and type-founding
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description

Non-Latin Scripts

Non-Latin Scripts PDF Author: Fiona Ross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780950416182
Category : Type and type-founding
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets

An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets PDF Author: Tim Brookes
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1529408253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
A global exploration of the many writing systems that are on the verge of vanishing, and the stories and cultures they carry with them. If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing - not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years - sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people - is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us - and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely.

The Trade in Papers Marked with Non-Latin Characters / Le commerce des papiers à marques à caractères non-latins

The Trade in Papers Marked with Non-Latin Characters / Le commerce des papiers à marques à caractères non-latins PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360875
Category : History
Languages : fr
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The nine contributions in The Trade in Papers Marked with non-Latin Characters initiated by Anne Regourd (ed.) approach global history through the paper trade. They cover, in addition to a paper used in 14th C Persia, papers used in Africa (Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia) and Asia (the Ottoman Levant, Mecca, Persia, Russia, and Yemen) during the 19th-20th C. Primarily based on paper examination and quantitative data, the book invites us to treat papers as a source, and provides tools to determine the production of manuscripts in space and time for the area of interest. This methodology offers new insights on the competition between suppliers to the various markets particularly in respect of the emergence of import-export trading companies. Le commerce des papiers à marques à caractères non-latins, dont Anne Regourd (éd.) est à l'initiative, a pour projet de traiter d'histoire globale par le commerce du papier. Les neuf contributions réunies ici font apparaître un premier exemple de ce papier, persan, dès le xive s. sous les Moẓaffarides et, principalement, des papiers utilisés en Afrique (Éthiopie, Nigéria, Tunisie) et en Asie (Levant ottoman, La Mecque, Perse, Russie et Yémen), aux xixe et xxe s. S'appuyant sur l'observation des papiers et des données quantitatives, le livre invite à prendre le support de l'écrit comme source de l'histoire du commerce et donne des instruments pour déterminer la production de manuscrits dans l'espace et le temps pour une aire définie. Cette méthode renouvelle notre connaissance de l'approvisionnement des marchés, avec, en particulier, l'apparition de compagnies d'import-export. Contributors are: Michaelle Biddle, Evyn Kropf, Anne Regourd, Francis Richard, Alice Shafi-Leblanc, Jan Just Witkam, Olga Yastrebova. Foreword by Anna-Grethe Rischel.

The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850

The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 PDF Author: Simon Franklin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108492576
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Explores a new approach to the history of writing, and a guide to writing in the history of Russia.

Nation, Language, Islam

Nation, Language, Islam PDF Author: Helen M. Faller
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9639776904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
A detailed academic treatise of the history of nationality in Tatarstan. The book demonstrates how state collapse and national revival influenced the divergence of worldviews among ex-Soviet people in Tatarstan, where a political movement for sovereignty (1986-2000) had significant social effects, most saliently, by increasing the domains where people speak the Tatar language and circulating ideas associated with Tatar culture. Also addresses the question of how Russian Muslims experience quotidian life in the post-Soviet period. The only book-length ethnography in English on Tatars, Russia’s second most populous nation, and also the largest Muslim community in the Federation, offers a major contribution to our understanding of how and why nations form and how and why they matter – and the limits of their influence, in the Tatar case.

The Chinese Typewriter

The Chinese Typewriter PDF Author: Thomas S. Mullaney
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262536102
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for “Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained “typewriter girls” and “typewriter boys.” Still later was the “Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of “predictive text.” Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an “object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Vox Latina

Vox Latina PDF Author: W. Sidney Allen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521379366
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This is a reissue of the second edition of a book on the pronunciation of Latin in Rome in the Golden Age. It has a section of supplementary notes which deal with subsequent developments in the subject. The author has also added an appendix on the names of the letters of the Latin alphabet.

Language Culture Type

Language Culture Type PDF Author: John D. (ed.). Berry
Publisher: Graphis Incorporated
ISBN: 9781932026016
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Language Culture Type grew out of the first international type-design competition, the 2001 bukva: raz!, whose goal was to promote global cultural pluralism, interaction, and diversity in typographic communications. The book lavishly presents the winning entries, along with information about each typeface, its language, and its designer. A series of essays gives context for the interplay of types and languages in the world today -- including the attempt to mesh all existing scripts into a single digital encoding system called Unicode. It also delves into the specific issues around developing typefaces for the many linguistic cultures in the world, from the various Cyrillic letterforms to Vietnam's ancient ideographic script.

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.

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia PDF Author: Peter Francis Kornicki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198797826
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia--not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned, and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.