"Jammed full of fabulous letters." — Words & Worlds of New York. Immensely practical volume (one of the largest of this sort available) contains 100 alphabets in 43 different languages, from Arabic to Welsh. Thirty-three are in accented Latin script (Albanian, Basque, Catalan); 10 in non-Latin scripts (Celtic, Cyrillic, Hebrew.) Ideal for any graphic or printed communications.

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.

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.

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

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.

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