Writing Systems and Phonetics provides students with a critical understanding of the writing systems of the world. Beginning by exploring the spelling of English, including how it arose and how it works today, the book goes on to address over 60 major languages from around the globe and includes detailed descriptions and worked examples of writing systems which foreground the phonetics of these languages. Key areas covered include: the use of the Latin alphabet in and beyond Europe; writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek and its Cyrillic offshoot, Arabic and Hebrew; languages in south and south-east Asia, including Hindi, Tamil, Burmese and Thai, as well as in east Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean; reflections on ancient languages such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Linear B and Mayan; a final chapter which sets out a typology of writing systems. All of the languages covered are contextualised by authentic illustrations, including road signs, personal names and tables, to demonstrate how theoretical research can be applied to the real world. Taking a unique geographical focus that guides the reader on a journey across time and continents, this book offers an engaging introduction for students approaching for the first time the phonetics of writing systems, their typology and the origins of scripts.

Writing Systems and Phonetics provides students with a critical understanding of the writing systems of the world. Beginning by exploring the spelling of English, including how it arose and how it works today, the book goes on to address over 60 major languages from around the globe and includes detailed descriptions and worked examples of writing systems which foreground the phonetics of these languages. Key areas covered include: the use of the Latin alphabet in and beyond Europe writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek and its Cyrillic offshoot, Arabic and Hebrew languages in south and south-east Asia, including Hindi, Tamil, Burmese and Thai, as well as in east Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean reflections on ancient languages such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Linear B and Mayan a final chapter which sets out a typology of writing systems. All of the languages covered are contextualised by authentic illustrations, including road signs, personal names and tables, to demonstrate how theoretical research can be applied to the real world. Taking a unique geographical focus that guides the reader on a journey across time and continents, this book offers an engaging introduction for students approaching for the first time the phonetics of writing systems, their typology and the origins of scripts.

Accessibly written, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach provides detailed coverage of all major writing systems of historical or structural significance with thorough discussion of structure, history, and social context as well as important theoretical issues. The book examines systems as diverse as Chinese, Greek, and Maya and each writing system is presented in the light of four major aspects of writing: history and development; internal structure; the relationship of writing and language; and sociolinguistic factors. The volume is extensively illustrated and the glossary of technical terms, exercises, and further reading suggestions that accompany each chapter make Writing Systems a valuable resource for students in linguistics and anthropology.

To say that writing has as much claim as speech to be treated as language may strike the reader as a statement of the obvious. But the fact is that, although the tide is beginning to turn now, for most of the twentieth century linguistics has almost wholly ignored writing. It is not necessary to accept all the theories of the French critic Jacques Derrida in order to agree with him when he describes writing as "the wandering outcast of linguistics." This book is offered in the belief that written language is a form of language. As such, it deserves to be treated with the methods of modern, scientific linguistic study, which have been increasing our understanding of the spoken form of language for many decades.

As the colonial hegemony of empire fades around the world, the role of language in ethnic conflict has become increasingly topical, as have issues concerning the right of speakers to choose and use their preferred language(s). Such rights are often asserted and defended in response to their being violated. The importance of understanding these events and issues, and their relationship to individual, ethnic, and national identity, is central to research and debate in a range of fields outside of, as well as within, linguistics. This book provides a clearly written introduction for linguists and non-specialists alike, presenting basic facts about the role of language in the formation of identity and the preservation of culture. It articulates and explores categories of conflict and language rights abuses through detailed presentation of illustrative case studies, and distills from these key cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalizations.

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.

An Exploration of Writing is a book about our alphabets, our syllabaries, and all the other kinds of writing that people use and have used for 5000 years. It introduces the general public to a topic that hardly anyone has heard about, so it clarifies basic linguistic terms as they occur. For linguists exploring the growing field of graphonomy-the study of writing systems-in which the author has long been a pioneer, it weaves together the many threads of theory into a tapestry showing a fuller picture of what all our scripts are seen to share. An Exploration of Writing begins with more familiar kinds of writing considered in unfamiliar ways-starting with English viewed syllabically--and leads the reader across the Old World and the New to less familiar kinds of writing, showing how all writings share a fundamental essence, however diverse they appear to be, because all writing represents language. The more familiar (Hebrew, Chinese, Korean) leads on to the less familiar (Udi, Pahlavi, Javanese). Featured are some of the world's most recently elucidated scripts, and some that are long known but long neglected, such as those for Central Asian languages, and some of the most recent interpretations of long-mysterious scripts, such as Sumerian and Mesoamerican. An Exploration of Writing is in the tradition of and in part a response to A Study of Writing (1952/1963), by I. J. Gelb. It encapsulates more than thirty years of the author's work and his dozens of articles on writing systems, ranging from investigating the physical process of writing to bringing to light the achievements of those who had deciphered forgotten scripts to developing a theoretical approach to the origins of writing which leads to insights into the nature of writing itself.