Gnanadesikan - The writing revolution: cuneiform to the internet

THE LANGUAGE LIBRARY

Series editor: David Crystal

The Language Library was created in 1952 by Eric Partridge, the great etymologist and lexicographer, who from 1966 to 1976 was assisted by his co-editor Simeon Potter. Together they commissioned volumes on the traditional themes of language study, with particular emphasis on the history of the English language and on the individual linguistic styles of major English authors. In 1977 David Crystal took over as editor, and The Language Library now includes titles in many areas of linguistic enquiry.

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This edition first published 2009
2009 Amalia E. Gnanadesikan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gnanadesikan, Amalia E.
The writing revolution : cuneiform to the internet / by Amalia E. Gnanadesikan.
p. cm. (The language library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-5406-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4051-5407-9
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. WritingHistory. 2. AlphabetHistory. I. Title.
P211.G58 2009
411.09dc22
2008014284

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Illustrations

Plates

1 Neo-Assyrian cuneiform tablet with observations of the planet Venus

2 Papyrus with illustrations and cursive hieroglyphs from the Book of the Dead of Any

3 Chinese oracle bone from the Shang dynasty

4 Carved sapodilla wood lintel from Temple IV at Tikal

5 Linear B written on clay tablets, from the Palace of Knossos, Crete

6 Sequoyah with his syllabary

7 Twelfth-century AD palm-leaf manuscript of a Buddhist Prajnaparamita sutra

8 Page from the Book of Kells

9 Page from the 42-line Gutenberg Bible

Figures

How different writing systems represent language

A proto-cuneiform tablet

The development from proto-cuneiform, through early Sumerian cuneiform, to later Akkadian cuneiform

The first sentence of Darius the Greats trilingual cuneiform inscription at Behistun

Some of the biconsonantal signs, triconsonantal signs, and determinatives used in Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian uniconsonantal signs, the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet, in rightward-facing orientation

The Rosetta Stone, with inscriptions in hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek

Shang characters with identifiable modern descendants, and evolution of two characters from oracle bones to modern standard and cursive scripts

The printed Diamond Sutra, the oldest surviving woodblock-printed book in the world, dating to AD

Chinese pnyn Romanization, with IPA equivalents

The Maya syllabary (incomplete)

Examples of Maya glyphs

Some of Kobers triplets

The Linear B syllabary

The Japanese syllabaries

A Japanese proverb written in (1) a mixture of kanji, katakana, and hiragana, (2) hiragana only, (3) katakana only

The Cherokee syllabary, as invented by Sequoyah and arranged by Samuel Worcester

Ancient alphabets

The Aramaic alphabet and three of its descendants

Three Altaic descendants of the Aramaic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet

Islamic zoomorphic calligraphy

Seal with Indus Valley symbols

The Devangar, Kannada, and Tamil scripts

The Thai script

The derivation of the hangl letters from their pronunciations

Hangl, the Korean alphabet, listed in the South Korean order

The derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician

Two of the descendants of the Greek alphabet

The Etruscan and Roman alphabets

Non-Roman scripts of the British Isles

The Phaistos Disk

The International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet applied to American English

The ancient Near East

The Chinese world