Kim-Renaud, Young-Key, ed. 1997. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Ministry of Culture and Information, Republic of Korea. 1970. A History of Korean Alphabet and Movable Types. Seoul: Ministry of Culture and Information. Contains copies of the Hunmin chng’m, Hunmin chng’m haeryae, and early printed material.
Sohn, Ho-Min. 1999. The Korean Language. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Insup and M. Martin Taylor. 1995. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Studies in Written Language and Literacy 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chapter 12 Greek Serendipity
The Greek alphabet is the perennial subject of scholarly debate, particularly with respect to its origins and its historical significance. Near Eastern scholars tend to date its creation earlier (around 1100 bc), before the stance of the letters and the direction of the script were standardized in the parent Phoenician script. Greek archaeologists, however, point to the absence of any surviving writing from that time and advocate a date closer to 800 bc. The version I have presented here, in which the Greek alphabet was created in the context of illiteracy (and was therefore subject to much variety as learners struggled with the new technology), takes into account both the varying stances and directions and the more modern date that fits the Greek archaeo-logical record. But see Sass (2005, listed under chapter 9) for a reconciliation that places the standardization of the Phoenician alphabet much later as well. How the semivowels and laryngeal consonants of the Phoenician alphabet were reinterpreted as vowels is also open to debate: I have presented what I as a phonologist think is the most likely process (i.e. the misunderstanding of a foreigner, for which see also Brixhe in the Baurain et al. volume) which also fits with the explanation of the varying directions and stances. However, semivowels and laryngeals are easily elided or used for vowels in many languages, as witness the Aramaic invention and subsequent widespread use of matres lectionis. For those wanting to know more about the various theories, see Baurain et al. (1991) and Havelock (1982) below, as well as Sass (2005), Healey (1990), and Naveh (1982) listed under chapter 9.
Allen, W. Sidney. 1987. Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn about Greek pronunciation in depth.
Baurain, C., C. Bonnet, and V. Krings, eds. 1991. Phoinikeia Grammata: Lire et écrire en Méditerranée. Namur: Société des Études Classiques. Contains articles presenting a range of scholarly opinion on the origins of the Greek alphabet. Very technical and in a variety of languages, but the article by Claude Brixhe is especially recommended.
Bonfante, Larissa. 1990. Etruscan. Reading the Past. London: British Museum.
Cook, B. F. 1987. Greek Inscriptions. Reading the Past 5. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cooper, Henry R. 2003. Slavic Scriptures: The Formation of the Church Slavonic Version of the Holy Bible. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Sections 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 60, 64, 67, by Swiggers, Threatte, Jenniges, Ritner, Ebbinghaus, Bonfante, Cubberley, Sanjian, Holisky, Comrie, Feldman, and Barac-Cikoja.
Easterling, Pat and Carol Handley, eds. 2001. Greek Scripts: An Illustrated Introduction. London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Accessible and well illustrated.
Harris, William V. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Havelock, Eric A. 1982. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Overstates the uniqueness of the Greek alphabet and is strangely dismissive of Near Eastern scripts, literacy, and literature, but is valuable on the transition from orality to literacy in Greece.
Jones, Peter. 1998. Learn Ancient Greek: A Lively Introduction to Reading the Language. New York: Barnes and Noble. A good place to start learning Greek, if you don’t mind the “lively” tone.
Morris, Ian and Barry B. Powell. 2006. The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Despite talking down to its intended audience (undergraduates), this book presents a thoughtful synthesis combined with extensive quotation from primary sources.
Chapter 13 The Age of Latin
Besides the works listed below, see also Gaur (1994), listed under chapter 9, and Harris (1989), under chapter 12.
Abels, Richard. 1998. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England. London: Longman.
Allen, W. Sidney. 1978. Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A thorough and excellent work.
Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 1963. A History of the English Language, 3rd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A classic.
Becher, Matthias. Charlemagne. Trans. David S. Bachrach. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bede. 1968. A History of the English Church and People. Trans. Leo Shirley-Price and R. E. Latham. London: Penguin.
Bonfante, Giuliano. 1999. The Origin of the Romance Languages: Stages in the Development of Latin. Ed. Larissa Bonfante. Bibliothek der klassichen Altertumswissenschaftern: Reihe 2; N. F., Bd. 100. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Cassidy, Frederic G. and Richard N. Ringler, eds. 1971. Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A classic textbook.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Sections 23, 24, 25, and 26, by Bonfante, Knight, Elliott, and McManus.
Gordon, Arthur E. 1973. The Letter Names of the Latin Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Humez, Alexander and Nicholas Humez. 1985. A B C Et Cetera: The Life and Times of the Roman Alphabet. Boston: Godine. Surprisingly, most of this book is not about the Roman alphabet, but it does contain information about the later additions to the alphabet, as well as social history of the Roman period written in an accessible style.
Janson, Tore. 2004. A Natural History of Latin. Trans. Merethe Damsgård Sørensen and Nigel Vincent. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKitterick, Rosamond. 1989. The Carolingians and the Written Word. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1995. An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. Both thorough and accessible.
Page, R. I. 1987. Runes. Reading the Past. London: British Museum.
Payne, Robert. 2001. Ancient Rome. New York: ibooks.
Peters, Edward. 1996. Europe and the Middle Ages, 3rd edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Sacks, David. 2003. Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of our Alphabet from A to Z. New York: Broadway Books. Written for a general audience.
Chapter 14 The Alphabet Meets the Machine
Estimates vary on the number of Bibles Gutenberg printed and how many calfskins went into making a vellum copy. I have taken my numbers from the British Library website cited below. In addition to the works listed below, see also Mafundikwa (2004) listed under chapter 1, Hunter (1943) listed under chapter 4, and Allen (1978), Janson (2004), Peters (1996), and Sacks (2003) listed under chapter 13. The book that speculated on the “no longer certain” future of the printed book is Febvre and Martin (1976, originally published in French in 1958). The numbers I quote on the amount of information and paper in 2002 come from Lyman and Varian (2003).
British Library. Treasures in Full: Gutenberg Bible. http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.xhtml.
Crystal, David. Language and the Internet, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A timely and readable work.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Sections 23, 24, 59, 63, 74, by Bonfante, Knight, Tuttle, Senner, Daniels, McMa
nus, Hamp, Comrie, Bendor-Samuel, ình-Hoà, Augst, and Daniels.
Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. 1976. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: Verso. A classic.
Friedman, Thomas L. 2006. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, updated and expanded edn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gillies, James and Robert Cailliau. 2000. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Godart, Louis. 1995. The Phaistos Disc: The Enigma of an Aegean Script. Itanos Publications.
Graff, Harvey J. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haas, Christina. 1996. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Describes experiments done to determine how word processing affects writing.
Heim, Michael. 1999. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Howard, Nicole. 2005. The Book: The Life Story of a Technology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Greenwood Technographies.
Johnson, Samuel. 1994. A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words are Deduced from their Originals Explained in their Different Meanings, and Authorized by the Names of the Writers in whose Works They are Found. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Lawson, Alexander. 1990. Anatomy of a Typeface. Boston: Godine.
Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian. 2003. How Much Information. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info-2003.
Prah, Kwesi Kwaa, ed. 2002. Writing African: The Harmonisation of Orthographic Conventions in African Languages. CASAS 25. Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society.
Report: Text Messaging Harms Written Language. http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/04/26/Ireland.text.message.reut/index.xhtml.
Sonn, William. 2006. Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Southall, Richard. 1984. First Principles of Typographic Design for Document Production. TUGboat 5.2. http://www.tug.org/TUGboat. Werschler-Henry, Darren. 2005. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Aptly named, a whimsically selective cultural history.
What is Unicode? http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.xhtml. Winks, Robin W. and Lee Palmer Wandel. 2003. Europe in a Wider World: 1350–1650. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plate 1 Neo-Assyrian cuneiform tablet with observations of the planet Venus. Copied at Nineveh in the seventh century BC; the original observations were made about a thousand years earlier. Image copyright © British Museum/HIP/Art Resource, NY.
Plate 2 Papyrus with illustrations and cursive hieroglyphs from the Book of the Dead of Any. From Thebes, Egypt, and dating to the nineteenth dynasty, c.1250 BC. Image copyright © British Museum/Art Resource, NY.
Plate 3 Chinese oracle bone from the Shang dynasty, bearing Chinese characters of the earliest form known. British Museum, London. Image copyright © Art Resource, NY.
Plate 4 Carved sapodilla wood lintel from Temple IV at Tikal, collected in 1877 by the explorer Gustav Bernoulli. Detail showing glyphs. Dated to AD 741. Museum fuer Voelkerkunde, Basel, Switzerland. Photo copyright © Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.
Plate 5 Linear B written on clay tablets, from the Palace of Knossos, Crete. At top, records of sheep at Phaistos. At bottom, records of oil offered to various deities. These and other Linear B tablets were preserved in the fire that destroyed the palace, around 1350 BC. Image copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Plate 6 Sequoyah with his syllabary. McKenney and Hall: “Se-Quo-Yah,” from History of the Indian Tribes of North America. c.1837–44. Hand-colored lithograph. Image copyright © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.
Plate 7 Twelfth-century palm-leaf manuscript of a Buddhist Prajnaparamita sutra from West Bengal, India. Image copyright © Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Plate 8 Page from the Book of Kells, showing the genealogy of Christ from the book of Luke. Written in a fine Insular Half Uncial and beautifully illuminated, c. AD 800. Trinity College, Dublin. Image copyright © Art Resource, NY.
Plate 9 Page from the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, produced at Mainz c.1455. The main text is printed with Gothic-style movable type, but the initials and marginalia are hand painted. Page 280, recto, with the prologue to the Book of Job. A picture of Job appears inside the initial V. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin. Image copyright © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.
Index
A
abjads, see consonantal alphabets under alphabets
Abkhaz
accounting, see record keeping
Achaemenid dynasty
acrophonic principle
administration
affixes, see morphemes
African languages
Afro-Asiatic languages; see also Semitic languages
Agamemnon
Åkerblad, Johan
Akkadian
language
texts
writing, see under cuneiform
aksara-based writing pl. 7
Albanian
Albright, W. F.
Alexander the Great
Alfred the Great
alpha
alphabetical order
alphabets see also aksara-based writing
consonantal alphabets
non-linear vs. linear alphabets
voweled alphabets
alphasyllabary, see aksara-based writing
Altaic languages
American Sign Language
Amharic
Amnisos
ampersand
Anatolian hieroglyphs
Andamanese languages
Anglo-Saxon, see English
Anglo-Saxon Minuscule
Anglo-Saxons
Anyang
Arabic
alphabet
language
Arabs
Aramaeans
Aramaic
alphabet
language
Armenian
art; see also calligraphy
Aryans
ash (letter)
Asia Minor
Aoka, Emperor
Assamese
Assyria
Athens
Augustus, Caesar
Austro-Asiatic languages
Austronesian languages
Avestan
Aztecs 298
B
Babel, tower of
Babylon
Balochi
Bambara
bamboo (writing on)
Bamum, see Shü-mom
barbarians
Barthelémy, Abbé
Basque
Behistun inscriptions
Belarusian
Bengali
Berber
Berlin, Heinrich
Berners-Lee, Tim
beta
Bi Sheng
Bible
Hebrew Bible
New Testament
birch bark (writing on)
Blegen, Carl
book hand
Book of Kells, pl.
Book of the Dead, pl.
bookburning
book-keeping, see record keeping
books
bpmf
Boudinot, Elias
boustrophedon writing
Brhm
Braille
Britain
Bronze Age
brush
Buddhism
Bulgarian
bureaucracy, see administration
Bronze Age
brush
Buddhism
Bulgarian
bureaucracy, see administration Burmese
Byzantine Empire
C
calendars
calligraphy<
br />
Cameroon
Canaanite
Old Canaanite alphabet
cantillation marks
capital letters
Carolingian Minuscule
Carthage
cartouche
Celtic languages
ceramics
Chadwick, John
Champollion, Jean-François
Charlemagne
Cherokee
language
writing
Cherokee Nation
chi
China
Chinese
language
Cantonese
Classical Chinese
Mandarin
Middle Chinese
Old Chinese
script, pl.
texts
Ch’oe Mal-li
Chosn dynasty
Christianity
Cilician
civil service examination
civilization
classical language
clay tablets, pl. 1, pl. 5
Cleopatra (Ptolemaic name)
Cleopatra VII
codex
computers
Confucianism
consonants
aspirated
click
doubled
palatalized
pharyngeal
plosive
retroflex
syllabic
voiced see also glottal stop; semivowels
Constantinople
Copán
Coptic
Corinth
Counter-Reformation
Cretan hieroglyphs
Crete
Croatian
cuneiform, pl. 1
Akkadian
decipherment
Elamite
Hittite
Hurrian
Old Persian
Sumerian
Ugaritic
Urartian see also proto-cuneiform
cursive writing
Cypriot syllabary
Cyril, Saint
Cyrillic alphabet
D
Darius the Great
Dead Sea Scrolls
decipherment
delta
demotic; see also Egyptian
determinative
Devangar
diacritics
cedilla
The Writing Revolution Page 35