A history of writing / Steven Roger Fischer.
"From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the Internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of the world's writing. After surveying the first stages of information storage - knot records, pictographs, message s...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
London :
Reaktion Books,
2001.
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| Series: | Globalities.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the Internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of the world's writing. After surveying the first stages of information storage - knot records, pictographs, message sticks or boards, coloured pebbles - Steven Roger Fischer focuses on the emergence of complete writing systems in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium B.C. and its many reflexes in Egypt, the Indus Valley, Canaan, Anatolia and the Aegean. Having traced the rise of Phoenician and its effect on the evolution of the Greek alphabet, a process that generated the West's many alphabetic scripts, Fischer turns his attention to the writing systems of Asia, presenting a detailed exploration of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. An analysis of the Americas' pre-Columbian writing is followed by a close look at the evolution of handwritten and printed scripts in Western Europe, from the Middle Ages through the invention of printing to the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--Book jacket. |
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| Physical Description: | 352 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-341) and index. |
| ISBN: | 1861891016 9781861891013 |