The Writing Revolution : Cuneiform to the Internet

• Autore: Gnanadesikan Amalia E
• Pubblicazione: Newark : , : John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, , 2025; ©2025
• Edizione: 2nd ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (407 pages)
• Disciplina: 411.09
• Nota di contenuto: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Chapter 1 The First IT Revolution -- Writing and Language -- Designing a Writing System -- Transliteration -- Chapter 2 Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People -- Proto-cuneiform -- Sumerian Cuneiform -- Akkadian Adaptation -- Spread Beyond Mesopotamia: Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Hittite -- Redesigns: Old Perian, Ugaritic -- Decipherment -- Chapter 3 Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Quest for Eternity -- Hieroglyphs -- Hieroglyphs in Art and Religion -- Hieratic -- Demotic -- Death of a Tradition -- Coptic -- Decipherment -- Chapter 4 Chinese: A Love of Paperwork -- Basics of Chinese Characters -- Writing in Ancient and Early Imperial China -- Classifying and Defining Characters -- The Unifying Effect of Written Chinese -- The Invention and Spread of Paper -- From Classical to Modern Chinese -- Characters in Modern Times -- Spread Beyond Han China -- Chapter 5 Maya Glyphs: Calendars and Kings -- The Calendar -- History of the Maya Hieroglyphic Script -- Decipherment -- Basics of Maya Glyphs -- Chapter 6 Linear B: The Clerks ofAgamemnon -- Discovery -- Three Cretan Scripts and a Cypriot Script -- Initial Decipherment Attempts -- Michael Ventris' Decipherment -- Loss of Cretan Writing -- Chapter 7 Japanese: Three Scripts Are Better than One -- Chinese Characters in Japan -- Man'ygana and Senmygaki -- The Two Kana Syllabaries -- Mixing Kanji and Kana -- Word Processing in Japanese -- Chapter 8 Cherokee: Sequoyah Reverse-Engineers -- Sequoyah's Story -- The Cherokee Syllabary -- Sequoyah's Legacy in North America, Asia, and Africa -- Chapter 9 The Semitic lep-Bt: Egypt to Manchuria in 3,500 Years -- Egyptian Origins -- Canaanite, Ugaritic, Old South Arabian, and Ethiopic -- Phoenician, Punic, Old Hebrew, and Samaritan -- Aramaic -- Square Hebrew. ; Palmyrene, Syriac, Nabataean, and Mandaic -- Parthian, Sogdian, Pahlavi, and Avestan -- Turkic, Uighur, Mongolian, and Manchu -- Arabic -- Chapter 10 The Empire of Sanskrit -- Ancient Indian Writing -- Writing with Aksharas -- The Age of Sanskrit -- Diversification and Spread -- Written Vernaculars -- Attitudes to Language and Script -- Chapter 11 King Sejong's One-ManRenaissance -- Sejong's Mission -- Han'gl Basics -- Han'gl's Reception -- Chapter 12 Greek Serendipity -- How the Alphabet Was Made -- Greek Literacy -- Post-Classical Developments -- Etruscan -- Gothic, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian -- Glagolitic and Cyrillic -- Chapter 13 The Age of Latin -- The Early Latin Alphabet -- Fall and Fragmentation of the Western Empire -- The Carolingian Renaissance -- Old English Literacy -- Chapter 14 The Alphabet Meets the Machine -- Paper Comes to Europe -- Growing Demand -- The Moveable-Type Printing Press -- A New Information Age -- Adapting the Roman Alphabet in Europe -- Spread of the Roman Alphabet Beyond Europe -- Further Mechanization -- The Typewriter -- Chapter 15 Writing Goes to Bits -- Louis Braille's Binary System -- Samuel Morse's Telegraph and Code -- Later Encodings and Unicode -- Word Processing -- The Digital Divide -- Old and New Styles and Genres -- Dangers of Digital Text -- Appendix -- Further Reading -- Index -- EULA.
• Sommario/riassunto: An exploration of the original Information Technology - the writing systems of history The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet explores the origins, historical development, adaptations, linguistic properties, cultural context, and social impact of one of humankind's greatest inventions: writing systems. Now in its second edition, this popular book traces the history of writing from the earliest proto-cuneiform tablet to the latest AI-generated text. Author Amalia E. Gnanadesikan offers an engaging, highly readable narrative account of how different writing systems originated, how they evolved over time, and how they have represented languages around the world. Concise, easy-to-digest chapters cover each of the world's major written traditions across time and space, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Bronze-Age Linear B, New World writing systems, the Roman alphabet, and many others. Updated throughout, The Writing Revolution features new and expanded coverage of the Digital Age, including Unicode, the World Wide Web, emojis, generative AI, and more. Investigating how the creation of writing made the modern world possible, The Writing Revolution: Covers the world's major writing systems as well as a selection of lesser-known scripts Discusses papyrus, paper, the printing press, digital writing, and other associated technologies Features engaging examples throughout, including Egyptian funerary texts, Maya calendars, Arabic calligraphy, Morse code, and modern text messaging Interweaves ideas from cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and information science The Writing Revolution is a must-read for students of writing systems, linguistics, information science, and intellectual history, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of written language.
• Titolo autorizzato: The writing revolution
• ISBN: 1-394-21822-2; 1-394-21820-6
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9911019855803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: The Language Library