Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis

Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics

by Florian Coulmas

The problem of reducing language to writing and conversely that of interpreting written signs as language has been resolved through the development of different writing systems. This illustrated textbook introduces the major writing systems of the world (from cuneiform to English spelling) and analyzes their structure and function. It includes a review of the history of writing and a discussion of the literate mind and society.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

Paperback

First published November 28, 2002

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an introductory textbook, so unfortunately it's required by law to include at least 30% meaningless filler (and I do mean meaningless, not just too precious about defining jargon, though there is some of that as well—like all fields in which you can only do so much legitimate work without leaving the comfort of your on-campus office, there are a lot of linguists whose body of work mainly consists of defining and redefining things in a circle), mostly concentrated in the early chapters, which you, also unfortunately, can't skip entirely because there are some important and wholesome truths being communicated there laypersons and many trained linguists alike could do with internalising (including, among others, a debunking of the view that writing is entirely secondary to language and only serves to represent the spoken word—a notion held explicitly by Saussure and implicitly by countless more).
If you don't care for philosophising as much you might expect that more of the meat of the book lay in the chapters detailing real-world writing systems, and while there certainly is a lot of it there, the actual descriptions also contain a lot of inaccuracies† and a sloppiness that Coulmas would undoubtedly defend on grounds of the book not being meant to be a reference for specific writing systems but only an introduction to thinking about writing systems in general—fair, but frustrating.

Still, there is much worth being aware of here, and even if not everything Coulmas writes is true, you'll certainly come away with a more nuanced understanding of writing systems in the end.

--------

† Coulmas is a Japanologist, so it's not that odd that he wouldn't be as intimately familiar with Ancient Greek as an Indo-Europeanist, but it is odd for any academic linguist in Europe not to know Greek to the point that they'd use Modern Greek phonemic realisations in a discussion of the application of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greek language, or claim that Thai adopting a writing system ultimately based on the same is particularly worth examining because ``[t]one is unknown in Semitic and European languages''.