Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms

by Akira Nakanishi

This unique, ambitious and entertaining book presents twenty-nine scripts in detail and offers examples of a hundred more. Written in nontechnical prose and organized into brief but comprehensive sections, it will serve as a handy reference for world travelers, stamp collectors, and calligraphers, along with providing hours of reading enjoyment to those who are fascinated by the written symbol itself.

The scripts covered here are from all over the world. A few, like Greek or the Cyrillic script used for Russian, may be familiar to readers of Western languages. But others may seem strange, such as Pakistan's Urdu, which is written in a style so fine that newspapers are not typeset but reproduced from pages laboriously written out by hand.

Each of the script sections includes charts of the symbols, reading tips, forms of numerals, and other features that help explain how the language is written. Further enhanced with maps, illustrations, a glossary, and useful appendixes, Writing Systems of the World is a remarkably concise and organized look at what is perhaps mankind's greatest achievement, the written language.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Cultural, Reference

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1980

Reviews

[Liz]

A joy to read. Easy to navigate, easy to compare systems. Clear, lucid prose. Excellent examples.

[J.]

One of my favorite reference books growing up. Granted it's been entirely supplanted by Wikipedia, but there used to be nothing like it.

[Alexis]

In late 2023, my 5 year old became interested, nay, obsessed, with alphabets. Not finding a sufficient kids book, I bought this one. It has become an essential part of our lives! The pages are falling out! Obviously this isn't a book "for" kids, but because it has one writing system per page (typically), and a nice full page newspaper example, it's actually a really simple resource. And it has depth as well, and covers a wide breadth of writing systems. It's very much a product of the 80s, as seen by the world map and descriptions of places and governments. And of course by the inclusion of newspaper front pages! I love that it was originally written in part to help stamp collectors. If I could have an updated version, there would just be more information on the languages that get glossed over -- for example aboriginal languages for which there were fewer widespread resources at the time of writing. Overall, this is a fantastic reference book and I'm really glad I found it and might need to buy another copy as it continues to fall apart from excessive use.

[Stephen Simpson]

In the time before Wikipedia (I believe the book was written in 1975 and first published in 1980) I can see how this would have been an interesting and, maybe, useful resource. Now, between Wikipedia, online newspapers (and other writing sources), and so on, it's not really much more than a quaint relic of linguistics history.

[Michael Jay]

Useful visual of writing systems -- it is a reminder of how we agree on symbols and improve on communication.

[Mark A.]

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[David]

One of my all-time favorites.

[Suhrob]

Wonderful concise encyclopedia of writing systems of the world. Each region is introduced and all its major actively used writing systems get a two page description with their full script and a scan of a newspaper title page. A selection of extinct or smaller local scripts get at least small showcases after each chapter.

I got this book, because Wikipedia is really not convenient to explore the scripts and it was worth it!

Minor problems: I would have liked more space (even full entries) for the historic scripts. The book hasn't been updated since 1989 so the old geopolitics is used (which makes me nicely nostalgic...).


My favourites: old favourites of Tibet, Mongolia and new discoveries - the Mandaean, Estrangelo and Buginese scripts

Silliest contestant: Rongorongo of Easter Island - a *reverse* boustrophedon - makes even a phonebook into a deluxe ergodic book! :)

[Jesus]

This shows the scripts of many different languages in two-page format.

[George]

Didn't know there were so many different styles of writing and languages.