The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, & Pictograms

by Andrew Robinson

A survey of the world's major scripts, studied through sight, sound and symbol Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol, and script in a succinct and absorbing text. He discusses each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan, as well as topics such as the Cherokee “alphabet” and the writing of runes. Full coverage is given to the history of decipherment, and a provocative chapter devoted to undeciphered scripts challenges the can these codes ever be broken? In this revised edition, the author reveals the latest discoveries to have an impact on our knowledge of the history of writing, including the Tabula Cortonensis showing Etruscan symbols and a third millennium BC seal from Turkmenistan that could solve the mystery of how Chinese writing evolved. He also discusses how the digital revolution has not, despite gloomy predictions, spelled doom for the printed book. In addition, the table of Maya glyphs has been revised so that they are up-to-date with current research.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Writing, Science, Anthropology

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

(William) Andrew Coulthard Robinson is a British author and former newspaper editor.

Andrew Robinson was educated at the Dragon School, Eton College where he was a King's Scholar, University College, Oxford where he read Chemistry and finally the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is the son of Neville Robinson, an Oxford physicist.

Robinson first visited India in 1975 and has been a devotee of the country's culture ever since, in particular the Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. He has authored many books and articles. Until 2006, he was the Literary Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement<?em>. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

He is based in London and is now a full-time writer.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Rob Hocking · Rating 1 out of 5]

I ordered this book because I was thinking about how the writing systems that I'd encountered in my travels seemed to fall into clusters with respect to their style. For example, the scripts in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos are all similar-looking and look roughly similar to Indian writing (in my opinion at least). Indian writing, in turn, looks roughly similar to Arabic writing. However, when you move either east or west, there is an abrupt divide - to the East, Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts are all similar but very different from the scripts of Southeast Asia. Roman, Greek, and Acrylic scripts are all roughly similar but very different from Arabic and Indian. So I wanted to find a book that would tell me about the evolution of these different scripts and perhaps shed some light on my observations.

Unfortunately, this book was deeply disappointing to me. Part of this is not the fault of the author, but part of it is.

The part that is not the fault of the author is that the focus of the book isn't what I wanted it to be. The author appears to be primarily interested in ancient, dead scripts and the history of their decipherment - who was involved and what their reasoning was - well over half of the book is devoted to this. This doesn't make the book bad, it's just that this isn't what I wanted to learn about. It's kind of like I was in the mood for sushi and went to a restaurant that I thought served sushi but actually, it was Korean Barbeque.

The part I do blame the author for is his treatment of Chinese and Japanese scripts. Everything that was said I either already knew, or strongly disagreed with, or found offensive, or else was simply wrong.

For example: "It is tempting to draw another parallel, this between the evolution of writing systems and the evolution of life on earth. From simple beginnings - pictograms and protozoa - there developed complexity. Sometimes, this ramified, leading to unwieldy excesses - cuneiform or Chinese characters, and dinosaurs; but it also led to highly successful forms - the alphabet, and homo sapiens."

Sentences like these - which indicate the author's belief in the inherent inferiority of Chinese writing and his overall western superiority complex - are sprinkled throughout the book, and I did not appreciate them. However, the main thing that annoyed me about this author is his repeated insistence - always given without evidence - that the popular notion that Chinese writing represents pure ideas decoupled from sound - is a myth. I'm first going to quote two examples of this from the book, and then I'm going to attempt to debunk it with an experiment, where I will attempt to read Cantonese, which I have never studied.

"If great claims are made for the power of the alphabet, even greater ones attach to Chinese writing. Chinese characters are said to be 'ideographic' - a word carefully avoided in this book in favour of the more specific 'logographic' - that is, characters are thought to be capable of communicating ideas without the intervention of phoneticism or indeed spoken language. Thus it is claimed that Chinese speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who do not know each other's 'dialect' and cannot talk to each other, can nevertheless communicate in writing through Chinese characters. Some people (both Chinese and westerners) even claim that the same scenario applies to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and (formerly) Vietnamese speakers, who languages differ greatly but who have shared the use of Chinese characters in their scripts. This, of course, would be quite impossible for the equivalent English, French, German and Italian speakers, who also use the same script. The implication is that the Chinese writing system works in a completely separate way from scripts with a large phonographic component. Writing systems, according to advocates of the ideographic principle, come in two fundamental varieties, one ideographic (e.g. Chinese), the other phonographic (e.g. alphabets).

Each of these claims is bogus, as shall see. Myths have obscured the understanding of Chinese characters for centuries...

In 1569, a Dominican friar in China became the first foreigner to suggest that those Chinese who could not understand each other's speech could nevertheless communicate in writing. The idea is still widely held. But it is not true.

What the outside world calls the Chinese language is in fact made up of eight regional languages ('topolects' or 'regionalects') that are mutually unintelligible, and tens, if not hundreds, of true dialects. Over 70 percent of Chinese do however speak a single language, Mandarin, also known as putonghua ('common speech'). Modern written Chinese is based on Mandarin or putonghua. It is the dominance of Mandarin speakers in China, both in classical times and today, that has fuelled the myth of the universal intelligibility of Chinese characters...the various Chinese regionalects such as Yue (Cantonese) and Wu (spoken in the Shanghai region) are then analogous to English, Dutch, and German in the Germanic group or French, Spanish, and Italian in the Romance group; while the dialects within Mandarin such as are spoken in Beijing or Nanjing are comparable to the British, American, and Australian dialects of English. And just as French and English speakers cannot understand each other's literature without learning each other's language (despite sharing the same roman script), so Cantonese speakers cannot understand modern written Chinese properly without learning how to speak Mandarin."

It is the last sentence in particular that pisses me off because the analogy with the Roman script is at best, very misleading. For example, without knowing French, I can't know that the word "cœur" means "heart", but both a Mandarin and a Cantonese speaker will understand that the character 心 stands for the concept of "heart". It is just that the Mandarin speaker will pronounce it as "xin" while the Cantonese speaker will pronounce it as "sum". That being said, I think there is some truth to what the author is saying, because while nouns and verbs can be represented by a single character independent of which Chinese language you are writing in, the same cannot be said of grammatical particles, as the details of the grammar will, in general, be different in different Chinese languages. Nevertheless, I believe that a person trained only in Mandarin will be able to extract much more information out of a sentence written in Cantonese than an English speaker with no French background could get out of a sentence written in French. Since I'm a scientist, it's not enough to say that I "believe" this - I have to do an experiment. Therefore, I've had my Mandarin teacher Mei Ho - whose native language is Cantonese - send me a sample of Cantonese writing (from a short story she uses to teach her Cantonese students). I'm now going to attempt to read it, having never studied Cantonese. (Note: the first word is in English, probably because her student is a native English speaker who does not yet know the word for headphones. She's also indicated the pronunciation of a word in one place).

Headphones平時好鍾意傾偈、食嘢同飲嘢。不過，佢返工嘅時候唔可以。因爲佢係一個的士司機。佢喺南非嘅一間的士公司做嘢。佢哋公司有五十五部車同五十五個的士司機。佢啲朋友覺得做的士司機好好。

因爲做司機嘅錢多過做夥計嘅錢。但係，佢哋個經理好麻煩(maa4 faan4)。佢哋經理日日都講：“唔返工嘅時候，你哋唔可以揸公司嘅車。喺車裏便嘅時候，你哋唔可以食嘢、飲嘢、打電話同睇戲。但係，啲搭的士嘅人可以。”

Now, before I attempt to read this (I'm actually doing it as I write this, I haven't done the experiment in advance), I'm going to make one small cheat - I'm going to the read the following Wikipedia article on "Cantonese Writing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written...

The reason I think this is fair is that many of the differences between written Cantonese and written Mandarin are simply that Cantonese speakers have chosen to use one character instead of another to represent a concept. For example, the concept of "eating" in written Mandarin is represented by the character 吃. But in Cantonese, for various reasons, they prefer to use the character 食. However, this doesn't reflect an intrinsic difference in the language - rather it represents an aesthetic choice. It's similar to if in British English, the letter "a" was written as "α", but the spelling of words was otherwise unchanged. I'm now going to attempt to read the above two paragraphs of Cantonese using only my knowledge of Mandarin as well as the list of character substitutions in the above Wikipedia article. My attempted translation is below:

"Headphones most of the time ****, eating and drinking. But, when he's at work, he can't. Because he is a taxi driver. He works at a taxi company in South Africa. Their company has 55 taxis and 55 taxi drivers. His friend thinks that being a taxi driver is good.

Because being a driver you can make more money than being a shop assistant. But, their manager is too annoying. Their manager always says: "when you aren't working, you can't ride the company car. When riding the car, you can't eat food, drink drinks, talk on the phone or play games. However, the passengers can."

This took about ten minutes, which is longer than it would take me to read the same sentences in Mandarin. Because I couldn't figure out the meaning of the characters 鍾意傾偈 in the first sentence, I've simply left that as ****. Otherwise, I was able to more or less understand or make an educated guess as to what was written (I now think that 'Headphones' is the name of a person, rather than a literal pair of headphones). Most of the difficulty lay in character substitutions - it was as if I was reading English but a, b, c, d, e, & f (say) had been replaced with other symbols, but the spelling was kept the same. In other places, the grammar was a bit strange, but because all the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc are all preserved, I was able to make an educated guess about what the sentence said. I also asked Maria - who is a native Mandarin speaker but has never studied Cantonese - to translate the text, using the same table of substitutions. She said "It was a little difficult, but I can parse it". Her translation is as follows:

Headphones (?) likes to talk, eat and drink. But he can't when he's working. He is a dirt taxi driver (?) for a taxi company in South Africa. His company has 55 dirt taxi and 55 drivers. His friends think being taxi drivers are great because they earn more money than labourers. But his manager is so annoying. His manager is always saying "when you are not working, you can't use the company car. When you are in the car, you can't eat, drink or call your friends. However, your passengers can do these things"

24 hours have now passed and I have received the correct translation from Mei Ho. It is:

"Normally ，Headphones likes talking、 eating and drinking. But, when he's at work, he can't. Because he is a taxi driver. He works at a taxi company in South Africa. Their company has 55 taxis and 55 taxi drivers. Those friends of him thinks that being a taxi driver is good.

Because being a driver you can make more money than being a shop assistant. But, their manager is too annoying. Their manager always says: "when you aren't working, you can't drive the company car. When driving the car, you can't eat food, drink drinks, talk on the phone or watch movies. However, the passengers can."

So, neither mine nor Maria's translation was *perfect*, but we got most of the main ideas. If it's true that claim that "Chinese speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who do not know each other's 'dialect' and cannot talk to each other, can nevertheless communicate in writing through Chinese characters" is "bogus", why were we able to do that? Now, let's consider again the sentence that pissed me off the most:

And just as French and English speakers cannot understand each other's literature without learning each other's language (despite sharing the same roman script), so Cantonese speakers cannot understand modern written Chinese properly without learning how to speak Mandarin.

If this comparison was fair, I should be able to take the following sentences in French (which I've just extracted from this news website), and extract as much information out of them as I was able to extract from the paragraphs in Cantonese that Mei Ho sent me, using only my knowledge of English and this Wikipedia article on "French Orthography": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_...

La Tunisie célèbre aujourd’hui le 63e anniversaire de la fête de l’Indépendance dans un climat délétère marqué par un véritable embrouillamini et l’absence de perspectives rassurantes. Le contexte tranche avec celui des premières années de l’indépendance marquées par d’autres soucis, ceux d’un pays exténué par 75 ans de colonisation, pauvre et sans ressources et dont la seule arme était la volonté de son peuple en osmose avec celle des leaders de l’indépendance autour de son «Combattant suprême », Habib Bourguiba. Grâce à son élan réformiste, ce dernier a réussi à doter le pays d’institutions modernes, à l’ouvrir sur le monde et à « créer une fierté nationale ».
Et il serait fastidieux de revenir sur les différentes péripéties et les faits marquants de ces six dernières décennies. Ni sur les heurs et malheurs du peuple tunisien au cours de cette période.
Laissons cette tâche aux historiens et concentrons-nous sur cette 2ème République qui a été instaurée suite aux élections législatives d’octobre 2014 et l’élection présidentielle de novembre et décembre de la même année, lesquelles ont mis fin à une période provisoire qui a duré plus que prévu. Période marquée par plusieurs événements qui ont failli faire chavirer « la barque Tunisie », avec trois assassinats politiques, ceux de Chokri Belaïd, Mohamed Brahmi et Lotfi Naguedh, l’émergence du phénomène du terrorisme directement et indirectement encouragé par le laxisme des gouvernements, des difficultés sociales et économiques et, un peu plus tard, la guerre contre la corruption.

Now, as it turns out, I *can* extract a few pieces of information, because of the similarity in spelling between certain words in English and French. I know the sentences have something to do with the 63 anniversary of the Independence of something, and there are a few other words I can pick out. But otherwise, I have absolutely no idea what these sentences say. However, I do have a pretty good idea of how these sentences sound. If I were to read them aloud, while no doubt there would be mispronunciations, what I said would perhaps be intelligible to a French-speaking person (unfortunately I don't know any, so I can't carry out this experiment). This is precisely the OPPOSITE of the situation with the Cantonese. There, while I was able to interpret the *meaning* of the sentences with a fairly high degree of accuracy, *I have absolutely no idea how they would sound in Cantonese*. In other words, there really *is* a fundamental difference between alphabets and logographic systems such as Chinese characters, with respect to what kind of information they are able to preserve across languages. Alphabets allow you to get the approximate sound of a sentence in a foreign language, but give you no information about the meaning. Logographic systems allow you to get the approximate meaning of a sentence in a foreign language, but carry no information about the sound.

As a final piece of criticism before I move on, I want to point out a bit of irony. This author claimed above that "Myths have obscured the understanding of Chinese characters for centuries", with the implication that he is going to set the record straight. But if anything, what he has said is more misleading than the very myths he was trying to dispel! From what I can tell, the "myth" he was trying to dispel is the notion that meaning is preserved *perfectly* in Chinese writing, across the various Chinese languages. This is true - meaning is not perfectly preserved - hence the small mistakes that Maria and I made. But it *is* preserved to a remarkably high degree, whereas he seems to imply that it is not preserved *at all*.

Finally, I will conclude with something nice. I did enjoy chapters 8 and 9, which traced the evolution of (many of) the various alphabets around the world from a common ancestor called "Phoenician".

[Linn J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enkel, givande och lättläst kurslitteratur gällande skriften och handskriftens historia

[Ioannis Savvas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Το «The Story of Writing» του Andrew Robinson το αγόρασα πέρσι στη Βιέννη από το Kunsthistorisches Museum (Μουσείο Ιστορίας της Τέχνης). Μόλις αυτό το καλοκαίρι όμως βρήκα την ευκαιρία να το διαβάσω. Η έκδοση είναι πολύ προσεγμένη, σε γυαλιστερό βαρύ χαρτί, με πολλές εικόνες και σχήματα. Η δομή των κεφαλαίων είναι κλιμακωτή και αυτό που κάνει το βιβλίο πολύ πρακτικό και εύκολο στο διάβασμα είναι ότι κάθε κεφάλαιο πιάνει ένα δισέλιδο (αντικριστό). Έτσι, ο αναγνώστης έχει σε δύο σελίδες όλες τις πληροφορίες (κείμενο, εικόνες, σχήματα) ενός κεφαλαίου.

Το περιεχόμενο είναι πολύ κατατοπιστικό και δίνει πολλές πληροφορίες για την ιστορία της γραφής, τις προσπάθειες αποκρυπτογράφησης (σφηνοειδής γραφή, αιγυπτιακά ιερογλυφικά, ιερογλυφικά των Μάγια, γραμμική Β’), αλλά και τη σύγχρονη πραγματικότητα των συστημάτων γραφής. Ξέρατε ότι η αραβική και η εβραϊκή γραφή δεν έχουν φωνήεντα; Ξέρατε ότι ο Μάο προσπάθησε να φέρει το λατινικό αλφάβητο στην κινεζική γλώσσα, αλλά συνάντησε ανυπέρβλητες αντιδράσεις (εδώ ο Κεμάλ ήταν αποτελεσματικότερος); Ξέρετε πόσο δύσκολο είναι να συνταχθεί ένα λεξικό της κινεζικής γλώσσας (μία εκδοχή περιλαμβάνει τις λέξεις κατά αύξοντα αριθμό των γραμμών που αποτελούν τα ιδεογράμματά τους – πιάσε το αυγό και κούρευ” το!);

[Darrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Story of Writing was not what I expected and more than I expected. I bought the book because of my interest in ancient scripts, languages and archaeology thinking it would be a good general overview. When I first glanced through it I thought I had bought a book more oriented toward middle school audience....that would be a wrong assumption. It is not an in depth scholarly work written for an audience with a graduate degree but it is still an engaging book for a later high school, freshman college level. It covers all of the major ancient scripts including cuneiform, Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs and much more. It goes into just enough depth to get you interested in learning more which I am sure is exactly what the author intended. The illustrations, explanations and examples are all well done. I didn't know a lot about cuneiform prior to reading this book and now I want to learn more. Also, even after reading several books about Mayan hieroglyphs I have never been able to understand the calendar system until Andrew Robinson was able to illustrate and explain it in such a clear way.

Very good. I recommend this to anyone with a budding interest in scripts and ancient languages.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very nice overview of ancient and modern writing methods, and the methods used to decipher them. Some aspects of it were surprising; for example, I had no idea how recently hieroglyphics had been used, or how recently Rongorongo still had people who understood it; nor how early our own alphabet became recognizable. There’s a photo of an Etruscan pot from the 6th century BC with, clearly, ABCDEF written on it.

Many of the alphabets are reproduced, at least in part, making this a nice reference book for game masters.

Most of the chapters are broken into one to two-page sections, making this almost a bathroom reader for people interested in the history of language.

[Stephen Politzer-Ahles · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had never heard of this book until one of my students quoted it in an essay. The quotation was, "Without writing there would be no history. In all civilizations, scribes have been the transmitter of culture, the first historians." This is such self-evident bullshit (I mean, oral traditions exist, and often predate writing systems) that I don't know how it got published. Of course, people with no linguistic training trying to write books about linguistic topics and doing a bad job of it is nothing new. Still, no one should read this garbage.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the title implies, these are the stories of writing, mostly about the story of lost languages deciphered.

In the process of telling these riveting stories, we exposed to the history of the people writing languages and how the language came to be lost.

A very quick and fun read for anybody interested in the history of ancient writing.

[Joe Kovacs · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Story of Writing should likely be read as a college student pores through a book assigned for a class and not as something to end the night on a light note. Although I was fascinated with the original explanation of Egyptian hieroglyphics as a written language of both conceptual symbols (logograms) and phonetic images, the ongoing analysis of different written forms--Babylonian cuneiform, Mayan glyphs--as well as the historical relationships between the various languages, quickly became something of a challenge. I'm not complaining. The book is laid out with fantastic photos of stones, tablets, pottery and artwork with different symbols, sketches and historic anecdotes to accompany the story of languages to make the reading a fascinating dive into history. However, a reader will have his work cut out for him. Unless you're a true student of writing and the written language, you may want to skip this in favor of something a little lighter. Otherwise, I would suggest this is a fascinating read.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superior descriptive and pictorial history of writing from the earliest times to the issue of Japanese difficulties near the end of the 20th century, and the presence of computers in handling the most difficult writing. I wish I might have had this book available at the time ca. 1968 when I gave a freshman seminar to a small class on the transmission of recorded information at Stanford University.

It must be made clear that this is a rapid survey of this huge topic. Each of these "languages" and other forms of writing have been treated in dozens of scholarly books. The author does well to provide 2 dense pages listing "further reading." The book can be read in one day, yet it would take many days to fully grasp all the author is providing in this introductory course covering the 5000-year history of graphical depiction and meaningful writing.

The host of illustrations add immensely to the information provided by clarifying and providing detail to the textural information. Published in 1995, the 8th chapter provides presentation of nine undeciphered scripts.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read some of the author's work before, I did not find this book or its approach particularly surprising.  It is striking to me, and more than a little bit disconcerting, just how political matters of orthography are.  The sort of letters we use when writing speak to a high degree about our own viewpoints of cultural imperialism, and to support alphabetization of languages around the world is, in some ways, to wish to make the world in our own image as users of a moderately effective Latin-based alphabet ourselves.  A great many writing systems have gone out of use, some are threatened (like Japanese kanji) by computers and the desire to make writing systems more rational and egalitarian, and still others have what should be fairly obvious acceptance threatened by political questions over which regime supports them (as is the case with the indigenous alphabet of the Koreans).  If all of this amounts to a great deal that I already know in new packaging, it is likely only because I have long been interested in languages, from ancient scripts to contemporary logograms, and the way in which many systems of writing require a fair bit of context to understand.  Most other readers will likely find this book far more original.

This particular book of a bit more than 200 pages is divided into 13 chapters, after a short introduction and before the inevitable suggestions for further reading and index.  The first part of the book examines how writing works, with chapters on reading the Rosetta stone (1), the relationship between sound, symbol, and script (2), and some examples of proto-writing in ice age symbols and various tallies and tokens and pictograms that may end up being seen as more full writing if more samples are discovered (3).  After that the author moves to extinct writing in the second part of the book, with chapters on cuneiform (4), Egyptian hieroglyphs (5), Linear B (6), Mayan glyphs (7), as well as a host of undeciphered scripts ranging from the Indus script, Etruscan, Proto-Elamite, Linear A, the Phaistos disk, and Rongorongo (8).  Finally, the book ends with a discussion of living writing in its third part, with chapters on the first alphabet of the Phoenicians (9), the way that new alphabets come from old ones, like the Greek and Latin letters from the Phoenician ones, the Arabic and Indian scripts, runes, and the Cherokee syllabary (10), as well as Chinese (11) and Japanese (12) writings and the return of logograms in the contemporary world (13).

As long as we attempt to understand and communicate with the world around us as human beings it is likely that writing will be a major aspect of this.  To be sure, writing has always presented various difficulties, including the problem of differentiating between sounds and the ambiguities that result from homophones and homonyms and often inconsistent pronunciation.  That said, there are clearly some forms of writing that are far easier to master than others, and a great deal of conflict that exists in the contemporary world because of what is viewed as cultural imperialism on one side or another.  Scripts become popular due to prestige--the rise of the Latin script was first due to the prestige of the Latin language within the European world and then the prestige of Europe within the world as a whole, even in the inspiration of other scripts that, like the Cherokee syllabary, were caused by the prestige of having writing and the desire on the part of Sequoia to create such a tool for his own language.  And this book reminds us that the struggle to record things in writing for the sake of posterity and communication and recording goes back a long way and is likely to be a considerable issue going forward as well.

[KiRsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vor 2 Jahren im British Museum in London gekauft, jetzt endlich fertiggelesen: Das Thema dieses Buches hat mich immer schon interessiert. Zur Anregung hier eine Zusammenfassung einer Dokumentation bei ARTE zum selben Thema, aber dann erweitert mit den Themen Schreibmaterialien, Buchdruck und die modernen Emoticonbildsprachen.

https://www.prisma.de/news/ARTE-Doku-...

Die Saga der Schrift: Am Anfang war ein Stierkopf (von Sarah Kohlberger)

Ein gedrehter Stierkopf und eine Welle des Wassers: Einfache Bilder entwickelten sich über Jahrtausende zu einem Schriftsystem, das für uns heute wie selbstverständlich dazugehört. Damals entstanden aus den Bildern die ersten Schriftzeichen, die sich wiederum zu den ersten Buchstaben verwandelten. Aus dem Stierkopf wurde der Buchstabe A, die Welle des Wassers ist heute ein M. Doch was steckt hinter der jahrtausendelangen Geschichte unseres Schriftsystems? Und wie haben sich die Buchstaben im Laufe der Jahrtausende entwickelt? Die neue dreiteilige Dokumentation "Vom Schreiben und Denken. Die Saga der Schrift" (ARTE), geht diesen Fragen auf den Grund.
Das Schreiben gehört für uns dazu wie das Lesen und Rechnen: Bereits im Kindergarten lernen wir die ersten Buchstaben, in der Grundschule dann das gesamte Alphabet sowie die Schreibschrift. Durch die Schrift können wir kommunizieren, uns mitteilen und Informationen austauschen, es ist zu einem wichtigen Bestandteil unseres alltäglichen Lebens geworden. Der Regisseur David Sington begibt sich in der ersten Folge mit dem Titel "Der Anfang" auf eine aufschlussreiche Reise weit in die Vergangenheit zurück, um den Ursprung dieser Schriftsysteme zu erörtern. Mithilfe von Ägyptologen, Archäologen und Philologen zeichnet er eine Entstehungsgeschichte nach, die sich über Jahrtausende auf der ganzen Welt ereignet hat. Bei seinen Recherchen begibt er sich nach Ägypten, wo vermutlich das Alphabet entstand, nach China und nach Australien.

Der zweite Teil der französischen Dokumentationsreihe mit dem Titel "Imprimatur. Buch und Zivilisation" setzt sich mit dem wohl wichtigsten Element der Schriftsysteme auseinander: den Utensilien. Zunächst waren Feder, Pinsel, Papyrus, Pergament oder Papier unerlässlich für das Festhalten der einzelnen Schriftzeichen. Dann erfand Johannes Gutenberg den Buchdruck – und sorgte für einen Umbruch in der Welt der Buchstaben. Welchen Einfluss hatte diese Entwicklung auf die drei Kulturräume Europa, Asien und die arabisch-islamische Welt? Und wie wirkten sich die neuen Materialien auf technische Innovationen, Kultur und Wirtschaft aus?

Die Reise von David Sington führt bis ins 20. Jahrhundert: In der dritten und letzten Folge "Eine neue Ära" werden Schriftentwicklungen der letzten Jahrzehnte unter die Lupe genommen. Neue digitale Errungenschaften ermöglichen eine Kommunikation rund um den Globus. Wie verändert sich unser Schriftsystem in den letzten Jahren – und wie der Mensch im Zuge dieser Entwicklungen? Durch die Digitalisierung und die Erfindung des Computers, der Tastatur und des Bildschirms hat sich eine neue Art der Kommunikation geformt – die nicht nur die Schrift, sondern auch uns Menschen maßgeblich beeinflusst hat.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that does exactly what it says on the tin. It gives the reader a brief introduction to a number of different areas of written communication: its main headings are How Writing Works, Extinct Writing, and Living Writing.

But though the introduction is brief, different aspects of it are explained in enough detail for the reader to get a basic understanding of how apparently indecipherable marks are decoded (whether they communicate, for example, phonographically or logographically), and covers topics such as the immense importance of the scribe, sign language, syllabaries, runes, calligraphy, and the purposes for which writing was developed. We are also introduced to some key figures in the world of writing such as Thomas Young and François Champollion (Egyptian hieroglyphs), Thomas Shelton and Isaac Pitman (shorthand), Carsten Niebuhr, Georg Grotefend and Henry Rawlinson (cuneiform), Michael Ventris (Cretan Linear B), and Diego da Landa and Yuri Knorosov (Mayan glyphs).

I found the most intriguing, and rather difficult sections dealt with Chinese, Korean and Japanese scripts. I remember being introduced to Korean scripts by a young Korean diplomat at a wedding in Portugal. He signed his name in the guest book in characters, then in Hangul and finally in the Roman script used in Europe and elsewhere. Chinese now has Pinyin – a westernised script – that supplements the traditional use of characters. But Japanese is majestically complicated. Fundamentally, the script is rooted in characters (kanji) borrowed from Chinese to which are attached meanings that may be different to those in China. But to indicate how the character is to be pronounced, a syllabary is used (kana). The syllabary, however, has two form: hiragana (informal) and katakana (formal). On top of these there are romaji, words written in Roman script. An advertisement for Kellogg’s is analysed to good effect as it uses characters, both syllabaries and romaji. Crikey O’Reilly! But then in the UK many immigrants are familiar with more than one script as evidenced in many public documents that bear instructions in several non-European languages. And when it comes to a general election voting slip, if you can’t read English, at least there is a ‘logo’ (a logograph) next to each candidate to help the voter ‘read’ where they want to put their cross.

This book is a useful as a reference text and a starting point for further study. It’s also of interest to the general reader, and is blessed with plenty of illustrations.

[Ludo-Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

As superficial as it gets.

If this is something targeted to teenagers then fine, good way to get a teen interested I guess. But if the target are adults, then it is a big disappointment.

I should have note as first sign of superficiality the size ratio. Never trust a 4:5 book! Also the fact that it proudly proclaims that it contains hundreds pictures….eeeeh that must have told me something, BUT I did not trust my guts and went on to buy it.

Mistake.

My hands still itch at the lack of details. One example: the author tells us something on how linear B was deciphered. Ok, that is interesting (if you are willing to ignore the lack of any kind of details). BUT it gives us no information on the historical context. How come linear A was replaced by linear B? Come on Andrew, you could have told us, I know you know! And how are we supposed to believe that it proved so far impossible to translate linear A if the author does not tell us that LINEAR A IS NOT INDO-EUROPEAN, WHILE LINEAR B IS. Come on this is crucial! Give us some historical context.

Same thing for Etruscan. Andrew tells us that we know very well the Etruscan alphabet BUT we do not understand it. How is that? ANDREW HOW IS THAT? Guess what, the language family history is lacking here as well. This is crucial to understand the whole book. The lack of it is unforgivable.

ALSO what is the deal with the graphs?? They are so imprecise! In one the author sketches the family tree of some scriptures. Ok. There is an arrow going from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin. So far so good. Then from Latin the arrow goes to MODERN EUROPEAN. What the hell is modern European?! FIRST OF ALL in Europe not all of us use the Latin script (see Greece and Bulgaria ehm ehm), THEN even if you want to excuse this and even if you assume that the author was referring to the Latin script, well we still use the Latin script exactly as the Romans did! It is exactly the same, there is no such thing as a “modern European script”.

I could go on but my hands are starting to itch again. Just want to close with my favourire quotation. Read this and weep

"Although it [linear B] is a millennium and a half younger than the earliest writing of Sumer and Egypt, it predates the Greek alphabetic inscriptions by as much as half a millennium"

Somebody pass me pen and paper, I have to set up an equation

[Chris Nagel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The butler did it.

It was an ancient, likely Canaanite butler, who started writing alphabetically. Maybe. Of course, there are non-alphabetic ways of writing, logographs and quasi-logographs and systems where the signs indicate only consonants or different syllables in different contexts.

This book doesn't really focus in what I was looking for, which was some deeper discussion of the ways writing was used. Extant examples of early writing are mainly administrative and business ledgers, which might suggest that writing began as a way to keep track of trade. That makes enormous sense to me, and if I've learned anything from linguistics, it's not to trust explanations that make enormous sense.

One big takeaway: Writing is a mess. At least I didn't have to learn Chinese growing up. That looks to be gruelling.

Then again, English has somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000 words in current use; 600,000 word-forms are defined in the O.E.D.; and Google researchers have estimated over a million words used in English-language contexts. Written (and to a somewhat lesser extent spoken) English is changing rapidly, again, like it did in the 16th C., so look the fuck out. Those papers that college faculty complain about, written with text-message constructions and "words" like lol or imo: that could be a glimpse of the future of written English.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting read. Lots of information about different writing systems and their histories. However, I was bugged by the fact that the author kept being snidely about how some theories or past work was "wrong." I just didn't like his attitude sometimes.
So for that reason, just the sheer arrogance of it, I couldn't really trust everything he said. But there was information that I had seen elsewhere, so I am sure that some of it was correct. I did find this to be a really comprehensive work on how and where writing started, which was what I was after. I'd just like to find another source now to corroborate the whole thing.
A wealth of information, a great bibliography in the back, and lots of interesting examples, photos, and exercises make this a book I will probably look at again.

[Alexander Labinsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought it at the British Museum and I'm quite disappointed - it's more like a really long article from National Geographic. It's not that I didn't learn anything new, however you have the feeling that it only scratches the surface of what's there. To give an example: The Code Book by Simon Singh only devotes maybe half a chapter to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs and Linear B as an example how decoding techniques were useful, but seems far more informative than this book written by a supposed expert on the decipherment of both writing systems! My gut feeling: Had I read this book if I was 14 years old I would have been absolutely flashed and devoured it - 20+ years on, not so much. So all in all 3 of five 5 - not a complete waste of time but certainly far from being the best book I read this year.

[Mike Parkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always found the study of language and linguistics a bit arcane and intimidating to approach, but wanted to learn more about the origin and evolution of writing. This book was a perfect entry point for a non-specialist like myself. In only 200 pages or so, you get an overview of the major written systems of the world, past and present (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Mayan glyphs, the evolution of the Greek/Roman alphabet, Chines characters, etc.), plus some basics on the relationship between languages and scripts, and an understanding of how key scripts were decoded. The text is strong, but what makes this a five-star book is the design. Every page makes good use of graphics and photos to illustrate and explain the concepts in the text. Highly recommended.

[Sheelie Kittee]

So illuminating! I learned so much from this text and the photography is excellent. I now know what cuneiform 'looks' like and unicorns are ( seriously! ) fredom India, and I can't believe the Indus Valley language's scriptures have still not been deciphered. Oh and the Rosetta Stone - the 3 scripts that are here. I wish they had included more about scripts of many other languages - when it came to this section I felt like they neglect all languages except Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc but yea - for example with India and so many languages and nearly all of them having their own script, I would have liked to read more about that. Otherwise it was still a great experience to read this!

[Christiane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found his beautifully-illustrated book to be a very good introduction into the history and development of the world’s major scripts, extinct or presently used. The writing is straightforward, neither too basic nor too scientific and I especially enjoyed the sections on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, Linear B and Mayan glyphs, etc. My one complaint is that the author gives very short thrift to the Arabic and Indian scripts, otherwise it's a great starting-point for those who want to delve deeper into the subject.

[M. Apple · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too herky-jerky from one page to the next. No transitions and not much explanation why each page needs to be a separate section, so I’m not sure whether this was meant to be a textbook or not. Much of the later sections on Chinese and Japanese are outdated, particularly the section describing pixels needed for writing Chinese characters digitally. This seems to be a “new” edition, but already by 2007 publication date Japanese characters already could be typed easily on mobile devices, let alone computer programs. Nice pictures, though.

[Filip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating story that provides a valuable insight into the evolution and functioning of world's most significant scripts. Especially the chapter about deciphering of cuneiform made me dive deep into the subject and continue in further research afterwards. The book contains plenty of photos, charts and other visual examples that enrich the reading experience and help to follow author's train of thoughts. True feast for each language loving reader.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really informative and well-written, and all around a pretty good read. It was usually easy to follow, but sometimes it got really technical and I had a hard time with it. I did appreciate the wide diversity of writing systems that were discussed, and that it wasn't just another book about the development of writing, of which I already have a few, but that it also delved into how the systems work and how they've been deciphered.

[Shantia · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب خوبي بود و پر از اطلاعاتي كه بعضي مواقع سرگيجه آور ميشد! يكي از ضعف هاي كتاب به نظر من نپرداختن به زبان سانسكريت و الفباي اون بود كه واقعا عجيب بود! حتي به زبان تقريبا مرده چروكي(سرخپوست هاي امريكا) هم پرداخته بود اما سانسكريت نه!!!
يه مقدار هم سطحش براي من كه مبتدي و براي پيدا كردن سوال هاي دوره بچگيم اين كتاب رو خوندم سخت بود!
و سوال دوره بچگيم اين بود كه چرا به "ا" ميگيم "الف" يا به "ن" ميگيم نون!
الفبا يعني چي؟! و البته جواب اين سوالاتم رو گرفتم
خوندنش توصيه ميشه

[Felix Hildebrandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice overview of lots of writing systems and how they were translated, but left out some Asian writing scripts. Generally it seemed to be quite western centered with some incision of east Asian writing. For me it was very interesting since I had not a lot of knowledge about writing systems prior but probably disappointing for people that already have a good basic understanding of the material. Overall solid overview!

[Mark White · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book that I read from cover to cover. Beautifully presented and easily readable, it explains the evolution of writing and scripts and explores the byways and forgotten corners. If you've ever wondered about cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese ideograms or any of the ancestors of our current alphabet, it's all here.

There's enough detail to give you the story without getting bogged down in detail and plenty of information for further research if you need it. This is a great example of how non-fiction should be written.

There are also some lessons on how preconceived notions can delay finding the truth. Evans and Thompson, early explorers of the Minoan and Mayan cultures, suppressed and belittled other researchers who turned out to be on the right track to decode the Minoan Linear B script and Mayan glyphs.

[Gwendalyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be interesting and fairly well written (despite the fact that it did not use the Oxford comma in most places). Lots of images to connect the words to the actual objects and texts discussed

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

More wasted trees for the ego trip of a small mind. This volume adds nothing new, and most data is already found on Wikipedia, from which Robinson has probably started, or at least covered some areas.

[Nathalie Pauwels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gives a regular overview of the history of writing with leaving out lesser known script systems. Robinson also focuses a lot on the deciphering process of certain scripts which makes this book resemble his other book 'Lost Languages' a lot more than perhaps it should.

[Marc Grabalosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molt interessant, explica part de la història de l'escriptura, des dels jeroglífics als alfabets. He disfrutat molt la part de com es desxifren els jeroglífics, el cuneiforme i el linear B. Amb ganes d'aprendre més.

[Maria Rosanna Ioannou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, though somewhat brief