Download or read book Writing from Invention to Decipherment written by Silvia Ferrara and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts. The volume offers state-of-the-art research on undeciphered scripts from the Aegean (as for example, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A) or not completely deciphered (as for example Maya) scripts. From a methodological perspective, these contributions lay out how and why writing was invented, who used it, and to what ends. Here writing is presented as a multi-modal cultural phenomenon, that intersects and transcends neat discipline boundaries, within an inclusive approach bridging archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and cognitive studies.
Download or read book Writing from Invention to Decipherment written by and published by . This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from across the world. The writers dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts.
Download or read book The First Writing written by Stephen D. Houston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-09 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading scholars in the field discuss and analyse the origins of ancient writing.
Download or read book The Greatest Invention written by Silvia Ferrara and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.
Download or read book The Disappearance of Writing Systems written by John Baines and published by Equinox Publishing (Indonesia). This book was released on 2008 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers papers from the first conference ever to be held on the disappearance of writing systems, in Oxford in March 2004. While the invention and decipherment of writing systems have long been focuses of research, their eclipse or replacement have been little studied. Because writing is so important in many cultures and civilizations, its disappearance OCo followed by a period without it or by replacement by a different writing system OCo is of almost equal significance to invention as a mark of radical change. Probably more writing systems have disappeared than survived in the last five thousand years.
Download or read book Archaeological Decipherment of Ancient Writing Systems written by Clyde Winters and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Archaeological Decipherment of Ancient Writing Systems I explain how archaeological evidence indicates that African literacy began in the Sahara over 5000 years ago . This earliest form of writing was a syllabic system , we call Thinite, that included hundreds of phonetic signs, which over time was shorten to between 22 and 30 key signs, and used as an alphabet by the Mande people of the Fezzan and Niger Valley, Dravidian speaking people in India, the Sumerians , Elamites, the Xi (Olmecs), Egyptians, Meroites, Phonesians and Ethiopians.
Download or read book The Origins of Writing written by Wayne M. Senner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 12 essays outlines what is now known about the origins and development of writing. The topics discussed include such precursors to writing as the tokens used for record-keeping in the Middle East, as well as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics.The alphabet is treated from its invention to its use in Arabic, Greek and Latin. Also presented are the writing systems of China and Middle America and two European systems, runes and ogham, that have been superseded by the Latin alphabet. An introduction surveys the subject and explores myths and theories on the invention of writing.
Download or read book The Antiquity of Greek Alphabet and Early Phoenician Scripts written by P. Kyle McCarter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communication in History written by Peter Urquhart and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-01-26 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated eighth edition provides a thorough and engaging history of communication and media through a collection of essential, field-defining essays. The collection reveals how media has been influential in both maintaining social order and enabling social change. Contributions from a wide range of voices offer instructors the opportunity to customize their courses while challenging students to build upon their own knowledge and skill sets. From stone age symbols and early writing to the internet and social media, readers are introduced to an expansive, intellectually enlivening study of the relationship between human history and communication media. New case studies explore the Black Press, the impact of photography on journalism, gender and civil rights discourses in the media, and the effects of algorithmic data on modern social media platforms. This book can be used as a core text or supplemental reader for courses in communication history, communication theory, and introductory courses in communication and media studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Orthography written by Marco Condorelli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 1075 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a team of global scholars, this is the first Handbook covering the rapidly growing field of historical orthography. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in the field, and in related areas such as morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and sociolinguistics.
Download or read book Deciphering Culture written by Jane Crisp and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2000 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This key title explores the issues of representation, subjectivity and sexuality, focusing in particular on the ways that representations are used to form identities in different spheres of life.
Download or read book Classics and Interpretations written by Ching-I Tu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years in the "West," scholars have attempted to unravel old constructs of interpretation and understanding, using the discipline of hermeneutics, or the scientific study of textual interpretation. Borrowed from students of the ever growing body of biblical interpretive literature that originated in the early Christian era, theoretical hermeneutics has given many contemporary scholars potent tools of textual interpretation. Classics and Interpretations applies this method to Chinese culture. Several essays focus on hermeneutic traditions of Neo-Confucianism. Others move outside of these traditions to attempt an understanding of the role of hermeneutics in Taoist and Buddhist textual interpretation, in Chinese poetics and painting, and in contemporary Chinese culture. This volume makes a concerted effort to remedy our ignorance of the Chinese hermeneutical tradition. Part 1, "The Great Learning and Hermeneutics," demonstrates the use of commentary to define how the individual creates his social self, and discusses differing interpretations of the Ta-hsueh text and its treatment as either canonical or heterodox. Part 2, "Canonicity and Orthodoxy," considers the philosophical touchstones employed by Neo-Confucian canonical exegetes and polemicists, and discusses the Han canonization of the scriptural Five Classics, while illuminating a double standard that existed in the hermeneutical regime of late imperial China. Part 3, "Hermeneutics as Politics," discusses the transformation of both the classics and scholars, and explores the dominant hermeneutic tradition in Chinese historiography, the scriptural tradition and reinterpretation of the Ch'un-ch'iu, and reveals the pragmatism of Chinese hermeneutics through comparison of the Sung debates over the Mencius. The concluding sections include essays on "Chu Hsi and Interpretation of Chinese Classics," "Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Poetics and Non-Confucian Contexts," "Reinterpretation of Confucian Texts in the Ming-Ch'ing Period," and "Contemporary Interpretations of Confucian Culture." Through these literate and brilliantly written essays the reader witnesses not merely the great breadth and depth of Chinese hermeneutics but also its continuity and evolutionary vigor. This volume will excite scholars of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist systems of thought and belief as well as students of history and hermeneutics.
Download or read book Deciphering the Proto Sinaitic Script written by Paul D. LeBlanc and published by Subclass Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egypt, Judaism, and the history of the alphabet intersect in Deciphering The Proto-Sinaitic Script. From its initial appearance, in around the 18th century BC, the origins of proto–Sinaitic writing can be traced back to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom period, when it was somehow derived from the hieroglyphs, its parent–system. The importance of proto–Sinaitic lies in the fact that it represents the alphabet’s earliest developmental period—a kind of ‘missing link’ between the hieroglyphs and these early Semitic alphabets from which our own Latin one descends, by way of the Phoenician and Greek. However, up until now, proto-Sinaitic has remained for the most part undeciphered. The intriguing possibility of giving voice to a lost culture or civilization from thousands of years ago is tantalizing. Representing one of the most enticing problems in modern archaeology, the enigmatic allure surrounding ancient languages and the undeciphered scripts in which they are encoded is truly vexing. In his bold and original research, LeBlanc argues convincingly to have solved the mystery and uncovers some incredibly enthralling information about the people who invented it: The epigraphic evidence suggests that the Egyptianized Canaanites who first devised the proto–Sinaitic script were surprisingly instrumental in the formation of early Israelite culture and proto–Judaism.
Download or read book The Origin of Writing written by Roy Harris and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Deciphering the New Antisemitism written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deciphering the New Antisemitism addresses the increasing prevalence of antisemitism on a global scale. Antisemitism takes on various forms in all parts of the world, and the essays in this wide-ranging volume deal with many of them: European antisemitism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. Contributors are an international group of scholars who clarify the cultural, intellectual, political, and religious conditions that give rise to antisemitic words and deeds. These landmark essays are noteworthy for their timeliness and ability to grapple effectively with the serious issues at hand.
Download or read book The Book written by Michael F. Suarez and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume seeks to delineate the history of the production, dissemination, and reception of texts from the earliest pictograms of the mid-4th millennium to recent developments in electronic books."--Page xi.
Download or read book Writing in Focus written by Florian Coulmas and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-22 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.
