Inventing the Alphabet

Inventing the Alphabet
Author: Johanna Drucker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226815811

"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, Drucker describes the frameworks-classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political-within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago"--

The Early Alphabet

The Early Alphabet
Author: John F. Healey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1990
Genre: Alphabet
ISBN:

In this generously illustrated book, John Healey outlines the basic principles of the early alphabet and describes the first attempts at alphabetic writing in the Semitic languages.

The World's Oldest Alphabet

The World's Oldest Alphabet
Author: Douglas Petrovich
Publisher: Hendrickson Academic
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Alphabet
ISBN: 9789652208842

For about 150 years, scholars have attempted to identify the language of the world's first alphabetic script, and to translate some of the inscriptions that use it. Until now, their attempts have accomplished little more than identifying most of the pictographic letters and translating a few of the Semitic words. With the publication of The World's Oldest Alphabet, a new day has dawned. All of the disputed letters have been resolved, while the language has been identified conclusively as Hebrew, allowing for the translation of 16 inscriptions that date from 1842 to 1446 BC. It is the author's reading that these inscriptions expressly name three biblical figures (Asenath, Ahisamach, and Moses) and greatly illuminate the earliest Israelite history in a way that no other book has achieved, apart from the Bible.

The Early Alphabet

The Early Alphabet
Author: John F. Healey
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 68
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520073098

00 In this generously illustrated book, John Healey outlines the basic principles of the early alphabet and describes the first attempts at alphabetic writing in the Semitic languages. In this generously illustrated book, John Healey outlines the basic principles of the early alphabet and describes the first attempts at alphabetic writing in the Semitic languages.

Reading the Past

Reading the Past
Author: C. B. Walker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780520074316

Contains six previously published titles brought together in a single volume.

Early Greek Alphabetic Writing

Early Greek Alphabetic Writing
Author: Natalia Elvira Astoreca
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789257468

Most scholarship on early Greek alphabetic writing has focused on the questions around the origin of 'the Greek alphabet', instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic Greece. The research concerning the so-called epichoric scripts was introduced by Kirchhoff in the 19th century and saw its highest point in the 1960s with the works of Jeffery and Guarducci. Nevertheless, recent epigraphical finds and new possibilities offered by digital tools call for a revised, comprehensive study of these alphabets. Unlike previous research, which was mostly concerned with palaeography, this book presents a linguistic analysis of the epichoric alphabets that follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics and the methodology of comparative graphematics. The latter is a branch of writing systems research focused on the relationship between graphemes and the values that they represent and compares them across writing systems. This study compares the different Greek alphabets in their earliest stages, i.e. 8th and 7th centuries BC, also taking into account other contemporaneous alphabets, like those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and the Italic languages. Through the analysis of the data provided by the epigraphic texts dated within the chronological framework of this thesis, it is possible to identify the different notation systems that Greek-speakers devised to represent their dialects in writing. This brings new insights on the innovations created by these communities and the different alphabetic traditions present in Greece and across the Mediterranean. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the need to study these regional alphabets independently, rather than considering them as part of a unified entity - 'the Greek alphabet' - which did not exist at the time, and creates a new line for future research that intends to frame them individually within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean alphabets.

Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet

Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
Author: Barry B. Powell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1996-10-28
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780521589079

A challenging and fascinating enquiry into the genesis of alphabetic writing.

The Alphabet Book

The Alphabet Book
Author: P.D. Eastman
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2000-09-26
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0375806032

From American ants to zebras with zithers, kids will love exploring the alphabet in this classically creative P. D. Eastman alphabet book.