Typology of Writing Systems

Typology of Writing Systems
Author: Susanne R. Borgwaldt
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2013-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271852

Typology research is extremely important in both proposing classification frameworks and in promoting the careful investigation and analysis of the core concepts inherent within the classification contrasts employed. More exemplary of the latter aspect, the present collection of papers on the typology of writing systems address a number of significant linguistic and psycholinguistic issues surrounding the classification of writing systems. The seven contributions within this volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of Written Language and Literacy 14:1 (2011), cover a wide variety of issues, ranging from an overview of writing system typology research, comparative graphematics, letter-shape similarities, the morphographic principle, tone orthography typology, measuring graphematic transparency, to unconventional spellings within online chat. Reflecting the growing interest in writing, the book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers working on writing systems, written language, and reading research.

The Handbook of Linguistics

The Handbook of Linguistics
Author: Mark Aronoff
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 727
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1119302072

"The first edition of this Handbook is built on surveys by well-known figures from around the world and around the intellectual world, reflecting several different theoretical predilections, balancing coverage of enduring questions and important recent work. Those strengths are now enhanced by adding new chapters and thoroughly revising almost all other chapters, partly to reflect ways in which the field has changed in the intervening twenty years, in some places radically. The result is a magnificent volume that can be used for many purposes." David W. Lightfoot, Georgetown University "The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition is a stupendous achievement. Aronoff and Rees-Miller have provided overviews of 29 subfields of linguistics, each written by one of the leading researchers in that subfield and each impressively crafted in both style and content. I know of no finer resource for anyone who would wish to be better informed on recent developments in linguistics." Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University "Linguists, their students, colleagues, family, and friends: anyone interested in the latest findings from a wide array of linguistic subfields will welcome this second updated and expanded edition of The Handbook of Linguistics. Leading scholars provide highly accessible yet substantive introductions to their fields: it's an even more valuable resource than its predecessor." Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University "No handbook or text offers a more comprehensive, contemporary overview of the field of linguistics in the twenty-first century. New and thoroughly updated chapters by prominent scholars on each topic and subfield make this a unique, landmark publication."Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University This second edition of The Handbook of Linguistics provides an updated and timely overview of the field of linguistics. The editor's broad definition of the field ensures that the book may be read by those seeking a comprehensive introduction to the subject, but with little or no prior knowledge of the area. Building on the popular first edition, The Handbook of Linguistics, Second Edition features new and revised content reflecting advances within the discipline. New chapters expand the already broad coverage of the Handbook to address and take account of key changes within the field in the intervening years. It explores: psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistic theory, language variation and second language pedagogy. With contributions from a global team of leading linguists, this comprehensive and accessible volume is the ideal resource for those engaged in study and work within the dynamic field of linguistics.

Writing Systems and Phonetics

Writing Systems and Phonetics
Author: Alan Cruttenden
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100033404X

Writing Systems and Phonetics provides students with a critical understanding of the writing systems of the world. Beginning by exploring the spelling of English, including how it arose and how it works today, the book goes on to address over 60 major languages from around the globe and includes detailed descriptions and worked examples of writing systems which foreground the phonetics of these languages. Key areas covered include: the use of the Latin alphabet in and beyond Europe; writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek and its Cyrillic offshoot, Arabic and Hebrew; languages in south and south-east Asia, including Hindi, Tamil, Burmese and Thai, as well as in east Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean; reflections on ancient languages such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Linear B and Mayan; a final chapter which sets out a typology of writing systems. All of the languages covered are contextualised by authentic illustrations, including road signs, personal names and tables, to demonstrate how theoretical research can be applied to the real world. Taking a unique geographical focus that guides the reader on a journey across time and continents, this book offers an engaging introduction for students approaching for the first time the phonetics of writing systems, their typology and the origins of scripts.

The World's Writing Systems

The World's Writing Systems
Author: Peter T. Daniels
Publisher:
Total Pages: 970
Release: 1996
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195079930

Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to modern Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this is the only available work in English to cover all of the world's writing systems from ancient times to the present. Describing scores of scripts in use now or in the past around the world, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of writing systems. More than eighty articles by scholars from over a dozen countries explain and document how a vast array of writing systems work--how alphabets, ideograms, pictographs, and hieroglyphics convey meaning in graphic form. The work is organized in thirteen parts, each dealing with a particular group of writing systems defined historically, geographically, or conceptually. Arranged according to the chronological development of writing systems and their historical relationships within geographical areas, the scripts are divided into the following sections: the ancient Near East, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Additional parts address the ongoing process of decipherment of ancient writing systems; the adaptation of traditional scripts to new languages; new scripts invented in modern times; and graphic symbols for numerical, music, and movement notation. Each part begins with an introductory article providing the social and cultural context in which the group of writing systems was developed. Articles on individual scripts detail the historical origin of the writing system, its structure (with tables showing the forms of the written symbols), and its relationship to the phonology of the corresponding spoken language. Each writing system is illustrated by a passage of text, and accompanied by a romanized version, a phonetic transcription, and a modern English translation. A bibliography suggesting further reading concludes each entry. Matched by no other work in English, The World's Writing Systems is the only comprehensive resource covering every major writing system. Unparalleled in its scope and unique in its coverage of the way scripts relate to the languages they represent, this is a resource that anyone with an interest in language will want to own, and one that should be a part of every library's reference collection.

Language Conflict and Language Rights

Language Conflict and Language Rights
Author: William D. Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108655475

As the colonial hegemony of empire fades around the world, the role of language in ethnic conflict has become increasingly topical, as have issues concerning the right of speakers to choose and use their preferred language(s). Such rights are often asserted and defended in response to their being violated. The importance of understanding these events and issues, and their relationship to individual, ethnic, and national identity, is central to research and debate in a range of fields outside of, as well as within, linguistics. This book provides a clearly written introduction for linguists and non-specialists alike, presenting basic facts about the role of language in the formation of identity and the preservation of culture. It articulates and explores categories of conflict and language rights abuses through detailed presentation of illustrative case studies, and distills from these key cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalizations.

Writing Systems

Writing Systems
Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1985
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780804717564

To say that writing has as much claim as speech to be treated as language may strike the reader as a statement of the obvious. But the fact is that, although the tide is beginning to turn now, for most of the twentieth century linguistics has almost wholly ignored writing. It is not necessary to accept all the theories of the French critic Jacques Derrida in order to agree with him when he describes writing as "the wandering outcast of linguistics." This book is offered in the belief that written language is a form of language. As such, it deserves to be treated with the methods of modern, scientific linguistic study, which have been increasing our understanding of the spoken form of language for many decades.

An Exploration of Writing

An Exploration of Writing
Author: Peter T. Daniels
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (Indonesia)
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781781795286

An Exploration of Writing is a book about our alphabets, our syllabaries, and all the other kinds of writing that people use and have used for 5000 years. It introduces the general public to a topic that hardly anyone has heard about, so it clarifies basic linguistic terms as they occur. For linguists exploring the growing field of graphonomy-the study of writing systems-in which the author has long been a pioneer, it weaves together the many threads of theory into a tapestry showing a fuller picture of what all our scripts are seen to share. An Exploration of Writing begins with more familiar kinds of writing considered in unfamiliar ways-starting with English viewed syllabically--and leads the reader across the Old World and the New to less familiar kinds of writing, showing how all writings share a fundamental essence, however diverse they appear to be, because all writing represents language. The more familiar (Hebrew, Chinese, Korean) leads on to the less familiar (Udi, Pahlavi, Javanese). Featured are some of the world's most recently elucidated scripts, and some that are long known but long neglected, such as those for Central Asian languages, and some of the most recent interpretations of long-mysterious scripts, such as Sumerian and Mesoamerican. An Exploration of Writing is in the tradition of and in part a response to A Study of Writing (1952/1963), by I. J. Gelb. It encapsulates more than thirty years of the author's work and his dozens of articles on writing systems, ranging from investigating the physical process of writing to bringing to light the achievements of those who had deciphered forgotten scripts to developing a theoretical approach to the origins of writing which leads to insights into the nature of writing itself.

Second Language Writing Systems

Second Language Writing Systems
Author: Vivian Cook
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781853597930

Second Language Writing Systems looks at how people learn and use a second language writing system, arguing that they are affected by characteristics of the first and second writing systems, to a certain extent independently of the languages involved. This book for the first time presents the effects of writing systems on second language reading and writing and on second language awareness, and provides a new platform for discussing bilingualism, biliteracy and writing systems.

The Unicode cookbook for linguists

The Unicode cookbook for linguists
Author: Steven Moran
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2018-06-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 396110090X

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post.