Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

by Henry Rogers

Accessibly written, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach provides detailed coverage of all major writing systems of historical or structural significance with thorough discussion of structure, history, and social context as well as important theoretical issues. Discusses systems as diverse as Chinese, Greek, and Maya.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language, School

344 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 2004

Reviews

[Nikolas]

Very informative and quite well written.

[Mohammed]

جميل ومفيد بالفعل، الموضوع جديد بالكامل بالنسبة لي ولم أكن مدركًا لوجود كل هذه الاختلافات والتشابهات في الأنظمة الكتابية للغات المختلفة.

[Freya Abbas]

I've never found a textbook as enjoyable to read as this one. There were clear explanations of how much each writing system corresponds to the phonology of the language. There were general concepts that helped you classify writing systems into different types (alphabets, abjads, abugidas, etc.) There were also useful practice exercises. I would have liked a bit more detail on Mayan glyphs (which I think deserves as much attention as cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese because of the complexity and the use of phonograms, morphograms, and both semantic and phonological complements). I also loved that this book included the Cherokee, Cree and Inuktitut writing systems because they were really fun to read about. Overall, this is really fascinating and makes me eager to learn more about this field.

[Wenjie Hua]

Nice choice for beginners