The World's Writing Systems

Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to contemporary Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of the world's scripts, from ancient times to the present. 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 conveymeaning in graphic form. Each writing system is illustrated by a passage of text, and accompanied by a romanized version, a phonetic transcription, and a modern English translation. The only available work in English to cover every major writing system, this is a reference that no linguist orphilologist will want to be without.