The Story of Writing

This is a good overview of the various worldwide systems used today and in the past. He explains that ALL scripts are a mixture of phonetic and semantic signs - it's only the degree that differs. There is a historical review of hieroglyphs and the origins of writing, then a discussion of the evolution of writing and finally a look at the present and the future where, surprisingly, semantic notation is making a comeback. The book is lavishly ilustrated with charts, photographs and maps.


An overview of writing systems.   May 31, 2003
Eds Word (El Paso, Texas United States)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

A richly illustrated nontechnical introduction to the history of writing. The author briefly touches upon the relationship between language and script and the challenges involved in the classification of writing systems but the bulk of the book is on presenting different families of scripts and accounts of thier development. The sections on extinct writing, such as cuneiform, and on undeciphered scripts were interesting but the book's chief attribute are the illustrations of alphabets, inscriptions, and glyphs, many of which are interpreted for the reader. A similar volume for the more linguistically inclined is "A History of Writing" by Steven Robert Fischer. The author, himself not without contraversy, provides the technical precision that is lacking in Robinson's book and has lots of examples of scripts as well.