The World's Writing Systems

Customer Reviews

• Comprehensive and useful

  This book covers 80 of the world's writing systems. Some of the languages are extinct, others are modern and alive.
  The authors have managed to treat and show many different writing systems in one single book. They also take up musical notation and body movement.
  This is definitely a comprehensive and useful reference work in the field.

• A great book

  Anybody who's interested in how we write the world over would do well to pick up this book. It's awfully costly, it's true, but if you're patient and you poke around a little, you can find it used for a third or less of what it's listed for.
  Serious linguists specializing in writing might read it through, but amateurs--like me--will just pick it up and leaf through it, stopping here and there, reading this chapter or that, or will use it to look up some specific thing they might want to know about, say, Bishop Wulfila's Gothic script's roots in the Greek alphabet or the origins of the Georgian or Armenian alphabets.
  It tells about scripts found all over the world, big ones--Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and so on--and far less well known ones, like Berber, Cherokee, Ethiopian, Deseret and some found in Indonesia and islands in the Indian Ocean.
  It tells the historic backgrounds and--for lack of a better word--genealogies of the scripts, then shows how they work.
  One thing that irks me no end is a shortcoming not with the book itself, but rather with the publishing business as a whole: the font used in the book is inadequate. It is appalling that in a book about writing systems, there are characters that have to be set in other fonts from the main book forn--sometimes even within one word--and characters that show up as composite characters with diacritics off center from the letter they modify. It is a fairly simple thing to edit a font and add characters as needed. It is a shame that major publishing companies seem unwilling to make the small investment in typography that would let them set a book like this in one font, with all the characters needed, so that it reads smoothly, without distracting inconsistencies throughout.
  Now, this is indeed a niggling compalint, and it in no way reflects on the beek itself, the writers or the editors. It is the fault of the publisher, and should in no way dissuade anyone interested in this admittedly esoteric subject from getting this book.

• Rare Excellence

  The "World's Writing Systems" is a rare event for in one tome it covers all the ways of writing known to us at present. As a professional graphologist this is an absolute boon not only for what it is but because it is also on special offer. While there are other tomes of similar ilk and implication this work has no equal. Until now the study of written language has had no clearly defined reference work.
  
  It has now. Thoroughly recommended.
  
  Peter West
  

• Concise and interesting

  It seems that this book is not intended for a general reader, judging both by its price and by multitude of unexplained linguistic terms plentifully sown in the book. I bought this book becuse of many positive reviews and because it was drastically reduced to USD45. The book scans many dozens of wrining systems, as good as it's possible to squeese into ten-some page article, but unfortunately, many of the systems, especialy the ancient and the modern Oriental ones are too complicated and extended to be fully accounted for in a limited space, so you can get acquanited with some 30 Sumer pictograms and never know the other 550, or you can see the 200 Chinese characters and just recall there are several thousands more or look into Devanagari alphabet but then keep in mind there is a multitude of amalgams that are not easily recognized and so on.
  It is also very helpful if one knows like what exactly sounds a linguolabial or a laminal or a voiced epiglottal fricative, otherwise he may be at lost..

• The best resource on writing systems available

  This a detailed survey of the systems that have been used for writing the world's languages, going far beyond the most familiar ones to encompass ones normally known only to specialists, ranging from the ancient Turkish runiform script to the Vai syllabary of Liberia, invented in modern times. Although it was written by experts for experts to read (and priced accordingly, but see the last paragraph below) most of it is well within the understanding of interested non-specialists. The authors assume a knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but it would have been almost impossible to avoid that, even if the book had been intended for the general reader. Even there it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that this is assumed, because the IPA is set out (albeit without much explanation) inside the front and back covers.
  
  In a book of this kind the quality of the printing is a major consideration, as the samples of text need to be large enough and black enough for the individual characters to be read, and ideally should harmonize with the surrounding text in English. Before the age of computer-based typesetting it would have been impossible even to approach this ideal except at enormous price, but now it has become realistic. In general this book comes very close to the ideal, with a very high level of typography.
  
  At more than 900 pages the book goes far beyond a mere listing of scripts with samples. It also includes a great deal of historical and cultural information, explaining how the different scripts evolved to their present state. In addition there is information about how the more successful scripts, not just Latin but also Arabic, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic and so on, were adapted to languages different from those where they began.
  
  At its published price the book is probably beyond the pockets of most general readers. It is worth mentioning, therefore, that on at least two occasions in recent years it has been available through Amazon with a very large discount, and one can probably expect this to happen again. I bought my copy at 40% of the published price, for example, and with that sort of discount it need not be restricted to libraries and specialists.