Read complete books and articles on: History of Writing

Writing - the visible recording of language peculiar to the human species. Writing enables the transmission of ideas over vast distances of time and space and is a prerequisite of complex civilization. Where, and by whom writing was first developed remains unknown, but scholars place the beginning of writing at 6,000 b.c. The norm of writing is phonemic; i.e., it attempts to symbolize all significant sounds of the language and no others (see phonetics). When the goal is established as one letter for one phoneme (and vice versa), the result is a complete alphabet. Few alphabets attain this phonemic ideal, but some ancient ones (e.g., Sanskrit) and some modern new ones (e.g., Finnish) have been very successful. The contemporary important writing not of alphabetic type is that in Chinese characters, in which thousands of symbols are used, each representing a word or concept, and Japanese, where each character represents a syllable. The Chinese system is so distant from the language that the same characters are used in writing mutually unintelligible dialects, e.g., Cantonese and Mandarin. In some languages, as in English and French, the modern freezing of spelling has removed the writing more and more from pronunciation and has resulted in the need to teach spelling and the growth of fallacies like the "silent" letter (a letter is really either the symbol of a sound or it is unnecessary). Writing was developed independently in Egypt (see hieroglyphic), Mesopotamia (see cuneiform), China, and among the Maya in Central America. There are some areas where the question as to whether writing was adopted or independently developed is in doubt, as at Easter Island. Ancient writing, at first pictographic in nature, is best known from stone and clay inscriptions, but the use of perishable materials, mainly palm leaf, papyrus, and paper, began in ancient times. See accent; calligraphy; punctuation; paleography.

See J. H. Ober, Writing: Man's Greatest Invention (1964); O. Ogg, The 26 Letters (rev. ed. 1971); J. A. Fishman, Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems (1977); A. Gaur A History of Writing (1984); G. Sampson Writing Systems (1985); R. Harris, The Origin of Writing (1986).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: History of Writing

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing » Read Now
by Jay David Bolter. 258 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
2.

The Triumph of the Alphabet: A History of Writing » Read Now
by A. C. Moorhouse. 228 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...TRIUMPH OF THE ALPHABET A History of Writing A Volume in the Life of...TRIUMPH of the ALPHABET A History of Writing By A. C. MOORHOUSE...the comparative study of the...
3.

Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading » Read Now
by Naomi S. Baron. 318 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

In Alphabet to Email Naomi Baron takes us on a fascinating and often entertaining journey through the history of the English language, showing how technology - especially email - is gradually stripping language of its formality.Drawing together strands of thinking about writing, speech, pedagogy...
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In Alphabet to Email Naomi Baron takes us on a fascinating and often entertaining journey through the history of the English language, showing how technology - especially email - is gradually stripping language of its formality.Drawing together strands of thinking about writing, speech, pedagogy, technology, and globalization, Naomi Baron explores the ever-changing relationship between speech and writing and considers the implications of current language trends on the future of written English. Alphabet to Email will appeal to anyone who is curious about how the English language has changed over the centuries and where it might be going.
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4.

Writing » Read Now
by David Diringer. 266 pgs.

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...straightforward example of progress in the history of writing. Such examples there have in...as we have mentioned, the history of writing as such is not studied in...
5.

A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology » Read Now
by I. J. Gelb. 296 pgs.

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...presented is not a comprehensive history of writing. This work is concerned only...with a similar step in the history of writing. Such a step of revolutionary...is perhaps...
6.

Communications and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization (Chap. 4 "The Establishment of Linguistics and the History of Writing") » Read Now
by Paul Heyer. 202 pgs.

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This innovative volume selectively assesses three centuries of inquiry into the role of communications in the history of civilization. It challenges the conventional assumption that inquiry into the human consequences of living in a communications-dominated age began in the middle of the 20th century as a response to omnipresent technology.
7.

The Cradle of Culture and What Children Know about Writing and Numbers before Being Taught » Read Now
by Liliana Tolchinsky. 256 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

This book provides a thrilling description of preliterate children's developing ideas about writing and numerals, and it illustrates well the many ways in which cultural artifacts influence the mind and vice versa. Remarkably, children treat writing and numerals as distinct even before they have...
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This book provides a thrilling description of preliterate children's developing ideas about writing and numerals, and it illustrates well the many ways in which cultural artifacts influence the mind and vice versa. Remarkably, children treat writing and numerals as distinct even before they have received any formal training on the topic, and well before they learn how to use writing to represent messages and numerals to represent quantities. In this revolutionary new book, Liliana Tolchinsky argues that preliterate children's experiences with writing and numerals play an essential and previously unsuspected role in children's subsequent development. In this view, learning notations, such as writing is not just a matter of acquiring new instruments for communicating existing knowledge. Rather, there is a continual interaction between children's understanding of the features of a notational system and their understanding of the corresponding domain of knowledge. The acquisition of an alphabetic writing system transforms children's view of language, and the acquisition of a formal system of enumeration transforms children's understanding of numbers. Written in an engaging narrative style, and richly illustrated with historical examples, case studies, and charming descriptions of children's behavior, this book is aimed not only at cognitive scientists, but also at educators, parents, and anyone interested in how children develop in a cultural context.
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8.

The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools » Read Now
by Lucille M. Schultz. 226 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools is the first full-length history of school-based writing instruction. Schultz demonstrates that writing instruction in nineteenth-century American schools is much more important in the overall history of...
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Lucille M. Schultz's The Young Composers: Composition's Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools is the first full-length history of school-based writing instruction. Schultz demonstrates that writing instruction in nineteenth-century American schools is much more important in the overall history of writing instruction than we have previously assumed.
Drawing on primary materials that have not been considered in previous histories of writing instruction -- little-known textbooks and student writing that includes prize-winning essays, journal entries, letters, and articles written for school newspapers -- Schultz shows that in nineteenth-century American schools, the voices of the British rhetoricians that dominated college writing instruction were attenuated by the voice of the Swiss education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Partly through the influence of Pestalozzi's thought, writing instruction for children in schools became child-centered, not just a replica or imitation of writing instruction in,the colleges.
It was also in these nineteenth-century American schools that personal or experience-based writing began and where the democratization of writing was institutionalized. These schools prefigured some of our contemporary composition practices: free writing, peer editing, and the use of illustrations as writing prompts. It was in these schools, in fact, where composition instruction as we know it today began, Schultz argues.
This book features a chapter on the agency of textbook iconography, which includes illustrations from nineteenth-century composition books as well as a cultural analysis of those illustrations. Schultz also includes a lengthy bibliography ofnineteenth-century composition textbooks and student and school newspapers.
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9.

Learning to Spell: Research, Theory, and Practice across Languages (Chap. 1 "From Writing to Orthography: The Functions and Limits of the Notion of System") » Read Now
by Michel Fayol, Charles A. Perfetti, Laurence Rieben. 376 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library
10.

The Psychology of Reading ("A Brief History of Writing" begins on p. 36) » Read Now
by Alexander Pollatsek, Keith Rayner. 529 pgs.

Collections: Education, Psychology, Entire Library
11.

Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication: Variation in Writing: Functional and Linguistic-Cultural Differences, Vol. 1 » Read Now
by Marcia Farr Whiteman. 214 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

...United States across history: an "ethnohistory of writing." Underlying the variety...Massachusetts passed a reading and writing requirement. The history of Southern...
12.

A History of Historical Writing: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 » Read Now
by James Westfall Thompson, Bernard J. Holm. 678 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...A History of Historical Writing THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK...OF CANADA, LIMITED TORONTO A HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING From the Earliest...through which the Greeks...
13.

A History of Historical Writing: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Vol. 2 » Read Now
by James Westfall Thompson, Bernard J. Holm. 676 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...A History of Historical Writing THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW...CANADA, LIMITED TORONTO A HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING VOLUME II The Eighteenth...NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE ON...
14.

Ancient Writing and Its Influence » Read Now
by B. L. Ullman. 242 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library