The Writing Revolution
eBook - PDF

The Writing Revolution

Cuneiform to the Internet

  1. 407 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Writing Revolution

Cuneiform to the Internet

About this book

An exploration of the original Information Technology – the writing systems of history

The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet explores the origins, historical development, adaptations, linguistic properties, cultural context, and social impact of one of humankind's greatest inventions: writing systems. Now in its second edition, this popular book traces the history of writing from the earliest proto-cuneiform tablet to the latest AI-generated text. Author Amalia E. Gnanadesikan offers an engaging, highly readable narrative account of how different writing systems originated, how they evolved over time, and how they have represented languages around the world.

Concise, easy-to-digest chapters cover each of the world's major written traditions across time and space, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Bronze-Age Linear B, New World writing systems, the Roman alphabet, and many others. Updated throughout, The Writing Revolution features new and expanded coverage of the Digital Age, including Unicode, the World Wide Web, emojis, generative AI, and more.

Investigating how the creation of writing made the modern world possible, The Writing Revolution:

  • Covers the world's major writing systems as well as a selection of lesser-known scripts
  • Discusses papyrus, paper, the printing press, digital writing, and other associated technologies
  • Features engaging examples throughout, including Egyptian funerary texts, Maya calendars, Arabic calligraphy, Morse code, and modern text messaging
  • Interweaves ideas from cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and information science

The Writing Revolution is a must-read for students of writing systems, linguistics, information science, and intellectual history, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of written language.

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Yes, you can access The Writing Revolution by Amalia E. Gnanadesikan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Historical & Comparative Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Preface
  7. Chapter 1 The First IT Revolution
  8. Chapter 2 Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People
  9. Chapter 3 Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Quest for Eternity
  10. Chapter 4 Chinese: A Love of Paperwork
  11. Chapter 5 Maya Glyphs: Calendars and Kings
  12. Chapter 6 Linear B: The Clerks ofAgamemnon
  13. Chapter 7 Japanese: Three Scripts Are Better than One
  14. Chapter 8 Cherokee: Sequoyah Reverse-Engineers
  15. Chapter 9 The Semitic lep-Bt: Egypt to Manchuria in 3,500 Years
  16. Chapter 10 The Empire of Sanskrit
  17. Chapter 11 King Sejong’s One-ManRenaissance
  18. Chapter 12 Greek Serendipity
  19. Chapter 13 The Age of Latin
  20. Chapter 14 The Alphabet Meets the Machine
  21. Chapter 15 Writing Goes to Bits
  22. Appendix
  23. Further Reading
  24. EULA