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