23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A textbook history of writing, February 6, 2000
If nothing else mattered, the lush photography of this book would bring it to the forefront of efforts to describe the history of written communications. Unfortunately, while it is extremely well written by an informed author, it has more in common with a text book than a real history. I cannot argue with most of the facts in the book, but I could argue with some of the conclusions. When authors, no matter how talented, no matter how well-informed, speak ex cathedra (my spelling here may well indicate the part of alphabetic writing which is decidedly not phonetic, in English, at least), especially when relentlessly advocating a particular point of view in a controversy, generally I am inclined to ignore them. A glance through the bibliography, though, shows that Robinson is quite willing to give a casual reader enough sources to spend many hours learning what is known of the history of scripts, and writing.
All in all, I would say this book is an excellent way to spark an interest in the subject.
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45 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Book, Some Flaws, March 24, 2001
As other reviewers have indicated, this book is beautifully illustrated, and it presents a great overview of the world's earliest writing systems and our attempts to understand them. If that is your interest, I cannot recommend a better introductory book.
On the other hand, if you wish to understand the relationship of writing to language, you may be led astray by the author's neglect of linguistic fundamentals.
The introduction of pictograms and proto-writing is useful. It tells most of what is theorized about the evolution of early language-based writing systems. However, the discussion of rebuses and logographs simply distracts the reader by mixing apples and oranges, namely language-based writing systems versus symbols and puzzles.
The author states that "English, French or German could be written in almost any script," but this obscures the fact that these languages adapted their common root -- the Roman alphabet -- differently to better support each language's unique phonetic structure. Similarly, how (or why) did our English orthography became fixed to now-extinct pronunciations? This you will not learn. Modern English is simply "less phonetic" than Finnish.
Of course, European writing is less novel than Japanese, Hangul or Cherokee, so the bulk of the discussion of modern writing systems focuses on the exotics. Unfortunately this is the subject area where the author is most dependent on the opinions of biased experts. For example, he bases much of his analysis of Japanese writing on J. Marshall Unger's attack on Japan's long-defunct 5th Generation computing debacle. The author relates the difficulty of the Japanese writing system to high suicide rates among juveniles during 1955-58, and tosses out unsupported gems like "It looks likely that the need for computerization must one day lead to the abandonment of kanji in electronic data processing, if not in other areas of Japanese life."
Again, the Western bias of the author (even selecting a Japanese movie poster about "Crint Eastwood" to illustrate a point!) enables him to make a very dubious claim: that even among readers of Japanese and Chinese, written symbols lack semantic content unless the reader can read the word out loud.
This argument is critical to his thesis that writing systems connect exclusively to the phonetic components of language, not to syntactic or semantic components. Ideographs persist merely to help the hapless speakers of Asian languages sort out their homphones. The thesis is wrong, and the supporting argument is severely ethnocentric.
In short, this is a great introductory history, but a lightweight analysis of writing as a linguistic phenomenon. Because of the book's focus on the history of writing, its historical merits outweigh its intellectual deficits; but please don't start an argument with a linguist or a native speaker of a non-European language based on what you've read in this book.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An overview of writing systems., May 31, 2003
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.
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