The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
16. How Many Kinds of Writing Systems are there?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Peter T. Daniels [+]
Independent Scholar
Peter T. Daniels, the world’s leading expert on writing systems, holds degrees in linguistics from Cornell University and the University of Chicago. His first interests were in Comparative Semitic linguistics, which built to the study of writing and decipherment. His challenge to his teacher I. J. Gelb’s influential theories of the evolution of scripts has led to a persistent search for legitimate principles of the nature and development of writing. He is co-editor (with William Bright) of and principal contributor to The World’s Writing Systems (1996) and is hte author of An Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018).
Description
People used to say that there are three kinds of writing systems—the Chinese kind, the Indian kind, and the Hebrew and English kind (logographies, syllabaries, and alphabets). But when we look more closely, we find that we need to name five kinds, recognizing that Hebrew and English writing, and Indian and Japanese writing, use quite different kinds of writing system. Different kinds work better for different languages.