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An examination, through a series of detailed case studies, of the different ways in which the world’s cultures have made spoken language visible and permanent.
Some critical comment:
- This is a splendid book ... of outstanding interest to professional linguists and students of linguistics, and also to the large number of lay readers who are fascinated by facts about human language
- — J.M.Y. Simpson, University of Glasgow, in British Book News
a refreshing and rigorous contemporary scientific examination of writing ... Linguists on all fronts should welcome this- — Choice
an incredible tour de force, covering both Western and East Asian scripts, their historical development and their linguistic features. The treatment of Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts is particularly fascinating for a Western reader ...- — ASI Newsletter
I have found Sampson’s book invaluable as a source of descriptive information ... it is written in a straightforward and approachable manner which makes it very engaging as general reading matter ... shows an acquaintance with recent psychological work that is seldom to be found in linguistic writing.- — Leslie Henderson in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
the best linguistic introduction to the study of writing systems now available- — Language
234 pp.
First published by Hutchinson (London), 1985; second, revised edition published by Hutchinson, 1987.
Currently available from Stanford University Press (Stanford, California).
ISBNs 0-8047-1254-9 (hardback), 0-8047-1756-7 (paper).
Translated into: Portuguese (1996); Spanish (1997); Korean (1999).
Readers please note: the second, 1987 edition of this book is
superior to the first; the first edition contained a
number of mistakes in material that was not shown to me in proof
before publication, but these were corrected in the 1987
edition. (Unfortunately, only the first edition is distributed
by the American publisher.) At this distance in time I have not
been able to retrieve all the points that were corrected between
the two editions, but some of them occur in the discussion of
the Greek alphabet on pp. 104–5. The Greek letters are
printed in a strange mixture of serifed and sans-serif fonts;
they should all be shown sans-serif, because for Greek
serifs are a very recent
innovation imported from the modern Roman alphabet. In the
display of long and short vowels on p. 105,
the symbols should be shifted
so that they occur in their conventional places within the
vowel quadrilateral. And, more important than these points,
in the second displayed section on p. 105 the letter V in
the second line (which is not a Greek letter) ought instead
to be Ω, a capital omega.
last changed 5 Jan 2005