Overview

Now in its second edition, The Writing Revolution takes readers on a journey through the origins, historical development, adaptations, linguistic properties, cultural context, and social impact of the world’s major written traditions. Demonstrating how the creation of writing transcended the limitations of human memory and made the modern world possible, linguist Amalia E. Gnanadesikan offers an engaging, easy-to-read historical narrative of written language that covers everything from the earliest proto-cuneiform tablet to the latest AI-generated text. Concise chapters describe how different writing systems originated, how they evolved over time, and how they represent the thoughts and sounds expressed in spoken language. Throughout the book, Gnanadesikan interweaves ideas from cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and information science—complemented by illustrative examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Japanese syllabaries, Chinese characters, New World writing systems, the Roman alphabet, and many others. Featuring new and expanded coverage of the Digital Age, including Unicode, the internet, emojis, and generative AI, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet is essential reading for students of writing systems, linguistics, information science, and intellectual history, as well as general readers with an interest in the remarkable history of written language.

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9781394218196

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AMALIA E. GNANADESIKAN served as the Technical Director for Language Analysis at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. Now retired, she has taught writing, linguistics, and writing systems at the University of Maryland, West Chester University, and Rutgers University. Her linguistics publications include works in writing systems, phonology, and language description. She is the author of Dhivehi: The Language of the Maldives.

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