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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Palaeography

The Greatest Invention - A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts (Paperback): Silvia Ferrara The Greatest Invention - A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts (Paperback)
Silvia Ferrara; Translated by Todd Portnowitz
R299 R234 Discovery Miles 2 340 Save R65 (22%) Ships in 5 - 10 working days

'Ferrara's book is an introduction to writing as a process of revelation, but it's also a celebration of these things still undeciphered, and many other tantalising mysteries besides.' The Spectator This book tells the story of our greatest invention. Or, it almost does. Almost, because while the story has a beginning - in fact, it has many beginnings, not only in Mesopotamia, 3,100 years before the birth of Christ, but also in China, Egypt and Central America - and it certainly has a middle, one that snakes through the painted petroglyphs of Easter Island, through the great machines of empires and across the desks of inspired, brilliant scholars, the end of the story remains to be written. The invention of writing allowed humans to create a record of their lives and to persist past the limits of their lifetimes. In the shadows and swirls of ancient inscriptions, we can decipher the stories they sought to record, but we can also tease out the timeless truths of human nature, of our ceaseless drive to connect, create and be remembered. The Greatest Invention chronicles an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research and the faint, fleeting echo of writing's future. Professor Silvia Ferrara, a modern-day adventurer who travels the world studying ancient texts, takes us along with her; we touch the knotted, coloured strings of the Incan khipu and consider the case of the Phaistos disk. Ferrara takes us to the cutting edge of decipherment, where high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer's eye, and further still, to gaze at the outline of writing's future. The Greatest Invention lifts the words off every page and changes the contours of the world around us - just keep reading. 'The Greatest Invention is a celebration not of achievements, but of moments of illumination and "the most important thing in the world: our desire to be understood".' TLS

A Place for Everything - The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Paperback): Judith Flanders A Place for Everything - The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Paperback)
Judith Flanders
R480 R400 Discovery Miles 4 000 Save R80 (17%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Learn Japanese with Manga Volume One, Volume 1 - A Self-Study Language Book for Beginners - Learn to read, write and speak... Learn Japanese with Manga Volume One, Volume 1 - A Self-Study Language Book for Beginners - Learn to read, write and speak Japanese with manga comic strips! (free online audio) (Paperback)
Bernabe; Illustrated by Luque
R434 R387 Discovery Miles 3 870 Save R47 (11%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Learn to read, write, and speak everyday Japanese with manga stories! If you enjoy manga, you'll love learning Japanese with this book. The language lessons are interspersed with entertaining manga comic strips, making it easy to learn and remember all the key vocabulary and grammar. With a focus on the casual speech used by young people in Japan, you'll find yourself feeling confident with speaking, reading, and writing Japanese quickly! Designed for self-study use by adult learners, this book is a fun resource for beginners--no prior knowledge of Japanese required! Readers will find: Help with learning to write and pronounce the 92 Hiragana and Katakana letters plus 160 basic Kanji characters Hundreds of useful words and phrases--from numbers and greetings to expletives and insults! Seven manga stories woven throughout the book, reinforcing your grasp of the language The basic vocabulary and grammar needed to communicate in Japanese! Hundreds of exercises with free online audio recordings by Japanese native speakers A bidirectional dictionary and answer keys for all the exercises **Recommended for language learners 16 year old & up. Not intended for high school classroom use due to adult content.**

ABC (Board book, Revised ed.): Matthew Porter ABC (Board book, Revised ed.)
Matthew Porter
R230 R197 Discovery Miles 1 970 Save R33 (14%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Reading & Writing Farsi (Persian): A Workbook for Self-Study - A Beginner's Guide to the Farsi Script and Language (Free... Reading & Writing Farsi (Persian): A Workbook for Self-Study - A Beginner's Guide to the Farsi Script and Language (Free Online Audio & Printable Flash Cards) (Paperback)
Pegah Vil, Amir Hossein Ahooie
R308 Discovery Miles 3 080 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Learn the basics of the Farsi Language quickly! Reading & Writing Farsi is a self-study guide to the Farsi alphabet for anyone who is just getting started in learning this beautiful language. Author Pegah Vil has helped thousands of English-speaking students to learn Farsi and she developed these easy lessons and exercises to help you quickly get up to speed with the basics. The lessons start by showing you how to write the 32 letters of the Farsi alphabet and how to pronounce them correctly (with the aid of native-speaker audio recordings, available online at no cost). From there, you quickly progress to full words and sentences. Extensive exercises and drills at every stage of the process help to reinforce what you have learned. This complete beginning-level language course includes: Memorable pictures to help you remember the Farsi letters by associating their shapes and sounds with familiar images A description of common errors made by English-speaking learners and how to avoid them Access to free, printable flash cards and online native-speaker audio recordings A comprehensive bidirectional dictionary of key terms and phrases with English-Farsi and Farsi-English sections Farsi is spoken by over 110 million people and has a rich poetic tradition. By using this carefully designed book, learners can quickly acquire a basic understanding of written Persian/Farsi--the national language of Iran.

Japanese Genkouyoushi Character Writing Workbook - Practice Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji - Includes Vertical Grids and... Japanese Genkouyoushi Character Writing Workbook - Practice Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji - Includes Vertical Grids and Horizontal Lines for Notes (Companion Online Audio) (Paperback)
Tuttle Studio
R203 Discovery Miles 2 030 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Learn to write Japanese the traditional way! This is the ideal workbook to use when learning to write Japanese in the traditional Genkouyoushi manner using vertical boxes. It includes a complete introduction to all 92 hiragana and katakana letters as well as the basic kanji needed for the AP and JLPT tests. The main body of the workbook has over 100 pages of blank vertical grids for handwriting practice as well as lined pages for notes. It also includes several pages of guided Audio Recordings handwriting exercises for the hiragana and katakana letters and 35 essential kanji characters, long with a list of vocabulary commonly appearing on Japanese language proficiency tests. Free online audio recordings by native Japanese speakers help you practice the pronunciations of all the letters and words in the book.

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese (Hardcover): Zheng-Sheng Zhang Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese (Hardcover)
Zheng-Sheng Zhang
R3,914 Discovery Miles 39 140 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language. Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language teachers Association (now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in the field of Chinese linguistics.

Inventing the Alphabet - The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (Hardcover): Johanna Drucker Inventing the Alphabet - The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (Hardcover)
Johanna Drucker
R1,005 Discovery Miles 10 050 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet's origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been "invented" as an object of scholarship.

Introduction to Qur'anic Script (Paperback): Syed Barakat Ahmad Introduction to Qur'anic Script (Paperback)
Syed Barakat Ahmad
R1,758 Discovery Miles 17 580 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

'Masterly work ... Leads the reader patiently but directly not merely into Qur'anic writing but into the heart of that Holy Book itself ... By the time we have followed Dr Ahmad to the end of this splendid work we have learned something new and indeed something uplifting about one of the world's great books.' Prof. F. E. Peters, New York University.

Fifty Mysterious Postcards - Pitman Shorthand Messages from the Golden Age of the Postcard (Paperback): Kathryn Baird Fifty Mysterious Postcards - Pitman Shorthand Messages from the Golden Age of the Postcard (Paperback)
Kathryn Baird
R399 Discovery Miles 3 990 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The lines, circles, ticks, hooks, dots and dashes of Pitman shorthand used by some postcard writers during the early twentieth century are obscure to most people. Could the mysterious messages contain scandalous gossip, tales of adventure or declarations of undying love? Fifty Mysterious Postcards presents fascinating examples from the 'Golden Age' of the postcard, each with a message written in the dying art of Pitman shorthand. The rules of Pitman have changed since the postcards were written and posted over 100 years ago, but careful transcription has unlocked their meaning to bring stories of penfriends, sweethearts, holidays and the First World War to life once more.

The Development of Written Estonian (Hardcover, annotated edition): George Kurman The Development of Written Estonian (Hardcover, annotated edition)
George Kurman
R3,604 Discovery Miles 36 040 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

Signs of Writing (Hardcover, Reissue): Professor Roy Harris, Roy Harris Signs of Writing (Hardcover, Reissue)
Professor Roy Harris, Roy Harris
R4,209 Discovery Miles 42 090 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech.
By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext.
This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.

Writing Systems and Phonetics (Paperback): Alan Cruttenden Writing Systems and Phonetics (Paperback)
Alan Cruttenden
R1,110 Discovery Miles 11 100 Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Writing Systems and Phonetics provides students with a critical understanding of the writing systems of the world. Beginning by exploring the spelling of English, including how it arose and how it works today, the book goes on to address over 60 major languages from around the globe and includes detailed descriptions and worked examples of writing systems which foreground the phonetics of these languages. Key areas covered include: the use of the Latin alphabet in and beyond Europe; writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek and its Cyrillic offshoot, Arabic and Hebrew; languages in south and south-east Asia, including Hindi, Tamil, Burmese and Thai, as well as in east Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean; reflections on ancient languages such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Linear B and Mayan; a final chapter which sets out a typology of writing systems. All of the languages covered are contextualised by authentic illustrations, including road signs, personal names and tables, to demonstrate how theoretical research can be applied to the real world. Taking a unique geographical focus that guides the reader on a journey across time and continents, this book offers an engaging introduction for students approaching for the first time the phonetics of writing systems, their typology and the origins of scripts.

Empires of the Word - A Language History of the World (Paperback, 1st Harper Perennial ed): Nicholas Ostler Empires of the Word - A Language History of the World (Paperback, 1st Harper Perennial ed)
Nicholas Ostler
R633 R492 Discovery Miles 4 920 Save R141 (22%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.

Basic Tagalog - Learn to Speak Modern Filipino/ Tagalog - The National Language of the Philippines: Revised Third Edition (with... Basic Tagalog - Learn to Speak Modern Filipino/ Tagalog - The National Language of the Philippines: Revised Third Edition (with Online Audio) (Paperback, 3rd Revised edition)
Paraluman S. Aspillera, Yolanda C. Hernandez
R462 R407 Discovery Miles 4 070 Save R55 (12%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Basic Tagalog is a friendly and accessible resource, providing beginning language learners with support, structure and thorough explanations. This is the most complete language course available for Tagalog--in one easy volume! This new edition has free online native-speaker audio recordings and dialogues in the contemporary Manila dialect spoken throughout the Philippines today. All materials have been thoroughly updated with current vocabulary, phrases and real-life expressions used by younger Filipinos. This textbook includes: Over 2,500 Tagalog words and phrases Online audio recorded by native speakers to help with pronunciation Bidirectional dictionary Updated cultural notes and sentence patterns Dialogues with manga illustrations Practical exercises at the end of each lesson Downloadable flashcards Clear and concise grammar explanations This comprehensive language learning course is ideal for both self-study and classroom learners who wish to learn Tagalog the way it is actually spoken.

Scripting Japan - Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Paperback): Wesley C. Robertson Scripting Japan - Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Paperback)
Wesley C. Robertson
R1,234 Discovery Miles 12 340 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts. This monograph provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan.

Dog Alphabet (Hardcover): Beck Feiner Dog Alphabet (Hardcover)
Beck Feiner; Illustrated by Beck Feiner; Created by Alphabet Legends
R384 Discovery Miles 3 840 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

From Beagles to Labradors, Pugs to Saint Bernards, Dog Alphabet fetches an A to Z of the most popular breeds of man's best friend. Adorably illustrated and written with love, this book is the paw-fect companion for dog devotees of all ages.

Farsi (Persian) for Beginners - Learning Conversational Farsi - Second Edition (Free Downloadable Audio Files Included)... Farsi (Persian) for Beginners - Learning Conversational Farsi - Second Edition (Free Downloadable Audio Files Included) (Paperback)
Atoofi
R505 R371 Discovery Miles 3 710 Save R134 (27%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Perfect for self-study or classroom learners, this Farsi language book takes a user-friendly approach. Farsi for Beginners is a complete language course by experienced teacher Dr. Saeid Atoofi, which will help you to speak the language and open doors to Persian culture. This second edition is updated to include IT and social media vocabulary and downloadable audio files. Whether for pleasure, travel or business, language learners will find these lessons clear and easy to follow. By the end of this course, you'll be able to understand short sentences, express your basic needs, and read and write the 32-letter Farsi alphabet. Farsi for Beginners contains the following essential features: Dialogues and stories about a family traveling to contemporary Iran Downloadable native-speaker audio recordings help you to pronounce Farsi accurately Idioms, sayings and poems introducing you to the cultures in which Farsi is used Extensive exercises with answer keys to guide your learning process Photos and insider cultural tips teach you about Persian culture Farsi is the language of Persia (present-day Iran). More than 1.5 million Iranian-Americans live in the U.S. today, and Farsi is considered a "critically needed" language by the U.S. government.

Learning Japanese Kanji - The 520 Most Essential Characters (With online audio and bonus materials) (Paperback): Grant Learning Japanese Kanji - The 520 Most Essential Characters (With online audio and bonus materials) (Paperback)
Grant
R414 Discovery Miles 4 140 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

An enjoyable and effective way to learn Japanese kanji! This useful reference book helps self-study and classroom students remember the meanings and pronunciations of 520 essential kanji. An otherwise daunting task, memorization is made easier with this book--which uses mnemonic techniques based on the psychology of learning and memory. Key principles include the use of visual imagery, the visualization of short "stories," and the systematic building-block approach that shows how more complicated characters are constructed from basic elements. This is a practical guide with a clear, concise, and appealing layout; it is well-indexed with easy look-up methods. The kanji in this volume give you the majority of characters you will encounter in daily life, from newspapers to street signs. It also includes the kanji required for the AP Japanese exam and N4 & N5 JLPT tests. Accompanying online audio provides recordings by native Japanese speakers to perfect your pronunciation.

A Place For Everything - The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Paperback): Judith Flanders A Place For Everything - The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (Paperback)
Judith Flanders
R280 R219 Discovery Miles 2 190 Save R61 (22%) Ships in 5 - 10 working days

One we've learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.

In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organizing things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful.

A Place for Everything fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth- century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by 'sirname' first.

The Segovia Manuscript - A European Musical Repertory in Spain, c.1500 (Hardcover): Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Cristina Urchueguia The Segovia Manuscript - A European Musical Repertory in Spain, c.1500 (Hardcover)
Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Cristina Urchueguia
R2,301 Discovery Miles 23 010 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Essays illuminating a complex and sophisticated musical manuscript. The Segovia Manuscript (Cathedral of Segovia, Archivo Capitular) has puzzled musicologists ever since its rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unique: no other manuscript of the period transmits a comparable blend of late fifteenth-century music, consisting of 204 sacred works and vernacular pieces in Flemish, French, Italian, and Spanish. An important group of pedagogical pieces by French and Flemish composers may preserve transcriptions of instrumental improvisation. This summary might suggest a messy collection, but on the contrary the manuscript is arranged with care, copied by one proficient scribe (except perhaps for the Spanish texts), who obviously followed a predetermined master plan. But which plan, who designed it, and why was the person responsible so interested in this combination? The essays here aim to treat every dimension of this fascinating source. New discoveries help date the manuscript and explain how it came to Segovia; particular attention is paid to the main scribe, now determined to be Flemish, and his relation with northern composers and repertory, above all that of Jacob Obrecht, Alexander Agricola, and Henricus Isaac; and the vexed question of the conflicting attributions is considered afresh and found to affect only a few of the fascicles. The contributors also look at questions of ownership and function. . WOLFGANG FUHRMANN is Professor of Musicology at Leipzig University; CRISTINA URCHUEGUIA is Professor of Musicology at the University of Bern. Contributors: Bonnie J. Blackburn, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Honey Meconi, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Cristina Urchueguia, Rob C. Wegman

Korean Hangul Writing Practice Workbook - An Introduction to the Hangul Alphabet with 100 Pages of Blank Writing Practice Grids... Korean Hangul Writing Practice Workbook - An Introduction to the Hangul Alphabet with 100 Pages of Blank Writing Practice Grids (Online Audio) (Paperback)
Tuttle Studio
R346 R203 Discovery Miles 2 030 Save R143 (41%) Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This is the ideal workbook for anyone who wants to learn to write the Korean Hangul script! It contains a basic introduction to the alphabet and all the sounds of the language, showing you how to write the letters and every possible syllable combination. This introduction is followed by over 100 pages of blank handwriting practice grids and lined paper for notes. This complete writing practice workbook includes: Guided writing exercises for Hangul letters, syllables and words Alternate square-gridded and lined pages for handwriting practice and notes K-Pop and Korean TV drama vocabulary and phrases are included along with popular Korean food names Free online audio recordings help you learn the correct pronunciation of all the letters, syllables and words in the book

Persian Calligraphy - A Corpus Study of Letterforms (Paperback): Mahdiyeh Meidani Persian Calligraphy - A Corpus Study of Letterforms (Paperback)
Mahdiyeh Meidani
R1,166 Discovery Miles 11 660 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This book is an exploratory adventure to defamiliarize calligraphy, especially Persian Nastaliq calligraphic letterforms, and to look beyond the tradition that has always considered calligraphy as pursuant to and subordinate to linguistic practices. Calligraphy can be considered a visual communicative system with different means of meaning-making or as a medium through which meaning is made and expression is conveyed via a complex grammar. This study looks at calligraphy as a systematic means in the field of visual communication, rather than as a one-dimensional and ad hoc means of providing visual beauty and aesthetic enjoyment. Revolving around different insights of multimodal social semiotics, the volume relies on the findings of a corpus study of Persian Nastaliq calligraphy. The research emphasizes the way in which letterforms, regardless of conventions in language, are applied as graphically meaningful forms that convey individual distinct meanings. This volume on Persian Nastaliq calligraphy will be inspirational to visual artists, designers, calligraphers, writers, linguists, and visual communicators. With an introduction to social semiotics, this work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in visual arts, media and communication, and semiotics.

Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England - Repairing, Recycling, Sharing (Hardcover): Hannah Ryley Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England - Repairing, Recycling, Sharing (Hardcover)
Hannah Ryley
R2,274 Discovery Miles 22 740 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. During the "long fifteenth century" (here, 1375-1530), the demand for books in England flourished. The fast-developing book trade produced them in great quantity. Fragments of manuscripts were often repurposed, as flyleaves and other components such as palimpsests; and alongside the creation of new books, medieval manuscripts were also repaired, recycled and re-used. This monograph examines the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. Drawing on the codicological evidence gathered from an extensive survey of extant manuscript collections, in conjunction with historical accounts, recipes and literary texts, it presents detailed case studies exploring parchment production and recycling, the re-use of margins, and second-hand exchanges of books. Its engagement with the evidence in - and inscribed on - surviving books enables a fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, looking at how people went about re-using books, and arguing that over the course of this period, books were made, used and re-used in a myriad of sustainable ways.

Kingdom of Characters - A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China (Paperback): Jing Tsu Kingdom of Characters - A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China (Paperback)
Jing Tsu
R265 R212 Discovery Miles 2 120 Save R53 (20%) Ships in 5 - 10 working days

A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences. With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations.

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