This is a handy and colourful illustrated guide to reading, writing and understanding ancient Egyptian names, epithets, titles and phrases. The Egyptians believed that the creator god Ptah brought the world into being by naming everything in it. Names had great power, and kings often over-wrote their own names on the monuments of earlier rulers. A person's name was a vitally important part of them, and the Egyptians were very concerned that their names should be recorded, remembered and spoken. Criminals and those who had fallen out of favour could be punished - wiped out of history - by having their names destroyed or defaced. The hieroglyphic script provided a beautiful, flexible and expressive means to write the names of humans, gods and animals. Angela McDonald explains the meanings of Egyptian personal names and how they were made up (Rameses = 'Ra has given birth to him') and demonstrates how they were written in different ways to convey various shades of meaning. Royal and divine names are always given special treatment. The Egyptians were not always formal, and nicknames were common. Even the names of pet animals are recorded in tomb paintings.

Learning to read in medieval Germany meant learning to read and understand Latin as well as the pupils' own language. The teaching methods used in the medieval Abbey of St. Gall survive in the translations and commentaries of the monk, scholar and teacher Notker Labeo (ca. 950-1022). Notker's pedagogic method, although deeply rooted in classical and monastic traditions, demonstrates revolutionary innovations that include providing translations in the pupils' native German, supplying structural commentary in the form of simplified word order and punctuation, and furnishing special markers that helped readers to perform texts out loud. Anna Grotans examines this unique interplay between orality and literacy in Latin and Old High German, and illustrates her study with many examples from Notker's manuscripts. This study has much to contribute to our knowledge of medieval reading, and of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in a variety of formal and informal contexts.

This book-length meditation on the Hebrew alphabet offers profound insights into many important ideas found in Jewish thought. From time immemorial, the Hebrew alphabet has been considered to be more than a collection of individual letters. Indeed, the essence of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be seen as a fundamental building block of the world. Jewish scholars throughout the ages have meditated on these letters, deriving spiritual inspiration in the process. In The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, Robert M. Haralick looks closely at each of the Hebrew characters, helping us to gain insight from this remarkable tradition. Drawing primarily upon traditional kabbalistic and chasidic thought, Haralick combines his own insights with those of great Jewish personalities such as Moshe Chayim Luzzatto and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, as well as drawing upon classical texts, including the Bahir, the Zohar, the Midrash, and the Talmud. One of Haralick's main sources of inspiration is the ancient Jewish art of gematria, where each letter has a numerical value as does each combination of letters. Through this traditional methodology, Haralick shows his readers the many, often dazzling, ways that the Hebrew alphabet has been examined.

This is an encyclopedia of writing systems, scripts and orthographies of all the world's major languages, past and present. It provides both a fully illustrated description of over 400 writing systems and an account of the study of writing in many different disciplines, from anthropology to psychology. Entries in this encyclopedia describe how writing systems evolved, how they work, and how they differ from each other. They deal with technical aspects such as handwriting, printing, word processing; with practical problems of decipherment, alphabet making and spelling reform; and with theoretical questions such as the functions of writing and the typology of writing systems.

Florian Coulmas starts from the view that writing reflects a process of linguistic analysis. Yet he ranges widely among different scientific disciplines. He draws on historical and paleographic research into fundamental structural options of representing language by means of a graphic code, on psychological investigation into the social conditions and consequences of literacy.

Entries vary between short explanations of terms and concepts, brief accounts of individual writing systems and longer theoretical articles. The encyclopedia contains an exceptional array of visual examples and is supported by a comprehensive bibliography.

This book reconstructs and studies the music, liturgy, and illustrations of a twelfth-century manuscript from the Austrian monastery in Lambach. The manuscript was taken apart in the fifteenth century and subsequently sold to various collectors in the twentieth century. The pages are here brought together (albeit photographically) for the first time since the original manuscript was dismantled five centuries ago. The book includes a black-and-white facsimile of the recovered portion of the manuscript. Charts and tables are used to demonstrate how it compares to other twelfth-century liturgical manuscripts.

This book is an account of the writing systems of the world from earliest times to the present. Its aim is to explore the complex ways in which writing systems relate to the language they depict. Writing, Coulmas contends, is not only the guide or garment of spoken language, but has a deep and lasting effect on the development of language itself.
His study takes in Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform system of the ancient Near East; he describes Chinese writing, discussing why an apparently cumbersome system has been used continuously for more than 3,000 years; he ranges across the writing systems of western Asia and the Middle East, the Indian families and the various alphabetic traditions which had its origins in the multifarious world of Semitic writing and came to full bloom in pre-Classical Greece.

Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - a full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, religion and gender history.

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.

Contents:
Introduction
Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Mary P. Richards
Using Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Alexander R. Rumble
Self-Contained Units in Composite Manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Period P.R. Robinson
Old Manuscripts/New Technologies Kevin S. Kiernan
N.R. Ker and the Study of English Medieval Manuscripts Richard W. Pfaff
Further Addenda and Corrigenda to N.R. Ker's Catalogue Mary Blockley
Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England Michael Lapidge
English Libraries before 1066: Use and Abuse of the Manuscript Evidence David N. Dumville

Before Writing gives a new perspective on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing began in Mesopotamia it was not, as previously thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. Instead, it was the outgrowth of many thousands of years' worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the rise of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, appeared in the Near East. These tokens--small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay--represented various units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was a breakthrough in data processing and communication that ultimately led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological site, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the various token types.

One of the primary aims of the book is to explore and formulate several Muslim legal theorists' pragmatic theories, communicative principles and linguistic views, construct them in the form of models and set them within a general uniform framework.

Who wrote about the past in the Middle Ages, who read about it, and how were these works disseminated and used? History was a subject popular with authors and readers in the Anglo-Norman world. The volume and richness of historical writing in the lands controlled by the kings of England, particularly from the 12th century, has long attracted the attention of historians and literary scholars. This collection of essays returns to the processes involved in writing history, and in particular to the medieval manuscript sources in which the works of such historians survive. It explores the motivations of those writing about the past in the Middle Ages (such as Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, Roger of Howden, and Matthew Paris), and the evidence provided by manuscripts for the circumstances in which copies were made.

In this activity-based text, Rebecca Hughes invites the reader to examine the differences between spoken and written English. Instead of presenting a bewildering array of 'facts' about variety in English, she encourages the reader to actively investigate the differences between these two modes of communication by comparing actual speech patterns with literary ones. This indispensable guide to the basic methods of analysis provides both an overview of the relationship between speech and writing and an introduction to a central theoretical issue in language studies. By the end of the book, readers will have had the opportunity to consider material from an extensive selection of spoken and written varieties - including boxing commentaries, detective novels and film scripts - while being encouraged to formulate their own opinions with regard to lexis and structure. In addition, the tasks that have been incorporated into the end of every chapter provide suggestions for further self-study and follow-up work.

The inscriptions dealt with in this book come from the Old Testament period (c. 1000 BCE to c. 200 BCE) and constitute an important additional source for our knowledge of the Hebrew language and the religion, history and customs of ancient Israel. The corpus includes texts such as the Lachish and Arad letters, the Siloam tunnel inscription, the recently discovered religious texts from Kuntillet Ajerud, and the hundreds of seals, seal impressions and weights that are now known. No such comprehensive edition has been published for over fifty years and the concordance is the first to be produced for this body of texts. It covers all complete words in the texts (including prepositions and names of persons and places), and also the Egyptian hieratic numerals and other symbols that were used in them.

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own.
The rich structure of meanings involved in the word "text" provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows:
* the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts;
* the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language;
* the initial phases of text construction by children; and
* the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

Academic and practitioner journals in fields from electronics to business to language studies, as well as the popular press, have for over a decade been proclaiming the arrival of the "computer revolution" and making far-reaching claims about the impact of computers on modern western culture. Implicit in many arguments about the revolutionary power of computers is the assumption that communication, language, and words are intimately tied to culture -- that the computer's transformation of communication means a transformation, a revolutionizing, of culture.
Moving from a vague sense that writing is profoundly different with different material and technological tools to an understanding of how such tools can and will change writing, writers, written forms, and writing's functions is not a simple matter. Further, the question of whether -- and how -- changes in individual writers' experiences with new technologies translate into large-scale, cultural "revolutions" remains unresolved.
This book is about the relationship of writing to its technologies. It uses history, theory and empirical research to argue that the effects of computer technologies on literacy are complex, always incomplete, and far from unitary -- despite a great deal of popular and even scholarly discourse about the inevitability of the computer revolution. The author argues that just as computers impact on discourse, discourse itself impacts technology and explains how technology is used in educational settings and beyond.
The opening chapters argue that the relationship between writing and the material world is both inextricable and profound. Through writing, the physical, time-and-space world of tools and artifacts is joined to the symbolic world of language. The materiality of writing is both the central fact of literacy and its central puzzle -- a puzzle the author calls "The Technology Question" -- that asks: What does it mean for language to become material? and What is the effect of writing and other material literacy technologies on human thinking and human culture? The author also argues for an interdisciplinary approach to the technology question and lays out some of the tenets and goals of technology studies and its approach to literacy.
The central chapters examine the relationship between writing and technology systematically, and take up the challenge of accounting for how writing -- defined as both a cognitive process and a cultural practice -- is tied to the material technologies that support and constrain it. Haas uses a wealth of methodologies including interviews, examination of writers' physical interactions with texts, think-aloud protocols, rhetorical analysis of discourse about technology, quasi-experimental studies of reading and writing, participant-observer studies of technology development, feature analysis of computer systems, and discourse analysis of written artifacts. Taken as a whole, the results of these studies paint a rich picture of material technologies shaping the activity of writing and discourse, in turn, shaping the development and use of technology.
The book concludes with a detailed look at the history of literacy technologies and a theoretical exploration of the relationship between material tools and mental activity. The author argues that seeing writing as an "embodied practice" -- a practice based in culture, in mind, "and" in body -- can help to answer the "technology question." Indeed, the notion of embodiment can provide a necessary corrective to accounts of writing that emphasize the cultural at the expense of the cognitive, or that focus on writing as only an act of mind. Questions of technology, always and inescapably return to the material, embodied reality of literate practice. Further, because technologies are at once tools for individual use and culturally-constructed systems, the study of technology can provide a fertile site in which to examine the larger issue of the relationship of culture and cognition.

The texts in this book have been selected to illustrate the process by which particular forms of English usage are erected and validated as correct and standard. At the same time, the texts demonstrate how a certain group of people, and certain sets of cultural practices are privileged as correct, standard and central. Covering a period of 300 years, these writers, who include Locke, Swift, Webster, James, Newbolt and Marenbon, consider the questions of language change and decay, correct and incorrect usage and what to prescribe and proscribe. Reread in the light of recent debates about cultural identity - how is it constructed and maintained? what are its effects? - these texts attempt to demonstrate the formative roles of race, class and gender in the construction of "proper Englishness". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English studies and language and linguistics including discourse theory and the history of language.

The Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan), are the only pre-Imperial Chinese manuscripts on silk found to-date. Dating to the turn from the 4th to the 3rd centuries BC (Late Warring States period), they contain several short texts concerning basic cosmological concepts, arranged in a diagrammatic arrangement and surrounded by pictorial illustrations. As such, they constitute a unique source of information complementing and going beyond what is known from transmitted texts. This is the first in a two-volume monograph on the Zidanku manuscripts, reflecting almost four decades of research by Professor Li Ling of Peking University. While the philological study and translation of the manuscript texts is the subject of Volume Two, this first volume presents the archaeological context and history of transmission of the physical manuscripts. It records how they were taken from their original place of interment in the 1940s and taken to the United States in 1946; documents the early stages in the research on the finds from the Zidanku tomb and its re-excavation in the 1970s; and accounts for where the manuscripts were kept before becoming the property, respectively, of the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, New York (Manuscript 1), and the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution (Manuscripts 2 and 3). Superseding previous efforts, this is the definitive account that will sets the record straight and establishes a new basis for future research on these uniquely important artifacts.

'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.

The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System provides a comprehensive account of the English writing system, both in its current iteration and highlighting the developing trends that will influence its future. Twenty-nine chapters written by specialists from around the world cover core linguistic and psychological aspects, and also include areas from other disciplines such as typography and computer-mediated communication. Divided into five parts, the volume encompasses a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: theory and the English writing system, discussing the effects of etymology and phonology; the history of the English writing system from its earliest development, including spelling, pronunciation and typography; the acquisition and teaching of writing, with discussions of literacy issues and dyslexia; English writing in use around the world, both in the UK and America, and also across Europe and Japan; computer-mediated communication and developments in writing online and on social media. The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.

A close analysis of forgeries and historical writings at Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury, offering valuable access to why medieval people often rewrote their pasts. What modern scholars call "forgeries" (be they texts, seals, coins, or relics) flourished in the central Middle Ages. Although lying was considered wrong throughout the period, such condemnation apparently did not extend to forgeries. Rewriting documents was especially common among monks, who exploited their mastery of writing to reshape their records. Monastic scribes frequently rewrote their archives, using charters, letters, and narratives, to create new usable pasts for claiming lands and privileges in their present or future. Such imagined histories could also be deployed to "reform" their community or reshape its relationship with lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Although these creative rewritings were forgeries, they still can be valuable evidence of medieval mentalities. While forgeries cannot easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts. This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks' interests in their present or future.

The ancient Maya civilisation of Mesoamerica was one of five in the history of the world to invent an original, functional writing system. Maya scribes documented the history of their civilisation in hieroglyphic script, yet by the nineteenth century there was not a single person left who could read this pictorial writing.

From Brontosaurus to Gallimimus, Oviraptor to Tyrannosaurus rex, Dino Alphabet takes us back to the Mesozoic era when these larger-than-life creatures ruled the earth. Majestically illustrated, this book unearths some fascinating facts about extinct species we are still getting to know. A must-have for the aspiring paleontologists in our midst!

This volume provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Gothic, the earliest attested language of the Germanic family (apart from runic inscriptions), dating to the fourth century. The bulk of the extant Gothic corpus is a translation of the Bible, of which only a portion remains, and which has been the focus of most previous works. This book is the first in English to also draw on the recently discovered Bologna fragment and Crimean graffiti, original Gothic texts that provide more insights into the language. Following an overview of the history of the Goths and the origin of the Gothic language, Gary Miller explores all the major topics in Gothic grammar, beginning with the alphabet and phonology, and proceeding through subjects such as case functions, prepositions and particles, compounding, derivation, and verbal and sentential syntax. He also presents a selection of Gothic texts with notes and vocabulary, and ends with a chapter on linearization, including an overview of Gothic in its Germanic context. The Oxford Gothic Grammar will be an invaluable reference for all Indo-Europeanists, Germanic scholars, and historical linguists, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The assumption is that most of what we know about the Romans and their history comes from Roman and Greek historians. While this is true up to a point, the reality is that there are many other primary sources which combine to give us the composite picture we have today of the Romans and their world. The Romans had in effect their own brand of social media, engineered to disseminate information, legislation, propaganda and misinformation to state and religious officials, citizens, the military and to the enemy, wherever they be. We know what the Romans did for us: roads, central heating and so on. But, just as importantly, they developed and perfected records and record-keeping and other methods of information storage and communication. It is the Roman preoccupation with record keeping and dissemination that informs the picture we have today of Roman civilisation. This is the first book to analyse what is in effect Roman social media: the keeping of records and archive material, and ways of communicating it. Uniquely, it assesses the impact this information had on and in Roman history and on our appraisal of that history.