From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and services in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sophisticated typographical resources available to the twenty-first-century users of desktop computers, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself. Calligraphy expert Ewan Clayton traces the history of an invention which--ever since our ancestors made the transition from a nomadic to an agrarian way of life in the eighth century BC--has been the method of codification and dissemination of ideas in every field of human endeavour, and a motor of cultural, scientific and political progress. He explores the social and cultural impact of, among other stages, the invention of the alphabet; the replacement of the papyrus scroll with the codex in the late Roman period; the perfecting of printing using moveable type in the fifteenth century and the ensuing spread of literacy; the industrialization of printing during the Industrial Revolution; the impact of artistic Modernism on the written word in the early twentieth century--and of the digital switchover at the century's close. The Golden Thread also raises issues of urgent interest for a society living in an era of unprecedented change to the tools and technologies of written communication.

Every writer gets a flood of ideas from time to time and it is best to have some way to make a note of all those ideas for use later on when the actual writing starts. The "Writing Journal for the Speedy Writer" is perfect. It allows the budding author to keep a track of all the great ideas that come out of a brainstorming session or those thoughts that come up throughout the day. There is an adequate amount of space to get the writing done in addition to the fact that the pages can be dated for reference by the user.

At the first meeting of his class in Northwest Semitic Epigraphy at Harvard, Frank Cross would inform students that one of the things each of them needed was an "eye for form." By this, he meant the ability to recognize typological or evolutionary change in letters and scripts. Frank, like his teacher William Foxwell Albright, was a master of typological method. In fact, typology was the dominant feature of his epigraphic work, from the origins of the alphabet to the development of the scripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Indeed, he has written about the importance of typology itself. Because Frank Cross has so dominated the study of the ancient Near East in the last 60 years, Aufrecht once asked him what he considered his primary field of study to be. Without hesitation, he said, "Epigraphy." It seems, therefore, that the field that he loved and to which he contributed so much is an appropriate subject for this Festschrift in his honor, which is being presented by his colleagues, friends, and former students. Included are an appreciation by Peter Machinist and a contribution by the late Pierre Bordreuil.

While investigating endangered languages, many researchers become interested in developing literacy for these languages. However, often their linguistic training has not provided practical guidance in this area. This book, with contributions by experienced practitioners, helps fill this gap. Both foundational theory and specific case studies are addressed in this work. Non-linguistic factors are described, particularly sociolinguistic issues that determine acceptability of orthographies. A principled approach to the level of phonological representation for orthographies is proposed, applying recent phonological theory. The thorny issues of how to determine word breaks and how to mark tone in an orthography are explored. "Overly hasty orthographies" and the benefits of allowing time for an orthography to settle are discussed. Principles of the foundational chapters are further exemplified by detailed case studies from Mexico, Peru, California, Nepal, and Southeast Asia, which vividly illustrate the variety of local conditions that must be taken into account. The combination of theoretical and practical makes this book unique. It will benefit those involved in helping establish orthographies for hitherto-unwritten languages, and provide concrete guidance through crucial issues. Michael Cahill (Ph.D. 1999, Ohio State University) developed the Konni orthography in Ghana. He was SIL's International Linguistics Coordinator for eleven years, and is on the LSA's Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. Keren Rice (Ph.D. 1976, University of Toronto) helped standardize the orthography of Slavey, and has taught on orthography development at InField/CoLang. She was LSA President in 2012 and is currently University Professor at the University of Toronto.

One of the remarkable facts about the history of Western culture is that we are still in a position to read large amounts of the literature produced in classical Greece and Rome despite the fact that for at least a millennium and a half all copies had to be produced by hand and were subject to the hazards of fire, flood, and war. This book explains how the texts survived and gives an account of the reasons why it was thought worthwhile to spend the necessary effort to preserve them for future generations. In the second edition a section of notes was included, and a new chapter was added to deal with some aspects of scholarship since the Renaissance. In the third edition (1991), the authors responded to the urgent need to take account of the very large number of discoveries in this rapidly advancing field of knowledge by substantially revising or enlarging certain sections. The last two decades have seen further advances, and this revised edition is designed to take account of them.

The Gambler paints a stark picture of the attractions--and addictions--of gambling. Using skillful characterization, Dostoevsky faithfully depicts life among the gambling set in old Germany. This probing psychological novel explores the tangled love affairs and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler, and Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves.

Navlipi, Volume 2, A New, Universal, Script (Alphabet) Accommodating the Phonemic Idiosyncrasies of All the World's Languages. Volume 2, Another Look At Phonic and Phonemic Classification: Navlipi, By Prasanna Chandrasekhar. This book presents a new, universal script, denoted NAVLIPI, capable of expressing all the world's languages, from English and Arabic, to tonal languages such as Mandarin, to click languages such as Xo Bushman. Based on the Roman script, NAVLIPI uses just five new or transformed letters (glyphs) in addition to the 26 letters of the Roman script; it uses no diacritics, rather making heavy use of post-ops, post-positional operators. Its expression is very facile and intuitive and highly amenable to cursive writing as well as keyboarding and voice transcription. More scientifically and systematically organized than even Hangul, NAVLIPI incorporates essential features of a universal script, thus far present in no world script to date, such as universality, completeness, distinctiveness, and practical phonemic application. It addresses the serious deficiencies of the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. Most importantly, NAVLIPI addresses phonemic idiosyncrasy, for the first time ever in any world script; among other things, phonemic idiosyncrasy makes transcription, in the same script, of, e.g. Mandarin and English, or Hindi/Urdu and Tamil, extremely difficult. It is felt that NAVLIPI is introduced at an appropriate time for a globalized world, which needs a single script in which it is easy and intuitive to transcribe all of the world's languages; it may also assist in the preservation of endangered languages. Apart from presenting the new script, the book also presents a thorough review of nearly all prior art through five millennia to the present, a basic discussion of phonetic and phonemic classification, exercises in coming up with new scripts, a glossary of terms, and more than 620 detailed references in linguistics...

This is 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' printed in the Shaw alphabet devised by Ronald Kingsley Read.

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observations, asemic writing is not everything: it is just an essential component, a newborn supernova dropped from a calligrapher's hand. Asemic writing is simultaneously communicating with the past and the future of writing, from the earliest undeciphered writing systems to the xenolinguistics of the stars; it follows a peregrination from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words. An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is compiled and edited by Tim Gaze from Asemic magazine and Michael Jacobson from The New Post-Literate blog. Contributors include: Reed Altemus, mIEKAL aND, Rosaire Appel, Francesco Aprile, Roy Arenella, Derek Beaulieu, Pat Bell, John M. Bennett, Francesca Biasetton, Volodymyr Bilyk, Tony Burhouse & Rob Glew, Nancy Burr, Riccardo Cavallo, Mauro Cesari, Peter Ciccariello, Andrew Clark, Carlfriedrich Claus, Bob Cobbing, Patrick Collier, Robert Corydon, Jeff Crouch, Marilyn Dammann, Donna Maria Decreeft, Alessandro De Francesco, Monica Dengo, Mirtha Dermisache, Bill Dimichele, Christian Dotremont, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Mark Firth, Eckhard Gerdes, Mike Getsiv, Jean-Christophe Giacottino, Marco Giovenale, Meg Green, Brion Gysin, Jefferson Hansen, Huai Su, Geof Huth, Isidore Isou, Michael Jacobson, Satu Kaikkonen, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Rashid Koraishi, Irene Koronas, Edward Kulemin, Le Quoc Viet & Tran Tr?ng Duong, Jim Leftwich, Misha Magazinnik, Matt Margo, Andre Masson, Nuno de Matos, Willi Melnikov, Morita Shiryu, Sheila E. Murphy, Nguyen Duc Dung, Nguyen Quang Thang, Pham Van Tuan, Francois Poyet, Kerri Pullo, Lars Px, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Roland Sabatier, Ekaterina Samigulina & Yuli Ilyshchanska, Alain Satie, Karen L. Schiff, Spencer Selby, Peggy Shearn, Ahmed Shibrain, Gary Shipley, Christopher Skinner, Helene Smith, Lin Tarczynski, Morgan Taubert, Andrew Topel, Cecil Touchon, Louise Tournay, Tran Tr?ng Duong, Lawrence Upton, Sergio Uzal, Marc van Elburg, Nico Vassilakis, Glynda Velasco, Simon Vinkenoog, Vsevolod Vlaskine, Cornelis Vleeskens, Anthony Vodraska, Voynich Manuscript, Jim Wittenberg, Michael Yip, Logan K. Young, Yorda Yuan, Camille Zehenne, Zhang Xu, & others."

The tale of a girl whose fall down a rabbit hole pulls her into a world of irresistible strangeness - of talking caterpillars, vanishing cats, and mad hatters. It is printed in the Ewellic alphabet devised by Doug Ewell.

This book presents a new, universal script, denoted NAVLIPI, capable of expressing all the world's languages, from English and Arabic, to tonal languages such as Mandarin, to click languages such as Xo Bushman. Based on the Roman script, NAVLIPI uses just five new or transformed letters (glyphs) in addition to the 26 letters of the Roman script; it uses no diacritics, rather making heavy use of "post-ops," post-positional operators. Its expression is very facile and intuitive and highly amenable to cursive writing as well as keyboarding and voice transcription. More scientifically and systematically organized than even Hangul, NAVLIPI incorporates essential features of a universal script, thus far present in no world script to date, such as universality, completeness, distinctiveness, and practical phonemic application. It addresses the serious deficiencies of the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. Most importantly, NAVLIPI addresses phonemic idiosyncrasy, for the first time ever in any world script; among other things, phonemic idiosyncrasy makes transcription, in the same script, of, e.g. Mandarin and English, or Hindi/Urdu and Tamil, extremely difficult. It is felt that NAVLIPI is introduced at an appropriate time for a globalized world, which needs a single script in which it is easy and intuitive to transcribe all of the world's languages; it may also assist in the preservation of endangered languages. Apart from presenting the new script, the book also presents a thorough review of nearly all prior art through five millennia to the present, a basic discussion of phonetic and phonemic classification, "exercises" in coming up with new scripts, a glossary of terms, and more than 620 detailed references in linguistics and related fields. Nicholas Ostler makes the following observation: "NAVLIPI is a systematic extension of Roman script with a number of aims in view: To be a practical (legible and writable) script for all the world's languages, but at the same time to represent the languages' sounds exactly and consistently, making no compromises on the phonemic principle. In this ambitious goal, it goes beyond existing scripts: Beyond ordinary Roman scripts, because it requires that its symbols are interpreted the same way everywhere; beyond phonetic scripts such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, by representing phonemes singly, rather than as a set of phones; and beyond all the other scripts, by attempting to replace every single one of them without loss of significant phonetic detail. This is a stupendous aim for a single system created by a single scholar. "The main obstacle to Chandrasekhar's achievement is the phenomenon of "phonemic idiosyncrasy," whereby the actual speech sounds are organized into different, and cross-cutting, significant sets in various languages: For example, p, whether aspirated or un-aspirated, is the same phoneme in English, but the two versions belong to contrasting phonemes in Hindi, where (however) f is heard as the same sound as aspirated-p. By juxtaposing letters, Chandrasekhar conjures up new symbols that represent directly the complex phonemic reality. The attempt to have all the possible virtues of a phonetic writing system at once - on the basis of a single man's ideal - is what makes this a heroic endeavor." Dr. Chandrasekhar was born in India and lives and works in America. He is a chemist and business owner active in the U.S. defense contracting industry, but his ethnic background places him in a multilingual, multiscriptal society. An idea like Navlipi was most likely to arise in India, where numerous scripts compete for the eye's attention in everyday life, and an inquiring mind such as the author's was moved to try to distil them into a single uniform writing system.

This book describes meaning, stages and methods of writing a successful research project proposal and a thesis from the first draft proposal to the final version of the thesis. As a manual, this book follows a simple approach that beginners can use without complications and many terminologies and technical terms have been translated into Arabic. The book explains the structure of a thesis and proposal including title, abstract, introduction, literature review, materials and methods, results, discussion, biography and appendix (if there is any). These parts of the thesis are often mixed up without emphasizing the purpose of each part and often without limiting oneself to the specific chapter.

Throughout the East, writing is held to be a gift from the gods, and the divinely inspired letters and characters are objects of the highest veneration. The religious significance of calligraphy has thus led to a unique development of the art of brush and ink in Japan, China, India, and Tibet. This beautifully illustrated book covers such topics as the history and spirit of Eastern calligraphy, the art of copying religious texts, the biographies of important Zen calligraphers, and practical instructions on materials and techniques for the contemporary student. No knowledge of the languages discussed is required for the reader to appreciate the study of this ancient practice.

John Stevens lived in Japan for thirty-five years, where he was a professor of Buddhist studies at Tohoku Fukushi University in Sendai. Stevens is a widely respected translator, an ordained Buddhist priest, a curator of several major exhibitions of Zen art, and an aikido instructor. He has authored over thirty books and is one of the foremost Western experts on Aikido, holding a ranking of 7th dan Aikikai. Stevens has also studied calligraphy for decades, authoring this classic "Sacred Calligraphy of the East." Other John Stevens titles that are likely to be of interest include "The Philosophy of Aikido, Extraordinary Zen Masters, " and "The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei."

When modern discussions of technology arise in rhetoric and composition studies, the topic is almost always related to computers-despite their comparatively recent development and deployment in this millennia-old profession. Computers themselves are new; composition's rush to emergent technologies is not. New teachers face expectations that they will master everything from word processing to the multi-modal essay, from Aristotle's Rhetoric to the classroom whiteboard. While little can be done immediately to change such unrealistic and unreasonable expectations, teachers and scholars can benefit greatly from considering the place such expectations and technologies have in the larger and longer flow of rhetoric and composition studies-from the technology of road building in the ancient world, which allowed students to travel to school from afar, to the technology of handwriting, now largely falling by the wayside. From this past emerge fresh perspectives on the future of writing technologies in the digital age. The story of technology in composition's history and pedagogy is one of stability and change, of short-term success and long-term failure. The essays in ON THE BLUNT EDGE: TECHNOLOGY IN COMPOSITION'S HISTORY AND PEDAGOGY tell the story of rhetoric and composition's long and intriguing relationship with writing technologies, revealing the ways that they have transformed the teaching and understanding of writing throughout history. Contributors include SHANE BORROWMAN, RICHARD LEO ENOS, DANIEL R. FREDRICK, RICHARD W. RAWNSLEY, SHAWN FULLMER, KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY, JOSEPH JONES, SHERRY RANKINS ROBERTSON, DUANE ROEN, MARCIA KMETZ, ROBERT LIVELY, CRYSTAL BROCH-COLOMBINI, THOMAS BLACK, JASON THOMPSON, and THERESA ENOS. SHANE BORROWMAN is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana Western, where he teaches composition and creative nonfiction. He is editor or co-editor of numerous collections, including Trauma and the Teaching of Writing (SUNY, 2005), The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration (Parlor Press, 2008), and Rhetoric in the Rest of the West (Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Additionally, he is editor/co-editor of multiple first-year composition textbooks and readers. His nonfiction has appeared in publications ranging from Brevity and Conclave: A Journal of Character to Whitefish Review and Rhetoric Review.

Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series(Part I and Part II) The Rosetta Stone is one of the world's great wonders, attracting awed pilgrims by the tens of thousands each year. This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum. A pharaoh's forgotten decree, cut in granite in three scripts--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek--the Rosetta Stone promised to unlock the door to the language of ancient Egypt and its 3,000 years of civilization, if only it could be deciphered. Capturing the drama of the race to decode this key to the ancient past, John Ray traces the paths pursued by the British polymath Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology" ultimately credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. He shows how Champollion "broke the code" and explains more generally how such deciphering is done, as well as its critical role in the history of Egyptology. Concluding with a chapter on the political and cultural controversy surrounding the Stone, the book also includes an appendix with a full translation of the Stone's text. Rich in anecdote and curious lore, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt is a brilliant and frequently amusing guide to one of history's great mysteries and marvels.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a Lewis Carroll, invented a special writing instrument he called "the Nyctograph" on 24 September 1891, in frustration at the process of "getting out of bed at 2 a.m. in a winter night, lighting a candle, and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten." This edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is written entirely in the author's unique night-time alphabet.

Idioms and Cliches... is a supplementary text for advanced ESL/EFL students and professionals who want to read and better understand business publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, etc. Gleaned from these sources, this book contains 250 idioms, explanations and example usage. This simple text relies on the instructor to further provide explanation and discussion. Some pages may be copied limitedly.

A book for anyone teaching English spelling, particularly those working with English language learners. This essential manual answers three challenging questions about teaching spelling: Why is there a problem with teaching and learning spelling? What can be done about it? How can this be accomplished? The first part of the book helps teachers understand the systems of English spelling and the regularities, which are not necessarily phonological. It explores the errors that learners really make and the challenges faced by teachers. The second part outlines a fresh, new, multi-dimensional approach to teaching spelling which recognises the need for learner engagement and strategy training as well as work on the patterns found in English orthography. The final part of the book presents over seventy engaging and effective activities which are designed to develop a range of strategies and knowledge about English spelling.

Mashayekhi collects more than 2,000 idioms and expressions that are used in the English language daily, yet are not found in dictionaries. Recommended for both native and non-native English speakers.