Learn to speak, read, and write Korean with this complete language guide for beginners! Learning Korean teaches you the basics of the Korean language, including practical daily conversations and vocabulary, and enables you to begin communicating effectively right away. All Korean words and sentences are given in Korean Hangeul script and romanized form for easy pronunciation, with English translations. Key features include: 11 lessons designed for beginning adult learners Basic sentence patterns and vocabulary used in daily conversations Suitable for self-study learners as well as beginning level classes Hangeul and Romanized versions of all Korean texts with English translations Cultural notes for understanding Korean customs and norms A dictionary of commonly-used words and phrases Accompanying native speaker audio recordings Downloadable flashcards The book also includes useful notes and explanations on pronunciation, the Korean Hangeul script, greetings and requests, basic sentence structure and vocabulary, verb conjugations, honorific forms, idiomatic expressions, and etiquette dos and don'ts. Free native-speaker MP3 audio recordings of the dialogues and vocabulary are available online and enable language learners to improve their pronunciation, while printable flashcards help with vocabulary memorization.

A fresh interpretation of an enigmatic illumination and its contexts. The Ashburnham Pentateuch is an early medieval manuscript of uncertain provenance, which has puzzled and intrigued scholars since the nineteenth century. Its first image, which depicts the Genesis creation narrative, is itself a site of mystery; originally, it presented the Trinity as three men in various vignettes, but in the early ninth century, by which time the manuscript had come to the monastery at Tours, most of the figures were obscured by paint, leaving behind a single creator. In this sense, the manuscript serves as a kind of hinge between the late antique and early medieval periods. Why was the Ashburnham Pentateuch's anthropomorphic image of the Trinity acceptable in the sixth century, but not in the ninth? This study examines the theological, political, and iconographic contexts of the production and later modification of the Ashburnham Pentateuch's creation image. The discussion focuses on materiality, the oft-contested relationship between image and word, and iconoclastic acts as "embodied responses". Ultimately, this book argues that the Carolingian-era reception and modification of the creation image is consistent with contemporaneous iconography, a concern for maintaining the absolute unity of the Trinity, as well as Carolingian image theory following the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. Tracing the changes in Trinitarian theology and theories of the image offers us a better understanding of the mutual influences between art, theology, and politics during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

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.

First published in 1979, this work, by the greatest living authority on medieval palaeography, offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account in any language of the history of Latin script. It contains a detailed account of the role of the book in cultural history from antiquity to the Renaissance and outlines the history of book illumination. By setting the development of Latin script in its cultural context, it provides an unrivalled introduction to the nature of medieval Latin culture.

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography.

Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger ( ) which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (

) and everyday (&).

From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang (?) and as divisive as the dash ( ). Ancient Roman graffiti, Venetian trading shorthand, Cold War double agents, and Madison Avenue round out an ever more diverse set of episodes, characters, and artifacts.

Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life."

This pioneering volume approaches the languages and scripts of ancient Cyprus from an interdisciplinary point of view, with a primarily linguistic and epigraphic approach supplemented by a consideration of their historical and cultural context. The focus is on furthering our knowledge of the non-Greek languages/scripts, as well as appreciating their place in relation to the much better understood Greek language on the island. Following on from recent advances in Cypro-Minoan studies, these difficult, mostly Late Bronze Age inscriptions are reassessed from first principles. The same approach is taken for non-Greek languages written in the Cypriot Syllabic script during the first millennium BC, chiefly the one usually referred to as Eteocypriot. The final section is then dedicated to the Phoenician language, which was in use on Cyprus for some hundreds of years. The result is a careful reappraisal of these languages/scripts after more than a century of sometimes controversial scholarship.

This volume offers a new and interdisciplinary treatment of syllabic writing in ancient Cyprus. A team of distinguished scholars tackles epigraphic, palaeographic, linguistic, archaeological, historical and terminological problems relating to the island's writing systems in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the appearance of writing around the fifteenth century down to the end of the first millennium BC. The result is not intended to be a single, unified view of the scripts and their context, but rather a varied collection that demonstrates a range of interpretations of the evidence and challenges some of the longstanding or traditional views of the population of ancient Cyprus and its epigraphic habits. This is the first comprehensive account of the 'Cypro-Minoan' and 'Cypriot syllabic' scripts to appear in a single volume and forms an invaluable resource for anyone studying Cypriot epigraphy or archaeology.

Creating an orthography is often seen as a key component of language revitalisation. Encoding an endangered variety can enhance its status and prestige. In speech communities that are fragmented dialectally or geographically, a common writing system may help create a sense of unified identity, or help keep a language alive by facilitating teaching and learning. Despite clear advantages, creating an orthography for an endangered language can also bring challenges, and this volume debates the following critical questions: whose task should this be - that of the linguist or the speech community? Should an orthography be maximally distanciated from that of the language of wider communication for ideological reasons, or should its main principles coincide for reasons of learnability? Which local variety should be selected as the basis of a common script? Is a multilectal script preferable to a standardised orthography? And can creating an orthography create problems for existing native speakers?

The method that's helped thousands in the U.S. and Japan learn Japanese successfully. The Japanese language has two basic writing systems, hiragana, and katakana, in addition to the one that uses Chinese characters or Kanji. This handy book teaches you a new mnemonic-based method to read and write the fundamental 92 hiragana and katakana characters. Along with its sister book: Japanese Kanji for Beginners it provides a complete introduction to written Japanese. Memorable picture mnemonics help you to learn the characters by associating their shapes and sounds with combinations of images and English words already familiar to you. Clear examples and engaging exercises offer opportunities to read, write, use and practice all 92 primary hiragana katakana characters, plus the remaining kana that stand for more complex sounds. Polish your knowledge with word searches, crossword puzzles, fill-in-the-blanks, timed recognition quizzes, and other engaging activities. The online media allows you to print out flashcards (featuring the same mnemonic images taught in the book) to help you review and practice, even while you are on the go. All media content is alternatively accessible on tuttlepublishing.com/downloadable-content.

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.

Originally published in 1915, this book was intended to encourage students of medieval history to take up palaeography by demonstrating its importance when applied to certain historical documents in the collection of the Public Records Office. Jenkinson details the various types of 'court hand' that may be seen on medieval records, and emphasises that the study of palaeography must necessarily be accompanied with an equal emphasis on the history of administration. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in medieval history and the history of British administrative conventions.

First published in 1925, and originally delivered as the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography for 1922--3, this book not only examines the history of the Year Book and its role in English law, but also provides practical suggestions for students of palaeography. Bolland supplies appendices at the end of the book with facsimiles of yearbook entries with a transliteration and translation of each. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British legal history or palaeography.

Principal librarian of the British Museum and eminent palaeographer, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson (1840-1929) had originally produced a handbook on the history and development of Greek and Latin handwriting in 1893. He extensively revised and expanded it for this 1912 edition, incorporating numerous facsimile plates. Thompson begins his treatment with an introduction to the Greek and Latin alphabets, then surveys ancient writing materials and implements, and describes the use and development of scrolls and codices. Later chapters, accompanied by valuable illustrations, examine the different forms of first Greek then Latin handwritten texts, from the earliest surviving examples (fourth century BCE) to the end of the fifteenth century. Punctuation, accents and abbreviations are considered, and the various scripts - cursive, uncial, majuscule and miniscule - are all illustrated and examined. Tables of Greek and Latin literary and cursive alphabets are also provided.

This volume offers a new and interdisciplinary treatment of syllabic writing in ancient Cyprus. A team of distinguished scholars tackles epigraphic, palaeographic, linguistic, archaeological, historical and terminological problems relating to the island's writing systems in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the appearance of writing around the fifteenth century down to the end of the first millennium BC. The result is not intended to be a single, unified view of the scripts and their context, but rather a varied collection that demonstrates a range of interpretations of the evidence and challenges some of the longstanding or traditional views of the population of ancient Cyprus and its epigraphic habits. This is the first comprehensive account of the 'Cypro-Minoan' and 'Cypriot syllabic' scripts to appear in a single volume and forms an invaluable resource for anyone studying Cypriot epigraphy or archaeology.

This book provides an introduction to the Meroitic language and writing system, which was used between circa 300 BC and 400 AD in the kingdom of Meroe, located in what is now Sudan and Egyptian Nubia. This book details advances in the understanding of Meroitic, a language that until recently was considered untranslatable. In addition to providing a full history of the script and an analysis of the phonology, grammar, and linguistic affiliation of the language it features: linguistic analyses for those working on Nilo-Saharan comparative linguistics, paleographic tables useful to archeologists for dating purposes, and an overview of texts that can be translated or understood by way of analogy for those working on Nubian religion, history, and archaeology.

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 (c.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.

Italy had long experienced literacy under Roman rule, but what happened to literacy in Italy under the rule of a barbarian people? This book examines the evidence for the use of literacy in Lombard Italy c. 568-774, a period usually considered as the darkest of the Dark Ages in Italy due to the poor survival of written evidence and the reputation of the Lombards as the fiercest of barbarian hordes ever to invade Italy. A careful examination of the evidence, however, reveals quite a different story. Originally published in 2003, this study considers the different types of evidence in turn and offers a re-examination of the nature of Lombard settlement in Italy and the question of their cultural identity. Far from constituting a Dark Age in the history of literacy, Lombard Italy possessed a relatively sophisticated written culture prior to the so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century.

In 1887, when the first volume of this work was published, Greek epigraphy was not systematically studied or taught in English universities, and the book was specifically written to fulfil a need for 'a popular work, giving a classification of Greek inscriptions according to their age, country and subject, and a selection of texts by way of samples, under each class'. At a time when the value of some Greek letters (those peculiar to one city's version of the alphabet and so known rarely in surviving inscriptions) was not universally agreed, and when excavation was regularly providing new materials for study, the book was widely welcomed as a tool for research. The first volume contains a historical sketch of the Greek alphabet and a sequence of inscriptions showing its development across the Mediterranean area and Asia Minor until the end of the fifth century CE.

The second volume of E. S. Robert's Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, written with E. A. Gardner and published in 1905, continued the important and innovative work of the first volume of 1887. The focus is on the inscriptions found in Attica, and especially Athens: they are presented in categories such as decrees of the city-state, foreign affairs, financial, military and naval affairs, administrative regulations, lists of officials, and dedicatory and funerary inscriptions. Each is given in transcription, with suggested restorations and the reproduction of unusual characters where the value is not certain, and with full explanatory notes.

Die Beitrage behandeln Aspekte sprachlicher Minderheiten im deutsch- und romanischsprachigen Raum, insbesondere in Italien. Im Mittelpunkt stehen sprachhistorische, sprachstrukturelle und sprachpolitische Fragen, auch im Hinblick auf die lebensweltliche Relevanz klein(er)er Sprachen. Nei saggi qui raccolti sono trattati temi relativi a minoranze linguistiche dell'area tedesca e romanza, soprattutto italiana. I lavori si occupano, in particolare, di aspetti concernenti la storia linguistica, le strutture linguistiche e la politica linguistica, dando voce, per altro, a rappresentanti delle stesse comunita di minoranza.

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!

The Bobbio Missal was copied in south-eastern Gaul around the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. It contains a unique combination of a lectionary and a sacramentary, to which a plethora of canonical and non-canonical material was added. The Missal is therefore highly regarded by liturgists; but, additionally, medieval historians welcome the information to be derived from material attached to the codex, which provides valuable data about the role and education of priests in Francia at that time, and indeed on their cultural and ideological background. The breadth of specialist knowledge provided by the team of scholars writing for this book enables the manuscript to be viewed as a whole, not as a narrow liturgical study. Collectively, the essays view the manuscript as physical object: they discuss the contents, they examine the language, and they look at the cultural context in which the codex was written.