The final section of the Montpellier Codex analysed in full for the first time, with major implications for late-medieval music. The Montpellier Codex (Bibliotheque interuniversitaire, Section Medecine, H.196) occupies a central place in scholarship on medieval music. This small book, packed with gorgeous gold leaf illuminations, historiated initials, and exquisite music calligraphy, is one of the most famous of all surviving music manuscripts, fundamental to understandings of the development of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century polyphonic composition. At some point in its historyan eighth section (fascicle) of 48 folios was appended to the codex: when and why this happened has long perplexed scholars. The forty-three works contained in the manuscript's final section represent a collection of musical compositions, assembled at a complex moment of historical change, straddling the historiographical juncture between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the contents and contexts of the Montpellier Codex's final fascicle. It explores the manuscript's production, dating, function, and notation, offering close-readings of individual works, which illuminate compositionally progressive features of therepertoire as well as its interactions with existing musical and poetic traditions, from a variety of perspectives: thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, art history, and manuscript culture. CATHERINE A. BRADLEY isan Associate Professor at the University of Oslo; KAREN DESMOND is Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. Contributors: Rebecca A. Baltzer, Edward Breen, Sean Curran, Rachel Davies, Margaret Dobby, Mark Everist, Solomon Guhl-Miller, Anna Kathryn Grau, Oliver Huck, Anne Ibos-Auge, Eva M. Maschke, David Maw, Dolores Pesce, Alison Stones, Mary Wolinski

Decades after Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B and showed that its language was Greek, nearly one-sixth of its syllabic signs' sound-values are still unknown. This book offers a new approach to establishing these undeciphered signs' possible values. Analysis of Linear B's structure and usage not only establishes these signs' most likely sound-values - providing the best possible basis for future decipherments - but also sheds light on the writing system as a whole. The undeciphered signs are also used to explore the evidence provided by palaeography for the chronology of the Linear B documents and the activities of the Mycenaean scribes. The conclusions presented in this book therefore deepen our understanding not only of the undeciphered signs but also of the Linear B writing system as a whole, the texts it was used to write, and the insight these documents bring us into the world of the Mycenaean palaces. A colour version of figures 5.1-5.4 of chapter 5 can be found under the 'Resources' tab.

A smorgasbord of surprising, obscure, and exotic words

In this delightful encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Anu Garg, the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (wordsmith.org), presents an all-new collection of unusual, intriguing words and real-life anecdotes that will thrill writers, scholars, and word buffs everywhere. Another Word A Day celebrates the English language in all its quirkiness, grandeur, and fun, and features new chapters ranging from ""Words Formed Erroneously"" and ""Red-Herring Words"" to ""Kangaroo Words,"" ""Discover the Theme,"" and ""What Does That Company Name Mean?"" In them, you'll find a treasure trove of curious and compelling words, including agelast, dragoman, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, tattersall, and zugzwang. Each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example, interspersed with illuminating quotations.

Praise for a word a day

""Anu Garg's many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here's a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up ""
--Barbara Wallraff, Senior Editor at "The Atlantic Monthly" and author of "Word Court"

""AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg's refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories.""
--John Simpson, Chief Editor, "Oxford English Dictionary"

In 1978, Congolese inventor David Wabeladio Payi (1958-2013) proposed a new writing system, called Mandombe. Since then, Mandombe has grown and now has thousands of learners in not only the Democratic Republic of Congo, but also France, Angola and many other countries. Drawing upon Ramon Sarro's personal friendship with Wabeladio, this book tells the story of Wabeladio, his alphabet and the creativity that both continue to inspire. A member of the Kimbanguist church, which began as an anticolonial movement in 1921, Wabeladio and his script were deeply influenced by spirituality and Kongo culture. Combining biography, art, and religion, Sarro explores a range of ideas, from the role of pilgrimage and landscape in Wabeladio's life, to the intricacies and logic of Mandombe. Sarro situates the creative individual within a rich context of anthropological, historical and philosophical scholarship, offering a new perspective on the relationships between imagination, innovation and revelation.

This study explores the evidence for Chinese writing in the late Neolithic (3500-2000 BCE) and early Bronze Age (2000-1250 BCE) periods. Chinese writing is often said to have begun with little incubation during the late Shang period (c. 1300-1045 BCE) in the middle-lower Yellow River Valley area as a sudden independent invention. This explanation runs counter to evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica that shows that independent developments of writing generally undergo a protracted evolution. It also ignores archaeological data from the Chinese Neolithic and early Bronze Age that reveals the existence of signs comparable to Shang characters. Paola Dematte takes this data into account to address the issue of what writing is, and when, why, and how it develops, by employing a theory of writing that does not privilege language as a prime mover. It focuses instead on visual systems of communication as well as ideological and socio-economic developments as key elements that promote the eventual development of writing. To understand the processes that led to primary developments of writing, The Origins of Chinese Writing draws from the latest research on the early writing systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, and other forms of protowriting. The result is a novel and inclusive theoretical approach to the archaeological evidence, grammatological data, and textual sources, an approach that demonstrates that Chinese writing emerged out of a long process that began in the Late Neolithic and continued during the Early Bronze Age.

Egypt in the early Byzantine period was a bilingual country where Greek and Egyptian (Coptic) were used alongside each other. Historical studies along with linguistic studies of the phonology and lexicon of early Byzantine Greek in Egypt testify to this situation. In order to describe the linguistic traces that the language-contact situation left behind in individuals' linguistic output, Coptic Interference in the Syntax of Greek Letters from Egypt analyses the syntax of early Byzantine Greek texts from Egypt. The primary object of interest is bilingual interference in the syntax of verbs, adverbial phrases, clause linkage as well as in semi-formulaic expressions and formulaic frames. The study is based on a corpus of Greek and Coptic private letters on papyrus, which date from the fourth to mid-seventh centuries, originate from Egypt and belong to bilingual, Greek-Coptic, papyrus archives.

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.

This volume, with origins in a panel at the 2018 Celtic Conference in Classics, presents creative new approaches to epigraphic material, in an attempt to 'shake up' how we deal with inscriptions. Broad themes include the embodied experience of epigraphy, the unique capacities of epigraphic language as a genre, the visuality of inscriptions and the interplay of inscriptions with literary texts. Although each chapter focuses on specific objects and epigraphic landscapes, ranging from Republican Rome to early modern Scotland, the emphasis here is on using these case studies not as an end in themselves, but as a means of exploring broader methodological and theoretical issues to do with how we use inscriptions as evidence, both for the Greco-Roman world and for other time periods. Drawing on conversations from fields such as archaeology and anthropology, philology, art history, linguistics and history, contributors also seek to push the boundaries of epigraphy as a discipline and to demonstrate the analytical fruits of interdisciplinary approaches to inscribed material. Methodologies such as phenomenology, translingualism, intertextuality and critical fabulation are deployed to offer new perspectives on the social functions of inscriptions as texts and objects and to open up new horizons for the use of inscriptions as evidence for past societies.

This is a history of the formation of Arabic letters from the earliest styles to modern computer fonts. This book, abundantly illustrated with examples of Arabic handwriting, calligraphy, and typography, clearly presents the development of Arabic writing styles, from the beginning with reed pens to twenty-first century computerized typesetting. The author explains the importance of writing instruments and the surfaces onto which letters are inscribed, including the particular challenges introduced with the innovation of the printing press, and later the computer. "Arabic Writing" will interest not only those interested in the extraordinary history of writing, but also graphic designers, calligraphers, and visual artists, enabling an understanding of the development of existing styles, and providing a foundation from which new logotypes and character fonts can be designed.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness—as if the scrawl itself is not enough. What other kinds of beliefs and longings justify our signing practices? Signature addresses these questions as it roams from a roundtable on the Greek island of Syros, to a scene of handwriting analysis conducted in an English pub, from a wedding in Moscow, where guests sign the bride’s body, to a San Franciscan tattoo parlor interested in arcane forms. The signature’s history encompasses ancient handprints on cave walls, autograph hunters, the branding of slaves, metaphysical poetry, medical malpractice, hip-hop lyrics, legal challenges to electronic signatures, ice cores harvested from Greenland, and tales of forgery and autopens. Part cultural chronicle, part travelogue, Signature pursues the identifying marks made by people, animals, and planetary forces, revealing the stories and fantasies hidden in their signatures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Accessibly written, "Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach" provides detailed coverage of all major writing systems of historical or structural significance with thorough discussion of structure, history, and social context as well as important theoretical issues. The book examines systems as diverse as Chinese, Greek, and Maya and each writing system is presented in the light of four major aspects of writing: history and development; internal structure; the relationship of writing and language; and sociolinguistic factors.

The volume is extensively illustrated and the glossary of technical terms, exercises, and further reading suggestions that accompany each chapter make "Writing Systems "a valuable resource for students in linguistics and anthropology.

What has fifteenth-century England to do with the Renaissance? By challenging accepted notions of 'medieval' and 'early modern' David Rundle proposes a new understanding of English engagement with the Renaissance. He does so by focussing on one central element of the humanist agenda - the reform of the script and of the book more generally - to demonstrate a tradition of engagement from the 1430s into the early sixteenth century. Introducing a cast-list of scribes and collectors who are not only English and Italian but also Scottish, Dutch and German, this study sheds light on the cosmopolitanism central to the success of the humanist agenda. Questioning accepted narratives of the slow spread of the Renaissance from Italy to other parts of Europe, Rundle suggests new possibilities for the fields of manuscript studies and the study of Renaissance humanism.

The birth of the Greek alphabet marked a new horizon in the history of writing, as the vowelless Phoenician alphabet was borrowed and adapted to write vowels as well as consonants. Rather than creating a single unchanging new tradition, however, its earliest attestations show a very great degree of diversity, as areas of the Greek-speaking world established their own regional variants. This volume asks how, when, where, by whom and for what purposes Greek alphabetic writing developed. Anne Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (1961), re-issued with a valuable supplement in 1990, was an epoch-making contribution to the study of these issues. But much important new evidence has emerged even since 1987, and debate has continued energetically about all the central issues raised by Jeffery's book: the date at which the Phoenician script was taken over and adapted to write vowels with separate signs; the priority of Phrygia or Greece in that process; the question whether the adaptation happened once, and the resulting alphabet then spread outwards, or whether similar adaptations occurred independently in several paces; if the adaptation was a single event, the region where it occurred, and the explanation for the many divergences in local script; what the scripts tell us about the regional divisions of archaic Greece. There has also been a flourishing debate about the development and functions of literacy in archaic Greece. The contributors to this volume bring a range of perspectives to bear in revisiting Jeffery's legacy, including chapters which extend the scope beyond Jeffery, by considering the fortunes of the Greek alphabet in Etruria, in southern Italy, and on coins.

Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book--the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book--is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology.
Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication, and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. Using as his center the role of printing in making the written way of thinking dominant, Martin examines the interactions of individuals and cultures to produce new forms of "writing" in the many senses of authorship, language rendition, and script.
Martin looks at how much the development of writing owed to practical necessity, and how much to religious and social systems of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and reveals their place in early civilization as mnemonic devices in service of the spoken word. The tenacity of the oral tradition plays a surprisingly important part in this story, Martin notes, and even as late as the eighteenth century educated individuals were trained in classical rhetoric and preferred to rely on the arts of memory. Finally, Martin discusses the changes to writing wrought by the electronic revolution, offering invaluable insights into the influence these new technologies have had on children born into the computer age.

Reading original documents is the only way to achieve a sound basis in historical studies and to acquire a true perspective on cultural evolution. Much modern research has been applied to Scotland's history, but until this volume there has been no comprehensive study of the country's handwriting for nearly 250 years. The main body of this book consists of facsimile texts, each facing a detailed transcript and commentary. The historical background of handwriting usage is surveyed in the introduction, with emphasis on changing fashions. There is also guidance on how to deal with early language and abbreviations. The principal aim is to assist research students, local historians, genealogists and calligraphers in their studies; but this work also recovers a lost chapter in the history of Scottish studies.

This book is a pioneering study of temporal typography and time-based calligraphic art written in the Arabic system of writing. Inspired by the innate qualities of Arabic script as well as certain practices in Islamic calligraphy and contemporary calligraphic art, the book devises five broad categories of temporal behaviors for Arabic characters in time-based media. It goes onto expand the vocabulary used to describe Arabic script's appearance in time-based media and proposes a theory to help artists, practitioners, and theoreticians push the boundaries of temporal text-based art. Furthermore, it tackles questions of legibility and readability, and seeks to understand how temporality of Arabic text influences the creation of meaning. This book will therefore appeal not only to animators, designers, and artists, but also to commentators and scholars who deal with temporal text-based art written in Arabic script.

This volume presents the Greek text of approximately 200 stone inscriptions, which detail the laws of ancient Crete in the archaic and classical periods, c.650-400 BCE. The texts of the inscriptions, many of which are fragmentary and relatively unknown, are accompanied by an English translation and also two commentaries; one focused on epigraphical and linguistic issues, and the other, requiring no knowledge of Greek, focused on legal and historical issues. The texts are preceded by a substantial introduction, which surveys the geography, history, writing habits, social and political structure, economy, religion, and law of Crete in this period.

Top 100 Books on Science, American Scientist, 2001 In 1992, the University of Texas Press published Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform and Before Writing, Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. In these two volumes, Denise Schmandt-Besserat set forth her groundbreaking theory that the cuneiform script invented in the Near East in the late fourth millennium B.C.—the world's oldest known system of writing—derived from an archaic counting device. How Writing Came About draws material from both volumes to present Schmandt-Besserat's theory for a wide public and classroom audience. Based on the analysis and interpretation of a selection of 8,000 tokens or counters from 116 sites in Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey, it documents the immediate precursor of the cuneiform script.

This workbook is designed for use with the Elementary Mandarin Chinese Textbook and offers a wealth of carefully-designed practice activities to help you solidify every aspect of your Chinese skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It includes extensive interactive drills, exercises and other practice materials. Online audio files are available for use in the relevant exercises. The lessons in this workbook correspond to the 24 lessons in the Elementary Mandarin Chinese Textbook. The materials in this workbook are meant to be completed by students outside of class to strengthen and consolidate their understanding of the materials in the textbook. Lessons 1 and 2 of the Workbook contain exercises to learn to read and pronounce the Pinyin alphabet along with simple classroom expressions. They also introduce 48 basic Chinese characters. Beginning with Lesson 3, each lesson of the workbook contains two parts. Each part has two sets of listening comprehension exercises, one translation exercise, one character practice sheet, and one reading and writing exercise. Lessons 13 and 24 of the textbook are review lessons and therefore have no corresponding workbook materials.

Latin books are among the most numerous surviving artifacts of the Late Antique, Mediaeval, and Renaissance periods in European history; written in a variety of formats and scripts, they preserve the literary, philosophical, scientific, and religious heritage of the West. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography surveys these books, with special emphasis on the variety of scripts in which they were written. Palaeography, in the strictest sense, examines how the changing styles of script and the fluctuating shapes of individual letters allow the date and the place of production of books to be determined. More broadly conceived, palaeography examines the totality of early book production, ownership, dissemination, and use. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography includes essays on major types of script (Uncial, Insular, Beneventan, Visigothic, Gothic, etc.), describing what defines these distinct script types, and outlining when and where they were used. It expands on previous handbooks of the subject by incorporating select essays on less well-studied periods and regions, in particular late mediaeval Eastern Europe. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography is also distinguished from prior handbooks by its extensive focus on codicology and on the cultural settings and contexts of mediaeval books. Essays treat of various important features, formats, styles, and genres of mediaeval books, and of representative mediaeval libraries as intellectual centers. Additional studies explore questions of orality and the written word, the book trade, glossing and glossaries, and manuscript cataloguing. The extensive plates and figures in the volume will provide readers wtih clear illustrations of the major points, and the succinct bibliographies in each essay will direct them to more detailed works in the field.

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 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.

Japanese Made Easy is a complete self-study guide that allows readers to begin using simple, everyday Japanese vocabulary and sentences from the first day! This handy resource features: Practical exercises to teach you the 30 most common Japanese sentence patterns Notes on the key points of Japanese grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary A detailed glossary of Japanese words and an index of vocabulary and grammar Sentences for everyday social situations encountered by visitors to Japan In this completely revised edition, vocabulary and sentences are shown in Japanese script, as well as romanized Japanese and English. This book includes many new dialogues, cultural notes, illustrations and updated vocabulary.