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.

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 most enjoyable way to learn about an unfamiliar culture is through its stories--especially when they're told in two languages! Korean Stories for Language Learners introduces 42 traditional Korean folktales with bilingual Korean and English versions, presented on facing pages, together with detailed notes and exercises aimed at beginning learners of the language. The book can be used as a reader in first- and second-year Korean language courses or by anyone who wishes to learn about Korean folktales and traditional Korean culture. This elegantly illustrated volume is designed to help language learners expand their vocabulary and to develop a basic familiarity with Korean culture. The stories gradually increase in length and complexity throughout the book as the reader improves their vocabulary and understanding of the language. After the first few stories, the reader is asked to use the vocabulary in speaking and writing exercises. By reading these classic stories, they also are given a window into Korean culture and learn to appreciate the uniqueness of the country--which provides greater motivation to continue learning the difficult language. Cultural notes and discussion questions further reinforce one's understanding of the stories, and bolster one's language skills. Korean-English and English-Korean glossaries are included as well as an overview of the Korean Hangeul script. Online audio recordings by native speakers help readers improve their pronunciation and inflection, and can be accessed at tuttlepublishing.com/downloadable-content.

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 1912 as the second edition of a 1910 original, this book contains the original Greek text of 55 papyri fragments from significant collections, including examples from Oxyrhynchus. Milligan supplies an English translation for each example, as well as a critical apparatus. This fascinating and readable book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the practicalities of ancient life.

In this book, Roger D. Woodard argues that when the Greeks first began to use the alphabet, they viewed themselves as participants in a performance phenomenon conceptually modeled on the performances of the oral poets. Since a time older than Greek antiquity, the oral poets of Indo-European tradition had been called 'weavers of words' - their extemporaneous performance of poetry was 'word weaving'. With the arrival of the new technology of the alphabet and the onset of Greek literacy, the very act of producing written symbols was interpreted as a comparable performance activity, albeit one in which almost everyone could participate, not only the select few. It was this new conceptualization of and participation in performance activity by the masses that eventually, or perhaps quickly, resulted in the demise of oral composition in performance in Greece. In conjunction with this investigation, Woodard analyzes a set of copper plaques inscribed with repeated alphabetic series and a line of what he interprets to be text, which attests to this archaic Greek conceptualization of the performance of symbol crafting.

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 is the very first 'teach yourself' book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives. Using a series of graded exercises in transcription, Teach Yourself Palaeography works backwards in time in easy stages from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century to the court hands of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. The book provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records.

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.

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.

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.

The discovery and decryption of Ugaritic cuneiform tablets in the 1920s has given scholars an insight into the development of alphabetic writing and the origins of biblical poetry. In this book, based on his Schweich Lectures given in 2007, Professor Dennis Pardee describes the origins of the cuneiform alphabetic writing system developed in Ugarit some time before 1250 BC, the use of alphabetic writing at Ugarit, and gives a comparison of Ugaritic and Hebrew literatures

The endangered languages crisis is widely acknowledged among scholars who deal with languages and indigenous peoples as one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, posing moral, practical, and scientific issues of enormous proportions. Simply put, no area of the world is immune from language endangerment. The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in 39 chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. A comprehensive reference reflecting the breadth of the field, the Handbook presents in detail both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it, and broadens understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, encouraging further research. The Handbook is organized into five parts. Part 1, Endangered Languages, addresses the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part 2, Language Documentation, provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part 3, Language Revitalization, includes approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping ("dormant") languages. Part 4, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment, and the common forces that now threaten the sustainability of their diversity. Part 5, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.

The B-version of 'Piers Plowman', perhaps the only version authorised by Langland, is the one most frequently read today, and the most influential form of the poem. This catalogue of the extant medieval manuscripts, now locaed in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Tokyo, and San Marino, California, offers both individual manuscript descriptions and a record of the annotations. The new and detailed codicological descriptions include information on provenance and ownership, a full list of the contents, and a description of the physical make-up and the presentation of each manuscript. The first published accounts of the various textual annotations on each manuscript (whether produced by the original scribes or later readers) provides the best record available of how 'piers plowman' was understoon by its earliest audience. Professor C. DAVID BENSON teaches in the English Department at the University of Connecticut; Dr LYNNE BLANCHFIELD is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.

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.

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.

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.