The Life of Mashtots' is mostly praise for the inventor of the Armenian alphabet-the only inventor of an ancient alphabet known by name-and progenitor of Armenian literacy that began with the translation of the Bible. Written three years after his death, by an early disciple named Koriwn, it narrates the master's endeavors in search for letters, the establishment of schools, and the ensuing literary activity that yielded countless translations of religious texts known in the Early Church of the East. As an encomium from Late Antiquity, The Life of Mashtots' exhibits all the literary features of the genre to which it belongs, delineated through rhetorical analysis by Abraham Terian, who comments on the entire document almost phrase by phrase. Translated from the latest Armenian edition of the text (2003), this edition of The Life of Mashtots' includes a facing English translation and commentary. The extraordinary narrative parades historical characters including the Patriarch of the Armenian Church, Catholicos Sahak (d. 439), the Arsacid King of Armenia, Vramshapuh (r. 401-417), and the Roman Emperor of the East, Theodosius II (r. 408-450). Koriwn is an eminently inspiring rhetorical writer and one of the first four authors known to write in the newly invented script. The marked influence of The Life of Mashtots' is discernible in subsequent Armenian writings of the fifth century, dubbed 'The Golden Era'.

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.

Bernhard Bischoff (1906-1991) was one of the most renowned scholars of medieval palaeography of the twentieth century. His most outstanding contribution to learning was in the field of Carolingian studies, where his work is based on the catalogue of all extant ninth-century manuscripts and fragments. In this book, Michael Gorman has selected and translated seven of his classic essays on aspects of eighth- and ninth-century culture. They include an investigation of the manuscript evidence and the role of books in the transmission of culture from the sixth to the ninth century, and studies of the court libraries of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Bischoff also explores centres of learning outside the court in terms of the writing centres and the libraries associated with major monastic and cathedral schools respectively. This rich collection provides a full, coherent study of Carolingian culture from a number of different yet interdependent aspects, providing insights for scholars and students alike.

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.

Over 5,000 years ago, the history of humanity radically changed direction when writing was invented in Sumer, the southern part of present-day Iraq. For the next three millennia, kings, aristocrats, and slaves all made intensive use of cuneiform script to document everything from royal archives to family records. In engaging style, Dominique Charpin shows how hundreds of thousands of clay tablets testify to the history of an ancient society that communicated broadly through letters to gods, insightful commentary, and sales receipts. He includes a number of passages, offered in translation, that allow readers an illuminating glimpse into the lives of Babylonians. Charpin's insightful overview discusses the methods and institutions used to teach reading and writing, the process of apprenticeship, the role of archives and libraries, and various types of literature, including epistolary exchanges and legal and religious writing. The only book of its kind, Reading and Writing in Babylon introduces Mesopotamia as the birthplace of civilization, culture, and literature while addressing the technical side of writing and arguing for a much wider spread of literacy than is generally assumed. Charpin combines an intimate knowledge of cuneiform with a certain breadth of vision that allows this book to transcend a small circle of scholars. Though it will engage a broad general audience, this book also fills a critical academic gap and is certain to become the standard reference on the topic.

This book explores the interaction between three key aspects of everyday life-language, writing, and mobility -with particular focus on their effects on language contact. While the book adopts an established view of language and society that is in keeping with the sociolinguistic paradigm developed in recent decades, it differs from earlier studies in that it assigns writing a central position. Sociolinguistics has long concentrated primarily on speech, but Florian Coulmas shows in this volume that the social importance of writing should not be disregarded: it is the most consequential technology ever invented; it suggests stability; and it defines borders. Linguistic studies have often emphasized that writing is external to language, but the discipline nevertheless owes its analytic categories to writing. Finally, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed communication patterns, transforming the social functions of writing and consequently also of language.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the actual people who produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. While traditional research has focused on identifying a 'pure' or 'original' text behind the actual manuscripts that have come down to us from pre-modern Egypt, the volume looks instead at variation - different ways of saying the same thing - as a rich source for understanding the complex social and cultural environments in which scribes lived and worked, breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as 'free' or indicative of 'corruption'. As such, it presents a novel reconceptualization of scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural environments. Introducing to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, among others, the authors then apply them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format. After first presenting this conceptual framework, they demonstrate how it has been applied to better-studied pre-modern societies by drawing upon the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English, before proceeding to a series of case studies applying these concepts to scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from the languages and writing systems of Pharaonic times, to those of Late Antique and Islamic Egypt.

Tocharian and Indo-European Studies is an international scholarly journal dedicated to the study of two closely related Indo-European languages, Tocharian A and B, attested in Central Asian manuscripts from the second half of the first millennium AD. This volume contains 11 articles by some of the world's leading specialists on Tocharian, as well as reviews of the most important publications in the field. The important article by Werner Winter was one of the last to be written by this outstanding scholar.

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.

Analysing examples from 18th century literary texts through to 21st century social media, this is the first comprehensive collection to explore dialect writing in the North of England. The book also considers broad questions about dialect writing in general: What is it? Who does it? What types of dialect writing exist? How can linguists interpret it? Bringing together a wide range of contributors, the book investigates everything from the cultural positioning and impact of dialect writing to the mechanics of how authors produce dialect spellings (and what this can tell us about the structure of the dialects represented). The book features a number of case studies, focusing on dialect writing from all over the North of England, considering a wide range of types of text, including dialect poetry, translations into dialect, letters, tweets, direct speech in novels, humorous localised volumes, written reports of conversations and cartoons in local newspapers.

An important aspect of the analysis of written language is to explain its relationship to spoken language. The volume focuses on how morphology influences forms of spelling. It brings together 8 papers, including a review of the historical development of German and Dutch orthography, a paper about the possibilities for marking morphological structure that exist in German spelling, and about the effects of such marking on the process of reading.

In addition to Phoenician, Greek, and Latin, at least four writing systems were used between the fifth century BCE and the first century CE to write the indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula (the so-called Palaeohispanic languages): Tartessian, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian. In total over three thousand inscriptions are preserved in what is certainly the largest corpus of epigraphic expression in the western Mediterranean world, with the exception of the Italian peninsula. The aim of this volume is to present the most recent cutting-edge scholarship on these epigraphies and on the languages that they transmit. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach which draws on the expertise of leading specialists in the field, it brings together a broad range of perspectives on the linguistic, philological, epigraphic, numismatic, historical, and archaeological aspects of the surviving inscriptions, and provides invaluable new insights into the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania and the ancient western Mediterranean. The study of these languages is essential to our understanding of colonial Phoenician and Greek literacy, which lies at the root of their growth, as well as of the diffusion of Roman literacy, which played an important role in the final expansion of the so called Palaeohispanic languages.

The first critical study of writing without language In recent years, asemic writing-writing without language-has exploded in popularity, with anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. Yet this burgeoning, fascinating field has never received a dedicated critical study. Asemic fills that gap, proposing new ways of rethinking the nature of writing. Pioneered in the work of creators such as Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, asemic writing consolidated as a movement in the 1990s. Author Peter Schwenger first covers these "asemic ancestors" before moving to current practitioners such as Michael Jacobson, Rosaire Appel, and Christopher Skinner, exploring how asemic writing has evolved and gained importance in the contemporary era. Asemic includes intriguing revelations about the relation of asemic writing to Chinese characters, the possibility of asemic writing in nature, and explanations of how we can read without language. Written in a lively style, this book will engage scholars of contemporary art and literary theory, as well as anyone interested in what writing was and what it is now in the process of becoming.