By Henri-Jean Martin
ISBN-10: 0226508366
ISBN-13: 9780226508368
Cultural background on a grand scale, this immensely readable book—the summation of many years of research by way of one of many world's nice students of the book—is the tale of writing from its very beginnings to its fresh modifications via technology.Traversing 4 millennia, Martin bargains a chronicle of writing as a cultural process, a way of communique, and a background of applied sciences. He exhibits how the written note originated, the way it unfold, and the way it figured within the evolution of civilization. utilizing as his heart the position of printing in making the written frame of mind dominant, Martin examines the interactions of people and cultures to provide new sorts of "writing" within the many senses of authorship, language rendition, and script.Martin appears at how a lot the advance of writing owed to sensible necessity, and what sort of to non secular and social platforms of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and divulges their position in early civilization as mnemonic units in provider of the spoken notice. The tenacity of the oral culture performs an incredibly vital half during this tale, Martin notes, or even as overdue because the eighteenth century expert participants have been expert in classical rhetoric and hottest to depend upon the humanities of reminiscence. ultimately, Martin discusses the adjustments to writing wrought by way of the digital revolution, delivering worthwhile insights into the impact those new applied sciences have had on young ones born into the pc age.
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Sample text
For example, when two people were talking he could reverse the signs attached to one person and point them in the direction of that person's interlocutor. Scribes also shifted the place of signs within a word for aesthetic reasons (graphic metathesis). " In a like spirit the lines and columns of inscriptions on a stele might change direction, either for aesthetic reasons or in order to adapt them to a representation such as the image of a god. On other occasions bas-reliefs show an interpenetration between the representation 18 CHAPTER ONE of personages or scenes and the legends that accompany them.
Writing thus became inaccessible to people not conversant with those foreign cultures. St. Sahac, the patriarch, and King Vramshapuh encouraged various attempts to constitute a national writing system, but the merit of having resolved the problem falls to St. Mesrop Machtots. Mesrop had studied Greek literature in his youth, after which he served as "chancellor of the ordinances of the sovereign" and custodian of the royal archives until he went to evangelize the province of Siunia. " After taking counsel with a group of scribes in Edessa who were working on an analogous project, Mesrop elaborated an alphabet of thirty-six signs inspired by the Greek system but with the addition of Semitic characters.
On the banks of the Pactolus River in Lydia, the legendary land of Gyges and the kingdom of Croesus, where caravans arrived from central Asia, at a time when the Greek cities of the Asia Minor coast, Miletus in particular, were striking "private" money. Money arose not long after a writing system that strove to be universal, and money was to become the spur and motive force for everything in the West. As Jacques Gernet has emphasized, this implies ways of thinking totally different from the Chinese, for example: WRITING SYSTEMS 37 It seems to me personally that there is a fairly strict relationship between the mentality that permitted the invention of a uniform money and the invention of the alphabet.
The History and Power of Writing by Henri-Jean Martin
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