Literacy and the Politics of Writing

by Gaur, Albertine

• ISBN13: 9781841500119
• ISBN10: 1841500119
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Author Biography

Dr. Albertine Gaur was Deputy Director and Head of Oriental Collections at the British Library.

Table of Contents

Author Biography and Acknowledgements	iv
Introduction	1	(2)
What is writing?	3	(13)
The purpose of writing
Invention or evolution?
Transmitting stored information
The two most stable components
Non-linguistic forms of writing	16	(14)
The power of pictures and signs
Narrative pictures
Objects
Tallies
Archival records
Property marks
Memory aids
Modern picture writing
The introduction of language elements	30	(9)
The riddle of the rebus
The emergence of the rebus in objects, proverbs and ritualistic memory aids
Sign languages
The failure of purely phonetic scripts
The elusive phoneme
Extinct scripts: the infrastructure of palace and temple	39	(26)
Mesopotamia
Ancient Mediterranean forms of writings
Peru
Egypt
Mesoamerica
Indus Valley civilisation
The common origin of some contemporary writing systems	65	(16)
Semitic scripts
The alphabets
The special place of certain writing systems	81	(11)
Indian forms of writing
Chinese forms of writing
The political success of unsuitable writing systems	92	(13)
The Chinese derived scripts of Korea and Japan
Indian script forms in Southeast Asia, the Himalayan countries and Central Asia
The success of cuneiform
The Arabic script and the Roman alphabet
Script inventors and script inventions	105	(13)
Hangul
the script of the people
Scripts invented to aid the spread of Christianity
Scripts as part of a self-respect movement
Rewards and problems of decipherment	118	(8)
Calligraphy --- a corporate logo?	126	(15)
Chinese calligraphy
Islamic calligraphy
Western calligraphy
What is a book?	141	(18)
Shape and material
Bookbinding
Illustration and illumination
The danger of books
Modern technology and the talking book
Printing, the writing masters and the Internet	159	(12)
What is literacy?	171	(13)
Benefits and pitfalls of literacy
Functional literacy
Oral literacy
Information overload?
Some final thoughts	184	(1)
Index	185