Inventing the Alphabet
The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
Johanna Drucker
- English
- ePUB (apto para móviles)
- Disponible en iOS y Android
Inventing the Alphabet
The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
Johanna Drucker
Información del libro
The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet's origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been "invented" as an object of scholarship.
Preguntas frecuentes
Información
Índice
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction
- one When Did the Alphabet Become “Greek”?
- two Divine Gifts: Original Letters, Moses, and the Tablets at Mount Sinai
- three Medieval Copyists: Magical Letters, Mythic Scripts, and Exotic Alphabets
- four The Confusion of Tongues and Compendia of Scripts
- five Antiquity Explained: The Origin and Progress of Letters
- six The Rhetoric of Tables and the Harmony of Alphabets
- seven Modern Archaeology: Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place
- eight Reading the Early Alphabet: Epigraphy and Paleography
- nine Alphabet Effects and the Politics of Script
- coda Alphabetic Agency and Global Hegemony
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index