LSA 369: Writing Systems

Richard Sproat

LSA Summer Institute, July 2007

Mo/Th 8-10

Room: 460-126

Office Hours/Location: Mo/Th 5:30-6:30, 460-004

Materials Assignments Syllabus Bibliography

Materials

The bibliography at the end lists material that should be on reserve electronically, or in hardcopy. This represents a fairly representative slice of work that has been done on writing systems.

Henry Rogers' book on writing systems is the best introductory text available. It is recommended for this course, though not required:

     Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach, Blackwell, 2005.

One book that everyone seriously interested in writing systems should consider owning is:

      Daniels, Peter and William Bright (editors). 1996. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Some of the material is accompanied by lecture notes, which I am in the process of developing for a course on Language, Technology and Society back at the University of Illinois. I have links to the relevant sections of the lecture notes in the syllabus below. Also sporadically linked are relevant web materials.

I strongly recommend that you plan to attend a Workshop I am organizing for July 11 in Braun Auditorium on Scripts, Non-scripts and (Pseudo)-decipherment.

Assignments

Those of you taking this course for credit will be required to do a project. The project should be in the form of a small research paper (maximum 10 pages) on some well-contained, but non-trivial topic. Since time is tight, we will need to be rigorous about the following schedule for projects:

The topic area is wide open, so long as it clearly relates to writing systems in one way or another. But some possibilities are:

Syllabus

Week 1: Thursday 7/5

Slides: Week 1.

Lecture Notes: Week 1.

Related Reading:

Links:

Week 2: Monday 7/9; Thursday 7/12

Slides: Week 2.

Lecture Notes: Week 2.

Related Reading:

Week 3: Monday 7/16; Thursday 7/19

Slides: Week 3.

Lecture Notes: Week 3.

Related Reading:

Links:

Week 4: Monday 7/23; Thursday 7/26

Slides: Week 4.

Related Reading:

Bibliography

Electronic reserves

Bird, Steven. 1999. "Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing systems". Written Language and Literacy, 2(1):1-44.

Boltz, William G. Section: 14: Early Chinese Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 191-199.

Bright, William. Section: 31 Devanagari Script, The. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 384-390.

Bright, William. Section: 37 Kannada and Telugu Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 384-390.

Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Comparative Table of Sinitic Characters. World's Writing Systems, The. Oxford University Press, 1996. 252-258.

DeFrancis, John. Ch. 15: Writing Reform. Chinese Language, The. University of Hawaii Press, 1984. 240-287.

DeFrancis, J. and J. M. Unger. 1994. "Rejoinder to Geoffrey Sampson: `Chinese script and the diversity of writing systems'." Linguistics, 32:549-554.

Faber, Alice. 1992. "Phonemic segmentation as epiphenomenon. evidence from the history of alphabetic writing." In Pamela Downing, Susan Lima, and Michael Noonan, editors, The Linguistics of Literacy. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pages 111-34.

Guy, Jacques. 1991. "The Lunar Calendar of Tablet Mamari." Journal de la Societé des Océ:anistes.

Hary, Benjamin. Section: 61 Adaptations of Hebrew Script. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 727-742.

King, Ross. Section: 17 Korean Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 218-227.

Knight, Stan. Section: 24 Roman Alphabet, The. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 312-332.

Macri, Martha J. Section: 12: Maya and Other Mesoamerican Scripts. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 172-182.

Mair, Victor H. Section: 15 Modern chinese Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 200-208.

Michalowski, Piotr. Section: 3 Mesopotamian Cuneiform. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 33-72.

O'Connor, M. Section: 68 Alphabet as a Technology, The. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 727-742.

Parkinson, R. B. Ch. 1: Deciphering the Rosetta Stone. Cracking Codes. University of California Press, 1999. 12-45.

Parkinson, R. B. Ch. 4: Future: further Does to Crack. Cracking Codes. University of California Press, 1999. 176-197.

Ritner, Robert K. Section: 4: Egyptian Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 73-87.

Salomon, Richard G. Section: 30 Brahmi and Kharoshthi. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 373-383.

Sampson, G. 1994. "Chinese Script and the Diversity of Writing Systems." Linguistics, 32:117-132.

Scancarelli, Janine. Section: 53 Cherokee Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 587-592.

Smith, Janet S. (Shibamoto). Section: 16 Japanese Writing. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 209-217.

Sproat, Richard. Review of William C. Hannas' "Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity". Language (LSA) 81.1 (2005): 251-254.

Stevens, John. Section: 20 Asian Calligraphy. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 244-251.

Swiggers, Pierre. Section: 21 Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 261-270.

Threatte, Leslie. Section: 22 Greek Alphabet, The. World's Writing Systems, The. Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. 271-296.

Books

Daniels, Peter and William Bright (editors). 1996. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

DeFrancis, John. 1989. Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Fischer, Steven. 1997. Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts. Number 14 in Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Fischer, Steven. 1997. Glyphbreaker. Copernicus.

Frost, Ram and Leonard Katz, editors. 1992 Orthography, Phonology, Morphology and Meaning, number 94 in Advances in Psychology. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pages 45-66.

Gelb, I. J. 1952. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hannas, William. 2003. The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Scholes, Robert. 1993. Literacy and Language Analysis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.

Smalley, William, Chia~Koua Vang, and Gnia~Yee Yang. 1990. Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Sproat, R. 2000. A Computational Theory of Writing Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.