Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms

Rating:
Summary: A nice sampler
Review: I liked this book, though finding it incomplete. It provides samples of the scripts used for most of the important languages of the world, but not all. There are some errors (a newspaper illustrated to show the Hebrew alphabet used for writing Yiddish is described as being published in the wrong place, as I, who can read Yiddish, could easily determine) but it is more accurate than a lot of other books on the subject.

The book is slim, and talks of writing systems more than languages. Thus "Russian script" really means Cyrillic and includes all the languages that use Cyrillic script. It is not a book to learn a language from, but rather a reference on alphabets, and for that purpose, I think a good but not great one.

The author does appear to be somewhat obsessed with newspapers. If a script is used for writing newspapers, it is important to the author; otherwise not. And for every script, the author gives an approximate count of the newspapers published using that writing system. But this is hardly a serious flaw.

This is not a perfect book on the subject, but it is one I liked. So I certainly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A good, brief overview
Review: This book serves well as a compact catalog of the major writing systems in the world. It's not the reference I was looking for, however. It's quite brief, and the examples are almost always newspapers. The other issues I have are:

1. It's kind of out of date - the information is all from the eighties. There's been some redrawing of the borders and changes in fonts and conventions since then.
2. The quality of the reproductions is poor. Many of the beautiful scripts in here are not shown in their best light. The plain fonts and photocopy-quality examples just don't do the scripts justice.

Still, it does contain reproductions of a lot of alphabets. It would be really handy in identifying an unkown sample of writing, for example.

Rating:
Summary: A Browser's Dream
Review: This is one of my favorite books. There are others that perform the same task, (notably Kenneth Katzner's "Languages of the World," which includes far more languages and examples of scripts.) However, for some reason this book has it's own magic.

It contains excerpts from newspapers in 29 different scripts, from all over the world. They are classified by geographical region. The phonetic value of the symbols are helpfully assessed for the reader, in alphabetic charts which accompany each selection. Each script shown is prefaced by a short paragraph explaining the history and development of that script.

Don't miss the especially cool litle section at the end of each geographical collection. There is a section of "Other Scripts in West Asia," "Other Scripts in Africa," "Other Scripts in the Americas and Oceania," etc. These selections are not in newspaper format, but are given as short excerpts from whatever the original source may have been. Examples include the Easter Island script, Sumerian cuneiform, and the script of the Indus Valley civilization.

Basically this book is a lot of fun, and it really opens the mind to a sense of wonder. I highly recommend it for anyone.