The Origin of Writing

@book{citeulike:221457, author = {Harris, Roy}, citeulike-article-id = {221457}, comment = {a short but insightful book. It starts with the "Just So Stories" story of the invention of spelling, moving on to how Tarzan decoded the bugs in the English Primer. The basic claims: 1. The origin of writing is not to write down speech. He is sympathetic to the idea that writing originated from counting/accounting. 2. The alphabetic writing was not invented to represent phonology; to the contrary, the reason why the Phonecian script did not represent vowels is because they didn't want to create a separate written word for each inflected form of the "same word". So the idea is -- to represent the word, just like logography or syllabary would do. Some very interesting comparisons between drawing and writing.}, howpublished = {Hardcover}, isbn = {0812690354}, keywords = {language, linguistics, orthography, reading, spelling}, month = {July}, posted-at = {2005-06-07 20:41:00}, priority = {0}, publisher = {{Open Court Pub Co}}, title = {The Origin of Writing}, url = {http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike07-20&path=ASIN/0812690354}, year = {1986} }

TY - BOOK ID - citeulike:221457 L3 - citeulike-article-id:221457 SN - 0812690354 TI - The Origin of Writing PB - {Open Court Pub Co} KW - language KW - linguistics KW - orthography KW - reading KW - spelling N1 - a short but insightful book. It starts with the "Just So Stories" story of the invention of spelling, moving on to how Tarzan decoded the bugs in the English Primer. The basic claims: 1. The origin of writing is not to write down speech. He is sympathetic to the idea that writing originated from counting/accounting. 2. The alphabetic writing was not invented to represent phonology; to the contrary, the reason why the Phonecian script did not represent vowels is because they didn't want to create a separate written word for each inflected form of the "same word". So the idea is -- to represent the word, just like logography or syllabary would do. Some very interesting comparisons between drawing and writing. AU - Harris, Roy PY - 1986/07/01/ UR - http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike09-20&path=ASIN/0812690354 ER -