This Subject Includes

• Course No: HS 235
• Course:
• Semester: VIII
• Title: Writing Systems of the World
• Stream: Linguistics

• Pre-requisites: Nil

  Theory and typology of writing systems: Classification of writing systems; Chinese, JapaneseKorean-Vietnamese, Cuneiform, Egyptian, Semitic, Greek, Roman, English, Indian Abugida, Maya; Theoretical Preliminaries: grapheme, allographs, free and bound graphemes, ligatures, relationship to spoken language, internal structure of writing, sociolinguistics of writing, nonsegmental graphemes, unit discrepancies; Chinese: language of written Chinese, relationship between language and writing in Chinese; Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese: history of Japanese kana systems, adoption of kanji, history of Korean writing systems, creation of hangeul, Vietnamese scripts, adoption of Roman scripts in Vietnamese; Cuneiform: creation and evolution of cuneiform, internal structure, Ugaritic and Old Persian cuneiforms; Egyptian: History and evolution of hieroglyphs, deciphering of the Rosetta stone, reading hieroglyphs; Semitic: Abjad writing systems, history of Semitic scripts, Old Hebrew, Arabic, New Hebrew; Greek: evolution of Greek scripts, Phoenician, Linear B; Roman: Latin alphabet system, evolution; English: old English script, middle English script and modern English script; Indian Abugida: Abugida systems, internal structure of Abugida systems; Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Indic scripts; Maya: deciphering the Maya script, reading the Mayan calendar, internal structure of the Maya script.

  Texts:

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

  2. Florian Coulmas, Writing Systems: An Introduction to their Linguistic Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  References:

  1. Vivian Cook, The English Writing System, Arnold, 2004.

  2. Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, Blackwell Publishing, 1999.