The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (review)

According to some, the world will come to an end on or around December 21, 2012, with the close of the thirteenth baktun of the current Mayan age. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet, an engaging book that combines accuracy and readability better than any other work on orthographic practices across time and space, Amalia E. Gnanadesikan concurs with the usual view that the complex calendrical system of the Maya's predecessors, the Olmec, was 'the intellectual stimulus' (80) for the development of writing in Mesoamerica, which she discusses in Ch. 5, 'Maya glyphs: Calendars of kings'. G takes the reader from 'The first IT revolution' (Ch. 1)—the idea of writing, which she calls 'a virtual necessity to the societies anthropologists call CIVILIZATIONS' (1)¹—to 'the ultimate triumph of the written word' (272) enabled by the World Wide Web (Ch. 14, 'The alphabet meets the machine'), along the way giving accessible accounts of the origins and spread of cuneiform, katakana, and much more. As to what comes next, in her concluding words, 'If handwriting ushered in civilization, and print ushered in modernity, it remains to be seen what hypertext will do for us' (272)—provided, of course, that we make it to 2013.

The fourteen compact chapters sparkle with the author's enthusiasm for her subject, which she credits in the preface to a friend who showed her the wondrous simplicity of the Korean writing system, han'gul, when she was a sophomore in college (xi). No linguist can resist han'gul—'the true paragon of scripts' (191; cf. p. 201), invented in the mid-fifteenth century—and it is perhaps not surprising that Ch. 11, 'King Sejong's one-man renaissance',² is especially fine.³ Today nearly every Korean is literate, 'proving, in North Korea, that a high literacy rate is no guarantee of economic success' (207).

Wry comments of this kind and G's evident delight in the offbeat give this book much of its charm and make it easy to recommend not just for undergraduate classes but also as bedside reading for professionals and the general public alike. It is hard to resist such phrases as '[t]he alphabet is a monument to human stupidity and hidebound conservatism' (143) and 'the fifth century BC Athenian unpopularity contest known as OSTRACISM' (217), not to mention the description of Italian as 'the Latin that stayed home' (236). And who could not enjoy learning, or being reminded, of King Ibrahim Njoya, the inventor of a now all-but-dead orthographic system for the Bamum people of Cameroon, over whom he ruled from the 1880s to the 1930s (5-10, also 133); of the Hanunóo of the Philippines, who typically write their Brahmi-derived script from bottom to top (180); or of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, said to be the first typed manuscript submitted to a publisher (265)?

It would be wrong of me to give the impression that G is primarily in the business of telling tales. Sometimes her stories are hokey: for example, Ch. 12, 'Greek serendipity', which begins with the sentence 'The Greeks of the ninth century BC were barbarians, a situation for which we should all be grateful' (208) and throughout thumps the 'barbarian' theme, goes on to tell what even G dubs a 'fanciful tale' (214) about how a Greek created the voweled alphabet under the tutelage of his consonantal script-employing friend the Phoenician (209-14). For the most part, however, she successfully weaves together linguistics and history, allowing the two areas of inquiry to illuminate each other.⁴ Although she wears her linguistic learning more lightly than the authors of competing books, she regularly finds attractive ways to explain difficult concepts. I may assign The writing revolution as the principal textbook the next time I teach 'Writing systems of the world' (a freshman seminar with no prerequisites) and will in...