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Praise for Alpha Beta
"This book comes at the perfect moment as we rediscover the importance in early reading of cracking the alphabetic code. The story of how that code came into being is a fascinating one, and Man is the ideal writer to tell it." Times Educational Supplement

"A richly absorbing exploration, from B.C. to PCs, of the evolution of the most fundamental characters of our cultural history, the alphabet we so much take for granted. John Man writes with a compellingly restless curiosity and immediacy. The ever surprising, exotically detailed narrative in his informative book makes it as undryly enjoyable as a successful archaelogical dig of one of Alan Moorehead s colorful histories of African exploration." David Grambs, author of The Describer s Dictionary and The Endangered English Dictionary

"Text that is crisp, taut, and as clear as a bell.... A fascinating story with many a beguiling subplot along the way." New Scientist

"Letter perfect the best histories and mysteries of our ABC s!" Jeff McQuain, author of Never Enough Words and Power Language

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本の長さ

312ページ
言語

英語
出版社

John Wiley & Sons Inc
発売日

2001/6/29
寸法

12.7 x 1.85 x 20.32 cm
ISBN-10

047141574X
ISBN-13

978-0471415749
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出版社からのコメント

"A richly absorbing exploration, from B.C to PCs, of the evolution of the most fundamental "characters" of our cultural history, the alphabet we so much take for granted. John Man writes with a compellingly restless curiosity and immediacy. The ever surprising, exotically detailed narrative in his informative book makes it as undryly enjoyable as a successful archaeological dig of one of Alan Moorehead's colorful histories of African exploraion."
(David Grambs, Author of The Describer's Dictionary and The Endangered English Dictionary)

"Letter perfect--the best histories and mysteries of our ABC's!"
(Jeff McQuain, author of NEVER ENOUGH WORDS and POWER LANGUAGE)

著者について

JOHN MAN is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Mongolia. His most recent books are Gobi: Tracking the Desert and The Atlas of the Year 1000. He also wrote The Waorani: Jungle Nomads of Ecuador and The Atlas of D-Day. He lives with his wife and family in London.

登録情報

出版社 ‏ : ‎ John Wiley & Sons Inc (2001/6/29)
発売日 ‏ : ‎ 2001/6/29
言語 ‏ : ‎ 英語
ペーパーバック ‏ : ‎ 312ページ
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 047141574X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0471415749
寸法 ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.85 x 20.32 cm

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John Man

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John A. Dodds

Short, fun overview of the history of Western alphabets (with a side trip to Korea)

2007年11月30日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み

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This book is a brief overview of how writing in general, and the alphabet in particular, got going. As other (mostly more negative) reviews note, the style is conversational and not "straight-through" in any way. I don't mind the diversions, though, as they are mostly used to illustrate a point or sometimes to explain the archeology behind particular pieces of knowledge or conjecture about how the alphabet got going. The author does take a significant diversion to explain the Korean alphabet's history, which is fascinating, but he then returns to the West and talks about Greek, Roman (with neat explanations of how their alphabet came from the Etruscans), and Cyrillic. And that's about it. For a short book, that works, but it's too bad there couldn't be more on how we ended up with some other major alphabets worldwide (Arabic, Devanagari and related Indian scripts, the scripts of Southeast Asia, and the odd scripts like Georgian and Armenian). Overall, a fun, quick, and informative read.

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C. L. Fluty

The adventures of the alphabet and how it grew

2009年4月7日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み

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John Man has written an informative and imaginative history of how the alphabet originated, developed and was disseminated worldwide. He traces how the earliest prototype of a sound-symbol system developed in Egypt via symbols extracted from hieratic to form the "proto-Sinaitic" script around 2000 BC, through its descendant "proto-Canaanitic", to the Phoenicians, from them to the Greeks, who added vowels to create a true alphabet, and on through the Romans to spread throughout Europe and its colonies. He also follows its peregrinations eastward, to form the various Semitic, Indic, Tibetan and Southeast Asian scripts; and how those inspired the creation of what may be the world's most nearly perfect script, Korea's Hangul (Great Script).
Man cites ample data, but he also makes imaginative leaps, hypothesizing about how some of the "great leaps" in the alphabet's evolution may have come about - yet he always makes clear the distinction between what is known and what is only conjecture. Still, his conjectures are illuminating and make good sense, as well as interesting reading. In his hands, the alphabet's story comes alive, through all its historical and cultural twists and turns. Above all, he points out how this brilliant concept has endured and conquered the world because of its simplicity and its very imperfection, the "fuzziness" that allows it to be adapted to hundreds of languages around the world. As Man says in his Introduction, the genius of "the underlying idea that unites alphabetical scripts from Abaza to Zulu [is] that all human speech can be symbolized by two or three dozen meaningless marks."

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Robert P

Very interesting. Slightly disjointed with digressions I found distracting ...

2016年11月21日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み

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Very interesting. Slightly disjointed with digressions I found distracting. I learned many things I did not know, however,
and believe others will as well.

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patricia a wade

Five Stars

2016年9月3日にアメリカ合衆国でレビュー済み

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A bit more complex than I needed but interesting..

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Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World ペーパーバック – 2001/6/29

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John Man

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