Product Description

Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets is a handy reference which presents the written form of nearly 40 of the world's varied languages.

Entries range from the mainstream, such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Korean and Thai; to the more obscure, such as Buginese, Cree, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Malayalam Samaritan and Telugu. Full script tables are given and each entry is accompanied by a brief overview of its historical and linguistic context.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2419706 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
George Campbell is the author of Routledge's Compendium of the World's Languages and Concise Compendium of the World's Languages.

Customer Reviews

Good start - many errors and omissions
This is a really interesting book in that it shows all (or most) of the characters in many scripts including some obscure scripts. It is more of a "fun" thing to look at rather than an accurate reference. There are many errors in foriegn texts which may just be typographical errors in the foreign fonts. Descriptions for each script vary, but for the most part are vague and inconsistent with eachother. The Arabic script is dealt with, but only for the Arabic language - lacking information about the differences and extra letters of Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi, Malay, etc. It is a hard book to follow because seemingly no phonetic key is followed... most scripts are described using solely the English alphabet making many letters appear to have identical value and often misrepresenting true sounds. Letters are shown, but constructed words are infrequently shown to see how letters actually combine together. It has a value to people who already know these scripts - but will be very confusing to people who are not familiar. All in all, it seems like a huridly prepared mish mash from different sources. It is claimed that the articles were taken from "Compendium of the World's Languages", but I found the references in that book much better done. If looking for a similar book to this - only very well done and with very few errors, I suggest Nakanishi's Writing Systems of the World.

A no-frills guide to a world of scripts
George L. Campbell's "Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" is a stripped-down guide to 40 writing systems from around the world. Alphabetically arranged from "Arabic" to "Tibetan," each entry contains a brief textual description of each writing system, along with a table in which each character is presented along with a transliteration into the Roman alphabet. The only departure from this format is for a non-phonetic system like Chinese.

Because of this no-frills format, there is virtually no depiction of the writing systems as actually used; all we see are the individual characters arranged in grids. The only real illustration is a photograph of a manuscript written in Roman characters; other than that, the various characters are oddly lifeless on the page. It would have been nice to see some lines from a poem, or perhaps a clipping from a newspaper for each script.

This drawback aside, "Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" is an informative work. And, despite the rigid presentation of the various scripts, I find great variety and beauty in this gathering of iconic characters. The loops and curls of the Tamil script, the mathematical regularity of the Cree syllabary, the bold lines of the Batak script--all these and more are a pleasure to behold.

Extremely Expensive, Extremely Thin
This book is nice, but too expensive and too thin...
It doesn't go into great detail, it is very brief.
A quarter of its price would be still a bit expensive.
The pages makeup is a bit flat.