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Writing does not begin and end with the encoding of an idea into a group of symbols. It is practiced by people who have learnt its principles and acquired the tools and skills for doing it, in a particular context that affects what they do and how they do it. Nor are these practices static, as those involved exploit opportunities to adapt old features and develop new ones. The act of writing then has tangible and visible consequences not only for the writers but also for those encountering what has been produced, whether they can read its content or not – with potential for a wider social visibility that can in turn affect the success and longevity of the writing system itself. With a focus on the syllabic systems of the Bronze Age Aegean, this book attempts to bring together different perspectives to create an innovative interdisciplinary outlook on what is involved in writing: from structuralist views of writing as systems of signs with their linguistic values, to archaeological and anthropological approaches to writing as a socially grounded practice. The main chapters focus on the concepts of script adoption and adaptation; different methods of logographic writing; and the vitality of writing traditions, with repercussions for the modern world. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

This paper reviews issues and early findings in the cross-linguistic study of alphabetic spelling development. The primary focus is on the effects that differences in orthographic consistency might have on the process of learning to spell across alphabetic writing systems. General characteristics of alphabetic writing systems are summarized, and various indicators of orthographic consistency are discussed for one consistent (Czech) and two inconsistent (English, French) orthographies. Then, against a model of spelling development in English, the results of several studies of spelling development in relatively more consistent orthographies are considered. Together, the current findings suggest that the core component skills underlying spelling development, namely, phonological awareness and letter knowledge, are similar across alphabetic languages. However, the degree of consistency of an orthography seems to play an important mediating role in determining the rate of learning to spell. The extent to which consistency interacts with the processes underlying spelling development cannot yet be determined, however current data suggest that the early learning process is fundamentally similar across alphabetic orthographies.

The region of West Africa is of interest for the study of the origin and development of writing because a number of scripts were created there for several local languages during the 19th and 20th centuries, especially for the Mande family (the Vai, Mende, Kpelle, Looma, and Bamana syllabaries). In 1949 the Guinean enlightener Soulemayne Kanté developed the N'Ko alphabet for the Manding (Manden) languages, which belong to the Mande family and include, in particular, Bamana (Bambara), Jula (Dyula, Dioula), and Maninka. The name "N'Ko" originates from the phrase N ko 'I say' in Manding languages. This script is predominantly used in Guinea for Maninka (Maninka-Mori), which is native to more than 3.5 million people in Guinea, Mali and Sierra Leone. The N'Ko alphabet is also widely used in Liberia, the Côte d'Ivoire, and the African diaspora (mainly in Nigeria and Egypt) by a hundred thousand to a million persons. This article provides information about studies of various aspects of the N'Ko alphabet. First of all, the complexity of the graphic forms of each of the 27 letters is calculated according to certain principles. For example, the point corresponds to 1, the straight line segment is 2, and the arc is 3; also certain weight is given to various types of connections and crossed lines. A frequency analysis of the distribution of letters is undertaken in the corpus of Maninka texts written in N'Ko, with more than 3.1 million words. This made it possible, in particular, to trace the extent to which the complexity of the graphic form of the signs correlates with their frequency. It appears that such a correlation is not very significant: the correlation coefficient is –0.38, whereas, for example, for the Morse code in English texts it reaches –0.82. The full inverse correlation, when simpler characters are always used to represent more frequent letters, corresponds to –1. It has also been shown that frequency analysis can serve as a further justification for certain orthographic principles in N'Ko, particularly of tone notation. The next task was to calculate orthographic uncertainty: in an ideal alphabet, where there is a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (signs), this uncertainty is equal to zero. In the N'Ko alphabet, its values are quite small: 0.37 without taking into account the tone notation, and 0.22 with tone notation. For comparison, the values corresponding to some "old" writing systems are as follows: in the Ukrainian alphabet, it equals 1.12, while a slightly simpler Italian orthography provides uncertainty at the level of 0.56. The results obtained in this study can be useful for studying phonotactics, prosodic elements, and the history of writing and lexicography, as well as in comparative and contrastive studies.

This study aims to specify the definitions of two terms, bigraphia and digraphia, and examine how these phenomena appear in post-socialist countries. It is currently a global phenomenon to use two or more writing systems in one country, due to the spread of English and the Internet. Bigraphia means when the function and prestige of two writing systems (or two varieties of one system) are equal. On the other hand, when there is a difference in the function and/or prestige between two writing systems, it is defined as digraphia. The paper examines the combination of writing systems in post-socialist countries such as Russia, Belarus, Serbia, and Uzbekistan. In-digraphia refers to a situation in which variations of one writing system coexist, and out-digraphia refers to a situation in which two different writing systems coexist. A narrower sense of digraphia is observed in Belarus today: Belarusian Cyrillic-Т(BC-T) is used to write Tarashkievitsa and Belarusian Cyrillic-N (BC-N) is used to write Narkamaŭka. Out-digraphia is observed in Serbia and Uzbekistan. In these countries, Cyrillic and Latin scripts are used to write Serbian and Uzbek. Out-digraphia is also confirmed in Russian texts: It is commonly thought that only Cyrillic letters are used to write Russian, but recently the use of the so-called "macaronic alphabet," which is a mix of Cyrillic and Latin letters, has become common.

Western Mesoamerican Calendars and Writing Systems draws together studies by some of the world's leading experts presented at a conference held in December 2020, 'The Origins and Developments of Central Mexican Calendars and Writing Systems'. Mesoamerica is one of the few places to witness the independent invention of writing. From the earliest attestations of this intellectual feat in the Late Preclassic period 900 bc-ad 150), writing spread throughout Mesoamerica, developing and diversifying into a series of distinct and independent scripts. With the exception of the celebrated phonetic decipherments of Maya and Aztec writing, which are now well-documented and can be fully read, most Mesoamerican writing systems remain little studied and undeciphered. This is particularly true of the writing systems of Western Mesoamerica, the topic of this volume.Bringing together new research on Western Mesoamerican writing systems, some contributions focus on specific features of a given writing system, whereas others offer state-of-the-art syntheses of whole writing systems. Two contributions focus on the calendar in particular, and associated notations, as integral parts of writing systems. Chapters are included on the writing system of Teotihuacan, the Ñuiñe writing of the Mixteca Baja and adjoining areas, the writing system of the Epiclassic period and Aztec writing of the Postclassic. These writing systems represent more than a millennium of written records and literacy in Mesoamerica, spanning from the Early Classic to the Late Postclassic (from the 2nd to the sixteenth centuries ad). Aztec writing even continued in use for several decades after the Spanish invasion of Mexico (ad 1519-1521), which saw the introduction of the Latin alphabet and the gradual obsolescence of Mesoamerican logophonetic writing systems.

In this article we examine, from a predominantly sociolinguistic perspective, the writing systems created throughout time for the graphic rendering of the variety of Romanian spoken by the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia. We especially investigate what influences the choice of a script (Latin or Cyrillic), of orthographic conventions and of a writing system, and how this choice correlates with the ideological attitude (reintegrationist or independentist) of the proponents. To this end, we analyse the writing systems used for rendering the vernacular in "Vorba noastră", the first publication in the local variety (1945–1948), and the systems put forward in the last 20 years by the members of the community engaged in political and linguistic debates (Paun Es Durlić, Dragomir Dragić, Slavoljub Gacović, Ljubiša lu Boža Kići, the "Gergina" Association). The analysis and the comparison of the systems attest to the importance of the ideological, social and political factors in creating and imposing an orthography for an unwritten idiom.

AbstractThe article-a revised version of the authors' contribution to the International Symposium "Bilingualism in Iranian Cultures" held 1992 in Bamberg (Germany)-deals with the problem of the introduction of new, or the reforming of already existing alphabets. It tries to illustrate how collective bi- and multilingualism, i. e. the use of different languages within a certain social community, affects the development of writing-systems, and how, on the other hand, these systems affect certain aspects of multilingualism. This is shown on the example of Tajik-Persian, Baluchi, Shughni and Jaghnobi, spanning the time from the beginning of the 20th century until the end of the Soviet Union. The related tables concern: 1) The introduction of the Latin script for the Iranian languages of the Soviet Union, 2) its abolishment; 3) the vowels of Baluchi language; 4) the vowels of Shughni language; 5) the vowels of Jaghnobi language; 6) Examples of the Latin script for Tajik-Persian language as introduced in 1928; 7) Examples of the Latin script for Baluchi language as introduced in 1933; 8) Examples of the Latin script for Shughni language as introduced in 1930.