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Cargando... Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (edición 2022)por Johanna Drucker (Autor)
Información de la obraInventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present por Johanna Drucker
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"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, Drucker describes the frameworks-classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political-within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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As Drucker writes, the idea that the Greeks invented the alphabet is deeply ingrained in modern thought. But this is the opposite of what the Greeks themselves thought; they were clear that it was borrowed. From the Greek perspective, the alphabet was invented either by the Phoenicians and given to the Greeks by Cadmus (this is the account given to us by Herodotus) or invented by the Egyptian god Thoth (as in the account of Plato). Other Greek descriptions tend to riff on either or both of these basic narratives. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries scholarship lauded the ‘genius’ of the Greeks for adding vowels to the existing consonantal alphabet used by the Phoenicians. Only recently has it begun to describe the birth of the Greek alphabet as a process of cultural contact, borrowing and collaboration.
Inventing the Alphabet raises all of the questions that have vexed historians. The Bible presents insoluble problems. If God wrote the Ten Commandments for Moses, what language were they in? What alphabet? If it was the first ever written text, how did Moses know how to read it? These questions led early modern thinkers to develop an intense interest in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. But Drucker also shows how incomplete each generation’s information was. Knowledge of inscriptions and coins was very limited in the early modern period, which meant that the Hebrew alphabet known in Europe was the elegant ‘square’ script rather than the Palaeo-Hebrew script used in the earliest part of antiquity. This was, therefore, how they imagined Hebrew to have been written in the distant past as well.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Katherine McDonald is Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Durham.