Origins of the Alphabet
Proceedings of the First Polis Institute Interdisciplinary Conference
Published on 30. September 2015
Book
Hardback
243 pages
978-1-4438-7746-6 (ISBN)
Description
Despite the fact that writing has arisen independently many times in various different regions of the world, including Egypt, Sumer, China, and Mexico, the concept of the alphabet was invented only once, somewhere between Egypt and Phoenicia, with all known alphabets going back to this single source. While it is possible, up to a certain point, for scholars to provide an answer as to how the alphabet came about, it is much more difficult to understand the cause of its origin: why did it come about? In February 2013 Polis - the Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities invited some of the leading experts studying the origins of the alphabet to Jerusalem for an interdisciplinary debate on this topic. Although the birth of the alphabet has been the subject of numerous international conferences and symposia, studies offering a linguistic, sociological or psychological perspective on the development of writing are extremely rare. This volume, bringing together the proceedings of this conference, shows that a broad consensus is emerging concerning the main factors and circumstances that surrounded the birth of the alphabet, accounting for such facets as the date of the first-known alphabetic inscriptions, the cultures involved in its invention, and the influence of the linguistic structure of the language spoken by the inventors.
More details
Edition
Unabridged edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
Unabridged edition
Product notice
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 212 mm
Width: 148 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4438-7746-6 (9781443877466)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Unknown | Claudia Attucci | Christophe Rico
Origins of the Alphabet
Proceedings of the First Polis Institute Interdisciplinary Conference
E-Book
09/2015
1st Edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€168.99
Available for download
Persons
Christophe Rico received his PhD in Greek Linguistics from the Sorbonne University in 1992, and his Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches from Strasbourg University in 2012. He currently belongs to the Faculty of the University of Strasbourg, and teaches ancient Greek and linguistics at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise de Jerusalem and the Polis Institute (www.polisjerusalem.org), a school of Classical and Semitic languages spoken as living ones in order to enable students to read and understand texts fluently, where he serves as Director and Chair of Greek. His publications include La Mere de l'Enfant-Roi - Isaie 7,14 (2013) and Polis - Speaking ancient Greek as a living language (2015), which has also been published in French (2009), Italian (2010) and German (2011). He has authored some forty scholarly articles treating Indo-European languages, general linguistics, translation theory, hermeneutics and Koine Greek. Claudia Attucci is a PhD candidate in Egyptology at the Sorbonne University and in a joint supervision program with the University of Florence, having spent many years studying in Paris at the College de France and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE). In 2008, she won the Prix Vandier in the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Paris, and in 2011/12 and 2012/13, in the same institution, she obtained research grants to spend two years at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique de Jerusalem where she earned the title of "Eleve Titulaire". She is now working on Semitic toponymy in Egyptian literature.