Writing Systems of the World

Mr. Nakanishi has done a superlative job of gathering native print samples from a vast array of different languages. For many languages he shows actual print samples, typically from a newspaper printed in that language. There are comparisons of languages and groupings into language families. For many languages he lists the "alphabet" (or syllabary or what have you for the given language) and includes a phonetic transcription of the individual characters.On the inside cover of the hard cover edition, there is a color map showing which scripts are predominantly used in different places around the Earth. The same map is in black and white in the back pages of the paperback edition.If you are looking for a book that shows you how characters look in many different languages, then this is the book for you. For just linguistic curiosity, it's a fascinating book, and extraordinarily helpful as a language/print reference source.

This delightful, short (116 pages, including glossary) reference book is a good read and a useful, quick tool to look up what is on that stamp, coin or maker's mark you want to decipher. It is frustratingly out of date. The Japanese original, of which this is the 1980 translation, predates major events like the fall of the Soviet Empire and the birth, rebirth or change in government of many countries and their subdivisions with consequent changes for official languages and scripts. Much scholarly work would require changes in the material. For example, linguistic analysis in the 1980's calls into question whether Thai should be classified as Sino-Tibetan. The recent Yale discoveries of early Semitic graffiti and much archaeological work in Central Asia, the Near East and elsewhere needs incorporation in a revised volume. Some detail known at the time of publication was omitted that would be of interest, like the alphabetic core of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system. The lack of mention of "Cretan" [it was found in profusion at Mycenae on the Greek mainland, also] Linear B being a syllabary used to write early Greek is another puzzling omission. So is the relationship of Etruscan writing to the Germanic runic alphabets not to mention the Roman alphabet. The statement on page 106 that there was no contact between the Americas and the "Old World" before the 15th century was known to be inaccurate at the time of publication and much more evidence of contact has been discovered since. In short, this is an enjoyable book with a delightful presentation. As should be clear, I want to see a new edition with a few corrections, some short elaborations and modernization of the material.

It is sometimes convenient to have a catalogue type book that includes images of the written format of a language. I have a real pleasure with this subject and advise anyone who enjoys languages, their differences as well as similarities to purchase this beauty. A quick glance may help you search in the right direction which is all you need sometimes. Enjoyable and I do hope to find more book of the sort.

This book serves well as a compact catalog of the major writing systems in the world. It's not the reference I was looking for, however. It's quite brief, and the examples are almost always newspapers. The other issues I have are:1. It's kind of out of date - the information is all from the eighties. There's been some redrawing of the borders and changes in fonts and conventions since then.2. The quality of the reproductions is poor. Many of the beautiful scripts in here are not shown in their best light. The plain fonts and photocopy-quality examples just don't do the scripts justice.Still, it does contain reproductions of a lot of alphabets. It would be really handy in identifying an unkown sample of writing, for example.

If you are looking for an inexpensive guide that shows all of the modern writing systems, this is it. Even though it has not been updated in over 25 years, it still has almost everything you would want from such a book. The examples of newpaper front pages for many of the major languages is a great way to see the various writing systems in modern use. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in internationalization or written languages in general.

It was well-received and is being used.

This book has facsimmiles of newspapers in the text The entire alphabet of selected scripts including Japanese, Tibetan, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, Russian Cyrillic, and many others with a phonetic equivelant to each of letters for each of the language script text. It also lists languages like Chinese and all world nations and the languages that newspapers are printed in there. I highly reccomend this book for all scholars of linguistics.

I bought this book sight unseen as a present for my niece, but gave it away to a local charity instead. Much of the material is out of date (it predates the fall of the Soviet Union, and the explosion of archaeological discovery that has happened since then in Central Asia), and the book itself is poorly produced --- the printing is fuzzy, and many of the images look like third-generation photocopies.

I bought my own copy after finding one in the library. For anyone fascinated by languages, orgins, structure and everything that goes with it this is a great little book. The wealth of information will keep you regularly returning to it for snippets and what it contains would be great for words of wisdom for discussion at parties and other gatherings. I was disappointed that the useful world map in my copy is only black and white, the hardback version in the library was in colour, making it easier to see the divisions where each language is spoken. The other map in the library version showing the countries is missing completely, which is a shame, even if out of date it provides very valuable information. However the content of the book apart from that appears unchanged, and makes a very good one for your reference shelf alongside the encyclopaedias.

This is an interesting book but more a catalogue of scripts than any analysis. I will keep it on my shelf for reference. It is a bit out of date and purchasers need to be aware of this.

This is a great book of ancient and nowadays writings. The author, explains the contents like a cronological dictionary, so it gets easy to compare them. It's simple and acurate, not too much info about all those writings, some of them have over 3000 years and I really find it hard to believe that some of them were deciphered. Anyway, it has pics of all those writings, and it makes you think and realise that some middle eastern writings are very very similar to the runic symbols for example. If you study ancient symbols , this is a book for you

This is not a book you read from beginning to end. It is more a reference book to refer to the many different types of language found around the world. There is a basic description of each language and images of newspapers.

very informative