Writing Systems of the World | Akira Nakanishi

Writing Systems of the World | Akira Nakanishi | Fabulous book for writing samples

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Writing Systems of...

	Writing Systems of the World Akira Nakanishi Tuttle Publishing, 1989 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The best in its category

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.

Fabulous book for writing samples

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.

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Fine introduction to languages & writing

"Writing Systems of the World" by Akira Nakanishi

This is one of the fine introductions to the subject of world languages and the history of the written word. I thought it an excellent book for my homeschooling. The history of written language is a fundamental history, as is mathematics. In this book, the first thing you notice are the profuse illustrations. The maps, illustrations and glossaries make this book useful.

It starts with Latin & Greek scripts, moves to scripts of the Soviet Union, India, Southeast Asia, Chinese & Mongolian, Africa, North and South America, and Oceania. Included in the Indian scripts, are the BRAHMI script, also termed the ASOKA script which is the ancient basis of many of the Indian scripts. When one considers that some of the worlds most ancient writings are from India, this is an excellent source book.

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An excellent reference!

Though this book was printed somewhere in 80s, its value has not diminished at all over the time, even though the political division of the world has changed since.

The book allocates exactly 2 pages for each one of the world mostly used or known writing systems (about several tens of them) and it brilliantly manages to condense all the importnat information about the system into these 2 pages: the letters, the digits, the basic rules and an example.
Of course, one cannot learn a language by the means of this book, but this book definitely 'demistifies' all these cryptic writings one can see on that or other occasion. Even more, I personally effectively used this book im several very partical application (a propos, computers), and above all the book is fascinating by the aesthetic beauty embedded in the writing itself.

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could refer to Unicode in an updated edition

Some of the country entries are outdated. Like the references to Yugoslavia or East Germany or the Soviet Union. This could be easily updated in a second edition.

But what would be a more extensive and possibly more useful addition is to mention the rise of Unicode. This did not exist when the first edition (which is this book) was written. But now Unicode has glyphs for all the major (and many minor) writing systems in the world. This has been an immense task, and Unicode 4 is now quite stable and mostly complete. If Nakanishi were to embed some links to the relevant portion of Unicode when describing an alphabet, then a reader could use the book in tandem with a browser, to look up more complete information on that alphabet.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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