Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction

I bought this book in a passing period writing system enthusiasm (don't ask where it came from). I actually found it to be quite boring most of the time... It's mostly a history of the writing systems. Even though it's well written, the topic makes the text hard to recall even after a few weeks after reading. (It doesn't link with previous knowledge in any way really).
So even if you understood everything, you probably learned next to nothing... That was the case for me anyway. It's not really the book's fault, but still, it is too history-orientated in my opinion. Other subjects may have been a bit more useful to me personally and to other people intrested in linguistics in general.

Most of what he says about the legibility of glyphs or brain processes involved in reading / writing is purely a guess -- and he often goes wrong as well.

He describes in detail the evolution and correspondance of Hebrew and Greek letters, but only passingly mentions the Arabic scripts. There's nothing about Devanagari or the Tibetian scripts.

It seems like he had a hard time of filling the 200 pages with content so the result is often either annoyingly sluggish or just completely made up.

Might be useful if you are required to know about the topics in university or something, but intresting, hardly.

This book is the one that got me interested in writing systems as a part of linguistics. If you teach reading or language, the linguistic background this book provides will inform your professional knowledge far more than you can ever imagine. There are basically three kinds of writing systems in use in the world today: alphabetic, syllabic and logographic. Sampson gives sufficient historical background to help you understand how, where and with what languages these types developed. You will find out why the term 'ideograph' does not really accurately refer to any writing system in use. You'll learn how Egyptian hieroglyphs actually worked. And you'll be surprised to find out how reading Japanese is somewhat similar to reading ENGLISH!

This book is in itself an education in linguistic background knowledge that non-linguists don't usually have, but don't worry, Sampson is such a clear writer and excellent teacher, that the non-specialist can usually follow the discussion without stopping.

If you have an interest in language and languages for personal or professional reasons, this book will greatly enrich your life.

A perfect companion volume is the more recent but equally wonderful, 'Story of Writing'by Andrew Robinson (who is book review editor for the Times Higher Education Supplement).

This, years ago, was just about the first book I read on a linguistic topic, and it's still my favorite. It covers writing systems, using such various interesting cases as Korean, Chinese, and Modern Hebrew. I know of no single book that covers so well such a large (and important) aspect of linguistics as this book, nor does it no intelligently. Plus it's fun.

This book does use linguistic terminology, but is totally accessible to non-linguists.

This book is great for reading on one's own, or could be useful as reading in a linguistics course. It should also be required reading for anyone interested in internationalization of software and any other kind of text processing that could involve non-Roman scripts.