The Alpha Bet

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.

Imagination runs riot in these unexpected tales without human protagonists; objects and concepts seem more than willing to share their emotions, though. Have you ever wondered why most fiction is so human-centred? Can you imagine a whole series of short stories about inanimate objects, concepts and letters from the alphabet? Then the unusual stories in 'The Alphabet Wars' are exactly what you want. Weep with seat no.36, discover the creativity of a keyboard, read the thoughts of Time, Space and Death, listen to the discussions in a library, and enjoy the adventures of different letters against the background of the Alphabet Wars. This collection contains, apart from the six stories linked by the Alphabet Wars theme, a wide range of tales about the most unexpected of characters: bicycle wheels and books, gods and weather map symbols, and many more.

This book is a consequence of the suggestion that a major key to ward understanding cognition in any advanced culture is to be found in the relationships between processing orthographies, lan guage, and thought. In this book, the contributors attempt to take only the first step, namely to ascertain that there are reliable con stancies among the interactions between a given type of writing and specific brain processes. And, among the possible brain processes that could be investigated, only one apparently simple issue is being explored: namely, whether the lateralization of reading and writing to the right in fully phonemic alphabets is the result of formalized but essentially random occurrences, or whether some physiological determinants are at play. The original project was much more complicated. It began with Derrick de Kerckhove's attempt to establish a connection between the rise of the alphabetic culture in Athens and the development of a theatrical tradition in that city from around the end of the 6th century B. c. to the Roman conquest. The underlying assumption, first proposed in a conversation with Marshall McLuhan, was that the Greek alphabet was responsible for a fundamental change in the psychology of the Athenians and that the creation of the great tragedies of Greek theatre was a kind of cultural response to a con dition of deep psychological crisis.

The "Alphabet of Nature" belongs to the debate over language that marked the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. Involved were profound issues about the origin and nature of language that could lead authors like van Helmont to imprisonment and even death.

This book contain is a comprehensive guide to the origins of the alphabet, exploring its existence in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Samaria. Laurence Austine Waddell (1899 – 1938) was a British Explorer, professor of Tibetan, and Indian army surgeon. Other notable works by this author include: “Among the Himalayas”, “The Birds of Sikkim” (1893), and “Some Ancient Indians Charms from the Tibetan” (1895). Contents include: “Ancestry of the Alphabets Re The Phoenicians”, “Alphabet Letters in Pre-Dynastic and Early-Dynastic Egypt and Theories Thereon”, “How the Sumerian Origin of the Alphabet was Discovered”, “The So-Called ‘Aphonic Owner’s Mark”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Teaching kids to read can be drudgery for parents and teachers alike, especially if the kids have learning challenges. "The Alphabet Kinection" applies the Kinesthetic Teaching Technique in a game for learning letters and sounds that is as simple and fun to play as Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders. It can be used with one student, thirty students, or more. It takes only about five minutes to learn how to teach, and the kids will not want to stop playing. The multi-sensory action allows students to have fun while they learn. "The Alphabet Kinection"will increase your confidence level as a teacher or parent to 'Kinect' with your child no matter their learning ability. The Kinesthetic Teaching Technique is on the cutting edge of adapting teaching methods to the short-attention-span culture in which we live. All types of students will learn quickly through direct interaction with the teacher and other students. "The Alphabet Kinection" has been used successfully with ADHD, dyslexic, and autistic students.