A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

Like money, the alphabet was a radical abstraction, for letters have no value or meaning in themselves, but stand for something that does. Trade Paperback available at Half Price Books. These travelers, sharing no common tongue, communicated in a form of creole whose words were then disassembled into phonetic characters which could be written as sounds required. A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Flanders, Judith. But, as she points out, we only have evidence of a single invention of phonetic writing, this by traders and mercenaries in the Middle East sometime in the second or third millenium B.C.

Flanders begins where she must, with the invention of writing, which, she notes, may have occurred as many as six times across the globe and which originally consisted of picto- or ideograph symbols. Creator/Contributor: Flanders, Judith,author. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. The plethora of detail often overwhelms the truly revelatory dimension of the work: the way the alphabet reflected and facilitated the change from a worldview that saw reality as having intrinsic meaning, with hierarchy as its underlying organizing principle, to one that was essentially nominalist, with the human mind inventing tools for organizing it usefully. A place for everything : the curious history of alphabetical order / Judith Flanders. A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order - Ebook written by Judith Flanders. Flanders has collected enough material on her subject to fill all the ingenious cabinets and filing devices found in the book’s illustrations. The true subject of this fascinating though relentlessly detailed book is the history of information retrieval, chiefly in Europe and America, up to the age of the computer. The first thing to know about Judith Flanders’s “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order” is that its subtitle is misplaced.

A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders