Chapter 1
Scripts and Languages
Writing is speech put in visible form.
— Michael D. Coe
Writing Systems, Scripts, and Languages
Categories of Writing Systems
Characters and Glyphs
Chapter Summary
Writing Systems,1 Scripts, and Languages
Michael Coe began his book on the decipherment of the Maya script with the memorable sentence above.2 Over the centuries, a hundred or so different scripts have been developed to record human languages. Many of them, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Cuneiform script went out of existence; others, such as Chinese characters, are still in use and have gone through an amazingly small amount of change during their ...
