Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A History of Reading
Takes in a wonderful diversity of things."-Nature. Now available in paperback, this final volume in the trilogy Language/Writing/Reading traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbols first acquired meaning through to the electronic texts of the digital age.
A History of Writing
From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Illustrated with numerous examples, this book offers a global overview in a format that everyone can follow. Steven Roger Fischer also reveals his own discoveries made since the early 1980s, making it a useful reference for students and specialists as well as a delightful read for lovers of the written word everywhere.
History of Language
It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer begins his book with an examination of the modes of communication used by dolphins, birds and primates as the first contexts in which the concept of "language" might be applied. As he charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century, when the science of linguistics was developed, Fischer analyses the emergence of language as a science and its development as a written form. He considers the rise of pidgin, creole, jargon and slang, as well as the effects radio and television, propaganda, advertising and the media are having on language today. Looking to the future, he shows how electronic media will continue to reshape and re-invent the ways in which we communicate. "[a] delightful and unexpectedly accessible book ... a virtuoso tour of the linguistic world."—The Economist "... few who read this remarkable study will regard language in quite the same way again."—The Good Book Guide
Island at the End of the World
On a long stretch of green coast in the South Pacific, hundreds of enormous, impassive stone heads stand guard against the ravages of time, war, and disease that have attempted over the centuries to conquer Easter Island. Steven Roger Fischer offers the first English-language history of Easter Island in Island at the End of the World, a fascinating chronicle of adversity, triumph, and the enduring monumentality of the island's stone guards. A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific drastically decreased around 1500, the Easter Islanders were forced to adapt in order to survive their isolation. Adaptation, Fis...
Rongorongo
This book is the first comprehensive documentation of Rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script and Oceania's only known pre-twentieth-century writing system. The author tells the full history of rongorongo's exciting discovery and the many attempts at a decipherment and provides full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving rongorongo inscriptions along with detailed photographs of nearly every incised artifact.
Glyph-Breaker
After successfully deciphering the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, Steven Roger Fischer gained a unique place in the pantheon of glyphbreakers: he is the only person to have deciphered not one but two ancient scripts. Both of these scripts yield clues of great historical importance. Fischers previous decipherment, of a Cretan artefact called the Phaistos Disk, provided the key to the ancient Minoan language and showed it to be closely related to Mycenaean Greek. Fischer's decipherment of Rongorongo shows that it was not merely a mnemonic device for recalling memorised texts, but was actually read and used for creative composition. This is the exciting story of these two decipherments, by the man who now must rank as the greatest glyphbreaker of all time.
Islands
When Lost’s Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashed, the survivors found themselves on a seemingly deserted island. In Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, while in the movie Castaway Tom Hanks survives over four years on a South Pacific island. And Jurassic Park kept its dinosaur population confined to an island off the coast of Central America. Islands often find themselves at the center of imagined worlds, secluded and sometimes mystical locales filled with strange creatures and savage populations. The cannibals, raptors, and smoke monsters that exist on the islands of popular culture aside, the more than one million islands a...
A History of Reading
A book for book lovers by a true lover of books! At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader’s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to digital.
An Introduction to English Runes
Introduction to the use of runes as a practical script for a variety of purposes in Anglo-Saxon England. Runes are quite frequently mentioned in modern writings, usually imprecisely as a source of mystic knowledge, power or insight. This book sets the record straight. It shows runes working as a practical script for a variety of purposes in early English times, among both indigenous Anglo-Saxons and incoming Vikings. In a scholarly yet readable way it examines the introduction of the runic alphabet (the futhorc) to England in the fifth and sixth centuries, the forms and values of its letters, and the ways in which it developed, up until its decline at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. It di...
Hispanisation
Literally hundreds of languages world-wide have experienced direct or indirect Hispanisation during the heyday of the Spanish colonial empire. The number of languages which continue to borrow from Spanish on a daily basis is considerable especially in Latin America. This volume gives the reader a better idea of the range of contact constellations in which Spanish functions as the donor language. Moreover, the contributions to this collection of articles demonstrate that it is not only possible to compare the contact-induced processes in the (Hispanised) languages of Austronesia and the Americas. It is emphasized that one can draw far-reaching conclusions from the presented borrowing facts fo...
