The technology of recording speech.
9 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling
Benjamin Franklin · 1779
Proposes discarding redundant letters and adding new ones so that English spelling represents pronunciation directly, on the grounds that a phonetic…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Dissertations on the English Language
Noah Webster · 1789
Argues that American English should reform its spelling and pronunciation independently of British usage, on the grounds that a new nation needs a…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Lettre à M. Dacier
Jean-François Champollion · 1822
Announces that Egyptian hieroglyphs are not purely symbolic but include a phonetic alphabet used to spell foreign names, the breakthrough that opened…
+6 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Benjamin Franklin
Proposes discarding redundant letters and adding new ones so that English spelling represents pronunciation directly, on the grounds that a phonetic alphabet would be faster to learn and harder to misread.
Irving Finkel (The British Museum)
Shows that cuneiform's wedge shapes follow directly from pressing a cut reed into wet clay, so the script's form is a consequence of its materials rather than a stylistic choice.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gina Marie Elia (TED-Ed)
Traces Chinese characters from early pictographs to the modern script, arguing that most characters are not pictures at all but a combination of a meaning component and a sound component.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Noah Webster
Argues that American English should reform its spelling and pronunciation independently of British usage, on the grounds that a new nation needs a language standard of its own.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Francis Carter
Traces movable type from its invention in Song-dynasty China through Korea and Central Asia, arguing the technology reached Europe by transmission rather than being independently invented by Gutenberg.
Peter T. Daniels
Surveys the world's scripts by the six-way typology the author introduced in 1990 — logosyllabaries, syllabaries, abjads, alphabets, abugidas and featural scripts — as a chapter for a general linguistics handbook.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Summarises the token-to-writing argument for a general readership, tracing how three-dimensional clay tokens used for accounting gradually flattened into the two-dimensional signs of the earliest Mesopotamian script.
Victor H. Mair (ed.)
Collects papers arguing that Chinese characters function through sound as much as meaning like every other writing system, and traces how the script has been reformed, romanised and adapted across the Sinitic-writing world.
Jean-François Champollion
Announces that Egyptian hieroglyphs are not purely symbolic but include a phonetic alphabet used to spell foreign names, the breakthrough that opened the script to translation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Isaac Taylor
Traces the major alphabets of the world back to a single Semitic ancestor, arguing that alphabetic writing was invented only once and then adapted repeatedly rather than reinvented.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan H. Gardiner
Argues from the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that the Semitic alphabet was invented by borrowing a small set of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs for their sounds alone, discarding their original pictorial meaning.
I. J. Gelb
Proposes a general theory that every writing system evolves along one path, from picture-writing through word-signs and syllables toward an alphabet, and ranks scripts by how far along that path they have travelled.