Comments on Robinson's "The Story of Writing"

Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Comments on Robinson's "The Story of Writing"

I just read Andrew Robinsons's "The Story of Writing" (Thames and Hudson, 1995). I quite enjoyed the book, and learned quite a few things from it. However I found it rather shallow (even by coffee-table standards), unbalanced, and poorly organized.

(The shallowness I hardly surprising, since the book was born as a TV series. Even the best multi-part TV documentaries become childish when cast into books. My first disappointment of that sort was Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man", and I have yet to see one redeeming exception.)

Besides, there were several items in the book that I found rather questionable. For instance, Robinson seems to regard the invention of the Greek alphabet as a major event in the history of writing. But surely the addition of vowels to the Phoenician alphabet was only a secondary improvement, nowhere as significant as the invention of phonetic writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia. All the more so considering that Persian cuneiform did have separate signs for some vowels, and the Greeks already had a syllabic script that implicitly recorded the vowel sounds.

Robinson seems strangely reluctant to accept the theory that cuneiform evolved from the Mesopotamian clay tokens. His argument for the opposite direction (in spite of some "slight" chronological problems), seem rather desperate. Since he doesn't mention any names, I suppose that he his speaking for himself there. I wonder how many scholars share his view?

The Mayan chapter opens with Eric Thompson's portrait in the place of honor, and does not even hint at his role in delaying the decipherment for 40 years. There is a picture of Knorosov later on, but the modern American mayanists who finally made the inscriptions readable are not even named in the book.

(In fact the book seems more than a bit slanted towards British subjects; which is understandable for a British TV series, but not so easy to forgive in a book on such a world-encompassing theme. Thus, for instance, Rawlinson's copying the Behistun inscription must have provided some good images for the screen; but his physical feat is hardly exceptional in the history of archaeology.)

Robinson's coverage of the subject is also extremely uneven. All the Indian and East Asian alphabets get only one page in the appendix, and not even an alphabet table. Armenian, Georgian, Tiffinagh, and many other obscure scripts (which should be important for the study of writing in general, precisely for being relatively independent data points) are not even mentioned.

Finally, Robinson's chapter on Chinese and Japanese, where he tries to convince the reader of the superiority of the Western alphabet, is irritatingly patronizing and ethnocentric, and sometimes flat wrong (as for instance when he claims that kanji are more wasteful of computer screen space than the pinyin equivalents). Surely those people can decide the issue for themselves? After all, the Chinese have been acquainted with alphabetic scripts (from India) for a couple of millenia --- longer than the British in fact 8-). If they haven't switched to the "superior" system, perhaps it is because of practical reasons that Robinson just failed to see?

All the best,

--stolfi