Reviews for Process of Language Acquisition: Proceedings of the 1999 Gala Conference

The average rating for Process of Language Acquisition: Proceedings of the 1999 Gala Conference based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-23 00:00:00 Minbo Wen Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World by John Man I checked out Alpha Beta from the library of the Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church library where we gather sometimes for our Greek conversation class. First, I read a little about the author, John Man, who seemed like he might be a rather interesting writer. I, as we all have probably, wondered where "X" came from or "Q" for example, but Man didn't cover individual letters so much. Instead, he tackled the evolution of our alphabet as a whole interspersed with a few interesting diversions on history. I like this sort of thing and found some useful information. I probably could have hopped around Wikipedia or Britannica and have accomplished more. I had hoped that he might enlighten me on how Chinese script developed, since he has experience with China. He did however explain a little about Mongolian script. His bit on what the Mongolians had done piqued my interest more in what kind of man Genghis Khan was really like. He also introduced an interesting perspective about the script of Korea. I have to say, in my view, that almost any subject is best appreciated and learned if introduced and discussed in its historical setting: such as mathematics, or U.S. politics, or art, music, etc. It's almost mandatory with the field of philosophy. This book would serve as a pretty good introduction to how the West got its alphabet. John Man did show, but not as deeply as I would have liked, how our alphabet originated and tracked over many centuries and many cultures to where it is now and has become universal if not cosmological. I think he could have done a better job of this. As Moses (who is discussed here) might have said about the author, "The works of Man is the measure of Man."

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-11 00:00:00 Ben Ushler Like a lot of books with high-concept titles, this one isn't really true to its billing. It is not a biography or even a history of the alphabet as we English-speakers know it. It's a survey of all the alphabets that have battled it out over the history of humankind -- a broader editorial scope that is challenging to sum up pithily. Certainly there's an emphasis on all things A to Z, but with a lot of time spent on Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and so forth. (The Korean material is especially interesting.) It's a fascinating, relatively quick read. One side note: there's a fascinating side bit in here about Thomas A. Sebeok, a retired professor from Bloomington, Illinois, who developed a plan for how to mark for thousands of years that a given spot is poisoned by nuclear waste. Showing that no symbols could do the job, he determines that the best plan, if any, would be to create an "atomic priesthood" whose sole role would be to maintain the continuity of this important information, generation after generation. Even though I've followed the Long Now organization for many years, I only now have connected Sebeok's plan with the group's projections, and with Neal Stephenson's novel, Anathem, which features a priesthood quite similar to the one described here. According to this post from the Long Now, Sebeok was not on the minds of the group's founders, even though there are striking parallels in their perspectives: