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The Alphabets of Latin America takes you on a roller coaster ride to one of the most culturally and geographically fascinating continents, known for its legendary Maya and Inca civilizations, sizzling Samba and Tango, the world's biggest carnivals, labyrinths of Borges, magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, great poetry of Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda , Gabriela Mistral, Cesare Vallejo, Octavio Paz, fascinating art of Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero, among others. As you flip its pages, you will find yourself swimming with pink dolphins in the Amazon river, watching the sunset in Martian landscape of Atacama desert, kissing the heights of Machu Picchu and admiring a thousand rainbows at Iguazu Falls. Feliz Viaje!
A global exploration of the many writing systems that are on the verge of vanishing, and the stories and cultures they carry with them. If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing - not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years - sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people - is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us - and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely.
This groundbreaking volume describes unprecedented changes in education across Latin America, resulting from the endorsement of Indigenous peoples' rights through the development of intercultural bilingual education. The chapters evaluate the ways in which cultural and language differences are being used to create national policies that affirm the presence of Indigenous peoples and their cultures within Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. Describing the collaboration between grassroots movements and transnational networks, the authors analyze how social change is taking place at the local and regional levels, and they present case studies that illuminate the expansion of intercultural bilingual education. This book is both a call to action for researchers, teachers, policy-makers and Indigenous leaders, and a primer for practitioners seeking to provide better learning opportunities for a diverse student body.
"Though there are many books about the history of the alphabet, virtually none address how that history came to be. In Inventing the Alphabet, Johanna Drucker guides readers from antiquity to the present to show how humans have shaped and reshaped their own understanding of this transformative writing tool. From ancient beliefs in the alphabet as a divine gift to growing awareness of its empirical origins through the study of scripts and inscriptions, Drucker describes the frameworks-classical, textual, biblical, graphical, antiquarian, archaeological, paleographic, and political-within which the alphabet's history has been and continues to be constructed. Drucker's book begins in ancient Greece, with the earliest writings on the alphabet's origins. She then explores biblical sources on the topic and medieval preoccupations with the magical properties of individual letters. She later delves into the development of modern archaeological and paleographic tools, and she concludes with the role of alphabetic characters in the digital era. Throughout, she argues that, as a shared form of knowledge technology integrated into every aspect of our lives, the alphabet performs complex cultural, ideological, and technical functions, and her carefully curated selection of images demonstrates how closely the letters we use today still resemble their original appearance millennia ago"--
The revolution in typesetting - a revolution that over the past two decades has eliminated a five-hundred-year-old system of hot metal production and replaced it with one of photo-generated and computer-driven composition - shows no sign of winding down. This book, more than any other we know, traces the steps that went into that revolution and simultaneously makes the argument that the letter forms themselves are in process of evolution. Tracy argues that, whether they are of the sixteenth or the twentieth century, the forms that comprise our alphabet are subject to the same rules of good taste, proportion, and clarity that have always obtained. But what we face today is vastly different from fifty years ago. For the first time, new technology has made the proliferation (and, as some would maintain, debasement) of letter forms fast and easy (or quick and dirty.) With fifty years of professional experience on both sides of the Atlantic (including thirty years as head of type design for the British Linotype Company), Tracy is in a unique position to make this argument and arrive at his sad conclusion: the design of distinguished, contemporary typefaces is far outnumbered by the mediocre and downright bad. Part of the reason for this deplorable deterioration is a lack of critical analysis of the particular esthetics involved. This step-by-step examination of type-design esthetics is precisely what Tracy provides here, while avoiding both the promoter's hype and the manufacturer's claims. Here are the gut issues of what makes type good or bad, legible or unreadable. Extensively illustrated with both typefaces and line drawings, this book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in thehistory of letters or in the artistry and peculiar problems that lie behind their production.
Beginning in Rome around 600 BC, Latin became the language of the civilized world and remained so for more than two millennia. French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian are among its progeny and it provides the international vocabulary of law and life science. No known language, including English - itself enriched by Latin words and phrases - has achieved such success and longevity. Tore Janson tells its history from origins to present. Brilliantly conceived and written with the same light touch as his bestselling history of languages, A Natural History of Latin is a masterpiece of adroit synthesis. The author charts the expansion of Latin in the classical world, its renewed importance in the Middle Ages, and its survival into modern times. He shows how spoken and written Latin evolved in different places and its central role in European history and culture. He ends with a concise Latin grammar and lists of Latin words and phrases still in common use. Considered elitist and irrelevant in the second half of the twentieth century and often even banned from schools, Latin is now enjoying a huge revival of interest across Europe, the UK, and the USA. Tore Janson offers persuasive arguments for its value and gives direct access to its fascinating worlds, past and present.
This is a reissue of the second edition of a book on the pronunciation of Latin in Rome in the Golden Age. It has a section of supplementary notes which deal with subsequent developments in the subject. The author has also added an appendix on the names of the letters of the Latin alphabet.
Brilliantly introduced by Nezar Andary, this book is a work of creative nonfiction that approaches writing on film in a fresh and provocative way. It draws on academic, literary, and personal material to start a dialogue with the Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (1969), tracing the many meanings of Egypt’s postcolonial modernity and touching on Arab, Muslim, and ancient Egyptian identities through watching the film.