the form of Alphabet

Once i was told the key word for this week's blog is alphabet, it soon dragged me back to what I have learnt in linguistics last year. 'Alphabet', as confusing as it sounds, then my second thought was to search for its connection with the lecture this week, by talking about publishing, alphabet is the core of understanding the texts for readers. Alphabet is everywhere in publishing, it conceptually constitutes the entirety by making the abstract sense to concrete sense of comprehension. In other words, publishing would be some meaningless symbols if nobody gets the code of alphabet.

Here comes with a quote 'the reader must learne the alphabet, to wit: the order of the letters as they stand' says by 1604 edition of an English dictionary 

Publishing is all dependent on writing, from the ancient age when it started from cave painting, which is already 32000 years old, the earliest form of print publishing to proper writing system. Anyhow, the writing system in publishing has gone through a long process of development. It was more sense of ideographic writing as below:

The picture-based writing could cause misunderstanding as it abstractedly conveys the meaning through an image, which may create different understanding when it comes to uncertainty of the picture for readers or we can say pictographs is non-specific to the text, the representation of the contexts could be varied for different readers.

another example would be Chinese, the whole system is evolved with pictographs that u have to remember what each character looks like and how that sounds:

Phonetic writing system was developed later on when alphabet started in ancient Egypt by 27th century BC Egyptian developed a set of 24 hieroglyphs. Hence, this invention generates more sense of consciousness for human to enjoy the literature. we can say alphabet is the primary element that makes a writing system alive. It generates the meaning and culturally transmit messages from one generation to the next. it becomes widely spread.

references

Eisenstein, E (1979) ‘Defining the Initial Shift: Some features of print culture’ in the Printing Press as an Agent of Change Vol 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43-163

Brannon, B.A (2007) ‘The Laser Printer as an Agent of Change’ in Baron, Sabrina et al., (eds.) Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press: 353-364

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet