Coulmas's new book, Writing systems, is intended as a textbook for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses dealing with written languages and literacy from the standpoint of linguistics and anthropology. The book provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the linguistic analysis of writing, and it offers detailed illustrations of the world's major writing systems and their social consequences, ranging from the birth of graphic signs as mnemonics to social stratification resulting from issues of literacy in modern society. Geared particularly toward the interests of linguists, the book places strong emphasis on the multiple levels of the form-sound nexus and the structural complexities of various writing systems around the world. It is accompanied by a concise exposition of the history of writing and a review of current investigations into reading and writing in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Overall, Coulmas does a first-rate job of linking the origin, development, and spread of writing to the growing interest in the linguistically motivated analysis of writing and its relation to the mind and society. Although the chapters cut across several layers of writing analysis, the historical, educational, and ideological issues of literacy are given less attention than might be expected, owing to the author's focus on the linguistic aspects of writing. At the end of each chapter, exercises are provided for mastery of basic concepts and issues discussed.

The first two of the twelve chapters eloquently introduce the origins and philosophical exegesis of writing. Chap. 1, “What is writing?,” starts with a revealing exposition of historical changes in the conceptualization of what “writing” is, the answer to which is, as shown by the claims of major scholars of writing, contingent upon historical and cultural circumstances. Coulmas traces the ways in which concepts of writing have shifted (and largely stayed the same) from the time of Aristotle, the most articulate Western proponent of writing as the surrogate for speech, to the contemporary view of Saussure, who upheld Aristotelian surrogationalism, which implies the assumed supremacy of spoken words and a dichotomous split that sees writing as conceptually distinct from speech.

Chap. 2, “The basic options: Meaning and sound,” juxtaposes two ideals of writing – semiography (meaning-based writing) and phonography (sound-based writing, which culminated in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA) – representing the human aspiration to pure reason on one hand, and on the other, the ideal of creating a neutral and faithful writing system corresponding to speech. Coulmas characterizes real writing as being “auto-indexical” and “conventional” in the sense that writing needs not only to convey the message in itself but also to be conventionally learned in accordance with the established procedures for interpretation. Finally, the author proposes three principles for linguistic analysis that underlie the following chapters (34): (i) the principle of the autonomy of the graphic system, (ii) the principle of interpretation, and (iii) the principle of historicity.

Chaps. 3–5 deal with the vaguely established analytical levels of writing from larger to smaller units. Chap. 3, “Signs of words,” focuses on a fundamental unit called the “word.” Despite its seeming transparency, this is shown to be an extremely difficult category to define in a way that is valid for all languages. Theoretically, a system of writing with words as the basic units is called a “logographic” or “ideographic” system. Coulmas examines two such systems, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters, and concludes that sound-meaning correspondence is never clear-cut because “the interpretation of words is a multilayered process involving reference to semantic, phonetic, and lexical information, all of which is hinted at more or less vaguely” (60).

In Chap. 4, “Signs of syllables,” Coulmas carefully considers the differences between speech and graphic syllables. Concise expositions of modern syllabaries such as Cherokee, Cree, and Vai are offered as representative examples that variously target “the syllable as the functional unit of the system” (69). Obviously, the problem here is striking the right balance between economy (or the learning load) and accuracy (or the efficacy for unambiguous understanding). Two ancient syllabaries, Aegean Cypriot and the Yi system of southwestern China, are used to illustrate two extreme cases that optimize the sound-based and meaning-based types of writing: the former with only a few dozens of writing syllables, in which the phonetic fit is thus very poor, and the latter with well over 800 signs encoding various tonal syllables, in which the learning burden does not meet the requirements of economy.

Chap. 5, “Signs of segments,” deals with phonemic segments, the notion of which is still largely fuzzy because “the relationship between sequences of alphabetic letters and speech is never a one-to-one mapping relation” (91). Nevertheless, a view that a segment in writing is “what alphabetic letters encode” (89) survives because the Latin alphabet is the most widely used script and is assumed to be the prototype of phonemic writing – a perception augmented by the elaboration of IPA. Coulmas shows that such a construct is simply an ideal in establishing orthography, and that phonetic representation and orthography operate on different levels.

The next two chapters investigate how speech sound may be represented in letters. The focus of attention here is on consonants and vowels (Chap. 6), and vowel incorporation (Chap. 7). To begin with, the author delineates different features of vowels and consonants, with vowels being more likely than consonants to be syllabic, to have stress accent, pitch, and tone, to be involved in sound change, to be uttered in isolation, and so on. These fundamental “differences in regard to how vowels and consonants are encoded in phonographic writing” (111) lead to the consequences that consonants are always present in writing systems (i.e., they are referentially rigid) and that, conversely, “the range of phonetic interpretation of V letters tends to be wider than that of C letters” (129).

Chap. 7, “Vowel incorporation,” focuses on the Indian writing systems which take the syllable as an intuitively salient unit in writing. However, these systems, often called “syllabic alphabets” or “alphasyllabaries,” have both the syllable and an internal structure that distinguishes between consonants and vowels. For example, Brhamı, a descendant heavily influenced by Semitic scripts and the source of all modern Indian scripts, has syllables that mostly consist of CV or CCV and is characterized by vowel incorporation – a phenomenon in which the consonantal base is “interpreted as incorporating it (an unmarked sound, usually reduced vowel

or

) together with the consonant unless otherwise indicated” (134: parentheses mine). This “inherent” vowel is superseded when marked by the other vowel diacritics, which are added around the base. Examining individual differences of Brhamı-derived scripts (Devanagari, Tamil, Tibetan, and Thai writing), Coulmas stresses that these scripts are “analytic” rather than sequential because some syllables need to be interpreted “as a whole rather than [as] a succession of isolated Cs and Vs” (137).

Chap. 8, “Analysis and interpretation,” picks up once again the point discussed in chap. 7, with the aim of deepening the understanding of how (linguistic) analyticity and (interpretive) linearity become manifest on different levels. For this purpose, Coulmas briefly delineates two more types of syllabic alphabets (Mangyan and Ethiopic scripts), and goes on to elaborate on the Korean script generally known as Han'gŭl, which is now well known for its “formal simplicity and systematic beauty” (156), and which is characterized by the iconicity of basic letter shapes (for positions of articulation) and the systematic arrangement of syllable blocks encoding consonants and vowels.

In Chap. 9, “Mixed systems,” Coulmas considers four scripts – Egyptian, Akkadian, Japanese, and English – all of which represent different degrees of mixing of the basic elements. Egyptian incorporates logograms (or ideograms), phonograms, and determinatives (semantic classifiers indicating materials, events, people, etc.), and the resulting system is quite complex in that one cannot differentiate the functional differences just by looking at the graphic appearance. This is the case also with Akkadian, which is an outcome of adapting Sumerian cuneiform writing to a Semitic language. It uses logograms, syllabograms, and determinatives, respecting the literary culture of the original Sumerian writing system. The Japanese writing system is similar in the latter respect, preserving many of the characteristics of Chinese system but modifying it through the application of indigenous interpretations of Chinese characters as well as the addition of two syllabaries called kana. English is an interesting case because, owing to its historical contacts with other languages (through the Norman Conquest) and phonological changes (through, e.g., the Great English Vowel Shift), several principles for reading coexist to the extent that the overall match between spelling and pronunciation is very low.

The topic of chap. 10, the history of writing, partially overlaps that of chap. 3, but here Coulmas focuses on three essential themes: writing's origin, its development, and its spread. With regard to origin and development, he states that writing was invented at least four times – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica – but he avoids monogeneticism and unidirectional evolutionism, which ultimately lead to a quasi-Darwinian view that writing evolves toward a destined goal, usually perceived to be the Roman alphabet. Finally, he takes the position that the spread and transformation of scripts has usually been motivated by trade and religion, but he acknowledges that language is always suffused with influences from indigenous sociocultural environments.

Chaps. 11 (“Psycholinguistics of writing”) and 12 (“Sociolinguistics of writing”) summarize relevant basic research questions and findings in the respective fields. Psycholinguistic research on literacy has been conducted predominantly in the study of reading, an area in which research designs are relatively easily controlled. In writing, however, there are many mental processes operating at the same time – including relevant physical operations before, during, and after the act of writing – and they are enclosed within “the black box” to a much greater extent. This, as well as the paucity of effective experimental techniques, undoubtedly has caused research on writing to lag behind. Yet even with these inadequacies, research on reading and writing has been steadily gaining in importance because of the widespread view that illiteracy is a social problem that should be eradicated, and an assumption that “written language, once mastered, takes on a life of its own, influencing the way we speak and conceptualize language” (221).

Although the scope of the author's argument is rather limited, chap. 12 takes on sociolinguistic aspects of illiteracy as a social problem. Coulmas first sketches the attitudes commonly taken toward illiteracy and illiterate people and contrasts with them the written code as the embodiment of the centralization of resources. He then discusses some instances of standardization, diglossia, and digraphia, all of which divide and stratify people in certain ways in indigenous contexts. Accordingly, the facets of literacy and illiteracy in society, as well as those of writing reforms, serve as indicators of social inequalities, loyalties, stigmas, and identities based on ethnocultural backgrounds.

As mentioned at the outset, there are some new developments that would appeal to researchers and students of writing that are not covered in this book, especially in the areas of sociocultural analysis and the language ideology of reading and writing. (Given the rapid advancement in individual domains, however, a general overview such as this will inevitably suffer from this inadequacy.) Because a basic knowledge of linguistics and its terminology is assumed, some portions of the author's discussion are highly technical and compel a very careful reading and even rereading. But the summary and exercises provided at the end of each chapter do help to highlight the basic issues and to clarify the points raised.

With regard to the organization of the book, there are some editorial problems that should be addressed in a future edition, such as typographical errors in scripts and transliterations and inconsistent citing of figures and tables in the text. Despite these things, the book will definitely provide an extraordinary learning experience for those interested in the study of language. The book's lasting value lies in its precise and systematic accounts of the intrinsic variability and intricate realizations of sound-form mapping in world writing systems, and in its clear exposition of the comparative stances in the linguistic investigation of writing in relation to speech. It represents an indispensable asset for both in-depth and cross-linguistic study of writing, and as such it accomplishes what other monographs on writing have rarely managed to achieve completely.