suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
>
> > Can you tell me anything about the Henry Smith Williams *History of the
> > Art of Writing* you mentioned last week? I've discovered that it's four
> > boxes of plates, either 50 per box, or "203 [i.e. 228] plates," which I
> > am stumped by; and that I actually have a work by Mr. Smith Williams --
> > the Wonder Book of the World's Knowledge (1935), ten little volumes of
> > gee whiz! factoids that would amuse the kiddies. (They certainly amused
> > this kiddie, 40 years ago.)
> >
> > There's a copy available for purchase for considerably less than any
> > other available copy, which is "missing plates 155 and 157." Since
> > they're from the "Oriental" set, I imagine they'd be important to me.
>
> Unfortuanately I don't know any more than that he refers to it when
> he writes in this book which is now an e-book, available on the
> internet in its entirety. He certainly had a way with words.

I thought you said you'd consulted it in that basement room of yours.

> A History of Science Volume I
> by Henry Smith Williams
> Part V
> The Alphabet Achieved
>
> http://www.worldwideschool.org/library
>
> Go to this webpage and look up Henry Smith Williams by Author under
> W.
>
> "We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final
> stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the devious
> and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is
> possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the
> shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of
> others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward. And this is
> seemingly what happened in the final development of the art of
> writing. For while the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content with
> their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them,
> geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps did
> not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary its
> secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary sign
> for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of human
> inventions, the alphabet. .....
>
> It made possible for the first time that education of the masses
> upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely to
> depend."

It's clear that he didn't understand how cuneiform works.

I'll be seeing the portfolios today.

> But in 1981 M.A. Powell (Visible Speech 15) said
>
> "the inescapable conclusion is that the introduction of the
> alphabet, by itself, has had little effect on the reduction of
> functional illiteracy, and thus its importance in the history of
> human development has been overestimated, whereas that of cuneiform
> has probably been underestimated."
>
> So I think of 1880's, Taylor, to 1980's as the century of the
> alphabet.
>
> What do you know about Powell?

He's a _really_ nice guy who seems to have felt very isolated out there
in DeKalb -- after ca. 1980, he stopped coming to events in Chicago, to
the Midwest or national AOS meetings, etc.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...