--- 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.

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."

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?

Suzanne