Williams Re: Alleged Syllabaries from Alphabets

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > > Can you tell me anything about the Henry Smith Williams *History of the
> > > Art of Writing*
> >
> > Another book of Williams is on the interent in its entirety and
> > mentions his view of the alphabet. I'll find it later.
>
> His History of Science (4v.) is available on Gutenberg -- the zip files
> are only ~150 Kb each, so I downloaded them and found the place (v. 1,
> chap. 4). He was not too badly informed, but he doesn't have anything
> particularly interesting to say; doesn't, of course, mention India at
> all.
>
> I'll see the History of Writing tomorrow -- the NYPL's Jewish Division
> has a copy, and there are _two_ librarians who know exactly where in the
> collection it's shelved (even though the main collection's copy is "off
> site," which means somewhere around Princeton, NJ, and there's no
> guarantee they'd be able to find it, so the supposition that it's
> available "in a day or two" is optimistic). But given what he said in
> the HoS just a few years later, I'm not expecting too much. I do hope,
> though, that the presentation will be Haut Art Nouveau.

It turns out to be a huge disappointment. Unlike Clodd's book published
in the same year, and Mason's 1920 book with the same title, it is not a
history of the art of writing. It is nothing but more than 200
photographs of documents (including a few cuneiform tablets in the BM,
and the Rosetta Stone, with the Orient represented by a Batak ms., a
Pali ms. [the plate was missing], a Tibetan page, and a very handsome
Burmese page). There is not one script chart, not one word about how the
scripts represent the texts that are translated.

And it isn't even attractive to the eye.

Fortunately, the other two things I went to the library for were there
and as expected.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...