Sampson, G: Writing Systems Second Edition

Reviews of the Second Edition
This book remains one of the most interesting, useful and balanced works on the typology, history and psychology of written language, and the revisions made for the second edition bring it nicely up to date.
Journal of Linguistics
The book is quite readable, is clearly written, and the bulk of it is a pleasure to read. The reader does need a basic knowledge of phonology to follow the totality of the book, and what a morpheme is, but not more than that. Thus the potential audience is fairly broad. Even those with no linguistic background could benefit to some degree.
By choosing key examples and representative orthographies, this volume quite nicely achieves its main goal of providing a typology of the main writing systems of the world’s languages.
LinguistList
Praise for the first edition
This is a splendid book ... of outstanding interest to professional linguists and students of linguistics, and also to the large number of lay readers who are fascinated by facts about human language.
British Book News
A refreshing and rigorous contemporary scientific examination of writing ... Linguists on all fronts should welcome this.
Choice
An incredible tour de force, covering both Western and East Asian scripts, their historical development and their linguistic features. The treatment of Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts is particularly fascinating for a Western reader.
ASI Newsletter
I have found Sampson’s book invaluable as a source of descriptive information ... it is written in a straightforward and approachable manner which makes it very engaging as general reading matter ... shows an acquaintance with recent psychological work that is seldom to be found in linguistic writing.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
The best linguistic introduction to the study of writing systems now available.
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