Historical Linguistics 3130 A

Talk on the history of the Greek alphabet.

While writing systems are not really a focus of our historical linguistics course, some of you may be interested in a talk by local author David Sacks on "Ancient Near Eastern Writing and the Birth of the Greek Alphabet." It's in Arts 016 at 2 p.m. on October 14 (Friday after Thanksgiving).

Sacks has written two books on the history of the alphabet recently. There is information about them on the Random House web site. Even though he is mainly talking about the alphabet, there is definitely information we can learn about ancient languages by looking at written records, and we will be talking about this later in the course.