02441cam a2200301 4500 1660872197 TxAuBib 20241018120000.0 ||||||s2022||||||||||||||||||||||||und|u 9781666186697 1666186694 0029397609 Axis360 TxAuBib Ferrara, Silvia. The Greatest Invention [Boundless]. Unabridged. Tantor Media Inc, 2022. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair's oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond.With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer's eye.A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing's future. Format: Acoustik. LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Alphabets & Writing Systems; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Writing / General; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative. General Adult. Importer Version: 2016-03-11.01 Import Date: 2024-10-17 20:00:03. LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES Linguistics Historical & Comparative. LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES Writing General. LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES Alphabets & Writing Systems. Portnowitz, Todd, narrator. https://marfa.boundless.baker-taylor.com/Title?itemId=0029397609 TXMAR