Stephen Houston

Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change - School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series Stephen Houston

Ten specialists convened at a seminar to address the question of what happens between the origins of a writing system and the time of eventual ‘script death’ or ‘extinction’. Although scholars are close to conceptualizing the way scripts emerge and pass into obsolescence, they are still far from explaining how scripts maintain themselves over time or how and why they change when they do.