The Book “Gems of Human Heritage: Our Scripts†Stimulates to Learn

Abstract

[Note added by the editor to foster comprehension of the book Gems of Human Heritage: Our Scripts by Jyoti Prakash Chaudhuri (ISEC, Kolkata, 2008; ISBN: 81-900442-8-1) which is a non-fiction title. It is a narrative on a journey across the languages along the bumpy road of orthography and phonetics in search of a suitable alphabet to solve the problem of discordance between spelling and pronunciation in English language. As a student of Banaras Hindu University the author was exposed to different Indian languages. In Germany he was confronted with European languages. Other academic missions brought him to Middle East and to the University of Hawaii where he could sample the Semitic and Sino-Japanese languages respectively. Scanning the spellings and scrutinizing the sounds he identifies the problem with the Latin alphabets used in English. The retail shops and the websites classify this title under philology, history of languages and ancient cultures.