Writing systems: methods for recording language

Until recently, the study of writing systems was something of a Cinderella subject within the discipline of linguistics. For a long time there was only one standard monograph, I.J. Gelb’s 1952 book A Study of Writing, which was valuable but was little influenced by the insights of modern structural linguistics. Many linguists saw human language as a window onto biologically-determined structures and processes of cognition; writing, as a technology evolved only within the past few thousand years and hence clearly a cultural rather than biological endowment, seemed accordingly less interesting than spoken language.