Symbols

Richard Sproat is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, Japan, working on Deep Learning for applications in speech and language processing. He attended the University of California, San Diego and then MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1985. He has published widely in various areas of linguistics and computational linguistics, and he has a particular interest in writing systems and symbol systems. His prior relevant books in this area include A Computational Theory of Writing Systems (2000) and Language, Technology, and Society (2010). He has been invited as a speaker to various international venues related to writing and symbol systems, such as the "Signs of Writing" conference (Chicago, 2014; Beijing, 2015), and he was a keynote speaker at "Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century" (Paris, 2022). He was a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System (2016), wrote a chapter (with Amalia Gnanadesikan) on writing systemsin the Oxford Bibliographies (2018), and contributed a chapter on writing systems to the Oxford History of Phonology (2022). He is on the editorial board of "Written Language and Literacy".

“The book is the first systematic study of graphical symbol systems, ranging from the imagery found in Paleolithic cave paintings, through ancient and contemporary writing systems employing both phonetic and logographic symbols, to modern language-independent symbols such as meteorological icons and emoji.” (Andrew Robinson, Science, science.org, Vol. 382 (6669), October 27, 2023)

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Semiotics.- 3. Taxonomy.- 4. Writing Systems.- 5. Symbols in the Brain.- 6. The Evolution of Writing.- 7. Simulations.- 8. Misrepresentations.- 9. The Future.