Peter T. Daniels

Peter T. Daniels (born December 11, 1951, currently living in New Jersey) is a scholar of writing systems, specializing in typology. He was co-editor (with William Bright) of the book The World's Writing Systems (1996), and he introduced the terms abjad (an "alphabet" with no vowel letters) and abugida (a system partly alphabetic, partly syllabic) as modern linguistic terms for categories of scripts. (These terms had been used previously in a more restricted sense by specialists in the fields of the Arabic alphabet and Ge'ez script, from which languages they were borrowed respectively.)

Education

• Cornell University: linguistics
• University of Chicago

Teaching

• University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
• Chicago State University

Bibliography

• 2008. Grammatology. In Cambridge Handbook of Literacy David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, (eds.), 25-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 2007. Littera ex occidente: toward a functional history of writing. In Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics Presented to Gene B. Gragg, Cynthia L. Miller, ed, pp. 53–68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 2006. On beyond alphabets. In Script Adjustment and Phonological Awareness, edited by Martin Neef and Guido Nottbusch. Written Language & Literacy. 9(1): 7–24. ISSN 1387-6732
• 2002 translation: Pierre Briant. From Cyrus to Alexander. A History of the Persian Empire. Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana. ISBN 1-57506-031-0
• 1997 Classical Syriac phonology. In Phonologies of Asia and Africa, edited by Kaye. Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana.
• 1997 The Protean Arabic Abjad. In Fs. George Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana.
• 1997 Surveys of languages of the world. In Fs. William Bright. de Gruyter.
• 1996 editor (with William Bright): The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0
• 1995 translation: Gotthelf Bergsträsser. Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text specimens and grammatical sketches. Second edition. Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana. ISBN 0-931464-10-2
• 1994 An overlooked ethological datum bearing on the evolution of human language. In LACUS Forum 1994. Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.
• 1993 Linguistics in the American library classification systems. In LACUS Forum 1993. Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.
• 1992 The Syllabic Origin of Writing and the Segmental Origin of the Alphabet. In Linguistics of Literacy, edited by Downing, Lima, and Noonan. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
• 1991 Ha, La, Ha or Hoi, Lawe, Haut: The Ethiopic letter names. In Fs. Wolf Leslau. Harrassowitz.
• 1991 Is a structural grammatology possible? In LACUS Forum 1991. Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.
• 1990 Fundamentals of grammatology. Journal of the American Orient Society.
• 1983 translation: Gotthelf Bergsträsser. Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text specimens and grammatical sketches. Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana.

External links

• review of Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (edd.), The World's Writing Systems