Review of Cotticelli-Kurras, Paola / Rizza, Alfredo (eds.): Variation within and among Writing Systems: Concepts and Methods in the Analysis of Ancient Written Documents. Reihe: LautSchriftSprache | ScriptandSound, Band 1. Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2017. 384 Seiten. ISBN: 978-3-95490-145-6.

The volume under review inaugurates the series LautSchriftSprache / ScriptandSound, dedicated to graphemic studies in their historical dimension. It gathers twenty-one contributions, most of which were presented at the third LautSchriftSprache conference (Verona, 2013). The editors, Paola Cotticelli-Kurras and Alfredo Rizza, situate the book within the trajectory of earlier meetings in Zürich (2008), organized by Elvira Glaser, and Munich (2010), organized by Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger, which had respectively offered a survey of medieval writing systems and examined the "perfect fit" between speech and script. The Verona conference sought to broaden the range of phenomena under study: geographically, from Anatolia and the Aegean to the Germanic and Italic worlds; chronologically, from the second millennium BCE to the twentieth century; and typologically, from cuneiform and hieroglyphs to alphabets and manuscript traditions. The geographical scope, while impressive within its chosen parameters, remains concentrated on Europe and the Middle East; the absence of independently-created writing systems from China and Mesoamerica represents a notable limitation that future volumes might address. This Eurocentric focus reflects broader issues in comparative writing system studies, where theoretical frameworks developed from alphabetic and syllabic traditions may prove inadequate for understanding logographic systems (Boltz 1994; Handel 2019) or the complex semasiographic elements found in Mesoamerican scripts (Lacadena 2008; Houston 2004). Incorporating writing systems from other regions could potentially alter or enrich the theoretical frameworks proposed in the volume. The volume's theoretical claims about "functional adequacy" and script adaptation would have been significantly strengthened by comparison with Chinese character adaptation across languages (Kornicki 2018) or the sophisticated integration of phonographic and semasiographic elements in Maya writing (Stuart 2013).