A Review of Meletis and Dürscheid (2022)

This working review evaluates Dimitrios Meletis and Christa Dürscheid's Writing Systems and Their Use as a strong recent comparative theory of writing and a useful pressure test for signed-language writing. The review treats the book's layer-level contribution as correct and useful: it moves beyond crude speech-dependence, gives writing internal structure, takes visual form and materiality seriously, and handles typology with real self-awareness. Its full-path judgment is that the framework remains typologically incomplete once signed writing and SignWriting are treated as real writing on their own terms, with plane-based written units, authored spatial composition, and signed-text infrastructure. This document DOI record includes the signed-writing pressure-test companion paper as a companion packet file for the review.