Cx3: Fry's Planet Word

Fry's Planet Word - The inimitable Stephen Fry provides expert curation on language and the written word across the world that has driven communication. If you have not already seen it, I do recommend you take the time to watch.

The series provides fascinating insight into the evolutionary (and revolutionary) characterisation of language and the essential development of the written word that supports interaction, engagement and technology. Without it, we would not be where we are today.

In last night's programme, "Stephen discovers the earliest writing - cuneiform - at the British Museum, and learns how our alphabet came from the Phoenicians. As part of his exploration of the diversity of scripts, Stephen visits 106-year-old Mr Zhou, the inventor of the Chinese phonetic writing system called Pinyin, who relates how literacy increased four-fold after its introduction under Mao.

After the written word came the printed word, and Stephen looks at how this has shaped our relationship with writing, giving us libraries, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. From the Bodleian to Diderot's favourite café to the cutting-edge research at MIT, Stephen explores how the written word evolved into printing, then libraries, encyclopaedias and computer code. Blogging and twittering is just the tip of a brave new future which no one dares predict."

There are echoes of Steve Jobs' passionate story about taking calligraphy classes upon dropping out of college, which retrospectively turned out to be a 'connecting dot', introducing multiple typefaces and proportionately spaced fonts to the Apple Mac.

Stephen Fry has carved his niche as an expert wordsmith and an influential voice on Twitter. He curates the programme with a down-to-earth raw passion that cannot help but draw you in. Watch Stephen Fry's Planet Word on BBC iPlayer.

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