Fry's Planet Word - Series 1 Ep. 4 - Spreading The Word

Episode Info

Synopsis

In this programme, Stephen Fry explores ‘The Written Word’. Writing is our greatest invention – making it possible to communicate across space and time. Without writing we would have no history, and very little technology. 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, 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.

See all available episodes (5)

Episode Info:

Release:

2011

Running Time:

60 min

Certificate:

General viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for young children

Availability:

• Watch online: Unavailable
• Download: Unavailable

Genre:

• Documentary

Cast:

• Stephen Fry

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• This programme looks at the ways language is used and abused.

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