patted, petted and prodded in Greece. You may end up 
     feeling like the family dog . . . in an affectionate family. This 
     propensity to pat seems to us a tactile extension of the avid 
     Greek curiosity noted before. It’s as though your hosts are 
     trying to find out what you are made of.

     The widely separate characters of the spoken and written 
words are easy to study today when there is ever closer touch 
with nonliterate societies. One native, the only literate member 
of his group, told of acting as reader for the others when they 
received letters. He said he felt impelled to put his fingers to his 
ears while reading aloud, so as not to violate the privacy of 
their letters. This is interesting testimony to the values of 
privacy fostered by the visual stress of phonetic writing. Such 
separation of the senses, and of the individual from the group, 
can scarcely occur without the influence of phonetic writing.