Russia to that of the Basques, from that of Portugal to that of 
Peru, are derivatives of the Graeco-Roman letters. Their unique 
separation of sight and sound from semantic and verbal 
content made them a most radical technology for the 
translation and homogenization of cultures. All other forms of 
writing had served merely one culture, and had served to 
separate that culture from others. The phonetic letters alone 
could be used to translate, albeit crudely, the sounds of any 
language into one-and-the-same visual code. Today, the effort 
of the Chinese to use our phonetic letters to translate their 
language has run into special problems in the wide tonal 
variations and meanings of similar sounds. This has led to the 
practice of fragmenting Chinese monosyllables into 
polysyllables in order to eliminate tonal ambiguity. The Western 
phonetic alphabet is now at work transforming the central 
auditory features of the Chinese language and culture in order