signs for the infinity of data and operations of social action. In 
contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able 
to encompass all languages. Such an achievement, however, 
involved the separation of both signs and sounds from their 
semantic and dramatic meanings. No other system of writing 
had accomplished this feat.

     The same separation of sight and sound and meaning 
that is peculiar to the phonetic alphabet also extends to its 
social and psychological effects. Literate man undergoes much 
separation of his imaginative, emotional, and sense life, as 
Rousseau (and later the Romantic poets and philosophers) 
proclaimed long ago. Today the mere mention of D. H. 
Lawrence will serve to recall the twentieth-century efforts made 
to by-pass literate man in order to recover human “wholeness.” 
If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner