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06607_Field_TCUM T172.txt
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1996-04-10
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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.