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06619_Field_TCUM T184.txt
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1996-04-10
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natural and fitting. Teeth are emphatically visual in their lineal
order. Letters are not only like teeth visually, but their power to
put teeth into the business of empire-building is manifest in our
Western history.
The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have
been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there
is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically
meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically
meaningless sounds. This stark division and parallelism
between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and
ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written word
sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured
by forms like the hieroglyph and the Chinese ideogram. These
culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no
means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous