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06628_Field_TCUM T193.txt
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1996-04-10
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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