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06630_Field_TCUM T195.txt
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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