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08316_Field_TCGG T81.txt
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phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor
did anybody else in his time or later. Before his time, the myth-
makers, poised on the frontiers between the old oral world of
the tribe and the new technologies of specialism and
individualism, had foreseen all and said all in a few words. The
myth of Cadmus states how this King who had introduced the
Phoenician script, or the phonetic alphabet to Greece, had
sown the dragon’s teeth and they had sprung up armed men.
This, as with all myth, is a succinct statement of a complex
social process that had occurred over a period of centuries. But
it was only in recent years that the work of Harold Innis opened
up the Cadmus myth fully. (See, for example, The Bias of
Communication and Empire and Communications. ) The myth,
like the aphorism and maxim, is characteristic of oral culture.
For, until literacy deprives language of his multi-dimensional
resonance, every word is a poetic world unto itself, a