home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
08384_Field_TCGG T149.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
929b
|
16 lines
A detailed history of spoken and written languages
would be irrelevant to our present subject, but
nevertheless there are certain matters of interest which
may be taken as a starting-point. The early writings of
Mediterranean civilizations were in picture, or
“logographic” script: simple pictures were used to
represent objects and also, by association, ideas, actions,
names, and so on. Also, what is much more important,
phonetic writing was developed, in which sounds were
given symbols. With the passage of time, the pictures
were reduced to more formal symbols as determined by
the difficulty of using a chisel, or a reed brush, while the
phonetic writing simplified into a set of two or three
dozen alphabetic letters, divided into consonants and
vowels.
In Egyptian hieroglyphics we have a supreme