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Nadin, Mihai, 1938-

"The Civilization of Illiteracy"

), and thus to support practical efforts
to diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth in
number. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written.
Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, and
in socially related interaction. The practical effort to embody
knowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survival
into all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation,
navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, the
development of the effort to optimize writing, better imitated
oral language. Personal characteristics, making the oral
expressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written with
the hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in the
phonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and what
others call the democratic language of phonetic writing deserve
their names only if we understand that languages are both
constitutive and representative of human experience.
Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed by
the object of the practical experience. Divided labor, while
affecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance of
the work process, is participatory, in the sense that its
results are related to the performance of each participant in the
process. Practical experience of language and experience of
divided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to the
pragmatic framework of this particular human scale.


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