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Nadin, Mihai, 1938-

"The Civilization of Illiteracy"

It
affects the nature of human work and the nature of social,
political, and national organization within emerging national
states. A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resource
availability shows that with language, writing and reading, and
finally with literacy, and even more through engineering outside
language experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic human
action was put in place, and used to compensate for the
progressive imbalance between population growth and resources.
Our time is in more than one way the expression of a semiosis
with deep roots in the pragmatic context in which writing
emerged. Engineering dominates today. In trying to define the
semiosis of engineering, i.e. how the relation between work we
associate with engineering and language evolved, we evidence
both continuity-in the form of successive replications-and
discontinuity-in the new condition of the current engineering
work. Our reference can be made to both the dissemination of the
writing system based on the Phoenician alphabet, and the
language of drawing that makes engineering possible.
Phoenician traders supplied materials to the Minoans. The Minoan
burial culture involved the burial of precious objects that
embodied the experience of crafts. These objects were made out
of silver, gold, tin, and lead. In time, increased quantities of
such metals were permanently removed from the market.


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