François Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P.
Seaton of L'écriture poétique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1977).
"The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke, separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5). He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic strokes,…one obtains other ideograms." The example given is that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big] and further on [sky, heaven].
On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, The
Early history of Indo-European Languages, in Scientific
American, March 1990, pp.110-116.
Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing (through the use of optical character recognition programs) led some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading (of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books, and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states: "RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key." The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena referred to are not a matter of advertisement slogans but of a new means for reading and even writing. A program such as VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician, the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language) and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors) is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words: "(belted/non-belted,) (driver/passenger) in (low/moderate/high) velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and (claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal phrases summarize situations that correspond to circumstances on record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions: "throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those beyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of the doctor.
The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated in Frances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system of theater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on the Shakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, orators constructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids in rehearsing and properly presenting their speeches.
Functioning of Language
Research on memory and language functions in the brain is being carried out at the University of Minnesota, Institute of Child Development. Work is focused on individuals who are about to undergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. The goal is to provide a functional map of the brain.
"History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, in its description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3).
Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabet and the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988.
In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on the different cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) and logographic (Kanji) characters in Japanese (p. 301).