ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind↗

History becomes possible only when the Word turns into words. Only verbatim traditions enable the historian to reconstruct the past.

At the time when heaven still embraced the earth, when Uranus still lay with full-hipped Gaia, an aeon before the Olympian gods, the Titans were born and with them, memory, or Mnemosyne.

The Lindisfarne Gospel , painted and lettered around 697 A.D., brings into sight the watershed that separates the oral from the descriptive mind.

In wordless speech there is no word-for-word reproduction of meaning. Writing had fixed neither the language frontier nor the monolingual dependence on translation.

The practical concern in the thirteenth century with the identity of two charters and the spiritual concern with the individuality of each person reflect the new ability to distinguish what is in the...

Both literary and moral feigning depend on the author's ability to reshape (in Latin fingere, whence "fiction") his own thoughts of untruth, which in the late Middle Ages is called narration.

The language that we hear spoken today is full of words of a special type: These words we will call amoeba-words, and the vocabulary that they constitute, Uniquack.

George Steiner closes After Babel , "in which the problem of Babel and of the nature of language is so insistently examined,"with the statement that the Kabbalah"knows of a day of redemption on which...