Quotes About Communication

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.

The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.

But the line most familiar to European and American readers is the one that led via the Phoenicians to the Greeks by the early eighth century B.C., thence to the Etruscans in the same century, and in the next century to the Romans, whose alphabet with slight modifications is the one used to print this book.

New signs were created by combining old signs to produce new meanings: for example, the sign for head was combined with the sign for bread in order to produce a sign signifying eat.

Information could be spread far more widely, more accurately, and in more detail by writing than it could be transmitted by mouth.

Thus, Sumerian writing came to consist of a complex mixture of three types of signs: logograms, referring to a whole word or name; phonetic signs, used in effect for spelling syllables, letters, grammatical elements, or parts of words; and determinatives, which were not pronounced but were used to resolve ambiguities. Nevertheless

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.

Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness. This

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)

there are current linguistic reverberations—especially the impending disappearance of most of the modern world's 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

It turns out that, in addition to China's eight 'big' languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as 'Chinese'), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 'little' languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.

We tend to have strong inhibitions about being rude to a live human who is two feet away from us, and whom we can see and hear. But we lose those inhibitions when people are reduced to words on a screen.

Pettureilla ei pitäisi olla perhettä, sillä lapset muistavat aina - tai saavat tietää.

You... are not a very nice old man!!!

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.