The gutenberg galaxy 137 A detailed history of spoken and written languages would be irrelevant to our present subject, but nevertheless there are certain matters of interest which may be taken as a starting-point. The early writings of Mediterranean civilizations were in picture, or “logographic” script: simple pictures were used to represent objects and also, by association, ideas, actions, names, and so on. Also, what is much more important, phonetic writing was developed, in which sounds were given symbols. With the passage of time, the pictures were reduced to more formal symbols as determined by the difficulty of using a chisel, or a reed brush, while the phonetic writing simplified into a set of two or three dozen alphabetic letters, divided into consonants and vowels. In Egyptian hieroglyphics we have a supreme example of what is now called redundancy in languages and code; one of the difficulties in deciphering the Rosetta stone lay in the fact that a polysyllabic word might give each syllable not one symbol but a number of different ones in common use, in order that the word should be thoroughly understood. (The effect when literally transcribed into English is one of stuttering.) On the other hand the Semitic languages show an early recognition of redundancy. Ancient Hebrew script had no vowels: modern Hebrew has none, too, except in children’s books. Many other ancient scripts have no vowels. Slavonic Russian went a step further in condensation: in religious texts, commonly used words were abbreviated to a few letters, in a manner similar to our present-day use of the ampersand, abbreviations such as lb and the increasing use of initials, e.g., U.S.A., Unesco, O.K. It is not the avoidance of redundancy that is the key to the phonetic alphabet and its effects on person and society. “Redundancy” is a “content” concept, itself a legacy of alphabetic technology. That is, any phonetic writing is a visual code for speech. Speech is the “content” of phonetic writing. But it is not the content of any other kind of writing. Pictographic and ideographic varieties of writing are Gestalts or snapshots of various situations, personal or social. In fact, we can get a good idea of non-alphabetic forms of writing from modern mathematical equations like E=MC2 or from the ancient Greek and Roman “figures of rhetoric.” Such equations or figures have no content but are structures like an individual melody which evoke their own world. The figures of rhetoric are postures of the mind, as hyperbole, or irony, or litotes, or simile, or paranomasia. Picture writing of all kinds is a ballet of such postures which delights our modern bias towards synesthesia and audile-tactile richness of experience,