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- 2 05 2001 - 23:23 - katatonik

A favourite source for catatonian irritation: when the local pretends to be universal

Textism hosts an impressive collection of writing samples to illustrate “The evolution of writing”. There’s no index, so you have to go through 93 screens to follow evolution. Which I haven’t done, just jumping in here and there, so I might be wrong. But as far as I noticed, nothing to the east of Greece is mentioned. One of my favourite sources of irritation: When content is local but the pretense is universal. After all, it’s called “the evolution of writing”, and not “the evolution of writing in Europe” or “the evolution of writing in the West”.
This reminds me of a discussion on German TV, where Christina von Braun claimed that something – unfortunately I don’t remember what – is unique to European culture because only European writing systems, deriving from ancient Greek, are truly alphabetic and do not represent words through ideograms. Ever heard of Brahmi? Kharosthi? Devanagari? Tibetan? Remember: Just because you can’t read it doesn’t mean it’s not true writing. Thus Spoke The Cringing Catatonian.

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