This quotation gives you an idea of what Illich's _ABC:Alphabetization
of the Popular Mind_ is about.  The quote itself is from his _In
the Vineyard of the Text_.
"We sometimes forget that words are creatures of the alphabet.  The
Greek language originally had no word for 'a word', singly identified.
Greek had only various terms referring to sounds and other signals
or expressions: utterances could be articulated by the lips, the tongue,
or the mouth, but also by the heart when it spoke to the friend, by
the "thymos" (which we might call "gal") which rose in Achilles
and drove him to battle, or by the onrush of a wave of blood. Our kind
of "words", like the other syntactic parts of speech, acquired meaning
only after they had been hatched under the alphabet during the first
centuries of its use.  This is one first obvious reason why, before the
fifth century, a string of "words" could not have been learned or
retained.  We can fix our minds on such units, and cull them from our
mental dictionary, because we can spell them."
This is great stuff.  And he continues:
"The symbol of preliterate memory was the bard, who stitched together
the rags of the past.  That is the reason why he was called *rhapsode* :
stitcher.  According to Plato, he was simply inspired to utter that 
to which the muse impelled him; not by rule of art but by divine grace
he sang (Ion 533).  ... The rhapsode makes "one man hang down from the
other, like the links of the iron chain that hangs from that stone in
the dome of Heraklea that Empedokles calls 'the magnet' " (ion 535) "
The bard, and the act of weaving an epic, the mental act of this, we're
given a good run-through on in _ABC_.  It makes you think different
about what language is.  It really impresses on you that we really
*think* different about language from the people who used language
eons ago.  
-michael
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
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