Being my usual dense self, I didn't catch that. I put too much meaning in the misleading word hieratic. Your point is made.
Btw, I purchased a nice looking book on hieroglyphics yesterday. I might add more thoughts when I have read it.
>I've never seen the Jonstown compendium.
The short notices found in the margins of RQ Companion and most issues of TotRM for example.
>Why do Grey Sages _need_ literacy?
For stuff just like that: disjointed pieces of knowledge, true or false, compiled from various sources, without enough context to be memorized in a reasonable way. I see LM sages as very encyclopediac fellows, collecting every scrap of 'knowledge' they can find and adding it to their tomes. But that is of course very far from the functions of a tribal lawspeaker.
>The signs found on the shells are
>pictograms?. Stylization being the development? And then turning into
>ideograms?
The signs on the oracular bones and bronze vessels are ideograms, but the symbolic pictures are easier to recognize for what they depict than modern chinese signs are since the latter are stylized to make them easier to write. There are also much fewer composite signs in the Shang writings.
>I'll gleefully continue the terminological
>fencing with you, Nils, in private, if this hasn't cleared things up.
I'll see if I can find anything else to pick on :-) Seriously though, the details that gritted on my sensibilities are all cleared up. I am not a linguist, so I won't contest such arguments.
/Nils W
Powered by hypermail