"Written language" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a small stamp bearing the ideograph which indicated the name Candron was using. Illiteracy still ran high in China because of the difficulty in memorizing the tens of thousands of ideographs which made up the written language, so each man carried a chop to imprint his name. Officially, China used the alphabet, spelling out the Chinese words phonetically—and, significantly, they had chosen the Latin alphabet of the Western nations rather than the Cyrillic of the Soviets. ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the brushwood and looked down. She shivered a little. From here they could see beneath the bows of the rocket-ship. And there was a name there, in the Cyrillic alphabet which was the official written language of the Com-Pubs. Here, on United Nations soil, it was insolent. It boasted that the red ship came, not from an alien planet, but from a nation more alien still to all the United Nations stood for. The Com-Pubs—the Union of Communist Republics—were neither communistic nor republics, but ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... written language of their own, the general rule of decision is an appeal to ancient custom; but since the system of Mahomet has made so great progress among them, the converts to that faith have gradually introduced, with the religious tenets, many of the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... whose spoken words were polysyllabic, and not monosyllabic like Chinese, had no written language beyond certain rude attempts at alphabetic writing, formed from Chinese characters, and found to be of little practical value. The necessity for something more convenient soon appealed to the prescient and active mind of Nurhachu; accordingly, in 1599, he gave orders ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... spelling in a phonetic direction. Those who fear that if phonetics is taught in the schools it will then follow that our books will be commonly printed in phonetic symbols, should read Dr. Henry Bradley's lecture to the British Academy 'On the relations between spoken and written language' (1913), and they will see that the Society's Tract II, on 'English Homophones', illustrates the unpractical nature of any scheme either of pure phonetics in the printing of English books, or even of such a scheme as is offered by 'the Simplified ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... read the Poet's dream, Shadow forth his glorious theme, And in written language tell The workings of the potent spell, Whose mysterious tones impart Life and vigour to his heart? 'Tis an emanation bright, Shooting from the fount of light; Flowing in upon the mind, Like sudden dayspring on the blind; Gilding with ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... s to r in this tense, and the assimilation of the inflections to the present, does not occur in the written language until the middle of the seventeenth century. The personal pronouns were always used with this tense in its late form, and the final consonants of the personal inflections generally coalesced with the pronouns, and so were omitted in writing, thus therav vî, theron nŷ, therough whŷ, ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... Pictur'd walls, l. 76. The application of mankind, in the early ages of society, to the imitative arts of painting, carving, statuary, and the casting of figures in metals, seems to have preceded the discovery of letters; and to have been used as a written language to convey intelligence to their distant friends, or to transmit to posterity the history of themselves, or of their discoveries. Hence the origin of the hieroglyphic figures which crowded the walls of the temples of antiquity; many of ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... common. But that initial stage is to be noted; it is the thing the Hebrew schoolboy, the Tamil schoolboy, the Chinese schoolboy, and the American schoolboy have in common. So much, at any rate, of the school appears wherever there is a written language, and its presence marks a stage in the civilizing process. As I have already pointed out in my book "Anticipations," the presence of a reading and writing class of society and the existence of an organized nation (as distinguished from a tribe) appear together. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... suggest in passing that a considerable part of the K.C. is in rhythmic prose—some of it declamatory. I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spoken word and intonation—not written language. It really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... makes us regard animals with a certain degree of contempt, and flatter our vanity in qualifying the baser part of our sexual appetite by the term animal instinct. But we are really very unjust toward animals. This injustice is partly due to the fact that vocal and written language gives us a means of penetrating into the psychology of our fellow creatures. By the aid of the common symbolism of our thoughts it is easy for us to compare them. Language thus enables us to construct a general human psychology. The absence of language, even in the higher animals, renders ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... time, I heard the story of Bishop Bedell, of the Irish Bible, and of the good work in rapid progress among the aborigines of the land. The extent and inveteracy of the disease, I well knew; but the suitability of the remedy had never been set before me. In fact, I hardly knew that the Irish was a written language; and strange it seemed, to have passed three years in a part of the country where it is extensively spoken, and in the house of one who always conversed in that tongue with the rustic frequenters of her shop, yet to be so grossly ignorant of all relating to it. I resolved to become an active partisan ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... a long time to solve this problem, but I think that by teaching a number of them to read and write English we shall then be able more quickly to give them a written language of ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ancient Egyptian monarch, show that a high degree of civilization prevailed from 2000 to 1300 B.C. The art displayed in the carvings and paintings, and the skill of the artisans are beyond praise. They had knowledge even of what are now lost arts. They had a written language 300 years before Homer wrote his immortal Iliad. Yet many higher critics claim that writing was unknown in the days of Moses and Homer. They declare that the Iliad, a poem in 24 books, was committed to memory, and handed ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... cheerfully, the window and door closed tightly by skins, shutting out the cold air. Here they amused themselves in recounting past scenes, and strange wild legends with which they had become familiar. Without a written language, the Indian preserves his national and domestic history solely by oral instruction, handed down from father to son. Thus every tribe has its own legends, while many vague traditions of national history are peculiar to the whole ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... The written language is the same everywhere, each character, of which the Chinese say there are between eighty and a hundred thousand, representing a complete word, so that before being able to read, and more especially write, a single sentence, each individual character in it ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... that any tradition or custom is common to all the tribes, or even to all of one tribe, of Borneans, would be far too sweeping. A still greater drawback to any universality, in legend or custom, is that there is no written language, not even so much as picture-drawings on rocks to give us a clue to ancient myths or traditions. The natives of Borneo are in a certain sense savages, but yet they are savages of a high order, possessed of a civilization far above what is usually implied by the ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... from spoken to written language, we come upon several classes of facts, all having similar implications. Written language is connate with Painting and Sculpture; and at first all three are appendages of Architecture, and have a direct connection with the primary form of all Government—the theocratic. Merely noting by the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows, must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victim of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which more real enjoyment can be derived than the art of letter-writing. All praise to the inventive genius that gave to man a written language, and with it the implements with which to talk across the world! Did you ever think, reader, what a world this would be without pen, ink, and paper? Then, the absence of friends were painful, and, as we grasped the friendly ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams |
