The same binome is printed in as many as half-a-dozen or more different combinations of characters that have been used throughout history lo write it out. This indicates powerfully the primacy of sound over written form as the ultimate determinant of Chinese language.
--
The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986)Victor H. Mair
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In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.
William Saroyan
The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
In human history it seems that the idea of using a pictograph in the new function of representing sound may have occurred only three times: once in Mesopotamia, perhaps by the Sumerians, once in China, apparently by the Chinese themselves, and once in Central America, by the Mayas. (Conceivably it was invented only once, but there is no evidence that the Chinese or the Mayas acquired the idea from elsewhere.) The idea that was independently conceived by these three peoples was taken over, as were at times even the symbols themselves, though often in a highly modified form, by others who made adaptations to fit a host of totally different languages. One of the major adaptations, generally attributed to the Greeks, was the narrowing of sound representation from syllabic representation to phonemic representation (Gelb 1963; Trager 1974), after an earlier stage of mixed pictographic and syllabic writing (Chadwick 1967).
John DeFrancis
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.
Eugene Ionesco
What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.
William Saroyan
Mair, Victor H.
Majewski, Andrzej
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