История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 9 стр.

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range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas

or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet door is an elliptical way of writing

“women's washroom,” just as the word “women” had been earlier. The plaque on

the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader already knows how to

express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider expressed the

message that horses and riders should avoid the trail.

Such signs, therefore, express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by

representing meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word.

Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a restricted set of

possible meanings.

The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are

great. These differences are that pictorial signs are “motivated,” that is, they

visually suggest their meanings, and that they express whole propositions rather

than single words. But such a collection of signs could express only an extremely

limited set of meanings.

Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are

so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read

them. Such reading ability is described as “environmental” literacy, not associated

with books and schooling.

Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such

symbols as the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many

languages, appear to express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic

structure. However, it is more useful to think of these numerals as a particular

orthography for representing the meaning structure of these numbers rather than

their sound structures. The advantages of this orthography are that the orthography

permits the user to carry out mathematical operations, and that the same

orthography may be assigned different phonological equivalents in different

languages using the same number system. Thus, the numeral 2 is pronounced

“two” in English, “deux” in French, “zwei” in German, and so on. Yet it represents

not a thought but the word, a piece of language.