Double art
Taught as we are to read and write in early childhood, we hardly realize the place this wondrous double art fills in civilized life, till we see how it strikes the barbarian who has not even a notion that such a thing can be. John Williams, the South Sea Island Missionary, tells how once being busy carpentering, and having forgotten his square, he wrote a message for it with a bit of charcoal on a chip, and sent this to his wife by a native chief, who, amazed to find that the chip could talk without a mouth, for long afterwards carried it hung by a string around his neck.
(Edward B. Tylor, 1881, Anthropology, pág.167)
Etiquetas: antropologia, citações, linguagem
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