Body Language & Banter 87

Body Language & Banter 87 degree of inflection is used in English, but only in extreme emotional contexts: A Chinese argument over cold tea can sound like an accusation of murder to a Western ear. Symbolic Communication The earliest recorded permanent human communication is cave painting, dating to 33,000BcE. Written communication emerged in Sumer, the southern part of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), using a script called Cuneiform, written on clay tablets. It was used primarily for accounting. The Sumerians are responsible for our common use of base twelve. Twelve hours in a day, inches in a foot, and notes in the scale; all stem from their civilization. Although not the first to write stories, the Greeks perfected the dramatic forms we use today: poetry, prose and plays. Watch an episode of ‘Law and Order’ and you are seeing a direct descendant of a Greek tragedy, complete with suffering and justice denied. All this permanent thought art is made possible by the translation of ideas into symbols. Scripts and Symbols The world supports a huge variety of scripts split roughly into phonetic, representing the component sound of words, and pictographic, stylized pictures of the ideas. Traditional # se Simplified JF # =} Open Picture Learn Chinese Traditional and Simplified Some scripts have interesting quirks. Ancient Hebrew, although phonetic, is a script where vowels are omitted. Modern Hebrew often leaves them out as well. This means words can be ambiguous and need context to decipher them. A common set of Chinese characters has long been used by Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese speakers even though HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015777