Logographic and Semasiographic Writing Systems: A Critique of Sampson’s Classification

The composer John Cage once remarked that silence is the sound the environment makes. Though Cage showed insight by noting that we rarely if ever experience a total lack of sound, one could hardly imagine a worse definition of the word “silence”. Cage’s observation is an oxymoron: its truth derives from the rhetorical force of a contradiction, which in turn depends on the fact the word “silence” denotes the absence of sound, not its presence. Anyone who thought Cage had actually improved on the definition of silence would simply be missing the point.

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