“sensible phenomenon that had previously called forth the spoken utterance, to the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written character. A direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured. The evocative phenomena—the entities imaged—are no longer a necessary part of the equation. Human utterances are now elicited, directly, by human-made signs; the larger, more-than-human life-world is no longer a part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part of the system. Or is it? When we ponder the early Semitic aleph-beth, we readily recognize its pictographic inheritance. Aleph, the first letter, is written thus: ​  Aleph is also the ancient Hebrew word for “ox.” The shape of the letter, we can see, was that of an ox’s head with horns; turned over, it became our own letter A.13 The name of the Semitic letter mem is also the Hebrew word for “water”; the letter, which later became our own letter M, was drawn as a series of waves: . The letter ayin, which also means “eye” in Hebrew, was drawn as a simple circle, the picture of an eye; it is this letter, made over into a vowel by the Greek scribes, that eventually became our letter O. The Hebrew letter qoph, which is also the Hebrew term for “monkey,” was drawn as a circle intersected by a long, dangling, tail ​ . Our letter Q retains a sense of this simple picture.14 These are a few examples. By thus comparing the names of the letters with their various shapes, we discern that the letters of the early aleph-beth are still implicitly tied to the more-than-human field of phenomena. But these ties to other animals, to natural elements like water and waves, and even to the body itself, are far more tenuous than in the earlier, predominantly nonphonetic scripts. These traces of sensible nature linger in the new script only as vestigial holdovers from the old—they are no longer necessary participants in the transfer of linguistic knowledge. The other animals, the plants, and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning to lose their own voices. In the Hebrew”