This book also begins with that wondrous first Information Technology and then moves on to tales about the wonders of the written word—great stories, many of them likely new to most readers. In them, you‘ll find all the backgrounds, foregrounds, premises, conclusions, and surprises that make up the best and most valuable books....

In the Bible, God‘s first gift to man isn‘t a lesson about how to make a fire or fashion a needle, a knife, or a spear. He first blesses him with language. Even before He takes Adam‘s rib to make Eve, He tells Adam to name every living creature. Adam immediately understands God‘s words and enunciates his own....

1. Did Water Monkeys Swim before We Spoke?-From whence cometh language, the InfoTech that lets us dominate our planet? We listen. We easily hallucinate word boundaries. Spaces, such as you see in writing, are absent from speech. Yet somehow we find it easy to make sense of speech. -- 2. The Gift of Memory-For millennia, mnemonics reigned over commerce, news, entertainment, and the perpetuation and refinement of crafts. -- 3. From Whence Cometh Indo-European Tongues?-Did a freshwater lake community flee a saltwater surge that filled the Black Sea and scatter its language west toward the Atlantic, southeast toward India, and northeast toward the Pacific? -- 4. Scripting Symbols of Shape-Scripting symbolic images lets man communicate over space and time. Balance of power shifts from tribal chiefs to city-state warrior-kings and priests. -- 5. Symbols of Sound Demand Analysis-The alphabet makes the pen mightier than the sword, generating the powers of knowledge needed to create and govern empires. -- 6. China‘s InfoTech Siblings-For centuries, the Chinese keep to themselves ?the wasps’ secret? and then develop printing blocks—the precur...