cultures of "preliterate orality" lack a "descriptive mode of perception"
the development of the alphabet "introduces a new state of mind--the alphabetic mind, if the expression be allowed" (Walter J. Ong)
Duden 33: "Without a concept of memory as the storehouse of retreivable sentences that can be quoted verbatim, reality does not solidify into the sort of descriptive terms that have become so self-evident to us"
34: "Only [an] intensive literary culture [such as that] of the fourth century made possible the emergence of a corpus of body descriptions"