ABSTRACT
The scriptist bias of modern linguistics reveals itself most crudely in the way in which, for all their insistence in principle on the primacy of the spoken word, linguistic theorists in practice follow the traditional assumption that standard orthographic representation correctly identifies the main units of the spoken language. An isolated monoglot community having only the most tenuous contacts with its linguistically alien neighbours would have no reason for supposing that languages were in principle translatable. The concept of a language which is required has to be such as to admit the possibility in principle of the same language cropping up in two different civilisations widely separated in time and space, in such manifestly disparate guises as Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Dutch alphabet. Saussure insisted on the primacy of the spoken word as an indispensable foundation of modern linguistics, and reproached nineteenth-century comparativists such as Bopp and Grimm with failure to distinguish clearly between sounds and letters.
