THE HISTORY OF WRITING 11

than attempts to represent the most funda-mental and abstract properties of spoken language, namely, phonemes, has the impor-tant implication I briefly mentioned above. It implies that these revisions of writing sys-tems were at the same time discoveries of the implicit properties of speech. This provides justification for the radical conclusion that I advanced earlier (Olson, 1994) namely, that

16 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF WRITING DEVELOPMENT

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