protoliterate
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English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Adjective[edit]
protoliterate (not comparable)
- (of a culture) With written language that is in its early stages.
- 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 131:
- Knowledge of a "fact" and its institutionalization in a society are quite distinct: murder, for example, was probably "discovered" in the Pliocene, but the institutionalization of murder in warfare does not seem to have occurred until the late Neolithic or the protoliterate period.
- (of a person) In the early stages of learning to read and write.