Writing is so ingrained in our culture, as well as in other cultures, that it can often seem as natural as the speech that it represents. One’s own writing system is often seen as the best for accurately conveying ideas and all others are somehow less clear or concise. This idea stems from the inherent belief that one’s culture is superior to others. In our culture, our orthographic and verbal universes often do not extend beyond the languages and writing systems with which we are familiar. Our egotism for our own culture and its linguistic systems (by no means a unique feature in the world) only becomes apparent when we choose to, or are forced to interact with other cultures. At a basic and reactionary level, these other cultures with which we interact often feel the same entitlement to chauvinism as ourselves. To objectify and quantify the superiority of ourselves over the “other”, we compare features of other languages with our own. Any feature present in our language but absent in another, is a deficiency in the other language, and any feature it possesses which our language lacks, is seen as superfluous, or an aberration. When we use autometry to measure other languages against our own, those most similar to ourselves inevitably appear better than those that are more dissimilar. If a culture is missing an entire category such as a written language system, then we assume that their deficiencies must be quite fundamental. The anthropological ideas of cultural relativity and linguistic relativity allow us a new perspective. (Duranti, 1997, p. 60) According to cultural relativism, the behaviors and patterns, such as writing, of other cultures can only be examined in their own terms, and not by the qualifications of another culture. This does not mean that writing systems cannot be compared; it only means that differences should not be equated with