The origins of literacy.

The two, orality and literacy, are sharpened and focused against each other, yet can be seen as still interwoven in our own society. It is, of course, a mistake to polarize these as mutually exclusive. Their relationship is one of mutual, creative tension, one that has both a historical dimenson – as literate societies have emerged out of oralist ones – and a contemporary one – as we seek a deeper understanding of what literacy may mean to us as it is superimposed on an orality into which we were born and which governs so much of the normal give and take of daily life (11).

It seems, in many of the texts that I am reading, as though there is this tension between orality and literacy. There is no doubt that we are a literate society now, but is literacy better? Have our  minds become mushy and flawed since the move towards written word, or does literacy simply make up for the fallibility of the human memory?

One thing is certain: writing is a learned activity. As I mentioned in this post re: Narasimhan (from the same volume at this), writing is a technology: developed, adopted, learned, but never natural.

The natural human being is not a writer or a reader but a speaker and a listener. Literacy at any stage of its development is in terms of evolutionary time a mere upstart, an artificial exercise, a work of culture, not nature, imposed upon the natural man (20).

The fact that writing is an artificiality means that it will always be set one step outside of human nature. Yes, we learn to write at a young age, and we have (mostly) become quite proficient at it. We use the written word to communicate and to comprehend, to alert others, to remember. But it has not always been that way; before there was written word, there were oral tales, accounts of events passed from person to person.

At some point, though, we needed written language.

Havelock cites the Ancient Greeks in this chapter, around 500AD, as having created the first truly useful, efficient written language. He notes:

A limited set of shapes small enough to be outlined quickly by the hand was devised that could be manipulated to form groups of shapes, combinations of two, three, or four, running to the thousands of such groupings that could correspond to the thousands of linguistic noises produced by the specialised organs of the throat and mouth. A given language restricted itself to a given number. The row of letters on the page became the automatic propmpters of corresponding speech that the brain recites to itself (24).

I am quite fascinated by linguistics. It’s a fascination that I’m not sure will ever lead to me studying linguistics, but it’s given me enough of an interest to be quite taken by the way that letters are combined into words, and those words arranged on the page, and the way that the removal of certain words (or even of something so seemingly minor as punctuation – the example of Let’s eat, kids! vs Let’s eat kids! springs to mind!) can entirely change the meaning of a sentence.

The written word is so natural to me today, sitting here typing out my thoughts into a blog post,  that the notion that it took some time to realise the true potential of the written word as a device for codifying new information.

At first the alphabet was used to record oral language as previously composed for memorization in Greek epics, lyrics, and drama. The conceptual revolution began when it was realized tha the full register of linguistic sound could be placed in a new kind of storage no longer dependent on the rhythms used in oral memory recall. It could become a document, a permanent set of visible shapes, no longer a fleeting vibration in the air but shapes that could be laid aside until rescanned for some purpose and indeed forgotten (25).

This concept – “no longer a fleeting vibration in the air” – will fit in quite well in the introductory paragraphs of Chapter Three of my thesis. I enjoy this contrast between the fleeting ephemerality of spoken word, and the permanence of written word – although, of course, nothing is truly permanent. Records may be destroyed, documents forged… No system is perfect.

One thing that I am unsure of is over what kind of a time the adoption of writing happened, and why people chose to stick to this one system. It would be quite interesting to read about some time when I have the opportunity.

reference: Havelock, Eric (1987), ‘The oral-literate equation: a formula for the modern mind’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance (1991), Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-27