The Development of Writing and its Consequences

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Main Part-
2.1 Identity and Cultural Heritage
2.1.2 Two TypesofMemory
2.1.3 Writing and Cultural Coherence
2.2 Different Writing Systems
2.3 The Alphabet-
2.3.1 Consequences on Cognitive Skills-
-2.3.2 The Automation of Writing and Reading
2.4 Restricted Literacy
2.5 Greece as an Example for a Literal Culture
2.6 Negative Consequences ofWriting-
2.7 From Handwriting to Printing

3. Conclusion

1. Introduction

“The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication between men. Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.”^[1]

If one reads the quotation given above, there soon arises the question of what was before mankind invented writing. Goody speaks of the ‘transitoriness of oral communication’. Did people know nothing about their past? How did a particular tribe constitute their identity? These questions will be briefly responded to in the following chapter. Subsequently, the focus will be on different writing system, especially on the alphabetic one and its impact on human cognitive skills. Then, the phenomenon of restricted literacy will be shown by giving the examples of China, India and Tibet. Thereafter, a leap from Asia to ancient Greece, the cradle of the modern alphabet, is made and then, with reference to Plato, some negative consequences of writing will be illustrated. The last chapter deals with the invention of the printing press and its great impact on literacy.

2. Main part

2.1 Identity and Cultural Heritage

According to Jan Assmann^[2], every culture develops connections between its different members. This is done in two dimensions, the dimension of time and the social dimension. The social dimension provides a link between people and offers trust and orientation by giving a collective sense of experience, expectation and action.

The dimension of time links the present to the past by bearing in remembrance incisive experiences and memories. It provides hope and memory by including tales and images of another time into a permanently progressing present.

The main principle of this connective structure is repetition which arranges the ‘traditional’ in recognisable patterns. Assmann gives the example of the Jewish Seder-tradition in which each celebration follows the same patterns. But in addition to repetition there is the remembrance of one special event, in the case of the Seder-celebration the exodus.

Every rite possesses this duality. Assmann points out that the transition from oral to written lore causes a gradual change from the dominance of repetition to a dominance of remembrance. Hermeneutics substitutes repetition.

He explains this phenomenon with the pressure within the written culture, namely the demand of the reader for new ideas and works. In the case of oral transmission the opposite is true. A bard, for example, is measured by the amount ofhis knowledge, because his memory is the only medium to store it. Repetition is a necessity, innovation would result in oblivion

2.1.2 Two TypesofMemory

A very typical phenomenon of memory in oral societies, which Assmann calls ‘floating gap’, is the fact that their members divide the past into the recent past and the time of their genesis. Between these two periods there is a gap of information about events. While there is lots of information about the recent past, there is a decline of it if one goes further back into the past until, at one point, there is plenty of information again. This point marks the genesis of the particular culture. Assmann distinguishes between communicative memory, which stores remembrances of the recent past, and cultural memory, which stores remembrances of the origin. The first one ‘survives’ because contemporary witnesses pass their knowledge to other members which results in a knowledge about the previous 80 to 100 years. The second one needs specialised mediums, who pass the knowledge to the audience in an encrypted form, for example in dances, images and words. In oral cultures the recent past and with it the present always seem to have the same distance from the period of genesis.

This point of view is not changed until there are written classics. When they emerge, there is a distinction between past and present in addition to the traditional dichotomy of genesis and present. The past is the time of classics and people realise the growing distance to the present.

2.1.3 Writing and Cultural Coherence

According to Assmann, the decisive change from ritual to cultural coherence was not caused by the advent of script., for holy texts do not demand interpretation. In contrast to these texts, canonical texts constitute the basis for a culture of interpretation. In the ambit of canonisation processes, a huge amount of interpreting literature is created, which rapidly becomes canonised itself. Therefore, the cultural memory consists of canonised texts of first, second and even third range on the one hand, and primary literature, secondary literature, texts and comments on the other hand. The most important step in the creation of canons is the act of ‘closure’. Canonical texts are not to be continued. They must not be changed and thus need to be transmitted in their original terms. Assmann contrasts holy and canonical texts. Like canonical texts holy texts demand a transmission in their original terms, while there is no need for interpretation. They have to be recited ritually in compliance with the regulations. Canonical texts embody the values of a society. They have to be obeyed in order to transform the written words into reality. Thus, recitation is not as important as interpretation. Exposure to canonical texts therefore needs not only a reader, but an interpreter, who mediates between text and recipient. The need for interpretation resulted in the establishment of interpreting institutions, which were more or less independent from political and economical power. They shared and embodied the canonical authority and the truth disclosed by the canon.

Only this independence from administrative, economic, judicial and even religious authorities enabled them to consecrate themselves exclusively to the interpretation and the preservation of meaning. The gap between the fixed text and a constantly changing reality can only be bridged by interpretation.

2.2 Different Writing Systems

The technology of writing was not invented at a certain time and then stayed unchanged until today. The first true writing was developed by the Sumerians around 3,500 BC, but there is evidence that the first attempts to represent information were made at least 20,000 years ago.

An early form ofbookkeeping with the help of clay tokens can be traced back some 10,000 years. While the Sumerian way of non-oral communication is considered script, the other two mentioned above are not. The definition of writing by Ong^[3] explains why: “The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds ofknowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a code system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text.”

As the main focus of this paper is not on the history of writing, the various stages in the development of the alphabet will not be explained. Instead of giving the different types of writing chronologically, I will only show some main types to which I will refer in a later chapter.

Pictographic writing uses pictures to represent particular images in a consistent way. The form , for example, might be used to represent cloud.

“An essential part of this use of a representative symbol is that everyone should use similar forms to convey roughly similar meaning. A conventional relationship must exist between the symbol and its interpretation.”^[4] The picture given above could develop to a picture like this:

It is imaginable that people would use it not only to refer to a cloud, but also to represent water, autumn or cold. The only difference between pictograms and ideograms is the relationship between the symbol and the entity that is represented. The forms very similar to pictures are pictograms, the more abstract forms are ideograms. Both pictograms and ideograms do not represent words or sounds in a particular language.

Logographic writing is the term for a writing system in which the relationship between the symbol and the entity it represents is arbitrary. It is a system of word-writing.

Rebus writing, in contrast, uses symbols to represent the sounds oflanguage. “[...] the symbol for one entity is taken over as the symbol for the sound of the spoken word used to refer to that entity. That symbol then comes to be used whenever that sound occurs in any words.”^[5]

Syllabic writing also relates to the spoken sounds. It uses a set of symbols which represent the pronunciations of syllables.

2.3 The Alphabet

“An alphabet is essentially a set of written symbols which each represent a single type of sound.”^[6] This revolutionary system was invented by the Phoenicians around the year 1500 BC. It first appeared in Mesopotamia, where, 2000 years earlier, the Sumerians had invented a form of logographic word-writing knows as cuneiform. At that time, the alphabet largely consisted of consonant symbols. It was the early Greeks who remodelled the alphabet by introducing separate symbols to represent vowels. Today, there are three main-types of alphabets, one of them the original and the other two derivations of it. The next chapter deals with the impact that the alphabet had, both on the individuals and the cultures using it.

2.3.1 Consequences on Cognitive Skills

De Kerckhove^[7] describes five cognitive tendencies of alphabetical script.

Firstly, the reading of iconic structures is facilitated by the vertical arrangement of symbols, the reading oflinear structures is facilitated by a horizontal arrangement of symbols. The transformation of pictography into phonography makes vertical scripts horizontal. The reading ofhorizontal scripts, therefore, improves cognitive skills which prefer an orientation on the horizon and with it, the horizontal mode if it comes to spatial cognition. This results in a disposedness to symmetry in alphabetic cultures Secondly, contextual relationships between individual symbols are preferably processed by the left visual field of each eye while linear relationships between individual signs are preferably processed by the right visual field of each eye. The transformation of consonant alphabets, which were read in a contextual way, through vocalization, which is read in a linear way, results in an arrangement of scripts from the left to the right. The consequence is a training of cognitive skills which prefer sequential analysis of real and mental images and their representation. In addition to the spatial analysis there is the factor of chronology. Thirdly, Syllables are complex signs representing sounds of a particular language. Phonemic symbols are simple symbols which can be combined to represent sounds of a language. Phonemic systems are capable of producing the complexity of spoken language by using a minimal number of elements. The cognitive skills trained by meaning-carrying basic modules prefer a systematic segmentation of modules in order to obtain the smallest inseparable elements.

Fourthly, in deciphering contextual symbols, the recognition and identifying of figures is preferred while in deciphering interrelated symbols it is more useful to combine in order to reconstruct words or sounds. Cognitive skills trained by arranging and combining basic modules in order to obtain meaning prefer logical composition and relationships between cause and effect.

Fifthly, syllabi c writing maintains a direct, visual-acoustic relationship with spoken language. Phonemic alphabets maintain an indirect, visual-acoustic relationship to spoken language. Cognitive skills trained to separate a code from its context completely, prefer the form of representation, essays and fiction. The flexibility of combining promotes innovation in alphabetic cultures.

According to de Kerckhove, the five cognitive tendencies mentioned above do not only have an impact on occidental reading culture, but also on our analysing reality. We also divide the world, as we see it, into its smallest proportions. De Kerckhove describes the principle of abstraction in the following way:

“Das Prinzip der Abstraktion, das in wachsendem AusmaB von der Erfindung der Schrift bis hin zur Informationsgesellschaft bestimmend ist, erreicht mit dem griechisch-romischen Alphabet einen Grad an Dekontextualisierung, der fahig ist, die Kommunikation zu entsinnlichen. Abstraktion konnte zumindest auf der Ebene der Sprache ohne weiteres als der Austausch der Sinne gegen den Sinn oder auch als der Austausch von Wahrnehmungen gegen Konzepte definiert werden.“^[8]

[...]

^[1] Goody, J., "Introduction", Goody, J., eds. Literacyin Traditional Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p.1

^[2] Assmann, J. Das kulturelle Gedachtnis- Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen. Munchen: C.H. Beck, 2005

^[3] Ong, W.J. Oralityand Literacy: The Technologizing ofthe Word. London: Methuen, 2002

^[4] Yule, G. The studyoflanguage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p 10

^[5] Ibid, p 12

^[6] Ibid. p 13

^[7] de Kerckhove, D. Schriftgeburten- Vom Alphabetzum Computer, Munchen: Fink, 1995

^[8] Ibid, p.29