The Writing Revolution
Page 33
Nevertheless, with all its fonts and font sizes, its cutting and pasting, and its two-column layout options, digital writing still imposes constraints. Many writers, including myself, feel that they can only really perceive and critique their own work when it is printed out. Reading is more difficult on-screen, and proofreading far less effective. The tactile experience of holding the paper and marking on it by hand, and the spatial experience of laying out separate pages side by side for comparison, cannot really be replicated on the screen, no matter how well it tries to simulate three-dimensionality. Thought is mediated by far more than vision alone, and the ability to touch the work and to locate its parts in space is important. The popularity of the computer mouse, I suspect, is not merely due to its ease of operation, but also due to the fact that it mimics natural hand motions such as pointing far more closely than pressing arrow keys does.
The Japanese believe that handwriting is a window to the soul. They are probably right. It is no accident that in the days of typewriters personal letters were still written by hand; a typewritten personal letter would have given offense. There remains a difference between letters that are formed by the motion of the individual body and letters that are selected from a menu – either the menu of the keyboard or the call-up menu that comes of selecting the “Insert Symbol” command. The latest word-processing programs come equipped with dozens of fonts, providing many options in letter style and even color. Programs like PowerPoint provide animation, letting the letters spin, jiggle, or disappear one at a time according to the writer’s wish, adding to the written word a temporal element that has been missing since its invention. Nevertheless, as typed text has come to be used for even the most intimate forms of written communication, a certain individuality has been lost.
This is not mere nostalgia speaking. E-mail, instant messaging, chat groups, and text messaging all bring us typed text across great distances at speeds that approach real time. The illusion that one is having a real conversation is easy to succumb to. Yet spoken language, especially in face-to-face contexts, contains many communicative cues that are missing from these contexts. The lift of an eyebrow, the length of a pause, the ironic intonation of a phrase... all of these work in the service of communication. Handwriting loses many of them, but may make up for it slightly by variations in letter formation, in expressive squiggles, and inventive use of punctuation. Only the last of these is really available on the Internet, although in some cases one can do one’s best with alternative fonts or give way to the urge to qualify remarks with “smileys,” :-) or :-(, or a written equivalent,
A tome on the history of printed books originally written in 1958 – awed, doubtless, by the recent advances in television, radio, and audio recording – describes the future of the book as “no longer certain.” Interestingly, the perceived threats were not the ones that we might think of today—the web, say, or e-books – but rather a previous generation of technology that supplemented the written word but in no way replaced it. With every succeeding advance in technology, rumors of the death of traditional print-and-paper books have similarly been greatly exaggerated. The world still produces nearly a million different new books a year. Printed books have not been replaced; they have merely been outstripped.
Nor has the “paperless office” ever come close to reality; in fact, half the world’s paper is used in office documents. In 1940 the United States produced about 13,038,000 metric tonnes of paper. By 2001 it was 81,660,000 tonnes. From 1999 to 2002 the amount of new information stored on paper rose by 36 percent. During that time book publications held steady worldwide (though showing strong growth in the United States), and academic journals decreased paper production (switching to web delivery), but office documents grew by 43 percent. Paper, too, though outstripped, has certainly not been replaced.
The most important apparent threat to the printed book is the World Wide Web, but it is no threat to the written word. Created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), the first website went up in 1990. By 1994 the web was carrying 400,000 bytes every second (roughly the informational equivalent of an Agatha Christie novel), and by 1999 there were nearly 10 million web servers.
The web is accurately named. What makes it so useful – much more than simply a large, searchable database – is the weblike hypertext links that connect one site to another. In hypertext one document is connected to another in ways other than the traditional, linear one by which one page is always followed by the next. Rather, wherever the author considers one piece of text to be relevant to another, a link can be made, right there. Reading is now transformed into “surfing the web,” as users click on one link after another.
Paper books and the web are both dwarfed by the production of more casual text. Researchers at the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley estimated in 2003 that in 2002 there were 5 billion instant messages sent a day for a total of 274 Terabytes for the year. A Terabyte is 1012 bytes; to print it on paper would take the wood of 50,000 trees. E-mails accounted for a whopping 670,000 Terabytes (though only about 400,000 Terabytes were original, and not all of it was text) per year, with 31 billion e-mails sent daily. By contrast, the print collections of the Library of Congress total only 10 Terabytes. The World Wide Web contains 170 Terabytes (not all of it text) on its “surface,” i.e. in fixed web pages, with much more in searchable databases that have been connected to the web.
As the technologies for producing text have expanded, humanity has produced more and more text, and this despite the proliferation of technologies that reproduce the spoken word. Even television news nowadays is frequently accompanied by a line of text at the bottom of the screen, and cell phones, which have greatly expanded the range of the spoken word, are often used for text messaging rather than conversation. Teenagers that a generation ago would have spent hours chatting on the telephone now spend the same amount of time instant messaging their friends in total silence. News headlines such as CNN.com’s “Report: Text messaging harms written language” overlook the obvious: there is more written language in the world today than there ever has been.
Written text is not just a cheap substitute for speech, and it never has been. It was invented as an information technology, and while it ended up being an alternative way to express language, it is not recorded speech. Its beauty is that it is actually much less than speech.
Much of the informational content of speech is lost in writing. This can certainly lead to e-mail squabbles, but it means that text can be transmitted with much lower bandwidth than speech (i.e. the message takes up far fewer bytes: a printed page is only about 2 kilobytes, but a high-resolution photograph is 2 megabytes and a minute of high-quality recorded sound is 10 megabytes). It also takes less time to process it. Writing may take time and effort, but (silent) reading is very fast. Think of how slow reading aloud is, and then picture accessing all one’s information at that speed. (Not surprisingly, those who routinely have to rely on recorded books use special playback controls that increase the speed of the voice without increasing its pitch.) The more the world relies on rapid access to information, the more it will rely on the written word.
So text remains with us. Greater and greater quantities of it are being produced by ordinary people. In a world in which anyone can have a web page and anyone can keep a blog, writing has entered a new phase of democratization. By contrast, the early writing systems of the world were not intended for ordinary people. Nor was the literature of the classical and medieval ages intended for the masses. Even when Sweden mandated universal literacy in the seventeenth century – the first country to do so – reading was the primary goal, not writing.
Until very recently, most written language – and virtually al
l publicly available written language – was mediated. The author was distinct from the editor, the typesetter, or the publisher. For today’s bloggers the word processor does the typesetting, the server does the publishing, and there is (for better or worse) no editor. The result is hand wringing on the part of language purists. They may have a point about stylistic quality, but they have failed to notice that what they are really witnessing is the ultimate triumph of the written word – the point at which the technology becomes second nature to a whole society. We live, therefore, at a turning point in the history of writing. On the one hand, the Information Age has made the Earth flat, leveling the playing field, lowering barriers, enabling collaboration, and encouraging healthy competition. On the other hand, it has opened a digital divide between those individuals and nations that are on-line and those that are not. History has yet to tally the ultimate results. If handwriting ushered in civilization, and print ushered in modernity, it remains to be seen what hypertext will do for us.
Appendix
Figure A.1 The International Phonetic Alphabet.
Figure A.2 The International Phonetic Alphabet applied to American English.
Figure A.3 The ancient Near East.
Figure A.4 The Chinese world.
Figure A.5 Mayan Mesoamerica and Cherokee North America.
Figure A.6 The Greek and Roman world.
Figure A.7 Southern Asia, the Sanskrit world.
Further Reading
These notes for further reading are both more and less than an academic bibliography. Less, because I have not listed all the many scholarly sources on each subject touched on in this book. More, because I have included synoptic works that are accessible to the general reader. Many such works are textbooks, often the best place to look for synthesis and summary within a given field. I have listed sources separately for each chapter, sometimes with commentary, in order to partially atone for a lack of footnotes or in-text references.
Chapter 1 The First IT Revolution
Those who are serious about the study of writing systems will not want to be without the multi-author volume edited by Daniels and Bright (1996). I acknowledge my substantial debt to that comprehensive work section by section in each chapter’s references. Coulmas (1989) and Rogers (2005) are other general works on writing systems that may be consulted for further information on many points that arise in this book. I owe to Harris (1986) the estimate of how many languages have a written literature, to Gordon (2005) the estimate of the world’s spoken languages, and to Ladefoged (2005) the estimate of the number of vowels and consonants in the world. It is worth noting that a serious attempt at bypassing language in writing has been made, in the form of Blissymbolics, an ideographically based symbolic system designed to be used in any language. In practice, however, texts using Blissymbolics stick close to the user’s language, as pointed out by Rogers (2005).
Coulmas, Florian. 1989. The Writing Systems of the World. Oxford: Blackwell.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fagan, Brian M. 1986. People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, 6th edn. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
Fromkin, Victoria and Robert Rodman. 1998. An Introduction to Language, 6th edn. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. A good place to start for those interested in language and linguistics.
Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com.
Harris, Roy. 1986. The Origin of Writing. London: Duckworth. Downplays (too much, I would say) the phonological aspects of writing.
Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. A Course in Phonetics, 4th edn. New York: Harcourt Brace. A good place to learn the IPA.
Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. Vowels and Consonants, 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Mafundikwa, Saki. 2004. Afrikan Alphabets. West New York, NJ: Mark Batty. Includes the story of King Njoya.
Pinker, Stephen. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: Harper Perennial. An engaging introduction to language and linguistics for the general reader. Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. A systematic introduction.
Röhr, Heinz Markus. 1994. Writing: Its Evolution and Relation to Speech. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
The International Phonetic Association. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/index.xhtml. The official IPA website.
Chapter 2 Cuneiform: Forgotten Legacy of a Forgotten People
It is a popularly accepted theory that proto-cuneiform grew out of a system of accounting tokens used throughout preliterate Mesopotamia. These tokens, representing various commodities, were enclosed in clay “envelopes,” and representations of the tokens were impressed on the outside. These impressed representations were supposedly the origin of written symbols. However, there has been much scholarly criticism of this theory (see, for example, Glassner 2003), so I do not espouse it here. Whatever its intellectual forerunners, proto-cuneiform writing was an invention substantially different from earlier representational systems.
The cuneiform in figure 2.4 is quoted from Darius (1907).
Caplice, Richard, with Daniel Snell. 1988. Introduction to Akkadian, 3rd edn. Studia Pohl: Series Maior: Dissertationes Scientificae de Orientis Antiqui 9. Rome: Biblical Institute Press.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Sections 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10, by Daniels, Michalowski, Cooper, Gragg, Testen, and Englund.
Darius I, Hystaspes. 1907. The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistûn in Persia: A New Collation of the Persian, Susian, and Babylonian Texts, with English Translations, etc. London: British Museum.
Edzard, Dietz Otto. 2003. Sumerian Grammar. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: Near and Middle East 71. Leiden: Brill.
Glassner, Jean-Jacques. 2003. The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. Trans. and ed. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Advanced reading on the subject of proto-cuneiform; see especially chapter 7.
Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1966. In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Contains a great deal of information on the Sumerians and their literature, interwoven with the intellectual autobiography of a leading Sumerologist.
Marcus, David. 1978. A Manual of Akkadian. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Pope, Maurice. 1999. The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script, rev. edn. New York: Thames and Hudson. A thorough but dense treatment.
Roux, Georges. 1980. Ancient Iraq, 2nd edn. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. A good introduction to the history of Mesopotamia.
Thomsen, Marie-Louise. 2001. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure, 3rd edn. Mesopotamia: Copenhagen Studies in Assyriology 10. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Walker, C. B. F. 1987. Cuneiform. Reading the Past 3. Berkeley: University of California Press and the British Museum. A good place to start.
Watt, W. C. 1987. The Ras Shamra Matrix as a Record of Ancient Phonological Perceptions. Studies in the Cognitive Sciences 45. Irvine: University of California, Irvine School of Social Sciences. Discusses Ugaritic and the origins of alphabetical order.
Chapter 3 Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Quest for Eternity
Adkins, Lesley and Roy Adkins. 2000. The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. New York: HarperCollins.
Allen, James P. 2000. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. An excellent introduction to the Egyptian language, including hieroglyphs.
Betrò, Maria Carmela. 1996. Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt. English translation. New York: Abbeville Press.
Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World�
��s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Sections 4 and 9, by Ritner and Daniels.
Davies, W. V. 1987. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Reading the Past 6. Berkeley: University of California Press and the British Museum.
Fedden, Robin. 1977. Egypt: Land of the Valley. London: John Murray. A very readable introduction to Egyptian culture and history, both ancient and modern.
Forman, Werner and Stephen Quirke. 1996. Hieroglyphs and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press.
Pope, Maurice. 1999. The Story of Decipherment: From Egyption Hieroglyphs to Maya Script, rev. edn. New York: Thames and Hudson.
Ray, John D. 1986. The Emergence of Writing in Egypt. World Archaeology 17, no. 3: 307–16.
Wilson, John A. 1951. The Culture of Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A classic text on ancient Egyptian culture.
Chapter 4 Chinese: A Love of Paperwork
Boltz, William G. 1986. Early Chinese Writing. World Archaeology 17, no. 3: 420–36.