The Joy of Writing

Since I am thoroughly ready to be done with oral language, at least as it has to do with antiquity (modern language is a different story), I thought I would do a little introduction to written language along with some of my experiences with it, even though I am sure we will get a more throrough introduction in class on Thursday. I had more pictures, but my internet is being frustrating, so I will skip them for today.

We are surrounded by written language every day, all the time, basically wherever we are. Think you escape it when you go fishing up in the mountains? Not a chance. You can escape oral language, but in our modern day it is much, much harder to escape written language. Your car has writing on it. Your fishing pole has writing on it. The packages for your food have writing on them. The tags of your clothes have writing on them. I read a book once that had a scene where the main character had to remove all of the bits of his clothes that had writing on them (it makes sense in context). He was not left with a lot (okay, this sounds skechy. It totally isn't). Point is, there is writing everywhere, and if you are like most people, you don't really notice it.

But people have not always had writing, and even if they did, it was usually
not for everyone. Writing for record keeping developed thousands of years before true writing. People used tallies for counting as long as 40
thousand years ago. Between 8 and 9 thousand years ago, the people in the fertile crescent developed clay tokens with symbols inscribed in them that were used for counting commodities in trade. This kind of thing is a precursor for what we see as written language, but it is obviously not something you could write a book with. For many years people assumed that the Mesopotamian civilizations were the first to develop true writing, at about 3000 BC. However, in the last decade or two, archeologist have found writings in both Egypt and the Indus valley that date to around 3500 BC. We may, in the future, find even earlier writings.

Not every writing system is the same, obviously. Some, like Korean, are almost completely phonetic. Otherrs, like Chinese, are almost completely not phonetic. Some, like English, are in between. Some, like the Cyrillic alphabet I saw a lot as I was styding the Slavs, look like they are similar to the Roman alphabet that we are used to, even when they are completely different. Others on first glance might not look to us like writing at all.

For most of my life, I didn't really think about the letters I used to write. Letters were just what they were. They had an order. They had a sound. They fit together to make words, and I never had to think in order to figure out what they were. I've mentioned before that I was an early reader--I honestly can't remember a time I didn't know what words said. I knew that there were other alphabets, but they belonged far away from me, and I never really considered that it was possible to learn them. Then one day when I was 15, I decided on a whim that I wanted to learn Japanese. Because it was cool. Almost the very first thing that I learned about was the writing system. At first, it was a bit like learning those codes that they have on the back of cereal boxes that you use to decode a "secret message." I would see the symbol in a word I was trying to read, か, for example, think back to the chart I had memorized, and remember that it was the one that is spelled in English "ka." It wasn't until a while later that I realized that when I looked at that symbol I no longer thought "ka." I thought "か," and I knew how that symbol sounded. Just shortly after that, I started learning characters, and for the first time when I saw the sign above that Japanese restaurant by my house, I realized that those fancy looking symbols on the sign actually meant something. They actually said the name of the shop. You could take the last character, the one that said "shop," and you could put it in the middle of a novel that a teenager would read for fun, and it would still say "shop."

Despite the vast eye-opening that I experienced by learning a different type of writing system from English, I still didn't really think of our own alphabet as anything other than the-thing-you-write-books-with. However, a year and a half after I started learning Japanese, I decided nearly out of the blue that I was not going to medical school after all. Instead, I wanted to major in Linguistics. My parents, being slightly baffled I'm sure, bought a set of video-taped lectures about linguistics so that they could figure out what the heck it was that I was going to study. I watched them as well, and in one lecture, the professor started to describe how the consonant sounds in English are produced. Here is about how it went: Think of the letter "p." When you say a "p" sound, what do you do with your mouth? You bring your lips together, build up a little bit of pressure, and then let the air puff out. Now try a "b." It's the same motion, isn't it? Except feel your throat when you say them. When you say the "b," your throat vibrates, and when you say "p" it doesn't. Now try a "t." When you say a "t," your tongue touches that ridge behind your teeth before letting out that burst of air. You get a "d" when you make the "t" motion but add the same vibration that was on the "b." Now think of the part of your tongue sort of in the back of your mouth. Raise it up to touch the top of your mouth, then let out a burst of air. What does that say?
Try it.
And all of a sudden my view of my language was different than it had been before.
And I realized that sounds are not originally shapes on paper. They are motions that people make with their mouth, tongue, and throat, and that our names for them are just names.
And I realized that alphabetic order is not some pre-destined order for letters to be in. It is something that someone made up arbitrarily simply because it was useful.
And I loved the knowledge.

It is fascinating to me, and always will be, the way that people have learned to translate the sounds that their mouths make into lines on a page that say almost the exact same thing, except permanently. You cannot hear the voice of Paul the Apostle, of Abraham Lincoln, or Jane Austen, but you can read their words--their exact words, not someone else's re-telling of the story. You can read the exact same thing that someone read 2000 years ago. Welcome to written knowledge.