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For the first time in my college career, I am somewhat disturbed by what I'm being taught in my classes.
In my Information Design class, we covered the origins of writing and how it relates to speech. Historically, speech came first, of course, and since children learn to speak before they learn to write, it is usually thought that speech represents a more natural, "root" form of human language. Writing is thus thought of as subordinate to speech: words are but the graphic representations of phonemes and vocalizations.
I have to say, I'm not too happy with this. In fact, my instinct is to argue that it's not the case at all.
Up until about the 7th century AD, words didn't have spaces between them, and text was generally meant to be a direct representation of speech. People would read (those who could at all, that is) out loud, sounding out the words as they went. But when text began to have spaces between the words, people started reading silently. Never mind the reasons why. I would argue that this was the critical point wherein written language and oral language parted ways.
Oh, there is still a relationship between them - see the beginning of this sentence for an attention-getting marker held over from oral language. But I, for one, do not imagine text being spoken out as I pass my eyes over it. I sometimes notice things like alliteration and cadence, which call to mind how those words might sound if said aloud, but some of the most effective prose I've read was effective not because it was sonorous.
Cognitive scientists would tell you that a lot of people read this way, in terms of neurophysiology:
Text > Sounds > Language processing > Abstract Comprehension
I tend to omit the "Sounds" part of that progression as I read. On those occasions when I am really "in the zone", I go straight from the text to the language processing, skipping over that so fast that it hardly registers as a step, and perceive the meaning of the words abstractly. In expository or academic writing, I perceive things directly in clusters of ideas, joined by logical relationships. In fiction, I perceive things visually, reconstructing the story as it might look if it were playing out.
This tendency to imagine things visually is interesting, because it marks me as a true graphocentrist through and through. Graphocentrists view written language as being superior to oral language, and the eye/vision as superior to the mouth/speaking (or ear/hearing). This might be due to my natural inclination towards visual comprehension, or to my long training in reading, and someone else, raised in a different environment and possessing a different brain chemistry, might have an equal proficiency and preference for oral language.
But I can't just let it go that easily. Getting back to my initial point about the causal relationship between oral and written languages, I believe them to be mostly separate entities, joined not to each other, but to a third entity: the language itself. I think that, while both media attempt to express ideas in the medium of language, language is a separate thing, exising outside the ken of either the written word or spoken sound, residing in the cognititon of whatever person is generating the idea. Neither text nor sound is sufficient to perfectly convey the linguistic form of an idea. For example: text lacks the added bandwidth of prosody, rendering words connotatively sterile except in the hands of skilled writers. Conversely, speech is limited by its fleeting nature, meaning that truly elaborate constructions are very difficult, if not impossible, to both create and understand: ideas must be expressed in quanta fitted to the short-term acoustic memories of the speaker/listener involved. In essence, both media have to not only represent the idea, but the language as well.
...where was that train of thought going? I forget, but I do remember that they have good pizza at the student center.
I wonder if there's a paper in there somewhere.
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| | Posted 1/16/2009 3:59 PM - 28 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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