Literacy And Orality Research Paper

To give some examples: Marshall McLuhan (1962) started from an oral society which was originally closed, which attached importance to the spoken word, and in which social roles were relatively fixed. He opposed this idealized form of community to Western literate societies which, having transformed oral language into a visible code, were seen as depreciating the spoken word, compelling us at the same time to cope with different social roles. In this context, a particularly negative influence is attributed to the invention of printing. Whereas Jack Goody and Ian Watt (1962) saw the transition from orality to literacy more in the sense of a profit-and-loss account, Walter J. Ong (1982) took an opposite stance underlining the positive aspects of literacy, thus suggesting the positive kind of innovation McLuhan was only willing to attribute to the New Age of television which, in his view, already occupies the place of literacy (Raible 1994).

The rash and overgeneralized judgments to be found in scholarly discussion of the 1990s suggest a more cautious attitude. The first question to be asked in this context is: what do ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ mean? Here we need to distinguish a medial from a conceptual or cognitive aspect: the medial one is trivial—something we utter is either spoken or written. The conceptual aspect is a continuum, intertwining orality and literacy. This conceptual side needs some more consideration.

Communication by language is based on social convention. Hence, the utterances we engage in or exchange with others always reflect a socially accepted Activity: somebody has to be welcomed; we engage in small talk with her or him, ask questions, give answers, make jokes, engage in gossip, and so on. Some more privileged individuals may pass judgment on somebody, make an injunction, or pronounce a verdict.

The terms in the preceding paragraph describe social activities accompanied—or even only made possible—by the use of language (‘speech acts’). They represent a continuum of text types which can best be arranged on a scale, one end of which can be termed ‘interactive text,’ and the other, ‘edited text’ (Biber 1988); other labels are ‘conceptually oral’ and ‘conceptually written,’ i.e., highly planned and edited text (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994). For a similar distinction, Karl Buhler (1934) had already introduced a pair of Greek terms used by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the nineteenth century: language as energeia vs. language as ergon—i.e., language as an Activity or process (involving present partners), as opposed to language as something created, produced, edited, e.g., a book. Increasing from one end of this scale to the other are, among other things, the degree of structuring and, at the same time, the degree of intersubjectivity. Conceptually scriptural texts should be accessible to a large and unspecified public.

The implications of the conceptual scale can best be shown within a three-level approach to language. Each one of these three levels should be conceived of as a scale, reflecting exactly the conceptual and cognitive scale holding between orality and literacy: on level (b), we encounter text types with an ever increasing degree of editing and planning. Stylistics and rhetoric belong to this level, rhetoric being, indeed, the art of planning effective texts in subsequent steps. It starts with a general idea and a global strategy: then come linear organization and memorizing; even the delivery is planned.

On level (a), we find the respective realizations, i.e., utterances occupying—like small talk—one end of the scale, or, in case of a judgment, a patent specification, the other one. Level (c) is the level of the corresponding systematic prerequisites: composing texts belonging to elaborate text types demands a much higher mastery of language than buying bread or joking with our neighbor.

Hence, conceptually speaking, orality and literacy are thoroughly intertwined. The often postulated ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy, between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ societies, simply does not and cannot exist (Hornberger 1994).

2. Transitional Aspects

This holds all the more as the existence of a script does not change or achieve anything by itself. Beyond doubt there is an immense creative and changing potential in literacy. But in order to unfold it, literacy has to meet the appropriate cultural—e.g., institutional—conditions.

There are, nevertheless, some evolutionary tendencies. One of them is that literate societies are likely to develop a greater number of textual genres, along with new—e.g., legal—institutions. This enlarges the conceptual space, shifting considerably the societal acquisition of conceptual scripturality (and augmenting the time it takes us to acquire it). There will be neither essays nor editorials, patent specifications, nor testaments in an oral society.

The augmentation of textual genres and the extension of the conceptual scale automatically means new demands on the systemic side. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that a considerable number of English speech act verbs appear for the first time in Early New English: to acknowledge, to advocate, to assert, to concede, to remind, to apologize, to question, to request; or even only in New English: to remark, to retort, to state, to accept, to guarantee, to volunteer (Traugott 1987). Together with the speech act types already mentioned, these examples enhance institutional aspects of literacy.

One further general tendency, which is illustrated below, is the slowness of all processes bringing about cultural change.

2.1 Alphabetic Writing, Orthography, And The Invention Of Printing

There are two kinds of writing systems: those representing formal aspects of speech (syllabic, alphabetic script), and those rendering content (ideographic script). Writing proper names is a task that regularly leads to syllable or even alphabetic elements in ideographic script, whereas alphabetic script tends to become ever more ideographic. By reflecting essential aspects of spoken language, early Greek script is characteristic of early alphabetic writing in general: since we do not hear pauses between words, scriptura continua is (with some exceptions) a quite natural outcome. It prevails in Western texts up to the eighth century AD and is linked with reading out loud. By 1200, all the achievements of what most of us would call modern layout are present in scholastic texts: spaces between words, punctuation, capitals at the beginning of a new sentence, paragraph indention, emphasis by means of different colors and different script (all of them ideographic features), chapter headings, short summaries in the margin, footnotes, a table of contents, alphabetic registers. As a result, the reader is not lost in an amorphous text. It is only at this time that the general practice of silent reading can begin (Parkes 1992).

Such developments are due to a feedback loop: the higher the number of readers, the more will their needs be taken into account by the invention of features facilitating the reading process—such as ideographic elements. This explains why such phenomena can be observed at the end of the twelfth century: it was not until then that lay literacy developed to any significant extent.

By this time, we observe an incredible increase in the production of written documents. In the State Archives of the Italian city of Siena, there are, for instance, about 500 documents from the twelfth century, but nearly 17,000 from the thirteenth. This acceleration of text production coincides with major changes in social, commercial, and agricultural organization. Thanks to doings and dealings, the city states of Northern Italy already had a population surplus; this required them to organize life and everyday supply very strictly by written statutes. A similar evolution can be observed in large parts of central Europe (for England, see Clanchy 1993).

As a consequence, there was an immense need for knowledge—how shall I write a letter? make a speech? a treaty? how do I behave well?—in short: ‘how to win friends and influence people?’ This was the time when, at Bologna, Roman Law was rediscovered; when the great encyclopedias of the Middle Ages were written; when Italian merchants came to invent paper money as well as the new juridical forms of joint stock companies and insurances. In Art and Science, this was the epoch of Gothic architecture and scholasticism (1100–1450), mediated by contact with Arabic culture, and by the discovery of Aristotle. From this perspective, the invention of printing presents itself much more as a necessary consequence than as an agent of change in the domain of literacy.

There was, nevertheless, at least one topic fostered by printing: discussion on orthography. On the one hand, printing books for a great variety of unspecified readers inspires thoughts on standardization. On the other, it goes without saying that all the achievements made in writing and layout increase the intellectual and the practical effort of the writer. This is why discussions on orthography have tended to be dominated, since the sixteenth century, by elementary school teachers who would like to reduce—for those learning to write—the difficulties brought about by the ideographic tendency under discussion.

2.2 Material Aspects Of The Written Text

The evolution of layout has an aspect which merits further attention. Unlike spoken language, written text presents itself in two dimensions. Layout makes use of the respective possibilities in making visible chapters, paragraphs, and so on. There is one further possibility which leads to modern mathematics. Thirteenth-century mathematicians were far from being familiar with the system of notation their successors use today. This system only took shape in a slow process between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Most of the symbols are the outcome of an intermediate stage presupposing alphabetic literacy: the stage of abbreviation. This led not only to most familiar signs such as & (‘et’), but also to the plus and minus (+,-), the symbol for the square root, etc. It was Descartes who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, introduced the conventions that are still followed for the symbolization of the unknown element; they facilitated the highly momentous discoveries made during the seventeenth century: analytic geometry and calculus, resulting in a new ideographic system.

Mathematical ideograms, consequently exploiting the two dimensions of the page, are accessible to simultaneous rather than to linear perception— provided one knows the system. This enormous progress made mathematics the most important complementary discipline to natural sciences, contributing in a decisive way to their role in our modern world (Kramer 1991). This is why, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei tells us that the Book of Nature is written in cipher and that those intending to read it have to master the language of mathematics.

In recent times, this role has partly passed to a new branch of mathematics, informatics. Texts written in programming languages not only are at least as demanding as complex written texts in natural languages (Raible 1999). At the same time, their influence on modern life is pervasive. Retrospectively, the second part of the twentieth century is likely to appear as the age of Claude E. Shannon (1916–2001).

2.3 The Written Text As A Metaphor

The use of written language as a metaphor also has a long history—witness the Book of Nature (Blumenberg 1999). The metaphorical use starts with the early atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. Their basic idea was that the whole complex, manifold world surrounding us is nothing but appearance, whereas in reality all was thought to consist of atoms and the void between them. According to what Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics (985b, 15ff.), their visible model for the invisible structure of matter was alphabetic script. The variety of the visible world would be due to the fact that the atoms are differently shaped—just as an A differs in shape from an N; that their order may be different—as the sequence AN is different from NA; finally, their relative position in space may differ: a rotation of 90 degrees makes an N out of a Z. The central idea behind this conception is the reduction of numerous varieties to a restricted set of elements (here the 20-odd letters of the Greek alphabet combining for a possibly infinite variety of written texts).

While the Book of Nature has been a powerful and influential metaphor since the Middle Ages, the idea of the alphabet as the basis of a code reappears at the end of the nineteenth century in cell biology (Friedrich Miescher, 1844–95). It was again put forward in 1943, this time by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, (1887–1961), in a series of lectures entitled ‘What is life?’ where he suggested a genetic alphabet similar to the Morse code. This idea was confirmed in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson who showed that the long strands of DNA (Schrodinger’s punched Morse tapes) have the structure of a double helix, and by the series of important discoveries that followed this breakthrough.

Since that time, the metaphor of language in the form of alphabetic script has become omnipresent in molecular biology. The four nucleotide bases abbreviated by A, T, G, and C were called letters of the genetic alphabet. RNA-polymerase is reading DNAsequences with their reading-frames. This process is called transcription, and it happens thanks to transcription factors; transcription is accompanied by an immediate process of proof-reading. The result is called a copy subject to further editing. The resulting string of mRNA will be translated into a polypeptide. This is made possible because the triplets of DNA encode or are coding for amino acids. The whole process is called gene expression. It presupposes a grammar of biology. As the genome of humans and of other species is being deciphered, the result is stored in large databases modeling the sequences of nucleotides as sequences of the letters A, T, G, C. In this context, molecular biologists are speaking of gene libraries. Recurrent sequences of nucleotide ‘letters’ as well as recurrent sequences of amino acids in proteins are called motifs, and the genome itself is seen as an encyclopedia (Raible 2001).

2.4 Some Other Processes Of Transition

One of the disadvantages of ‘oral’ cultures is what was called a ‘collective censorship.’ Texts the audience dislikes fall into oblivion. In literate societies all written texts can be preserved and rediscovered by future generations. This advantage, however, changes into a serious problem with mass media, including the Internet—this is, above all a true consequence of printing.

Unless the public simply refrains from reading, there are at least three reactions. Long texts are transformed into shorter (and cheaper) versions. A lot of these text types were created in antiquity or in the Middle Ages—e.g., epitome, summarium, argumentum, catechismus, breviarium, compendium. Other genres make a new text out of parts of others—e.g. anthology. Modern literary scholars cannot but use one of the vernacular versions of Valentino Bompiani’s Dizionario delle Opere di tutti i Tempi e di tutte le Letterature.

A second reaction is an institutional censorship as embodied by all systems of education. They make use of specific curricula, syllabi, textbooks, introductions, primers in order to transform youth into fully-fledged members of society. Making texts as attractive as possible, at the same time making their content easily accessible, is a third answer to the problem. The most radical changes in writing can be observed in the history of mass media, i.e., in journalistic writing and in the corresponding genres of television. Scientific writing is another good example: the articles published in the respective journals are structured according to an identical model and endowed with tables, schemes, and pictures, whose captions and legends, together with the obligatory abstract of the article itself, swiftly inform the readers. The last point shows one of the problems, though: it holds only for those who are already experts in the subject, with the cognitive demands of such texts increasing at the same time.

The presentation of information in the Internet repeats an evolution that took place in the layout of written text. Witness the plethora of new elements in subsequent releases of hypertext markup language (it corresponds to the third level in the above scheme) and the introduction of meta-tags leading, for web crawling machines, to the equivalent of subject catalogues in our libraries. The web pages of the Internet basically exploit the acquisition of literacy (in traditional texts, ‘footnotes,’ page references, a table of contents, etc., correspond to ‘links.’ The only major difference is the ready availability of the objects referred to). New features are the availability of color, sound, and moving items.

3. A Precarious Equilibrium

There is no great divide, then, between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ societies, orality and literacy being inter-twined on the conceptual level. In addition to this, there is another factor of cultural variation: a social community can dispense with script, but not with spoken language. Apart from entirely oral cultures, we are thus always confronted with more or less literate societies. Given the dialectical relationship between orality and literacy, this means a steadily changing state of equilibrium.

There are indicators showing that the precarious- ness of this equilibrium is felt. As the evolution of culture in general may lead to the slogan ‘back to nature,’ the increase in literacy may make us long for the lost paradise of ‘innocent’ orality. This desire may materialize in a motto like ‘let us write the way we speak’ (Bader 1994). First examples were Plato’s critique of literacy (Phaidros 275 d) and the effective- ness of highly planned Sophist rhetoric which made the public suspicious.

Anyhow, the consequence of such reactions is even more literacy. Since antiquity, theoreticians of rhetoric know that among the genres of speech ex improviso, speech is the most artful one. Baldassar Castiglione (1478–1529), whose Courtier was a model for Europe from the Italian Renaissance on, tells us that true art means dissimulation of art. The same thing holds for the impression of orality called skaz that was dis-covered and recommended by some of the Russian formalists.

What at first sight might appear as paradoxical is quite clear at a closer look. Given the dialectical relationship, in a literate society orality has to be artificially created—just as seventeenth-century authors conceive of Nature (in literature and in the Fine Arts) as ‘the negation of the negation of nature.’ Once a culture has adopted literacy, returning to ‘authentical’ orality is impossible.

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