Early Writing and Development

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Early Writing and Development
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Early Writing

• The first writing Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE
• Pictographs
• Development of an alphabet

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Transition From an Oral Culture to a Literate One

• More than any other single invention writing has
  transformed human consciousness.
• -Walter J. Ong

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Change in the way language evolves
A naperon.an apron an ekename..a nickname
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• Fundamental change in human thought and
  consciousness
• Knowledge of an object in a literary sense
  changes how we think of that object
• Writing is intimately connected with speech for
  the literate individual
• Change in fluidity of texts

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Authority of documents

• Writing gains respect and meaning

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Document as Art

• Making illuminated manuscripts
• Text as secondary
• Visual design and purpose

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Document as a Symbol

• Objects symbolized transfer
• Document or seal supersede the object
• Small change in acceptance
• Large change in substance

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Voice of the Document

• Fundamentally letters are shapes indicating
  voices. Hence they represent things which they
  bring to mind
• through the windows of the eyes.
• Frequently the speak voicelessly the utterances
  of the absent.
• John of Salisbury, Metalogicon

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Voice of the Document

• Witness heard and saw donor
• Letters indicate voices
• Reading substitute for seeing
• Last longer than living memory

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Memory vs. Text

• Truth established by statement
• Too far in past, oldest men asked
• Truth simple and personal
• Laws lasted as long a memory

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Social Cultureand Technology
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Social Culture

• In a literate culture, we lose the interaction
  that the oral culture used to provide. Whereas
  the oral culture could be experienced one-on-one
  or with a group, a literate culture is limited in
  that its mostly a personal and individual
  experience.
• Censorship Literature can be banned and
  destroyed. Oral culture is experienced at the
  moment and after the interaction is exchanged,
  its impossible to be censored.
• Social class Literacy was a mark of the wealthy
  and level of education

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Technology

• Secondary Orality Termed by Walter Ong.
  Expresses the shift and morphing of oral and
  literate culture as modern technology begins to
  play a larger role in the current culture through
  several different medias.
• Secondary orality does not fall neatly into
  either of the traditional and classic definitions
  of oral or literate culture but rather, is made
  distinctly possible through the ever-evolving
  technology.

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Examples

• Internet Instant messaging, emails, youtube
• Phones text messaging, long distance calls
• Television
• Oral culture ? Literate culture ? Oral culture
  (?)

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Questions to Consider

• What is (or will be) the impact of the
  continually developing technology?
• What effect is it having on our literate culture?
• Is oral culture making a comeback as the dominant
  culture?
• Will books ever make a permanent exit?

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Want An Example?

• BEOWULF!!!

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Beowulf as an Example of loses in Literate Culture

• Beowulf was written in an unrhymed four-beat
  alliterative meter of Old English Poetry
• Beowulf was composed to be heard aloud, probably
  recited by a bard before a company of men.
• This being so, reading the poem instead of
  listening to it causes us to lose some meaning as
  well as its rhythm, diction, and sound texture.

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Beowulf as an example of gains in a Literate
Culture

• We have gained preservation of ideas through
  text, the sharing of ideas.
• Gain more by HAVING a text version of Beowulf
• We gain as a literate culture, history, language,
  and the free flow of ideas

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Wrapping it Up

• Through Beowulf we lose the original text and
  form it was meant to be presented in
• Through Beowulf we gain actually getting to read
  and understand Beowulf and know of its existence.
  

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Evolution of The Westernized Latin Alphabet
From- Calligraphy
To- Graphology Palaeography

• And eventually Graffiti

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Brief history of Written English

• Latin based scripts 2 categories
• Formal Instrument of authority
• Informal Cursive or quickly written scripts for
  everyday use. (historically, formal scripts
  degenerated into cursive forms which in turn,
  over the passing of time, achieved formal status
  in their own right.)

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Definition of Style

• A script is a system of handwritten characters,
  the main body of which compose what we think of
  now as fonts. National scripts became a
  predominant form of distinguishing letter forms
  and shape as well as method of production. (i.e.
  Merovingian-influence from France, and the
  Visigothic-influence from Spain most notably. In
  fact the gothic influence was the first script to
  incorporate upper and lower case letter forms,
  based on the Greek system of unicals developed
  for and used by the early Christian church.
• A hand is the individualized characteristics
  that each persons form of handwriting naturally
  entails. (i.e. level of skill/training, type of
  material being written, etc.)

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Aesthetics influence GrammarForm follows suit

• Early Gothic scripts were the first to employ
  upper and lower case letters in the same
  sentence used to denote a proper noun or start a
  sentence, the aesthetic choice influenced our
  later grammatical rules and also lead to the
  prosperity of the golden age of calligraphy the
  art of writing.
• Versals and Cadels Gothic capitals lead to the
  development of highly ornate decoration on
  capital letters, ranging from simple larger than
  normal bold letters, called versals, to the
  intensely elaborate, sometimes whole page
  paintings adorned with gold leaf, called versals.
• Modern aesthetics considered, Graffiti may be
  thought of as the continuation of mans interest
  in penmanship and the inherent relatable quality
  found in reading what someone has written by
  hand.

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What weve gained and lost

• Some books to check out
• Orality and Literacy
• by Walter J. Ong
• From Memory to Written Record England from 1066
  to 1307
• by M. T. Clanchy
• The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages
• by James W. Thompson