SEL2211: Contexts Lecture 13: Literacy and its implications

1. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Thus far, this module has addressed issues in the study of language as a science in its scientific context. The remainder of the module now shifts the focus to language technology, that is, to the invention of language tools and their application in human culture. Language technology is included in the module for two main reasons: Theoretical reason: Language technology has been and continues to be fundamental to the development of human culture, and awareness of its role provides an enhanced understanding of that development. We feel that all students of language and linguistics should have this awareness. Practical reason: Language technology is at the heart of contemporary digital information technology, and it offers a range of intellectually stimulating careers; our aim is to give an overview of some possibilities.

2. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications This lecture deals with an invention that has been fundamental to the development of human culture in its present form, where 'culture' is understood in its broadest sense of the way in which human population groups exist --the social, political, economic, scientific, and technological context in which people live their lives. That invention is literacy, that is, the symbolic representation of natural language. The discussion is in four main parts. Part 1 defines 'technology'. Part 2 outlines human cultural development Part 3 defines the nature of literacy. Part 4 explains the fundamental importance of literacy and its implications for human cultural development.

3. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 1. Technology Homo sapiens is the only species that modifies its environment to a significant degree. This modification is technology: the creation of artefacts, that is, of structured physical objects, and their use in the conduct of human affairs. Technology has enhanced the length and quality of human life far beyond what natural selection provides for our species. It has hugely extended our natural intellectual and physical capabilities and given our lives a richness unavailable even to our closest biological relatives.

4. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2. Outline of human cultural development As a species, humans are late arrivals in the history of the world. On current estimates, the world is about four and a half billion years old, but creatures that we would recognize as humans rather than some kind of ape have only existed since about 500,000 BC

5. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Our species, homo sapiens, is more recent still, first appearing about 200,000 BC. This means that we have been here for about 0.0001% of the world's existence.

6. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications For most of those 200,000 years humans were what archaeologists and anthropologists call hunter-gatherers. They lived in small groups, had a few stone tools, and fed themselves by foraging for edible plants and by hunting animals. To avoid exhausting local resources these groups were frequently on the move; there were no permanent settlements.

7. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications After the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 BC, things began to change in one particular part of the world that we now call the Middle East, and was in earlier times known as Mesopotamia. Here, from about 10,000 BC, wild plants and cereals began to be cultivated and wild animals like sheep and goats to be domesticated. This provided a more predictable food supply, and by about 5000 BC settlements began to appear on the banks of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.

8. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications By 3000 BC these settlements had become cities with architectural fortifications and buildings, and the people who inhabited them had developed political, economic, and social structures unknown in earlier times: kingship, aristocracy, priesthoods, class differentiation, a trade-based economy, and administrative structures like law and taxation to keep it all functioning. Archaeologists have excavated many of these cities; here's a reconstructed example:

9. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications The Mesopotamian developments soon spread eastwards into present day Pakistan and northern India, and westwards around the Mediterranean basin. Egypt had its pharaohs and pyramids, Greece its acropolis and philosophical schools, and by about the year 0 the Roman Empire had come into being and controlled the territories surrounding the Mediterranean as well as most of present-day Europe. The Roman Empire came to an end about 500AD, and in the 1500 years since then we have developed a highly structured scientifically and technologically sophisticated world culture.

10. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Let's define 'cultural complexity' as the degree of political, economic, social, and scientific / technological structuring in a human culture, ranging from very low when homo sapiens first appeared on the scene to very high now. If one plots the development of this complexity over the time covered in the preceding section, the plot looks like this:

11. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Complexity did not increase gradually at a pretty much constant rate. It increased very slowly for a very long time, and then, suddenly, it took off. It's still heading north. So what? So this. It happens that the point at which the development takes off is the time when literacy appears in Mesopotamia about 2000 BC.

12. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications What's more, whenever literacy at any point in subsequent history spread to a non-literate part of the world, cultural complexity in that part of the world suddenly exploded in the same way. Is this a coincidence? The remainder of this lecture suggests not.

13. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 3. The nature of literacy How long humans have had language is unknown and, modern scientific attempts to find out notwithstanding, is probably unknowable except perhaps within broad limits. What is clear, though, is that for most of its history humankind was non-literate. As far as we know, literacy in the sense understood in what follows was invented only once, in Mesopotamia c.2000 BC, from where it spread from there to the rest of the world over time. What was the nature of this invention?

14. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications The lecture began by noting that literacy is the symbolic representation of natural language. On this definition, the pictures that all known cultures, including our own, used to convey meaning do not constitute literacy. The famous caves of Altamira in Spain, dating from about 15,000 BC, are an example.

15. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Archaeologists and anthropologists argue endlessly about what this and similar cave paintings mean. For present purposes it doesn't matter because they do not involve language any more than a painting hung on the wall of a modern house involves language. Literacy has to do with the representation of language symbolically, that is, in physical form, and pictures don't do that --they represent perceived reality directly.

16. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications So how is language represented in physical form? The answer involves two concepts: Symbols: A symbol is a physical thing to which a community assigns a meaning by common assent --for example, a stop sign or the American flag. Phonemes: A phoneme is the smallest sound in a language that changes the meaning of an utterance. Every language has its own phonemic system, and there is generally quite a small number of phonemes in any given language --something on the order of 40.

17. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications How do these two concepts relate to literacy? The answer is that, by about 2000 BC in Mesopotamia, the idea of symbolizing each phoneme of the languages they spoke had developed. The Mesopotamians did this for their own languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, but an English example will show what's involved: Using this idea, it's possible to represent anything which is spoken symbolically by writing it down on some surface like stone or paper. It's a simple idea, but it has momentous implications, as the next part of the lecture shows.

18. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 4. The cultural implications of literacy Anthropologists and social historians have found that population groups which have a coherent long-term existence are in possession of a body of cultural knowledge which gives them their identity and makes it possible for their social institutions to function, including such things as religion and mythology, national history, law, science, and technology. Without such knowledge social cohesion rapidly decays and the culture disappears. The importance of literacy lies in the vastly extended scope for the preservation of cultural knowledge that it provides. We look first at how such knowledge is maintained in non-literate cultures, and then at the effect of  the introduction of literacy.

19. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2.1 The preservation of cultural knowledge in non-literate cultures Where literacy is unavailable, cultural knowledge is preserved orally in the form of verse memorized by professional priesthoods, who transmit it in that format from generation to generation. We have no direct knowledge of this prior to about 2000 BC because, in the absence of literacy, no historical information is available. In more recent times, however, literate observers of nonliterate cultures have described this institution: The Brahmins of India memorized huge amounts of cultural knowledge, the vedas, transmitted from generation to generation in verse form. The aborigines of Australia memorized 'songlines' that defined their religious, historical, and legal beliefs and institutions in that format.

20. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications The Celts of central Europe in the last few centuries BC did the same. Here is what an observer, Julius Caesar, had to say about it round about 50 BC: The druids are concerned with divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices public and private, and the interpretation of ritual questions. A great number of young men flock to them for instruction, and hold them in great honour. If any crime has been committed, or murder done, or there is any dispute about succession or boundaries, they also decide it, determining rewards and penalties...The druids usually hold aloof from war, and do not pay taxes with the rest. They are excused from military service and are exempt from all liabilities. Tempted by these great rewards, many young men gather to receive their training…Report says that in the schools of the druids they learn by heart a great number of verses, and some persons remain in training for twenty years…The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and, since the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold this belief to be the greatest incentive to valour. Besides this they have many discussions regarding the stars and their movement, the size of the universe and the earth, the order of nature, and the strength and the powers of the immortal gods. These are the beliefs they hand down to their students.

21. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications And here is an account of how such a druidical school worked: Concerning the poetical seminary or school, it was open only to such as were descended of poets and reputed within their tribes. The qualification first required was...a strong memory. It was likewise necessary the place should be a solitary recess of a garden or in a sept or enclosure far out of reach of any noise, which an intercourse of people might otherwise occasion. The structure was a low, snug hut, and beds in it were at convenient distances, each within a small apartment without much furniture of any kind...No windows to let in the day, nor any light at all used but that of candles, and these brought in at a proper season only...The professors (one or more as there was occasion) gave a subject suitable to the capacity of each class, determining the number of rhymes, and clearing what was to be chiefly observed therein as to syllables, quatrains, concord, correspondence, termination, and union, each of which were restrained by peculiar rules. The said subject...having been given overnight, they worked it apart each by himself upon his own bed the whole next day in the dark, until at a certain hour in the night, lights being brought in...they dressed and came together into a large room where the masters waited, and each scholar gave his performance...The course was long and tedious, and it was six or seven years before a mastery or last degree was conferred.

22. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2.2 Literacy and the maintenance of cultural knowledge What are the implications of literacy for the maintenance of cultural knowledge? To answer that question we'll first look briefly at a current and highly influential theory in cognitive science.

23. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2.2.1 Situated cognition Situated cognition, or as it is also known, embodied cognition emphasizes the importance of interaction with a structured environment for human cognitive functioning. Specifically, it argues that humans have a crucial advantage over other animals, even our nearest primate genetic neighbours: as a species we structure and restructure our physical environment in the course of our cognitive activity, using the current state of the world as input for subsequent actions on it, and thereby generate the artefacts of culture. The structured environment that humans build around them enhances their innate cognitive abilities, and the more complex that environment the greater the cognitive capabilities of the humans who live in it.

24. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2.2.2 Situated cognition and written language Literacy, that is, written language, is one of the most important ways of structuring the environment that humanity has ever invented, and arguably the single most important one, because it overcomes a fundamental human cognitive limitation. Psychologists have amply demonstrated two aspects of human memory: (i) it is severely limited in the amount of information that can be remembered, even with special training, and (ii) it is highly unreliable in terms of the accuracy with which information is remembered. Literacy allows linguistically-encoded information to be recorded on media external to the human mind. An arbitrarily-large amount of information can be recorded in this way, and that record is reliably accurate.

25. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications 2.2.3 Consequences for human cultural development As we have seen, non-literate societies depend on memorization and oral transmission of cultural knowledge. This limits both the amount of cultural knowledge that can be maintained, and its accuracy. With literacy it becomes possible to overcome these limitations via the creation of text. Why should text be so important? For the following reasons:

26. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Text is permanent Humans use language to communicate immediate concerns to, and coordinate behaviour with, other humans. Such communication is essentially ephemeral. Language is, however, also used to state knowledge about the world which is considered useful and worth remembering for future application. But our cognitive capacities are such that the individual human can only remember a relatively small amount. Text externalizes such linguistically-stated knowledge in a permanent physical representation: once recorded as text, linguistically stated knowledge does not need to be remembered, since one can always recover that knowledge if necessary by reading the text.

27. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Because text is permanent, it is possible to build up large repositories of knowledge which no individual human or group of humans could hope to store in their minds. The cultural knowledge base can grow effectively without limit; the world's libraries and the Web are examples of this.

28. SEL2211: ContextsLecture 13: Literacy and its implications Text is objective Disagreement over what was said by someone is a commonplace of human experience. Text, however, is objective in the sense that, once written, it exists independently of any individual, including the person who wrote it, and enters the public domain. In other words, what was said becomes a matter of indisputable public record. Because text is objective, it defies manipulation by special interest groups and individuals. This has numerous consequences. For example: -- Politics: public accountability of ruling groups; preservation of individual freedoms against government -- Law: objectivity of law for all -- Commerce: objective record of transactions