Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy:
"When this is all said, however, about the Semitic alphabet, it does appear
that the Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they
developed the first alphabet complete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes
that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to
sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient
cultures. The reader of Semitic writing had to draw on non-textual as well as
textual data: he had to know the language he was reading in order to know what
vowels to supply between the consonants. Semitic writing was still very much
immersed in the non-textual human lifeworld. The vocalic Greek alphabet was
more remote from that world (as Plato's ideas were to be). It analyzed sound
more abstractly into purely spatial components. It could be used to write or
read words even from languages one did not know (allowing for some inaccuracies
due to phonemic differences between
languages). Little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were
very young and their vocabulary limited. (It has just been noted that for
Israeli schoolchildren to about the third grade vowel 'points' have to be added
to the ordinary consonantal Hebrew script.) The Greek alphabet was
democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. It was also
internationalizing in that it provided a way of processing even foreign
tongues.This Greek achievement in abstractly analyzing the elusive world of
sound into visual equivalents (not perfectly, of course, but in effect fully)
both presaged and implemented their further analytic exploits.
It appears that the structure of the Greek language, the fact that it was not
based on a system like the Semitic that was hospitable to omission of vowels
from writing, turned out to be a perhaps accidental but crucial intellectual
advantage. Kerckhove (1981) has suggested that, more than other writing
systems, the completely phonetic alphabet favors left- hemisphere activity in
the brain, and thus on neurophysiological grounds fosters abstract, analytic
thought.
The reason why the alphabet was invented so late and why it was invented only
once can be sensed if we reflect on the nature of sound. For the alphabet
operates more directly on sound as sound than the other scripts, reducing sound
directly to spatial equivalents, and in smaller, more analytic, more manageable
units than a syllabary: instead of one symbol for the sound ba, you have two,b
plus a.
Sound, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is going out of
existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: when I say 'existence',
by the time I get to the '-tence', the 'exis-' is gone. The alphabet implies
that matters are otherwise, that a word is a thing, not an event, that it is
present all at once, and that it can be cut up into little pieces, which can
even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: 'p-a-r-t' can be pronounced
'trap'. If you put the word 'part' on a sound tape and reverse the tape, you do
not get 'trap', but a completely difrerent sound, neither 'part' nor 'trap'. A
picture, say, of a bird does not reduce sound to space, for it represents an
object, not a word. It will be the equivalent of any number of words, depending
on the language used to interpret it: oiseau, uccello, pajaro, Vogel, sae,
tori, 'bird'.
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