Literacy and the Politics of Writing

Albertine Gaur

Description

With the growth of modern information technology, it is time to re-examine the concept and purpose of writing, and question the long cherished idea that the alphabet stands at the apex of a hierarchy towards which all proper forms of writing must necessarily progress. This book shows that the primary purpose of writing is the ability to store and transmit information, information essential to the social, economical and political survival of a particular group. Writing, in whatever form, allows the individual the interact with the group, to acquire an amount of knowledge that far outweighs the scope of memory (oral traditions), and to be free to manipulate this knowledge and arrive at new conclusion. Providing a quick and easy entrance to information related to the subject, the volume contains a network of references leading the reader towards further information, and most entries are listed with bibliographical notes.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Linguistics
• Philosophy of language
• Comparative
• Literacy
• LAW

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508818
• Langue: English

Extrait

Literacy and the Politics of Writing
Albertine Gaur
Hardback Edition First Published in Great Britain in 2000 by Intellect Books , PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in USA in 2000 by Intellect Books , ISBS, 5804 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2000 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdani Cover Design: Robin Beecroft Copy Editor: Wendi Momen

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-881-0 / ISBN 1-84150-011-9
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Wiltshire
Contents
Author Biography and Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. What is writing?
The purpose of writing - Invention or evolution? - Transmitting stored information - The two most stable components
2. Non-linguistic forms of writing
The power of pictures and signs - Narrative pictures - Objects - Tallies - Archival records - Property marks - Memory aids - Modern picture writing
3. The introduction of language elements
The riddle of the rebus - The emergence of the rebus in objects, proverbs and ritualistic memory aids - Sign languages - The failure of purely phonetic scripts - The elusive phoneme
4. Extinct scripts: the infrastructure of palace and temple
Mesopotamia - Ancient Mediterranean forms of writings - Peru - Egypt - Mesoamerica - Indus Valley civilisation
5. The common origin of contemporary writing systems
Semitic scripts - The alphabets
6. The special place of certain writing systems
Indian forms of writing - Chinese forms of writing
7. The political success of unsuitable writing systems
The Chinese derived scripts of Korea and Japan - Indian script forms in Southeast Asia, the Himalayan countries and Central Asia - The success of cuneiform - The Arabic script and the Roman alphabet
8. Script inventors and script inventions
Hangul - the script of the people - Scripts invented to aid the spread of Christianity - Scripts as part of a self-respect movement
9. Rewards and problems of decipherment
10.Calligraphy - a corporate logo?
Chinese calligraphy - Islamic calligraphy - Western calligraphy
11.What is a book?
Shape and material - Bookbinding - Illustration and illumination - The danger of books - Modern technology and the talking book
12.Printing, the writing masters and the Internet
13.What is literacy?
Benefits and pitfalls of literacy - Functional literacy - Oral literacy - Information overload?
Some final thoughts
Index
Author Biography
Albertine Gaur received her doctorate from the University of Vienna, where she specialised in Ethnology and Philosophy. She studied Tamil and Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and spent five years in India, two of them teaching at a rural university in Rajasthan. After a short spell at the India Office Library and Records she joined the British Museum (later the British Library) as Assistant Keeper in charge of South Indian materials, going on to become Deputy Keeper and Head of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books until 1990. Since then she has served a four-year term in local government with the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames and is at present on the governing board of two local schools. She also acts as outside examiner for the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She is the author of many books, including the widely acclaimed A History of Writing (British Library, 1984, 3rd revised edition, 1992), which has been translated into Japanese, Persian, Spanish, Italian and Korean. Another relevant publication is her A History of Calligraphy (British Library, 1994) and she is the co-author of Signs, Symbols and Icons (Intellect, 1997).
Acknowledgements
Plates 8 (National Museum, Taiwan), 15 (Aleppo Museum, Syria), 16 (Idrib Museum, Syria), 23 (Museo National de Arqueologia e Ethnologia, Guatemala), 24 (Palenque Museum, Mexico), 25 (Museuo de Arqueologia e Ethnoligia, Guatemala), 29 and 33 (Damascus Museum, Syria), 34 (Villa Giulia National Museum, Italy), 35 (Vatican Museum), 40 and 42 (National Palace Museum, Taiwan), 46 (Bangkok National Museum, Thailand), 50 (National Library of Russia, Petersburg), 51 (National Historical Museum, Sofia), 58 (National Place Museum, Taiwan), 62 and 64 (Royal Library of Rabat, Morocco), 68 (Idrib Museum, Syria), 69 (National Palace Museum, Taiwan), 70 (Bangkok National Library, Thailand). Reproduced from the Morisawa Calendars Man and Writing , produced by the Morisawa Company, Tokyo Branch, with kind permission of the President, Mr Yoshiaki Morisawa, and the Art Director in General, Mr Ikko Tanaka. The photographers were Mr Taishi Hirokawa and Mr Takashi Hatakeyama. I would also like to thank Prof. F. Yajima for his support and advice.
Plate 43 has been reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University. Plate 73 examples shown here are the work of the contemporary bookbinder Hilary Henning and are reproduced with her permission. Plates 3, 4, 11, 20, 21 and 87 have been photographed by the author. Plate 37 has been reproduced by permission of the Department of India and Oriental Collection, British Library. Plate 77 is reproduced by permission of Glasgow University Library.
The rest of the illustrations are reproduced from the author s A History of Writing and A History of Calligraphy , both published by the British Library. Information about oral traditions in Judaism have been reproduced with the author s kind permission, from an unpublished article on A Jewish Perspective of Oral Tradition (1999) by Dr David A. Glatt-Gilad of Beersheba University.
Introduction
This is neither a history of writing nor a handbook of existing scripts and writing systems. I have already tried to deal with these subjects in A History of Writing (1984), especially in the enlarged American/British edition of 1992.
The main questions I am trying to examine are: (1) What exactly is the primary purpose of writing? (2) How does the ability to put down information in permanent form relate to the concept of literacy? and (3) Does literacy depend on writing? In attempting an answer I have tried to look at the questions in a purely pragmatic manner, taking into account data that is at present available to us. New data, contradicting much of what we now take for granted may, after all, reach us at any time. One has only to consider how profoundly our understanding of human history has been changed during the last few centuries by the discovery and decipherment of hitherto unknown scripts, which served quite different, highly sophisticated, but now extinct civilisations.
Writing is (and has always been) a purely practical phenomenon insofar as it stores available, and for a particular society vital, information. As such, it is an essential part of the infrastructure of a given society. Literate are those able to access and/or contribute to this infrastructure. Many societies have, of course, functioned perfectly well with oral traditions alone and oral traditions have indeed never been wholly abandoned - to some extent they form an essential pre-condition for written literacy. But by being part of the infrastructure, writing is influenced less by linguistic, philosophical or philological considerations than by elements of power politics: how can what passes for writing at a given time aid a particular group to survive, develop and/or maintain a dominant position. Infrastructures deal not with abstract speculations but with purely practical problems. In fact, as far as written information storage is concerned, we had already left the age of linguistic philosophy when we started to rely on computers that are no longer based on language but on the interplay of just two numbers, 0 and 1.
If we look at past attempts to deal with the history of writing, we can see a dividing line between the efforts of those who addressed the question up until the mid-20th century and those who came afterwards. The 18th and the 19th centuries were largely dominated by scholars greatly influenced by biblical traditions, be they Jewish or Christian. Or, if they were of a non-religious disposition, by the values of the Enlightenment that put everything within human reach, promising, at least by implication, the possibility of a solution to all problems. In addition, most scholars were also familiar with Darwin s theory - it is difficult not to be influenced by prevailing theories, even if one only feels called upon to dispute them. They saw the origin of writing ( proper writing) either as an act of divine inspiration or as the work of (often just one) human genius. By subscribing to such retrospective interpretation and, in addition, to a purely linear concept of historical (or evolutionary) development, which moved towards one (Platonic) goal, they arrived, generally, at one overriding conclusion: the history (or evolution) of writing has moved from pictures to linear script forms, towards the representation of phonetic elements, reaching its eventual peak in the alphabet.
Towards the middle of the 20th century came the time of specialisation. It is true that the previous generalists had often lacked deep insight into every possible subject. But as the view of the post-1950s specialists grew more and more narrow, they paid for their insight into one particular field (or sub-field) with an often almost complete disregard for all other subject areas. They began to look at writing, and what they imagined to have been the development of writing, only from their own narrow, specialised background and in consequence arrived at times at quite startlingly naive conclusions. (A similar trend made itself felt in the field of anthropology).