Writing and the Expansion of the Human Mind
The story of writing seems to me to be a story of the expansion of human mind. It is, therefore, a story of a wonderful adventure. I cannot participate in the observance of the United Nations Literacy Decade without reminding myself and others of the story of writing through the centuries.
Our relationship with writing has many facets: We look up an address; we jot down a shopping list; we consult the Internet; we prepare training material at work or as part of volunteering; we read a novel; we write a love letter; we read a prayer, and feel its words flow through us. These activities take place in ordinary people like us because we have been taught a system that records ideas through agreed-upon symbols, and because we have been taught that we have the right to use that system.
The latter of these two reasons, that we have been taught that we have the right to use a system of symbolic communication, and to use it for our own purposes, is what makes the story of writing not only a story of adventure, but a story of freedom.
It appears that writing developed originally among only four groups in the world:
---the Sumerians
---the Egyptians
---the Chinese
---the people of what we now call southern Mexico.
It also appears that the world’s original writing systems began as groups of codified symbols for certain kinds of objects, such as domestic animals or metal ingots. Scribes in the service of kings or priests usually manipulated those symbols; the written records were for very restricted use and very few readers. Also, because of the limitations of early writing systems, the symbols, even in combination with each other, were able to convey little information.
For some people, it was enough to be able to say, “The king has 1000 copper ingots.” For other people, that was not enough. The latter were the people who drove writing forward, who combined the symbol for head with the symbol for bread, thereby expressing the concept “to eat”. Then such people began to use a symbol for an easily represented object or action to suggest something that was far less easily represented, but that had a similar sound. For example, the Sumerians used the symbol for “arrow” to represent “life” because the words had very similar sounds. Other symbols were devised to represent grammatical endings, conceptual categories, and other units of meaning and organization; in that way, scribes and others began to link the sounds and orders of words to the marks they made on clay or bone. People who saw what language could do became increasingly skilled at reflecting and recording people’s lives. Nevertheless, royal courts and the sanctuaries of state religions were the only places where people wrote and read.
Most cultures other than the Chinese began to at that point to focus more strongly on the link between their writing systems and their speech sounds rather than the link between their writing systems and symbols of meaning. In the case of the ancient Egyptians, a well-developed system of sound symbols came into being to compliment the earlier symbols for objects, actions, and concepts. In the case of the Maya, sound symbols and meaning symbols could be combined in the representation of a single word, according to the artistic or other preferences of the writer. In ancient Greece, by contrast, writing broke away from king, priest, and scribe; it became a more democratic form of communication that used a comparatively simple written form. In China, progress was directed toward making more expressive and better-organized combinations of meaning-based characters to express people’s lives.
As writing developed, important changes took place in the relationships among people. Among these were:
---A writing system that had been developed for one language could be used for another. The system that had been developed for Arabic was used, with some modifications, for languages spoken in Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and India. Chinese characters were used in Japan and Korea before those countries developed sound-based writing systems, and characters continue today to be used in certain circumstances. That meant that writing, apparently invented in only four places in the world, could spread to wherever people wanted to express their lives in forms that lasted longer than speech and were more specific than a painted wall or marks cut into a stick.
---Writing, and especially sound-based writing, gradually ceased to be a tool used only by kings, priests, and scribes. The ability to read and write spread through social classes until the degree of literacy in a country became a way of evaluating that country in broader terms. Of course, widespread literacy has been achieved in China also, but children in that country spend considerably longer learning to read and write than children who learn sound-based writing systems.
When we examine the potential of sound-based writing to represent almost any language and to increase the well-being of those who learn the corresponding system, we can conclude that it is not enough that literacy is possible for nearly everyone. Instead, we must view literacy as one of the most important and practical goals for individuals and societies. The potential for universal literacy must become reality.
The increasing reality of worldwide literacy not only makes it possible to function better in their own societies, but to reach out through distance and time . Some people find this possibility to be exhilarating and hopeful; others find it unsettling and even frightening for a variety of reasons, and respond by burning books or forbidding their publication, excluding girls or the poor from schooling, blocking Internet access, and other means perfected (if that is the word) over years and centuries of denial.
When I look at the ancient beginnings of writing, limited and limiting, and compare them to what is possible and being achieved today, the difference reminds me of a long, rocky road that has been successfully traversed. However, we must all be aware that while the human mind has made the journey through history to current systems of recording and transmitting information, many individuals have not made their individual journeys even to the skill levels of basic literacy. Those individual and societal failures are usually “writ large” in the cultures and economies in which those people participate, as well as in the lives of the individuals.
United Nations Association of the U.S.A.
San Fernando Valley (California) Chapter
2003