In all of my years of teaching, I always find that the hardest point to get across to students is that language and writing are two separate things - that letters and sounds aren’t the same thing, that the letters represent the sounds. I tell them, “leave your letters at the door.” And they never do.

When most people think about language they think of language as being, in some sense, essentially written. So when you think about English, you’re taking an English course, you are taking a course on written English. It’s hard to imagine taking an English course that didn’t involve reading. But for linguists, when linguists talk about language, linguists think of language as being essentially spoken. And for them writing is not really a form of language, but is a way of recording language, so in some sense we actually think of writing as a kind of technology, as a simple recording machine. But linguists, when they think about a language like English, don’t really think about it as something that is essentially written. For linguists, language is really spoken, and writing is a recording device. It’s a primitive recording device, a very simple recording device, but we think of it as actually a very elegant recording device, and in terms of history it’s at least as important as the wheel. And I think you could make a very good argument that it is more important than the wheel.

THE INVENTION OF WRITING

Speech is something that is natural to human beings. Children learn to speak spontaneously, no one has to teach them to speak, it just happens. Writing is not something that happens naturally to people; writing has to be acquired, and in the history of human beings, writing wasn’t always there, it had to be invented.

The question of how many times writing was invented is a bit controversial and there are various theories, but I personally think that the notion that there were three separate inventions is the most reasonable one. The three places where writing was invented were China, Sumer (which is very close to modern Baghdad), and the Maya country in southern Mexico. It’s a little odd at first that writing should have been invented separately in three different places, but there is a theory that seems to explain it, and that is that in these three different places, the languages were actually very similar in their structure. In each of the cases the language that was used by the people had words that consisted of just one syllable. Linguists use the term monosyllabic to talk about a language like that. English has a lot of monosyllabic words. We have words like dog, run, tie, hit - those are all one-syllable words. Of course, we also have words like cornucopia and onomatopoeic, and obligatory, and even longer words. Now most of those much longer words, as it happens, were words that we borrowed from other languages. The basic English vocabulary really is for the most part one-syllable words.

We know that writing systems, when they arose, arose only in cultures that we can think of as being civilized in the etymological sense, where civilized really means people living in cities. If you don’t have a certain level of material culture, then you don’t really need a writing system, but once you have that writing system then the writing system really is a bootstrap mechanism for accelerating the rate of material change, if you will, material progress.

Writing developed in societies that themselves had grown out of agriculture. We think of agriculture as something simple in our modern world, but, in fact, the cultivation of grain was what allowed people to settle down and develop complex material cultures. Before agriculture, people were hunter-gatherers; they found whatever food they could, they ate the food, then they went looking for more food. What agriculture does is it puts you on a regular cycle, and it forces you not only to save what you’ve grown, but to keep track of what you’ve grown. You really have to know what you have. You have to count what you have. And it was those sorts of circumstances, that kind of agricultural society that led to the possibility of writing. Agriculture led quite quickly to specialization, so you might have some particular product that I needed and I might have something that you needed, and we would have to exchange. That naturally leads to record keeping, and record keeping leads very naturally to writing. In fact, we have evidence that just before the invention of what we think of as writing in Sumer, there arose another system for keeping records that involved symbolic objects; little clay pieces which themselves represented animals, grain, commodities. And it looks like that system of record keeping of clay objects that led fairly directly to writing, at least in Sumer.

We have to take ourselves back to a point before there was writing and we have to understand that before there was writing people didn’t really understand what a word was. They didn’t need to understand what a word was, they didn’t need to distinguish between the word and the thing that the word represented. In the early stages of writing, people had symbols that they thought were symbols for things. In these monosyllabic languages, these one-syllable languages, you could develop a set of symbols that stood for things. But the great leap was for people to realize that what they were symbolizing was not the thing, but the word for that thing, the sound of the word.

A wonderful example comes from Sumer where, in the very earliest writing, we see the syllable “tee” being used to represent arrow and indeed what we got was a picture of an arrow. It became real writing when the Sumerians realized that same syllable “tee” also meant life. And when they started using that arrow symbol to represent not just the arrow but also the word life; that was when they had a writing system. So what happens is that a picture becomes a sound, and that’s really when we can say we have a writing system, because a writing system is not recording ideas, it’s not recording things, a writing system is recording words, sounds.

So writing grew out of pictures, but what’s the big deal, what’s the difference between writing and pictures? And why do we say that writing is better than pictures? After all, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. Well, that is exactly the point. A picture can be interpreted in many many different ways. I can look at a picture, I can tell the story, it may be the same story, but I can tell that story any way I want to. Writing represents not an idea, not a story, but individual specific words. It’s a recording device. When I write something down, when someone reads it, they read exactly the words that I have written down. And that’s what makes writing so remarkable. When we look at those drawings, what we know is that they are not representing words, they may be representing ideas, but they aren’t specific words. In fact the great breakthrough of Champoleon in studying Egyptian hieroglyphics was to understand precisely that. That hieroglyphics was not a system of recording ideas, but was a system of recording language, and that allowed him to try to discover what the language was that those symbols were recording, not what the ideas were.

WRITING SYSTEMS

Let’s say you’ve been asked to invent a writing system. You know that the writing system has to represent the sounds of the language. Well, what sounds, what size, how big? It turns out that people who have invented writing systems have worked with three different sizes of sounds. The simplest and the first are those in which the sound is the sound of a whole word. So we have the sound of dog, we have the sound of chicken. Those are what we call logographic writing systems. Then the next level of abstraction we might think of is the level of the syllable, in which the symbol doesn’t represent a whole word but each symbol represents an individual syllable of that word. So instead of having one sign that represents chicken, we have two signs, one for chick and another for en. A very nice example of this is Japanese, which has both syllable symbols and word symbols. Japanese has thousands of word symbols because there are thousands of words on Japanese, but it only has sixty some syllable symbols because that’s how many syllables there are in Japanese.

In terms of the number of symbols that you need in your writing system, the kind of system with the fewest number of symbols is an alphabet, in which every symbol stands for a single speech sound. The alphabet is such an abstract notion that it was invented only once, and then probably by accident. It was such a wonderful system though, that almost all of the worlds writing systems today are alphabetic.

THE ALPHABET

It was invented only once in Egypt, and it was so difficult to grasp that the Egyptians didn’t even realize that they had invented it. It took an entirely different group of people to understand what the Egyptians had done, and to turn their discovery into the alphabet that we know today. But this alphabet was so remarkable that it has spread almost all over the world. Of course you don’t need to have an alphabet. Chinese is written to this day without an alphabet. Japanese is written without an alphabet. People certainly prosper without alphabets, but the invention was so remarkable that it spread over a period of millennia all the way around the world.

India has many alphabets, Tibet, Mongolia, parts of Indonesia. All of these alphabets seem to be quite different from one another, but at heart they stem from that one single accidental invention. One simple bit of evidence for that is that pretty much all alphabets have the same number of letters: somewhere between twenty and thirty. That, in fact, was an Egyptian invention, thought the Egyptians didn’t realize that they had invented it. The Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols usually symbolized more than one sound. But they did in fact have symbols for about 25 individual speech sounds. They could have used them as an alphabet, they just didn’t.

It was a Semitic tribe, but we don’t know exactly who they were. They were probably speakers of a Canaanite dialect who figured this out, and invented the alphabet. The system that they used, which they had pretty much borrowed from the Egyptians was to have a symbol that stood for some recognizable object whose name began with the particular sound that they were interested in. For example the second letter of the Semitic alphabet was the word “beta”. That was a picture of a house because “beta” in this early Semitic language meant house. So you could say that the second letter of that Semitic alphabet was house. Beta stood for the sound “B” because that’s what it began with. The fourth letter of that same alphabet was “dalet”. Dalet was the word for door in that language and it stood for the sound “D”. The principle that the letter stands for the first sound of its name is called the acrophonic principal. Acro is Greek, it means beginning or top; phonic is, of course, Greek for sound. That same alphabet is the alphabet that we use today. The Semitic people used it only for consonants.

How did the vowels arrive? The answer is that they probably arose out of a misunderstanding, and I like to picture the misunderstanding this way. The Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians. So let’s picture two sailors, a Phoenician sailor and a Greek sailor sitting on a dock. And the Phoenician is trying to teach the Greek the principles of this invention called the alphabet. And the Phoenician says “Listen, Greek, its very easy. Every one of these symbols stands for the first sound in its name. So Beta stands for buh, and dolet stands for duh. And hey stands for huh.” The problem is that the poor Greek didn’t have the Huh sound. The poor Greek learned the principle of the first sound, repeated the alphabet to himself and when he got to ‘hey’, said ‘eh’ instead, and concluded that that letter stood for the sound ‘eh’. You do that with about five other Semitic consonants that are unpronounceable in Greek, and you end up with a Greek alphabet with about twenty consonants and about five vowels. So what we think of as the alphabet, which is this combination of consonant symbols and vowel symbols was really the result of bad learning on the part of a poor Greek.

So the people who invented the alphabet as we know it were a Semitic tribe, a Canaanite tribe, and most of the people have disappeared today. The only Canaanites left today are the Jews and the other Canaanites that we remember are the Phoenicians. And it was the Phoenicians among those Canaanite tribes who transmitted the alphabet to other groups outside the area. Phoenicians were traders, they traveled all around the Mediterranean, they met many different people. They transmitted the alphabet to the Greeks, the Greeks in turn transmitted it to the Etruscans, who transmitted it to the Romans, and from there, all around the western world. On the other side of things, through other Semitic-speaking people, the same alphabetic writing system made its way east into India, and then through Southest Asia and Northeast Asia. So from that one central spot, the alphabet spread all around the world.

Why do we have 26 letters in our alphabet? Well if you take the original Semitic alphabet and compare it to our alphabet that we use for English today, we have almost exactly the same letters, and in almost exactly the same alphabetic order that the earliest known alphabets were found. Why they are in that order, why the letters are in that order: nobody knows. What’s remarkable to me is how conservative the alphabetical system has been, that at least in the West, we very, very reluctantly add a few letters here and there, but we keep pretty much the same system.

THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING

The evolution of writing didn’t just stop with the invention of the alphabet. There are lots of aspects of our writing system today that came much later. Things like punctuation. Modern punctuation is actually very, very young. Maybe a few hundred years old, and you can pick up a book today that was published a hundred years ago and you will quickly notice that the punctuation is very different from what it is today. Even after the alphabet was invented there were a lot of basic issues that still had to be settled and it didn’t really settle down for quite a while. For example, what direction do you write in? Do you write sideways? Do you write up and down? And if you are writing sideways, lets say I start over here and I get to the end of the line; well what do I do then? One simple solution would be just to go back again, and keep on writing like that. And in fact, that’s the way a lot of the early writing looks. It goes back and forth. In the Semitic tradition, people decided that they would always write from right to left. In the Greek and Latin tradition, people decided that they would always write from left to right. In China and Japan, people decided to write like this. We, of course, take all these things for granted, but those decisions really took quite a while to sort out.

What about spaces between words? Well, in the Semitic writing system, they figured that out pretty quickly. The Greeks though, had a lot more trouble. In fact, they pretty much gave up on spaces between words. And it wasn’t until the Irish in the 8th or 9th century that Europeans started to put spaces back in between the words. The Greeks left out the spaces between the words; they felt they didn’t need them. They were taking up too much room. It sounds strange to us that somebody would do that. After all, how do you read without seeing the spaces between words? But it turns out that the Greeks and medieval people were really reading in a different way from the way we read today. First of all, they read aloud, they didn’t read silently. Silent reading is actually a pretty late notion. They were also pretty much reading the same text over and over again. So they could recognize what words they were reading much easier than we do today. They weren’t reading for pleasure, for leisure. They didn’t have the punctuation that we have today. When punctuation was first invented it was really almost a musical notation, a way of indicating how people should recite the text when reading it out loud. It wasn’t what we think of as punctuation today, which is punctuation not for the sound but punctuation for the sense of things.

It was the Irish, in fact, fairly late in the 8th or 9th century, who first lit upon the idea of separating the words, making spaces between words. And that’s spread pretty slowly, it wasn’t until 1200 or 1300 that it became standard throughout Europe to put spaces between words. The most likely reason for why the Irish put these spaces between words was because they were reading and writing in Latin, a language which was pretty difficult for them and pretty unfamiliar, and those spaces helped them to be able to read the words. The continental monks, the Italian, French, Spanish, for them Latin was a much easier language to understand, so they didn’t need the extra help that the spaces gave them. In a sense you can think of the spaces as a kind of a crutch.

LITERACY

We assume that literacy is nothing but a good thing, but I don’t know, are literate people better than illiterate people? Are they more ethical? Do they lead happier lives? I don’t think there’s really any evidence for that, so the real question is what does literacy do for people?

Plato, for example, was worried that literacy would lead to the atrophy of memory. He was also worried that once something was written down it would become so codified, that it would just be repeated over and over again. That’s true to some extent. It’s easier to see with music than it is to see with writing for most of us. So take classical music, which has been written down for hundreds of years. When someone plays Beethoven, what they do is they simply repeat those notes that Beethoven wrote down two hundred years ago, the same notes over and over again. Jazz, on the other hand, is not a written form of music, at least improvisatory jazz, and so when Miles Davis performed a piece, he could perform the same piece dozens of times and he would never perform it in exactly the same way. It was always new because it wasn’t written down. That’s what Plato was worried about, that we would lose the Miles Davis’ of this world. In fact, its not just writing that does this, its any form of recording.

Popular music today, though it’s not written down, is recorded. And so when we listen to a piece of popular music, a Beatles song, we listen to the same version over and over again hundreds of times. The Beatles are just like Beethoven, they’re not like Miles. So it’s the same thing with writing, when you write something down it becomes permanent, it acquires a particular form. We think of great works of art as being permanent, we think of great works of verbal art as being permanent. So we think of great poems as always being the same; a poem by Wordsworth, a poem by Yeats, a poem by Emily Dickinson. Those poems are going to be repeated verbatim every time we say them, but that’s just an artifact of writing. When Homer recited a poem, every time Homer recited that poem he recited it in a completely different way, the words we never the same. It wasn’t until some other Greek hundreds of years later wrote Homer down, that the Iliad and the Odyssey became those permanent words that we know today.

Was Plato right or wrong? Well, that depends. Sometimes we want language to be permanent, we want to be able to preserve those exact words, to repeat over and over. But sometimes we want to be able to improvise. I think when you write, you’re thinking of the language in a different way from when you speak. Speech is choppy, people don’t speak in full sentences; they interrupt one another. You can’t interrupt in writing, writing is much more deliberate and you can go back, you can correct it before you actually put it down on paper. So like when you when you listen to me talking right now; I think if you actually wrote down what I was saying right now, it would make even less sense than it’s making because, I’m hesitating, I’m stopping, I’m starting over again. You can’t do that in writing. Writing is an idealized form of language, like some linguists even make the mistake of thinking that written language is somehow more perfect than spoken language because it doesn’t contain all of the errors that speech contains. Just being able to, or being forced to write something down forces you to think about your word choice, your word order in a way that you just normally don’t do when you’re speaking. Most people don’t speak like a text, most people speak in a casual choppy manner.

The trouble with writing is that all you’ve got is the words. You don’t have the inflection in your voice; you don’t have that intonation, you can’t slow things down, you can’t speed up, you can’t hesitate significantly in the way you do in speech. You can’t wave your hands around; you don’t have those gestures, so all you’ve got is the words. Maybe that makes you pay more attention to the words. That’s why when we think about language as written language we think about it as words. And so maybe because written language makes you focus so much on words and nothing else, that’s why words become so important in written language. And that may be why literate people think so much of words when they think of language.

Literacy is not something that’s necessary in order for people to function as human beings. People functioned for hundreds of thousands of years without being literate. Children are illiterate. A large proportion of the population of the earth is illiterate. Being illiterate does not make you less of a human being, but in the modern world of the last 200 hundred years, literacy has become like electricity. It’s something we really can’t function without. If you look around you, you will see that we are surrounded by the tools of literacy, and by the demands of literacy. There are signs everywhere - just imagine being deprived of ATM machines, walking into McDonalds and not knowing what kind of food to order. Not being able to use a telephone properly, especially these days where you may have to dial 14 numbers in order to get yourself connected. It means that you are just missing out on a lot of what the world consists of today if you are illiterate.

One of the great landmarks in the history of written language was Gutenberg’s letterpress, printing press, which allowed the written word to spread far and wide. The advent of the letterpress printing allowed for mass spread of documents in a way that hadn’t occurred before, and we naturally think that this led instantly to widespread literacy. But in fact, it was hundreds of years, really not until the early 19th century, that mass literacy became a goal. And then, only in the United States, where people came up with a truly revolutionary idea that everyone had to go to school, that everyone had to learn to read and write; that this was a social obligation. Of course that raises the question of how you learn to read and write, a question that’s still with us today.

“CORRECT” WRITING

People talk a lot about on the one hand good and bad writing, and on the other hand correct and incorrect writing, and there’s a tendency to confuse the two. To assume that if you can learn to write correctly that somehow by writing correctly you are automatically going to write well. Or, on the other hand, someone who doesn’t write correctly isn’t going to write well, but they are really quite separate from one another. All you have to do is pick up an academic article, and you can understand very quickly that yes, this may be written in perfectly correct English, but its not written very well because its not terribly interesting. Lets make a distinction: there’s good and bad writing and there’s correct and incorrect writing, and they’re really two very different things.

I think it’s easier to think about correct and incorrect writing because we have lots of explicit rules for what’s correct and what’s incorrect. Spelling rules, for example, when you learn English, you learn to spell. Now English happens to be a frightfully difficult language to spell for complex historical reasons. Spelling, for example, every word has a correct spelling and so it’s pretty easy to tell whether someone has made a mistake in spelling or not. What’s much harder of course is to distinguish between good and bad; that’s a matter of taste. There’s that famous opinion of Truman Capote’s who said of Jack Kerouac, “That’s not writing, it’s typing!”

TABOOS

In every language there are forbidden words, what we call taboo words, words that you are not allowed to say. In English, in this country, we even have a list of words that is officially unsayable on broadcast television and radio, and if you do say them they’re going to get bleeped out the way they do in rap songs. There are these so called taboo words that you’re simply not supposed to say, and, of course, sometimes you can express the same concept but using a different word and it’s fine.

I think in the mid-sixties, the word “pussy” was less taboo than it is today. There are certain topics that are now taboo that were not taboo 40 years ago, so the big thing now is any sort of physical handicap. So 40 years ago you could be crippled and nowadays you simply can’t, you’re not allowed to use that word. Its very, very difficult to use the word crippled; even handicapped has become a difficult term. Disabled, all of those terms… that is just generally…. I wanted to say bodily defect, are taboo but of course we can’t call them defects any more. And physical challenges have become a taboo subject, so that’s a big shift. We can say “piss” on broadcast television. When I was a kid, if I said piss, my mother would wash my mouth out with soap. On cable now, Pen and Teller have a show named Bullshit…Are we allowed to say bullshit on broadcast television? I think for your father lousy meant full of lice, right? But I think if you asked your average person today what lousy meant and whether it had anything to do with lice, they would say, ‘no, lousy just means bad, it doesn’t have anything to do with lice.’ Anyway, lice are so remote that for most people they don’t even think of this as somehow an impolite topic.

In some languages certain written forms become taboo. Actually a fascinating example comes from Hebrew in which the name of God, the four letter name of God, is considered to be unpronounceable in every sense of the term; you’re not allowed to pronounce the name of God, and furthermore nobody really knows how to pronounce it. Because the theory is that if you ever did pronounce the name of God, the world would come to an end. And so I could spell it out for you: it’s Y H V H, and that’s the name of God. When we translate it into English some people translate it as Jehovah, but that’s a mistake, and other people translate it as Yaweh, but in fact nobody has any idea. Presumably Yaweh is the wrong pronunciation because if it were the right pronunciation than we wouldn’t be standing here anymore because the world would have blown up. But the taboo is so strong that in Hebrew you’re not allowed to write the letters YH together just by themselves, or VH together just by themselves because its too close to the name of God. So when you write the numbers in Hebrew, you can use letters to write number and to write the number fifteen, you should write YH, because Y is 10 and H is 5, so the number 15 should be written that way. But instead what you do is instead of writing ten, five, you write nine, six. That’s standard, that’s perfectly normal in standard written Hebrew that the number 15 is written 9 plus 6 because other wise you would be writing those two letters in that forbidden combination.