WRITING VS. MEMORY

Here we are on Flagstaff Mountain overlooking Boulder, Colorado. Behind me is the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains. On this side, the Great Plains, was the territory of the Arapaho Indians. They did not have a writing system; they were hunting and gathering people. They kept records of their history on animal skins. But everything else they needed to know, they memorized: the stories they told their children, the sacred myths, the ceremonial rituals. Everything was done without the aid of any writing system. They don’t seem to have suffered much from the lack of a writing system. They did not have large populations; they didn’t have bodies of knowledge any larger than what their elders could memorize and transmit to the young people. They got along fine without writing systems.

By comparison, the people like the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia who invented writing for the first time, they had agriculture of a scale that permitted them to build cities and have centralized governments. Those were people who really needed a writing system. They were acquiring a society of such complexity that nobody could remember all that needed to be remembered. And that’s what writing is for.

There are still people in India who have memorized poetry that takes a week to recite. And there’s Indians in Latin America who have never had a writing system who can also recite poetry word for word, letter for letter, or sound for sound, that takes a week to recite.

It’s been often noticed that we’ve lost our powers of memory. The more literate we become, the poorer our memories get to be. Long ago in ancient Greece, Plato had something to say on this. His grandfather had been illiterate. Writing had only been introduced to Greece two generations before Plato and Plato said, “writing’s all very well and good, but it’s going to destroy people’s memories”. Up to now, people have memorized everything, they’ve memorized long epic poems that took days and weeks to recite, and as soon as they put everything into writing, the gift of memory is going to be gone. The trouble is, with writing, words become permanent, and the ideas that are expressed become permanent whether they’re true or not.

When you get an oral message from somebody, you can see the face of the man that you’re getting the message from. You can look him in the eye, you can tell by his tone of voice, by the expression of his face, how reliable he might be. On the other hand, when you’re reading something, you don’t know who said it, you don’t know whether the person that wrote it is honest, you don’t know whether what it says is true at all. When writing was first introduced to England, there was great resistance to the idea of having written contracts because people said “well if I talk to a man and shake his hand on a contract I know I can believe him, but if he signs a piece of paper, what’s that? Anybody can forge a signature on a piece of paper.”

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET

There are three steps in the history of writing. First is not really writing, it’s pictures - pictorial representations. The second is what we might call word writing; the pictures become simplified, they evolve into representations of words. The third is sound writing, the kind of thing that we have in the alphabet where the symbols stand not for things, not for words, but for the sounds of the language. This happened first in the ancient Near East. It was put into the form of an alphabet by the Greeks and this is the alphabet that we have today, where the written symbol corresponds to the sound of our language.

The Phoenicians lived in the eastern shore of the Mediterranean where Lebanon and Israel are now. They spoke a language related to Hebrew and to Arabic. They were traders and they spread their writing system all over the Mediterranean, including Greece. But the writing system of the ancient Phoenicians only wrote the consonants. Now that kind of writing system is continued in the writing of modern Hebrew and of modern Arabic. Those languages have ways of writing vowels but they don’t use them so much. The vowels are downgraded and often not indicated at all.

The Greeks learned about the ancient Phoenician writing system and saw that it would be useful, but they improved on it for their purposes by adding symbols for the vowels. That’s the basis of the alphabet; it was then borrowed by the Romans and spread to most of Europe. It was also borrowed by the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and is represented in the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Russians today.

We think of the alphabet in English as being A B C D E F, etcetera. This order of the letters and the shapes of the letters we got from the Greeks who called them Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon, etcetera. The Greeks got shapes of the letters and the names of the letters and the order of the letters also from the Phoenicians who called them Aleph Beth Gimel, etcetera.

There’s some people that think of the alphabet as the greatest cultural innovation of all time; certainly it was very important for Europe and became very important for the whole world, but I would insist that other kinds of writing - for instance Chinese writing - can be equally useful and equally valuable for modern life.

EDITING

This is the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I’m Bill Bright; this is my friend Robert Frost. He’s writing a poem called “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.” I’ve been very much involved all my life with writing, with written language, and with editing. I was the editor of my high school annual and I haven’t stopped editing since then. The job of the editor is to improve the rough copy that people produce when they write, make it as readable as possible, make it accord with people’s ideas of correctness - that is, correct spelling and correct grammar. The editor tries to make writing easier for people to read; he’s looking at matters of spelling and grammar and style that are considered acceptable by the society.

Nowadays, writers give editors a lot of work to do. This is partly because they don’t teach grammar in primary and elementary school very much any more. It’s partly because people working on the computer, I think, are tempted to use more words than they need to just because it’s so easy. Writers often complain that editors take out the best parts of what they’ve written. Well, an editor may have several reasons for taking things out. One is he may be able to only fit in so many words and some words have to go. Another possibility is that most writers are terribly wordy; they say everything three times. The editor, I think, is completely within his rights in taking out some of that repetition. I’ve often have writers come to me, a year, two years after I edited and published something that they’d written, and they said “I’m so glad you took all that junk out of my article. I would have been so embarrassed if it had gone to press that way.”

This poem by Robert Frost is a classic and I wouldn’t dream of trying to edit it. But Robert Frost probably had an editor too, and he and his editor probably discussed some of the wording in this poem before the work went to press. The editor has to keep in mind that he’s trying to help the writer express himself as clearly as possible, and when he does that, he’s a good editor. If an editor tries to impose the rules from the book on a poet, the result will be disastrous. Of course, no good poet writes according to a rulebook. There are books that contain rules, but famous poets like Robert Frost have bent and broken every rule that was ever written.

RULES

The rules that an intelligent and educated people follow in writing and in speaking have been formulated unconsciously throughout their lives by living in our society, by reading what authors have written in English. And they choose the rules to determine the pronunciation and the grammar that they use depending on what they instinctively know to be socially appropriate in each particular situation.

In some countries like France and Spain, there’s an official National Academy of the Language and they make the rules and people are supposed to follow them, whether they actually do or not. In this country, we don’t have any official body like that. But we know what sounds correct or what reads right. We know because we unconsciously have it in our heads on the basis of our experience as members of this English-speaking society.