Alphabet Soup
As regular readers of such
publications as Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies ; the Classical
Journal ; and the Journal of Biblical Literature are by now well
aware, a dispute has long simmered about whether people in ancient times read
to themselves silently, as we moderns do, or mostly read aloud. The unequivocal
references in ancient sources to silent reading are few, and the context often
suggests that the practice is unusual. St. Augustine describes with amazement
how the great Ambrose, bishop of Milan, could follow the written text with his
eyes even as "his voice and tongue stayed still."
The majority view today is
that reading aloud was the rule in antiquity--a view that has now received
powerful new support from Paul Saenger, a medievalist and curator at the
Newberry Library in Chicago. Saenger observes in Space Between Words: The
Origins of Silent Reading that most ancient texts virtually demanded to be
read aloud, because the words were written in what is known as scriptura
continua --that is, they were all run together,
forcingthereadertosoundeverythingout. Then, in the sixth and seventh centuries,
Irish-speaking monks, for whom the Latin of literature and Scripture was a
foreign language, began inserting spaces, just to help tell all those
unfamiliar words apart. Irish manuscript traditions went on to influence the
whole Western world, and the separation of words became a universal
convention--thereby making silent reading practical. Silent reading--now so
vast and entrenched that we take it for granted--seems to have come about more
or less by happy accident.
Specialists will no doubt be arguing over Saenger's thesis for years to
come--don't let your subscription to Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
lapse. But I was drawn to the argument of Space Between Words for two
reasons: First, it treats words as physical objects produced by physical means
and designed to be understood by physical beings; and second, it reminds us of
the breathtaking role serendipity can play in matters of language.
The physicality of words is something we tend to lose sight
of--literally--although the consequences of physicality are inescapable and
often startling. Some years ago I shouldered the rewarding (and not very
exacting) task of editing some articles by Bernard Lewis, distinguished scholar
of the Arab world. At one point in our conversations the subject drifted, and I
found myself asking Lewis--thinking he was bound to know--about the kind of
ancient Greek writing that was written from left to right on one line, then
from right to left on the next, then from left to right again, and so on.
"You're thinking of boustrophedon ," he replied at once. "The term comes
from Greek words that describe the way an ox-drawn plough turns in a
field."
I pursued
the matter a little further, asking how such a writing system came to be.
Lewis' answer emerged after a pleasant subterranean rumbling that I took to be
laughter (though his answer was entirely serious). "It probably arose," he
said, "from the practice of writing long inscriptions on cliff faces." Imagine,
he went on, lowering a chap with his chisel from the top of a monument and
moving him along as he does his work. What do you do when he finishes the first
line? Do you haul him all the way back to where he started? Or do you just drop
him down a few feet to the next line and then let him continue his work in the
opposite direction? The subterranean rumbling resumed for a moment, making it
clear the answer should be obvious.
In his 1996 memoir Running in the Family the
novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje wrote evocatively about the alphabet he
learned in Sri Lanka as a boy, making note of the aesthetic consequences of yet
another technological imperative:
I still believe the most
beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into
a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt
glass which betray no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its
sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which
people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and
so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin.
There has
been no lack of commentary about the consequences that the latest version of
Ola leaves--computers and electronic text--will have on the future of reading,
writing, and the Word, and I have no wish to revisit all the speculative Big
Questions here; Sven Birkerts, Michael Joyce, Steven Johnson, and the rest of
the gang can agonize or exult over these without any outside help. Many issues
will simply remain up in the air for years to come, no matter what anyone
says.
Still, computers and electronic text have already wrought
changes in the way the world's words are constructed. In Japan, individuals
have long been accustomed to elaborating upon the way their basic names are
written in kanji characters--personalizing names with a flourish of extra
characters or with added or subtracted strokes. Those flourishes now must come
to an end for official purposes, in the interest of computer standardization.
Likewise, the Association of Spanish Language Academies has voted to eliminate
"ch" (as in chorizo ) and "ll" (as in llama ) as distinct letters
in what had been a 29-letter Spanish alphabet. (An extra Spanish letter "n,"
the one with the tilde, remains in place for now.) The Germans, for their part,
have begun this year to phase out their distinctive letter for a double "s,"
the letter that looks somewhat like an English capital "B."
The forces
that are bringing a little more order to orthography are doing the same to
semantics. Because an electronically linked worldwide medical community needs a
common language, new terminology has been adopted by the International
Federation of Associations of Anatomists to describe human body parts. The
Adam's apple is henceforward to be known as the laryngeal
prominence . The Achilles tendon now becomes the calcaneal
tendon . The space between a woman's breasts is now to be known as the
intermammary sulcus .
It is beyond me to chart the future byways of
the digital revolution, but I'll venture one counterintuitive prediction:
Electronic media will usher in a resurgence in the quality and value in
handwriting. Signs of a renaissance of the handwritten word are here and there
discernible. Most obviously, there is the proliferation of specialty shops for
fountain pens and handmade paper. But it can also be seen, hauntingly, in the
almost sacral reception given to Ronald Reagan's handwritten letter revealing
his affliction with Alzheimer's disease. "Script's primary power," wrote Edmund
Morris, Reagan's biographer, in a 1995 reflection on the letter, "is to convey
the cursive flow of human thought, from brain to hand to pen to ink to
eye--every waver, every loop, every character trembling with expression."
As handwriting becomes ever
less a daily utilitarian workhorse it may well become ever more a cherished
means of interpersonal transmission--for the sorts of messages that one sets
aside to preserve (or pulls out to reread from one's intermammary sulcus). Some
future Paul Saenger, perhaps in a book to be called When Hands Left the
Keyboard , will, I hope, be able to tell the story of one more happy
accident.
