Signs can be recorded-quite a few were recorded in and on various
materials- and so can language, as we all know. But language did
not start out as a written system. The African Ishango Bone
predates a writing system by some thousands of years; the quipus
of the Inca culture are a sui generis record of people, animals,
and goods previous to writing. China and Japan, as well as
India, have similar pre-writing forms of keeping records.
The polygenetic emergence of writing is, in itself, significant
in several ways. For one, it introduced another mediating
element disassociated from a particular speaker. Second, it
constituted a level of generality higher than that of the verbal
expression that was independent of time and space, or of other
forms of record keeping. Third, everything projected into signs,
and from signs into articulated language, participated in the
formation of meaning as the result of the understanding of
language through its use. Only at that moment did language gain
a semantic and syntactic dimension (as we call them in today's
terminology).
Formally, if the issue of literacy and the constitution of
languages are connected, then this connection started with
written languages. Nevertheless, events preceding written
language give us the perspective of what made writing necessary,
and why some cultures never developed a written language.
Although referring to a different time-frame (thousands of years
ago), this could help us comprehend why writing and reading need
not dominate life and work today and in the future. Or at least
it could help clarify the relation among human beings, their
language, and their existence. After all, this is what we want
to understand from the vantage point of today's world. We take
the word for granted, wondering whether there was a stage of the
wordless human being (about which we can only infer indirectly).
But once the word was established, with the advent of the means
for recording it, it affected not only the future, but also the
perception of the past.
Conquering the past, the word gives legitimacy to explanations
that presume it. Thus it implies some carrying device, i.e., a
system of notation as a built-in memory and as a mechanism for
associations, permutations, and substitutions. But if such a
system is accepted, the origins of writing and reading are
pushed back so far in time that the disjunction of
literate-illiterate becomes a structural characteristic of the
species at one of the periods of its self-definition. Obviously
expanded far in time and seen in such a broad perspective, this
notation (comprising images, the Ishango Bone, quipus, the Vinca
figurines, etc.) contradicts the logocratic model of language.
Mono- and polysyllabic elements of speech, embodying audible
sequences of sounds (and appropriate breathing patterns that
insert pauses and maintain a mechanism for synchronization),
together with natural mnemonic devices (such as pebbles, knots on
branches, shapes of stones, etc.) are pre-word components of
pre-languages. They all correspond to the stage of direct
interaction. They pertain to such a small scale of human
activity that time and space can be sequenced in extension of the
patterns of nature (day-night, very close-less close, etc.).
This juncture in the self-definition of the species occurred when
the transition, from selected natural marks to marking, and
later to stable patterns of sounds, eventually leading to words,
took place. This was an impressive change that introduced a
linear relation in a realm that was one of randomness or even
chaos. If catastrophes occurred (as many anthropologists
indicate), i.e., changes of scale outside the linear to which
human beings were not adapted, they resulted in the disappearance
of entire populations, or in massive displacements. Rooted in
experiences belonging to what we would call natural phenomena,
this change resulted in rudimentary elements of a language. New
patterns of interaction were also developed: naming (by
association, as in clans bearing names of animals), ordering and
counting (at the beginning by pairing the counted objects, one
by one, with other objects), recording regularities (of weather,
sky configurations, biological cycles) as these affected the
outcome of practical activities.