Tracing the origin of language to early nuclei of agriculture,
as many authors do (Peter Bellwood, Paul K. Benedict, Colin
Renfrew, Robert Blust, among them), is tantamount to
acknowledging the pragmatic foundation of the practical
experience of language of human beings. Language is not a
passive witness to human dynamics. Diversity of practical
experience is reflected in language and made possible through the
practical experience of language. The origins of language, as
much as the origins of writing, lie in the realm of the natural.
This is why considerations regarding the biological condition of
the individual interacting with the outside world are extremely
important. Practical experiences of self-constitution in
language are constitutive of culture. The act of writing,
together with that of tool-making, is constitutive of a species
increasingly defining its own nature. Considerations regarding
culture are accordingly no less important than those concerning
the biological identity of the human being.
Let us point to some implications of the biological factor. We
know that the number of sounds, for instance, that humans can
produce when they push air through their mouths is very high.
However, out of this practically infinite number of sounds, only
slightly more than forty are identifiable in the Indo-European
languages, as opposed to the number of sounds produced in the
Chinese and Japanese languages. While it is impossible to show
how the biological make-up of individuals and the structure of
their experience are projected onto the system of language, it
would be unwise not to account for this projection as it occurs
at every moment of our existence. When humans speak, muscles,
vocal chords, and other anatomical components are activated and
used according to the characteristics of each. People's voices
differ in many ways and so subtly that to identify people
through voice alone is difficult. When we speak, our hearing is
also involved. In writing, as well as in reading, this
participation extends to sight. Other dynamic features such as
eye movement, breathing, heartbeat, and perspiration come into
play as well. What we are, do, say, write, or read are related.
The experience behind language use and the biological
characteristics of people living in a language differ to such an
extent that almost never will similar events, even the simplest,
be similarly accounted for in language (or in any other sign
system, for that matter) by different persons.
The first history, or the personal inquiry into the probable
course of past events, rests upon orality, integrates myths, and
ends up with the attempt to refer events to places, as well as
to time. Logographers try to reconstruct genealogies of persons
involved in real events (wars, founding of clans, tribes, or
dynasties, for example) or in the dominant fiction of a period
(e.g., the epics attributed to Homer, or the book of Genesis in
the Bible). In the transition from remembrance (mnemai) to
documented accounts (logoi), human beings acquired what we call
today consciousness of time or of history. They became aware of
differences in relating to the same events.
The entire encoding of social experience, from very naive forms
(concerning family, religion, illness) to very complex rules (of
ceremony, power, military conduct) is the result of human
practice diversified with the participation of language. The
tension between orality and writing is, respectively, an
expression of the tension between a more homogeneous way of life
and the ever diversifying new forms that broke through
boundaries accepted for a very long time. In the universe of the
many Chinese languages, this is more evident than in Western
languages. Chinese ideographic writing, which unifies the many
dialects used in spoken Chinese, preserves concreteness, and as
such preserves tradition as an established way of relating to the
world. Within the broader Chinese culture, every effort was made
to preserve characteristics of orality. The philosophy derived
from such a language defends, through the fundamental principle
of Tao in Confucianism, an established and shared mechanism of
transmitting knowledge.
Unlike spoken language, writing is fairly recent. Some scholars
(especially Haarmann) consider that writing did not appear until
4,000 to 3,000 BCE; others extend the time span to 6,000 BCE and
beyond. To repeat: It is not my intention to reconstitute the
history of writing or literacy. It makes little sense to
rekindle disputes over chronology, especially when new findings,
or better interpretations of old findings, are not at hand or
are not yet sufficiently convincing. The so-called boundaries
between oral and post-oral cultures, as well as between
non-literate, literate, and what are called post-literate, or
illiterate, cultures are difficult to determine. It is highly
unlikely that we shall ever be able to discover whether images
(cave drawings or petroglyphs) antecede or come after spoken
language. Probably languages involving notation, drawings,
etchings, and rituals-with their vast repertory of articulated
gestures-were relatively simultaneous. Some historians of
writing ascertain that without the word, there could be no
image. Others reject the logocratic model and suggest that
images preceded the written and probably even the spoken. Many
speculate on the emergence of rituals, placing them before or
after drawing, before or after writing. I suggest that primitive
human expression is syncretic and polymorphous, a direct
consequence of a pragmatic framework of self-constitution that
ascertains multiplicity.