The oral phase of language made it difficult, if not impossible,
to account for past events. Testimony in communities researched
while still in the oral phase (see Lévi- Strauss, among others)
shows that they could not maintain the semantic integrity of the
discourse. Words uttered in a never-ending now-the implicit
notion of present-seem to automatically reinvent the past
according to the exigencies of the immediate. The past, during
the oral phase of language, was a form of present, and so was the
future, since there are no instruments to project the word along
the axis of time.
Orality is associated with fixed frames of existence and
practical life. The culture of the written word resulted from
the introduction of a variable frame of existence, within which
a new pragmatic framework, corresponding to a growing scale of
human activity, required a stable outline of language. This
outline of language-over short time intervals it appears as a
fixed frame of reference-can be associated with more mobile,
more dynamic frames of existence and practical experiences, whose
output follows the dynamic of the linear relations it embodies.
Work and social interaction-in short, the pragmatic dimension of
human existence-made the recording of language necessary and
impressed linearity upon it.
A cuneiform notation, over 3,500 years old, testifies to a
Sumerian who looked at the nightly skies and saw a lion, a bull,
and a scorpion. More importantly, it demonstrates how a
practical experience constitutes a cognitive filter: what people
saw when they looked at something unknown and for which no name
was constituted, and how disjoint worlds-the earthly environment
and the sky-were put in relation at this phase of language
constitution. This is even more important in view of the fact
that as an isolated language, Sumerian survives only in writing,
a product of that "budding flower" as A. and S. Sherrat
described it, referring to the agricultural heartland of
Southwest Asia where many language families originated.
Writing, which takes place in many respects at a higher cognitive
level than the production and utterance of the word, or than in
pictographic notation, is a multi- relational device. It makes
possible relations between different words, between different
sentences, between images and language. From its incipient phase,
it also related disjoint worlds, but at a level other than that
achieved in Sumerian cuneiform notation. Writing facilitates and
further necessitates the next level of a language, which is the
text, an entity in which its parts lose their individual meaning
while the whole constitutes the message or is conjured into
meaning. The experience already gained in visual records, such
as drawing, rock engravings, and wood carvings, was taken over in
the experience of the written word.
The pictorial was a highly complex notation with a vast number of
components, some visible (the written), some invisible (the
phonetics), and few rules of association. Within the pictorial,
sequences are formed which narrate events or actions in their
natural succession. What comes first in the sequence is also
prior (in time) to everything else, or it has a more important
place in a hierarchy. The male-female relation, or that between
free individuals and slaves, between native and foreign was
embedded here. Even the direction of writing (from left to right,
right to left, top to bottom) encodes important information
about the people constituting their identity in the practical
experience of engraving letters on tablets or painting them on
parchment. The very concrete nature of the pictograms prevents
generalization. Expression was enormously rich, precision
practically impossible to achieve.
The detailed history of writing makes up many chapters in the
history of languages. It is also a useful introduction to the
history of knowledge, aesthetics, and most likely cognitive
science. This history also details processes characteristic of
the beginning of literacy. Probably more than 30,000 years
passed between the time of cave paintings and rock engravings
and the first acknowledged attempt at writing. From the
perspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberation
of the human being from the pictorially concrete and the
establishment of the realm of conventions, of purposeful
encoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitive
support of abstract representations and the sharing of
conventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shaped
letters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations of
Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek,
and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcome
concreteness. They offer a system of abstract notation for
increasingly more complex languages.
Until writing, language was still close to its users and bore
their mark. It was their voice, and their seeing, hearing, and
touching. With writing, language was objectified, freed from the
subject and the senses. The development towards written language,
and from written language to initially limited and then
generalized literacy, paralleled the evolution from satisfying
immediate needs (the circular relation) to extending and
increasing demand (the linear function) of a mediated nature. The
difference between needs related to survival and needs that are
no longer a matter of survival but of social status (power, ego,
fear, pleasure, incipient forms of conviction, etc.) is
represented through language, itself seen as part of the
continuous self-constitution of the human being in a particular
pragmatic framework.