The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 49

Roger Grainger. The Language of the Rite. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974.

Mythe-rite-symbole: 21 essais d'anthropologie littraire sur des textes de Homre. Angers: Presses de l'Universit d'Angers, 1984.

Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universe and of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English).

Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case of wishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp.

117-118.

He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematical conception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculation system, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, a generic system of notation.

B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial stages in the development of mathematics, in Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 16 (3-4), 1978, pp. 142-166.

A. Marshack. Upper paleolithic notation and symbol, in Science, 178: 817-28, 1972.

E.K.A. Tratman. Late Upper Paleolithic Calculator? Gough's Cave, Cheddar, Somerset, in Proceedings, University of Bristol, Speleological Society, 14(2), 1976, pp.115-122.

Iwar Werlen. Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhltnis von Sprechen und Handeln in Ritualen. Tbingen: Narr Verlag, 1984.

Inner clock, or biological clock, defines the relation between a biological ent.i.ty and the time-based phenomena in the environment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadian meaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms of existence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. The appearance, at least, is that of an inner clock.

The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA and RNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences of genes in these molecules represent particular sequences of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embody instructions for making of different types of proteins. On the same subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionary definition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The Double Helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. (A new critical edition, including text, commentary, reviews, original papers, edited by Gunther S. Stent). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Homeostasis: the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body.

Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium are interlocked in dynamic processes.

References to the oral phase of language in Claude Lvi-Strauss: La Pense Sauvage (1962). Translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Andrew and Susan Sherrat (quoted by Peter S. Bellwood, Op.cit): A distinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew, Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, in which the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages use syllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such as in the j.a.panese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When two different conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid: the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, but also uses Chinese characters, but p.r.o.nouned in Korean. The hangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire for self- ident.i.ty.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e).

Oralt.i.ty and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language?

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

Amos Oz refers to self-const.i.tution in language as follows: "...a language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. [...] If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, a.s.sociations, longings, connotations, atavistic att.i.tudes towards the whole of creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1979, p. 189).

J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the language and a.n.a.lyze only the expressions and their designata"

(Vol. 1., p.115).

Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete situations" (p.4).

Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate const.i.tution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959), an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned (within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976), and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more convincing (as his critics noticed).

Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Gnrale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.

Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is socialized" (p. 33).

Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.47).

In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak'

or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing, designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of themselves, within the system of their own symbolism"

(Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23).

Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous.

Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity, an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd.

Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987.

Luciano Canepari. L'intern.a.z.ione linguistica e paralinguistica, Napoli: Liguori, 1985.

Canepari insists on prosodic elements.

The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).

Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention of semioticians because codes other than those of language are at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic ent.i.ties in the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of how much of the language experience is continued where language is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor), Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.

Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book appeared eight years after this chapter was written.)

As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites (sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as -; r as -

; san as -

Franois Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P.

Seaton of L'criture potique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977).

"The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke, separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5).

He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic strokes,...one obtains other ideograms." The example given is that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big]

and further on [sky, heaven].

On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, The Early history of Indo-European Languages, in Scientific American, March 1990, pp.110-116.

Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing (through the use of optical character recognition programs) led some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading (of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books, and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states: "RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key."

The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena referred to are not a matter of advertis.e.m.e.nt slogans but of a new means for reading and even writing. A program such as VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician, the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language) and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors) is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words: "(belted/non-belted,) (driver/pa.s.senger) in (low/moderate/high) velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and (claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal phrases summarize situations that correspond to circ.u.mstances on record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions: "throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those beyond the lexicon usually surpa.s.s the competence of the doctor.

The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated in Frances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system of theater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on the Shakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, orators constructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids in rehearsing and properly presenting their speeches.

Functioning of Language

Research on memory and language functions in the brain is being carried out at the University of Minnesota, Inst.i.tute of Child Development. Work is focused on individuals who are about to undergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. The goal is to provide a functional map of the brain.