[lit-ideas] Must the Word be Literate?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 13:39:32 +0900
Linguistics gives priority to the spoken over the written word.
Linguistic philosophy tends to reverse this order and seek precisely
the right words to express a truth about the world. As a philosophical
exercise, the search for a perfect language extends is characteristic
of modern philosophy from Leibniz to the early Wittgenstein (the one
who wrote the Tractatus). But the search for the One True Language is,
of course, much more older and more widespread.
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition it begins with the Tower of Babel
and the confusion of human languages after the Tower's fall. The hope
of its resurrection is implicit in the opening words of the Gospel
According to John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God and the Word was God." In Judaism, it may only be a single
word, the unsayable true name of Jehovah. In Islam the text of the
Koran is sacred and the classical Arabic in which it is written
sacrosanct by association.
The belief in primordial and, thus, powerful words survives as a theme
in, for example, the Earthsea novels by Ursula Laguin. It is, however,
also found at the other end of Asia, in the popular (religious) Taoist
belief that the primordial words embodied in charms have a uniquely
valid relationship to reality that accounts for their magical force.
I find myself wondering, then, if this belief--in intrinsically
powerful primordial words--occurs outside a literate context. Is the
written word, the word of scribes with the esoteric ability to read
and write, the source of this model of and for?
Anybody know?
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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