[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 19:35:33 -0700
It means a culture based on written language. Literacy is the ability to
read and write. Not the ability to use language.
And just how well could a pre-literate culture use language, if they have no
externalized language?
- They have no concept of a list, since they can't write down a list
- They have no concept of sorting a list in alphabetical order, since they
have no spelling
- No concept of a glossary
- No dictionary or encyclopedia
- No index
- No chapters, headings, or paragraphs
- No grammar
- No spelling
What's left? Simple story telling, based on a few memorized rules. Yes,
these rules can produce poems with 100,000 lines, but this is simple
generation of permutations based on rules.
There's also naming. They can name hundreds of things. But they can only
name as many things as they can personally experience and remember. This
means any member's vocabulary is probably at most a few thousand words. The
highest would be perhaps 5,000 words. Someone might say yes, but Amazonian
tribes have 20,000 words. Only for an anthropologist does it have 20,000
words, since he systematically interviewed the members ("What is this?") and
wrote down all the words (which requires spelling, list, dictionary, etc.)
He will know many more words than any member of that tribe.
Look at the names of colors. Pre-literate tribes and pre-technological
societies have only a few dozen names for colors. Look at a paint company's
catalog. They can distinguish thousands of colors. We have easily 100,000
named colors. That's more names for colors than the entire vocabulary for
most languages. And then there's numbered colors. Any computer can produce
16 million colors, each of which has a number.
Another way to look at this is to talk about numbers. How well could a
non-literate culture use numbers? They would have cardinal and ordinal
numbers (one, two, three, first, second, third) and simple arithmatic, but
they can't have fractions, a concept of base numbering, and none of the
higher forms of mathematics. Why would we think they use numbers just as
well as we do?
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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