Orality and Literacy
I was wandering through the bookstore today when I came upon a title I hadn't looked at since undergrad - Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy. Ong was looking at a problem that affects students of linguistics and comparative literature: the extent to which the assumptions of a literate culture affect our understanding of non-literate societies. But there is much in his opening chapters that might give food for thought to students of language.
In oral cultures, you can't write things down in books, so both knowledge and, er, literature, have to be maintained in ways more conducive to memorization. Hence epics with set meters or rhymes. Hence apprenticeships where a student learns at the side of the master. One of the things that goes with this is smaller vocabularies: you can't look up words in non-existent dictionaries, so oral cultures have to stick to less specialized and more figurative ways of communication if they want knowledge to be transmitted across time and space. This pops up in, er, literature too - lots of stock figures like wine dark seas and the Shining Achilles because these a) are easy to remember and b) have the right meter so that if you forget what the bard you heard the story from said you've got something you can drop in on the fly.
In literate cultures, language ceases to be what people say to one another and becomes a thing unto itself. Written - and recorded - language outlives the context in which it was uttered, indeed outlives its speakers. This creates an interplay between the language as maintained in writing and the language as used by its current speakers. We can write "I cannot" or even "I can't" for the three words "I can not" because these were in use before the writing of English became standardized. But we can't write "I'm gonna," even though it's what we say. And then, if we're giving a proper speech, we can't say "I'm gonna" because it's not what we'd write. Likewise, the French can and must write "je ne sais pas," even though the "pas" had no negative meaning and just reinforced the "ne" when it came into use. But they can't write "chépa" even though it's what they say all the time, because it's not what they were saying when the language came to be widely written and it doesn't represent the three words that have merged into one unit of thought, ie, "I dunno." And when they're giving a formal speech, they can't say, "chépa" because that's not what they'd write.
The interplay between the written and spoken word has both its advantages and disadvantages. The first advantage is clear enough - at least until recently, most language learners got their start with a book. The downside is that whether you're starting with a book, CDs or DVDs, if you're from a high literacy culture, you're going to be looking for rules and patterns that on the one hand will help you make sense of the language but on the other hand can lead you to trying to make more sense of the language than is there to be had.
In studying Breton, one of the most frustrating things for me has been the lack of a written standard. It's not just that there are four dialects. It's the presence of multiple writing systems, and that every time I get something new for Breton, it's using a different one. However, the more I've worked with Breton, the more I've found myself reading sotto voce and piecing together what's going on with the language. But it's been a struggle, and a big part of that struggle is because I wanted to make Breton work the way English does in terms of its set forms - except that English actually doesn't.
I mentioned that in oral cultures, the poets and rhetoriticians would memorize certain stock phrases and epithets that they would then string together. That made me think of the debate over whether to learn words or whole sentences with one's preferred flashcard system. It might even be worth it to put small conversations on one's flashcards, that way the language exists in context. Working with Assimil, and reading text on the internet, etc, I'm finding that I learn a lot more by being around the language than I do in conscious study. That's why neither Talk Now nor the Colloquial program have done that much for me. That's not to say that beginning materials are unneeded, nor that we should retreat to some pre-literate mindset to learn language. But when we learn, we should keep in mind that even the greatest materials, whether written or recorded, are just an entrée into something that goes beyond what can actually be captured however many books and materials we might buy.
In oral cultures, you can't write things down in books, so both knowledge and, er, literature, have to be maintained in ways more conducive to memorization. Hence epics with set meters or rhymes. Hence apprenticeships where a student learns at the side of the master. One of the things that goes with this is smaller vocabularies: you can't look up words in non-existent dictionaries, so oral cultures have to stick to less specialized and more figurative ways of communication if they want knowledge to be transmitted across time and space. This pops up in, er, literature too - lots of stock figures like wine dark seas and the Shining Achilles because these a) are easy to remember and b) have the right meter so that if you forget what the bard you heard the story from said you've got something you can drop in on the fly.
In literate cultures, language ceases to be what people say to one another and becomes a thing unto itself. Written - and recorded - language outlives the context in which it was uttered, indeed outlives its speakers. This creates an interplay between the language as maintained in writing and the language as used by its current speakers. We can write "I cannot" or even "I can't" for the three words "I can not" because these were in use before the writing of English became standardized. But we can't write "I'm gonna," even though it's what we say. And then, if we're giving a proper speech, we can't say "I'm gonna" because it's not what we'd write. Likewise, the French can and must write "je ne sais pas," even though the "pas" had no negative meaning and just reinforced the "ne" when it came into use. But they can't write "chépa" even though it's what they say all the time, because it's not what they were saying when the language came to be widely written and it doesn't represent the three words that have merged into one unit of thought, ie, "I dunno." And when they're giving a formal speech, they can't say, "chépa" because that's not what they'd write.
The interplay between the written and spoken word has both its advantages and disadvantages. The first advantage is clear enough - at least until recently, most language learners got their start with a book. The downside is that whether you're starting with a book, CDs or DVDs, if you're from a high literacy culture, you're going to be looking for rules and patterns that on the one hand will help you make sense of the language but on the other hand can lead you to trying to make more sense of the language than is there to be had.
In studying Breton, one of the most frustrating things for me has been the lack of a written standard. It's not just that there are four dialects. It's the presence of multiple writing systems, and that every time I get something new for Breton, it's using a different one. However, the more I've worked with Breton, the more I've found myself reading sotto voce and piecing together what's going on with the language. But it's been a struggle, and a big part of that struggle is because I wanted to make Breton work the way English does in terms of its set forms - except that English actually doesn't.
I mentioned that in oral cultures, the poets and rhetoriticians would memorize certain stock phrases and epithets that they would then string together. That made me think of the debate over whether to learn words or whole sentences with one's preferred flashcard system. It might even be worth it to put small conversations on one's flashcards, that way the language exists in context. Working with Assimil, and reading text on the internet, etc, I'm finding that I learn a lot more by being around the language than I do in conscious study. That's why neither Talk Now nor the Colloquial program have done that much for me. That's not to say that beginning materials are unneeded, nor that we should retreat to some pre-literate mindset to learn language. But when we learn, we should keep in mind that even the greatest materials, whether written or recorded, are just an entrée into something that goes beyond what can actually be captured however many books and materials we might buy.
2 Comments:
I'd like to see some empirical evidence for your claims about oral cultures, especially the idea that "One of the things that goes with this is smaller vocabularies: you can't look up words in non-existent dictionaries, so oral cultures have to stick to less specialized and more figurative ways of communication if they want knowledge to be transmitted across time and space". I don't know of any unwritten language that suffers from vocabulary deprivation - indeed some such languages have thousands of specialised terms, eg. in Australian Aboriginal languages there is a rich vocabulary of sounds (eg. the sound of movement in the distance, the sound of a snake moving through grass etc), as well as terms for plant and animal species and the environment. Your claim is just false.
As for painting oral literature as stringing fixed phrases together, well go look at some real oral literature from Africa, Siberia or Aboriginal Australia and you'll soon realise that this claim is false too.
Anonymous,
Perhaps my characterization was overly reductive since I was trying to get to applications for foreign language learners vis-à-vis the oral/literate distinction. You can see what I was talking about fleshed out in greater detail in Ong, mentioned in the post, and decide whether I oversimplified or misunderstood.
That said, I did manage to get through a Masters in French literature and most of the way through a doctorate. Because of the nature of my studies, my comparisons of oral vs. literary "literature" are diachronic and my exposure to today's oral cultures are limited. However, in my studies from Homer to the epics of the medieval period, it was always brought home to me that in working with cultures that tended not to write things down just yet, there was a great deal of repetition, of stringing together set phrases in new ways or orders, etc. And this is certainly the impression I got looking at, eg, the Iliad for the Greeks and Roland for the French. According to Ong, the literate Greeks such as Plato likewise were wary of the Homeric tradition for the same reasons that the Romantics prided themselves on creating something new and original as opposed to the medieval morality plays and songs.
My point with this post was not to denigrate oral societies, however, but to assert a) that they have something to teach us about memory and b) that coming from literate societies we may have a mistaken sense of how language works. Living in a literate society where what's written down is seemingly known, we may confuse regular shuffling of written flashcards with learning a language or get hung up on mastering specialized vocabularies and unusual turns of phrase. And I wanted to make the point that being able to string together set phrases in ways that work is the way you get things done with language, even though what we learn in school suggests that we ought to scurry to dictionaries for the precise word and the thesaurus to avoid using it too much.
I've been wading through Pillars of the Earth and thinking back on the medieval churches I visited when living in France. Those churches have stood the test of time even though their designers lacked calculus, never mind computers, in large measure because they used repeated elements well put together. There's a parallel with Homer stitching together tales from his age into a work that has endured for millennia even though he lacked literary theoreticians to tell him how to do it, what it meant and what needed polishing so the NY Times Review of Books would have kind things to say about it.
I think a key question here is rooted in your use - not mine - of the term "vocabulary deprivation." I'd worry, to the contrary, about the language learner trying to take on an excess of vocabulary. When I open my Oxford unabridged, I find literally hundreds of thousands of words I do not know and have no need of. Only a select group of people need any of them and no one needs anywhere close to all of them. The thing is that in a literate society, these words exist to transmit knowledge through the printed page to a restricted set of people - the same way that apprenticeships transmitted specialized knowledge in oral societies to a select set of people.
I am not a specialist in oral cultures. Ong, however, put quite a bit of thought and study into what differentiates oral and literate cultures. And what I read in him resonated with me with respect to my limited exposure to oral "literature" when I studied French and comparative literature, as well as giving me some new ideas about thinking about how to approach language learning.
I'm sure that some have debunked Ong and others have written in his defense, then others have argued he missed the point then still others that he really knew what he was talking about. We love to do this sort of thing in literate societies, taking one person's writing, analyzing it in our own writing, making little tables to document this or that and publishing anew so the whole process can start again. I assume things are different in oral cultures, but I don't have any written sources to back that up.
At any rate, this is a language learning site, not a cultural studies forum. I'm sorry if any offense was given, because my aim in writing the post was to alert literate language learners to some of their blind spots, not to pass judgment on oral cultures. I'll close by noting that if you'll forgive any perceived condescension toward oral cultures on my part, I'll forgive your oppressively Eurocentric notion that empirical data should stand superior to the personal truth I was attempting to elaborate in my post.
Cheers,
GBarto
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