Writing, speech and Language:
In
ordinary parlance we speak as if there are two kinds of language, say, written
English and spoken English, or written Urdu and spoken Urdu. Indeed the so-called written Urdu alone is
regarded as real Urdu. So if somebody
can converse in Urdu but cannot read or write in that language, he is apt to say
that he does not know Urdu. While we distinguish
between Hindi and Urdu newspapers or books, we don’t quite clearly distinguish
between Hindi and Urdu films. Ordinary parlance, it must be pointed out, is misleading here. We don’t have two kinds of language, rather
we have the same English or Urdu and it is communicated either through speech
or through writing. Language is a system
of meaningful symbols, while speech and writing manifest language through systems
of communicative signals. How are these
two signaling systems, the speech system (phonology) and the writing system (graphology),
hooked on to the symbolic system of language?
Here, it must be admitted, students of linguistics fall into
two schools. Hjelmslev or Halliday, for
example, think that speech and writing are on a par, simply two alternate modes
of manifesting language in a parallel fashion.
SPEECH
LANGUAGE
WRITING
Others, like Book field or Hackett or Bazell, think that
language is essentially speech, and writing is an optional appendage to language.
(WRITING--)SPEECH--LANGUAGE
Let us call these the parallelism school and the appendage school respectively. To my mind, evidence bears out that writings
is an optional attachment all right, but that this attachment is not always made
‘after’ speech, that is, it is not always correct to say that writing is essentially
a record, a rather imperfect record to be sure, of speech. The relevant facts may be set out as follows:
(1)
In the history of mankind,
the beginning of writing cannot be earlier than 4000 B.C. while the beginning
of speech is much older. Indeed
it may coincide with the beginning of Homo sapiens alias ‘Homo
eloquent’. In the history of any
given language speech always antedates writing by a few centuries. Indeed the large majority of language never
got written at all. (Speakers of such
languages are not illiterate, they are simply pre-literate). In the life-history of a single individual,
speech always antedates writing. Even
with a literate language some individuals may remain illiterate. In India illiterates
and pre-literates for outnumber literates.
Adherents of the parallelism school may shrug off this argument
as an example of the genetic fallacy. But
the temporal priority of speech over writing is too overwhelming to be lightly
set aside.
(2) Perhaps what
is more to the point are the following facts pointing to the dependence of language
as written on language as speech.
While the child learns to speak and learns
the symbolic system of language more or less simultaneously without any special
coaching or training, the same cannot be said about the child’s learning to write.
Deafmute children find it difficult to learn language and writing in the
absence of speech, while blind children have no difficulty in learning language
and speech in the absence of writing.
Similarly,
the very system of language clearly shows that it is meant to be spoken. Even language as written shows the imprint
of speech—it is always linear. It has
to make up its mind as to the relative order, for example, of subject, verb, and
object: it does not bypass the problem (as it could easily have done) by the placing
the three in two-dimensional space as a triangle. All writing systems (like all speech systems)
are linear. Again, no writing system makes
use of explicit bracketing to resolve ambiguities as the one between—(old men)
and (women) and (old men and women).
Since English writing obliterates such things as accents and
tones from speech it has to resort to such dis-ambiguations as—
women
and old men
as
distinct from—
old
men and old women.
The speech system is more intimately connected with the language
system than the writing system is connected.
This is shown by the fact that changes in phonology very often have important
repercussions on grammar (thus coming comes from two distinct earlier forms ending
in --d and – g) while changes in graphonomy have no such repercussions (thus the
shift from the Arabic script to the Roman script did no bring about changes in
the Turkish Language).
(3)
The passing mention of the obliteration of accents and tones
in English writing leads us to the admission that when writing does attempts to
record speech it does so only imperfectly. When
a child learns to read such writing it reads it ‘aloud’ and the vocalization is
only gradually suppressed—sometimes only imperfectly. One has seen lips silently moving presumably
accompanied by inner vocalization at the time of silent reading, Indeed ‘adult’
fast reading presupposes the suppression even of this inner vocalization.
But we must extract a further admission from the adherents of
the appendage school. While it is true
that writing (and silent reading along with it) essentially depends on language
as spoken not only temporarily but also structurally (our arguments 1 and 2),
it is also true that writing may occasionally bypass phonology at the point where
it is hooked on to language. While speech
helplessly accepts homonymy between bear and beer, writing accepts only the second
harmony, but not the first: beat and beet stand clearly distinguished and have
to be learned as such by the school child. And what about a written signal like &?
The ampersand does not clearly stand for the sequence and: we don’t write r&om
for random. It stands for the word and
for the et in etcetera. The word etcetera
can also be written as etc. or & some writing systems, as we shall see later,
this kind of bypassing in a much more thorough going manner.
More of this later.
In short, the writing system of a language is an optional appendage
to that language so that the user of that language can communicate with the help
of that language without restoring to speech and thus exploit the fact that while
speech (and writing in the sky with smoke) is evanescent most writing is relatively
permanent. Indeed the earliest examples
of writing are not speech substitutes like letter-writing (with the coming of
the telephone letter-writing is loosing its importance) but records of commercial
transactions, royal acts, and the like. Though this optional appendage is heavily dependent
on the spoken use of language in terms of life-history, it can and does bypass
speech in recording a message in a language.
Writing, proto-writing and epi-writing:
We have earlier mentioned the road not taken by writing—namely,
triangular or two-dimensional sentence structures or arithmetic like explicit
bracketing. But of course the road has
been taken—not by writing systems but by other systems of visual communication.
This is true of visual systems older than and leading towards writing,
namely, proto-writing as well as of visual systems younger than and leading away
from writing, namely, epi-writing.
An oft-cited example of proto-writing is that of certain American
Indian ‘documents’ such as treaties between tribes speaking different languages.
Proto-writing may be a preparation that lead or that might have led to
writing proper, but it is distinct from writing proper.
It is not only pictorial in symbolizing objects such as reverse and fish
and through these objects even more abstract entities such tribal fishing rights,
but also pictorial in symbolizing the inter-relationships between these concrete
and abstract entities by freely using two-dimensional space. Thus victorial proto-writing is distinct from
pictorial writing, the latter is linearized. Also, the latter corresponds to linguistic messages in a much more
definite manner.
Much more recently in human history, we see the rise of visual
system that are dependent on writing. Arithmetical
notation with its bracketing is an obvious example of such epi-writing.
Other examples will be road signals, semaphore signals.
While with some kinds of epi-writing the dependence on writing is very
heavy, witness, semaphore signals, Braille, Morse code or ciphers, with others
the link with language becomes tenuous. It
is already difficult to read aloud tabulations, flow charts, and formulas in organic
chemistry. The visual notations of higher
mathematics and symbolic logic leave language far behind in moving along certain
directions. But epi-writing is still anchored
in writing proper, however tenuously. Indeed it is very often interspersed with writing.
Some visual systems may be wholly or almost wholly language
independent—for example, some deafmute hand-signalling systems or the visual signs
used at international airports or Olympic games. Even such language-independent visual signs
may incorporate language messages in writing—for examples verbal legends in mans,
machine drawings, circuit diagrams, or musical staff notations.
Much more rarely, spoken communication may be supplemented by
writing proper. A common sight in the
city of Hong Kong is that of two Chinese talking and at the same time busily drawing
characters in the air with a forefinger to overcome their dialectal differences.
Of course air-drawn characters are probably more accurately called epi-writing? Not really, certainly not in the sense that
Morse code is epi-writing dependent on writing. Rather, we must say that characters are characters whether drawn
in ink, paint, depressions in sand, smoke trials against the sky, finger movements
in air, ink-stains left by stencils, or embroidered threads. All this latter variety belongs to what one
may with more justice call the technology of writing, which is, to a certain limited
extent, comparable to the physiology of speech. The technology of writing is only a appendage
to the writing system proper, though it may occasionally govern the shapes of
the written characters thus, the stylus strokes of Cuneiform writing the brush
strokes of Chinese writing, and the rounded strokes of palmleaf writing seen in
the Oriya script.
Writing systems and types of Writing:
A writing system is a system of signs that connects the visual
signals to appropriate language messages for the reader and connects the language
messages to appropriate visual signals for the writer. The two ways of using the system, receptively
or passively for reading and productively or actively for writing, must naturally
match each other. Thus, if we read a script
from left to right, for example, we must also write correspondingly from left
to right; or if we write the word and by the spelling &, we must also read
& correspondingly as a word (and mot merely as a syllable).
This should be obvious enough.
What is not so obvious is that the connection between the visual
signals and the appropriate features of language messages such as syllables or
words need not be a direct one. In fact
it is a medicated connection it has what linguists call a “double circulation”.
To clarify this point further, a writing system or graphonomy consists
of two subsystems—a script system (or calligraphy) and a spelling system (or orthogaphy). Thus, when we write Sanskrit in Devanagari
and in Roman, we may be using two script systems but one and the same spelling
system. But when we write Hindustani in
Devanagari and in perso-Arabic, not only are scripts different, but spellings
also are somewhat different –thus the same word is spelt báta in Devanagari but
bat in perso-Arabic, or (to cite another word) the same word is spelt taraha in
Devanagari but tarh in Perso-Arabic (with a special t and a special h). Consider also konkani as written in Roman—the
same name will be written as X’anta by some (using the portuguese spelling system)
and Shanta by others (using the English spelling system).
The ‘lower’ subsystem or script system is directly hooked on
to the visual signals but only indirectly hooked on to the language message.
The ‘higher’ subsystem or spelling system is directly hooked on to the
visual signals. Let us briefly look at these two subsystems.
The
script system or calligraphy consists of the following:
(i) a list of graphemes
(letters or characters as well as non-literal signs
such as capitalness and punctuation marks).
(ii) each grapheme has variants
that are not distinctive (each Arabic
grapheme has initial, medical, final, and absolute forms,
small Greek
sigma has a non-final and a final shape).
(iii) each variant of each grapheme can be analyzed
into strokes placed in a particular direction, (thus the Arabic characters go
‘from east to west in Arabic and Sindhi but ‘from north-east to south-west’ in
Persian and Urdu), in a particular order (compare the Marathi and Hindi way of
writing same Devanagari character ka), with a particular thickness (compare the
Telugu and the Kannada way of writing what is essentially the same character ka),
and within a particular enclosure (one can imagine any Chinese character enclosed
in a square but not any small Roman character which may have a suspender or a
flagpole).
(iv)
a scheme of linearization (left to right, right to left, top to bottom,
or boustrophedon for graphemes in a line; top to bottom, right to left for lines
in a page; left-sewn or top-sewn or right-sewn pages in a book or pages stacked
top to bottom in a loose leaf portfolio or a codex; left to right volumes in a
book rack but top to bottom in a binder).
(v) accepted forms of layouts
(justified or unjustified at the left or right or top or bottom margins; prose
and verse alignments, pros paragraphs, verse paragraphs, and stanzas; centered
titling; and so on).
A respect of last three components of the calligraphy, the outline
of the two-dimensional writing surface of course has to be predefined—the writer
or the reader has to know which side is up, which down, and so on. This applies even to cylindrical or spherical
surfaces. Consider the problem presented
by characters embossed on a small circular disc—is this 6 or 9? N or Z?
Runic inscriptions do not presuppose a ‘flat’ surface, but an edge.
The spelling system or orthography consists of the following:
(i)
a list of the smallest units of the language message recognized for spelling
purposes (the ‘long u vowel’ seen in cute, few, pure, beauty, feud, etc., but not in you, your, etc.; the
words and, two, zed seen in &, 2, Z; the sentence type direct question seen
in who’s there’s etc).
(ii)
a decision of the basic strategy and other details for the hook up with
the lower level of the script system (in German, predicting pronunciations from
the graphemic realizations of the spelling units is fairly straightforward, but
predicting the grapheme sequence from the pronunciation is difficult in either
direction—we have already seen the various graphemic manifestations of the ‘long
u’ vowel, consider now the various orthographic sequence gh seen in ghost,
enough, fight, hiccough; in Roman, each character is enclosed in its own
distinct plot of ground, ligatures like ae, ff, fi, ffi, in printing being purely
accessory; in Devanagari and in Arabic, ligaturing is
the rule, not the exception).
(iii) a decision of the basic
strategy and other details for the hook up with the units of the language message (in the English writing system,
the basic strategy is hook up from the
grapheme or grapheme sequence) to the phoneme—in other words it has an alphabetic
orthography; so has the Sanskrit writing system except that its true alphabetic
character is obscured by the ligaturing of vowels to preceding consonants and
of consonants to following consonants).
(iv) accepted forms of layouts
(matters such as paragraph division, dialogue layout, columns, chapter division
and perhaps some kinds of epi-writing like tables, tree diagrams, flow charts,
and the like could be considered here).
It will be seen that the full description of a writing system
involves the description of three hookups transitions : The transition from visual
signal to calligraphy, the transition from orthography to language. Each of these transition enables us to classify
writing systems and their specific details into types.
In view of the first transition (visual signal to calligraphy)
we can recognize the following types: The character orientation may be top-left to bottom-right (Roman,
Devanagari) top-right to bottom-left (Arabic, Sindhi), top to bottom (Chinese,
Japanese), and so on; the line orientation may be left-right ad top-bottom (Roman,
Devanagari); top-bottom and right-left (Chinese, Japanese); left-right-left, to
bottom (certain ancient Greek inscriptions in the so-called boustrophedon way
of writing), and so on; the thickness may be uniform or variable (of course with
a ballpoint pen one has no choice in the matter).
In view of the second transition (calligraphy to orthography),
we can recognize the following types: The segmentation may be clear cut (Greek, Chinese, Japanese), ligatured
(Proso-Arabic, Arabic, Devanagari) or conjunct (the characters ks and jn in Devanagari,
some Chinese characters); the type identification may be one-one (Sanskrit, finnish,
Czech), may-one (German), one-many (Marathi), many-many (English, French); the
segment identification may be one-one (Czech, Finnish), may-one (sh in English,
ch in French, sch in German for the hushing consonant), one-may (x in Greek, Latin,
English, French or German, the shch letter in Cyrillic), and many-many
(ei, ei in English kaleidoscope, fierce).
In view of the third transition (orthography to language), we
can recognize the following types: The
hook-up may feature-phonographic (the aspiration stroke in Kannada, the nasalization
tilde in Portuguese, the fronting umlaut-sign in German), segment-phonographic
(the so-called alphabets), syllable-phonographic (the Japanese and other syllabaries),
lexis-logography (ampersand in English, French, German – respectively and, etc.,
unt, omkar characters in Marathi etc.,: present-day Chinese), grammar logographic
(the interrogation mark in European punctuation systems), and semographic (mostly
arbitrary, as the so-called Arabic numerals in European writing systems, iconic
as in English U-tube, T-shirt, metonymic by the rebus principle as in English
Xmas, Xt or by symbolism as with the obelisk against the name of a deal person
in European writing systems).
The complex nature of a writing system will now be appreciated.
This complexity gives rise to the large variety of types of writing systems.
When a writing system changes through history, it may split
itself into two or more writing systems. Thus,
the Brahmi script gave rise through successive stages to a large number of scripts
found at present. The two subsystems may
change independently. A given language
may come to be written in different scripts—this may result in different script
systems and a shared spelling system. Problems of script reform and of spelling reform
are thus different and two kinds of reform do not always go together.
Thus, for Marathi, Savarkar proposed a script reform and N.S. Phadke and
N.C. Kelkar proposed a spelling reform.
Written Languages
When the same script is used for the two languages, what may
distinguish the two writing systems is not so much their script systems as their
spelling systems. The language is more
likely to affect the spelling system than the script system is likely to affect
language. Can we think of influence in
the reverse direction? Can a script system
or a spelling system be reflected in the language? After we examine a message in language can
we say that it is meant for or suitable for the written channel of communication
than for the spoken channel of communication?
To begin with there are the written ‘translations’ of certain
specially spoken idioms—the foregoing and the following translate in writing as
the above and the below, the former and the latter translate as the left-hand
and the right-hand. The hemmings and hawings
cannot go into writing; on the other hand, idioms like if I may say so and how
shall I put it? Which have similar functions can go into written communication.
The asides spoken in a low soft voice translate as parentheses and footnotes
and marginal notes.
Of course certain devices that belong to writing may have spoken
translation—quotation marks translate as and I quote; headings and colophons translate
as I am now going to talk about such and such and the like.
Interesting as such observations are and useful too to a person
composing the script of radio talks, film dialogues, or stage dialogues, they
hardly touch the heart of the relationship between the spoken and the written
se of language. We have already alluded
to the fact that in view of the non-availability in written use of accents and
tones, facial expressions and gestures, feed-back from listener’s cross talk like
and then? And other responses like the
skeptical headshake, the sender of the message, has to be extra careful in avoiding
ambiguities, imprecision and the like – better say men and old women or old men
and old women than risk the ambiguity of old men and women.
We can also point out that the availability of certain facilities in the
written use should be fully made use of – facilities like cancellation, corrections,
insertions, re-writings which are available to the writer and facilities like
pausing to reflect, going over the text or any portion of it over again, skipping
what one can afford to skip, jumping ahead and coming back, dipping and skimming,
looking up from the index, scanning an alphabetized list which are available to
the reader.
We have also alluded to the fact that adult fast reading implies
fuller suppression or articulate or inner vocalization of text. In fairness we have to point out that there
are written texts that demand some vocalization. The play being enacted on the inner stage of the reader is an obvious
case in point. The same goes for a personal
letter from a friend or an intimate. The replacement of the elocutionary punctuation of Shakespeare by
a ‘tidier’ logical-grammatical punctuation by his eighteenth century editors was
thus clearly a misguided ‘improvement’
on the bard. And of course the playwright
was a poet too. Poetry also demands to
be heard if only in an undertone by the reader to himself or silently by the reader’s
inner ear. But when due allowances are
made for such spoken or silently spoken scripts, we have to recognize the larger
body of written texts – most documents and prose fiction and discursive essays
and scientific treatises, for example – that demand to be left alone with the
silent reader without the intervention of either loud or silent vocalization.
The coming of recorded and transmitted speech shows no signs
of rendering obsolete of the hand-written or typewritten ‘manuscript’ and the
multiplied and transmitted versions of it. Occasions
still arise when one would rather write a heart-to-heart letter then have that
face-to-face talk or that telephone call. Writing and reading permit certain special
facilities as we have already seen. Even
the handicaps can be turned to advantage – the absence of supplementary vocal
or bodily gestures encourages greater care in ‘composing’ a text ‘formulating’
the content. Translations written at leisure
have a better chance to be elegant and faithful than the necessarily rough-and-ready
spoken interpretations done on the spot or written translations done in a newspaper
office or a broad-casting studio. All these point to the fact language in written
use has some special assets – it can be cultivated, refined, elaborated, careful,
detached, precise, unambiguous, exact, accurate rather than slapdash, banal, repetitive,
hand to mouth, elliptical, commonplace, routine, run of the mill, current coin.
It can be, but it may not be. Language
in the written mode also has certain special liabilities – it is apt to be frozen,
lugubrious, circumlocutionary, about-the-bush-beating, and the like rather than
be fresh, involved, spontaneous, direct and the like.
Spoken and written language modes are both here to stay. Only the older tendency to a more rigid differentiation
between the two is now giving place to a more flexible, give and take specialization
and division of labour between the two.
Implications:
What I have been presenting so far has a rather modest aim,
to bring together the best current thinking among linguists on writing and its
relation to language before an audience of persons to whom these insights are
likely to be of interest and use. I am
of course aware psychologists, ethnologists, and others have also made a study
of writing.
Thus language teachers will note perhaps the following:
(1) In the elementary phase, writing should not loom large.
(2) In the advanced phase, writing will play an important role.
(3) In teaching the script system, eye-training for distinguishing resamblant
letters and stroke analysis for hand-training should be emphasized.
(4) In teaching the spelling system, visual recognition should be emphasized
(5) In teaching language, the special features if any of the spoken
and
written modes should be brought to the notice of the learners.
Those engaged in decipherment and analysis of ancient writings
may note the following:
(1). In tackling any data, the first task is to identify proto-writing,
writing, and epi-writing.
(2). In decipherment the three
translations should be worked out independently from each other. From the visual science to the scrip system,
from the script system to the spelling system, and from the spelling system to
the language. At each point the varied
types should be identified. A writing system usually displays a mixture
of types but the dominance of one or two types out of the spectrum of possibilities
listed earlier.
(3). In analysis, segmentation and identification should be worked out
jointly and graphemes (script-units) and ortho-graphemes (spelling-units) should
be listed along with their non-distinctive variants.
Those engaged in applied writing arts such as decorated and
display calligraphy and typographic design may note the following :
(1) A grapheme should remain recognizable, as also their sequence.
This especially applies to decorative directions.
Care should be taken that resembling characters will remain distinct –
especially in the design of typefaces for printing, typewriting, stenciling, lighted
screening and in display calligraphy.
(2) While the relation between the script system
and the language message is only indirect, there is good scope for exploiting
the visual qualities of the graphemes in way of creating a style and making it
associable with the proposed message or
message type by way of iconicity, metonymy, traditional association etc.,
Finally, those interested in script reform and orthographic
reform may well note the following:
(1) The two reform proposal should be kept distinct.
(2) A reform proposal should exploit the tendencies and possibilities
of the
existing writing system rather than bring in total innovations.
(3) A step-by-step staggered program and a wholesale shift should both
be
considered Habits from the existing writing system are bound
to be
carried over. Better
to move them than to fight them tooth and nail.
(4) Ease of reading, ease of writing, and ease of learning should be
considered – first separately and then jointly. The demands of the three
need not always be the same.
(5) Ease of reading, writing, learning the handwritten and the printed
forms
of the script should be considered – first separately and then
jointly.
The demands of printing and handwriting need not always be
the same.
At the same time one should think twice before imposing the
need for
learning the script twice – first for handwriting and then
for writing.
COLOPHON:
This was published in Caltis-83 on the occasion of the calligraphy,
lettering, and Typography of Indian scripts Seminar, Pune, January 1983.
