Changing the Use of the Written Word by Humanity - Research Paper Example

?How has humanity’s use of the written word evolved over time? The first known use of writing comes from the area of the world known as the “fertile crescent” which surrounds the two main river deltas of the Nile and the Euphrates. (Historyworld website). Another name for this region is Mesopotamia (which means “between the rivers”) and this shows how critical the geography of the area was for early human history. The people who lived there had managed to build up extensive civilizations, including the Sumerian and Egyptian cultures, based on the rich agricultural territory that the rivers provided. As they prospered due to plentiful food and water they had a growing tendency to use surpluses to build impressive and complex cities for trade and emerging industries. It is thought that these complex city societies invented writing in order to help them keep track of their goods and property, and of their business deals. The Sumerians took the material that was most plentiful in that area, and one that they used to make the bricks that built their homes: the clay from the delta. Another plentiful commodity was the reeds which grew by the water and these were sharpened so that they could be used to make small marks in the clay. The distinctive wedge shaped format of the reed stem is what gave its name to this earliest form of writing: cuneiform. The clay tablets that cuneiform was written on were very cheap to produce. They could also be left to harden in the sun, or in an oven, so that they became more permanent records, and they proved very popular because of this. The system of writing depended on tiny symbols being used to represent items in the real world. These early symbols were called “pictograms” because they were mini pictures that recalled the sounds or shapes of things in the world. (Harry Ransom Center Website). Archeologists have found vast libraries of these cuneiform tablets, containing laws, literature, and huge numbers of lists and business records. One of the disadvantages of clay are that it is brittle and liable to cracking and breaking, which makes it a risky medium for permanent records. The Egyptians solved this problem by carving their most important writing onto permanent stone monuments. Their writing is called “hieroglyphics” which means “scared carving” (Harry Ransom Center Website) and it had much more elaborate pictograms which resemble birds, animals and objects which are recognisable even today. Stone is extremely heavy, and it takes a very long time to carve, and so the Egyptians also looked for lighter, cheaper and more flexible ways to record everyday things. They used a kind of plaster on walls, and painted onto that with colored pigments, and they also invented papyrus, which is a type of processed reed that could be made up into a light and flexible surface. The design of the scroll, which allows the the papyrus to be rolled up into a tube, made transportation and storage much easier. Depending on the purpose of the writing, Egyptian scribes used three different scripts: “there is one, the most formal, for religious documents; one for literature and official documents; and one for private letters.” (Historyworld website) In other parts of the world such as central and northern Europe, America and China there were different geographical conditions. Societies here developed their own methods of writing using local materials. Manuscripts of the finest quality were produced in the ancient period and right through the middle ages using the scraped skins of animals, called parchment or vellum (University of Michigan Library website). Scripts such as Latin and Greek moved away from pictograms and into a system using a stylized alphabet based on sounds, which could be written speedily. Germanic tribes lived in areas with huge forests, and so they chose a simple script based on straight lines that could be carved on wood. In China rice paper was invented for painting and writing. These systems could be written left to right, right to left, and in a vertical line also. As time went on there was more and more interaction between cultures, and written languages settled down into regional conventions: in the West left to right became the norm, while in the East right to left was preferred (as in Hebrew and Arabic). The far East retained with vertical arrangements (as in Chinese and Japanese). The highest quality manuscripts of monks in the middle ages were often “illuminated” which means patterns and illustrations were added to the basic script. The book form was developed to allow the pages to be kept flat and to allow ease of reading, since scrolls can be unwieldy to handle, especially if they are very long. In the West alphabets based on phonetics were used, which made the process of learning to read and write much easier than the pictogram method with its thousands of individual characters which was favored in China. Far fewer items need to be learned in an alphabet, and this meant that a larger proportion of the population could use writing in the West than in the East. Manuscripts were passed around and widely copied, but they were expensive to produce, and also they took a very long time to make. Gradually a system of making woodblocks for stamping images onto a page emerged, and improved technology produced paper instead of vellum for text, In 1452 to 1455 a German inventor called Gutenberg designed a system for making blocks which contained movable pieces, and this allowed books to be mass produced for the first time: “The genius of Gutenberg’s invention was to split the text into its individual components, such as lower and upper case letters, punctuation marks, ligatures and abbreviations, drawing on the traditions of medieval scribes.” (Gutenberg website) He naturally chose the best seller of the time as his first major work, namely the Christian Bible, and this Gutenberg Bible became the standard for writing in Medieval Europe. The importance of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press was enormous. There was suddenly more demand for books, because people could now afford them, and so new formats appeared such as political pamphlets, newspapers and all kinds of literature intended for a wider audience than the previous elite of monks, senior government officials and rich people, who were the only people who could afford to read in the Middle Ages. Serialized stories in newspapers by authors such as Charles Dickens in England were very cheap to buy, and they became popular with a wide readership, turning eventually into the genre that we now would call the novel. In the United States, too, the explosion of printing allowed vast amounts of new scientific knowledge to be gathered together and published widely, allowing the development of the new continent to take place using the latest technologies, some of them drawn from European books and some produced in the new colonies for their own use. A great many scientific, religious and political ideas were explored in this period leading up to the twentieth century, and institutions such as schools and universities expanded to cater for the new reading public. Writing became increasingly standardized, and grammar books and dictionaries were composed in order to train writers and readers in the common conventions of each language. The twentieth century has witnessed the fastest pace of change in writing technologies. The invention of the personal computer changed the way that people in the developed world relate to the written word in many different ways. There is no longer such a need to rely on physical substances like clay, parchment or paper, and written language is now most often encountered on a screen. Individual handwriting is disappearing, and the keyboard with its highly standardized fonts is becoming the norm for the production of written texts. Writing is faster, and easier to erase and rewrite, and there is a whole new dimension in which writing exists: cyberspace. The Internet and the World Wide Web have enhanced the dominance of a few languages, and especially English, at the expense of others, and for the first time there is a global network in which written documents can be published. One feature of internet writing is that it incorporates many of the features of speech, such as the ability to convey emotions through emoticons, and the ability to conduct a “conversation” in real time, through systems like text messaging, and internet chat relay systems. Even in the last twenty years there has been significant change in the way that the internet uses writing. Features such as hyperlinks allow the reader to hop from a main text to others to find information, and there are many new types of writing form like blogs, emails, message boards and discussion forums which allow everyone who has a computer to become a publisher. This raises issues about quality control and reliability, and it creates a large division in the world between those who are able to take advantage of the new writing and reading opportunities, and those who are not. The long and varied history of writing has shown that the human being is capable of great feats of invention and adaptation, using all kinds of writing systems to capture and pass on its knowledge and skills to future generations. References Ager, Simon. “Omniglot” Website. 2008-2011. Available at: http://www.omniglot.com/ Gutenberg website. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.de/english/erfindun.htm Harry Ransom Center. “Early Writing.” 2011. Available at: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/educator/modules/gutenberg/books/early/ Historyworld website. “History of Writing.” 2011. Available at: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab33 University of Michigan Library website. “Ancient Writing Materials: Parchment.” Available at: http://www.lib.umich.edu/papyrus-collection/ancient-writing-materials-parchment Read More