你的书评：口述与书写

Imagine that you are dropped seven thousand years in the past, right in the middle of a village on a festival day. Everyone stares at you in horror: they think you’re a demon, a vengeful spirit. You are dressed in strange clothes, you are much taller than them, and you are holding a magic mirror that flashes with unexplained colors and sounds. The villagers are almost about to rush at you and kill you when the King’s right hand man, who happens to be visiting the village, comes to the front of the crowd.– State your business, demon.– I’m not a demon, I’m from the future.– If you’re really from the future, what gifts have you brought us?Oh shit. You don’t really have any gifts. You don’t know how to build an airplane, or how to make ammonia, or how to breed dwarf wheat. You think hard. Hmm… you do know one useful thing that, upon looking around, you are pretty sure these villagers don’t know. You tell the King’s right hand man what you know. He is pleased. He takes you with him to visit the King. You both arrive at court, and you sit on the sidelines as the right hand man goes up to the King to show off the new knowledge you gave him. As the King begins to speak, the right hand man demonstrates writing: IAMTHEKINGANDTHISISMYDECREE…Wait, what?1. CarveWhen Romans first began to write Latin, they wrote without spaces and punctuation. They simply put all the letters in a row,Why? Because that’s how people speak. They don’t speak with punctuation, they don’t even really pause between words, they mostly speakcontinuouslylikethis. (This is very obvious to anyone who has tried to learn a second language, only to become confused at how native speakers squeeze all their words together instead of saying them one at a time.)When it was invented, writing was very closely tied to the act of speaking. Many texts were speeches written down after the fact. And reading a text meant speaking it out loud again. It took a long time for writing to establish itself as its own thing, one with its own conventions and uses.People often say that “language is the greatest human invention” but this is imprecise. Language is not a single invention, it is two: oral language and written language are quite different. We’ve grown up with both, so we don’t notice how these are different, but they are. Ong’s Orality and Literacy walks us through the differences.2. PressThroughout his book, Ong is at pains to define orality on its own terms, not as an absence of literacy. This is because he wants to respect orality. But let’s you and I stipulate that we are nice people who respect everyone and then cut to the chase: oral cultures can’t write anything down, which in turn means oral cultures have extremely punishing memory constraints. They can store a decent amount of information inside people’s heads, but this is not trivially easy.It is hard to imagine how such a society would work, but looking at very little kids gives us some idea of what a non-literate existence is like.Little kids love using songs to learn and recall information. At my home, we have a handwashing song and a getting dressed song.Little kids love listening to the same story over and over again to keep it alive. As Ong puts it, “when an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”Little kids rely on adults to remember things for them.Little kids live in oral culture. And if they stayed there as adults, they would refine those same strategies to remember larger and more complex pieces of information.The songs would increase in both number and length, sometimes even reaching epic-length.They would develop routines and occasions for listening to these songs often.Some kids would grow up to become poets whose job is to memorize the songs and sing them.Literacy, which for our purposes means the ability to write things down, offers a lot of advantages, but the first advantage it offered was making remembrance easier.The transformation from speaking to writing changed a lot about language. At the smallest level, it changed our words. Oral languages typically have thousands of words, but English now has more than a million. Written languages can have more words because it is quite easy to store a million words in a dictionary, but it is hard to keep them alive by speaking them in conversation all the time.This is a list of words from last year’s spelling bee finale. No one is saying these words out loud outside a spelling bee; they would not exist in an oral language.An advantage of a written language is that we can find a word for every mood; instead of always walking, we can schlepp, or go on a jaunt or a hike. But a small disadvantage is that, to us, words typically seem inert or dead. The names of all objects are like tags stapled to them; imagine, for example, a tree with a “TREE” stapled to it, or a cloud with a “CLOUD” stapled to it. In contrast, for oral cultures, words are magical and have real power. For them, the world is not full of tagged objects. The act of speaking the name makes it real; the words don’t exist without people to speak them.Oral cultures also form different kinds of sentences. Their sentences are less abstract, more rhythmic. For example, a very common sentence pattern is “[something] and [something] and [something] and [something]” instead of the more modern “[something] when [something] then [something] thus [something]”. Words like when/then/thus are abstract guideposts for the sentence, but oral speakers prefer simply adding clauses with ‘and’. For one, it is easier and quicker to say ‘and’ every time, for another, using ‘and’ every time adds a pleasant rhythm to the clauses.But maybe the most important reason is that oral cultures rarely indulge in abstraction; abstraction is a written hallmark. This shows up, for example, in the Iliad, where Homer talks about all the Greek leaders and their ships, but in the context of all of them doing something. For example:Next those from Aspledon and Minyan Orchomenos, led by Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, sons of Ares whom the fair maiden Astyoche bore to the mighty god, for he lay with her in secret, in her room in the house of Actor, son of Azeus. They brought thirty hollow ships. The natural modern way to present this information would be as a list or a table, but an abstracted list of items undistinguished from each other is hard to memorize.This Wikipedia table is both hard to memorize and impossible to say out loud.Similarly, the Bible has genealogies in the formatA begat B, B begat C, C begat D, … This is more abstract than Homer’s list, but still exhibits hallmarks of oral culture that we’ve been talking about above. Each phrase has a nice rhythm to it because of the repeating pattern. Not only does repeating each person’s name twice make remembering all the names easier, it also gives people more time to recall which name comes next. And finally, even here, people are not mentioned in an abstract bullet-point list but in the active act of begetting.Havelock, a mentor to Ong who wrote about similar topics, in his book The Muse Learns to Write, provides examples of how sentences in the play Oedipus changed from its oral version to its written one.Oral: The city altogether bulges with incense-burnings. Written: The town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells. Changes: In the original, there is a single vivid image. In the written version, atomistic pieces (heavy, mingled burden, sounds, smells) are glued together (using is, with, of, and).Oral: What things I adjudicated not from messengers other than you or myself to hear. Written: I did not think it fit that I should hear of this from messengers. Changes: The written version adds abstract concepts of ‘it’ and ‘this’. The verb becomes ‘thinking’ not ‘hearing’.Oral: Oh aged sire, speechify. You have grown appropriate to pronounce in front of these here. Written: You are old and they are young. Changes: The ora