Emergence of meaning from written language

I'm hardly a biblical scholar, but a quick internet search indicates that the Torah was compiled between 700 and 600BCE, during the Jewish people's exile in the Babylonian empire. (Yes, I'm the guy who refuses to write "god" with a capital G. But "Torah" and "Bible" are titles of books and in English writing we always capitalize titles of books, songs, paintings, etc.)

We have undeniable evidence that the technology of written language was invented between 4000 and 3000BCE, and other tantalizing bits of evidence might push that back another 2000 years. Remember that writing evolved from accounting symbols, as civilization grew so large that time-delayed transactions among multiple parties who did not all know each other personally made it impossible to do business with a good memory and a handshake. Writing was invented by merchants, not scholars or priests.

The writing of the Torah occurred quite a long time after the invention of writing. Surely many of the stories that comprise it were handed down from previous generations (and probably also in writing), but much of it was more-or-less contemporary accounts, and the Torah itself is clearly a written artifact, not an oral legend.

BTW: You mean ". . . . the written Torah and the oral Torah." All language is "verbal" by definition. The word "verbal" means, literally, "expressed in words."

The human brain has a speech center. This is why other species of mammals and birds, even the most intelligent, can master only a tiny bit of human language. Dogs can understand as many as 200 words, and parrots can build three-word phrases. Gorillas and chimpanzees can learn to communicate in American Sign Language, with (so far) a vocabulary of about 1,000 words.

However, I have never seen a biologist claim to have identified a "writing center." Although reading is something we do quite a bit faster than speech, writing is much slower, except for a few highly talented people who can write in shorthand or use a court reporter's machine. For the rest of us, writing is such a slow process that it's not unreasonable to assume that it does not use a specialized brain center.

Again, bear in mind that the use of symbols developed slowly. Written language did not burst on the scene suddenly. Hash marks for numbers, pictograms for directional markers, signs for other concepts were developed over the ages, as needed. It was quite a while before a complete system of symbols was elaborated that could be used to transcribe every word in a language--these were now logograms (representation of words) rather than pictograms (representation of ideas). Phonetic writing systems arose much later. The Chinese still don't use one, and the Japanese use a hybrid combination of Chinese logograms with a phonetic syllabary.

As civilization and science allow us to live longer, the study of Alzheimer's disease (IIRC, now one of the top five causes of death in America's rapidly aging population) has revealed some interesting information about written language. Reading and writing is a skill that is overlearned. It's one of the very last abilities that people lose as they sink into dementia. People who have strokes and lose the ability to speak can still write.

If there's a beloved elder in your family who has trouble remembering things, rather than telling him something orally, write it down and hand him the note. Once he's read your note he will remember the information much longer than if you say it out loud. Not to mention, he still has the note so he can re-read it whenever he needs to.

One lady was crestfallen because when she walked into her mother's room she asked, "Who are you?" She said, "Mom, I'm your daughter, Susan!"

Mom said, "You're not my daughter. Susan is young and beautiful."

So she found an old photo of herself and attached the caption, "This is your daughter Susan at age 25," and then took a new photo with the caption, "This is your daughter Susan at age 55." She handed the photos to her mother, who looked at them for a long time and kept re-reading the captions. The she smiled and said, "Susan, you're here! You're as beautiful as ever!" From that day on, she never had a problem recognizing her daughter.

The technology of written language kept this family together!

 

Tell that to the kids who sit there "texting" furiously all day! Their language looks like something a really smart elephant could master.

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Yes. As I've often noted, it's almost impossible to express sarcasm in writing, because it is all about the non-verbal components of oral language.

This is why we had to invent emoticons like

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now that the internet has taken written language to a whole new level. And there are even dialects of emoticons: Asians prefer to "spell" it as ^_^.

Con artists learn to recognize "tells." I don't remember the precise numbers, but women have about 50% more than men (something like 75 vs. 50), so con men find women easier to read and easier to con.

Psychologists read them too. For example, if a man and a woman are sitting next to each other on a bench with their legs crossed, so that the feet of the crossed legs are pointing at each other, this supposedly means that they have romantic aspirations, since they are presenting their genitalia to each other. Crossed the opposite way, means there is no interest. If one points one way and the other in the opposite direction, somebody's going home disappointed.

Actors and theatrical directors make constant use of these things. In live theater they exaggerate body language so the people in the back rows can see it. In a movie it's more likely to be closer to a natural movement, but still a talented actor can make a posture or a gesture much more dramatic than you or I could.

Every article I've read on the subject agrees.

Consider life in the Neolithic Era: small farming villages. John makes a spear for Frank and everybody knows it. So later in the year when John's wife has a baby, Frank's wife makes a cute little outfit for her.

Now fast-forward to the Bronze Age: a city with a couple of thousand people, many of whom barely recognize each other and don't even know each other's names. John makes a new wheel for Mary's wagon. John doesn't need any of the clothes Mary makes but she makes a coat for Bill. Three months later, Bill replaces the broken window in Pete's house. Next summer, Pete brings his band to Sarah's house to perform at her daughter's birthday party. Sarah keeps bees and gives Hank some honey. Six months later John needs a new pair of shoes and Hank makes them for him.

Each person has provided goods or services to someone else, and each has received goods or service from someone else, so they all feel that they've gotten a fair deal. But these people don't know each other! This isn't an intimate little village where everybody is family; if somebody invented the process of cheating, how would anyone know he did it? The answer is: keeping records. In many early communities, olive oil was used as a currency and people traded chits that represented one pint or one gallon of olive oil over at Sam's olive grove. Sometimes they'd carry them home, but sometimes they'd just leave them at Sam's place and Sam became the first banker. The value of goods and services was calculated in ounces or pints or gallons or barrels of olive oil.

The first chits were made by scratching hash marks in soft clay and then firing them. The hash marks eventually evolved into numerals. Roman numerals actually were mostly hash marks: I, II, III, etc., with a few shorthand notations. V was five and one V upside down underneath another V, forming an X, was two fives, or ten.

As commerce became more complex they needed symbols for more concepts besides numbers, such as date, quality, etc. People expanded this system to other concepts and soon there were symbols for animals, activities, seasons and gods.

Carl Jung tells us that these beliefs are instinctive in our species; he calls them archetypes. Genetics was not a mature science in his day but we now know that instincts are pre-programmed into our synapses by our DNA, which has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Most instincts are clearly survival traits, such as the universal instinct in vertebrates to flee from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face: a predator. Any animal without that instinct will be eaten before he gets old enough to reproduce and pass his DNA down to another generation.

The instinct for belief in the supernatural is a little harder to explain, since it does not appear to confer a survival advantage. On the contrary, judging by the headlines in this morning's news, religion appears to motivate us to kill each other. Nonetheless, it might have been a survival trait in the distant past, when dangers existed that we can't imagine. Or it might just be a random mutation that happened to be passed down through a genetic bottleneck, and we're stuck with it. (Not all of us: my family seems to have lost that gene, so perhaps there's hope for humanity.)

Actually, Jules Verne wrote his science-fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. His travelers were shot out of a space cannon in a projectile with no engine of its own. However, the first rudimentary rockets had already been invented by the Chinese in the 1200s, so it was just a matter of time before somebody had the brilliant idea of combining the two ideas into a new technology.

 

Written language was invented early in the Bronze Age. Civilization could never have advanced into the Iron Age without it, much less the Industrial Era and today's Post-Industrial Era.

Yet . . . if a denizen of the Stone Age were picked up in a time machine and taken on a tour of today's civilization, I don't think that writing would be the technology of our era that amazes him the most.

He'd surely be in awe of our skyscrapers, airplanes, movies, weapons, clothes and musical instruments. But I think what he would try to hide under his bearskin robe and take back to his own tribe would be our incredibly wonderful tools! Imagine what he could do with just one metal saw!

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The wheel could not be invented until metal cutting tools existed.

 

Written language has its own embellishments. Psychologists study these things all the time. As a professional writer I often help people with their resumes, and there are lots of tips for submitting a resume that will make a better impression on the headhunter so he'll forward it to his client.

Font, color, size, headings, margins, spacing, bulleted and numbered lists, flush vs. ragged right, hyphenation vs. a short line or one full of long spaces, indentation, bold, italics, abbreviation vs. spelling out, exactly two pages, etc.

This is even more true, and there are many more attributes to fiddle with, in an advertisement, magazine cover or website.

Now as a resume consultant, and many years ago as a hiring manager, I kept seeing resumes that had been done by a "resume service." They were really good looking, well-laid out with eye-catching graphics. But they were full of language errors! Not just typos, but plain old stupid composition. My reaction to the applicant was always: "You obviously spent a fair amount of money on this. Yet it's a piece of crap. You expect me to hire you? What kind of stupid mistakes are you going to make with MY money?"

Also: con men have had no trouble adapting to the internet.

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Psychologists tell us that reading is a skill we overlearn. It is, in fact, one of the last ones people lose as they get older. Alzheimer's patients who can't remember what you said five minutes ago can remember something they read five years ago. (A hint: If someone you know has it, don't talk to them. Hand them notes.) So literacy is an integral component of who we are and what it means to be human.

Our brain has a fully dedicated speech center. We actually think in words. We don't know what we're going to say after the first word, because the thought and the sentence are being created simultaneously in real time.

Writing is a slower process than speaking, so we compose the thought first, in silent speech, and then transcribe it into writing. Because of this, we re-work it, changing it from the colloquial form of English that is fine for a sentence that's going to be forgotten in five minutes, into the more proper form of English suitable for a sentence that may be read multiple times, or perhaps even published. Today's electronic writing tools have even changed the process of writing: We can now go back a second time and a third time to make the sentence even clearer, and also to correct errors and even change the attitude.

That's a horrible idea! Who thought of that??? Toss it in the trash and forget you ever heard it.

The advantage of writing is that you can be clearer and less ambiguous! Brevity is not an important goal in writing, unless you're entering a contest and the rules say, "Tell us in 100 words or less why you like our product."

Write as much as you have to in order to express yourself completely and accurately. THEN you can go back over it and look for ways to make it more efficient. But most of us can't do it. I write for a living and even I have trouble making things shorter. This is why we need editors. My wife (who is also a writer although not a professional) goes over my writing and it comes back 2/3 shorter.

But whatever you do to make it shorter, don't inject ambiguity. That's not concise writing: it's bad writing.