Level 5 Reading 9B

Reading 9B

THE POWER OF WRITING Joel L. Swerdlow investigates the history and future of one of humanity's most potent forms of artistic and cultural expression. No other invention—perhaps only the wheel comes close— has had a longer and greater impact on humanity's development than writing, Written words have overthrown governments and changed the course of history. So powerful is writing that the beginnings of civilization and history are most often defined as the moment cultures develop it. The transformation of language into written words has immortalized passion, genius, art, and science. Much of writing's power comes from its flexibility. Ever since the Sumerians began keeping records by carving signs on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, humans have searched for the ideal tool to portray words. They have carved symbols in stone and bone and written on leaves, bark, silk, papyrus, parchment, paper, and electronic screens. This skill, once known only to a few professional scribes, grew into mass literacy: More than five billion people— over 86 percent of the world's population—can now read and write. To understand how writing evolved, I visited Serabit el-Khadim, a flat-topped, wind-eroded mountain of reddish sandstone in the southwestern Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Here, in a turquoise mine dug by Egyptians almost 3,500 years ago, is one of the earliest examples of a phonetic alphabet. "What do you think?" asked Avner Goren as we stooped to enter a dark hole. Goren, an archeologist who supervised excavations in the Sinai for 15 years, was pointing to a wall just ahead of us. Carved into the stone were crude sketches of a fish, an ox head, and a square. The simplicity of the marks belied their significance. The people who made them were among the first to use characters that denote sounds—an alphabet. The alphabetic symbols each represented the initial sound of an object. The picture of the square—a house— thus stood for the b sound because the word for house was beit. The signs were remarkably different from the Egyptian hieroglyphs found elsewhere at the site. If these ancient writers were not Egyptians, who were they? Most researchers now believe that this alphabet was invented in Canaan, a region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Most likely, Canaanites, who were brought in to work the mines, left these messages. Egyptian scribes had to master hundreds of symbols. I asked Goren if alphabetic writing must have seemed attractive to those scribes. "Probably not," he says. "About 30 of the symbols in Egyptian hieroglyphs represent single sounds, just like the alphabet. They knew about using symbols to represent sounds, so to the Egyptians, the Semitic writing may have looked too primitive to be significant. "Goren warned me against seeing an alphabet as "superior" to pictographic writing. "If you came from outer space and wrote a report, you'd give the alphabet high marks," he says. "It's flexible and easy to learn. But what actual effect did that have? There was no mass literacy until after the development of the printing press in the mid-15th century." Nevertheless, although it took hundreds of years, alphabets would eventually change the way people thought. From a small patch in the Middle East, the notion of one symbol per sound gradually became widespread around the world, taking root first among the Greeks, who adapted some characters into written vowels. The Latin alphabet of the Romans evolved from the Greek around the sixth century B.C. By the ninth century A.D., Japan had integrated phonetic components into its written language; Korea did so by the 15th century. Indeed , of the several hundred written languages in the world today, only Chinese still relies on a traditional writing system where by individual characters represent individual words. These characters often mean one thing when used alone, but something else when combined. The Chinese character for trust, for example, shows the character for man alongside the one for word, literally a man standing by his word. Since its beginning as a means for keeping records, writing has evolved into one of humanity's most powerful forms of self-expression. People have used writing to counter loneliness and to establish a sense of self. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle saw writing as away to express "affections of the soul." Recent studies have shown that writing about feelings can alleviate depression, boost the immune system, and lower blood pressure. And yet, of the more than 10,000 languages ever spoken, most had no written form. How, then, do people in societies without writing express themselves? "We talk to each other, listen, visit, and trust the spoken word," says Guujaaw, a leader of the Haida Nation. "Writing is not essential to living; expressing yourself without writing is natural."

The Haida have lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia for more than 10,000 years. I suggest to Guujaaw that things get distorted when people repeat them to one another, especially over a long duration of time. "Things get distorted in writing as well," he says. "People with writing are a brief chapter in our history, but oral histories from our people go back thousands of years. They are a living history and provide a link between story teller and listeners that written stories cannot. In fact, human intimacy and community can best come through oral communication." Plato, Aristotle's teacher, would probably agree. Living at a time when writing began to challenge Greece's oral-based culture, he warned that writing would make people "trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves ... They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing." But Plato lived in the fifth century B.C., when reading was physically difficult. Books were papyrus scrolls often more than 15 meters long; the idea of pages only emerged in Europe in the second century A.D. Spaces between words did not become standard in Western society until the seventh century. Long after Plato's time, writing served mostly as an aid to memory, something to stimulate the spoken word. The transition from the spoken to the written word occurred because writing meets certain needs so much more effectively. Writing permits analysis, precision, and communication with both current and future generations in a way that is much more powerful than the spoken word. Thousands of years ago, China's rulers learned the value of a uniform written language, recognizing that it has the power to unite people. In the third century B.C., Chinese people spoke at least eight languages and countless dialects, but with the establishment of a unified empire and a standard writing system around 200 B.C., everyone could read the same characters. Today, the extra work needed to manually enter Chinese into a computer— up to five keystrokes for one Chinese character—raises an important issue. China could become the wealthiest country in the world; it already is a major factor in the international economy. As this economy relies more on computers, does the Chinese writing system act as a constraint on its development? Perhaps not. Usama Fayyad, a former researcher at Microsoft Corporation, whose job was to think about the long-term future of computers and data storage, says technology will eventually offer efficient and economical ways to bypass keyboards. Technology that incorporates voice and handwriting recognition, he claims, could make it irrelevant which writing system is used. Fayyad also says that the distinction between an alphabet and Chinese characters does not matter in terms of how a computer operates. He explains that when you hit a letter on the keyboard, the computer enters that action into its memory as a number. Each letter is a different number, and a sentence inside the computer is a string of numbers. It's up to the computer program to interpret how the string of numbers corresponds to an instruction. Overall, computers are terrifically useful machines, but perhaps paper is still superior. You can hold it, fold it, put it in your pocket, look at it again later when it's convenient. This thought leads me to Joseph Jacobson, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped found a company, E Ink, whose technology has transformed ink from a permanent medium to a format that can change electronically. "Paper is fantastic," Jacobson tells me. "If books or newspapers on paper had not already been invented, if we lived in a world only with computer screens, then paper would be a breathtaking breakthrough. But the way we use paper is incredibly wasteful." E Ink is a major developer of electronic-paper—the kind you see on tablets such as Amazon's Kindle. E-paper works by printing electronic letters on squares of plastic that look and feel like paper but can be erased and reused. Jacobson believes that using e-paper will significantly reduce the cost and pollution associated with paper manufacturing. "Paper needs to be taken into the digital age. We need writing that changes on paper," says Jacobson. With that in mind, E Ink has just released a new kind of e-paper called Just Write that promises to offer an experience just like writing on real paper. Users can write on the paper, roll it up, and even cut holes in it— all with very low power usage and no backlight. As I observe E Ink's latest technology, I feel as if I'm back in the cave at Serabit el-Khadim—looking at a piece of the future.

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