I posted the "Writing is prior to speech but not prior to rhetoric" quote on my Facebook page just to see what kind of conversation I could get going (yes, my friends are as nerdy as I am). A couple of people pointed out that this is similar to the chicken & egg dilemma.
Rather than try to reconstruct the entire conversation, let me share where we (more or less) ended.
So presumably early humans had grunt, gestures, and marks of various sorts to communicate. (What I know about early humans is embarrassingly limited, btw, so please excuse the goofs in description as I try to get to a point.) I would call the marks "writing", and the grunts I would call "speech", but the gestures? I don't know. To me who is mindful of ASL I want to say it's speech, but I suppose it could also be called a form of writing. Regardless, the "winner" is the one who can take his or her means of communication and make the next person understand. And not just understand, but also repeat that same grunt/gesture/mark. So, it seems that in the race for written v spoken communication, writing would come first only if markings were communicating a message more clearly.
Someone pointed out that the virtual realm gives us a whole new slant to the topic, since text to speech software was prevalent before speech to text. Could this be a coincidence, or is this a case of technology imitating life, since in that case the written word would precede the spoken?
And finally, to the area of cognition. Some people think predominantly in pictures, some in words, and I'm sure there are some who have an even combination of the two. (We talked this over at home: Chad thinks in pictures, I think in words.) And we know the maxims of "Think before you speak" or "Think before you act", which to me means that I've "written" in my head what I'm going to say or do. So is that evidence that writing comes first in the human brain? Does anyone else do the same thing?
I'm a picture person--thus the reason writing has been such a slow process for me. I can see the scene in full detail, but getting the words on the page? Where's my mental projector screen?
ReplyDeleteGreat food for thought.
Kennedy seems to support this thesis by noting that Ccro-Magnon "Cave-men" were painting cave-walls before humans developed systems of spoken or written language. He also notes that even this (the cave-painting) was preceded by rhetoric(insofar as rhetoric is an "impulse and expenditure of energy" (13)). So the notion I take from this is that humans felt a need to communicate rhetorically(energetically) which led them to create intuitive symbols for real-world objects (hieroglyphics, for example) that eventually evolved into more abstract grunts, letters, words, etc. In a way, each of the three things had to exist in order to give rise to the next. The way that ancient hieroglyphics(in several societies) evolved from rugged illustrations of the concepts into more abstract symbols seems to support his notions.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm pretty sure I think in a combination of words and images. When I consider the future, it seems to be through a both an inner monologue and through visual representations of what that monologue would look like. So (in my observation) I simultaneously think, for example, "If I do X, my friend will be pissed off" and imagine actually doing X and what my friend's anger will look like (not talking to me, telling me to go shove it, etc). I wouldn't say that it's an even combination, though. The images are so much more vivid than the words that they tend to be what motivates me to take one course of action as opposed to another.
In the end, as humans we naturally think in symbols. Both writings and drawings are complex systems of symbols that are interpretations of thought being reformed into a way that our conscious mind can better process it. It's kind of the same way that a TV works: a stream of data is sent, arrives at the receiver, and is then interpreted and displayed in the way that the audience understands best. Even a slight discrepancy results in white noise, unintelligible gibberish (to us) that we can't hope to interpret. You can't really give primacy to either writing or pictures: it's really more just a matter of what channel you're tuned to.
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