For a while, a few years ago, I considered studying to become a linguist. Then I met some linguists, and discovered that the discipline was either a) almost completely theoretical in nature, b) utterly bogged down in researching minutiae so obscure that no one would ever care, or c) completely shot through with loonies. I then briefly considered linguistic anthropology as a field, but realized that I was too old to begin a career at Starbucks.
I guess what I'm saying is that I like the concept of linguistics far more than I like the actual practice of it. I like studying languages and the differences and similarities in them. I like the methods of communication created by humans, and how we create these shared, communal symbols, both written and verbal, in order to interact with one another.
I especially love learning about Japanese, by which I mean it drives me up a wall and I hate it. That sounds like a horrible thing to say, but anyone who has ever studied Japanese knows exactly what I'm talking about. Japanese has four very distinct and different syllabaries, each serving its own purpose and two of them stolen outright from other cultures. Trying to figure out the written Japanese language is like trying to figure out, well, Japan. It makes perfect sense right up until it doesn't. You'll be walking down the street, seeing all the different yet familiar corporate logos from around the world. People are wearing Adidas and staring at iPhones and listening to whatever racket passes for pop music these days. It all looks perfectly normal and then BLAM GIANT ANIMATED CRAB HANGING OFF THE SIDE OF A BUILDING and then you're lost again.
I'm particularly fascinated by kanji, the Chinese ideograms that the Japanese use to express concepts and common objects, such as "love" or "water" or "economic analyst." There's not a really clear number on how many kanji actually exist, and some of them have several different pronunciations, depending on usage. These symbols serve a valuable function in Japanese.
But they are damned difficult to use, here in the 21st century, and here is where we come to my actual point, which is the interface of writing utensils and their effect on language.
The type of writing a culture uses (assuming it has a written language to begin with) is often shaped by utensils it uses to express that language. The Sumerians, as far as we know, invented written language. We know this because their language, cuneiform, is the oldest samples of writing we have ever found.
Except that that's probably bollocks. Cuneiform is the oldest writing we have ever found because it consists of marks pressed into wet clay with a pointed stick. Wet clay, left in the sun, becomes dry clay, which is really just a sort of rock. (Sit down, geologists.) It's the oldest writing because, well, it's the oldest. There might have been earlier scripts than cuneiform, in other places, but those lost writings were scraped into tree bark that rotted away, or onto leaves that withered and crumbled, or onto dried skin that disintegrated. Sumerian cuneiform lasted, because it was printed on a more durable medium, and went on to be adapted to serve a dozen other civilizations, before being pushed aside by the Phoenician alphabet. There are still samples today.
Another example of historical writing, and one that I personally think belongs in the bin, is cursive. Cursive script was developed centuries ago, back when most discourse was in Latin or Greek. Writing utensils were generally some sort of quill or reed, dipped in ink and then drawn across the paper. If you picked up the pen between each letter, you were basically just asking for ink spots and blots all over your nice clean letter to the Pope begging for a stay of execution for your uncle the fish merchant, who was in that part of Venice completely by mistake and had no idea how those sacks of gold went missing. His Holiness could be put off by your sloppy penmanship and put an end to dear Uncle Heinrich ahead of schedule, even. No, cursive handwriting was designed to keep the nib of the pen on the surface of the parchment as much as possible.
Once we had movable type, however, things changed. The uniformity of type made it possible to make letters clearer and easier to read. Spelling and grammatical rules became more uniform. Written communication was no longer an art form, but a clear method of transmitting ideas and concepts. It is no mistake that the Renaissance and Enlightenment (not to mention the Protestant Reformation) all came about in the wake of movable type. Information became more easily disseminated. Cursive was dead at that point, it just didn't stop moving for some time. You'll note that very few typesetters went to the trouble of creating typefaces to mimic cursive fonts. Those were usually engraved by hand, and reserved for upper-class use.
Japanese writing does not come from the pen, of course, but from the brush. There is still an art to writing Japanese correctly, not only in kanji, but also in hiragana and katakana, the phonetic scripts used where kanji is either not viable or is unusable. Katakana, for example, is used almost exclusively to spell foreign words. It doesn't work very well, however, because, instead of creating new symbols to express foreign sounds, they simply used the existing phonemes they already had and just created new symbols for those. Which is daft. It's like if we created another alphabet, ABC through Z, and just came up with different shapes for each letter, and then said, "Okay, this is the alphabet that immigrants use."
Each character in these different syllabaries must be written in a distinctive way, following what is called a "stroke order." If you don't follow the correct stroke order, the meaning of the character can be reduced or even changed outright. This can and does cause problems. Someone's address or surname might be mispronounced or misunderstood. This could be a problem if you're trying to get the fire department to swing 'round your place. (Don't get me started on Japanese addresses.)
So, on the one side, we have Western culture, with a written language driven by the pen; on the other, we have Asian culture and the brush. Now, I'm not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which takes the position that language determines thought. It seems a little too pat at least and borderline racist at worst. (Also, it's kind of made up: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any such hypothesis; later linguistic anthropologists [those guys again] made it up and stuck their name on it.)
But I do have to wonder if there is something to the idea that the way in which we put words on the page influences our way of thinking. For example, I maintained throughout my entire academic career that taking notes by hand was a far more effective method of retaining lecture information than by typing on a computer. (Purely anecdotal and not backed up by any data, although my GPA seems to bear it out.) Does using a pen or pencil or brush change the way in which we process ideas? What about a keyboard? In just two generations, we have moved from writing on paper to the keyboard and mouse paradigm of the desktop computer to the trackpad/touchscreen gesture-driven language we use now. Is it changing us?
And what of texting as a language interface? Done primarily with thumbs, which is a new development; thumbs were previously used as a stabilization base for the fine motor control of a pen or pencil, or to operate the space bar on a keyboard. Texting is different between cultures, as well. In English, I text by selecting the letters on a virtual keyboard, much like a typewriter or laptop. In Japanese, I text by entering the phonetic values of the Japanese word on an English-style keyboard. I type in, "do-ko-ni-i-ki-ma-su-ka," and the computer in the phone uses contextual algorithms to translate that to "どこに行きますか". It even selects the correct kanji for me, which is worrying some older Japanese, who think this is causing younger Japanese to forget how to write, a sort of parallel worry to Americans who think that an ability to write cursive is vital.
If I send a text in Mandarin, which is more and more rarely as I forget the language through lack of use, I simply write the characters with my fingertip on the screen. The computer takes a good guess at what it thinks I was trying to write, and hits, most of the time, so that I say to a vendor in Guangzhou, "xie xie ni," and the correct characters are sent. (True story: as I was writing this, every time I tried to switch the computer to my Chinese keyboard set, Chrome shut down, which is why you're seeing the phonetic words and not the characters. My computer is getting old.)
I wonder if the homogenization of language input interfaces, brought about by the necessity of the vast majority of computers only using three or four operating systems worldwide, will result in a shift in thought? Will we slowly begin to think in similar ways?
Would that even be a bad thing?
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