Orality, Literacy and the Digital World

In the past several months the author Ted Chiang has written several op ed articles on the nature of artificial intelligence as currently reflected in ChatGPT and other Large Language Modules [1,2]. He is however better known as a writer of short stories usually classified under the genre of Science Fiction, though for me they are more akin to those of Jorge Luis Borges in respect of their postmodern feel. His initial anthology (Stories of Your Life and others) [3] was published in 2002 and his more recent anthology (Exhalation) in 2019 [4]. Several explore the inter-relationship between language, cognition and memory (Understand, Story of Your Life and the Truth of Fact, the Trust of Fiction). In his story notes to the latter he acknowledges the inspiration provided by a book published more than 40 years ago - Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy [5].

Ong spent many years investigating non- or pre-literate cultures, both historic and contemporary. He drew attention to the fact that language is primarily oral-aural both in respect to the relatively recent development of writing compared to the duration of time that the human species has existed (currently estimated as @300,000 years) and the fact that of the many thousands of languages that have existed only around 100 have been committed to writing to any extent.

In Ong’s view there is a profound difference in the way primary oral cultures think and express themselves compared to cultures which have a strongly literate mode of thinking. In the absence of writing, the only way of retaining and retrieving thoughts is through mnemonic patterns such as aphorisms and narratives which are not repeated verbatim but formulaic with strict patterns of rhythm, repetition and alliteration and standard thematic settings. Ong suggests that in a primary oral culture thought cannot be separated from these mnemonic patterns (and that which does is forgotten) and therefore tends to be situational, existential and traditional in nature. This is consistent with the idea that language principally evolved as a tool for social coordination reinforced through oral epic stories performed or sung at community gatherings [6]. As Elon Musk recently tweeted 'Listen to The Iliad as an audiobook, it was meant to be spoken' (X 8th September 2023).

A good example is the oldest surviving British poem, Y Goddodin, a lament to the fall of 360 warriors in the battle of Catraeth around 600 CE transcribed into early Welsh around 1300 CE [7]. The Gododdin were an iron age tribe living around Dun Edin – what we now call Edinburgh. Prior to the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the 5th and 6th centuries CE the majority of people in what we now call Great Britain spoke Brythonic Celtic languages – the forebears of modern Welsh, Cornish and Bretton (and dissimilar to the Goidelic Celtic languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx). Interestingly vestiges of this common Brythonic past linger in some place names such as Aber- and Pen- (for example Aberdeen and Penicuik in Scotland and Aberystwyth and Pencoed in Wales).

The first written script (cuneiform) developed in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE, though the alphabet itself was invented only once in or near Egypt around 1500 BCE and adapted to include vowels in Greece around 800 BCE. Ong argues that it was this that led to the restructuring of consciousness and the development of abstract, analytical and objective modes of thought. During most of the next 1000 years however writing was the preserve of the few and with the demise of Greek philosophy Europe (though not the rest of the world) slipped into medieval scholasticism. It was only with the invention of alphabetical printing by Gutenberg in 1450 that access to writing and reading became more widespread facilitating the Renaissance, Enlightenment and emergence of the Modern world.

In his final work, published 15 years after his death, Ong speculated about the impact of the development of electronic and digital media (radio, television, computing) [8], but did not live long enough to explore the emergence of the world of the global internet, artificial intelligence and virtual realities. Will these media lead to another revolution in the way we think, express ourselves and remember the past? I think they probably have already started to do so and will more profoundly in the future – perhaps in ways that we cannot yet predict or understand.

References

1.?????? ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. The New Yorker? February 9th 2023.

2.?????? Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’. Financial Times. 9th July 2023.

3.?????? Ted Chiang. Stories of Your Life and Others. Picador 2002.

4.?????? Ted Chiang. Exhalation. Picador 2019.

5.?????? Walter J Ong. Orality and Literacy. Methuen and Co Ltd. 1982.

6.?????? Nick Enfield. Language vs Reality, Why language is good for lawyers and bad for scientists. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2022.

7.?????? The Gododdin: lament for the Fallen. Faber 2021.

8.?????? Walter J Ong. Language as Hermeneutics: a primer on the word and digitisation. Cornell University Press 2018.