Final Thoughts on ENGLB6400

It was with pleasure that I participated and learned many new things in ENGL B6400. Taking the graduate course Theories and Models of Literacy broadened my scope of knowledge on several areas of global literacy, namely history. Such an expansive subject area was covered in the course that I have had to narrow down the things I will talk about in this post. The readings which spoke to me the most were more historically-geared than theory-oriented. Alberto Manguel's chapter from his book A History of Reading was written simply and at the same time intellectually stimulating. It intrigued me to read the rest of the book. Learning about the evolution of silent reading was fascinating. Another material which piqued my interest was John Man's book Alpha Beta. I read it cover to cover in two days. For me it shone a light on the British perspective of the development of pictorial writing systems, syllabaries, and alphabets first by way of Ancient China, the Near East, and then the early cultures of the Mediterranean. If I were to sing praises to any part of Man’s book, I more than happy to single out the last two chapters, “Why We Don’t Write Etruscan” and “The Limits to Growth.” In the first, Man takes us on an interesting historical detour as he recounts the explosive growth in the field of Etruscan studies starting in the seventeenth century after it lay relatively unknown for almost two millennia. Of course, much about these people still remains a mystery, as very little survives the careless and wanton destruction of their antiquities by both ancient Romans and the Enlightenment treasure hunters and scavengers. In the last chapter, Man sheds light on just how and why the Western and Eastern Europe split when the latter adopted the Cyrillic alphabet – and why several, including Romania, later switched. (Which recalls the same reason modern Turkey, under Ataturk, ditched Arabic script for Roman.) E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy sparked a very interesting debate in our classroom, I felt this text nudged people to speak out their opinions more, and this was very enjoyable to watch and listen to. The common consensus was that everyone hated Hirsch's guts, and at times during this reading I could sort of see their point-- there are phrases and themes that seem profoundly one-sided and ignorant of socioeconomic status in here-- and yet I can't help but agree wholeheartedly with his central thesis, which is that education should be broad with deep grooves, or, to use his terminology, to be intensive in matters of personal interest, yet extensive for everyone. The Columbia Rare Books Library was also a notable class of the semester. We had a chance to peruse extensive, eclectic ancient texts and manuscripts, to learn about materials used in printing and publishing them. Finally, my report on Paolo Freire and the readings I did for it, namely Victoria Purcell-Gates' Other People's Words brought me closer to understanding critical literacy theory and how it can be tied to different populations. Overall a fascinating project and I hope it will be enjoyed by all on my blog post below. Thank you, Professor Gleason, for a wonderful semester.

Rewrite of Essay #2 Expository Essay Topic: Different Types of Writing Systems with a Special Focus on Alphabetic Writing Systems and Alphabetic Literacy

Throughout Western history, the way we communicate has evolved from cave drawings to remarkably complex languages and writing systems. Civilization today is dependent on the written word, of which two main systems are the most widely used: logographic and alphabetic. Deeply enmeshed in our culture, these writing systems have pervaded -- and evolved -- through thousands of years of human history and social transformation. As humanity evolved from the crudest forms of communication to the more advanced linguistics we know today, civilization and society has remained deeply connected to language and how we use it. The changes in writing systems reflect that evolution, moving from pictograms to logograms to syllables. In many ways, language is semiotic, or essentially, it is a system of symbols. To read and write, or be literate, is to derive meaning from these symbols (Olson, 1). Writing is defined as a form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language. Yet it is also notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form – the words on the page represent sounds and the words they say and hear. Literacy makes it possible to speak our written language, and in turn, written language bears responsibility for injecting the concepts of the properties of speech into the public consciousness (Olson, 1). It is unknown exactly how or when the first writing systems were conceived, yet scholars point to evidence indicating human beings were developing forms of written communications as early as the 2nd millennium BC (Olson, 1). The history of writing is partly, as Olson describes, “a matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in the attempt to construct an efficient, general and economic writing system capable of serving a range of socially valuable functions” (Olson, 1). Writing has evolved not only in tandem with our spoken language, but as a means of refining and strengthening that spoken language: the two are inextricably linked. By examining two of the major writing systems in contemporary use, logographic and alphabetic, we can better understand how critical the written word is to communication, and how literacy is developed in practitioners of the system. The written word is not necessarily required to communicate in a civilized society. Oral tradition can function perfectly well as a means of communicating, and continues to do so, in many cases. But speech alone is ephemeral: once words are spoken, they can be remembered, but never accessed exactly as they were first given. And human memory is notoriously unreliable. But the written word preserves information—across time and space. Canadian economist Harold Innis makes the notable distinction between writing systems bound “through time,” exemplified by Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in stone, or Akkadian cuneiform incised in clay, and those that bind “across space,” exemplified by the portable papyri used by the Romans (Olson, 4). It wouldn’t be practical to send the Rosetta Stone through the mail, but papyrus on the other hand can be taken from one place to the next. Likewise, leaving a piece of papyrus in the desert for future generations to find is probably not a good idea either. These two methods of preserving information served the society at the time. Indeed, throughout history, the very systems of writing we use have evolved to reflect society’s needs. The systems of writing developed by the Chinese and the Sumerians produced logographic and alphabetic writing systems, respectively. A logographic writing system is also known as an ideographic writing system. It is defined as a writing system in which each symbol represents a complete word or morpheme. The symbols do not indicate the word's pronunciation, only its meaning. Historically, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics were logographic, but today Chinese is the only known writing system in the world that remains logographic. In Chinese writing, many words that sound the same do not have the same meaning. There are many homophones and it is monosyllabic. In order to eliminate this ambiguity and confusion for speakers and learners, the logographic writing system provides one character for one meaning. Therefore when one is reading the logographs, the reader can tell which meaning is in use. A multitude of symbols exist in the Chinese writing system; however according to Olson a literate Chinese person today knows about 4,000 of the most important characters (Olson, 3). From the text of Writing: A writing system, technically referred to as a script or an orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters of graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system (Olson, 5). Reading, writing and understanding Chinese is all about placing the words in context. John Man elegantly describes the necessity of language, and where a basic pictogram system fall short in a world of competing cultures, identities and perspectives: Does the image of a figure in a skirt say "female toilet' to a kilt-wearing Scot as surely as it does to trousered Sassenachs? A hard-hat symbol means 'wear hardhats (and if you don't have one get one)', but a wheelchair symbol does not mean 'sit in a wheelchair (and if you don't have one, get one)'. Ambiguities can never be ironed out with pictures alone, because the human brain is not set up to process them as it processes language (Man, 19). Though logographic writing systems dominated many, mostly Eastern, cultures, other, Indo-European cultures such as Semitic, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Greek, developed writing systems based around syllables, also known as alphabetic writing systems. The first writing system consistently based on the sound structure was Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek orthography developed around 1400 BC. Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet to form the Roman, or Latin alphabet. To this day, the majority of language written and spoken in the world continues to use the same 26 letters found in the Roman alphabet, including the words on this page. Language has not just evolved in reaction to the needs of human civilization. In fact, it has also influenced our development and altered the course of our own evolution: from how we read and write, to the creation and evolution of printing technology and even the development of our cognitive faculties and how we perceive that process. "Today, literacy is meant to be the birthright of all, without it no one can be truly part of society," writes Man. Indeed, the knowledge of the written word has become essential for both communicating and participating in the modern economy; literacy rates are seen as a proxy for the success of developed nations. Culturally, it is equated with competence and worthiness within society, and without such knowledge one cannot hope to equally participate. We closely identify literacy with learning (Olson, 1), and indeed, formalized education systems place their primary focus on teaching kids how to read. However, alphabetic literacy encompasses a broader range of interpretive behavior, including comprehension, decoding and contextualizing. The growth and development of literacy and its installation into society have played a crucial role in the chart of Western history. As reading and writing slowly became not only the provenance of the nobility, but trickled down into the masses, more materials for those people to read proliferated, necessitating the invention of new printing techniques and technology. (Olson, 14). Indeed, it encouraged more writing in general and the invention of different types of writing – from the novel to the propaganda pamphlet. The claim that rising literacy levels played a crucial role in shaping “social transformation” is equally compelling: the Protestant Reformation could not have had such a strong impact had the defense of Protestantism not been based on the strict understanding that it was the right of people to read and understand the Bible on their own terms. Taking the role of interpretation out of the hands of the rarified clergy and putting more onus on individual practitioners was a critical part of Protestant thought. Of course, the tension wrought by the reformation, and the broader concept of challenging the Catholic Church would prove to be essential elements in the charting of future events in human history, notably the Enlightenment. Without the Enlightenment, we would not have progressed to making the scientific achievements we take for granted today; without the emphasis placed on individual responsibility in Calvinism, we might not have adopted the cultural norms and adages we do now, and so on, and so forth. Reading and writing have done more than just help us communicate. They have changed the way we live and influenced the course of human events. Compelling claims can be made as well about the relationship between literacy and cognition. The part of the human brain associated with cognitive abilities may develop in different ways depending on whether or not the person is literate and exposed to a system of alphabetic literacy. Studies have shown that learning an alphabetic written language as a child, when the brain is developing at rapid rate, actually changes the way that person communicates, i.e., their person auditory-verbal language system and the part of the brain that govern it, going so far as to suggest that “functional architecture of the brain is modulated by literacy” (Petersson, 4). Lack of literacy can also affect one’s ability to learn secondary languages, even when solely confined to oral skills in that language (Tarone, 26). The brain’s ability to comprehend language function on a variety of levels: what specific skills are required to achieve competency in an alphabetic writing system? As discussed, part of how we understand language is semiotic: words are symbols, associated with meaning; through context, we can piece together what sentences mean. In observing how foreigners being to grasp the English language, researchers found students actively decoding certain words based on the context they were placed, referencing existing information they had in their head and using that to infer meaning from words they may not have known. As Papalia writes: Comprehension, then involves the use of multiple, overlapping strategies. It requires attention, decision-making, and a committal of details to memory, where they interact not only with existing schemata but incoming information. Phonemic awareness is the ability to separate sounds into their smallest units and differentiate them to create meaning. For example, even a small word like house has three distinct phonemes (the “h” sound, the middle vowel sound, and the “s” sound at the end). This principle is critical to reading an alphabetic writing system. Indeed, research continues to point to phonemic awareness as a crucial factor in the acquiring literacy and, in fact, contributes to the reader’s ability to decode (Steinhaus, 12). Literacy is at once more complicated and more intuitive than we realize. We need to know far more than just how to spell in order to read and write—we have to know meanings of words, how they sound, and be able to synthesize meaning based on context. But just as we have evolved to better thrive in our world both our language and our writing systems have evolved to suit our needs. Works Cited Man, John. Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World. New York: Wiley, 2000. Print. Olson, David R. "Writing." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web, 2006. Olson, David R. "Chinese Writing." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web, 2006. Papalia, Anthony. “Interaction of Reader & Text.” Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Petersson, KM, A. Reis & M. Ingvar. “Cognitive processing in literate and illiterate subjects: a review of some recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging data.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 42(3), Jul 2001, 251-267. Steinhaus, Patricia. “Nurturing Phonemic Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge in Pre-kindergartners.” Issues in early childhood education: Curriculum, teacher education, & dissemination of information. 2001. Tarone, Elaine, Martha Bigelow and Kit Hansen. Literacy and Second Language Oracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

The Last Americans: Applying Paolo Freire’s Theories of Critical Pedagogy to Improving Literacy Among Non-Literate White Appalachians

Paulo Freire’s teachings have created a profound and enduring impact on critical pedagogy, from the first publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 until today. His ideas offered a fundamentally new way of looking at how the education process takes shape, explicitly incorporating Marxist philosophy and laying more responsibility on the part of educators to not only teach their students, but acknowledge their role in creating a more equal society. Freire’s approach to education links the identification of issues to positive action for change and development. Freire was particularly interested in issues of adult literacy and how different approaches to pedagogy can yield positive results. How can we apply his teachings to the problem of illiteracy in the United States today? Specifically, we can look to Other People’s Words, where Victoria Purcell-Gates examines the seldom talked-about population of non-literate white people. In examining white, non-literate populations of the Appalachian region, we see a pattern emerge that suggests Freire’s theories – both economic and pedagogical – may yield positive results in increasing literacy rates. One of Paolo Freire’s key principles was the analysis of most contemporary education systems as what he describes a “banking system.” In this model, the model preferred by educators in civilized society for millennia, students are seen essentially as passive vessels, waiting to be filled with information by the teacher: Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (Freire, Chapter 2) Freire’s concepts, which burst onto the academic scene in 1970 with the publication of Oppressed, were a clear indictment of the prevailing ideas in pedagogy at the time. Freire challenged the notion that students were merely products on an assembly line waiting to be topped off with knowledge from a professor whose job was over at the end of the school day. The psychology of the dynamic described by Freire is explicitly “oppressive,” he argues because it puts the student in a position of feeling less than the teacher. Conversely, the teacher validates his or her position by feeling superior: “The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.” This, Freire argues, can only result in the oppression of student psychologically. As a pedagogical result, this concept negates the “process of inquiry” in learning, i.e. the student asking questions, figuring things out on their own and drawing his or her conclusions, because that idea places too much agency on the part of the “ignorant” student (in the banking model). “Critical consciousness” refers to a process where the student develops the ability to “analyze, pose questions, and take action on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts that influence and shape their lives.” (Dirkx) This is the type of approach Freire favored, which can be traced back to the Socratic method, heavily influenced by Plato. This is not an idea favored by the banking model. The banking model aims to create knowledge-machines of students—what they do with that information is immaterial, as they long as they absorb what they are supposed to. Thus, the status quo is preserved. To challenge the banking model as Freire does, requires, to some extent, agreeing with certain Marxist or progressive economic and political ideas that place an emphasis on systemic change and creating a more just society. Accepting these precepts begs the question: how can one fix not just the students, but also the system itself? Freire offers: “the oppressed are not ‘marginals,’ are not living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’ the structure which made them ‘beings for others.’ The solution is not to 'integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’ ” (Freire). In Freire’s mind, that students “critically consider reality” is a key notion to becoming more developed as a human being, and not just a robot who can regurgitate information. If we accept that this is a noble goal, how would this approach objectively improve efforts to educate people? Specifically, in the case of economically marginalized, illiterate whites in the United States today, how would a more critical pedagogy help ameliorate their learning skills and increase literacy? Moreover, how can we measure those results, and are there more progressive, economic ways to facilitate and measure those results applying Freire’s theories? “Transformative learning” is the natural outcome of applying Freire’s teachings. It essentially proposes that teachers must not just give information to students, but help transform their worldview, that they cast a more critical lens on reality. Transformative learning “posits experience as its starting point and as its content for reflection. Engaging the life experience in a critically reflective manner is a necessary condition for transformation. Finally, the entire process is about change—change that is growth-enhancing and developmental.” (Merriam, 149). Looking at certain demographics, like non-literate White Appalachians, whose backgrounds and cultural norms are so different than the urban, middle class literate-based model we hold as the ideal (or superior, in the banking model), we can see how a transformative process might accelerate attempts at promoting literacy in individual students. Our entire concept of literacy is typically in sync with the so-called banking model proffered by Freire. In his essay Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought, Walter Ong asserts: “Literacy is imperious. It tend to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought.” That is to say, being literate in the written word is the only, and normative, way to communicate and without that skill set – even the term “illiterate” he argues—persons are deviant from the norm, and by association inferior. We can see the cycle of oppression first described Freire at work here. Ong argues that a deeper understanding of how people communicate learning requires a separate emphasis placed on spoken word—and academicizing it and legitimizing as an equally substantive learning tool and communication method. Ong writes that we “take for granted” that writing is a “technology.” Indeed, without acknowledging its technological features, we cannot understand that it works in a different way for each person. Sentences structures vary depend on the context and what we are talking about. Informal person-to-person conversations between literates are not structured like those among persons in a primary oral culture. Simple queries for information acquire a new status, for oral cultures typically use words less for information and more for operational, interpersonal purposes than do chirographic and typographic cultures. Writing is only one of the various developments making for the transformation of consciousness and of society, but once writing takes over, it appears to be the most crucial development of all. (Ong, 36) This idea is critical: different cultures may communicate in different ways, and crucially Ong is pointing that a non-literate culture, like the culture non-literate White Appalachians come from, still has its own communication habits and customs—and they need to be legitimized and treated with the same amount of seriousness as literate culture in order to provide those people with literacy tools. The idea should not simply be to change their consciousness into being the same as people who grew up in a literate household, but to help them develop literacy tools that they may continue to communicate in the way that is customary to their culture, as well as function more thoroughly in a literate society. In Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy, by Victoria Purcell-Gates, we hear the story of Jenny and Donny, a mother and son from deep within the Appalachian Mountains, both illiterate, who move to a Midwestern city in search of a better life. Hailing from one of the most economically disadvantaged regions of the country, they are described as "urban Appalachians.” Jenny and Donny live in the central city, but are for the most part segregated from the African-Americans who make up the majority of their economic class in the urban area where they reside. On the contrary, they live in a neighborhood with other urban Appalachians. What Purcell-Gates describes in the book is a system that is a designed to fail people like Jenny and Donny. Just as Freire enumerated the ills of an “autonomous” system that uses a one-size-fits-all method to fill “empty vessels” with knowledge, Purcell-Gates acknowledges that without understanding the cultural nuances of certain demographics, we cannot hope to adequately provide an education that will better their circumstances. Non-literate, Appalachian whites have their own dialect, their own cultural values, their family attitudes towards education itself—without incorporating those ideas into a curriculum, argues Purcell-Gates, we won’t see the same effectiveness as we would using the same methods on white, middle-class students from literate households. (Purcell-Gates, 102). "Contrary to popular impression, it is the white urban Appalachian children, not the urban African American, who occupy the bottom of the educational ladder, at least in this city. Dropout rates for urban Appalachians range from 40 percent to near 75 percent in the poorest areas. Absence rates are more than twice that of the system as a whole. Those students who remain in the school achieve at a low level relative to national norms and at significantly lower levels than their non Appalachian peers, black and white." (Purcell-Gates, 33) Jenny wanted something from the city, specifically from the city schools. She wanted literacy, for herself and for her children, She did not want to “become” middle class. She did not want to change herself, her cultural “ways of being,” or her language. She only wanted to learn to read and write for her own needs and desires. This goal, however, proved elusive, given the cultural and societal walls standing between her and the literacy controlled by the mainstream schools (…) Jenny’s desire for literacy, both for herself and for her child, was impeded by a wall of exclusion erected by a society that willfully failed to see her and Donny, and thus to consider and include them. (Purcell-Gates, 156) Here, Purcell-Gates directly echoes Freire’s argument for systemic change—and the rejection of the assimilation viewpoint that attempts to instruct all types of learners using the same methodology. Time and again, we are shown scenes of Jenny, Donny’s mother, struggling with myriad issues related to her son’s education, because of her illiteracy, and the school administration’s insistence on communicating with her via written word, and often using a more difficult to understand register and vocabulary than she would be able to use even in speech. One point Purcell-Gates is keen to make is that “print is present to an individual only to the extent that it is used by members of one’s sociocultural group.” (Purcell-Gates, 124) Using Freire’s theories of oppression, we might infer that instead of using the same texts to teach to all populations, we use texts more closely associated with that of similar demographics, socioeconomic and sociocultural traditions and values, so that they gain a better introduction to the technology of writing and can more easily use its building blocks as tools, rather than obstacles. Donny was seen as a “hillbilly” by his educators (Purcell-Gates, 185). His teachers did not respect his unique background and cultural associations, and thus could not work with him to help him and Jenny achieve their goals. Transformative learning posits that “trust, friendship and support,” (Merriam, 153) are critical to the educational process. In Donny’s case he didn’t have that with his teachers. From Freire’s initial Marxist-influenced philosophies on a more egalitarian approach to pedagogy, to later academic approaches to incorporating transformative learning, we can see how a more inclusive and progressive approach to literacy might be enormously beneficial to specific, highly differentiated cultures like that of non-literate White Appalachians. The challenge remains for institutions to adopt these more progressive methods. Works Cited Dirkx, John. “Transformative Learning Theory in the Practice of Adult Education: An Overview.” PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning, Vol 7, 1998, 1-14. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Merriam, Sharan B., Rosemary S. Caffarella, and Lisa M. Baumgartner. Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide, 3rd ed. (San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons/Jossey-Bass, 2007). Ong, Walter. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” From The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, edited by Gerd Baumann. Clarendon Press: Oxford 1986. Purcell-Gates, Victoria. Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Columbia Rare Books Library Visit

Due to the enormity of the publishing world, and the highest literacy rates the world has even seen, books are generally taken for granted by society. On Tuesday, November 19th, 2013 the Language and Literacy department of City College organized a trip for students from the course, Theories and Models of Literacy, to visit the ancient collection of rare books and texts at Columbia University in order to learn about these ancient artifacts. Likewise, this foray reminded us that comprehension and dissemination of written communication was not always so singular and universal. It was fascinating to visit the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) and learn about ancient books and manuscript production techniques that spanned many centuries. Humans have communicated with each other via inscribing words, symbols and drawings on different materials. An article from Encyclopedia Britannica explicates further: Ancient and medieval literacy, for instance, was restricted to a very select few. Moreover, it was first employed primarily for record keeping. Written communication did not immediately displace oral tradition as the chief mode of communication. Conversely, production of written texts in contemporary society is widespread and integrally depends on broad general literacy, widely distributed printed materials, and mass readership. I found the workmanship of monks and scribes very intriguing; especially how they used parched animal skins as writing material. We learned that vellum, or parchment scrolls, were actually made of calfskin. Additionally, both sides of an animal’s skin were used to write on, though sometimes one side would be too coarse to effectively utilize. If scroll format was used, the written information would only be displayed on the outside of the scroll. These factoids made me wonder how expensive it would be, back then, to create such a delicate and difficult to produce product. Also, it was fascinating to learn about oak galls, which were used on manuscripts from Northern Europe. Oak galls are where the black, lasting ink of many manuscripts came from. This permanency was possible since oak trees produce a swelling to protect themselves from gnat parasites. Furthermore, when boiled, these galls produce a viscous black substance that could then be used as a key ingredient in the ink. In the 12th and 13th centuries, colors and decorative illustrations were introduced within texts. One of the methods used to differentiate older manuscripts from newer ones is to analyze if a manuscript has longer lines, columns, and the evenly spaced-out words. These traits are indicative of newer manuscripts. Conversely, early manuscripts contained writing which was bunched together without decipherable spaces between words. Additionally, medieval books did not have titles. Professor Dutschke introduced a Psalter Bifolium which was affixed to the beginnings of Psalms from the Bible. Thus, the Bifolium could be used as a reminder of each psalm for the pious churchgoer. Plimpton MS 259, a commonplace book, was thought to be someone’s personal notebook. It exhibits a very “ad hoc,” 15th century binding. The contents were thought to Robert Gottes’ landowner notes and/or poems that he wanted to remember or copy at a later time. It was riveting to see the first three manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and feel the substantive tactile difference between the pages which were paper and those which were composed of a more expensive, thick parchment. One of the biblical manuscripts had internal errors in its text. These errors had points underneath them which were used to indicate the error, as opposed to erasing the error altogether. I found it interesting that the restorers chose to save the errors for posterity. Hoc est corpus roughly translate as ‘this is my body’. These are the words that a priest says when he executes the consecration of the body of Christ. This is where the phrase “hocus pocus” is thought to come from. John of Holy Wood, or Plimpton MS 184, thought to be from Bavaria, shows that the use of illustration became increasingly common as literacy rates rose. Another great example of illustrative tendencies was the Brunetto Latini Plimpton MS 281 which was thought to originate from France in 1484. The alphabetically arranged letters of this early encyclopedia were marked in vivid red so that the reader could effectively distinguish between them. It was fascinating to see the beautiful illustrations of various animals dancing across the pages and margins. These vivacious medieval doodles made it look like the text comprehensively interweaved with the pictures in creative and novel ways. This ancient encyclopedia, however, only portrayed illustrations between letters A and C. According to Prof. Dutschke, this is a potential indication that the person completing it was perhaps working under a time constraint. This book was written by Dante’s teacher who moved from Florence, Italy to Montpellier, France. One question which came to mind was: who was George Plimpton, and how did he come to inherit such a rich collection? Books of Hours and Prayers for the Hours of the Day both had covers made of resplendent-looking wood. I subsequently learned that blue ink cost substantially more than red ink. Thus, the colors used can sometimes reveal the price of the book. I came across some interesting quotes from Alberto Manguel’s book, A History of Reading – specifically from the chapter, The Silent Readers: Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit meanings. Particular sounds, thus, were indicative of different conditions of the soul. In sacred texts, where every letter, number of letters and their order were dictated by the godhead, full comprehension required not only the eyes but also the rest of the coordinated body; It was imperative for a reader to sway to the cadence of sentences and lift the holy words to one’s lips so that nothing of the divine could be lost within the act of reading. The ancient writing on scrolls-- which neither separated words, used punctuation, nor made a distinction between lower-case and upper-case letters -- served the purpose of accustoming the art of reading out loud to nascent written communicators who needed to learn how to aurally disentangle what the eye read as a continuous string of semiotics and signs. So important was this continuity that the Athenians supposedly raised a statue to a certain Phillatius. This honorable man apparently invented a glue for effectively fastening together leaves of parchment or papyrus. Columbia’s rare book collection houses over 2000 fragments of papyrus; the vast majority of which are legal documents. The Papyrus that was in the RBML exhibited parts of Homer's Odyssey, five fragments of the Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid.

Essay #2 Expository Essay Topic: Different Types of Writing Systems with a Special Focus on Alphabetic Writing Systems and Alphabetic Literacy Throughout Western history, the way we communicate has evolved from cave drawings to remarkably complex languages and writing systems. Civilization today is dependent on the written word, of which two main systems are the most widely used: logographic and alphabetic. Deeply enmeshed in our culture, these writing systems have pervaded -- and evolved -- through thousands of years of human history and social transformation. As humanity evolved from the crudest forms of communication to the more advanced linguistics we know today, civilization and society has remained deeply connected to language and how we use it. The changes in writing systems reflect that evolution, moving from pictograms to logograms to syllables. In many ways, language is semiotic, or essentially, it is a system of symbols. To read and write, or be literate, is to derive meaning from these symbols (Olson, 2006). Writing is defined as a form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language. Yet it is also notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form – the words on the page represent sounds and the words they say and hear. Literacy makes it possible to speak our written language, and in turn, written language bears responsibility for injecting the concepts of the properties of speech into the public consciousness (Olson, 2006). It is unknown exactly how or when the first writing systems were conceived, yet scholars point to evidence indicating human beings were developing forms of written communications as early as the 2nd millennium BC (Olson, 2006). The history of writing is partly, as Olson describes, “a matter of the discovery and representation of these structural levels of spoken language in the attempt to construct an efficient, general and economic writing system capable of serving a range of socially valuable functions.” (Olson, 2006) Writing has evolved not only in tandem with our spoken language, but as a means of refining and strengthening that spoken language: the two are inextricably linked. By examining two of the major writing systems in contemporary use, logographic and alphabetic, we can better understand how critical the written word is to communication, and how literacy is developed in practitioners of the system. The written word is not necessarily required to communicate in a civilized society. Oral tradition can function perfectly well as a means of communicating, and continues to do so, in many cases. But speech alone is ephemeral: once words are spoken, they can be remembered, but never accessed exactly as they were first given. And human memory is notoriously unreliable. But the written word preserves information—across time and space. Canadian economist Harold Innis makes the notable distinction between writing systems bound “through time,” exemplified by Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in stone, or Akkadian cuneiform incised in clay, and those that bind “across space,” exemplified by the portable papyri used by the Romans (Olson, 2006). It wouldn’t be practical to send the Rosetta Stone through the mail, but papyrus on the other hand can be taken from one place to the next. Likewise, leaving a piece of papyrus in the desert for future generations to find is probably not a good idea either. These two methods of preserving information served the society at the time. Indeed, throughout history, the very systems of writing we use have evolved to reflect society’s needs. The systems of writing developed by the Chinese and the Sumerians produced logographic and alphabetic writing systems, respectively. A logographic writing system is also known as an ideographic writing system. It is defined as a writing system in which each symbol represents a complete word or morpheme. The symbols do not indicate the word's pronunciation, only its meaning. Historically, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics were logographic, but today Chinese is the only known writing system in the world that remains logographic. In Chinese writing, many words that sound the same do not have the same meaning. There are many homophones and it is monosyllabic. In order to eliminate this ambiguity and confusion for speakers and learners, the logographic writing system provides one character for one meaning. Therefore when one is reading the logographs, the reader can tell which meaning is in use. A multitude of symbols exist in the Chinese writing system, however according to Olsen a literate Chinese person today knows about 4,000 of the most important characters. From the text of Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World, by John Man: A writing system, technically referred to as a script or an orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters of graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system. Reading, writing and understanding Chinese is all about placing the words in context. Man elegantly describes the necessity of language, and where a basic pictogram system fall short in a world of competing cultures, identities and perspectives: Does the image of a figure in a skirt say "female toilet' to a kilt-wearing Scot as surely as it does to trousered Sassenachs? A hard-hat symbol means 'wear hardhats (and if you don't have one get one)', but a wheelchair symbol does not mean 'sit in a wheelchair (and if you don't have one, get one)'. Ambiguities can never be ironed out with pictures alone, because the human brain is not set up to process them as it processes language. Though logographic writing systems dominated many, mostly Eastern, cultures, other, Indo-European cultures such as Semitic, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Greek, developed writing systems based around syllables, also known as alphabetic writing systems. The first writing system consistently based on the sound structure was Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek orthography developed around 1400 BC. Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet to form the Roman, or Latin alphabet. To this day, the majority of language written and spoken in the world continues to use the same 26 letters found in the Roman alphabet, including the words on this page. Language has not just evolved in reaction to the needs of human civilization. In fact, it has also influenced our development and altered the course of our own evolution: from how we read and write, to the creation and evolution of printing technology and even the development of our cognitive faculties and how we perceive that process. "Today, literacy is meant to be the birthright of all, without it no one can be truly part of society," writes Man. Indeed, the knowledge of the written word has become essential for both communicating and participating in the modern economy; literacy rates are seen as a proxy for the success of developed nations. Culturally, it is equated with competence and worthiness within society, and without such knowledge one cannot hope to equally participate. We closely identify literacy with learning (Olson, 2006), and indeed, formalized education systems place their primary focus on teaching kids how to read. However, alphabetic literacy encompasses a broader range of interpretive behavior, including comprehension, decoding and contextualizing. The growth and development of literacy and its installation into society have played a crucial role in the chart of Western history. As reading and writing slowly became not only the provenance of the nobility, but trickled down into the masses, more materials for those people to read proliferated, necessitating the invention of new printing techniques and technology. (Olson, 2006). Indeed, it encouraged more writing in general and the invention of different types of writing – from the novel to the propaganda pamphlet. The claim that rising literacy levels played a crucial role in shaping “social transformation” is equally compelling: the Protestant Reformation could not have had such a strong impact had the defense of Protestantism not been based on the strict understanding that it was the right of people to read and understand the Bible on their own terms. Taking the role of interpretation out of the hands of the rarified clergy and putting more onus on individual practitioners was a critical part of Protestant thought. Of course, the tension wrought by the reformation, and the broader concept of challenging the Catholic Church would prove to be essential elements in the charting of future events in human history, notably the Enlightenment. Without the Enlightenment, we would not have progressed to making the scientific achievements we take for granted today; without the emphasis placed on individual responsibility in Calvinism, we might not have adopted the cultural norms and adages we do now, and so on, and so forth. Reading and writing have done more than just help us communicate. They have changed the way we live and influenced the course of human events. Compelling claims can be made as well about the relationship between literacy and cognition. The part of the human brain associated with cognitive abilities may develop in different ways depending on whether or not the person is literate and exposed to a system of alphabetic literacy. Studies have shown that learning an alphabetic written language as a child, when the brain is developing at rapid rate, actually changes the way that person communicates, i.e., their person auditory-verbal language system and the part of the brain that govern it, going so far as to suggest that “functional architecture of the brain is modulated by literacy” (Petersson, 2001). Lack of literacy can also affect one’s ability to learn secondary languages, even when solely confined to oral skills in that language (Tarone, 2009). The brain’s ability to comprehend language function on a variety of levels: what specific skills are required to achieve competency in an alphabetic writing system? As discussed, part of how we understand language is semiotic: words are symbols, associated with meaning; through context, we can piece together what sentences mean. In observing how foreigners being to grasp the English language, researchers found students actively decoding certain words based on the context they were placed, referencing existing information they had in their head and using that to infer meaning from words they may not have known. As Papalia writes: Comprehension, then involves the use of multiple, overlapping strategies. It requires attention, decision-making, and a committal of details to memory, where they interact not only with existing schemata but incoming information. Phonemic awareness is the ability to separate sounds into their smallest units and differentiate them to create meaning. For example, even a small word like house has three distinct phonemes (the “h” sound, the middle vowel sound, and the “s” sound at the end). This principle is critical to reading an alphabetic writing system. Indeed, research continues to point to phonemic awareness as a crucial factor in the acquiring literacy and, in fact, contributes to the reader’s ability to decode (Steinhaus, 2001). Literacy is at once more complicated and more intuitive than we realize. We need to know far more than just how to spell in order to read and write—we have to know meanings of words, how they sound, and be able to synthesize meaning based on context. But just as we have evolved to better thrive in our world both our language and our writing systems have evolved to suit our needs. Works Cited Man, John. Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World. New York: Wiley, 2000. Print. Olson, David R. "Writing." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web, 2006. Olson, David R. "Chinese Writing." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web, 2006. Papalia, Anthony. “Interaction of Reader & Text.” Interactive Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Petersson, KM, A. Reis & M. Ingvar. “Cognitive processing in literate and illiterate subjects: a review of some recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging data.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol 42(3), Jul 2001, 251-267. Steinhaus, Patricia. “Nurturing Phonemic Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge in Pre-kindergartners.” Issues in early childhood education: Curriculum, teacher education, & dissemination of information. 2001. Tarone, Elaine, Martha Bigelow and Kit Hansen. Literacy and Second Language Oracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.