Literacy vs. Orality / Writing vs. Speech

In the very beginning, many cultures could not grasp the idea of writing things down. There was neither set alphabet nor system of pictograms that could communicate wide scale ideas and information around the world. It is hard to imagine a society that has any form of government being able to run with function yet having no system to write down what its learning’s, rules, and the very tradition of its own culture down. Yet, this was the truth of many people before the Greeks, who now researchers give, credit for creating a system of symbols with a given sound to them. Although, people in a society as ours, cannot understand how these people survived we must look at the context of sound and its different relationships to look at if these societies were really that much different from our own.

When we look at sound as an object, we have to look at its biggest relationship that has the strongest connection to it, which is time. Time has the biggest relationship to sound because it is time that creates the sensation given with sound. What sounds to form words are said at certain times is a good example of this relationship between sound and time. As Walter Ong put it (History of Communication pg. 67) “All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way.” If we put sound in this context than we can see the importance of sound, the way we say a word and what it means in that time place and what has not been written down in the past.

That is why its’ been found that in primary oral cultures and ones that are semi-oral that there is a limited vocabulary that is made up usually of action words. Ong presents many good examples of this “limited” vocabulary such as the word Dabar in the Hebrew language; which can be translated as either: “word” and event”. We can see that these words mean the same thing yet have two very different translations to themselves, which changes the complete context of the sentence that the speaker presents. Yet, that is important to note of primary oral languages, that this is essential to how they worked before. For the words, you said and what you said in that time was what had been important to the people, because researchers have found that these words usually conveyed to been enforced by power. With this idea the actions of re-calling is much more important to oral people. Without re-call, these societies would not be able to function and survive the way they had years before the invention of the written system.

Using this idea of re-call and the true impact of words, which we discovered is just as good as the writing system, then compared to the writing system, which allows us to sugar coat objects, we get into the topic of which is better. In the sense of a technology, based society writing has over taken us by means of the printing press, the phonograph, and even the invention of Morse code. Yet, when it comes to being honest and looking at human interaction it is the oral system that is superior in society. A great example of this is with the internet, on the internet there is a system known s emotion cons. These small smiley help express on a voiceless system how we feel to other people since there is no such thing as tone on the world wide net. Without using these, we could not express sarcasm, anger, fear and many more emotions that help us make the building blocks we have with other people. While we live in a technology ran society these oral skills have survived million of years and has become so superior to the writing system because the key to its survival has been so important to human existence and allowing people to live in societies. Without its success at allowing people to be honest with each other than people would not be able to live in the same place since oral language allows us to learn more about other people, as Ong has put it; “Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.” Using this ideology it is the knowledge that our voice and tone and vocabulary that gives us knowledge and knowledge to other people which in turns gives us unity and the truest sense of harmony that is found.