Response #1: Havelock

Havelock's "The Coming of Literate Communication to Western Culture"


In this essay, Havelock examines the creation of written language in Ancient Greece. He does so by first examining the oral communication that came before literacy and how it shaped the first uses of written communication. Specifically, he states that the first written works were composed orally before being transcribed to writing, and that it took many centuries for the Greek public to become literate. This is the result of a dearth of literature to be read and to practice reading with, and a pervading view that the study of letters should at most support an oral education, rather than replace it.

I enjoyed this reading greatly, in part because it discusses a very significant event in the history of human communication, and in part because of the many controversial statements made by the author. My favorite is at the top of the second page: "Biologically we are all oralists, who have become literate only through cultural conditioning". I somewhat agree with this statement, because Havelock makes a convincing argument that literacy is a very fabricated thing rather than something that comes naturally to people, and that reading and writing are both things that must be taught, rather than things that can be understood through abstract thinking.

While this reading was enjoyable, there were parts of it that I didn't understand, not initially, at least. When Havelock begins discussing the alphabet, and how characters were borrowed from the Phoenicians, he mentions that the systems of writing that already existed had "problems", that "the possible total of syllables in any tongue is too large, and their exhaustive definition too difficult, to be manageable except in some approximate and incomplete fashion". According to Havelock, the Greeks solved this problem by "invent[ing]  the five vowel sounds" and separating them from consonants. It took me a while to understand how this reduced the number of needed characters, but some collaboration made it somewhat clear that rather than having a system of characters that represented syllables, syllables (unique sounds) were created by combining characters, and the "invention" of vowels was what made this possible. Though, after typing this, I'm still not entirely sure I understand, but I'm glad that our writing system has only 26 characters, compared to the hundreds of characters in languages like Japanese.