Yesterday, I posted a sign continuum, which leads into this next post all about text. A pictorial language like hieroglyphs is representative of certain things like a goat or a bit of grass but like in my continuum that I posted about yesterday this representative language transforms into a abstracted language that as to be learnt as it has no resemblance to what it really is. Hieroglyphs are probably not the best example of a pictorial language as until the Rosetta stone was discovered nobody knew what they meant either.
Here is a wee link to the Arty Factory website : http://www.artyfactory.com/egyptian_art/egyptian_hieroglyphs/hieroglyphs.htm
Carrying on with hieroglyphs which in its day was a language of the elite and was generally unfit for general note taking as it was time consuming and complex. So Egyptian scribes created hieratic and then demotic which were further abstracted forms of hieroglyphs and themselves. Egypt needed these simpler, more abbreviated texts for trading and record keeping. Written text was needed by most settled human communities who traded. Through trade language spread and when the Greeks got a hold of demotic and other trade languages they created the first alphabet with phonetics. Which expanded further during the Roman empire. Examples of Roman typeface show spacing, layout, serifs and upper and lower case, this could be seen as one of the turning points for typography as an art form. Moving on from hand craved or written lettering which was inefficient and expensive came moveable printed text. The first example of this in the western world is the Gutenberg printing press which could make 240 impressions a day and was quicker and cleaner than the work of scriptoriums. However, this is not the first ever moveable text, the Tang dynasty in China in 868 AD had moveable wood block typing and even further back again to the Greeks and the Phaistos disc (1800 – 1600 BC) which despite being having disputed authenticity would be the earliest known example of moveable type. But back to Gutenberg and the age of enlightenment. Mass produced text is wonderful, books galore and in own modern age many other forms of mass communication. But have we become lazy, for example in this post spellcheck as told me my spelling is wrong several times and helped me fix it as well as auto correcting it, sometimes to the wrong thing. Walter J. Ong argues that text takes a living thought and objectifies it and at the same time makes us and text a little bit dumber. Which I can agree with as when I was watching Fry’s Planet Word he featured at tribe Asia which up until recently recorded all its history orally but with some recent generations being taught writing they found they could no longer remember as much as their forbearer’s had as they had become reliant on text. We probably are very reliant and trusting of text, probably because we are taught that it is important, it will help us and that it is part of life from an early age. Yet, it wasn’t always like that, we evolved and grew into it. When we first started using text it created a new kind of power, one that can be used wisely but also snobbishly.
Like uncle Ben said “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
Oh dear I just quoted Spiderman, I don’t even like Spiderman. I should probably stop now.
Also here is a link to the Fry’s Planet Word’s programme page : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015h1xb
The picture is of the Norse Viking runic alphabet, which was briefly mentioned in the lecture. Some of the characters are similar to the lettering we use today.
All of the above links were accessed on the 19.10.2013.
robynglendinning 