The New World of Autonomous Discourse

　More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. In oral cultures, the utterer himself or herself is considered only the channel, not the source.

　The Delphic oracle

“The book says”

Plato, Writing and Computers

　Writing is inhuman; pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind.

　Writing destroys memory.

　A written text is basically unresponsive.

　The written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can.

　Writing is passive. So are computers.

　Print destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by reliving it of too much work.

　One weakness in Plato's position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing.

　Platonic form was from conceived of by analogy with visible form.

　One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death.

　2 Corinthians 3:6 “The letter kills but the spirit gives life”

　Odes Henry Vaughan “every book is thy epitaph”

　Robert Browning Pippa Passes “faded yellow blossoms/twist page and page” pressing living flowers to death between the pages of printed books

　The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text assures its endurance and its potential…

Writing is a Technology

　Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of computer.

　Writing is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment.

　By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial.

　Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness.

　Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.

　The use of technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life.

What is “Writing ” or “Script”?

　Writing was a very late development in human history.

　The first script, or true writing, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the 3500 BC.

　A script is more than a mere memory aid.

　Codes ultimately have to be explained by something more thab pictures; that is, either in words or in a total human context, humanly understood.

　A script in the sense of true writing, does not consist of mere pictures, of representation of things, but is a representation of an utterance, of words that someone says is imagined to say.

　Writing, in the ordinary sense, was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions.

　True writing systems can and usually do develop gradually from a cruder use of mere memory aides.

Many Scripts but Only One Alphabet

　Many scripts across the world have been developed independently of one another.

　Mesopotamian cuneiform 3500BC

　Egyptian hieroglyphics 3000BC

　Minoan or Mycenean ‘Linear B' 1200BC

　Indus Valley script 3000-2400BC

　Chinese script 1500BC

　Mayan script AD50

　Aztec script AD1400

　Most of not all scripts trace back directly or indirectly to some sort of picture writing, or, sometimes perhaps, at even more elemental level, to the use of tokens.

　Pictures can serve simply as aides-memoire , or they can be equipped with code. Chinese character writing is still today basically made up of pictures, but pictures stylized and codified in intricate ways which make it certainly the most complex writing system the world has ever known.

　Pictographs

　Ideograph

　All pictographic systems, even with ideographs and rebuses, require a dismaying numbers of symbols.

　The advantage of a pictographic system

　Some languages are written in syllabaries, in which sign represents a consonant and a following vowel sound.

　(Japanese) Katakana syllabary

　Many writing systems are in fact hybrid systems, mixing two or more principles.

　The Japanese system

　The most remarkable fact about the alphabet not doubt is that it was invented only once.

The Onset of Literacy

Writing is often regarded at first as an instrument of secret and magic power. The middle English ‘grammarye'—book-learning, magical lore, ‘glamor', ‘Glamor girls'—grammer girls.

Some societies of limited literacy have regarded writing as dangerous to the unwary reader, demanding a guru-like figure to mediate between reader and text.

〔會議紀錄〕

•  The New World of Autonomous Discourse

　　書寫是將別人所說的話紀錄下來，但是這畢竟與對話不同，書寫記錄是單向式的，一旦以文字的方式表達之後說話者便無法再做辯駁。在文字時代我們習慣於去找這句話的來源（ source ），如說話者是誰、在怎麼樣的情境下有那樣的發言等等，但在過去口語時代來源並不是大家所關注的，說話的人不是來源而是一個頻道（ channel ）將話語傳達出來，如同古代的神諭。

•  Plato, Writing and Computers

　　書寫是非人性的（ inhuman ），身為紀錄的工具但是它本質上是破壞記憶的，因為它讓記憶力的用途減少。

　　電腦本為書寫的工具，它的話語是人類賦予它的，本應如神諭一樣僅是一個頻道傳達出話語，但現代人卻有逐漸發展為沒有電腦不行的趨勢，它在更實質的層面上影響人類的行為。使用電腦類似於早期的打字，這個過程的心智活動和書寫是不同的。對於 “writing destroys memory” 這個論點，在場有人認為並不是這樣，對於個人來說是 “writing recalls memory” 但仍會有文字不足以表達之處，就會改變文字的表達。

　　柏拉圖感到文字時代來臨的威脅而反對書寫，如同現代人反對電腦，但卻是個勢不可檔的趨勢。

“writing is for myself” p80 ） text 是死的東西，在聖經中， St. Paul 寫給哥林多人（過著腐敗生活，信假耶穌）的人「 The Letter kills but the spirit gives life. 」字句不能給你生命，聖靈可以。

•  The Onset of Literacy

　　當我們在學習母語（ native language ）時，其實不是刻意地學習，而是以獲得的方式（ language acquisition ）習之，因此在一個不知不覺的過程（ unconscious ）中得到了文法的規則，根本不需要學就能互相瞭解，可以整理出其中的自然法則。當我們學習第二外語（ second language ）時，就是刻意地學了，這跟母語的學習不同。為了營造與母語學習類似的氣氛，有時我們會和一群同講那種語言的人在一起，沈浸在那個環境中。一開始會有一個 “silent period” ，這個時候雖然沈靜地，但其實默默地接受著 input 並累積中。

〔對談節錄〕

湯貴婷：
　 　其實白話文是最難學的，因為變化很多。

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