History of Reading

Steven Roger Fischer

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781861895950
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Steven Roger Fischer's fascinating book traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day. Describing ancient forms of reading and the various modes that were necessary to read different writing systems and scripts, Fischer turns to Asia and the Americas and discusses the forms and developments of completely divergent dimensions of reading.With the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East, innovative re-inventions of reading emerged – silent and liturgical reading; the custom of lectors; reading's focus in general education – whereupon printing transformed society's entire attitude to reading. Fischer charts the explosion of the book trade in this era, its increased audience and radically changed subject-matter; describes the emergence of broadsheets, newspapers and public readings; and traces the effect of new font designs on general legibility.Fischer discusses society's dedication to public literacy in the sweeping educational reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and notes the appearance of free libraries, gender differences in reading matter, public advertising and the "forbidden" lists of Church, State and the unemancipated. Finally, he assesses the future, in which it is likely that read communication will soon exceed oral communication through the use of the personal computer and the internet, and looks at "visual language" and modern theories of how reading is processed in the human brain. Asking how the New Reader can reshape reading's future, he suggests a radical new definition of what reading could be.

one

The Immortal Witness

Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book which makes him remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him.¹

‘In the mouth of the speaker who reads him’, intoned the Egyptian scribe who, about 1300 BC, appreciated that ‘to read’ meant ‘to recite’. For most of written history, reading was speaking. People had earlier realized that verbal instructions, agreements and tallies could easily be garbled, disputed or forgotten. A special witness had been needed, an ‘immortal witness’, who could recall aloud amounts and commodities without error, who could be questioned at any time to confirm facts verbally and stop disputes. And so writing was born, at first blush the human voice turned to stone. When city-states expanded into kingdoms, demands on writing increased exponentially, necessitating ever more complex forms of written documentation – each time intended to be read aloud.

Reading has always been different from writing. Writing prioritizes sound, as the spoken word must be transformed or deconstructed into representative sign(s). Reading, however, prioritizes meaning.² The faculty of reading has, in fact, very little to do with the skill of writing.

What is reading, then? The answer is not simple, as the act of reading is variable, not absolute. In its most general modern definition, reading is of course the ability to make sense of written or printed symbols. The reader ‘uses the symbols to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently uses this information to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer’s message’.³ But reading has not always been this. Initially it was the simple faculty of extracting visual information from any encoded system and comprehending the respective meaning. Later it came to signify almost exclusively the comprehending of a continuous text of written signs on an inscribed surface. More recently it has included the extracting of encoded information from an electronic screen. And reading’s definition will doubtless continue to expand in future for, as with any faculty, it is also a measure of humanity’s own advancement.

Just like our five senses, reading involves something wonderfully unique, as the following paradox will illustrate.⁴ Jones has taught himself to read Greek letters, but hasn’t learnt Greek yet. Andropolis grew up speaking Greek, but has never learnt Greek letters. One day Andropolis gets a letter from Greece, and has Jones read it to him. Jones can voice the letters, but cannot understand; Andropolis can understand, but cannot voice the letters. Who, then, is actually reading? The answer: both together.

Reading is not merely the attaching of sound to grapheme, which occurs only at an elementary level. Meaning is involved, and in a fundamental way. At a higher level of perception reading can even convey meaning alone, without any recourse to sound.

Therein lies reading’s sense-like magic.

The multiple processes of reading, as the eminent British linguist Roy Harris has affirmed, ‘must inevitably be relative to particular cultural purposes, and depend on the contrasting modes of oral rendition which a particular culture may have institutionalized’.⁵ Hence, what we judge to be ‘reading’ in the past is usually an arbitrary comparison based on what reading means to us today. Such a retrospective judgement is invalid, because throughout history reading has been many different things to many peoples.

Its origins are ancient.

Reading appears to be superficially and parasitically coupled to such primeval cognitive scanning processes as tracking, weaving, tool-making, berry gathering, face and gender recognition and many others, whereby a flood of visual data – shapes, units, patterns, orientation, sequencing – is assessed at a glance. Specialists in communications recognize five phases of information exchange: production, transmission, reception, storage and repetition. When writing is present in a society, these five occur either aurally (one is read to), as in spoken discourse, or visually, incorporating the sense of sight (or, with the blind, touch). Reading is frequently a synaesthetic process: that is, it often combines the two senses of hearing and sight. However, most significantly, hearing is habitually bypassed, leaving reading reliant only on sight (or touch).

Consequently, two conflicting theories of reading obtain. The first, supported by those who believe reading to be an exclusively linguistic process, sees reading as a phonological (relating to the sound system of a language) linear process that occurs letter by letter, linking language’s elements into ever larger comprehensible units, until first utterance and then understanding are achieved. The second theory, endorsed by those who hold reading to be a visual semantic process, maintains that the grapheme or graphic form – whether logogram (word sign), syllabogram (syllabic sign) or a combination of letters (signs in an alphabetic system) – yields meaning without necessary recourse to language. Whole words and phrases, even short sentences, can be read ‘at one go’, the proponents of this theory maintain; one doesn’t have to deconstruct them into individually sounded-out letters.

Yet both theories are correct, in that each obtains at a different level of reading competence and/or activity. That is, elementary reading is indeed a phonological linear process, whereas fluent reading is a visual semantic process.

Others have argued that early historical reading in particular was ‘a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.’⁶ This theory of ‘aural hallucinating’, however, defies both laboratory evidence and the known history of writing: both ‘ear’ and ‘eye’ demand equal acknowledgement in any responsible theory of early reading. This is because the act is in reality a highly complex, multilevel, cerebral process requiring fundamentals and higher-order units simultaneously. Learning to read appears to be a separate activity from fluent reading, to be sure. But as fluent reading frequently requires recourse to learning stratagems – when reading an unfamiliar or foreign word, or a different hand, type, script or even entire writing system – so, too, does learning to read require recourse to advanced visual stratagems in turn, in order to internalize patterns.

In this way, two different types of reading have apparently always obtained: literal or mediate reading (learning), and visual or immediate reading (fluent). Everyone begins with mediate reading, putting sound to sign. Most learners then progress to immediate reading, putting sense to sign directly, then advance to larger sign groupings (phrases or even short sentences). After several exposures to a word or sign-combination, a reader comes to form a direct pathway between sign and sense, bypassing sound altogether. Only this explains most of what we find with fluent adult reading.

Frequent readers always become fluent readers, who then minimize sound and maximize sense.

For want of longer texts and a reading audience, reading as we know it today did not exist before classical antiquity. The earliest readers sighted the notched stick or the dictated tally, the oral made visible. Very few people had cause to learn to read: only those who wished to verify an account, check a label or identify an owner’s mark. In time, scribe-reciters intoned dockets, letters, legal documents, paeans and dedications. Antiquity’s great clay and papyrus archives eventually appeared, though first and foremost to oversee and authenticate accounts and contracts and to prompt the memory of those who recalled the greater oral story.

During its first three millennia, the ‘immortal witness’ was the spoken word incarnate.

THE FIRST READERS

The further one looks back into the past, the more difficult reading becomes.⁷ Primitive recording systems comprised codes known only to a small group of practitioners. For the most part, ancient ‘literature’ conveyed only what could be learnt by heart. Reading and writing did not exist as autonomous domains of activity. They were minimal appendages to speech. Ambiguity abounded.

Decoding of mnemonics (memory aids) and graphics (pictorial displays) can also be regarded as ‘reading’, albeit in a primitive sense.⁸ Both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens sapiens read notches on bones signalling something that was meaningful to them – perhaps a tally of game, days or lunar cycles. Cave art was ‘read’, too, as graphic stories bearing meaningful information. Primitive tribes read lengthy picture messages on bark or leather that could convey great detail. In many earlier societies tally sticks were read to learn amounts. Signalling allowed symbolic messages to be read over a distance: flags, smoke, fired powders, reflections from polished metals and other devices. The Incas read the colour-coded quipus knots to keep track of complicated mercantile transactions. Ancient Polynesians read string and notch records in order to chant their generations. All such ‘readings’ involved predetermined codes. They conveyed a known significance – whether an action (as in cave art), numerical value (as in tallies and knots) or spoken name (as in notches and strings) – without fulfilling, however, the criteria for complete writing.

In its most general sense, writing is the ‘sequencing of standardized symbols (characters, signs or sign components) in order to graphically reproduce human speech, thought and other things in part or whole.’⁹ Because this is a limiting definition of something that defies limitation, the wonder of writing, it might be preferable to use ‘complete writing’ instead as a working model, understanding this to comprise the fulfilment of three specific criteria:

• Complete writing must have as its purpose communication;

• Complete writing must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface;

• Complete writing must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant vocal sounds) or electronic programming in such a way that communication is achieved.

Complete writing was a long time coming.

For thousands of years, people used indexical symbols to record quantities: five pebbles for five sheep, for example, with each pebble ‘read’ as one sheep. As early as 10,000 years ago, the Azilian people of France were painting crosses, stripes and other designs on pebbles to be read as a code for something, the meaning now lost. Small clay tokens or counters of various geometrical shapes, bearing lines, crosses, circles and other designs, were read for some 8,000 years in the Middle East in a rudimentary bookkeeping system, each token representing one of the given commodity, its design identifying its kind.

In time, such chit-like counters in Mesopotamia were being enclosed in special clay ‘envelopes’ called bullae, the outside of which bore the same token design to identify, at a glance, commodity; it also held a sequence of dots or lines to signal amount. Eventually, clay tablets conveyed similar bookkeeping, also using readily identifiable graphic symbols to represent these and other things. Over time, the pictograms became standardized and abstract, but retained their phonetic value. A paradigm shift occurred when Sumerian scribes began using systemic phoneticism: that is, they systematically coordinated sounds and symbols (including pictograms) to create ‘signs’ of a writing system. A design no longer signified a real commodity, like a sheep, but stood for a specific sound value instead.

It was Sumer’s conscious exploitation of the phonographic in the pictographic that turned incomplete writing into complete writing. Reading in its true form emerged when one started to interpret a sign for its sound value alone within a standardized system of limited signs. Whole texts, and not just isolated words, could now be conveyed, meaning that reading was no longer a one-to-one transfer (object to word), but a logical sequencing of sounds to recreate a natural human language. Rather than reading pictures, one now read language.

The three criteria for complete writing were now fulfilled.

Sign became sound – freed from its system-external referent – in Mesopotamia between 6,000 and 5,700 years ago. The idea soon spread, west to the Nile and east to the Iranian Plateau and even to the Indus, where different languages and different social needs demanded other graphic expressions. Everywhere, writing was recognized to be an invaluable tool for accumulating and storing information: it facilitated accounting, material storage and transport, and it retained names, dates and places better than human memory ever could. All early ‘reading’ involved very simple code recognition, and was invariably task-orientated.

MESOPOTAMIA

Reading long remained a very primitive tool in Mesopotamia. The world’s first active readers sighted only a bare skeleton of text (name, commodity, amount), the control of which served to empower an oligarchy. Sumerian writing developed ‘not to reproduce a pre-existent spoken discourse but to commit to memory concrete bits of information’.¹⁰ This soon led to classifying reality in useful lists made up of nouns (proper names and commodities), adjectives (qualities), verbs (actions) and numbers arranged in easily comprehensible columns, themselves bearing meaning through their orientation. ‘Reading’ entailed logically putting together bits of connected information, not reconstituting articulate speech. Though the very earliest readings were perhaps of incomplete writing, these were nonetheless ‘complete readings’. For unlike writing, reading is not bound to language: reading is foremost visual (not oral) and conceptual (not linguistic).

Whereas Egypt codified its hieroglyphic and hieratic signs early on, and so fossilized its writing system, for many centuries Sumer maintained a loose and ambiguous inventory of about 1,800 pictograms and symbols.¹¹ Simplification and conventionalization occurred, and by 2700–2350 BC, with the tablets of Shuruppak, the inventory had been reduced to about eight hundred, with greater use of linearity (writing in lines of text). By roughly 2500 BC nearly all the graphic elements in Sumer’s writing system had become sound units. And by 2000 BC only about 570 logograms were in everyday use.¹²

Wedges had replaced the earlier pictograms, now impressed by a reed stylus (a pointed writing instrument) into soft clay. The wedges became stylized, eventually losing identifiability. Most Mesopotamian reading occurred in this cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing in clay, though cuneiforms were also carved in stone and inscribed on wax, ivory, metal and even glass. Very seldom, however, was cuneiform written in ink on papyrus, as scribes customarily wrote in Egypt. Mesopotamians read, then, foremost a ‘literature of clay’. Because of this, the physical act of reading was frequently problematical: to remain wieldy, clay tablets had to be palm-sized, obliging miniature texts.

‘To read’ was Sumerian šita (šit, šid, šed), meaning also ‘to count, calculate, consider, memorize, recite, read aloud’. Very few in Mesopotamia could ever achieve this faculty. Around 2000 BC at Ur, the region’s greatest metropolis with a population of around 12,000, only a small proportion – perhaps one out of a hundred, or about 120 people at most – could read and write. From 1850 to 1550 BC the Babylonian city-state of Sippar, with approximately 10,000 inhabitants, housed only 185 named ‘scribes’ (that is, official tablet writers), ten of whom were in fact women.¹³ It appears from this and similar statistics elsewhere that no more than a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• 1 The Immortal Witness
• 2 The Papyrus Tongue
• 3 A World of Reading
• 4 The Parchment Eye
• 5 The Printed Page
• 6 The ‘Universal Conscience’
• 7 Reading the Future
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration Acknowledgements
• Index