scripts and project themes

Scripts, alphabets, and writing systems seem to fit with the theme of this project in a number of ways:

VOICES

Most writing systems work by recording the way in which a speaking voice would pronounce the words of the language. So, the written form ‘cat’ has no direct relationship with the concept it evokes – it is simply a transcript of the sequence of sounds that English speakers use to summon up that concept. Even Chinese writing, which we often think of as recording concepts rather than sounds, has strong phonetic elements. The omniglot site puts it like this:

The majority of characters in the Chinese script are semanto-phonetic compounds: they include a semantic elements, which represents or hints at their meaning, and a phonetic element, which shows or hints at their pronunciation.

Xu Bing’s piece trades on the fact that Chinese characters suggest a sound as well as a meaning, so that, if you ‘spell out’ English words in Chinese characters, you produce strange ‘messages’ like ‘big cloth six’.

BUT

Writing systems only capture a few elements of the speaking voice – just enough for us to understand which word is intended. All sorts of phonetic detail is left out and that is detail that may be VERY meaningful to us when we hear another person speak, giving clues about where they are from, how they feel, whether they intend to be sarcastic etc. So ordinary scripts are terribly flawed if we REALLY want to capture the speaking voice and people with a serious professional interest in these things have devised ever more creative ways of transcribing voices so that more and more information is retained.

Rousseau believed that language originated in music. He argues that the first language was like singing and that writing, although useful, ruined its expressiveness by fixing it too much and suppressing all the beautiful variation.

ARCHIVES

Archiving voices

Writing systems enable us to archive voices by capturing the ephemeral experience of speech in a lasting form. We can still ‘hear’ the voices of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians by means of their writing.

BUT

Precisely because writing does not capture everything about the voice, written archives are partial. They only encode a part of the experience of hearing speech and miss out the rise and fall of the voice, the volume of an utterance, interruptions, the murmurs of assent, the particular pronunciations of individuals or groups. The systems of transcription that I mentioned earlier are useful in this context but, in fact, there is always a subjective quality to even the most rigorous systems of transcription. And, of course, illiterate people cannot use the technology of writing to make their own archives of their own voices. Oral traditions may provide a way of passing on an archive THROUGH speech but our perception of oral cultures is often very romanticised (as Rousseau’s enthusiasm for pre-literate language might make us suspect). These considerations have led some researchers to celebrate technologies that allow us to capture the voice itself (recording equipment of all kinds) but an audio recording isn’t a perfectly transparent record of a past moment either and one critic has coined the term ‘tape fetishism’ to describe the overly reverential way some researchers treat their recordings.

Scripts as archives

As you said in an earlier post, alphabets and other scripts are also collections in their own right. The particular signs used in a script have their own history. Our alphabet, like a range of other modern scripts, originates in the Phoenician writing system and it has often been suggested that the letter forms originate in pictograms. (A is supposedly a stylised drawing of an ox’s head.)

BUT

The status of modern scripts as archives is not always transparent to those who use them. How often do we think about the origins of A in a drawing of an ox head? :o)

EXILE

I think that, whenever we engage with a foreign language, we enter a kind of state of exile. As long as we are using the ‘other’ language, we are not at home and that can be both troubling and thrilling. We have to make our way through a sort of mental landscape and, indeed, a soundscape, that is unfamiliar and strange. This can be upsetting, frustrating, even humiliating – but it can also result in our seeing the world afresh. Reading a ‘foreign’ script is a special instance of this experience.

BUT

Interestingly, reading a foreign script makes one child-like, perhaps even more than speaking a foreign language. When one speaks a foreign language, one has to deal with the fact that one’s vocabulary is limited and, because of limitations in one’s grammar, one often has to adopt ways of speaking that probably sound quite unsophisticated to native speakers. But that is not quite like being a child – the nature of the limitations is different. With a foreign script, though, one becomes child-like in a much more literal way. Like a child, one doesn’t have the dexterity to produce elegantly formed versions of the characters and, while reading, one stumbles through, spelling words aloud to make sense of them. And there’s a kind of paradox here: we’ve said a number of times that adulthood is a state of exile from childhood but, in the exilic state of reading a foreign script, one becomes strangely childlike again.

These are some of the thoughts that have been going through my head when I think about writing systems. I’m not sure how useful any of this is at a MUSICAL level, though?