From skoyles@globalnet.co.uk Mon Jan 26 08:27:42 1998
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 11:21:42
From: "Dr. John Skoyles" 
Reply-To: classics@u.washington.edu
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: The Greek alphabet -- new evidence

Jack Goody, Ian Watts, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and Herold Innis have argued that the 'Greek revolution' links to the Greek alphabet. In recent years, the 'literacy hypothesis' has been dismissed (for instance by Brian Street and John Halverson) as an ethnocentric myth. The result is that the standard view of Classicists and Classical archeologists, for example A. K. Bowen and G Woolf (Eds) _Literacy and power in the ancient world_ CUP 1996, is that whatever happened in Greek culture has nothing to do with the Greek alphabet and its vowel letters.

This conclusion, however, appears premature: recent research upon how vowelled and unvowelled alphabets are read argues that the Greek alphabet (as many in the past suspected) is in someways a better script (at least for the preprinting press age of the ancient world).

Essentially, the Greek alphabet (with its spelling of vowels) compared to earlier Semitic alphabets (which do not consistently and completely spell vowels) is now known to be :

First, Joseph Shimron and Tamar Sivan of the University of Haifa and Var Ilan Universities (1994) using cross-translated texts and bilingual readers have found that English and vowelled (pointed) Hebrew texts are significantly quicker to read than unvowelled Hebrew ones (in spite of the English texts being 40% longer than the unpointed Hebrew ones). They also found that English and pointed Hebrew texts were comprehended better than the unpointed ones. This suggests not all ancient scripts were equal. Rather that one form of writing --- that started by the Greeks with its consistent and complete spelling of vowels -- was in terms of speed and ease of reading superior.

Second, consistent and full spelling of vowels makes the Greek alphabet markedly easier to learn compared to the early Semitic consonantal one. The research evidence for this again comes from modern Israel. Here adult writing is based around a consonantal alphabet: however, due to the development of 'points', a kind of vowel diacritic, (developed sometime around or after the 7th century AD) this alphabet can spell vowels as consistently and fully as the Greek ones. This Greek-like alphabet is much easier to learn than the consonantal one. Indeed, all primary school children learn to read initially with it (in spite of later having to adapt to the adult unpointed writing). As three Israeli reading psychologists, Ilana Ben-Dror, Shlomo Bentin and Ram Frost summarise research 'all the attempts to teach children to read using nonvoweled material have failed' page 880, 'Semantic, phonologic, and morphologic skills in reading disabled and normal children: Evidence from perception and production of spoken Hebrew', (1995), Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 876-893. Thus the Greek alphabet is not only superior in terms of the ease with which it is comprehended and read but also in the ease with which it is learnt.

Third, recent psychological work finds that illiterates when compared with literates of the same background, show cognitive difficulties in nonreading tasks such as phoneme awareness, repeating nonwords (phoneme sequences that do not pronounce a familiar word), memorising pairs of phonologically related words compared to semantically related ones, and difficulties in generating words starting with a common phoneme sound or which are the names of animals or furniture (Reis & Castro-Caldas, 1997). In the case of phoneme awareness, research shows this does not link to literacy itself but alphabetic literacy: Chinese literate only in logographs (but not those also literate in Pinyin, (a alphabet used for writing Chinese) fail in phoneme awareness like literates (Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986).

Moreover, recent brain mapping studies of illiterates and control literates suggest this may link to the effects of alphabetic literacy upon the brain. To quote from the researchers which have carried out this research: Repeating pseudowords engages mechanisms at which illiterate subjects fail. These include phonological attention/awareness, phonological analysis, phonological memory and, based on these, the production of motor sequences not previously learned. Pseudoword repetition is not based on a pre-learned lexic-semantic reference system but in a de novo sequential arrangement based on phonological attention and analysis. Learning the visual representation of language knowing the rules to match phonemes to graphemes develop a new strategy and consequently a particular activation pattern that seems to be absent in illiterate subjects. This may provide an explanation for the failure of the illiterate group to activate the anterior cingulate cortex and basal ganglia in trying to repeat pseudowords compared to the literate group. Only the literate group has a trained system for phonological attention/awareness and analysis, driving the organisation and production of motor sequences not previously learned (Castro-Caldas, Petersson, Reis, Stone-Elander & Ingvar, in press). This suggests the Greek alphabet might have challenged not only how the Greeks heard language -- and even the organisation of their brains.

The idea that the Greek innovation of vowel letters, for instance, made reading easier to acquire, moreover, fits the historical evidence that Greek and Roman literacy was easy to pick-up.

(2) Only in the Greek and Roman worlds was literacy delegated down to slaves with literacy itself holding no prestige. Elsewhere, literacy was a valued, high status skill restricted to a powerful minority of scribes which used it to control society and preserve their privileges.

(3) Written ideas were criticised by ordinary people, as evidence in Aristophanes' comedies. For instance, consider Peisthetaerus' famous attack upon the oracleman in Aristophanes' Birds. Here the literacy of Peisthetaerus plays a key role in preventing the oracleman's literacy enablying him to gain control. Nothing like this could happen in ancientIsrael or Egypt. In these places, the ordinary person, represented by Peisthetaerus would be illiterate and at the mercy of the oracleman's literate access to tradition.

In summary, there is good reason to look closely again at how the Greek alphabet might link to the Greek revolution. Obviously, these new facts do not explain why the superior literacy of the Greeks should have produced their cultural revolution. However, it is not hard to see possible links. Notably, Herold Innis provided a plausible connection: an 'everyman' literacy stops the rise of literate elites and so enables a quite different --often democratic -- society to emerge.

Unfortunately, the present orthodoxy which views this link as ethnocentic has a strong hold over publishers (at least those I have contacted). Ironically, the very qualification which enables one to question the new orthodoxy -- familiarity with current reading research -- means one lacks the contacts which would normally overcome such barriers.

Thus I would like to ask for some help. Do the above new facts interest you? Would you like to read an extended review of them in the context of a new approach to the formation of Greek and Western civilization? Would you be prepared to try and help me find a publisher interested in such a thesis? If so then look at this summary (and links) at:

Castro-Caldas, A., Petersson, K. M., Reis, A., Stone-Elander, S. & Ingvar,
M. (in press) The illiterate brain: learning in childhood determines the
functional organization of the adult brain. Brain

Read, C., Zhang, Y., Nie, H., & Ding, B. (1986). The ability of manipulate
speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic writing. Cognition, 24, 31-44.

Reis, A. & Castro-Caldas, A. (1997). Illiteracy: A cause for biased
cognitive development. Journal of the International Neuropsychological
Society, 3, 444-450.

Shimron, J. & Sivan, T. (1994). Reading proficiency and orthography:
Evidence from Hebrew and English. Langauge Learning, 44, 5-27.

Dr. John R. Skoyles
6 Denning Rd,
Hampstead, NW3 1SU
London, UK

Check out my Golden House-Sparrow award winning homepage
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.htm.

* * *

From skoyles@globalnet.co.uk Tue Jan 27 09:31:48 1998
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 09:32:28
From: "Dr. John Skoyles" 
Reply-To: classics@u.washington.edu
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: The Greek alphabet -- new evidence

Helma Dik raises the 'ancient mass literacy' objection against the Greek alphabet being responsible for the Greek revolution.

However, the theory I propose does not require mass literacy in ancient Greece, only that literacy, as a communication technology, due to the ease of acquiring literacy in the Greek alphabet, was not restricted to a particular class -- the situation elsewhere in the ancient world.

The potential social impact of unrestricted literacy can be seen, to take a nonancient example, in the impact of slave literacy in the American South. Here literacy had a social and political impact not because the mass of slaves were literate but because literacy could not be confined to the ruling elite of slaveowners and other whites. It needed only a few literate slaves to read the whiteperson's Bible to discover it contained arguments that the oppressed (such as themselves and fellow slaves) should and could be freed. Moreover, it only needed a few literate slaves for slaves in general to know the degree to which slaveowners perverted the meaning of the texts of their Christian religion to justify their own interests. Those few literate slaves with access to Christian texts could and did go further because of their literacy and take control of that religion out of the hands of white people.

One literate slave, Denmark Vesey, for example, quoted from the Bible to his followers, passages about the oppression and deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egypt. In 1822, he had enough support to organise a rebellion in Charleston.

In August 1831, revolt occurred in Southampton County, Virginia -- its leader Nat Turner read from the Bible to inspire his followers. The Nat Turner rebellion left 61 whites dead. In 1832, Sam Sharpe, a black school teacher led a rebellion in Jamaica. As Cornelius puts it, both slave-owners and abolitionists saws that `literacy for the slaves, was followed by slave rebellion and finally emancipation (Cornelius, 1991: 32-33).

Not surprisingly, slaveowners did their best to confine literacy to themselves: as the social historian Cornelius notes, `Georgia in 1829 provided fines, whipping, or imprisonment for anyone teaching slaves or free blacks to read or write. In 1830 a provision of the Louisiana slave code stated "that all persons who shall teach, or permit or cause to be taught, any slave in this State to read or write, shall be imprisoned not less than one or more than 12 months". North Carolina also forbade teaching or giving books to slaves in an 1830 law, since such teaching "has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and produce insurrection ...". In its 1830-1831 legislative session, Virginia provided penalties for whites who assembled with negroes to teach reading or writing, who taught any slave for pay. ... Alabama also prohibited, under fine, the attempt to teach any slave or free person of color to spell, read, or write. In Virginia, informers were encouraged by been given half of any fines collected'.

Thus, the impact of literacy upon a society does necessarily depend upon mass literacy. Equally, and perhaps more importantly, is whether literacy can be restricted to a social elite, or whether literacy can fall into the hands of those under them.

The ease of reading given by the Greek alphabet could therefore produce the Greek revolution even if it did not lead to mass literacy. What was sufficient was that the easily to read Greek alphabet stopped literacy skills being restricted -- as existed everywhere else in the ancient world -- to one particular social group. This had a major impact upon Greek society: literacy in the Greek nonlandowning classes had a major role (as I show in my ms) in the rise of Greek democracy.

Dr. John R. Skoyles
6 Denning Rd,
Hampstead, NW3 1SU
London, UK

Check out my Golden House-Sparrow award winning homepage
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.htm.

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