Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Speech and writing
5. Speech and writing.
5a. Traditional Western education inculcates the view that speech can be ‘represented’ in written form. Alphabetic letters are thought of as ‘representations’ of individual spoken sounds. Ideally, there is assumed to be a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the spoken and the written word. That is why a word such as bed is said to be ‘written as it is pronounced’ or ‘pronounced as it is written’: the three separate ‘sounds’ of the spoken word are matched by the three separate letters of the written word, and these three letters are said to represent ‘the same sounds’ in other words (bad, red, etc.). On the other hand, chew is regarded as a misleading or ‘irregular’ spelling, in that the spoken form does not contain any separate sounds corresponding to the four separate letters c-h-e-w. English writing is said to be full of these ‘irregularities’, and that is alleged to be a major source of difficulty for foreigners learning English.
5b. All these judgments are based on the ethnocentric prejudice of regarding alphabetic writing as the only ‘rational’ or the ‘best’ system of writing, while non-alphabetic writing is ignored or treated as inferior. (Dr Johnson, when asked on one occasion why he regarded the Chinese as barbarians, replied: ‘Sir, they have not an alphabet’.) This kind of prejudice is what gives rise to all the confusions listed in 5a. They have no place in integrational linguistics. Collectively, they make it virtually impossible for anyone who has had a monolingual education in a Western school to look at language from an integrational point of view.
5c. The further we move from a fixation on alphabetic spelling towards recognizing the existence and antiquity of non-alphabetic forms of writing, the more we are led to question the notion of writing as a ‘representation’ of speech. Speech and writing are indeed complexly integrated activities, but each deploys a totally different inventory of signs. There is nothing in common between the two. The signs of speech are based on the continuum of sound, whereas the signs of writing are based on the continuum of space (not on vision, as is commonly supposed). One form of language is dynamic and ephemeral: the other is static and relatively permanent. Neither ‘represents’ the other, although either may be substituted for the other up to a point, depending on the specifics of the communication situation. The first thing that has to be understood about language is that whatever makes speech possible as a form of human communication also makes possible the integration of that form of communication with forms of communication based on signs of an entirely different kind.
5d. A literate community is a community which has developed ways of integrating the use of spoken signs with the use of written signs for purposes of communication. A preliterate community relies on the former exclusively. That is why a literate person’s view of language can never coincide with that found in communities where speech is its sole form of verbal expression.
5e. All communities – as far as is known – are potentially literate communities. There are no documented cases of communities where the introduction of writing proved to be impossible, i.e. where no writing system was ‘learnable’. However, that universal potential has not always had the happiest consequences for the study of language.
5f. Many of the conceptual muddles that are pervasive in contemporary linguistics can be traced to the fact that literate linguists – even when dealing with preliterate communities – typically start by ‘reducing’ utterances to writing (commonly called ‘phonetic’ or ‘phonemic’ transcriptions), and then analysing the transcriptions as if they were analysing sequences of spoken forms. This is also the procedure followed in many student textbooks on linguistics. It betrays a complete failure to appreciate how literacy can mask one’s view of the integrational character of language. Speech is being treated as faithfully ‘represented’ by a chosen sequence of written forms, which then act as surrogates for purposes of linguistic analysis. No attention is paid to features of speech which cannot be captured at all in writing, given that the two types of linguistic sign are intrinsically different. It is as if, as Saussure once remarked, it were thought better to study a person’s photograph in preference to studying the face, in order to gain a better understanding of what that person looks like. This objection to studying speech on the basis of written forms is one that university linguists continue to ignore, without realizing that this is a tacit admission of the methodological incoherence of their own discipline. The reason for this incoherence points to a failure to recognize the nature of the disparity between oral and written communication. Even when analytic work in the classroom is based on ‘live’ recordings of speech, the analyst is at a loss to suggest how oral units can be identified for metalinguistic discussion without overt or tacit reference to some hypothetical transcription. (It soon becomes tedious to have to identify sounds by constant reference back to their ‘position’ in ‘utterances’ that now exist only on tape.)
