Air Quotes

In his book Orality and Literacy Walter Ong talks about how living in a literate society changes the way that you think and speak. Just knowing that writing is possible forces you to put your thoughts together in a different way. So, even when speech is totally detached from the written word, it is still influenced by writing. (Although I am a huge fan of Ong, I don't have the book on me currently. Apologies for not including a proper quotation or page numbers.)

There are many ways that writing can influence speech, but one that quickly comes to mind for me is the use of air quotes. Quotation marks exist on the page and came about after the invention of writing. So what are they doing in our speech?

Most punctuation marks are meant to describe things about the sentance that would be apparent if it were spoken rather than written down. For example, the comma indicates a pause. In speech a pause is necessary to help distinguish clauses. When you are reading you do not actually have to pause, becuase you see the comma, and understand that there is some kind of seperation between what comes before and what comes after.

Exclamation points indicate excitement. Without them it would be difficult to differentiate an excited phrase from a calm one. When someone is speaking they show excitement in their tone of voice. A question mark is very similar in that it clarifies what a sentence on the page is doing. But when a question is spoken aloud you understand it is a question because of how the speaker says it.

There is more to speech than the way words sound. There are all sorts of aspects to speech, such as timing and tone, that help the listener ascertain meaning. The use of punctuation attempts to tackle these aspects.

But I don't think quotation marks work quite the same way. I think if you wrote the way people speak, or the way people used to speak before writing existed, you wouldn't need quotation marks. Quotation marks don't illustrate something people naturally do when they speak, they have deveolped with the complex dialog that only exists in literate stories. Since they aren't from the speaking relm, when we speak the way we write we sometimes need to show that quotation marks are there. So we use our hands.

HTML

In the process of creating a personal website, I have been learning HTML (hypertext markup language). I started wondering how languages like HTML fit into the sound and sense discussion. After all, this is a language that is not spoken. In fact, it isn't even meant to be read by people. It is a language solely for communicating with computers, to make them display what is meant to be read by people.

Remember that in phonetic languages the written version of a word describes the spoken version of the word. HTML describes the written version of a word. So, a document that is coded for the web is even further removed from meaning than a document that is written on a piece of paper. Don't believe me? Take a look at the source code for this page. Unless you do some coding yourself it's pretty scary looking. (Still scares me.) And even if you understand what it means and you see that a certain word is supposed to be displayed with italics, you aren't actually seeing it in italics. Just like you can read a word in italics and know that it is spoken with emphasis, but can't actually hear it.

Is this enough to declare a trend? The invention of writing allowed people to communicate over longer distances, preserve thought, and be more creative. The invention of the internet has allowed people to communicate with almost anyone on the planet, instantly publish their every thought, and be even more creative. But in each case, the code used gets a little further away from the things that are actually being said. The more sophisticated a method of communication is, the less it has to do with meaning.

Tickets To Where?

England is bursting with examples of how the spoken word and the written word evolve at a different pace.

One of the main and obvious differences between the spoken word and the written word is permanence. This will come up often as we discuss sound and sense, because believe it or not, the ephemeral nature of the spoken word can be a very good thing. If you have ever had a teacher collect a note you were passing in class, you may know what I mean.

As a word is used, the way that people pronounce it changes. Maybe it is hard to say, so they slur it into something easier. Maybe the change is based on a mixing of cultures causing a change of accent. You will recall that in many of the world's languages, the written word is meant to reflect the pronunciation of the spoken word. So, does spelling really change with pronunciation?

Since I am currently living in Norwich (which rhymes with porridge) I can definitively state that the written word is not keeping up. Other examples of deceptively spelled place names in England include: Wymondham (pronounced 'win-dom'), Leicester (pronounced 'les-ter'), and Grosvenor (pronounced 'grove-ner').

Spelling is standardized. We have dictionaries telling us exactly how words are spelled, and there is only one right way to do it. It is one thing for a group of people to subtly pronounce a word differently, until over time, they've left out an entire syllable. It is something else to take a word everyone agrees on the spelling of and start leaving letters out of it. So eventually, the spoken and written word pull apart until they hardly resemble one another at all. And since the written word was based on the spoken word in the first place, its connection with meaning becomes tenuous. When an American tourist asks for train tickets to 'Why-mond-ham' the British rail worker doesn't know where he wants to go.

The Relationship Between Sound and Sense

A word has three main parts: the written representation of the word, the spoken representation of the word, and the meaning.

First we may ask, 'What is the relationship between the written word and the meaning?' In some languages, the relationship is clear. For example, in a pictographic writing system, the written word is meant to illustrate its meaning. This does not mean that anyone can automatically read the language without any training. With complex thought comes the need to write about abstract concepts. You and I may understand that this <3 is a heart and can be used to mean 'love.' But someone from outside our culture might not read '<3' as 'love.' A native reader of a pictographic language, upon encountering a word he or she has never seen before, may be able to figure out what it means based on the way other symbols work and knowledge of the culture. However, he or she will not know how the word is pronounced.

What about languages that use an alphabet? In these languages symbols represent sounds, rather than meanings. A finite number of symbols can be arranged an infinite number of ways to transcribe the sounds of spoken words. Thus, what ends up on the page is almost entirely divorced from the meaning. Take a look at the word 'cat.' It in no way resembles the cute furry animal. A reader of this type of language, upon encountering a word he or she has never seen before, knows how the word is pronounced, but does not automatically know what it means.

Now let us consider the connection between sound and sense. In some instances the connection is clear. This is the case with onomatopoetic words. If you say 'woof,' what you mean is 'woof.' The sound is the sense. There is evidence of this in the fact that although different languages have slightly different words for animal noises, it is not difficult to figure out what animal is being imitated when you come across a variation you have not heard before. If you can hear a word and deduce its meaning from its sound alone, then there is a strong connection between sound and sense.

But aside from onomatopoeia, is there a connection? Because the spoken word developed from a need to communicate, I believe there must have been a more obvious connection once. Primitive man did not randomly make up sounds and assign them to meanings. There was a reason the words he said meant what they meant. Our present day languages have their roots in this meaning-rich communication and perhaps those underlying connections are still hidden in there somewhere.

Let us step away from the literal for a moment, however. Speech can mean more than the sum of its parts. In a world with Twitter and text messages, talking is not obsolete. Could it be that when we take the time to speak to one another, we are saying something?

I am a storyteller and a librarian. I have allegiances to both the spoken and written word. Speaking could never replace writing. Writing allows for complex and creative thought that is not possible without an external reservoir ('external' being, outside the brain), whether that be a piece of paper or a computer. On the other hand, I do not believe writing can ever truly replace speaking. The reason for this is the connection between sound and sense; both the fact that some words just mean more spoken aloud, and the fact that the act of speaking can be more meaningful than the act of writing.

Through this blog I hope to justify some of the ideas I have put forth in this introduction by writing about my experiences with sound and sense. And, yes, I do recognize the irony of defending the spoken word in a written medium.