Tazin speaks at Talent Day, Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement

Every year, the Bangladesh Forum for Community Engagement in Sydney, Australia hosts an event called ‘Talent Day’ to acknowledge the achievements of primary and high school students in the Australian-Bangladeshi community. How does this interest a sociolinguist?

In so many ways – the interaction of multiple languages, the code-switching in the speeches, the expressions of heritage and identity in language use, the living examples of language shift through generations of migrants and so much more.

This year, though, my attention was taken by a request to give a short guest speech to the HSC graduates about to embark on their university journeys. My first dilemma was determining what meaningful contribution, as a second year PhD student, I could make. Which part of my university experience could I share? I decided to talk about my PhD supervisors and share two experiences that, for me, underlined the significance of language itself.

I told them about the lecture that Dr. Loy Lising delivers on the first day of class for our students. In the process of introducing me and the other members of the teaching team, she brings up the slide about communicating with us. But before the technical details, she implores the students to remember our common humanity when communicating with teachers. She explains that the use of our shared courtesies, such as “Dear [teacher’s name]”, “could you”, “thank you” acknowledge that a student and a teacher are two human beings communicating with one another.

From Dr. Lising’s words, I extrapolated that approaching someone more learned with humility confers dignity to both the teacher and the student and if anything, reminds one of the humility that should be cultivated in the pursuit of learning.

I then spoke about my first time as a student of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, when I was doing my Masters of Applied Linguistics. It was time for the final assignment and before giving us the details, she displayed an image of a Persian rug. She directed us to the intricate parts that were woven, bit by bit, to produce something so beautiful.

Her next request was for us to write her a “beautiful” assignment. To achieve this, she asked us to remember the great privilege of higher education, which so many others have been and continue to be deprived of. We were reminded of our moral obligation to use our learning to contribute to society and the first step was to dedicate our attention to writing a good assignment – to remember the privilege of being able to write one.

I had never had an assignment presented quite like this before!

Conceptualising and expressing the act of learning as a privilege and the production of work as beautiful was yet another exercise in humility, a reminder of the very significant role that our teachers play in shaping our minds, and an acknowledgement of the purpose of higher education.

Towards the end of my speech, I realised I had given the students a series of stories and I wanted to explain why I had done this.

To be meaningful, university and higher education must be a journey of purpose, guided by our teachers and mentors who nurture our potential to contribute to the world. Ultimately, the university journey symbolises the lifelong commitment to learning from those who are more learned and passing it on to those that follow.

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

It is a cliché to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be. The Sumerians were the first inventors of writing; and the Latin alphabet in which this text is written is a distant descendant of the cuneiform script they invented about 5,000 years ago in the ancient Middle East.*

Most people have heard that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing, along with agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, urbanization, and social stratification. Their Neolithic revolution fundamentally reshaped the world, and ultimately ushered in the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today (Crosby, 2004).

But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? Unless you are an Assyriologist – an expert in the languages, cultures, and history of the ancient Middle East – you may not know the details, but you are likely to assume it was one particular language.

Well, you’d be wrong. The Sumerians were multilingual, and language contact is evident in the written record from Day 1.

The multilingual Sumerians

Sumerian is a language isolate that is not related to any other known language, living or dead (Cunningham, 2013). However, back then, as today, most languages of the Middle East were Semitic languages, like modern Arabic or Hebrew. The continuum of Semitic dialects the Sumerians were most in contact with is called Akkadian. And contact between Sumerian and Akkadian is apparent from the very beginning of the written record (Hasselbach-Andee, 2020).

The Manishtushu Obelisk (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name “Sumerian” is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. The Sumerian word for their language was “Eme-gir,” which literally means “native language” (Cunningham, 2013).

The earliest written documents legible to us date from around 2,600 BCE. These documents all provide evidence of sustained multilingualism (Crisostomo, 2020). This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary.

Language mixing

First, there are texts that include loanwords from one language into the other or texts that are so heavily mixed that they cannot even be assigned to one language or another. An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. This is a short excerpt, with Sumerian words in roman font and Akkadian words in italic (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410):

šu‐niĝin 10 ĝuruš be‐lu gana gu kug‐babbar gana ša‐at e‐ki‐im ù zi‐ma‐na‐ak (“Total: 10 workers, lord of the fields, recipients of the payment of the field of Ekim and Zimanak.”)

As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts – translanguaging avant la lettre!

Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The Sumerians clearly had no such qualms about keeping written languages neatly separate. Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. So, mixing languages must have felt right and sufficiently “weighty” for such an important title deed.

Whatever the writer’s reasoning was, “Sumerian and Akkadian (Semitic) are, throughout much of our material, intertwined and interconnected” (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 416).

Multilingual texts

In addition to administrative texts, some of the earliest surviving texts are – surprise, surprise – bilingual word lists (Michalowski, 2020).

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. New scribes may not necessarily have been proficient in Sumerian. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). That is why bilingual word lists can be found among the earliest written documents: they served a didactic function and the institutionalization of language learning clearly went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of writing.

“Ubil-Eshtar, brother of the king, Kalki, scribe, is your servant” (Image credit: British Museum)

Because writing was invented by the Sumerians, writing itself seems to have become associated with Sumerian. It seems likely that Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it ceased to be used as a written language (Michalowski, 2006).

As a result, scribes not only needed to learn the art of writing, but they also needed to be formally trained in the Sumerian language.

An intriguing example in the kind of diglossia that ensued can be found in an oft-quoted record about an escaped slave. This text records the event in Sumerian (roman font) but reports direct speech in Akkadian (italic font): “Lugalazida, the slave of Lugalkigal, escaped from the Ensi. About his hiding place, the slave girl of Urnigin said: ‘He lives in Maškan-šapir. He should be brought here’” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410).

Metalinguistic commentary

Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform – a logographic aide memoire – to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. In short, they collected and distributed goods.

The status of scribes is evident from cylindrical seals – like modern trademarks and signatures. These served to confirm the authenticity and legitimacy of traded objects (Pittman, 2013). The famous seal of Kalki provides an example. The seal is understood to depict a foreign expedition, which included a hunter, the scribe’s royal patron with an ax, and the scribe with tablet and stylus.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. Then, as today, teachers seem to have taken it upon themselves to act as language police, as this student complaint shows:

“The one in charge of Sumerian said: ‘He spoke Akkadian!’ Then he caned me.” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 408)

At the other end of the social spectrum, speaking multiple languages gave you bragging rights – also just like in our own time. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, “King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe,” whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities:

By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains. Fourthly, I can do service as a translator with an Amorite, a man of the mountains. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. Fifthly, when a man of Subir yells, I can even distinguish the words in his language, although I am not a fellow-citizen of his. When I provide justice in the legal cases of Sumer, I give answers in all five languages. In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. (Shulgi, 2000, pp. ll.20-220)

“Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Image credit: Louvre)

Note that Shulgi does not even spell out his first two languages – taking it as implicit that a Sumerian must be bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian.

What about translation and interpreting?

It should have become obvious by now that the Sumerians operated a bilingual language regime. This is certainly true of the scribal caste – and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate – and the kingly elite. Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian.

However, linguistic mediation was necessary with the speakers of other languages, such as Shulgi’s third, fourth, and fifth language.

Like the Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians institutionalized the role of linguistic mediator for trade and diplomacy. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The idea of professional certification – modern as it may seem – is also first in evidence with the Sumerians, as this seal demonstrates. This seal also happens to be the first-ever known depiction of an interpreter in action – predating the interpreting relief in the Tomb of Horemheb by almost a thousand years.

The writing on the seal says that it belongs to “Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Edzard, 1968). The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013).

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for “linguistic mediator” – a Sumerian word (“eme-bal”) and an Akkadian word (“targummanu”). Now remember that recently we encountered “dragoman” as a fancy English word for “interpreter”? Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between “targummanu” and “dragoman”?

(Source: Thornton, 2013, p. 601)

“Dragoman” first appeared in English around 1300. It is a relatively rare word that refers specifically to interpreters working in the Middle East and with the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. “Dragoman” arrived in English from Old French “drugemen” or Medieval Latin “dragumanus” and, via late Greek “dragoumanos,” goes back to Old Arabic “targumān.” The modern Arabic word is tarjumān, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians.

“Targummanu” not only made it into English as “dragoman” but into many other modern languages, too. The words for “interpreter” in Turkish (“tercümen”), Georgian (“tarjimani”), Russian (“tolmač”), Polish (“tłumacz”), Hungarian (“tolmács”), and German (“Dolmetscher”) all go back to the same source (Jyrkänkallio, 1952).

It is fitting that the word for “interpreter” in so many modern languages should link us back to ancient Mesopotamia, and remind us that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission from the time when humans first learned to speak some 300,000 years ago.

In fact, “targummanu” did not start in Akkadian but was a borrowing from Luwian, a language spoken in another multilingual and multiethnic empire the Sumerians came into contact with, that of the Hittites, in modern-day Turkey (Melchert, 2020). The Luwian word is likely a borrowing from yet another language, which has been covered by the sands of time (Popko, 2008).

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity.

*Postscript, 21/07/2021: I’ve been asked by a learned reader to clarify that the Latin alphabet does not directly descend from cuneiform. It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. Early alphabetic writing systems are more closely linked to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to cuneiform. Whether they were invented independently or inspired by hieroglyphs, and whether hieroglyphs were invented independently or inspired be cuneiform is a matter of ongoing debate that may never be resolved. Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact – in the ancient world, as today – I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. While there is clear evidence for the independent invention of writing at least three times (Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica), the emergence of several writing systems in the Ancient Middle East in relatively close proximity to each other (geographically and chronologically) would suggest, at the very least, transfer of the general idea.

Related resources:

• Who invented writing?
• The Latin alphabet’s take-over of the world’s languages

References

Crisostomo, C. J. (2020). Sumerian and Akkadian Language Contact. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 401-420). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Crosby, A. W. (2004). Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, G. (2013). The Sumerian language. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 95-110). London: Routledge.
Edzard, D. O. (1968). Die Inschriften der altakkadischen Rollsiegel. Archiv für Orientforschung, 22, 12-20.
Hasselbach-Andee, R. (2020). Multilingualism and Diglossia in the Ancient Near East. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 457-470). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jyrkänkallio, P. (1952). Zur Etymologie von russ. tolmač “Dolmetscher” und seiner türkischen Quelle. Studia Orientalia, 17(8), 3-11.
Melchert, C. (2020). Luwian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 239-256). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Michalowski, P. (2006). The lives of the Sumerian language. In S. L. Sanders (Ed.), Margins of writing, origins of cultures (pp. 159-184). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michalowski, P. (2020). Sumerian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 83-105). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Popko, M. (2008). Völker und Sprachen Altanatoliens (C. Brosch, Trans.). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Pittman, H. (2013). Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 343-366). London: Routledge.
Shulgi. (2000). A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B). Retrieved from https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr24202.htm
Taylor, J. (2013). Administrators and scholars: The first scribes. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 314-328). London: Routledge.
Thornton, C. P. (2013). Mesopotamia, Meluhha, and those in between. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 624-643). London: Routledge.

The Phoenician abjad – the ancestor of almost all scripts in use today (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Today, literacy has become near universal with the global literacy rate around 85 percent. Even the minority who remain illiterate are likely to be aware of the existence of written language (and their exclusion from its benefits). Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity and dates from the 19^th century, with literacy rates steadily increasing over the past 200 years. Before then, literacy was restricted to a tiny elite in those societies where literacy existed and there were many societies that were not familiar with written language at all.

Can you image living in a society that does not have any writing? Why and how would anyone in such a society invent writing?

Inventing writing by imitation

Most writing systems that have been invented through the ages took inspiration from another writing system: the Latin alphabet was inspired by the Greek alphabet; the Greek alphabet was inspired by the Phoenician abjad; the Phoenician abjad was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs. In another line of transmission, the Phoenician abjad (which, with the exception of the Chinese script, is the ancestor of all writing systems in use today) also inspired the Old Hebrew script (ca. 1000 BCE), which inspired the Aramaic script, which inspired the Syriac script (ca. 500 CE), which inspired the Sogdian script, which inspired the Uighur script (ca. 800 CE), which inspired the Mongolian script (1200 CE).

The details of most of these relationships of inspiration and imitation are lost in history and must be credited to anonymous traders, missionaries, or soldiers. Individual inventors of a writing system are rare exceptions, such as King Sejong, who invented the Korean script. King Sejong took inspiration from the Chinese script.

Creating a new writing system for a language by drawing on an existing model from another language, as King Sejong did for Korean, is undoubtedly an enormous achievement. However, it pales in comparison to the achievement of those inventors who created writing from scratch, at a time when writing did not exist anywhere else in their known world.

Why was writing invented?

Proto-Cuneiform tablet, ca. 3000 BCE (Image credit: Metmuseum)

Living in a highly literate society, it is tempting to imagine that those first inventors wanted to write down stories and transmit them to posterity. Unfortunately, you’d be mistaken. The transmission of stories worked really well orally. Our ancestors had much better memories than we have (and how literacy has affected our brains is another story), as is evidenced from the great epics or the extensive Aboriginal Dreamtime stories that were transmitted orally over thousands of years.

This means that in a preliterate society no one had any need to write down the knowledge that was encoded in stories, myths, legends, or genealogies. And we can be sure that no one just thought one day, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could write down spoken language?”

Writing is a technology that emerged together with urbanization. The first city states constituted a new form of social organization that created specific problems of record keeping: how to account for the surplus created by agriculture and trade, and the activities it resulted in. As humans founded city states and empires, practical problems such as these arose: How much arable land is there? How many heads of cattle can be kept on a particular plot of land? How much tax should be extracted from a farming household of a particular composition? How can we be sure that Farmer So-and-so has already paid his taxes and does not just say they paid? How many slaves need to be captured to build a new temple? How many soldiers need to be kept in the army to protect the city, and how much provisions and equipment will they need to invade the next city down the river and incorporate it into one’s kingdom?

Not necessarily pretty questions that inspired writing invention! Writing was not invented for some lofty intellectual pursuits but as a technology of power. Writing was invented as a means of record keeping. It is an information technology that emerged in the domains of state administration and bureaucracy, trade and commerce, and religion.

Early writing had little to do with language and everything to do with keeping a quantitative record of something. Think of it this way: our writing-inventing ancestors needed spreadsheets. It was only over time that these “spreadsheets” became writing: a visual form of language associated with a particular spoken language.

Who invented writing?

In fact, not all “spreadsheet systems” became fully-fledged writing systems. So, who invented writing? The answer you’re probably familiar with is: the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. That’s true but it’s not the whole story because writing was invented multiple times, in response to social developments similar to those I outlined above.

Mayan glyphs (Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia)

To the best of our knowledge, writing was invented independently at least three times: Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia (ca. 3400 BCE), Chinese characters in China (ca. 1200 BCE) and Mayan glyphs in Mesoamerica (ca. 300 BCE). Of these, only the Chinese script is an unbroken living tradition.

I’m saying “at least three times” because it may well have been more often. Our knowledge is limited in three ways.

First, the archeological record is incomplete and only the most durable early writing (pressed in clay or chiseled in stone) has survived while the record for less durable materials (drawn on paper, velum or bark in natural colors, scratched in bone) has disintegrated and only accidental fragments may or may not have survived.

Second, the relationship between different writing systems is unclear. For instance, there is debate whether Egyptian hieroglyphs (the earliest of which date back to ca. 3250 BCE) constitute an independent invention or were inspired by Sumerian cuneiform. Similar uncertainties exist related to the Indus Valley script (ca. 2600 BCE) or Linear B from the island of Crete in Greece (ca. 1450 BCE).

Third, the history of writing has largely been written by Europeans and is embedded in colonial epistemologies. This limits our knowledge in various ways.

These limitations are well illustrated by our scant knowledge of Mayan writing. To begin with very little research efforts are dedicated to that striking writing system, which only survives in a small number of stone inscriptions and four book manuscripts. This small number is not only due to natural degradation but is the result of active destruction by the Spanish colonizers. “We burned them all”, as Bishop Diego de Landa reported in 1566. Not only the products of Mayan writing were destroyed but transmission was suppressed and eventually knowledge of Mayan writing disappeared.

Deciphering ancient scripts became a European passion in the 18^th and 19^th century. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822 and the German scholars Karsten Niebuhr Georg Friedrich Grotefend deciphered Sumerian cuneiform in 1837. These developments created a lot of excitement and working on ancient documents became all the range in certain academic circles. However, interest in Mayan glyphs remained limited. Partly this was due to the fact that documents written in that script were far less accessible to European scholars than Middle Eastern documents. But it was also due to the fact that – in yet another colonial way of seeing – they thought the glyphs weren’t really a script and just some non-linguistic code. Mayan glyphs were only deciphered in the late 20^th century by US scholar David Stuart, drawing on work by Russian scholars Yuri Knorosov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.

In the end, not even a topic as seemingly straightforward as the invention of writing has a single story.

Want to learn more?

If you want to find out how our clever ancestors turned their “spreadsheet proto-writing” into visual language, head over to Youtube to listen to my lecture about “The invention of writing” (36:23 mins)

If you don’t have that kind of time, “The invention of writing” also exists as a Twitter thread.

Listen up, boys and girls, because I'm going to tell you the story of the greatest inventors of all times: the inventors of #writing

Can you imagine a world without writing? No writing on screens, no writing on paper, no writing on stone, no writing on clay tables, nothing … pic.twitter.com/9SDjQWONeh

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

Although the content of these three versions is largely the same and although all three versions have the same author, myself, the “story” changes even within these narrow parameters of identical topic and author. Can you spot the differences? How does content and presentation change across the written, spoken, and digital formats? And, with it, how does your learning experience and response change? What are the affordances and limitations of each medium?

My “audience” as I was recording the first online lecture for the new term

Yesterday, I spent six hours pre-recording a puny little lecture of 15 minutes for the postgraduate “Literacies” unit I’m teaching this term. The unit has gone fully online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and I have been planning for interactive delivery in a variety of formats.

One element in the overall mix is a podcast series. I’ve taught the unit a couple of times already so have the content down pat and figured all I needed to do was sit down and deliver my lecture into a microphone. It did not turn out to be a smooth experience.

The content I was covering yesterday – features of written vs spoken language – usually takes about 40 minutes of class time to deliver. That includes asking questions, taking student responses, and summarizing those responses. A standard teacher question-student response-teacher feedback cycle.

Without dialogue, the lecture shrunk to not much more than a third of the time it would normally take but producing it blew out by about nine times.

Most of this production time is a one-off, as I needed to learn how to use Adobe Audition and spent a lot of time designing an intro and an outro, and figuring out how to overlay them with a signature tune (I chose a few bars of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto :-). Including a signature tune is a playful option that is obviously not strictly necessary but was fun to learn.

Quite a bit of time also went to editing in order to smooth out bloopers.

Hot tip: If you are unhappy with anything you’ve recorded, don’t stop recording. Instead, pause, click your tongue three times, and repeat whatever went wrong. This way you can easily identify the bits you’ll need to cut in your voice editor.

I may have smoothed out major bloopers but the final product still doesn’t please me and doesn’t meet my usual standards of work. I’m dissatisfied with recurring disfluencies, with too much detail in some parts and not enough in others, a joke that I started and then trailed off because it seemed silly delivering it to the unmoved microphone.

Seeing how much time I invested, I’m wondering where did I go wrong?

Maybe it’s not me at all but the problem is the genre of the academic lecture?

What’s wrong with lectures?

Lectures are odd creatures at the intersection of reading and writing, as a quick look at the table listing the key differences between written and spoken language will show.

The academic lecture, including in its pre-recorded version, is obviously a form of spoken language. However, most of its characteristics are typically associated not with spoken but with written language:

• The lecture is technologically mediated (recording device at my end, audio player at yours).
• Speaker and audience are distant across time and space (I recorded the lecture yesterday in my home and students will listen to it at other times and places).
• In terms of context, the lecture sits somewhere in the middle between high and low context (it’s part of a unit taught in the Applied Linguistics program at Macquarie University but it could be taught in any Applied Linguistics program in an English-medium program).
• The recording is durable and not as fleeting as the spoken word usually is.
• The lecture is not quite as scannable as a written text but you can certainly stop and rewind if there is something you didn’t understand, or jump ahead if you get bored.
• The lecture is planned and tightly structured.
• In terms of syntactic complexity and formality, I was aiming for a simple and casual style – the desired “conversational tone” of a podcast. However, on listening back, I discovered that I used a garden path sentence to exemplify one, and I also used words such as “therefore” and “thus” – clear traces of written language.
• I don’t even need to mention that the content of the lecture is relatively abstract (“Features of written language”) and that I delivered a monologue.

These mismatched criteria produce a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” genre. For instance, I did not write up the lecture beforehand and so did not read out a script. In face-to-face teaching, I don’t need one and for pre-recordings the general advice seems to be that a script will make the lecture sound unnatural. Even so, I’m now I’m beating myself up for uneven delivery – there are a few unfinished thoughts and dysfluencies.

How did such an awkward genre become the main mode of university teaching?

Miniature drawing of a medieval lecture (Image credit: British Library)

The academic lecture has its origins in the European Middle Ages, when both literacy – the ability to read and write – and books were scarce. In a world where writing is cheap and literacy is almost universal, it is hard to imagine just how scarce they were back then. Only the most valuable information was committed to writing. Hand-written manuscripts took years to produce and books were a rare and extremely valuable commodity. Online courses, textbooks, even notebooks were still far in the future.

To teach the valuable information committed to manuscripts, early university education therefore consisted of a “lecturer” reading to an audience. A lecturer is literally a “reader”, a title still used in UK academia today for what is an Associate Professor in the Australian and US systems. The lecturer read the set text out loud, sometimes providing running commentary or explanations as they went along.

That explains why the lecture is such an odd cross-over genre between written and spoken language. It’s a written text read out loud.

What it doesn’t explain is why we are reverting to this mode of teaching as we transition from face-to-face to online teaching. The best explanation I can come up with is that technical affordances of the digital world have changed both written and spoken language in fundamental ways, and we are all still working out how to harness them best for learning.

What do you think about pre-recorded lectures? And what are your most and least favorite teaching genres? Have they changed between face-to-face and online?

As for me, I’ll try and mix genres as much as possible. Even if they make me cringe, I’ll keep podcasts in the mix for now, mainly because I want my students to experience another form of writing to learn: note taking. To commit something to memory and process it deeply, writing continues to be the medium of choice.

“To reach the mind, knowledge has to flow through the hand,” as one of my lecturers in teacher training kept insisting.

U.S. Vice President Pence ignores NASA “DO NOT TOUCH” sign. Would anyone else get away with such illiterate behavior?

“Literacy” is one of those words that everyone uses as a technical term but that is actually really hard to pin down. When I asked the new students in my “Literacies” unit last week what they thought “literacy” meant, they came up with quite a variety of definitions.

The most popular definition of “literacy” was that it is simply a cover term for “reading and writing”. That understanding of literacy contrasts with spoken language. Closely related to this first understanding of literacy is a second of literacy as “the ability to read and write.” Students with a background in language teaching readily referenced the “four skills” – speaking, listening, reading and writing – that make up language proficiency.

The latter understanding of literacy has spawned a significant expansion of the use of “literacy”: today, “literacy” is no longer exclusively about language but may be used to refer to all kinds of knowledge and competences: financial literacy, computer literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, news literacy, environmental literacy, ethics literacy, health literacy, spiritual literacy, artistic literacy, emotional literacy, etc. etc. While the connection with written language is more obvious in some of these literacies than in others, the reason for the extension of the meaning of “literacy” to “competence” is clear: in the contemporary world, the acquisition of most competences is mediated through the written word and at least some reading and writing is involved in the vast majority of learning.

The multiple meanings of “literacy” from “written language” via “ability to use written language” to “all kinds of language-mediated competences” make the link with social practices obvious and give us yet another perspective on literacy: literacy is a way to do things with words. Literacy practices are intricately linked to the way we manage our social affairs and organize our social lives. In short, literacy is a tool of power.

While some people like to pretend that literacy is a neutral technology and that “the ability to read and write” will be equally beneficial to everyone and have the same consequences for any individual and in any society, nothing could be further from the truth.

One simple way to start thinking about the power relationships inherent in literacy practices is to consider its semantic field. A semantic field is constituted by all the words in a language that relate to a particular subject. In English, the key terms in the semantic field “literacy” are obviously “reading” and “writing”. Both words have Germanic roots: “read” derives from Old English “rædan”, which meant “to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide.” Its German cognate is “raten”, which means both “to advise, counsel, guide” but also “to guess.” So, reading was associated with thought and cognition early on.

“Write” derives from Old English “writan” meaning “to carve, scratch.” Well, writing started out as a way to scratch marks on bone, bark or clay, or to carve them in stone or wood. So, it’s not surprising that the word for “write” originally meant something like “to carve or scratch” in many languages. Latin “scribere” is no exception.

You may wonder why I’m bringing up Latin here. Well, it is not to show off my classical education but to draw attention to the fact that – apart from basic “read” and “write” – most English words in the “literacy” field are actually derived from Latin.

The Latin verb “scribere” has given us “ascribe”, “describe”, “inscribe”, “prescribe” and “proscribe”, to name a few. The latter two in particular point to the fact that the written word is closely connected to the enactment of power: so close, in fact, that the written word may be equal to the law. The expression “the writ runs” makes this connection obvious: where a particular written language is used, a particular law applies.

English words that make the power of literacy obvious are usually derived from Latin (and, of course, “literacy” itself is another example). This demonstrates the strong hold that not only the written language per se but Latin writing in particular had over Europe for almost two millennia. Latin was the language of the law and the language of religion – two domains that took a long time to separate from each other. The close association of writing with religion is also obvious from the word “scripture” – where a word for “writing” generally has come to stand specifically for religious writing.

There are many other fascinating associations to explore in the semantic field of “literacy” but I’ll close with an example from German, which makes a neat point about the fact that the relationship between written and spoken language is also a power relationship in itself. The German word “Schriftsprache” literally translates as “written language” but specifically refers to the standard language. The expression “nach der Schrift sprechen” (“to speak according to writing”) means to not use a regionally marked dialect but to speak the national language in a standard manner.

As linguists we like to insist on the primacy of speech but “nach der Schrift sprechen” reminds us that power usually runs in the opposite direction and, in literate societies, the power code is either written or writing-based speech.

What does the semantic field for “literacy” look like in your language? What is the etymology of the translation equivalents of “read and write” or of “literacy”? And what do they tell us about literacy as a social practice embedded in relationships of power?

Reference

Details of the vice-presidential transgression in the image are available in this Time article.