By the time the English adopted the Roman alphabet, the Latin language no longer had a [w] semivowel. The consonant spelled V or U had hardened, first into a [β] and then to a [v], as in modern French and Italian. The English used U/V only as a vowel. The [v] sound was to them a variant of [f] (as [z] was of [s]), so it was spelled F. Heaven, for example, was spelled heofon. Old English, like Modern English, also had a [w] sound, and the Latin alphabet of the time provided no way to spell it. The futhorc did, however, so the eighth rune, , called wynn, was incorporated into the alphabet. Old English also had a dental fricative, [θ], with a voiced variant [] occurring between voiced sounds. For this they used the third rune, , thorn. Probably two different people worked on the problem of how to spell the dental fricative, as the resulting Anglo-Saxon alphabet also included a modification of the letter D for this phoneme. It was called eth and written in capital form, in minuscule. Eth and thorn were used interchangeably. Although extinct in English, these letters survive in Modern Icelandic, where eth is reserved for the voiced fricative (appropriately symbolized [) and thorn is used for the voiceless fricative [θ].
Old English also had a vowel sound unknown to Latin, the low front vowel found in the modern word hat. For this they used a ligature of Roman A + E, Æ (æ in minuscule), but called it ash, the name of the twenty-sixth rune in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. Another English vowel, the high front rounded [y], also did not occur in Latin. For this the English appropriated the letter Y, unwittingly returning it to its Classical Greek pronunciation.
To the Anglo-Saxons the [j] semivowel (spelled Y in Modern English) was not a separate phoneme but a variant of [g] that appeared before a front vowel. It was accordingly spelled G, though the Half Uncial G looked something like a modern numeral 5, . Carolingian Minuscule brought a more modern-looking G, but the “figure-5” G was retained for Old English. All in all, manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon Minuscule can be difficult to read, containing wynns, thorns, eths, ashes, and figure-5 Gs, not to mention abbreviations such as one for “and” that looks like the numeral 7. Punctuation was minimal, and “lines” of poetry were not written as separate lines – that would have been a great waste of parchment.
The first person known to have created Christian poetry in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of alliterative (as opposed to rhyming) poetry was Cædmon, a lay brother in a Yorkshire monastery, sometime between 657 and 680. Anglo-Saxon poetry, like early Germanic poetry generally, was originally oral and devoted to heroic themes. The Anglo-Saxon poets not only added Christian themes to their repertoire, but wrote some of their works down in their adapted version of the Roman alphabet. Thus we still have today not only Cædmon’s first hymn, but Beowulf as well.
The real stimulus for Anglo-Saxon literature was a decline in the level of Latin learning that followed in the wake of the Viking raids that began in 787 and continued relentlessly for the next century. The Vikings were pagan, and they considered the monasteries of England fine prey, containing much wealth and livestock, and few warriors. The more valuable books in them could be sold or returned for ransom, while the cheaper ones made good kindling.
As the Viking attacks grew from summer-time raids to wars of conquest, Anglo-Saxon England nearly went under. Only under Alfred the Great of Wessex (871–99) was the Viking advance finally halted, though much formerly Anglo-Saxon territory remained in Danish hands.
Alfred was much like Charlemagne. Both were Christian Germanic warrior kings who worked to revive the standard of learning in their lands. Alfred, however, embraced the vernacular. He ordered his ealdermen and reeves to learn to read, and resolved to make important works available in English. Although he encouraged scholarship in Latin, he recognized the futility of expecting everyone to learn Latin in order to become literate.
Like Charlemagne, Alfred gathered around him scholars of international rank. First he had them tutor him in Latin. Then he set out, with their advice, to translate Latin works into Old English. He translated the first 50 Psalms and adapted into English (not as strict translation) the Pastoral Care by Pope Gregory the Great, the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and St. Augustine’s Soliloquies. Other works were done under his direction.
This translation was harder than it might at first appear. The Latin language had a well-developed religious and philosophical vocabulary. Old English had a well-developed heroic vocabulary (with many words for swords and shields, to be used according to the demands of the alliterative poetic line), but not a philosophical one. Quite sensibly, languages are well adapted to the contexts in which they are used. If the context changes, speakers will either switch languages or make changes to their native tongue. The clerics learning Latin throughout Christendom were choosing the first alternative, but Alfred chose the second. With his scholastic advisors, he found ways of using native English vocabulary to express theologically and philosophically sophisticated ideas. As a result, English was by far the first vernacular language in Western Europe to have a developed literary form. Even parts of the Bible were translated into English, and a number of its books were adapted into alliterative poetry. (In later centuries translation of the sacred Book was to be condemned as dangerous and illegal.) Latin retained its prestige, however, and continued to be used by the most educated. Some texts were bilingual, with Carolingian Minuscule used for the Latin, and Anglo-Saxon Minuscule for the English translation.
What brought an untimely end to Old English – and its written tradition – was the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Normans, originally Viking “Northmen,” had in the previous century taken over what is now Normandy in France and settled down to learn French and rule the native French population. With the invasion of England by William the Conqueror (1066–87), French came to England. Norman noblemen replaced most of the Anglo-Saxon lords, and soon the prestige spoken language of England was French and the only acceptable written language was once more Latin.
Nowadays the surviving words of Old English origin are the simple or even rude ones. Words associated with gentility, courtesy, administration, religion, and education are of French origin or borrowed directly from Latin or Greek. This leaves an inaccurate picture of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Old English was not simple, but under the Normans erudite Old English words withered away. What to Alfred would have been §riness (“threeness”) and welwillendness are to us the Romance Trinity and benevolence. English ceased to exist as a literary language and almost ceased to be written at all.
When it finally returned, with tentative stirrings in the late thirteenth century, it was forever marked by French. In part because of its inclusion of French vocabulary, the fourteenth-century Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, though odd to the modern eye, is recognizable as English, whereas Beowulf appears to be in a foreign language.
The Norman Conquest also altered the English alphabet, bringing it under Latin sway. The Normans had adopted the practice of writing [w] as a double U (or, in capitals, a double V). This was the forerunner of the letter W, nemesis of the wynn, although it was not recognized as a separate letter until the sixteenth century. The Normans, following the Latin practice of modifying letters with H, introduced TH (formerly or ), SH (formerly SC), and CH (formerly just C when next to a front vowel). Under this treatment, the eth died out by the fourteenth century. The thorn clung to life for some time, although eventually it lost its upper closure and began to look like Y. Even after TH was used in most cases, thorn was used as an abbreviation in short words such as “the,” eventually yielding misleading pseudo-medieval spellings such as “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.”
French used the Carolingian form of G, while the Anglo-Saxons had used a version descended from the figure-5 Half Uncial version. Since in French the G stood for different sounds than in English (Old French [g] or [] versus English [g], [j], and sometimes even [x] or [), the English G came to be considered a separate letter, 3, called yogh, and used for the native English Gs, especially where these were not to be pronounced [g]. The yogh eventually lost out to Y. English had lost i
ts rounded [y] vowel in the transition to Middle English, so Y was no longer needed for that. The French, for whom Y sounded the same as I, found Y to be more easily readable than I in the overly compacted Gothic scripts of the later Middle Ages. So Y came to be used as a vowel interchangeably with I, and with the death of yogh, as a consonant as well. Yogh hung on for a while in Scotland, but printing, with its finite list of reusable characters, was not kind to variant letters. It was replaced with Z.
Meanwhile, the first stirrings of vernacular literature were occurring on the continent. Northern France began experimenting with written French in the eleventh century. The trend spread southward, reaching Spain and Italy in the thirteenth century. At first the vernacular was used only for creative works, while anything formal continued to be written in Latin. Nevertheless, by the end of the Middle Ages Latin had clearly lost its absolute monopoly. It was soon to lose much more ground in the Renaissance and Reformation. The Roman alphabet, however, was to go from strength to strength in its third millennium, being used today for more languages than any script ever has been.
14
The Alphabet Meets the Machine
One of the most significant events in the history of writing – indeed, in the history of the world – was the completion, in the German city of Mainz around 1450, of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press. Just as the original technology of writing was central to the development of civilization, so the technology of printing – which mass produced the written word – was central to the development of the modern world. Yet movable type alone could not change the world; the world had to be ready for it. King Sejong could have told us that.
In Europe’s case, however, the stage had already been set for the impact of printing during the late Middle Ages. One important aspect of the preparation was the advent of paper. Paper took a thousand years to reach Europe from China; it was first used in Constantinople in 1100 and in Arab-controlled Sicily in 1102. Later in the twelfth century Arabic Spain opened its first paper mill. Somehow the technology fell into Christian hands; legend puts a paper mill in Vidalon, France, in 1157, while more secure records mention paper mills in Fabriano, Italy, in 1276. By the end of the fourteenth century there were several paper-making centers in Christian Europe.
Accustomed to parchment, Europeans wrote with quill pens, rather than Chinese brushes or Islamic reed pens. They therefore needed paper that was strong, scratch resistant, and relatively impervious to ink (to keep the ink from spreading). The solution was to use a gelatine size – a thin layer of glue on the surface of the paper. The result still got mixed reviews: compared with parchment, paper tore easily and was clearly not going to outlast the millennium. Important documents therefore continued to use parchment. But paper was somewhat cheaper, rather lighter, and, most importantly, could be made in greater and greater quantities, at least so long as supplies of the raw materials – cotton and linen rags – held out. By the end of the fourteenth century the use of paper was finally well established; the printing press appeared promptly not long thereafter. Without paper, a printing press would have been nearly pointless. With paper, printing could create the world’s first truly mass communication.
Paper also affected the way printing was done. Neither Bi Sheng nor the Korean printers had ever used an actual press. Their printing was done by rubbing a sheet of paper over the inked type. Asian paper, made to be written on with a brush, was soft and absorbent, making printing easy but restricting it to one side of the paper. When printing was later reinvented in the West, it used a press, by which the paper was forcibly squeezed down onto the inked type. That part of the technology was old, borrowed directly from olive and wine presses. But the reason for the force was European scratch-proof paper: the stuff was so opaque and stubborn that a simple rubbing would not transfer the ink to the paper. And so a press was necessary; the upside was that one could print on both sides of the paper.
The printing press was born, conveniently, into the waning years of the Latin empire. Across Western Europe literate people were reading in Latin. With weak national borders, the press’s early products had an international clientele. And that clientele was growing. The number of literate people had been rising since the tenth or eleventh century. Cities and towns had grown, along with the merchant and professional classes. Literacy moved out of the monasteries and upper nobility to meet the needs of urban laypeople. Italy saw the development of commerce and banking, and accordingly led the continent in literacy rates.
With the spread of literacy had come the founding of the first universities, starting with the University of Bologna in the late twelfth century. These universities were centers of an unprecedented demand for books. Lay scribes arose to fill the need, and the crowded Gothic hand developed to help get the books copied quickly and cheaply.
At the same time, the continental vernacular languages were starting to get their first literary attention. Latin was a very old language by this point: the world was changing, but Latin had been fixed by rule and was not changing to keep pace. It was well developed for philosophy and theology, but creativity demanded a living language. Epic, romantic, and chivalrous poetry began to be written in various vernaculars, and folktales were written down. The city of Florence, a wealthy hotbed of literacy (with rates as high as 25–35 percent), produced Dante (1265–1321), Petrarch (1304–74), and Boccaccio (1313–75), literary giants who pioneered in the use of Italian (thus winning for the Tuscan dialect of Florence the honor of setting the standards for written Italian). Vernacular literature could reach a much wider audience than Latin could; even illiterates could enjoy listening to the stories read aloud, as they often were. The printing press was therefore a response to a growing market for books.
Despite their vernacular works, Petrarch and Boccaccio were early Italian humanists, scholars who revered antiquity and looked to classical authors for wisdom. Humanists were more tolerant than their predecessors of Roman paganism, and they sharply criticized the medieval Christian lens through which all classical works had been studied. Humanists were also aware that in the long process of copying and recopying during the Middle Ages many errors had been introduced into ancient works. In the fifteenth century humanists went on a treasure hunt, searching monasteries and libraries for neglected ancient manuscripts. At the same time, they learned Greek and began to read Classical Greek works in the original, tutored by Greek scholars fleeing the tottering Byzantine Empire. These refugee scholars gathered in Florence, where they and the Italian humanists established the Platonic Academy to study Greek philosophy in 1462. The humanists wished to publish complete and corrected versions of ancient works. The new printing technology fit the need admirably: finally, here was a way to reproduce the classics without multiplying errors with every copy.
As he worked on his first press, Johannes Gutenberg (1399–1468) was probably oblivious to the fact that he had been scooped by both Bi Sheng and the Korean government. He did, however, know that others were experimenting with ways to reproduce writing, and (to the frustration of later historians) he kept his work secret. His first products seem to have been a few calendars and a Latin grammar, but it was with his 42-line Bible (so called because there were 42 lines per page) of 1455 that the printed book entered Western history (plate 9).
Gutenberg made about 45 copies of his Bible on vellum (thereby using 7,650 calfskins) and another 135 copies on paper (thereby saving nearly 23,000 skins but requiring an investment of almost 45,000 sheets of paper). The 1,282 pages of each copy were bound into two or three volumes. Before Gutenberg could profit from his work, however, his financial backer, Johann Fust, foreclosed. The next major printed work, and the first to bear a date, was the Mainz Psalter, which came out in 1457, purporting to be the work of Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant Peter Schöffer.
Others in Mainz (and perhaps Gutenberg himself, thought to be the printer of the Mainz Catholicon of 1460) soon set up print shops. A three-volume, 36-line Bibl
e was out by 1461. Then in 1462 Mainz was sacked by one of two claimants to the title of archbishop; its printers fled the violence and commercial instability. By the end of the decade Cologne, Basel, Rome, Venice, Paris, Nuremberg, and Utrecht had their own presses. By the end of the following decade, printing had reached England, Spain, and Poland.
The use of type not only revolutionized the scale of book production, but marked a significant conceptual change in the way writing was done. The original process of writing by the creation of letters became a process of writing by selection from a preformed set of letters. The human hand creates infinite variety. Different people have different handwriting, and even an individual’s handwriting will vary from one writing session to the next according to mood, fatigue level, posture, etc. Movable type changes all that. Individual Mycenaean or Carolingian scribes can be still identified by their work; not so the modern writer. Within a single font, the e in one word will look just like the e in the next, no matter who originally authored the individual words. How many people’s words, for example, have been uniformly recorded in Times New Roman type?
Inevitably, there were some who objected to the sterility of the new process. How could the spiritual value of a printed Bible possibly compare to that of one crafted by hand by a praying human soul? Equally inevitably, perhaps, the new technology won the day. The invention of movable type by no means halted to the activity of handwriting, but it did mean that most public texts thereafter were written by selection rather than by creation. At first the privileged domain of print shops, writing by selection has only become more dominant with the invention and widespread use first of typewriters and then of personal computers.
Making a type font for the new selection process was no small undertaking. The first step was to cut a metal punch – a raised, reversed image of a letter carved onto the end of a hard metal bar. This punch was then driven into a softer metal to form an indented, unreversed version of the letter called the matrix (so called because it was the mother of the pieces of type cast from it). The matrix was then placed into a mold, where molten metal was poured over it to create individual pieces of type – again raised and reversed in orientation. Many identical pieces of type could be made from the same matrix to supply the many individual instances of a letter needed to set several pages of type at once (this was one reason not to just print directly from the punches). To set just the previous page of my manuscript, for example, would require 1,605 pieces of type. A full font was about 80,000 pieces. As printing spread, type foundries arose which made enough type to fill the needs of many print shops. Professional type-casters in the early years could make four pieces of type in a minute; by 1900, rotary machines containing the matrices for 100 sorts could make 60,000 pieces of type in an hour (a sort being a character in a type font, and “out of sorts” an unpleasant condition for a printer to be in).
The Writing Revolution Page 30