The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  The Celtic languages adopted a version of the Roman alphabet, as did a number of Slavic languages; the Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian; the Uralic languages Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian; Maltese Arabic; Basque; and Albanian. The alphabet stretched to cover phonemes it had never encountered before: in Welsh, the lateral fricative received the spelling ll, and w became a vowel. Polish had two l-like sounds, and spelled one of them (the so-called “dark l,” [Ú]) as D, though with time the pronunciation (but not the spelling) changed to [w]. It also had nasalized vowels, and adopted a subscript hook (rather than the tilde of Portuguese) to make .

  Irish had a particular problem: it has way too many consonants for the Roman alphabet, as each consonant comes in both “broad” and “slender” versions (the latter being palatalized – almost as though followed by a small palatal glide [j]). Instead of creating new consonant symbols or multiplying consonant digraphs, the Irish chose to indicate the quality of the consonant by the vowel symbols that surround it. Front vowels i and e were associated with the “slender” consonants, and the back vowels a, o, and u with the “broad” consonants. Thus some vowels letters in Irish are meant to be pronounced as such, while others are there merely to tell the reader something about the nearest consonant. The result, to the foreigner, is a bewildering profusion of vowels in which, for example, the word buíon (“host”) is merely pronounced [bin], the u and o indicating the “broad” quality of the consonants.

  The Slavic languages also make use of palatalized consonants, for which they generally use diacritics on the consonants. A particularly Slavic diacritic is the hácek (which occurs on the third letter of its own name), which evolved from a superscript dot introduced by the fifteenth-century Czech reformer and forerunner of Martin Luther, Jan Hus.

  In the twentieth century the Roman alphabet was adopted by Turkish (not without further diacritics) and, by an uncomfortable stretch, Vietnamese. Vietnamese has eleven vowels (requiring the use of diacritics) and six distinct tones (requiring the use of even more diacritics). Another stretch has been the application, beginning in the nineteenth century and still ongoing, of the Roman alphabet to the languages of Africa. Most languages of sub-Saharan Africa have not traditionally been written down, though a few scripts have been invented in West Africa, such as King Njoya’s Shü-mom script, the N’ko alphabet, and the Vai, Loma, Kpelle, Mende, and Bambara syllabaries.

  Many other African languages have looked to the Roman alphabet. Although it is the script of colonialism, it is a practical choice for sub-Saharan Africa because it looks international, because individuals already educated in the colonial languages (English, French, and Portuguese) already know it (and adults do so hate to learn a new script), and because of the lasting, arguably pernicious influence of the typewriter. Computers are not yet universal, and many in Africa are still dependent on typewriters and their severely limited repertoire of letters.

  Adopting the Roman alphabet to African languages is far from straightforward. Most of the languages have more than five vowels, many have tones, and many have a great number of consonants. These consonants may be doubly articulated plosives, which are like [k] and [p] or [g] and [b] pronounced simultaneously; they may be labialized, palatalized, or aspirated; they may be prenasalized (as in the name of President Mbeki, in which the m and the b represent parts of a single phoneme); or they may be clicks (sounds unlike the phonemes of any other languages, but used by English speakers in non-linguistic utterances to urge on a horse, show disapproval, or mime a kiss). Grudging additions to the typewriter set have been made in some cases, most commonly by adding the vowel symbols ε, and , and the consonant η. is required because ng is needed for prenasalized [ηg]. Single phonemes may require up to four letters to write, as in Setswana tlhw (technically a “labialized aspirated lateral affricate”) and tshw (a “labialized postalveolar affricate”), or in Naro tcg’ (an “alveolar ejective click with fricative release”). Some of the click languages may have over 100 distinct consonant phonemes, though this does depend a little on how you count. (Is the Naro tcg’ really a single phoneme, or a sequence?) Not even the International Phonetic Alphabet – based as it is on the Roman alphabet – has individual symbols for all these sounds, relying on the conjunction and/or super- and subscripting of symbols. (Setswana tshw, for example, is transcribed [t∫w].)

  The adaptation of the Roman alphabet to the African languages – and even to some of the languages of Europe – makes it less a phonemic alphabet and more a script that records features, or aspects of phonemes. In clusters such as Setswana tlhw, the individual letters stand for parts of the phoneme. Similarly, with the use of diacritics, such as the Slavic háek, the háek and the letter it is added to also stand for two aspects of a single phoneme. The result is not unlike Sejong’s system, in which related phonemes are given related symbols.

  Meanwhile, in English the Roman alphabet has picked up traces of both logography and syllabary. The words heart and hart; sea and see; there, their, and they’re; or two, too, and to are spelled that way not just for historical reasons but because it is useful to have different words look different, even if they are pronounced the same. As in a logogram, the spelling “two” directly tells the reader the meaning of the word, not just its pronunciation. Much ambiguity is thereby avoided.

  More recently, the letters of the alphabet have done roaring business as syllabograms. Each letter has a syllabic name – bee, cee, dee, etc. – but the proportion of English syllables covered this way is very small. Nothing daunted, however, the users of text messaging and participants in chat groups, for whom shortness of text is a desideratum, are now typing messages such as bcnu (“be seeing you”), 2l8 (“too late” – here the numerals are also pressed into service as syllabograms), or ruok (“are you OK?”). Abbreviations are running rampant again, with messages such as brb (“be right back”). The later history of the Roman alphabet, like the history of writing in general, is deeply paradoxical: a never-ending adaptation of a set of symbols that very much prefer to become fixed and fossilized.

  The Roman alphabet’s initial spread throughout much of Europe was fueled by the power of Rome, followed by the continued power of Latin and of the Catholic church. Later it spread throughout large parts of the world, fueled by European settlement and colonialism, the printing press, and, significantly, the typewriter. As more and more text appeared in the Roman alphabet, more and more languages used it.

  All that text had to be printed on something. Paper made printing practical, and printing turned paper into big business. The trade of paper-making exploded in the sixteenth century and again in the eighteenth. Literacy rates were still increasing, and new publications such as newspapers and scientific journals were created. Paper money had also made it from China to the West. But supply could not adequately keep up with demand. Linen rags were not plentiful enough, and desperate measures were undertaken to increase their supply: the English Parliament decreed that the dead should be buried wearing wool, so as to keep the linen in which they were traditionally laid out aboveground. The size of newspaper sheets was also regulated, to save paper. Experiments were undertaken to determine what other kinds of fiber could be used to make paper. Swamp moss, potatoes, cattails, nettles, hops, marshmallows, thistles, and various kinds of bark were all tried. Some of them did result in serviceable paper, but mass production was not economical.

  As the modern world unfolded, the demand for the printed word, and the demand for paper, only grew. The mechanization of the Industrial Revolution spurred on the world’s voracious appetite for the printed word. In 1798 Nicholas-Louis Robert patented the first paper-making machine, which produced paper in a long unbroken sheet instead of one sheet at a time dipped out of a vat by hand. The invention was slow to take off in Revolutionary France; a version of it was finally manufactured in England beginning in 1807.

  Fed with more paper, the printing press responded with its own mechanization. A number of improvements were due to Fredrich K
önig of Germany. First he added a mechanical inking mechanism. Then he added steam power to the mechanism of the press. Finally he wrapped the paper around a cylinder and rolled it over the type. This mechanical single-cylinder press, capable of printing 1,100 sheets per hour, debuted in 1814 with the November 29 issue of The Times of London, much to the consternation of its pressmen, who suddenly found themselves unemployed. Suddenly, thick daily newspapers could be printed in the space of a single night – and more paper was needed to produce more print. The next few years saw the introduction of stereotype rotary presses, which wrapped a cast (the stereotype) of the type around a cylinder and rolled the cylinder across the paper (instead of the other way around). Soon the rotary presses could print two sides of the paper at once. With further refinements, mechanical rotary presses could print both sides of 10,000 sheets of paper an hour by 1863.

  As early as 1719, the French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur had realized that humans were not the first species to make paper. Wasps do it naturally, building their nests in trees. Réaumur rightly concluded that wood fiber could be used to make paper. However, it was some time before wood pulp was successfully used in the paper industry. A machine was needed to grind the wood (patented only in 1840), and the resulting paper was of poor quality. A chemical process to separate the fibrous material from the rest of the wood and produce a paper of more acceptable quality was implemented only in the 1870s. Meanwhile, the desperate search for appropriate fibers had continued, resulting in the commercial production of straw paper and even, in one or two colorful instances, of paper made from the cloth wrappings of Egyptian mummies.

  A remaining bottleneck in the printing process was the typesetting. From hesitant beginnings – in which the Gutenberg 42-line Bible probably took two years to typeset – typesetting had grown to a specialized craft. But filling forms with individual pieces of type simply was not fast enough to feed the hungry presses. Machines were needed. On the Linotype or Monotype machines, invented in the late nineteenth century, compositors pressed keys instead of selecting type by hand. The keys controlled the selection of type matrices, and type was cast from the matrices by the line or the complete galley form as it was needed. Not only was the actual typesetting faster, but the type did not need to be broken up and returned to the cases afterwards. Since the 1950s phototypesetting (and, later, digital type) has done away with the need to cast metal type at all.

  First, however, metal type had a final important job to do. Stuck onto the ends of metal bars and controlled by levers worked with keys, type entered the realm of the individual with the typewriter. With typewriting the technology of type was applied to the individual copy – type writing rather than type printing.

  The very earliest document written with type is actually the Phaistos Disk, a nondescript little brown clay disk that sits in a small display case in the archaeological museum in Heraklion, Crete (figure 14.1). Dating from somewhere between 1550 and 1200 bc, it is a unique document, written in an undeciphered and (unless more examples come to light) undecipherable script. Its message of 242 characters is impressed into the clay with 46 different punches – one for each of the 46 different characters used. The Cretans of the time were writing Linear A and B, so the mysterious disk may be an import, though from where we do not know. In sharp contrast with the Linear B tablets, where different scribes’ handwriting can be identified, if we do ever find another example of the type, we will not know whether it was created by the same “typist” or another.

  The first design for an actual typewriting machine was patented in 1714 by the Englishman Henry Mill, but it is not known whether he ever built one. The nineteenth century was full of experiments in mechanical writing, but it was not until 1873 that production began on Christopher Latham Sholes’s typewriter at the factory of E. Remington and Sons.

  The typewriter placed the pieces of type at the command of a person’s fingers, making typing as fast as pressing buttons (though with the early manual typewriters, some force was required to do the pressing). It was a while, however, before the potential speed of the typewriter was realized: touch typing, using all ten fingers, was not invented until about 1880. As the speed of a good typist could just about keep pace with measured dictation – and then, unlike shorthand, did not need to be recopied in order to be legible – typists soon became indispensable to offices and authors.

  Mark Twain was supposedly the first author to submit a typed manuscript (Life on the Mississippi) to a publisher in 1874. He didn’t type it himself, however, but had it copied by a female secretary. Some authors typed their own manuscripts or composed directly onto the typewriter, but typing remained something of a specialized skill, like playing the piano. Also like playing the piano, it was considered an appropriate activity for young ladies, and so many typists were women. (This had, somehow, been foreseen by Remington, who put its new typewriter project in the same division as its sewing machines, not its guns.) Women were paid less than men, and the machines they operated saved a great deal of work. Together, their value to the industrialized world must have been enormous, creating or copying documents cheaply in half the time of handwriting.

  Figure 14.1 The Phaistos Disk, the world’s oldest typewritten document. The text, in an undeciphered script, was impressed into the clay with punches some time during the Bronze Age. Discovered at Phaistos, Crete, in 1908. Archaeological Museum, Heraklion, Crete. Image copyright © Bridgeman-Girandon/Art Resource, NY.

  Just as early Mesopotamian writing was at the service of state administration, so typing made bureaucracy, administration, and commerce run more smoothly. In the newly global economy that came in the wake of colonialism and saw the growth of new multinational corporations, the result was to advantage those nations whose scripts fit easily onto a typewriter keyboard. Writing longhand benefited neither Chinese characters nor the Roman alphabet; even movable type was relatively unbiased (characters required a much larger font, and a huge case for all the sorts, but at least the typesetter only had to reach for one piece of type per morpheme). But the typewriter was an alphabetic machine.

  And it was ugly. The text that came out of typewriters, while even, regular, and legible, was unquestionably ugly. Every letter had to fit into exactly the same amount of space as every other, leading to a very cramped m and w, and a very fat i and l. There was no taking into account the effects of neighboring letters on each other, or of allowing them to overlap in any way (a process known in printing as kerning), as in fi. And, of course, heaven help you if you wanted to write something that was not on the keyboard. What people could write became constrained to an extent never before imaginable – but in compensation, they could write it very quickly. Even today, the keys available on standard typewriters drive decisions about what writings systems are best for newly written languages.

  In short, it was a technology destined to be superseded. The term “word processing” was first used by IBM in 1964 in reference to a typewriter that stored the typed text on magnetic tape and allowed a certain amount of editing. The technology has come a long way since then, from souped-up typewriters to personal computers. Early computerized texts combined the flaws of typewriting with poor screen and printer resolution and minimal graphic design. More recent programs, either for word processing, web page design, or presentational aids, have done away with many of these shortcomings.

  The move to word processing brought a change from writing that is either physiologically produced (in handwriting) or mechanically produced (in type) to writing that is electronically produced and digitally stored. Although the computer keyboard looks suspiciously like a typewriter keyboard, there are no levers and no pieces of type attached to the computer keys. Instead the stimulus gets converted into an electronic signal that does not look like anything, let alone writing. That signal is converted to an electronic code, which is what the computer works with. The code for the writing – not the writing itself – is what is stored in the computer’s memory or conveyed
to the printer. It is also conveyed to the screen and reassembled into writing again – but in a very ephemeral form. This digital writing is not fixed in any location: it moves automatically up the screen as new writing appears below it. It can also be erased with convenient but occasionally disastrous ease. Its chief attraction is the ease with which it can be revised. Nowadays we must all be typists. But no matter how poorly we type, the backspace button is there to provide us with orthographic forgiveness. Electronic writing does not have the permanence of a clay tablet or even a sheet of paper. It does not fossilize as readily as traditional writing, and many writers facing the blank screen feel it easier to get started, knowing that they are not committing to the result, but can change it or erase it at any point. Electronic writing is so easy and so fast that one can be fooled into thinking that there is a direct transfer of thought into text – though this may not be either true or a good thing. Writers spend less time planning to write and more time writing, though they often then fritter away the saved time by fiddling with the resulting text.

  It will be interesting to see if the new electronic fluidity and impermanence result in a change of attitude toward written language. If writing is no longer permanent, it may lose some of its authority, and “I read it in a book” may no longer be the argument clincher that it has been for so long.

  Word processing has also been an equalizing force for the world’s scripts, undoing some of the damage done by the typewriter. Within the Roman alphabet proportional spacing can again be taken for granted. The Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew alphabets as well as mathematical symbols are standard equipment. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and even Syriac come standard with Windows XP, though typing them straight from the keyboard requires some special installation. Cherokee and Linear B are available on the web. The Unicode project is now in the process of converting all the world’s scripts into a single code, giving each unique character a unique computer code. As computer systems adopt the Unicode standards, communication in any script becomes possible. If some of the fossilizing effect of writing does indeed become eroded, orthography projects creating written forms for previously unwritten languages may soon discover that their choices are far wider than the QWERTY keyboard. The expansionist days of the Roman alphabet may be nearly over.