In her book Proust and The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf writes about the power of an alphabet. In particular she focuses on the ancient Greek alphabet and observes, "Young Greek pupils were given an almost perfect alphabet with almost perfect rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. As a result, these pupils could gain fluency in literacy far sooner than their Sumerian, Akkadian, or Egyptian counterparts." (p. 68)
Put another way, there is incredible power in an alphabet, which allows for unending combinations, as opposed to a pictographic language in which whole ideas are represented by images. Even today, you can communicate with greater sophistication, greater depth, and greater novelty with a 26-letter alphabet than you can with a hundred emojis.
The Roman poet Lucretius noted this as well in his work De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the first century B.C. didactic poem that explored the world of atoms. In Book 2 we find the following.
quin etiam refert nostris in versibus ipsis cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata; namque eadem caelum mare terras flumina solem1015 significant, eadem fruges arbusta animantis; si non omnia sunt, at multo maxima pars est consimilis; verum positura discrepitant res. (DRN 2.1013-1018)
Why, it even matters in our very own verses With what and in what order the elements have been placed; For the same letters indicate the sky, the sea, the lands, the rivers
The sun, and the same indicate grains, trees, and living things.
If not entirely, they are for the very most part very
Similar, but they distinguish things by their position.
Lucretius was pointing out the atomic nature of an alphabetic language, for just as atoms combine in endless arrangements to create new things, so the letters of a language function in a similar way. If we combine three English letters we get "tap," if we combine them in a different order we get "apt," and if we rearrange them yet again we get "pat."
When I taught classes called Critical Thinking and Theory of Knowledge, my students would often discuss an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Darmok." In that episode, Captain Picard interacts with a being whose people only speak in allegories that reference their own mytho-historical past. One question that inevitably came up was how such a race could have engineered the space ships that they used. It seemed that their allegory-based language was ill-suited to the kind of scientific specificity that could only be expressed through an infinitely flexible, alphabetic language.
Yes, we language teachers teach people how to speak and write in other languages and how to understand the written and spoken word. Yet it is worth the pause every once in a while to marvel at the beauty, the power, and even the limitations of human languages, for with words we speak ideas into existence.
A friend of mine shared that an educator in her child's district had sent the following to parents as part of a district-wide communication. "Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind." This quotation was attributed to Plato.
My immediate reaction was that Plato could not have written that statement. As I texted my friend, that statement is closer to what the pre-Socratic philosopher Protragoras said in his famous dictum, "Man is the measure of all things," which Plato utterly destroyed in his dialogue Theaetetus. I added that according to his theory of forms laid out in Book 7 of Republic, Plato suggests that reality is not the physical objects around us, but rather transcendent forms accessible only to the mind. This in no way suggests reality is subjective and created by the mind, as the quotation sent to the parents does, but rather the exact opposite.
All this reminds me of a scene from The West Wing (S04, E04) in which Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) asks his assistant Donna Moss (Janel Maloney) to attend a self-help seminar hosted by someone who is advising their opponent in the upcoming presidential election. The scene that follows depicts what happens when she returns to the office.
Not only does proper citation of sources matter so that others can follow the same research and so that we do not misattribute facts and quotations, but it matters because it usually indicates a broader, deeper acquaintance with primary sources and the bases of research. Few people actually want the cheap, knock-off perfume or jewelry. They want what is genuine, although many are happy to pass off their work as authentic when in fact it is a pale imitation.
The Roman orator Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was known to end sections of his speeches with certain rhythms. One in particular followed the pattern DUM dum dum DUM dum, which was easily achieved by putting the present infinitive of the verb "to be" next to a 3rd person singular present passive subjunctive from a second conjugation verb. Esse videatur was a common example, so common in fact that people who wanted to imitate Ciceronian style thought it was good enough just to tack that wording onto the ends of sentences. Needless to say, DUM dum dum DUM dum does not an orator make.
The song that captures this best for me is George Strait's "The Real Thing," which is from his 2001 album The Road Less Traveled. He sings of discovering rock and roll in the '50s and realizing there was more to music than just what he had heard on the radio. As he sings in the chorus line, "I don't want you under my roof with your 86 proof watered down 'til it tastes like tea. You're gonna pull my string, make it the real thing for me."
I couldn't agree more. It is important to use and cite primary sources, to take the extra step to do the research, and to express your ideas, not with imitated eloquence, but with the force and beauty that can come for dealing with the real thing.
