Page 38 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 27

language as sound: in one of its guises (and probably, historically, its early use)
the alphabet represents sounds. Users of the alphabet therefore tend to think of
language first and foremost as a system of sounds. Sounds occur in two kinds of
combinations, once as larger sound-units, ‘syllables’, and once as meaning-
units, ‘words’. There is a complex relation between syllable and morpheme – the
unit of sound-form and the unit of meaning-form. Ideas are expressed as
morphemes – in oxen there are two morphemes: the lexical, meaning-bearing
morpheme ox, and the grammatical meaning-bearing unit –en, the plural affix.
But this expression of meaning is not there at the first step. By complete
contrast, the situation with a character-based writing system is that characters
represent ideas, or maybe – there is no real agreement on this among those who
understand this system – words. So for users of character-based writing systems,
the focus is on meaning, as a first step. At a second step, there are then
indications, either in the character itself or in rules and conventions for sounding
characters in a particular dialect, as to how that character can be sounded. The
character-based writing system records ideas, and sounds can be attached to the
characters. Language appears, at a first step, as a system of ideas, which can be
‘sounded’. The alphabet/letter-based writing system records sounds, and ideas
can be attached to strings of letters. For the user of the letter-based system, the
focus is on sound, as a first step. At a second step, ideas can be attached to these.
Setting the difference between the systems out in this fashion brings us to the
second issue: do we include a character-based writing system in our definition of
literacy? If so, we have taken a giant step: literacy is now not defined as the
technology for transcribing sounds as letters, or as the technology for making
graphic marks called letters combine into units called ‘words’. Literacy can now
be any system of transcription or recording, whether of sounds or of ideas. If it
can be both the technology for transcribing sounds or for transcribing ideas, or
mixtures of the two, then ‘literacy’ has come to mean ‘transcription system’
simply, and the decision for us to settle is then what it is we wish to transcribe
and how, and with what resources, we wish to transcribe or record it . That
system is then not (just) tied to language, but can extend to music, to numbers
and to many other forms of ‘expression’. But it has then become so broad, in its
aim of inclusiveness, that it has lost any real ‘bite’, or any usefulness as a
technical term.
Two further questions open up here, most immediately the question ‘what is
language?’ (as against the question ‘what is music?’ or ‘what is the system of
numbers?’), with the implication that we call everything ‘language’ or that we
wish to reserve ‘language’ for a specific system of making meaning. The second
question, already half stated, is, ‘what is it that we are transcribing?’ Are we
always transcribing some meaning system into some visible or audible form, or
are we simply translating from one transcription system to another? A case of the
latter might be the system of Morse code. Here we have one transcription
system, namely the alphabet, and a second system into which it is
transcribed. The operators of Morse code are not concerned with meaning. They