Page 39 - Literacy in the New Media Age

28 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

do not bother, like the translator of a short story or poem or report from one
language into another, with possibilities of equivalence – is there a word for
‘Weltschmerz’ in English, or how do you translate the genre of the Elizabethan
sonnet into Chinese? The operator of Morse code is concerned with accuracy and
precision in the application of the code, that is all.

Transcription systems
To begin with the second question first, a transcription system is always partial.
Take the alphabet again, as an example. I said that one thing that it does is to
offer a means for transcribing sounds into letters. But we all know that that is
only partially so. The alphabet was not designed for one particular language; it
evolved in its use by many cultures and many, very different, languages. Each
culture bent and twisted and shaped a system that did not fit its own language well.
All cultures that use it make the best possible use of a system which was never
meant for their specific language in the first place. That leads to the well-
understood problem of a ‘lack of fit’. In most or all languages which use the
alphabet, from north-western Europe through the Middle East to the Indian
subcontinent, the sound-systems of the languages are quite out of kilter with the
letter-system, so that the transcription can only ever and at best be an
approximation of the one to the other.
But the more important partiality is a different one: the alphabet selects only a
small range of the sound features of a language – broadly speaking, vowels and
consonants and variants of these. It does not attend, for instance, to intonational
features, the up and down of the voice, or to rhythmic features, or to length,
loudness or general pitch-level (is the voice-level high or low?). These decisions
are not made on the basis of meaning, or rather they are made on the basis of a
selection of one kind of (potential for) meaning over others. What is recorded are
the sounds which form words – or rather, conventionalised understandings of
sounds that form words. Anyone who has looked at the early, or not so early,
spelling of children will know what this is about. Early spellings by children
attempt to record anything and everything that seems meaningful in the sounds
of language. They are attempts by young humans who, on the one hand, have the
most acute hearing and an absolute obsession with precision in transcription and,
on the other, have as yet no or little knowledge of the conventions which govern
the transcription of speech, whether as consonant and vowel sounds or as
something else, and whose hearing has not therefore become structured by those
conventions. So what they record is what they hear and, in that, what seems to
them most significant at this moment. That is what is recorded and transcribed by
them and often what they record goes well beyond sounds that form spoken
words transcribed as letters which form written words.
Not recorded and not transcribed in conventional spelling are a whole range of
other meanings. Because they are not included in the conventions
of transcription, they become overlooked and then become unofficial meanings;