Page 41 - Literacy in the New Media Age

30 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

It is important to insist that while these are ‘unofficial meanings’ they are
never meanings that are not meant, even though we have decided to rule them out
as ‘unofficial’, as meanings that do not belong into that which we have defined
as language. It becomes clear that definitions and conventions of transcription
have fundamental consequences for how we see language and for what we regard
as language, for what is included and for what is excluded, as much as for basic
conceptions of what the resource of language is. One further example, to make
the point. In linguistics, a distinction is made between ‘tonal languages’ and
those which are not. Chinese, Thai and some West African languages such as
Igbo and others belong to the former group. Tonal languages are defined by the
characteristic that intonation has lexical effect: the same group of sounds said
with different tones produces different meanings or words. In English, by
contrast, it is assumed that tone does not have lexical effect, but has grammatical
effect only, as in the example mentioned earlier. In fact, that is not the full story
even for English: if I say the word ‘yes’ with differing intonations – say a clearly
falling intonation compared to a rising or a ‘wavering’ one, I do in fact produce
very different meanings, and hardly the same word. They are very different
‘yeses’, and the last two do not in fact mean ‘yes’ (as clear affirmation) at all, in
fact they mean kinds of ‘no’. They are in fact different words. English, it seems,
has some features that resemble a tonal language.
So what we might say is this: the alphabet, as a transcription system, is a
mnemonic for certain aspects of sound, largely those that form words, not
precisely so, but nearly enough. It is not a system for transcribing all important
and meaningful sound; it is hugely partial. Unlike character-based systems, it is
not focused on meaning, and therefore treats language as being primarily about
sound. The letters of the alphabet are also a means for the visible representation
of written words without ‘passing through’ speech first.
In the ‘West’ we are used to what is, from the perspective of many cultures,
truly odd, in having a single transcription or writing system for a language. In
many parts of the world the situation is that one language can be recorded by
many transcriptional systems. In such cultures any one writer might use one or
two or three different transcription systems to write the one language, so much so
that even a single word might be represented using two or three transcription
systems, each bringing with it clear meanings of a cultural/social kind. That is a
useful reminder that transcription systems are not meaning-neutral: social
meanings attach to them. One such important meaning, in the ‘West’, is the
assumption that the alphabet represents the ‘finest achievement’ of human
culture, and that the highest forms of rationality – certain forms of abstraction –
are embedded in it. This may explain one part of the objection to image-based
transcription systems, and to images themselves as a representational resource,
namely what is seen as their lack of producing abstraction. Such an approach
rests on an entire misunderstanding of how different transcription systems
produce abstractness.