1982, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd

Page 5

“Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the father of modern linguistics, had called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency, even among scholars, to think of writing as the basic form of language. Writing, he noted, has simultaneously ‘usefulness, shortcomings and dangers’ (1959, pp. 23-4). Still he thought of writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization (Saussure 1959, pp. 23-4).

Page 11

“Writing makes ‘words’ appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling word to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed ‘words’ in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of its is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”

Page 81

“Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer. Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves, as Plato’s age had not yet made it fully a part of itself (Havelock 1963), we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing (and especially alphabetic writing) is a technology, caling for the use of tools and other equipment:

Page 82

styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of woods, as well as inks or paints, and much more. Clanchy (1979, pp. 88-115) discusses the matter circumstantially,t in its western medieval context, in his chapter entitled ‘The technology of writing’. Writing is in a way the most dramatic of three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the seperation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.”