Sunday 21 January 2007

scratching the surface

aikriti t'aikwi , mai m'aikriti t'aisripsi !qklo ...
Écrire c'est être; mais écrire c'est également griffoner ...


It seems that Every great inspection must be initiated by an inquiry. I do not like being bounded by ritual, But on the other hand there be some peoples who do them and fail realising their true value. Let us proceed to asking, What is writing?

What is the intention of asking such a question? How is this not a meaningless, clichaied, pedantic question? But such a question becomes inevitable, For the nature of writing has changed radically over the two or three centuries or so, breaking away from ancient tradition, If not the last few decades. We in this day and age often neglect remembering the humble origins of writing: Scratching in stone; in wet clay; on wood; It is only after that that We come to the prestigious papersheet.

It is necessary to inquire Because some people are saying that The current writing of the modern world is not writing at all. The people of the current generation these days are not used to true writing, Allege the pedants and the old conpreservatists. It is a simple matter of convenience Of eyescrolling the iwer, assertively boasting into the voiskrip, and handtyping into the keybot for solidarity. The schoolchildren complain of the tediousness and the pointlessness Of actually manually handwriting anything more than a 200 word functional composition. A handwritten poem, never mind a draft of a novel, short story or even an argument, is a rarefind these days.

There is some partial concern from my perspective, Because handwriting lends a great deal of rote, association and feel to one's sense of language. Handwriting is tedious and ritualistic, repeating curves, strokes and characters over and over again. It is precisely Because handwriting brings one pain, tedium, dolour and calloused palms that One has a strong grasp of the concepts of a language's graphemes, phonemes and lexemes; A strong command in general. Each of these emics holds a special (painful) place in our hearts. Every time we recall a word or a sense, we remember our pain and passion associated with each one, or at least its constituent emics. Our internal yearnings then transfer to words very easily.

But perhaps i think It is possible that We have identified the wrong process. Dolour may be necessary, But perhaps it is handwriting is not the only thing that is responsible for such dolour.
The origins of this very prestigious Latin alphabet That this very writing is being written in are derived from heiroglyphs, where The graphemes were the morphemes and also the phonemes, where one symbol represented an entire concept. The philosophy of the writing system would be very much different, and Yet their command of language should not seem to suffer. Can one attach the semantic feel of "-ism", "-ed" or "yearn" to a single consonant, or While drawing a bird? Other scripts have similar histories. And Of the Chinese scripts? Or Of its fluid prehistoric form where Each character had not yet been tied down in tradition to a particular specific meaning?

The most obvious rebuttal of course, is How did our ancestors tie down their command of their language without writing if writing is so crucial to mastery of a language? It has been noted as a general trend that The less modern the language, The more complex and highly inflected it is, If not polysynthetic. Surely a highly inflected language requires skillful command.

I should offer the caveat that I do not mean "less modern" being derogatory, But rather that Truely new languages, Such as one spontaneously formed by children with mute parents for example, tend to be highly inflected, and that They tend to lose their inflection as They age. Much of this process has been lost to the ages so I concede that This cannot be verified concretely via any comperative method, But this is a suspicion that I hold. New creoles are indeed new languages in the general sense, But they draw their grammars from older languages and hence do not begin the process all over again.

Many of the world's supposedly oldest written languages may be in fact relatively new to the highly inflected languages That never had a writing system Until linguists decided to romanise their speech for study. After all, The written record of history is very limited, and The origins of each language do not simply disappear Because the comparative method proves insufficient to discover their secrets. Furthermore, many influences, new devices and advances do not necessarily pass along genetically, But get transmitted areally. The rapid breakup of dialect continuums in history followed by a long period of stablisation may be explained by the languages that were spoken in the area Before the dialect's superparent extended influence over the area. In the process of assimilation and colonisation, The native population's original native language may become extinct, But it does not simply disappear, and often it bears influence on the new language that arrives in the area; But often this aspect is overlooked.

Now that This is dealt with, let us return to the question, What indeed, is writing? If we restrict it to the sole definition of handwriting, and naively assume the premises of this era's self-appointed language guardians and concerned conservatives, then Writing actually seems like a very trivial art. It cannot possibly be the sole fashion in which One acquires command and mastery of language. How one acquires command and passion, or the fashion in which One expresses oneself often changes with technology. Yet, there must be something That is far more transcendent. Perhaps it is that We cannot acquire our sense of a language again, once we have mastered it. We therefore cannot experience What it is That replaces the dolour yet passion that handwriting gives in the technology of iwers and voiskrips. But i have this suspicion that an analoguous process occurs.

Though we cannot master a language once We have mastered it, Can we not remaster it? Though we cannot learn to speak as a native speaker once We have already spoken as one, Can we not explore what lies behind our reflex sense of command.

Why do i ask, What is writing? For, English is not my native tongue, and I only write this writing in it, not for the prestige as some do, but Because i wish to express in a convenient medium As writing in others would make it hard to distribute. I did not even acquire my sense of language in the normal manner. But in fact i think, Neither does anyone. Arguably i have no native language, But arguably i do. But in fact i think, is that not the case for everyone?

I write to express, and That i think, is what writing is. There is a distinction from mere speaking. Is there not a difference between voicing one's thesis via the voiskip and merely chatting on the phone? But as I see now, There is one characteristic that now becomes apparent to me That defines writing. That is the yearn of building; to construct.

I am isrekas.