#ZEEJLFatBL : From Hieroglyphs to Emojis

hello everyone and a very warm welcome you're a precious audience particularly on a day like today when India's playing against Pakistan in a very very heated match a part of me cannot but help but wonder what you're doing here but I am glad you're here and I'll tell you why writing is almost second nature to us it is so utterly commonplace that we can't help most of the times but take it for granted but what we forget very often in the process is that the history of writing which is 5,000 years old is so intricately intertwined with the history of the evolution of human race but to talk about writing is to talk about everything and that's exactly what we're gonna try and do in 45 minutes and then open it up to all of you to participate in the conversation I'm gonna start with you Irving and I'm gonna start right from the beginning the beginning of the history of writing the beginning of writing itself pick tog Rafi and cuneiform and hieroglyphs so could you start could you just tell us a little bit about where it originated and how it sort of evolved at the very beginning right well you have to start at the beginning and it's an archaeological matter because to trace the first appearance of writing in the world and you rely on archaeology and as far as we understand it the first efforts at writing appeared in ancient Iraq somewhere around 3500 BC possibly a lot earlier now the thing about a discussion of writing in 45 minutes with all of us together is you have to have a simple definition to begin with and as far as I can see writing itself is a process of making marks on a surface from which another person can retrieve the sounds of the words and the language which are encapsulated in it this is my simple everyday family definition now the thing is this you had a period in the world when there was no writing at all and that's what people used to call Prius and then you have the beginnings of writing as far as we know in Iraq that maybe also somewhere else and what is true there is that the earliest signs that we can see we find on clay tablets are what we usually call pictographs because in principle they are like the sort of draw drawings that three-year-olds do when they first start to draw so the head stands for a man and legs stand for to walk and at the very beginning you have a series or very simple marks or symbols from which ideas and sounds can be generated now the good thing about the world is it didn't stop there it changed from that writing system preliminary stages into a beautiful and flexible system whereby the cuneiform writing system developed so that any language could be reduced to syllables with special aids inside it so in other words if you learn cuneiform at university which I hope you will do after this meeting you will have a writing system which will enable you to write Chinese or Latin or Swahili using this proper writing system so you have a jump of pictographs which are simple Elementary and for children like emojis in my opinion and then you move on to a real writing system so we don't know whether this process happened lots of times or once but in my opinion it is quite likely that there was contact from the original stimulus because writing appears in Egypt and elsewhere gradually afterwards it's a very similar point in time however the most important lesson never to be forgotten is archaeologists don't know anything at all and one day a piece of writing might turn up in Russia which is thirty thousand years old and we'll all be confounded so this is a danger warning about pontification it is my curse to have to go on from that point and pontificate okay so I wanted to I wanted to you actually led up to my next question which was I was going to ask you if I writing orig originated organically at several different points in the in in the world around the same time or did you think that there was contact you clearly do think that there was some level of contact given that there are lot of people of Indian origin and maybe even Pakistani origin in this auditorium I do want to ask you about the Indus Valley script and what are your thoughts on why it hasn't you know why historians have been able to read it in quite the same way don't worry about that I'm going to do it because no one else has done it yet so I thought I might as well take off the couple of days over a weekend and sort it out now the problems are simple of course as everybody understands like where was Etta Stone if you're going to have decipher an unknown writing system you have to have a bilingual which unlocks the other one and the problem with the Indus Valley writing is that we don't have such a bilingual secondly the inscriptions are almost unexceptional e very short indeed so there are almost certainly proper names and you could never decipher English from a phone book so the thing is the archaeologists who enjoy themselves over there and presumably spend most of the afternoon sleeping should get on with finding more inscriptions there is one big one that kind of Lydon tell which shows that the writing system was not limited to seals but was actually a public information system because it probably said gentles and gentleman's lavatory or something like this so that writing system is not just for seals and this is what people think that because you have seals with it writing on it's writing for seals period but what would happen which is what I believe to be the case is that everybody in those cities wrote on palm leaf because all the palm leaf would disappear and you'd have a perfectly flexible wonderful thing with sutras and all sorts of religious philosophy from the Year dot all disappeared and all we have is these stupid little stamps so there are any answer there are two answers I can tell you but it will take me some time so am I going home I'll tell you one really hair-raising matter there's a man could ask Oh popular who's a kind of genius who use a computer in order to analyze the script of the indus valley to find out which of the many signs appeared in conjunction one to the other and which never did so from this you can deduce a certain quality about the writing system the second thing is this that when Saleem had Willie excavated at or in southern Iraq he found from the same period of the indus valley about 2600 bc seven or eight seals of unicorn type which they always have the beautiful great cake with writing underneath in the indus valley writing system where characters were found in conjunction that they never exhibited at home so this proves beyond any shadow of a doubt this was a phonetic writing system whereby somebody from mohenjo-daro ending up in barbarian southern Iraq hearing a blokes name could write it in their own script in a way that they would not normally do so that to me shows that you are dealing there with a fully fledged sophisticated writing system so it just needs some kind of weary jaded genius as I said you take off a weekend and just sort the thing out so probably sometime at the end of the summer I'll look into it for you cannot wait I also wish you take up a college in your spare time but I'll petition that a little later all right one quick question that I wanted to ask you you mentioned writing on palm leaves I know you're a big fan of I believe I don't know you're a big fan of clay tablets could you tell us about what the early instruments of writing and you know what what writing was being done on tell us about well in Mesopotamia in Iraq when writing first began to preoccupy people with experiments they used as their support clay from the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers which happened to be of a very high quality and ideal for taking sharp impressions so it was a clay based society and they used it for all manner of things but they always for the next three thousand years or more rate on tablets of clay which when dry lasts forever so this is why I'm so excited to be in this library is surrounded by vulnerable kinds of Records like books and paper and computers because clay will last till the end of time so this writing system and it was more like printing than drawing you because you had to produce a science by impressing it into the surface of the clay and very often that people sealed a tablet with a cylinder leaving an impression on it that's a ratified now the seals from the Indus Valley which are stone with a little handle are obviously the same principle to seal and ratify a document so I imagine that the documents in India were palm-leaf with the string around the middle then you took a bit of clay plunked it on the knot and sealed it with your seal so it would be closely analogous and very understandable you know we think of printing as a fairly modern phenomenon but would it be a stretch to imagine that the early Babylonians could also have perhaps come upon movable type oh I mean given that you're talking about clay imprints they did you know nebuchadnezzar ii king of the world and the biggest man ever born and he had bricks stand with a very boring inscription when he rebuilt babylonian to make it into the new rival of manhattan every tenth brick had this time the king of the world i'm the greatest person i'm the greatest person and the way they did it after a while was to cut it in reverse on a stamp and once upon a time a lady came to the fish museum with a brick of nebuchadnezzar which is very obscure to me at first and i realize what it was because some of the signs in the four lines were upside down which means the stamp which engendered this inscription for us to read had tight which could be removed from the matrix and washed under a tap so to speak to get rid of the clay brie put back in to carry on doing it and somebody put one of them upside down showing that a actually invented movable type but the only thing they used it for was this damn stupid inscription they could have done the whole of gilgamesh and Lord knows what else but given that you're the world's greatest living expert according to me on everything but definitely on cuneiform what is the what is the early content that one is reading in the first couple of decades of of writing and how does that differ across geographies well in our case it's a sobering matter because if you are a poetic individual you imagine that writing was created by sensitive persons who were struck with the beauty of nature I want you to make and their own ideas clear for the future but in point of fact writing came into the world as far as we know it by the ancestors of the Inland Revenue because the very first text that we have our administrative with totals that's a miserable twerp because then add up and check and come after you if you'd got it wrong so they had their hands on us since the first writing ever was born and what happened is that other people afterwards realized the potential of this system and they made dictionaries of signs they started to make poetry we can read about the gods so by two thousand eight hundred this some other brave thinkers started to use writing for literary purposes and other things like that okay one final question to you before I move on to other speakers as well I want you to talk a little bit about the evolution of the relationship between languages and scripts from the beginning of writing it's a funny thing in the British Museum up the road with the big sister of this little place and we do a lot of work about writing with the public and they're all very interested in it and one of the things is that most normal people by which I mean normal people never think of themselves in writing in a writing system they only think of themselves in writing in a language and the fact is the writing system and language system are completely and utterly separate and this is something when you grasp it it's rather interesting for example in Dongfang they found some Chinese manuscripts that looked like all other Chinese manuscripts and columns are writing which turned out to be an Aramaic so some scribe who was fluent in the street in the script could transpose the words of Aramaic that some speaker did into Chinese script so in that illustrates in an extremely lucid way that the language is a language phenomenon and the script is a tool for recording it now tell you one other thing before they take away my microphone that my friend Jeremy Black who did a serial adji in Oxford with Durrani in the first week was given a list or signs to learn which of course he could do because he was only 18 and then he had to go home and take the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice and transcribe the words it is the and so forth using the canary form writing system so he labored over the whole of the weekend and produced this cuneiform and transcription using the signs to record the language not to translate Jane Austen's prose into Babylonian language but just to use the signs in order to record it so somebody else you've never read Pride and Prejudice but who knew the script recite the first chapter by reading those characters just for what is what that sooner surrender my microphone then take away yours but I will bring Michael in at this point in time you have and taking off from what what having was talking about you have written more allograph E and you've in fact written wonderfully about a letter that is written in two different scripts what does this tell you about the relationship between scripts and cultures so the the letter that I've written about which is in writing making your mark on at the British Library now until August 27th and is actually written in two different scripts but also two different languages so we have the top of the letter that's written in Arabic and Arabic script in the bottom of the letter that's written in what's often referred to as well daya sometimes is neo Aramaic language that spoken by Christian as well as Jewish communities in northern Iraq in the Syriac script so there what we see is is someone who's switching between languages between scripts and and sometimes we know that scripts would have been used at different scripts would have been used because it would have been a marker of the identity of the person a different script might have been used because it was harder to decipher it was harder to read perhaps on a quick exam amination I hear these are two standards so the majority of Arabic speakers will write Arabic in the Arabic script some have not in the past and some do not today depending on how you view a language like Maltese whether it's a dialect of Arabic or a language on its own and then people who read and write Syria will often write in the Syriac script those who read and writes whadaya or modern languages like - Roy Oh in southern Turkey might use for example the Latin script the Latin alphabet because there that's the one there they're more comfortable with but it's sort of two dominant different systems but I think hearing what when Ervin's been saying and and just thinking about algorithm I'm sort of reminded as well and of my linguistics 101 class at the University of Toronto and we had one lecture that was about writing systems and scripts to compliment sort of this general idea of of language and it as a phenomenon in society and the professor asked us showed us the Hebrew script the Hebrew absurd and and and said does anyone think that English could be written in this writing system the class kind of puzzled over whether or not it was possible and I started giving all sorts of answers as to why it couldn't be so oh it's it doesn't go the right way it doesn't have vowels it doesn't look the right thing oh it's got too much history is got not enough history it's shoe curse if it's not cursive enough it's this going on and on and on until the answer well of course it can be because a language like English has been written in it and continues to be written in it and indeed Yiddish has long been written in the Hebrew script with modifications and continues to be used it continues to use that script and so it brought to the fore that idea that as we're being said language and writing systems are separate but within particular context we we conceived of them as being bound together we see them as being band together because of the way our culture's teach us that there is a dominant scripts that we use for a particular particular language the way that we conceive of them as being markers not just of the language but of our identity so in writing making your mark we have a song sheet from 1911 from from this country from London where a printing press that catered to the Jewish community the yiddish-speaking community prints a song in both Latin script the Latin alphabet and the Hebrew script and it's the same song so there you can see that the language could have been written in either script in either way but it looks odd to see it in Latin characters because we're taught that's not the script you use for Hebrew for Yiddish rather that there's a particular connection because of the culture that the script is used as a marker as a differentiator of our identity in this particular case of the identity of Jews in London that this is the language they speak this is the language that they produce and it's it has to be separate from other languages other dialects and lacked sand and other modes of speech that are produced in the Latin alphabet so it's it's such a tightly bound in a particular context so tightly bound identification that it's not necessarily language that it's representing so much as identity the way we view ourselves in the way we want to be viewed by others because you mentioned identity a couple of times there I'm gonna try and complicate this conversation a little bit and ask you about at some point in you know in in history we see the emergence of this idea of one nation one language and one identity and even though of course there are nation-states where most nation-states multiple languages are spoken there's a dominant language that is sort of politically ascribed to that particular state I'm curious to to understand what this idea what kind of impact it might have had on the languages the different languages and scripts that existed at that point in time and did they suffer at all as a result of this idea so I think this is quite an interesting question I gotta try not to nerd out and eat up all of the time and the answering but I say we have sort of two different bodies of literature about about there's one that sort of studying and so contemporary scholars who will look at languages and the idea of the nation and and how they come together and and there are different views as to my language and nation are linked so why for example all Germans people who or of the German nationality not just citizenship should speak German and as being as a reason for why they belong in the state and then there are others who theorize as to how to build a nation and and so we see various different people who come up whether they're nationalists they're socialist communist marxist and and my own particular research has looked at some of the Marxist some of the socialist whether the austria socialists like Otto Bower or some of the Marxist Leninist like Stalin who enunciate this idea that language is a very important part of forming the nation and part of that comes into this idea that if you're a nation you're perhaps an imagined community to use a contemporary scholars words you have to communicate with one another so if the nation is a body is a polity you have to have a means of actually talking to one another people like Stalin and and Otto Bauer also add an economic component so this idea Marx himself and unseated this idea that it's sort of a the nation is an imagination of the an imagined community of the bourgeoisie a marketplace that's captured and developed in order for the bourgeoisie to develop its factors of production and and so if you're going to develop this space you need to have a way to communicate to the other members of the nation and with that you need one particular language you need one language that you can issue orders in that they can speak to each other that you can organize production of course if you're communicating over long distances you need to do it in a particular writing system and so often it's the idea of having just one writing system that's directed from the center that is used to connect the nation together and so we see different groups have have already stumbled upon this idea so I spoke about Jews with the idea of Hebrew script Jews using Hebrew script both for Hebrew and for other local languages that they spoke around other different countries and other different communities you have the same thing so Turkish was predominantly written in Arabic script but it could be written in Greek script in Armenian in Hebrew script in runic as well as Latin those are different communities that identified themselves much as Jews who use Hebrew script Yiddish as being distinct because of their particular writing system but as the nation-state formed and they had to be brought together into one particular group as a nation as the Turkish nation the tolerance of different script traditions falls out because everyone has to communicate with everyone else everyone has to be given orders or given information from the center from the state really in one way and that way the state decides is the Latin alphabet so it's really it's quite a fascinating process that we see where you need to have this one mode of communication obviously you can write Turkish in so many different ways but if you're the government and you want to communicate to all citizens in an equal fashion and make them all feel like they're all part of one project they're gonna be band together in some way and not that way happens to be the Latin alphabet after 1928 you know before I bring David and I I want to talk to both you and having a little bit about the exhibition that's ongoing in the British Library at this point in time and I don't know how many of you are aware of this exhibition I know Michaels mentioned it a couple of times now but it's called making your mark is that what it's called reading making me your mark writing making your mark it's a wonderful exhibition I've seen it a couple of times now and especially since you've you know you've you've been sitting through this talk I highly recommend that you go and see it here after but there's one particular aspect of the exhibition I won't talk to I want both your views on what it was like you're reading that exhibition and what sort of discoveries I know it's a topic that's very familiar with for both of you but even so the process of putting something together a lot of times illuminates things you know brings up ideas that you might not have been in the forefront of your mind so if there any thoughts please do share that and particularly one aspect of it which is through the objects in the exhibition there is a kind of relationship established between religion and writing I would also like your thoughts on that so try to be succinct well I think as well so yeah and so curating this exhibition was both a great blessing and a challenge it was a challenge because I'm familiar with Turkey and contemporary Turkish history but obviously unfortunately perhaps the exhibition doesn't just deal with that perhaps fortunately if you go through and you might be a bit bored if you have seen 120 objects about writing in Turkey in the 20th century but and he said it took all four of us you were curating this exhibition quite a lot of effort and intellectual and physical effort to learn about different traditions really we wanted to create something that embraced the history of writing the histories of writing in various different parts of the world the different technologies of writing the different uses of writing as people how do we relate to one another through writing so it meant that we had to learn quite a bit we learned quite a lot from one another we learned quite a lot from our colleagues at the British Museum to whom we're very grateful for their expertise and from a number of different sections on how to interpret objects we mainly deal with texts that are in book form or manuscript form so if it's an object like a clay tablets like a 2 metre tall one-ton block of stone the Maya stealer we need their assistance in learning about this and then there are so many different connections that we discovered as well connections be across regions across time different ideas of different people's whether the Cherokee the voi various different communities in Africa and Asia creating writing systems as a way to challenge colonial ideas about prehistory history about people without histories without writing and their inferiority to the metropolitan center but when it comes to religion one of the things that was quite interesting that came out from it is obviously we have we have this relationship between writing and and and religion but it's not as straightforward it's not it's not nearly as simple as some might think so we have in the exhibition a number of different objects of wonderful calligraphy from seven different parts of the world some of many of them are religious objects and so we see religion has motivated beautiful writing people who are very pious people who want to pay tribute and to show their devotion to a particular Dogma a particular faith will create these incredible objects there's a 17th century Persian Quran that is filled with gold with incredible calligraphy the Ramsay the Ramsay soldier one of the great treasures of calligraphy from this country but we also have to recognize that there are many religions that don't rely on writing and so we weren't able to provide examples of all of the religions of even many different major belief systems because there's a lot in there that Aurel and we have to pay tribute to the fact that religious belief and Irvan can speak about that they so for the long history but it's not it's not reliant exclusively on on text and many belief systems continue today that rely on that oral tradition that eschew written written tax because they're not seen as being ways of continuing an organic faith an organic relationship to the faith that's defined within that particular community I think I'd love your thoughts on this I'd also am curious has a tree of work have you encountered anything that sort of also documents the shift towards monotheism from polytheism in these areas yes about the exhibition I thought it very interesting to be in on it I would actually like to do it then in in the middle of the empty reading room the mission is in where we have nothing at all and put all the writing systems of the world all under one roof and make people go oh and our because I think exhibitions should make people go who and our and I think writing is one of the very few miraculous extraordinary achievements of the human race and it should be celebrated in a more articulate embracing point as for the relationship between writing and religions is a huge topic but one interesting thing is is that the Babylonians made lists of everything including lists of the gods in their Pantheon because they had hundreds of God's big ones medium ones and little ones and they tried to sort them out who was who and everything like that and at the time when Nebuchadnezzar was on the throne some scholarly priests in Babylon wrote these texts in which they took the ten or twelve most important of the gods in the pantheon all of whom had a strong individual identity such as god of architecture god of irrigation and so forth and they rewrote religion so that all of these major gods with their own temples were about aspects of the one god Marduk who was moving closer and closer to the old testament idea of a single god so the way they got rounded was to give them an office in in the administrative Bureau of their main god so this is actually an astonishing matter especially as you realize that this is when the refugees so to speak from Jerusalem who were taken there by Nebuchadnezzar or setting up house in Babylonia and encountering these things and this was exactly their own conception that there was only one God and all the others were a load of nonsense so possibly there was an intellectual and religious interface between these communities which stimulated within the old long-running literary can and traditions of Babylonia the idea that maybe we need to think about this again so the thing about all these matters you're asking about is that the evidence is so diffused all over the world throughout all history that all you can do is pick on a single thing like that for example but you can't extrapolate from that principles because human beings are so complicated one other question we're on this topic and do you think that the default position for Homo sapiens is to be multi languages or just one language this is an interesting things when babies are born you could teach them seven languages without any difficulty and by the time they can give instructions to the chauffeur in any language you like which is of course an advantage so human beings have as part of their apparatus the capacity to in a great number of languages which in this country is totally frittered away by teachers who can't even teach one language so the other matter is of course that big and powerful countries like America and are populated by people who only speak one language they have two dialects one is normally one is shouting so when you when you put this stuff together you can't really generalize about anything fair enough David I want to bring you in Irving earlier was talking about how well preserves from the K tablets are you've done work on digital libraries and I was wondering that there's this sort of idea that one has that they are really a revolution when it comes to documentation and preservation does that hold water let me just start by saying a word about my own background obviously I'm here to play you know you notice the temporal flow here right so I'm supposed to be the future but except that what you need to understand is that I'm trained as a computer scientist indeed but I after I finished my PhD at Stanford in the late 70s I moved to London to study calligraphy and bookbinding and I actually have a degree in calligraphy and bookbinding I'm very interested in the relationship of different materials and I'm not somebody who thinks that digital has the answer to everything in fact what I see is a greater continuity rather than a you know in in Silicon Valley which is what I come out of everything has to be new everything has to be different but in fact what we're seeing I think with digital libraries and digital materials is a yet another set of basically if you like I'm looking at Irving another kind of clay has been created and the same work has to be done with this new clay which is to figure out the modes and the genres of writing in that and how they relate to the earlier ones and so I I don't think that there is actually something quite so remarkably new about the digital world except for this really I think huge political point which is maybe the main point I can make in the seven or eight minutes I have what's happening in the digital world as a result of this new not fully formed clay is that old conventions and norms of writing and speaking are being partly dissolved I mean look at how we can now shop 24 hours a day seven days a week right I mean as one example or how the week and the weekend certain social constraints are being are diminished or eliminated the big question we're facing now in in in this digital world which we're beginning and we still in early stages of it is when as we create those new conditions under what conditions are we are there are is writing going to be used for the good and when is it going to be used in dangerous and and less helpful ways right I mean I think a perfect example which I might speak about another in another minute if there's time is the really challenging stuff that's going on around social media now in terms of politics and certainly in the United States as the loss of the gate papers of institutional institutions like libraries and publishers allowing everyone quote everybody to speak is leading to a kind of pandemonium in in the United States we're dangerous actors are coming in to incite tribal differences so well I think what I'm trying to say is we're in a very interesting moment the clay is not yet formed and it's a whose all of us to begin to understand how we're going to shape that clay for the sake of greater good and not for global pandemonium and and and disagreement because we started with the hieroglyphs there is that there is a sort of idea that given the popularity of emojis it is taking us back to the dark ages of primitive sort of writing is that is that something you'd agree with well first of all I mean I would turn to the the true scholars on the panel to respond I'm maybe there wasn't a dark age of writing maybe that's too simplistic an idea so but if we put that aside I mean I think I think that emojis represent a wonderful explosion of creativity and I offer tremendous potential my sense is that they arise out of emoticons does everybody know and remember the Moto cons the semicolons and all of that which were originally I think intended in in the days of email which we still have by the way we haven't left it behind as a way to add inflection and nuance into discussion when you're on a listserv when you're actually no longer talking to individuals you know but you're talking more broadly to be able to say I'm being I'm trying to be funny this is a joke or or whatever and what we see and and and I think by the way this is one of the reasons why predictions are almost impossible is that we can't see where all of this is ultimately going but but I think that there's a richness and a life in in the colored emoticons that that have the potential to I mean to represent something very wonderful and exciting that of course is being embraced by young people I mean you you most of us have probably got in the text where we've just said something to someone else and somebody put you know shows a birthday cake or a smiling face or something else and the immediacy of that feeling you know in your body the emotion that's being represented by that I think is a wonderfully direct thing but I don't see that arising as a as an independent system so much as I see it actually being connected back into our textual systems well that's a pity I is everyone in the audience some familiar with the myth of the Tower of Babel Babel however you pronounce it yes no maybe okay so I I mean emojis could well be the first step towards the universal language now I know loving here's a huge fan of emoji so I'd like to definitely bring him in and ask him to share a couple of thoughts on it oh geez and nothing to do with language they are a simple fact is a system of communication by people who are a too damn lazy to say anything be totally ill-equipped to express themselves in their own language if I take a spread of evidence of my own children if we were going to design emojis from scratch the first twelve of them would be the word like and any other word would be almost entirely redundant because this in my opinion is an example of something filling a vacuum when facility in self-expression mastery of subtle grammar the ability to communicate real ideas instead of birthday cake was paramount in the world was paramount in the world listen if you take the oxford english dictionary open the huge thing wide I guarantee that none of you will know more than one word on the whole four columns of spread and the English language like the Arabic language and the other historical languages in the world are full of richness where the most subtle distinction can be expressed by vocab riah syntax in the arrangement and the balance of a sentence and writers know this because that's what they do and people who use emojis are not only on the edge of becoming robotic they are halfway down the mineshaft and I hate them with a passion I be Irving I'm afraid to say I'm one of those people so I what what what cannot what can I do how can I reform myself well I am merely on his side because I as a writer I don't get the advantage of being able to luxury being able to use emojis however final question to all of you and this you know I'd like to start with you David but we can now record what's going on as is happening with the session right now on video on audio why should we still think about leaving or preserving or documenting stuff in writing Wow it feels actually almost too obvious to know how to articulate but I know everything is going to have a lot to say about it and I and I'm sure that Michael will too so I'm gonna leave plenty of time for him to respond no I think that all these different modes of communication serve their purposes within the particular cultural milieu in which within which they were created and as much as we care about the past we will care about the various the writing systems the the forms of content I mean I mean I'm a computer scientist not a historian but I draw heavily on history and so I mean in a sense if we want to celebrate the path that humanity has been on and going on we would never want to lose the what what people are ultimately trying to say in all the modes and all the materials that we are lucky enough to have Michael all right to be great I think it's a bit of a red herring to say that because we have these technologies we're gonna lose writing I mean we have we've had the telephone for decades and decades and we still write to communicate with each other we still write I mean rarely we might hand write letters but we still read emails to each other we still write text messages including with emojis and but it's still writing at some level with in order to communicate with one another despite the fact that you could pick up the phone and call an and dude in through voice telephony I don't think that we have to worry that we're gonna give up writing just because we have video recordings and things like that and but at the same time I think we always make choices as David said I mean our culture will use to to record or to not record and why we might want something written down so that those words are there so that the nuances are there and I'm thinking in the opposite frame as well there's a Mexican ethnographer Fernando Benitez who in speaking about their which or less a nation in Mexico an indigenous nation says the ritual is sort of and preempted Mexican politics by understanding that sometimes you don't want to record things and you don't want things written down for posterity so sometimes we might want to record things and we'll continue to record things in words because we want to have that nuance and that flexibility of interpreting them and sometimes we won't because as I'm sure every politician will understand you don't want a written record of what you've said because it's a lot harder to dispute those words than to be able to say well you you're misremembering what I would have said my problems in the modern world is when you have evidence that somebody said something this dismissed as being not reliable and not true anyway so that undermines that argument totally it's going on at the very moment look the real reason for keeping records in my opinion is to do with the to combat the arrogance of the human race because the human beings begin to believe that they are the apogee of creation and they are the forefront of evolution and they are marvelous and flawless and when you know anything about history you see how wrong that is there is no progress in the human race there is no learning from experience no learning from experience people blunder around like a load of chimpanzees on a rugby pitch and if you have written resources from earlier times and if they are made available to the world when the world is a civilized world instead of the mess in which we live there's a lesson from history which is a crucial crucial thing that you have to learn from experience you have to know that war never ever ever does any good why don't we know this yet and the only reason the only way that people understand this is if they know about the wars that happened and people don't know about what happened the second one war they don't know what happened who happened it's only with records that you can stand up and say that this is what happened this is what we know happened that's the real reason I mean it with that I just asked well who's reading those records well that's another man because nowheres access away technology with any kind of literature the reader has to interpret and most records have an agenda but you're a fool if you believe everything without contemplating how it reflects this time how it reflects the person how it reflects realism you always have to interpret but if you don't have the resources you haven't got anything to interpret and it's really important to know what happened before I mean I had a general on radio for being interviewed when he came back from Afghanistan you know he sat down in the chair they asked him what it was like you know I tell you something Afghanistan's a hell of a bad place to have a war we're not going there again you know as if we'll go down too when we feel in a militant mood we'll go down to the newsagent and find a report about good countries to go and have a war in but he didn't know anything that had happened in Afghanistan before he didn't know anything about it that is incredible to me so that illustrates in a minor way the crucial nature of history being brought alive and rescued and I'll tell you one other thing which is rather interesting you know Google Translate everybody uses listen and they pretend they can read Italian but the interesting thing about Google Translate is their professed ambition then because we dealt with them in the museum they came to see us we went to learn now to find out what their names were they were all like mr. mr. one and mr. two and mr. three so when we talk to them we were mr. 19 and mr. 38 that showed them and we're the point about it is this their plan is to find a computer system whereby any language in the world can be translated into any other language in the world not French into Swedish but all of them this is their ambition that's a very interesting perspective and it also shows me that underneath the the the distance are independent languages it no longer has to be stubborn and irritating because with this development many of the problems of all these languages being existent can be removed because at the beginning it was terrible the translation you can see it was done by somebody with a dictionary and there was no grammar and everything but now even already it is extraordinary I'm perfectly happy to surrender my mic at this point in time and take questions from the audience what we're going to do is in the interest of time take a couple of questions together and if you could also say who you'd like who you who your question is addressed to that'd be fantastic can we start with the lady here and I'll come to you sir I'll come to you no no the lady de and green please sorry I'm curious about how changing script affects not just sort of language in the sense of how it's written but also grammar and usage and pronunciation and specifically I worked in Central Asia so that's my context where you had during Soviet ization you had local languages that were once written in Persian that uses diacritic marks for hours then then change to the Cyrillic script which writes out vowels and then in Independence there was heat this was in the late 90s around to early turn-of-the-century there's a huge debate about whether to go back to Persian or to maintain Cyrillic or to follow the example of Turkey and adopt the Latin script and obviously the language changed because of those decisions so I'd like to just find out what you think about that I thought I'd take a couple of questions but that is a complicated question so maybe if one of you would like to so uh I think this is the first time I've ever been at a talk and had a question about Central Asia and I'm delighted I'm I feel validated now my my educational choices but I also think it's a fascinating question because often script change comes about with other changes so many of the languages for Central Asia and the Caucasus the Turkic ones were written in a purse or Arabic script up until about 1926 and then they actually used Latin for about a decade and then Cyrillic and then many now have have switched back to to a Latin script or found a new Latin version and I think in the 1920s and 30s you see parallel parallel developments where the script changes only one of a number of different reforms enacted by the Soviet authorities because everything is about showing a change so they changed the grammar they changed the script they changed the pronunciation and the vowels but I think for the most part there's a greater change between using pers Arabic script and say Latin or so we're like them between Cyrillic and and Latin so the grammar doesn't change that much whether you're going to use Latin or Cyrillic or that the perception of the language because they're both alphabets so it's the same sort of logic one sound one one letter but between an Arabic script and Latin script or between Arabic script and and Cyrillic Arabic script works without the vowels and part of the reason is because the speaker will know how to fill those vowels in based on the grammar based on the way that the the Arabic language works so you can add it one letter one particular vowel if it's a passive form a different one if it's an active form and you know that from the context Turkic languages don't work like that so there is a lot of debate about the idea of needing to have an alphabet because Turkic languages work differently from Arabic ones and the the transfer over from Arabic script into Cyrillic or Latin meant that you no longer had this this ambiguity and so that had to be marked out clearly and people would begin to understand those forms and conceive of them differently because they no longer worked with the way that they were conceived of under the Arabic script but now they were made a they were made explicit through this use of Latin or Cyrillic and it really brought that to the fore of how you would form a passive how you would implicate all of these different grammatical forms without the use of the Arabic structure and which was in some ways foreign to that that idea the logic internal logic of the Turkic languages thank you the gentleman over there in red and then the gentleman in front please just a question for mr. Finkel if you had a choice of communicating by telephone would you rather text or tell or speak to the person did you get my email thank you I want to speak in defense of David because I think there's evidence to suggest that language is very poor form of communication and I think quite often in in modern world when people are short time and want to communicate very quickly they tend to have an addition to to language with with emojis I understand that 70% of communication is actually nonverbal in any case and because we are now so glued to our screens we need that additional nuance that that Irving talked about so I hate emojis as much as you do but I think they do serve a subtle purpose of nuance saying the the language that is already deficient in in fully communicating despite the OECD and the resources that we have we don't all have access nor the intellectual ability to use all the words that are in the OED so so I think there is a there is something about language that that actually so my question is is there a the further down the temporal setting and underst age is there a time when perhaps language will evolve sufficiently to communicate ideas to a community particularly community emotions well I will just start with that again say that I think prediction is a very dicey thing but the rich I'm with both of you I'm with Irving too in the sense that I mean look we are not giving up on script and language by any means in fact you I don't know how many of you remember that 20 25 years ago people were beginning to say that images were going to be everything and now look at the extent to which people actually are writing using email using texting using social media oh the only argument I'm trying to make which is a you know III after this I will get Irving to help me figure out how to solve my problem about emoji oh the truth is I don't use them that much but I'm willing to play the the emoji user for the moment but I think what we're seeing is that we I mean language does a very good job with emotion in in in in the right genre is in the right context what our novels about right what our story's storytelling is a beautiful form of the use of language orally and textually to evoke all of this what's happening is that as we evolve more communicative means and genres we didn't have texting before we didn't have Twitter we're trying to figure out within communities of use what quality of expression we want and we're so and we're searching for methods of that I'm one of the things I've learned from my young students students for example undergraduates around texting is because texting has been such a in some sense linguistically impoverished mechanism with a very short amount of space to write anything that young people have tended to look to try to read meaning into whether there's punctuation in it or not is there a period at the end or not or or how quickly did my friend or my partner respond to me in other words we want we're working on in this new clay trying to figure out what the expressive mechanisms will be and it seems to me that emojis are just one very interesting direction but just I don't think they're going to supply anything particular I know I sort of brought this up to play the devil's advocate but you know this is a sort of false debate between language and emojis I mean there isn't as you know a days and he that's for that matter we could be talking about coding versus language or maps versus language or you know so on and so forth but on the subject of language being deficient any quick thoughts well I I'm probably boring I I think that and when people read literature the mastery and use of their language is massively extended and libraries are closing down all my kids as far as I can tell without interrogation with pointed needles none of them has ever read a book from beginning to end so the actual fabric whereby vocabulary is acquired and the actual Rea that goes into your mind about how to have a balanced sentence with precise meaning has just disappeared from the entire landscape so I mean my daughter uses the word um what is it to go or to have gone or should have gone or went to mean to speak now this bill Wilbur's their hell out of me because in Sumerian we have a separate verb to go to walk and a separate verb to speak now what happens if we've got it wrong - what happens if when we read these five thousand-year-old messages when they're saying they went somewhere they actually mean they said something I mean and the thing is the thing is if you take one of these kids on their own you have to isolate them from their herd if you take one of them and you try to ask them to justify something they are all over the place because they don't have the training in thinking and speaking and arguing even in defense of their idiocy so I feel this needs to be attended to thank you the gentleman over here please and then there was a question in the back the lady I have a question about the in this very script so I will bring everybody back thousands of years I have spent time as a teenager in mohenjo-daro and 20 years ago in Babylon and I'm really have questions about 500 alphabets of the Indus script and the cuneiform can be read now and it says that maloja which means which they are talking about mohenjo-daro and there are Manju Darrow's seals in or how how far are we from really deciphering the Indus script one of the most of the things are in the seals and thousands of them even in Oman they have in this valley seals but in Talavera in Gujarat there's a big sign of in the script of ten alphabets which is almost like it may be saying welcome or something in so can you please the big lintel in Dholavira and I mentioned it briefly before shows that the writing system is a proper writing system and the thing is this that we know that the people from from that culture traded with people in southern Iraq because these seals are there so that we know that the people in the Indus Valley Civilisation were familiar with cuneiform writing because they were in the city and they'd seen it so we also have a seal of a Babylonian from about 2600 who is described as a Malaga interpreter so there were people in Babylonia or in southern Iraq who could speak this language this is a remarkable matter so the only way we will jump forward is simply to find in the inscription now it is always possible with archaeology that something amazing will happen and until we find a bilingual or some other piece of evidence like that I don't think what we have in those characters is enough for decipherment because some very clever people have been preoccupied with that for 60 or 70 years and everything possible has been tried using computers and so forth we just have to wait yes well you know about YouTube presumably you're familiar with it yes well there you are you see you can find anything you like on YouTube and I get letters from people who've deciphered the Indus Valley script in their bedroom and such places probably three or four times a month you know I mean it's okay I'm being told I'm really sorry I'm being told that we're out of time this is really not up to me but but but we do have books by Irving and David in the bookshop they're going to be around right outside to sign the books I think and also perhaps if they are in the mood they could answer a couple of questions and do not forget to go check out the exhibition that michael has curated in the British Library on this subject thank you for being patient thank you for listening to us thank you thank you David [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Jaipur Literature Festival

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Id: LHKsMRbBQsw

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019