Chapter 3: The Birth of an Alphabet

Those who can read see twice as well.

-Meander (Fourth Century BCE)

               In my last blog entry, I discussed the first two breakthroughs in the earliest forms of writing.  The first being symbolic representation, where symbols and drawings stood for something, goods, animals, people, etc., or even something more abstract, such as a number.  The second breakthrough came when cultures such as the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians used these symbols to communicate sounds.  Chapter three begins with what Maryanne Wolf, in her text on the reading brain, Proust and the Squid, considers to be the most significant breakthrough, the sound-symbol representation.  To establish the importance of this representation, Wolf delves into the development of early alphabets and their importance to the development of reading.

Wolf cites Eric Havelock’s three criteria for what constitutes an alphabet: a limited number of letters or characters, a comprehensive set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language [phonemes], and a complete correspondence between each phoneme in each language and each visual sign or letter.  For many classicists, the Greek system is the first to satisfy all of the above requirements.

The origins of the Greek alphabet has been widely disputed for thousands of years, with some saying it is a version of an earlier, Phonecian system, though it uses this system as a base, while others say it stems from Egyptian consonant-based characters.  What is known is that it was designed and disseminated to trading colonies in Crete, Thira, El Minya, and Rhodes somewhere between 800-750 BCE.  This alphabet used the Phonecian consonant-based system as a base, as was alluded to above, and incorporated an invented system for vowels perfectly aligning the letters with all known sounds.

Getting back to the overall purpose of the book about the reading brain, Wolf makes three claims as to how alphabets build a reading capable brain.  The first claim is that the alphabet is more efficient than all other writing systems.  For a brain to allow for efficient reading, speed and automaticity must be a key factor.  In addition to speed, comprehension must play a significant role.  The alphabet, with its limited number of characters allows for such rapid fire recognition and comprehension.  This is done primarily in the back of the left hemisphere, a visual portion of the brain.

The second claim is that the alphabet stimulates novel thought.  For thousands of years prior to the creation of the alphabet, members of an educated culture had to rely on memorization and other strategies to preserve collective knowledge.  If information was not set to successful rhythm, formulas and strategies, the information would be lost.  By creating an automaticity that was described above, the alphabet removed those constraints and allowed for a greater acceptance of what could be thought of and written by the people of any culture.  It should be noted that though the alphabet did not create ‘novel thought’, it did improve the efficiency that it was utilized.

The third claim is that the alphabet facilitates reading acquisition through enhanced awareness of speech.  The Greek culture responsible for this breakthrough in reading discovered that all oral speech could be broken down into individual sounds.  My understanding of this claim that even by being aware of the phonetic capabilities of letters, the ability to read is increased dramatically.  Maryanne Wolf points out through these three claims that the alphabet does not create a better brain, as some scholars argue, but it builds a more capable reading brain read for the phonemic awareness necessary, that is described later in the book.

At the conclusion of this chapter, I conducted an experiment in my first grade summer school classroom.  At the conclusion of the “Morning Meeting”, I gathered the students at the reading center like I do every morning.  I asked the students if they could tell me what the alphabet was.  Almost immediately as if it were rehearsed, 20 little voices began singing, “A! B! C! D!...”  To my students, the alphabet was not a set of fixed symbols whose individual symbols stood for a very precise set of sounds, it was a song that was taught early in life that they took with them every year from classroom to classroom.  They are showing signs if difficulty breaking through what they’ve always known, their Primary Discourses, and accepting something new and necessary, a secondary school Discourse.  Since the culmination of this chapter, I have stressed the importance, and even struggled with, showing my students how each letter, though individual on its own, is part of a larger system that is more than just a song.

Until next time…