Mon 14 Jan 2008
Could the state institutions that we currently have (in the form of government, e.g.) exist without some form of written language?
Posted by Phire7 answers so far!
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If these institutions were started in the oral tradition, I don’t see any reason it couldn’t continue successfully that way. However, we’re talking ’bout a whole ‘nother animal if we one day decided to do without orthography.
No. Information of such complexity and density requires storage and retrieval mechanisms well beyond the capability of human memory. (Imagine a government agency that consisted of nothing but Tax-Code Cenobites… *shudder*)
Well, let’s get creative, though. Was the oral tradition ever really pushed to the limits by modern industrialists? Let’s scale things up, not story-telling but highly specialized store-and-retrieve agents? A cadre in every city, a whole complex toolset of semantic and semiotic tricks for memorizing (and in some cases encoding non-orthographically) infrustructural information?
Perhaps some of the details would be different — there are things we could do less well, but others we could probably keep up with just fine. Could we have the states of today, exactly? That’s pushing it. But what about a hundred years ago?
Some other hairsplits: no formal written language, but does that preclude formal diagrams? Can we have blueprints?
The earliest computers were programmed in machine code (and modern computers still are, indirectly) — that’s a language so non-human and bare-literal that I’d argue we could grandfather it in as a possibility (assuming we had computers in the first place).
What about numerals? Arithmetic? Can we allow formal symbolic math in the absense of a general-use written meta-language? Surely tally marks would be allowed, so where is the line drawn?
Let’s milk this sucker.
(And to turn it on its head: if we were to assume a society capable of producing complex, modern-ish infrustructure in the absence of formal written language, would they end up inventing one anyway?)
What forms of error-correction would such a system have to use? Seems like it’d evolve toward one meaning per phoneme, whatever that means. A nested set of sound signifiers logically linked hierarchically so complex conceptual retrieval wouldn’t be entirely dependent on memory. It would have to have built-in “checksums”, too. Perhaps even complicated “songs” that could then be vocally unpacked to reveal related layers of information — “chords”. OMG MUSIC IS LANGUAGE I JUST BLEW MY OWN MIND
I’m reaching really far into my memory here, and I could be getting this completely wrong, but didn’t the Mayans (?) have a really complex bookkeeping? story-keeping? somethingorother? system based on patterns of knots?
Damn you, imperfect brain!
You’re thinking of the Incas and their quipus.