История письма и чтения: Учебное пособие по английскому языку

ИСТОРИЯ ПИСЬМА И ЧТЕНИЯ Учебное пособие

Ульяновск 2004

Федеральное агентство по образованию Государственное образовательное учреждение высшего профессионального образования

Ульяновский государственный технический университет

ИСТОРИЯ ПИСЬМА И ЧТЕНИЯ Учебное пособие для студентов, обучающихся по специальности 21500

Составитель Г. К. Асафова

Ульяновск 2004

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УДК 420(075) ББК 81.2-923я7 И 32 Рецензент доцент цикла «Лингвистика» УлГТУ, кандидат филологических наук, доцент Н. С. Шарафутдинова Рекомендовано редакционно-издательским советом УлГТУ в качестве учебного пособия История письма и чтения : учеб. пособие по английскому И32 языку / составитель Г. К. Асафова. – Ульяновск : УлГТУ, 2004. – 148 с. ISBN 5-89146-500-0 Составлено в соответствии с программой курса английского языка для высшей школы, содержит практический материал, построенный на оригинальных текстах из научно-публицистической литературы. Пособие предназначено для студентов первого и второго курсов гуманитарного факультета направления «Филология, издательская деятельность и редактирование» содержит тексты, упражнения, а также словарьминимум к каждому уроку. Имеющийся материал позволяет овладеть навыками чтения литературы по специальности и развить навыки общения на профессиональном английском языке. Работа подготовлена на кафедре «Иностранные языки» УлГТУ и кафедре «Русский язык» Даремского университета Великобритании.

УДК 420(075) ББК 81.2-923я7

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Учебное издание ИСТОРИЯ ПИСЬМА И ЧТЕНИЯ Составитель АСАФОВА Галина Константиновна Учебное пособие Редактор Д. В. Царева Подписано в печать 19.11.2004. Формат 60×90/8. Бумага писчая. Усл. п. л. 18,25. Уч.-изд. л. 18,25. Тираж 300 экз. Заказ . Ульяновский государственный технический университет 432027, г. Ульяновск, ул. Сев. Венец, 32 Типография УлГТУ, 432027, г. Ульяновск, ул. Сев. Венец, 32

ISBN 5-89146-500-0

© Асафова Г. К., составление, 2004 © Оформление. УлГТУ, 2004

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CONTENTS Предисловие...........................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 1 WRITING AS A SYSTEM OF SIGNS.....................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 2 THE FUNCTIONS OF WRITING ............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 3 HISTORY OF WRITING SYSTEMS.......................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 4 TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEMS ............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 5 DEVELOPMENT OF ALPHABETIC SYSTEMS ...Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 6 THE RISE OF LITERACY .......................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 7 LITERACY AND SCHOOLING ..............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 8 HOW ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DEVISED WRITING SYSTEMS ........... Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 9 MAKING PAPER OUT OF PULP............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 10 ALL THE BOOKS IN THE WORLD.....................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 11 SACRED TEXTS AND ACHING BACKS............Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 12 GOLDEN LETTERS THAT LIT UP THE PAGE................. Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 13 CASTING THE TIPE THAT WOULD SPREAD THE WORD . Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 14 A CODE FOR SPIES AND PLOTTERS ............Ошибка! Закладка не определена. UNIT 15 THE WORLD IN SO MANY WORDS ............Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Appendix .................................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Ogham writing........................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Old testament literature ...........................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Hermetic writings ...................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Hieroglyphic writing...............................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Relationship of writing and art ............................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Newspaper Syndicate .............................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Nespaper publishing ...............................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Early newspapers in Britain and America ...............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The modern era of newspaper publishing.............................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Era of the industrial revolution..............................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Controls over printing............................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Printed illustrations.................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The book trade ......................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The age of early printing: 1450–1550 .................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Modern printing techniques..................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. We are all readers ................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The vital question ..................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The silent readers.....................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Learning to read.....................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Picture reading........................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. Private reading........................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. The author as reader ................................................................Ошибка! Закладка не определена. ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ

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Настоящее учебное пособие предназначено для студентов специальности 021500 «Издательское дело, редактирование», изучающих английский язык в рамках двухгодичной вузовской программы на базе средней школы, и составлено в соответствии с требованиями программы по иностранным языкам для неязыковых вузов. Целью данного пособия является обучение студентов чтению профессиональной литературы для извлечения информации, а также развитие навыков устной речи в рамках данной специальности. При составлении пособия авторы ставили целью не просто подобрать тексты, связанные по содержанию со специальностью «Издательское дело, редактирование», но и предоставить студентам интересный с познавательной точки зрения исторический материал. Пособие состоит из двух частей. Первая часть представляет собой уроки-темы, содержащие текстовый материал, англо-русский словарь, упражнения и задания, направленные на проверку понимания прочитанного, усвоение профессиональной лексики и развитие навыков говорения и перевода. Первые восемь уроков представлены текстами, описывающими в хронологической последовательности возникновение и развитие письменности. Последующие семь уроков, связанные с историей книгопечатания, органично развивают и дополняют исторический материал первых восьми. Вторая часть – приложение, включающее в себя 22 текста для самостоятельного чтения. Тексты приложения развивают тематику уроков первой части: первые пять текстов описывают конкретные системы письменности, идущие за ними четыре текста представляют собой историю появления газет, шесть следующих текстов рассказывают о книгопечатании и иллюстрировании книг, и, наконец, последние семь текстов содержат интересный исторический материал о развитии разных видов чтения. Все тексты учебного пособия подобраны из оригинальных английских источников: из энциклопедии «Британика» и книги Альберто Мануэля «История чтения», изданной в Лондоне в 1997 году. Часть текстов подверглась адаптации и сокращениям, что, как надеются авторы, не повлекло искажения смысла. Данное учебное пособие рассчитано примерно на 100 часов аудиторных занятий, но может использоваться и для самостоятельной работы с целью овладения навыками профессионального чтения.

UNIT 1 WRITING AS A SYSTEM OF SIGNS

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Languages are systems of symbols; writing is a system for symbolizing these symbols. A writing system may be defined as any conventional system of marks or signs that represents the utterances of a language. Writing renders language visible; while speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparison, permanent. Both speaking and writing depend upon the underlying structures of language. Consequently, writing cannot ordinarily be read by someone not familiar with the linguistic structure underlying the oral form of the language. Yet writing is not merely the transcription of speech; writing frequently involves the use of special forms of language, such as those involved in literary and scientific works, which would not be produced orally. In any linguistic community the written language is a distinct and special dialect; usually there is more than one written dialect. Scholars account for these facts by suggesting that writing is related directly to language but not necessarily directly to speech. Consequently, spoken and written language may evolve somewhat distinctive forms and functions. Once writing was seen as providing a new medium for linguistic expression, its distinctness from speech was more clearly grasped. Scholars such as Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong were among the first to analyze the conceptual and social implications of using written as opposed to oral forms of communication. Writing is merely one, albeit the most important, means of communicating by visible signs. Gestures–such as a raised hand for greeting or a wink for intimate agreement–are visible signs but they are not writing in that they do not transcribe a linguistic form. Pictures, similarly, may represent events but do not represent language and hence are not a form of writing. But the boundary between pictures and writing becomes less clear when pictures are used conventionally to convey particular meanings. In order to distinguish pictures from pictorial signs it is necessary to notice that language has two primary levels of structure: the meaning structures on one hand and the sound patterns on the other. Indeed, linguists define grammar as a system for mapping– 8

establishing a system of relations between–sound and meaning. The basic unit of the meaning system is called a morpheme; one or more morphemes make up a word. Thus the word boys is composed of two morphemes, boy and plurality. Grammatically related words make up clauses that express larger units of meaning. Still larger units make up such discourse structures as propositions and less welldefined units of meaning such as prayers, stories, and poems. Writing systems can serve to represent any of these levels of sound or any of the levels of meaning, and, indeed, examples of all of these levels of structure have been exploited by some writing system or other. Writing systems, consequently, fall into two large general classes, those that are based on some aspect of meaning structure, such as a word or morpheme, and those that are based on some aspect of the sound system, such as the syllable or phoneme. The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented to express thought directly, by passing language altogether. The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the perfect writing system, which would reflect systems of thought directly and thereby be readable by all human beings regardless of their mother tongues. We now know that such a scheme is impossible. Thought is too intimately related to language to be represented independently of it. More recently there have been attempts to invent forms of communicating explicit messages without assuming a knowledge of any particular language. Such messages are communicated by means of pictorial signs. Thus the skirted human figure painted on the door to a toilet, the human figure with an upraised hand on the Pioneer spacecraft, and the Amerindian drawing of a horse and rider upside down painted on a rock near a dangerous trail, are all attempts to use visual marks to communicate without making any appeal to the structure of any particular language. However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted 9

range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet door is an elliptical way of writing “women's washroom,” just as the word “women” had been earlier. The plaque on the spacecraft can be read as a greeting only if the reader already knows how to express a human greeting symbolically. The inverted horse and rider expressed the message that horses and riders should avoid the trail. Such signs, therefore, express meanings, not thoughts, and they do so by representing meaning structures larger than can be expressed by a single word. Such signs are readable because the reader has to consider only a restricted set of possible meanings. The differences between such pictorial signs and other forms of writing are great. These differences are that pictorial signs are “motivated,” that is, they visually suggest their meanings, and that they express whole propositions rather than single words. But such a collection of signs could express only an extremely limited set of meanings. Such pictorial signs, including logotypes, trademarks, and brand names, are so common in modern urban societies that even very young children learn to read them. Such reading ability is described as “environmental” literacy, not associated with books and schooling. Similarly, number systems have posed a problem for theorists because such symbols as the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, etc., which are conventional across many languages, appear to express thought directly without any intermediary linguistic structure. However, it is more useful to think of these numerals as a particular orthography for representing the meaning structure of these numbers rather than their sound structures. The advantages of this orthography are that the orthography permits the user to carry out mathematical operations, and that the same orthography may be assigned different phonological equivalents in different languages using the same number system. Thus, the numeral 2 is pronounced “two” in English, “deux” in French, “zwei” in German, and so on. Yet it represents not a thought but the word, a piece of language. 10

It is for these reasons that writing is said to be a system for transcribing language, not for representing thought directly. Thus writing can be defined formally as a notational system for representing some level or levels of linguistic form. Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet. The accepted view today is that all writing systems represent relatively optimal solutions to a large and unique set of constraints, including the structure of the language represented, the functions that the system serves, and the balance of advantages to the reader as opposed to the writer. Consequently, while there are important differences between speaking and writing and between various forms of writing, these differences vary in importance and in effect from language to language and from society to society. VOCABULARY Albeit adv.

Хотя и

Assign v.

Возлагать, приписывать

Assume v.

Допускать

Boundary n.

Граница, рубеж

Clause n.

Предложение (в грам.)

Consequently adv.

Следовательно, значит

Constraint n.

Принуждение, ограничение

Conventional adj.

Обычный

Convey v.

Передавать

Discourse n.

Речь, рассуждение

Distinctness n.

Отличие

“Environmental” literacy

«Стихийная» грамотность

Evolve v.

Развивать(ся)

Explicit adj.

Ясный, точный, четкий

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Exploit v.

Разрабатывать, использовать

Grasp v.

Понимать, схватывать (мысли)

Implication n.

Значение

Intermediary adj.

Промежуточный, посреднический

Inverted adj.

Перевернутый

Map v.

Отобразить на бумаге

Morpheme n.

Морфема (в грам.)

Notational adj.

Знаковый

Phoneme n.

Фонема (в грам.)

Pictorial adj.

Изобразительный, в виде картинки

Plaque n.

Табличка, дощечка

Proposition n.

Заявление, предложение

Render v.

Представлять

Scholar n.

Ученый

Set out v.

Задумать, вознамериться

Syllable n.

Слог (в грам.)

Thereby adv.

Этим, таким образом

Trial n.

Испытание

Underlay v.

Лежать в основании, крыться

Utterance n.

Выражение, высказывание

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

What is a writing system of a language?

2.

What is more concrete: writing or speech?

3.

Can any writing be easily read by anyone?

4.

What is the difference between speech and writing?

5.

Is writing a means of communication?

6.

What is the difference between pictures and writing? 12

7.

How do linguists define grammar?

8.

How can a clause be defined?

9.

What two classes do all writing systems fall into?

10.

Can any writing system express thoughts directly?

11.

Is there any perfect writing system?

12.

Do pictorial signs represent some perfect writing system?

13.

What is the difference between pictorial and conventional writing?

14.

Do Arabic numbers represent thoughts rather than being some linguistic structure?

15.

How can the alphabet be defined?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. Система меток и знаков; 2. в сравнении; 3. лежащий в основе устной формы; 4. ученые объясняют эти факты; 5. средства общения с помощью видимых знаков; 6. границы стираются; 7. независимо от родного языка; 8. фигурка в юбке; 9. фигурка с поднятыми руками; 10. не прибегая к структуре определенного языка;

11. представлять высокий уровень

лингвистической структуры; 12. очень ограниченный диапазон значений; 13. выражать законченную мысль, а не отдельные слова; 14. надписи в виде

картинок

очень

распространены

в

современных

городах;

15. «стихийная» грамотность, не связанная с книгами и обучением; 16.

представлять

собой

проблему;

17.

без

промежуточной

лингвистической структуры; 18. однако проще рассматривать цифры как; 19.

одна

и

та

же

орфография

может

передаваться

разными

фонологическими эквивалентами; 20. общепринятая точка зрения сегодня. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English:

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1.

Письмо – это некая общепринятая система, которая представляет собой отображение звучащей речи.

2.

Как речь, так и письмо тесно связаны с лингвистической структурой языка.

3.

Вполне естественно, что письменная речь не может читаться тем, кто не знаком с лингвистической структурой устной языковой формы.

4.

Многие ученые считают, что письмо тесно связано с языком, но не обязательно непосредственно с речью.

5.

Письмо – это один из многих способов общения с помощью видимых знаков.

6.

Картинки – это также видимые знаки общения, но их нельзя считать письмом, так как они не имеют лингвистической формы.

7.

Ученые много раз делали попытки изобрести письменность, которая бы не предполагала знания какого-либо определенного языка.

8.

Важно отметить, что письмо – это знаковая система языка, которая не может непосредственно передавать мысли.

9.

Любое письмо основано на лингвистической системе языка, знание которой необходимо для понимания текста.

10.

Поскольку языки отличаются своей лингвистической структурой, существуют и различные формы письма.

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UNIT 2 THE FUNCTIONS OF WRITING Given that literacy is not a prerequisite of rationality and civilization, it may be asked why writing systems were invented and why, when they were, they so completely displaced preexisting oral traditions. Many accounts have been given of the dramatic impact of the encounter with written text on an “oral” culture. Isak Dinesen, in her autobiographical Out of Africa, reported on the response of Kikuyu tribesmen to their first exposures to written texts: “I learned that the effect of a piece of news was many times magnified when it was imparted by writing. The messages that would have been received with doubt and scorn if they had been given by word of mouth were now taken as gospel truth.” Certainly writing has been observed to displace oral traditions. The American scholar Albert Lord wrote: “When writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same purposes as the oral narrative song, when it is employed for telling stories and is widespread enough to find an audience capable of reading, this audience seeks its entertainment and instruction in books rather than in the living songs of men, and the older art gradually disappears.” The adoption and use of writing systems depend primarily on their ability to preserve language and information through time and across space. But the use of a writing system for this purpose is shaped in part by the nature of the system and by the cultural practices in the society that has adopted it. These uses tend, therefore, to be local and specific and characteristic of a particular literate society. The Canadian economist Harold Innis classified writing systems into two basic types: those that bind through time, exemplified by Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in stone and Akkadian cuneiform incised in clay; and those that bind across space, exemplified by the portable papyri used by the Romans. Writing used to store information for posterity may be considered to serve an archival function. Such writing may be used not only for constructing, accumulating, and preserving 15

records of political, religious, scientific, and literary interest but also for the more mundane purpose of keeping trade accounts and records. Writing used to transmit information across space, as in letters, encyclopedia, newspapers, and the like, may be considered to serve a communicative function. Writing used for purely private ends, to record notes, diaries, or other personal data, may be considered to serve a mnemonic function. Almost any notational form may be used for mnemonic purposes, foronly the person who “wrote” the message needs to be able to “read” it. The carved notches in a wooden counting stick or the pebbles in a counting sack corresponding to the number of cattle under the care of a cowherd are a suitable aide-mémoire, since the writer knows what the notches or pebbles represent. But such a system could not be read by others; it would not be clear what the notches represented or even that they represented anything at all. For a writing system to be communicative, the signs must be conventionalized so that the meaning can be grasped by other readers. Such a system may be restricted to a small set of familiar messages that can be read by a limited circle of acquaintances. But for a writing system to serve an archival function it must be sufficiently conventionalized to permit decoding and interpretation by readers who may know nothing about the writer or his message. It is only with the development of explicit writing systems capable of representing the nuances conveyed in speech that writing can be used archivally or communicatively. VOCABULARY Account n.

Значение, польза, выгода

Aide-memoire

Памятная записка

Archival adj.

Архивный

Bind v.

Связывать(ся), переплетать(ся)

Cowherd n.

Пастух

Displace v.

Замещать, вытеснять

Encounter n.

Тот кто сталкивается с 16

Exemplify v.

Служить примером

Explicit adj.

Ясный, четкий, прямой

Gospel truth

Истинная правда

Impact on n.

Влияние, воздействие

Impart v.

Передавать, сообщать

Incise v.

Вырезать

Magnify v.

Преувеличивать

Mnemonic adj.

Мнемонический

Mundane adj.

Земной, мирской, светский

Narrative adj.

Повествовательный

Notch n.

Зарубка

Portable papyrus

Переносной папирус

Posterity n.

Потомство, последующее поколение

Prerequisite n.

Предпосылка

Restrict to v.

Ограничивать до

Shape v.

Вырезать, формировать

Widespread adj.

Распространенный

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

Is literacy the result of civilization?

2.

How can a written text influence a reader?

3.

How did Isak Dineseu describe the effect of written texts on Kikuyu tribesmen?

4.

What role did writing begin to play after displacing oral traditions?

5.

Why was writing widespread so quickly?

6.

What influenced the use of writing system?

7.

What do uses of any writing system tend to be?

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8.

How many types did Harold Innis classify writing systems into? (How many types were writing systems classified into and by whom?)

9.

What kind of writing system does Egyptian hieroglyphics exemplify?

10.

What kind of writing may papyri represent?

11.

What purposes may writing serve?

12.

How can writing be used for storing information?

13.

In what way can information be transmitted by writing?

14.

Why can’t notches or pebbles be considered a universal way of storing information?

15.

What must the signs be for a writing system to be communicative?

16.

What makes a writing system easy for decoding?

17.

What allows a writing system to be used for archiving and communication?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. вытеснить существовавшие ранее устные традиции;

2. первая

демонстрация письменного текста; 3. эффект был во много раз больше; 4. передавать с помощью письма; 5. воспринимаются как чистая правда; 6.

наблюдается,

что

письменность

вытесняет

устную

7. сохранять язык и информацию во времени

традицию;

и пространстве;

8. представленная Египетскими иероглифами; 9. высеченный на камне; 10. коническое письмо, начертанное на глине; 11. хранит информацию для последующих поколений; 12. более светские цели; 13. вести торговые счета и записи; 14. исключительно в личных целях; 15. полезная памятка. Ex. 3. Give a brief summary of the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English using active vocabulary: 1.

Интересно, как была изобретена письменность и почему. 18

2.

Известно,

что

письменность

полностью

вытеснила

ранее

существовавшую устную традицию в культуре. 3.

Трудно себе представить, какое сильное влияние имели первые письменные тексты на человека.

4.

Любая новость, представленная в письменном виде, кажется во много раз важнее.

5.

Если бы я просто услышал об этом, а не прочитал, я бы скорее засомневался и отказался бы от этого предложения.

6.

Когда я прочитал об этом в газете, мои сомнения улетучились, и я все принял за чистую правду.

7.

Чтобы письменность могла распространиться, нужна была аудитория, которая бы смогла читать то, что было написано.

8.

Письменность стала идеальным средством для сохранения языка и информации во времени и пространстве.

9.

Харольд Иннис выделяет два типа письменности: один – это тот, что связан со временем, а другой – тот, что связан с пространством.

10.

Основными

функциями

письменности

являются:

архивная,

коммуникативная и мнемоническая. 11.

Мнемоническая функция – это абсолютно частное использование письма, как, например, дневники, личные данные и т. д.

12.

Почти любая форма записи может быть мнемонической, если только предназначена для того, кто писал это.

13.

В любой системе письменности значки должны быть стандартизованы так, чтобы быть понятными для читателя.

14.

Только письмо с четкой знаковой системой может передавать все нюансы речи и языка и использоваться для хранения информации и коммуникации.

19

UNIT 3 HISTORY OF WRITING SYSTEMS While speaking is a universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is acquired by all normal human beings without systematic instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until recently concentrated on a single aspectincreased efficiency- with the Greek invention of the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs (images) that can express the full range of meanings in a language. As Eric Havelock wrote, “At a stroke the Greeks provided a table of elements of linguistic sound not only manageable because of economy, but also accurate for the first time in the history of homo sapiens.” Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by word-based writing systems; then by soundbased syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet. The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique; the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech. The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for non alphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp distinction between the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit 20

orthographies require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents. It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to serve mnemonic purposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms but once invented could serve aesthetic functions. Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which have simple syllabic structure and a great number of homophones, a writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabary or an alphabet, would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that more recent accounts of writing systems have stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently, given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as appropriate to the languages they represent. Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development, and there are many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be traced back to the beginnings of symbol-making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that Oriental writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese. 21

VOCABULARY Abandon v.

Отказаться

Acquire v.

Усваивать, овладевать

Aesthetic adj.

Эстетический

Appropriate adj.

Соответствующий

Borrow v.

Заимствовать

Break down into

Разбить на

Consonantal adj.

Консонантный

Constituent n.

Составная часть

Contemporary adj.

Современный

Distinguish v.

Различать

Elaborate v.

Разрабатывать, отделывать

Encounter v.

Встречаться, сталкиваться

Familiarity n.

Знакомство

Graph n.

График, изображение

Homophone n.

Омофон

Manageable adj.

Удобный

None the less

Тем не менее

Notion n.

Понятие, мнение, представление

Orthography n.

Орфография, правописание

Pattern of sounds

Сочетание звуков

Perceptible adj.

Воспринимаемый, осознаваемый

Rank v.

Классифицировать, причислять

Species n.

Биологический вид, человеческий род

String n.

Цепочка

Subsequently adv.

Впоследствии, затем

Subtle adj.

Тонкий, неуловимый 22

Syllabary n.

Слоговая азбука

Syllabic adj.

Силлабический, слоговой

Unvocalized adj.

Безгласные

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

What is a definition of a universal human competence?

2.

How is speech acquired by people?

3.

How is writing acquired by people?

4.

Which appeared earlier: writing or speaking?

5.

What was the culmination of a long evolution of writing?

6.

What is efficiency of writing based on?

7.

How many and which stages did Ignace Gelb distinguish in the evolution of writing?

8.

What was the greatest achievement of Western culture?

9.

How was the first alphabet invented and by whom?

10.

How did the alphabet come to be used for the expression of a great many functions of speech?

11.

Is it difficult to master writing?

12.

What possibilities does the alphabet give to the reader?

13.

What does the efficiency of a writing system depend on?

14.

What do notions of explicitness depend on?

15.

Which languages do not use the alphabetic system of writing and why?

16.

How do the modern historians of writing treat the existing orthographies?

17.

Why is it unlikely that writing was invented only once and was borrowed by different cultural groups?

18.

How many histories of writing are recognised now?

23

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1.общечеловеческое умение; 2. исторические свидетельства о развитии письменности; 3. растущая эффективность; 4. рассматривается как наивысшая точка исторического развития; 5. ограниченный и удобный набор изображений (значков); 6. полный диапазон значений; 7. передавать тонкости значений; 8. он стал использоваться для; 9. понять впервые встретившееся слово; 10. уловить содержание отрывка в целом; 11. для того чтобы; 12. надо помнить, однако; 13. удовлетворять одной цели; 14. простая слоговая структура; 15. имея в виду именно эти факторы; 16. когда некоторые языки причисляются к более примитивным; 17. маловероятно, что письменность была изобретена только один раз; 18. нет причин полагать; 19. восточная письменность. Ex. 3. Give a brief summary of the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Говорение – это совершенно естественное умение для человека, не требующее специального систематического обучения.

2.

В отличие от говорения, технологиям письма надо обучать.

3.

Письменность имеет относительно небольшую историю, кульминацией развития которой является изобретение греками алфавита.

4.

По

существу,

алфавитная

лингвистических

звуков,

система способных

–

это

таблица

передавать

весь

элементов диапазон

значений в языке. 5.

В эволюции письменности можно различить четыре этапа: письмо с помощью картинок; письмо, основанное на слове; слоговая система письменности и, наконец, алфавитное письмо.

6.

Значение алфавита для Западной культуры вряд ли можно переоценить. 24

7.

Уникальной особенностью алфавита является то, что изобретенный однажды, он был заимствован многими культурами.

8.

Эффективность системы письменности зависит не только от ее природы, но и от функций, которые эта система выполняет.

9.

Алфавит явился удобной системой для греческого и ряда других европейских языков, но не для таких, как китайский или японский.

10.

Для языков с простой слоговой структурой и большим количеством омофонов, примерами которых служат китайский и японский языки, алфавит является чрезвычайно неэффективной системой.

11.

Совершенно очевидно, что разные языковые орфографии могут функционировать эффективно в языках, которые они представляют.

12.

В результате последних научных исследований лингвисты отказались от теории прогрессивной эволюции языков.

13.

Таким образом, одни языки не могут причисляться к более примитивным по сравнению с другими, как считали ранее.

14.

Все существующие языковые орфографии рассматриваются теперь как соответствующие тем языкам, которые они представляют.

25

UNIT 4 TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEMS A writing system consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system. Roughly speaking, if a character represents a meaningful unit, such as a morpheme or a word, the orthography is called a logographic writing system; if it represents a syllable, it is called a syllabic writing system; if a segment of a syllable, it is called a consonantal writing system or an unvocalized syllabary; and if a phoneme, it is called an alphabetic system. While relatively pure examples of these different types of script are known, most writing systems that have been used for general purposes combine properties of more than one type. General writing systems all analyze the linguistic form into constituents of meaning or sound. Chinese script is primarily a logographic script; each word or morpheme is represented by a single graph or character. Two words, even if they sound exactly the same, will be represented by entirely dissimilar characters. But as the number of distinguishable words in a language can run into the tens of thousands (written English has a recorded vocabulary of some 1,500,000 words), the number of logographic characters to be memorized is extremely large. Syllabaries provide a distinctive symbol for each distinct syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech composed of a vowel sound or a combination of consonant and vowel sounds; the sounds pa, pe, pi, po, pu are different syllables and are easily distinguished in a word. The word paper has two syllables, pa-per. Syllables are the most readily distinguishable units of speech, and consequently, the earliest of the sound-based, or phonographic, writing systems are syllabic. The number of syllables in a language, while differing considerably from language to language, is always quite large, hence some hundreds of graphs may be required to make a functioning syllabary. Even such writing systems are far from explicit, for any 26

string of syllabic graphs may be read in a number of different ways. Reading of such a script would rely upon the reader's prior knowledge and ability to work from the context, along with some guesswork. Consonantal writing systems, as the name implies, represent the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element. Such a system, therefore, would represent the syllables pa, pe, pi, po, pu with a single character. Such scripts have graphs for consonant sounds but not for vowel sounds, with the result that a certain amount of guesswork is involved in determining which syllable is being represented. This ambiguity, however, should not be overemphasized. When a consonantal system is used to represent a language like English, in which vowels differentiate root morphemes (in English, pat, pet, pit, pot, put are all different morphemes), discarding the vowel results in a highly ambiguous written expression that can be understood only by a reader who already had a good idea of the content of the written message. But in Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, the absence of characters representing vowels is much less serious, because in these languages vowel differences generally do not distinguish morphemes. Vowel differences mark inflections, such as tense and aspect that, while of some importance to the representation of meaning, are both more readily recovered from context and less likely to change the overall meaning. The failure to notice the intimate relation between the morphophonemic structure of the language and the type of orthography has led some scholars to underestimate the efficiency of consonantal writing systems and, perhaps, to overestimate the centrality of the invention of the alphabet to the evolution of Western culture. Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes. The achievement of the alphabet is to analyze the syllable into its underlying consonant and vowel constituents. The economy of representation comes from the fact that a large number of syllables can be generated from a small set of these constituents. An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and five vowels 27

can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent a full range of phonological differences. It is a script particularly suited to representing a language in which morphological differences are marked in phonological differences; it is less useful for a language, such as Chinese, in which one syllable represents a large number of morphemes. For the Chinese language a logographic system is more efficient. No orthography is a pure system. The clearest example of logographic writing, Chinese, consists not only of characters representing meanings but also of secondary characters based on sound similarity for representing meanings that were difficult to picture. It therefore relies upon both word-based and sound-based principles. On the other hand, alphabets, which are primarily sound-based, also use fixed letter strings to represent the same meaningful unit even if the pronunciation of that unit varies in different contexts. So, for example, the common spelling for the root photo is preserved in the words photograph and photography even though they are pronounced somewhat differently. Conversely, alphabets often provide different graphic representations for homophones (words that sound identical but have different meanings) the more clearly to distinguish their meanings, as in meat, meet, mete; pain, pane; be, bee. The morphemic unit is so fundamental to the reading process that some linguists have concluded that for an orthography to be practical and efficient, it is more important to provide an invariant visual form for each meaningful unit than for each sound unit. The shaping of a writing system to make it suitable for a wide range of cultural purposes required other developments besides the invention of a system of characters for representing linguistic form. To facilitate fast and accurate recognition, the form of writing was improved by introducing spaces between the words, developing conventions for punctuation and paragraphing, and simplifying graphic forms. This evolution continued through the invention of printing and the invention of type fonts. And to exploit the aesthetic properties of the writing system, artistic forms of writing were developed. 28

VOCABULARY A number of

Ряд

Along with adv.

Наряду

Ambiguity n.

Двусмысленность, туманность, неясность

Artistic adj.

Художественный

Character n.

Символ, знак

Combine v.

Сочетать

Constituent n.

Составная часть

Content n.

Содержание

Convention n.

Условность

Conversely adv.

Наоборот

Determine v.

Определять

Discard v.

Сбрасывать, отбрасывать (как ненужное)

Distinguishable adj.

Различимый

Exploit v.

Использовать

Facilitate v.

Ускорять

Font n.

Комплект шрифта

Generate v.

Производить, генерировать

Graph n.

Графическое изображение

Guesswork n.

Догадка

Hence adv.

Следовательно

Imply v.

Подразумевать, означать

Invariant adj.

Инвариантный

Logographic adj.

Логографический

Meaningful adj.

Значимый

Memorize v.

Запоминать 29

Orthography n.

Правописание, орфография

Overemphasize v.

Придавать слишком большое значение

Overestimate v.

Переоценивать

Property n.

Свойство

Pure adj.

Чистый, беспримесный

Recognition n.

Признание, узнавание

Rely upon v.

Полагаться, надеяться, рассчитывать на

Root n.

Корень

Type v.

Печатать

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

What does any writing system represent?

2.

Can any visible sign or mark be called a character of a writing system?

3.

What is a logographic writing system?

4.

What types can all writing systems be divided into?

5.

What is an alphabetic system based upon?

6.

Can any writing system be a pure example of one of the different types of script?

7.

What are the main constituents of general writing systems?

8.

What is a logographic script?

9.

What kind of script is called syllabic?

10.

What does a consonantal writing system represent?

11.

How can you characterize an alphabetic writing system?

12.

What are the advantages of alphabetic systems?

13.

Why isn’t alphabetic system suitable for absolutely any language?

14.

Is Chinese based purely on logographic writing? Why?

30

15.

What features of logographic writing system does the English alphabet contain?

16.

Why does any writing system require a constant development?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. набор видимых значков; 2. структура в лингвистической системе; 3.

проще

говоря;

4.

включать

свойства;

5.

основные

системы

письменности; 6. составляющая значения или звучания; 7. даже если они произносятся абсолютно одинаково; 8. совершенно непохожие значки; 9. может доходить до; 10. непохожий символ для каждого отдельного слога; 11. легко различаются в слове; 12. наряду с догадкой; 13. как видно из названия; 14. приводит к весьма двусмысленному письменному выражению; 15. хорошее представление о содержании написанного; 16. мало вероятно, что измениться общий смысл; 17. привели некоторых ученых

к недооценке

эффективности;

18. переоценить

значение;

19. мельчайший произносимый сегмент речи; 20. короче говоря; 21. весь диапазон 23.

фонологических

вторичные

символы,

различий;

22.

основанные

самый на

яркий

звуковом

пример; подобии;

24. неизменные буквосочетания; 25. различные графические изображения омофонов; 26. обеспечить неизменную визуальную форму; 27. чтобы ускорить быстрое и точное понимание; 28. разработка стандарта для пунктуации; 29. упрощение графических форм; 30. изобретение печатных оттисков; 31. чтобы использовать эстетические свойства письма; 32. художественная форма письма. Ex. 3. Retell the text.

31

Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Любая система письменности – это набор видимых значков или меток, которые соответствуют лингвистической системе.

2.

Знаки системы письменности могут представлять различные уровни значимых единиц лингвистической системы: морфемы или слова, слоги и фонемы.

3.

Если мельчайшая значимая единица – морфема или слово – система называется

логографической

системой

письменности,

примером

которой является китайский язык. 4.

Если самая маленькая значимая единица – это слог, то такая система называется слоговой системой письменности, примером которой являются такие языки, как хебрю и арабский.

5.

Алфавитная система письменности основана на фонологической структуре языка.

6.

Существует тесная связь между морфонемической структурой языка и типом используемой орфографии.

7.

Непонимание связи между структурой языка и типом орфографии заставило некоторых ученых переоценить значение изобретения алфавита для развития западной культуры.

8.

Достижением алфавита среди других систем письменности является ограниченный набор видимых знаков, которые представляют собой фонемы гласных и согласных.

9.

Алфавит, состоящий всего из 21 согласного и 5 гласных, может произвести более 2000 слогов, короче говоря, полный диапазон фонологических различий.

10.

Ни одна из орфографий не представляет собой какую-либо систему письменности в чистом виде.

32

11.

Логографическая система, которая основана на принципе слова, может иметь и звуковые знаки, а алфавитная система, основанная на звуках, может включать неизменные буквосочетания для выражения одной и той же значимой единицы.

12.

После того, как алфавитная система была изобретена, она потребовала дальнейшего развития и, наконец, приобрела современную форму и привела к изобретению печатания.

33

UNIT 5 DEVELOPMENT OF ALPHABETIC SYSTEMS Sumerian script was adopted in the 3rd millennium BC by the Akkadians, who greatly expanded the phonographic properties of the script and were responsible for most of the cuneiform writing in a form known today as Akkadian cuneiform. While cuneiform had many graphs that represented syllables, many syllables were not represented. The methods used for representing syllables that did not have distinctive graphs were quite unsystematic. The first writing system consistently based on the sound structure of a language was Linear B. Linear B was an incomplete script for representing the phonological structures of the spoken language. Hence, there are usually several ways of reading a series of Linear B graphs, and a correct reading depended upon the reader's knowing what the text is about. The final stage in the evolution of writing systems was the discovery of the alphabetic principle, the procedure of breaking the syllable into its constituent consonantal and vowel sounds. According to Geoffrey Sampson, the British linguist, “Most, and probably all, ‘alphabetic' scripts derive from a single ancestor: the Semitic alphabet, created sometime in the 2nd millennium [BC].” Modern versions of Semitic script include the Hebrew script and the Arabic script. Their most prominent characteristic is that they have graphs for consonants but not for vowels. This fact has led some scholars, notably Gelb and Havelock, to claim that Semitic scripts are not true alphabets but rather unvocalized syllabaries. Other scholars, noting that the graphs represent consonants rather than syllables–for example, pa, pe, pi, po, and pu would all be represented by the same character– insist that the script is an alphabet.

34

Because vowel sounds generally distinguish grammatical rather than lexical meaning, some Semitic writing systems never developed any device for representing them. Nonetheless, ignoring the vowels does result in an orthography that is far from explicit or complete; many ambiguities in decoding remain. The transition from consonantal writing to alphabetic writing, writing with full representation of both consonants and vowels, occurred when the Semitic script was adapted to the Greek language. This occurred about 1000–900 BC. Scholars have traditionally considered the Greek invention as a stroke of genius. While not minimizing the significance of the Greek invention, it is now recognized that the invention of the alphabet was, in fact, the rather straightforward consequence of applying a script invented for representing one kind of language to a quite different kind. The letters used by the Greeks to represent consonantal sounds were borrowed rather directly from the Semitic script. What was distinctive was that the Greeks used six of the Semitic letters, those that represented sounds that did not occur in Greek, to represent vowel sounds. Greek, like English, is an IndoEuropean language that uses vowel distinctions to make lexical contrasts. Moreover, words may consist simply of vowels, words may begin with vowels, and words with adjacent vowels are not uncommon. Such forms are rare in Semitic languages in which simple consonant-vowel syllable structures predominate and in which vowel differences usually mark only grammatical inflections. The Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet (along with many Greek words and much of Greek culture) to form the Roman, or Latin, alphabet. Written “learned” Latin was the language of state and of scholarship in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. Further developments of the alphabet resulted from changes in the phonology of Latin and of the Romance languages that evolved from it. For English, the differentiation of all the 26 letters was completed only in the 19th century. While the invention of logographic writing, the later invention of the principle of phonetization, the analysis of syllables into a consonantal writing 35

system, and the addition of vowels to make a full alphabet do constitute progress toward an efficient, economical, explicit, and complete writing system, this progress was not simply a matter of increasing insight. Advances resulted from attempts to apply a writing system invented for one language to another language for which it was not completely appropriate. Yet the accumulated discoveries yielded an analysis of deeper and deeper levels of linguistic structure of the type associated with discoveries in the natural sciences. For this reason, writing has almost always been the means not only for transcribing speech but also for uncovering its underlying structure. That is, to a large extent writing is what has made people conscious of the properties of speech. Observation of children learning to read and write an alphabetic orthography suggests that children pass through some of the same stages in interpreting the code that the writing system itself passed through in the course of its development. The youngest child's hypothesis about writing is that words must be similar in some way to the objects they represent. Thus, at the earliest stage children think that the word “train” must be represented by a long word because it is a long thing. Similarly, they think that “two little pigs” must be represented by two words, one for each pig, and so on. Later, they invent the hypotheses that writing represents words rather than things and that these words are series of sounds. At this point children may write the word with a series of consonants; cat becomes kt. Only later do they recognize the alphabetic principle that words must be written with both consonants and vowels. Yet the evolution of the alphabet, an invention of enormous importance for Greek and for all Indo-European languages, was of little use for Semitic languages, in which the vowels played a smaller role than in Greek. And it was of no use at all for Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language with a great many homophones.

36

VOCABULARY Addition n.

Добавление, дополнение Смежный,

примыкающий,

Adjacent adj.

близлежащий

Adopt v.

Принимать, перенимать

Advance n.

Продвижение

Along with adv.

Наряду с

Ambiguity n.

Двусмысленность, неясность

Ancestor n.

Предок, прародитель

Appropriate adj.

Соответствующий

Be responsible for

Отвечать за

Break into v.

Делить на

Claim v.

Утверждать

Conscious adj.

Сознающий, понимающий

Consequence n.

Следствие, последствие

Constitute v.

Составлять, устанавливать

Derive from v.

Происходить от

Distinction n.

Отличие, различие

Evolve v.

Развивать, разрабатывать

Expand v.

Расширять

Inflection n.

флексия, склонение (грам.)

Insight n.

Проницательность,

понимание,

постижение Nonetheless adv.

Тем не менее

Occur v.

Встречаться, происходить

Prominent adj.

Заметный, выдающийся

Property n.

Свойство

Significance n.

Значение, смысл

Straightforward adj.

Прямой, непосредственный 37

Stroke of genius

Гениальный

ход,

гениальная

мысль To a large extent

В большой степени

Uncover v.

Обнажать, обнаруживать

Yield v.

Приносить, производить

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

Who developed the cuneiform writing and when?

2.

What were the characteristics of cuneiform writing?

3.

Which was the first writing system, based on the sound structure of a language?

4.

What were the drawbacks of this system?

5.

What does the alphabetic principle of a writing system represent?

6.

When was the first alphabet created?

7.

Which script was the ancestor of all alphabetic scripts?

8.

Which modern scripts may be attributed to Semitic script?

9.

What is the most prominent characteristic of these modern scripts?

10.

What were the reasons of inexplicit and incomplete orthography in Semitic writing systems?

11.

When did the transition to pure alphabetic writing occur?

12.

What was called a stroke of genius?

13.

According to modern studies, the invention of the alphabet was the consequence of what?

14.

What was a peculiar feature of the Greek alphabet?

15.

How did the Latin alphabet appear?

16.

What language evolved from Latin?

17.

What did the observations of children learning to read and write suggest?

18.

Did the evolution of the alphabet influence all the existing languages?

38

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. расширить свойства письменного текста; 2. значки, которые представляли собой слоги; 3. совершенно бессмысленный; 4. фонологическая структура языка речи; 5. разложение слогов на согласные и гласные звуки; 6. происходить от одного и того же прародителя; 7. этот факт привел к утверждению 8. пренебрежение гласными все-таки приводит; 9. переход от консонантной к алфавитной письменности; 10. был приспособлен к греческому языку; 11. не преуменьшая важности изобретения греков; 12. прямое следствие; 13. который использует различия между гласными; 14. дифференциация была завершена; 15. не просто дело все большего понимания; 16. развитие было результатом попыток; 17. открытия привели к анализу более глубоких уровней лингвистической структуры; 18. в большой степени; 19. изобретение огромной важности; 20. оно было совершенно бесполезно. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Шумерская письменность третьего тысячелетия до нашей эры уже содержала знаки, которые представляли собой слоги.

2.

Слоговое письмо шумеров было первым шагом на пути к алфавиту.

3.

Открытие алфавитного принципа явилось решающим фактором в развитии системы письменности.

4.

Алфавитный принцип привел к тому, что слоги в слоговой системе письменности стали разбиваться на составляющие их согласные и гласные звуки.

39

5.

Зачатки алфавитного принципа можно найти в семическом алфавите, созданном во втором тысячелетии до нашей эры, в котором уже были значки для согласных, но не было для гласных звуков.

6.

В семическом письме гласные звуки вносили лишь грамматические различия, а не

лексические, поэтому семическая письменность так и

не развила никаких знаков для представления их. 7.

Хотя в языках подобных семическому, таких как хебрю и арабский, консонантная система сохранилась, пренебрежение гласными звуками все-таки ведет к орфографии, которая далеко несовершенна и приводит к двусмысленности при расшифровке.

8.

Переход от консонантного письма к алфавитному был сделан греками в 1000–900 годах до нашей эры.

9. 10.

Изобретение алфавита греками считается гениальным событием. Не умаляя значения греческого изобретения, современные ученые признают, что появление алфавита

было фактически следствием

применения письма, изобретенного для одного языка, к совершенно другому. 11.

Гениальным изобретением греков явилось то, что они использовали 6 семических букв, которые не вошли в греческий алфавит, для представления гласных звуков.

12.

Позднее римляне заимствовали греческий алфавит и сформировали римский или латинский алфавит, который и стал родоначальником романских языков.

13.

Английский алфавит также прошел долгий путь развития, прежде чем дифференциация его 26 букв была полностью завершена в XIX веке.

14.

В большой степени именно письмо заставило людей обратить внимание на особенности и свойства речи привело к появлению лингвистической науки.

40

и, в конечном счете,

UNIT 6 THE RISE OF LITERACY Competence with written language, both in reading and writing, is known as literacy. High levels of literacy are required for using scripts for a wide range of somewhat specialized functions. When a large number of individuals in a society are competent in using written language to serve these functions, the whole society may be referred to as a literate society. Just as scripts have a history, so, too, does literacy have a history. This history closely reflects the increasing number of ways in which written materials have been used and the increasing number of readers who have been able to use them. Scripts were elaborated to serve new purposes; more importantly, new kinds of writing systems permitted them to serve a wider range of purposes by a larger number of individuals. Although the uses of writing reflect religious, political, and social factors and hence are not determined simply by orthography, two dimensions of the script are important in understanding the growth of literacy: learnability and expressive power. Learnability refers to the ease with which the script can be acquired, and expressive power refers to the resources of the script for unambiguously expressing the full range of meanings available in the oral language. These two dimensions are inversely related to each other. Simple, restricted scripts are readily learned. Pictographic signs such as those used in “environmental writing” and logographic scripts with a limited set of characters are easiest to learn and, indeed, are acquired more or less automatically by children. Syllabaries are reported to be learnable in a day, or in a few days. Consonantal scripts and alphabets are difficult to learn and usually require a few years of schooling. Full logographic systems, such as Chinese, or mixed systems, such as Japanese, are difficult to acquire because they require the memorization of thousands of distinctive characters. Once learned, however, they appear to function as well as alphabets. 41

But pictographic signs and logographic scripts with a limited, readily learnable set of graphs are restricted to expressing a limited range of meanings. Syllabaries are highly ambiguous and hence dependent on knowledge not only of the script but also on the likely content of the message. Syllabaries therefore serve a restricted set of functions, primarily personal correspondence. They are of limited use in expressing novel meanings that could be read in the same way by all readers of the script. Consonantal and alphabetic writing systems can express essentially all the lexical and grammatical meanings in the language (but not the intonation) and are thus highly suitable for the expression of original meanings. They constitute an ideal medium for technical, legal, literary, and scientific texts that must be read in the same way by readers dispersed in both time and space. The ease of acquisition of a script is an important factor in determining whether a script remains the possession of an elite or whether it can be democratized, that is, turned into a possession of ordinary people. Syllabaries are readily learned, but their residual ambiguity tends to restrict their uses. Alphabets have been viewed by many historians as decisive in the democratization of writing; alphabetic writing could become a possession of ordinary people and yet serve a full range of functions. But even in a literate society, most readers learn to read only a narrow range of written materials; specialized materials, such as those pertaining to science or government, remain the domain of elites who have acquired additional education. The second factor determining the social breadth of the use of writing is the range of functions that a script serves. The functions served are directly related to the orthography. Early forms of writing served an extremely narrow range of functions and were wholly unsuitable for others. While tokens served for simple record keeping, and early Sumerian writing was useful for a range of administrative purposes, a relatively complete script is required for writing histories, edicts, treaties, and scientific and literary works that, to be useful, must be read in the same way by all readers. Considerable scholarly controversy surrounds the question of the role of the invention of more complete or explicit 42

scripts, such as the alphabet, in the evolution of these more specialized uses of language. If the alphabet were decisive, one could look for the basis of many of the particular features of Western culture in the invention of an alphabetic orthography. This question is far from resolved. Historically, the rise of cities coincided with the development of a script suitable for serving bureaucratic purposes. Later, the scientific and philosophical tradition that originated in classical Greece and that prevails in the West to this day developed along with the alphabet. Many writers, including Eric Havelock, have maintained that the alphabet was a decisive factor in the cultural development of the West. Scientists have claimed that the rise of literacy in the later Middle Ages was fundamental to the cultural flowering known as the Renaissance. It is perhaps characteristic of alphabet-based conceptions of literacy to draw a strict distinction between reading and interpreting. As interpretation came to be seen as interpolation into or distortion of the text, the attempt was made to write texts in such a manner as to reduce the possibility of variant interpretations. This resulted in the attempt to write texts with univocal meanings, texts that mean neither more nor less than what they say. To achieve this required the formalization of grammatical structures, the conventionalization of meanings of terms, and the invention of standard punctuation. Such textual developments were especially important for the specialized functions of science and philosophy. The distinction between meaning and interpretation fostered the idea that texts have a literal meaning, that knowledge can be completely expressed by means of such literal meanings, and that texts can be autonomous and objective. In the Western tradition, knowledge is treated as if it were an ideal text, as something that is regarded by most learners as given rather than created. These assumptions about meaning were important to both the literary and the scientific traditions that took form in western Europe in the 17th century and that continue to this day. When writing becomes a predominant institutional and archival form it has contributed to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by 43

skepticism and science. Writing has permitted the development of extensive bureaucracy, accounting, and legal systems organized on the basis of explicit rules and procedures. Writing has replaced face-to-face governance with written law and depersonalized administrative procedures. And, on the other hand, it has turned writers from scribes into authors and thereby contributed to the recognition of the importance of the thoughts of individuals and consequently to the development of individualism. VOCABULARY Accounting n.

Бухгалтерия, бухгалтерское дело

Acquire v.

Приобретать, усваивать, овладевать

Acquisition n.

Приобретение

Available adj.

Наличный, доступный

Breadth n.

Широта, размах

Coincide v.

Совпадать

Consequently adv.

Следовательно, значит, стало быть

Constitute v.

Представлять собой

Controversy n.

Противоречие

Conventional adj.

Обычный, привычный

Correspondence n.

Переписка, соответствие

Decisive adj.

Решающий

Dimension n.

Измерение, размер

Disperse v.

Рассеиваться

Distinction n.

Отличие, различие

Distinctive adj.

Отличительный, характерный

Distortion n.

Искажение, искривление, извращение

Domain n.

Область

44

Edict n.

Указ

Elaborate v.

Разрабатывать

Elite n.

Элита

Essentially adv.

По существу

Expressive adj.

Выразительный

Flowering n.

Процветать

Foster v.

Вынашивать

Governance n.

Управление, руководство

Hence adv.

Следовательно

Institutional adj.

Установленный, учрежденный

Interpolation n.

Интерполяция

Inverse adj.

Обратный

Learnability n.

Способность к обучению

Likely adj.

Вероятный, правдоподобный

Literacy n.

Грамотность

Literate adj.

Грамотный

Medium n.

Среда

Novel adj.

Новый, необычный

Once adv.

Как только, когда бы не

Permit v.

Позволять

Pertain v.

Подходить

Possess v.

Обладать

Possession n.

Владение, собственность

Power n.

Способность

Predominant adj.

Преобладающий

Prevail v.

Преобладать

Record keeping

Ведение записей

Regard v.

Считать, рассматривать

Relate v.

Устанавливать связь 45

Residual adj.

Остаточный

Resolve v.

Решать, принимать решение

Restrict v.

Ограничивать

Scholary adj.

Научный, ученый

Strict adj.

Точный

Thereby adv.

Этим, таким образом

Therefore adv.

Поэтому

Token n.

Знак, символ, жетон

Treaty n.

Договор

Turn into a possession

Превратиться в собственность

Univocal adj.

Универсальный речевой

View v.

Наблюдать, рассматривать

Wholly adv.

Полностью, всецело

Ex. 1. Answer the questions: 1.

What is literacy?

2.

What kind of a society may be considered literate?

3.

What does the history of literacy reflect?

4.

What are the two dimensions of the script that help to understand the growth of literacy?

5.

What part did learnability play in the growth of literacy?

6.

What does the term “expressive power” mean?

7.

Why was expressive power so important in the development of writing?

8.

What were the stages of learnability in the history of writing?

9.

How was the accuracy of decoding developed with the development of writing systems?

10.

What system appeared to be decisive in the democratization of writing?

11.

How did the range of functions that a script served change with the development of writing? 46

12.

What was the role of literacy in the cultural flowering known as the Renaissance?

13.

What

led

to

the

formalization

of

grammatical

structures

and

conventionalization of meanings? 14.

How was knowledge treated in the Western tradition?

15.

How did writing change the life of a society?

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. высокий уровень грамотности; 2. широкий диапазон функций; 3. служить новым целям; 4. рост грамотности; 5. для недвусмысленного выражения значений; 6. иметь обратную зависимость; 7. логографические знаки легче всего выучить; 8. требуют нескольких лет обучения в школе; 9. запоминание тысяч непохожих значков; 10. выражать ограниченный диапазон значений; 11. быть очень двусмысленным; 12. предполагаемое содержание; 13. личная переписка; 14. они ограниченно используются; 15. представлять идеальную среду; 16. легкость обучения письму; 17. оставаться привилегией элиты; 18. значительные научные разногласия;

19. возникновение городов;

20. решающий фактор культурного развития; 21. культурный расцвет; 22. проводить четкое разграничение между; 23. толкование начало рассматриваться; 25.

буквальное

установленная

24. значение;

возможность 26.

вариантной

сформироваться;

27.

интерпретации; преобладающая

форма; 28. способствовала замещению мифа историей;

29. широкое развитие бюрократии 30. на основе четких правил и процедур. Ex. 3. Retell the text.

47

Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Грамотность определяется как способность писать на каком-либо определенном языке.

2.

Письменный язык выполняет большой диапазон специфических функций.

3.

Общество считается грамотным, когда большинство его членов могут успешно

использовать

письменный

язык

для

выполнения

его

разнообразных функций. 4.

Грамотность имеет свою историю, которая тесно связана с развитием путей использования письменных материалов.

5.

Кроме того, история грамотности связана с религиозной, политической и социальной историей общества.

6.

Легкость овладения письмом и выразительность письменного текста – это те факторы, которые способствовали росту грамотности.

7.

Пиктографические значки с ограниченным набором характеристик легче всего выучиваются, тогда как полностью логографические и смешанные системы, такие как китайское и японское письмо, трудны для овладения, поскольку требуют запоминания тысяч отличных друг от друга значков.

8.

Пиктографическое и логографическое письмо, однако, имеет большой недостаток: набор значков этих систем ограничивается выражением небольшого диапазона значений.

9.

Недостатком слоговых систем является двусмысленность, что не позволяет использовать их для выражения новых значений.

10.

Консонантные и алфавитные системы выгодно отличаются от всех остальных тем, что могут выражать практически все лексические и грамматические значения в языке, а значит и передавать точный первоначальный смысл.

48

11.

Легкость овладения алфавитом стала решающим фактором в развитии письменности.

12.

Другим важным фактором в развитии письменности является орфография,

которая

непосредственно

связана

с

функциями,

выполняемыми письмом. 13.

Исторически, расцвет городов совпал с развитием письменности, которая служила бюрократическим целям.

14.

Научная, философская, а также и культурная традиции шли в ногу с развитием письменности.

15.

Формализация грамматической структуры, стандартизация значений терминов и изобретение пунктуации привели к тому, что знание можно было передать с помощью буквальных значений, а тексты сделать автономными и объективными.

16.

Такое точное по смыслу письмо превратило пишущих из писцов в авторов, тем самым признавая важность мыслей отдельных людей и, по существу, привело к развитию индивидуализма.

49

UNIT 7 LITERACY AND SCHOOLING Whereas oral language is learned quite independently of whether it is taught or not, literacy is largely dependent upon teaching. While some local scripts are taught relatively informally by parents or someone who knows the script well, widespread or universal literacy is dependent upon schooling. Indeed, in many societies schooling and literacy have been almost synonymous. Schools in such diverse places as Sumer and China developed concurrently with the development of a full writing system and were concerned primarily with teaching first adults and later children to read and write. And it is inconceivable that modern, technological societies could survive without schools to develop high levels of literacy. Although schooling is critical to the development of literacy, it is not, by itself, sufficient. Historians have shown that the level of literacy produced by schools of any society is directly tied to the functions and levels of literacy in the society as a whole. Consequently, it is unrealistic to expect that a modern, literate society could be created simply through establishing schools and teaching children to read. Schools tend to reflect society rather than to change it dramatically. When compulsory schooling was introduced in Britain, Europe, and America in the 19th century, it was nurtured by an environment of “lay” literacy in which as much as 75 percent of the population could use written materials for informal purposes such as keeping diaries, reading and writing notes and letters, and personal record keeping. Such a climate of widespread practical literacy is important to the effectiveness of schooling. The relation between literate practices in the home and the level of literacy achieved by children in school has been documented. It is common to think of literacy as the simple ability to read and write. In part such thinking is the consequence of the naive assumption that alphabetic literacy is a matter of simply decoding graphs into sounds and vice versa. In fact, 50

literacy involves competence in reading, writing, and interpreting texts of various sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher levels of comprehension and interpretation. These higher levels depend upon the knowledge of specialized uses of language. The intimate relations among language, literacy, and knowledge have contributed to the identification of literacy with schooling. As different scripts serve different functions and make different demands upon readers, it is a complex matter to define literacy in universal terms and so to judge the literacy levels of a society at different periods or to compare one society with another. Scripts that,because of incompleteness or inexplicitness, rely heavily upon the prior knowledge of reader and writer remain the domain of a specialized elite, as did cuneiform, or they are used for rather restricted purposes, like for example a syllabic system. Scripts that are relatively explicit and complete permit a reader who is unfamiliar with a text to read it in a reliable way and hence they can be used for a much broader range of functions. The form of the script may be less crucial than the range of functions a script serves. With the growth of readership there came an increased production of materials to be read, an increased number of social functions the script is used for, and the invention of new, more specialized genres of writing. The novel form, for example, was invented in Europe only in the 17th century. Other specialized uses of writing developed much earlier. As European societies became more literate during the Middle Ages, writing came to be used for functions that earlier had been performed by oral language and by ritual. Indenture of servants, deeding of property, evidence at trials, and accounts of the lives of saints all came to be functions of written texts. As literacy began to be required for these vital social purposes, oral language came to be seen as loose, unruly and lacking in social authority. And people who could not read and write came to be regarded as simple and ignorant–in short, unlettered. Rising levels of literacy in Europe were closely related to great social transformations, notably the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science. The right to read the Bible for oneself and to discover its meaning was the 51

fundamental tenet of Protestantism, and the private study and verification of written texts was important to science. Both of these functions were enormously facilitated by the development of printing and by the translation of important books from scholarly Latin into vernacular languages. With the increase in the uses of writing and the spread of printing there were more texts to read. Concurrently, European society as a whole became more literate in two ways: more individuals learned to read and write their native tongues, and even those who could not themselves read and write came to rely upon written documents as loci of authority and significance. In the 18th and 19th centuries in western Europe and in America, even before the establishment of compulsory schooling, more than half of the population had some competence in reading and writing. Compulsory schooling had, by the end of the 19th century, made some level of literacy more or less universal. Partly because of the close tie between schooling and literacy, literacy levels are often defined exclusively in terms of the number of years that a person has attended school. Educational institutions usually differentiate a basic, or functional, level of literacy, roughly equivalent to six years of schooling, from a high level of literacy, a level of competence roughly equivalent to 10 to 12 years of schooling. Such categorical distinctions have been criticized because they are insensitive to the diversity of particular uses of literacy even in a literate society and the irrelevance of the school to many of them. Many people incapable of or uninterested in reading continuous texts pertaining to science and literature nonetheless read menus, catalogs, letters, labels, warnings, invoices, and a range of other materials of relevance and interest to them. Moreover, literacy levels are judged against a sliding scale. The more literate the society becomes, the higher a standard of literacy is judged as functional. In Sweden in the 17th century a person was judged as literate, and allowed to marry, if he could read bits of the catechism and sign the church registry. In the United States at the time of World War II, when soldiers were screened for military service the army defined a minimal level of literacy as that normally achieved in 52

the fifth grade (about 10 years of age). By 1966 the criterion of functional literacy in the United States had been raised to completion of secondary school by the Adult Education Act passed by Congress in that year. Using this criterion, some writers have claimed that 25 percent of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate. Some commentators see in such figures a social problem of great importance and promote various programs of educational reform intended to produce higher levels of literacy. As an alternative to simply identifying levels of literacy with years of schooling, some scholars have distinguished levels of literacy in another way. Environmental or lay literacy is the term used to designate that form of unspecialized competence involved in generally dealing with a literate environment. Such literacy need never be taught. It is a type of literacy that is acquired through participating in a literate environment in which written signs, labels, trademarks, headlines, sports scores, and the like, are ubiquitous. A literate society is also dependent upon the development of elite literacy, a high level of literate competence, possessed by a relatively small percentage of the population, in specialized fields of endeavour such as science, law, or literature. High levels of literate competence involve learning a somewhat specialized vocabulary as well as the nuances of meaning that are relevant to lexical choice. It is estimated that literate people have a reading vocabulary, consisting of words that are encountered only in reading and writing, that may be more than double the size of their ordinary speaking vocabulary. In addition to specialized vocabularies, high levels of literate competence involve knowledge of specialized grammatical constructions that serve to set out explicitly the logical form of an argument and of specialized genres or literary forms such as description, explanation and argument. These specialized skills require many years of formal schooling to be mastered. VOCABULARY Assumption n.

Предположение, допущение

Attend v.

Посещать 53

Be encountered

Встречаться

Be screened for

Быть отобранным

Be ubiquitous

Вездесущий

Be unlettered

Неграмотный, необразованный

Claim v.

Утверждать, заявлять

Compulsory adj.

Обязательный

Concurrently adv.

Одновременно

Consequence n.

Последствие

Deeding of property

Акт/ договор о собственности

Designate v.

Обозначать

Differentiate from v.

Отличать от

Diverse adj.

Разный, разнообразный

Endeavour n.

Старание

Environment n.

Окружающая среда

Evidence n.

Свидетельство, доказательство

Inconceivable adj.

Непостижимый, немыслимый

Indenture n.

Контракт (с хозяином)

Insensitive to adj.

Нечувствительный, невосприимчивый

Invoice n.

Счет на товар

Judge v.

Оценивать

Keep diaries

Вести дневник

Lay literacy

Мирская грамотность

Locus (loci pl.) n.

Классическая цитата

Nonetheless adv.

Тем не менее

Notablе adj.

Замечательный, заметный, известный

Nurtur v.

Питать

Participate v.

Участвовать 54

Pertain v.

Принадлежать, относиться

Relevance n.

Уместность

Set out

Выставлять

Sliding scale

Скользящая шкала

Sufficient adj.

Достаточный

Tenet n.

Догмат, принцип, доктрина

Tie n.

Связь

Transformation n.

Преобразование

Trial n.

Суд

Verification n.

Проверка, подтверждение

Vice versa adv.

Наоборот

Widespread adj.

Распространенный

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

What does literacy depend on?

2.

What is the relation between the development of schooling and a writing system?

3.

How do schools influence the level of literacy in a society?

4.

Can schools dramatically change society?

5.

When was compulsory schooling first introduced in Britain and in Europe?

6.

What is meant by environment or “lay” literacy?

7.

How is “lay” literacy and schooling interconnected?

8.

What is the common understanding of literacy?

9.

What does real literacy involve?

10.

Is it possible to define literacy in universal forms?

11.

What is most crucial for a script: its form or its functions?

12.

What specialized and social purposes is writing used for?

13.

Why did people who couldn’t read and write come to be regarded as simple and ignorant? 55

14.

What can the rising levels of literacy in Europe be attributed to?

15.

How did printing influence literacy?

16.

When did the level of literacy in Europe become more or less universal?

17.

What is the usual way to define the level of literacy?

18.

What is a basic or functional level of literacy?

19.

What do high levels of literate competence involve?

20.

How can people master the specialized skills connected with reading and writing?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. Широкая всеобщая грамотность; 2. развиваться одновременно; 3. касались в основном обучения взрослых; 4. школьное обучение важно для распространения грамотности; 5. само по себе это недостаточно; 6. обязательное школьное обучение; задокументировано;

9.

7. вести дневник;

следствие

наивного

8. подробно

предположения;

10.

предшествующее знание; 11. относительно ясный и полный; 12. контракт слуг с хозяином; 13. договор о собственности; 14. судебное свидетельство; 15. жизнеописание святых; 16. очень важные социальные цели; 17. начали считаться

примитивными

преобразования;

невеждами;

18.

серьезные

19. основной принцип Протестантизма;

социальные 20. перевод с

латинского на родной язык; 21. начали доверять письменным документам; 22. посещать школу; 23. поскольку они не отражают разнообразия; 24. оцениваются по скользящей шкале;

25. реформа, направленная на

повышение уровня грамотности; 26. приобретаться на практике. Ex. 3. Retell the text.

56

Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Грамотность и школьное обучение тесно взаимосвязаны.

2.

Устному языку можно обучиться вполне самостоятельно, и школа для этого не требуется.

3.

Школьное обучение развивалось, по существу, одновременно с развитием системы письменности.

4.

Школы являются очень важным, но не единственным фактором

в

развитии грамотности. 5.

Совершенно очевидно, что грамотное общество нельзя создать, только увеличивая количество школ и обучая детей чтению.

6.

Впервые

обязательное

школьное

обучение

появилось

в

Великобритании, Европе и Америке в XIX веке. 7.

До XIX века грамотность населения была обусловлена средой и обществом, т. е. большая часть населения могла читать и использовать письмо для неформальных целей, это была так называемая «мирская» грамотность.

8.

Нельзя воспринимать грамотность как только способность читать и писать, т.е. просто расшифровывать знаки, превращая их в звуки речи и наоборот.

9.

Грамотность заключается в компетенции в чтении и письме, а также в мастерстве восприятия и интерпретации текстов из различных отраслей знаний.

10.

Рост умеющих читать повлек увеличение производства печатных материалов, а значит и увеличение числа социальных функций, для которых использовались печатные тексты.

11.

Такая форма, как роман, появилась в Европе в XVII веке, тогда как другие специфические формы использования письма развились гораздо раньше.

57

12.

Повышение уровня грамотности в Европе было тесно связано с Реформацией Протестантизма и подъемом науки.

13.

Основным догматом Протестантизма было право читать Библию и открывать для себя ее содержание.

14.

Библия и другие важные книги начали переводиться с латинского на родные языки, что привело к ускорению развития книгопечатания.

15.

С развитием книгопечатания общество становилось более грамотным, с одной стороны, потому что все больше людей учились читать и писать на родном языке, и, с другой стороны, те, кто не умел читать и писать, начали доверять (полагаться на) письменным документам.

16.

Нет

достаточно

четких

критериев

для

определения

уровня

грамотности, поэтому он чаще всего определяется количеством лет обучения в школе. 17.

В настоящее время уровни грамотности определяются по скользящей шкале, в основе которой лежит понятие функционального уровня грамотности.

18.

Чем грамотнее общество, тем более высокий стандарт грамотности считается функциональным.

19.

Подсчитано, что словарь грамотного человека может более, чем в два раза превышать размер обычного разговорного словаря.

20.

Высокий уровень грамотности предполагает знание грамматических конструкций и литературных форм, а также владение специальными навыками, которые требуют многих лет обучения в школе.

58

UNIT 8 HOW ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DEVISED WRITING SYSTEMS Records made of knotted strings High in the Andes Mountains, an old man fiddled with a bunch of coloured, knotted strings and racked his brain to interpret the meaning of the knots. If the old man made even the slightest error of interpretation, his punishment could be death. Message of the belt The Inca peoples who inhabited what is now Peru from around AD 1000 used these knotted cords to record important data from each district in the inca empire. The knots at the end of a string represented single units, above them tens, above these hundreds, and so on. Each differently- coloured cord represented a commodity, such as gold, maize, cattle or spears. In North America too, native peoples used available materials to convey information. Wampum belts, made of shells, were exchanged between tribes to mark agreements, to record events or to send messages. The belts, made from shell beads strung together in rows, could be as long as 6ft (1.8 m).Designs varied from tribe to tribe, but white belts generally expressed good things, such as peace and friendship, whereas black belts ( made from the purple shell ) meant bad news. A black wampum marked with a hatchet in red paint signified war.

59

LETTERS DRAWN ON CLAY AND CARVED IN STONE Clay was moulded into the records of the ancient world, as well as its bricks, tiles and pots. From before 3000 BC, Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia kept records by drawing pictures on soft clay tablets with a pointed stylus, then leaving the tablets to harden in the sun. During the next 200-300 years, the pictures evolved into symbols composed of triangular or wedge-shaped imprints in the clay, made using the straight-cut end of a reed stylus. This script is known as cuneiform, from cuneus, Latin for “wedge”. Building words out of syllables Cuneiform symbols could represent abstract ideas, as well as objects. This sometimes caused confusion. For example, a circle not only represented the sun, but also the concept of heat and time associated with it. Instead of creating even more symbols, scribes began to join two or more symbols together to form more complex words. It is as if in English, to make the word “treason”, we joined the words “tree” and “son”. In this way, short words came to represent the syllables of a longer word with a different meaning, and came to have a phonetic value. Initially the system included around 1200 symbols. The Chinese develop a different system of writing. The earliest examples, dating back to about 1700 BC, are simple pictures of everyday objects and activities. Each character represented a whole word, rather than just a sound; more than 9000 characters were in use by AD 220.

VOCABULARY Bunch n.

Пучок, связка

Character n.

Знак, буква, литера 60

Commodity n.

Предмет потребления, товар

Complex adj.

Сложный

Confusion n.

Путаница, неразбериха

Convey v.

Передавать

Cuneiform adj.

Клинообразный

Fiddle v.

Вертеть в руках

Harden v.

Твердеть, застывать

Hatchet n.

Большой нож, сечка

Imprint n.

Отпечаток

Inhabit v.

Населять

Initially adv.

Первоначально

Join v.

Присоединять

Knot n.

Узел

Make an error

Делать ошибку

Mould into v.

Превращаться в

Object n.

Предмет

Rack smb.’s brain

Ломать голову

Reed adj.

Тростниковый

Represent v.

Представлять собой

Signify v.

Значить, означать

Spear n.

Копье

String v.

Нанизывать

Syllable n.

Слог

Treason n.

Государственная измена

Value n.

Значение, ценность

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions:

61

1.

What was the first writing system?

2.

When and where was this system used?

3.

How was the information conveyed with the help of this system?

4.

What kind of information could be conveyed by this system?

5.

How did ancient Sumerians keep records?

6.

When did Sumerians begin keeping records?

7.

When did the cuneiform script appear?

8.

What could the cuneiform symbols denote?

9.

Why did the ancient scribes begin to join symbols together?

10.

What is a syllable?

11.

How many symbols did the cuneiform system include?

12.

What kind of writing system did the ancient Chinese develop?

13.

When did the Chinese develop their characters?

14.

How many characters did the Chinese system contain as far back as a thousand and a half years ago?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. ломать голову; 2. понять значение; 3. малейшая ошибка; 4. вести записи; 5. затвердевать на солнце; 6. картинки превратились в символы; 7. известное как клинопись; 8. вызывать путаницу; 9. связанный с; 10. начали приобретать фонетическое значение; 11. первоначально; 12. повседневные предметы и дела. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1. В древние времена, более тысячи лет назад, люди начали использовать специальные системы для «записи» и передачи информации. 62

2. Народы Инков передавали информацию с помощью небольших узелков, завязанных на веревках. 3. Жители Северной Америки, примерно в то же время, использовали специальные пояса из раковин для «записи» и передачи информации. 4. Длинные пояса в Северной Америке могли передавать абстрактные идеи, такие как «мир», «дружба», «война», а также числа. 5. Что приводило к путанице при чтении клинописи, так это то, что одни и те же знаки могли обозначать абстрактные идеи и предметы. 6. Соединение нескольких символов в один привело к образованию сложных слов. 7. Китайцы на основе клинописи разработали свою систему, где знаки – это картинки предметов и идей. 8. Процесс производства бумаги был впервые открыт в Китае еще почти две тысячи лет назад.

63

UNIT 9 MAKING PAPER OUT OF PULP

The art of paper making had been known in the Far East since AD 105 when Chinese court official Tsai Lun, soaked a mixture of rags, hemp and bark in water, then drained the pulp over a flat sieve. The fibres formed a sheet of wet paper which dried to form a writing surface. By the early 2nd century the Chinese were making paper from bamboo. They soaked the shoots, then boiled, pounded washed them to form a pulp. They squeezed out the water in a press, and hung the sheets on walls to dry. From the 6th century the Japanese were practising a similar method using bark. In Western Europe, meanwhile, scribes relied on parchment and vellum – the specially treated skins of sheep and goat. It was not until AD 751 that some Chinese soldiers revealed the secret of paper making to the Arab captors, who set them to work making paper in Samarkand, whence it spread throughout the Arab world and into Europe. Egypt’s sacred carvings

At about the same time as the Sumerians began to write on clay tablets, in the third millennium BC, the Egyptians were developing their own distinctive writing method. Their system, which we call hieroglyphs (from the Greek for “sacred carvings” ), comprised pictures representing everyday objects: a feather, a beetle, a bird. Some signs stood for what they portrayed, but other signs had a phonetic value, representing one or two sounds rather than a whole word. Only the consonants were written. Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial character, and so often had a decorative function. When carved directly onto the stone monuments, inscriptions had to be drafted carefully in ink on the stone before being finally carved and painted. Other more everyday writing surfaces were available for scribes, including special writing boards and old shards of pottery. 64

The Egyptians also kept records on papyrus, a paper-like material made from tall reedy plants which thrived on the banks of the Nile. Labourers cut the fibrous stems of the plant into thin strips, laying them side by side. They added a second layer on top, at right angles to the first, and pounded them together until the starchy sap from the fibers bound them. After the sheets had dried in the sun, they were ready to be written on using brushes or pens made from thin reeds, cut at the end to form a nib. Scribes used black ink made from pulverized charcoal or soot, and coloured inks, especially red, based on ground minerals mixed with water. Papyrus was very expensive, so texts were often erased and the sheets used a second time. Limestone and pottery were cheaper and used for less important documents.

VOCABULARY Bark n.

Кора (дерева)

Carving n., v.

Резьба, резать (по дереву)

Charcoal n.

Древесный уголь

Comprise v.

Охватывать, включать в себя

Consonant n.

Согласный (звук, буква)

Distinctive adj.

Отличный, характерный

Draft v.

Делать чертеж, чертить

Drain v.

Стекать, осушать

Fibre n.

Волокно

Flat adj.

Плоский

Hemp n.

Пенька, конопля

Limestone n.

Известняк

Nib n.

Кончик, острие копья

Parchment n.

Пергамент

65

Pictorial adj.

Изобразительный, живописный

Pottery n.

Глиняная посуда

Pound v.

Толочь

Pulp n.

Мягкая бумажная масса

Rag n.

Тряпка, тряпье, лохмотья

Retain v.

Сохранять, удерживать

Reveal v.

Открывать, выдать секрет

Sap n.

Сок

Shard n.

Черепок

Shoot n.

Росток, побег

Sieve n.

Сито

Sign n.

Знак

Soak v.

Мочить, вымочить

Soot n.

Сажа

Squeeze out v.

Отжимать

Starchy adj.

Крахмалистый

Strip n.

Полоска, полоса

Surface n.

Поверхность

Vellum n.

Тонкий пергамент, веленевая бумага

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

Where was paper made first?

2.

What was used for paper making?

3.

When did the Japanese begin to make paper, and what did they use for it?

4.

What did the scribes in Western Europe use for writing on?

5.

How did paper spread all over the world?

6.

When did Egyptians begin to develop their writing method? 66

7.

What was their system like?

8.

What did Egyptians use as writing surfaces?

9.

What did Egyptians make papyrus from?

10.

What instruments did the Egyptians scribes use for writing on papyrus?

11.

Why did Egyptians sometimes erase the texts from papyrus?

Ex. 2. Find the equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. искусство производства бумаги; 2. поверхность для письма; 3. специально выделанные кожи; 4. открыть секрет; 5. откуда она распространилась; 6. разработать свой собственный метод; 7. некоторые значки ставились вместо описаний; 8. размечать чернилами; 9. делать записи на папирусе; 10. похожий на бумагу материал; 11. укладывать рядом; 12. под прямым углом; 13. тексты часто стирались. Ex. 3. Retell the text Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Процесс производства бумаги был впервые открыт в Китае еще почти две тысячи лет назад.

2.

Китайцы использовали тряпье, кору, пеньку и бамбук для производства бумаги.

3.

Японцы пользовались почти тем же методом для производства бумаги, но гораздо позднее, в VI веке.

4.

Лишь в VIII веке бумага пришла в Европу.

5.

Египетские иероглифы датируются 3-им тысячелетием до н. э.

6.

Слово «иероглиф» в греческом языке означало «священная резьба».

7.

Египтяне использовали различные поверхности для «писем», например, камни, специальные дощечки, глиняную посуду, известняк и папирус. 67

8.

Египетские писцы пользовались для письма на папирусе специальными ручками, сделанными из тонкого тростника, заостренного на конце.

9.

Египтяне могли делать чернила на основе измельченного древесного угля или сажи, а также цветные чернила, используя различные природные минералы.

10.

Очень важным в папирусе было то, что записи можно было стирать с него и использовать вторично.

68

UNIT 10 ALL THE BOOKS IN THE WORLD How the great library At Alexandria was created A former personal bodyguard and general of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy has seized power in Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 BC. Although he was one of the world’s great military leaders, and ran a mighty kingdom, he also sought a different kind of power: to conquer the world of knowledge. He set out to build the library containing everything that had ever been written. The city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, was the major political and commercial centre of Alexander’s vast empire, which stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Ptolemy was determined that it should also be the world’s cultural capital. Books taken from visiting ships Ptolemy made a Greek scholar, Demetrius Phalereus, responsible for creating a great place of learning centre on the royal palace. Together the two men started to build a storehouse of knowledge. While Ptolemy wrote to emperors, kings and princes asking them to send their nations’ books, Demetrius dispatched agents to buy books abroad. All ships sailing into the port of Alexandria were searched for books, and any found were copied by a team of scribes. The copies were returned, and the originals stayed on the shelves. The great enterprise continued for many years. During the reign of Ptolemy 11 (284-246 BC) the poet Callimachus catalogued the library and recorded 90 000 original manuscripts and 400 000 copies; a further 42 800 rolls were stored in a smaller library elsewhere in the city. But the library’s vast collection was lost to the later generations.

69

VOCABULARY Conquer v.

Завоевывать

Determined p.p.

Полный решимости

Dispatch v.

Посылать, отправлять

Enterprise n.

Инициатива, предприятие

Generation n.

Поколение

Kingdom n.

Королевство, царство

Major adj.

Большой, важный

Reign n.

Правление

Responsible adj.

Ответственный

Scholar n.

Ученый

Search for v.

Обыскивать

Seek (sought) v.

Стремиться

Seize v.

Захватывать

Sit out v.

Намереваться

Storehouse n.

Сокровищница

Stretch v.

Простираться

Vast adj.

Громадный

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

Who was the ruler of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great?

2.

Who was Ptolemy?

3.

What did Ptolemy seek besides world power?

4.

What did Ptolemy dream of?

5.

Who was involved in creating a learning centre in Egypt?

6.

What did Demetrius do for this centre?

7.

What was the result of the great Ptolemy’s enterprise? 70

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. захватить власть; 2. управлять королевством; 3. жаждать власти; 4. вознамериться построить; 5. сокровищница знаний; 6. великое дело (предприятие); 7. где-то в городе; 8. потеряна для грядущих поколений. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Птолемей был величайшим полководцем и правителем Египта в четвертом веке до нашей эры.

2.

Птолемей стремился к завоеванию не только новых земель, но и мирового знания.

3.

Он намеревался построить библиотеку, в которой было бы все, когдалибо написанное в мире.

4.

Александрия, столица огромной империи, должна была также стать и культурной столицей мира.

5.

Птолемей пригласил греческого ученого Деметриуса Фалереуса для выполнения этой миссии.

6.

Птолемей писал императорам и королям письма с просьбой прислать свои национальные книги.

7.

Деметриус посылал агентов по всему миру, чтобы они покупали книги.

8.

Все корабли, приходившие в порт Александрии, обыскивались в поисках книг.

9.

В третьем веке до нашей эры Александрийская главная библиотека уже насчитывала 90 000 оригинальных манускриптов и 400 000 копий.

10.

К

сожалению,

огромная

коллекция

последующих поколений.

71

библиотеки

не

дошла

до

UNIT 11 SACRED TEXTS AND ACHING BACKS How medieval monks copied manuscripts “A man who knows not how to write may think this is no great feat”, wrote Prior Petrus as he sat hunched over his angled desk in a chilly Spanish monastery in about 1100. “But only try to do it yourself and you will learn how arduous the writer’s task is. It dims your eyes, makes your back ache, and knits your chest and belly together – it is a terrible ordeal for the whole body”. Until about 1200, many of the books made in Europe were for religious use, most of them Bibles and psalters (book of psalms). Most monasteries had a library, some containing hundreds of volumes. Each of these books had been written out by hand and most were copies, taken line by line from an existing book, often on loan from another monastery. Coping was sacred work. The monks’ aim was to preserve and transmit the holy texts: hence books were produced to the highest standards possible. It took a scribe year of training and painstaking practice to achieve the confident and elegant touch that sets the finest medieval manuscripts apart. Parchment, pen and ink One of the most expensive components of a book was the material from which the pages were made. Both parchment and thin sheets of sheepskin or goatskin and the finer vellum, made from calfskin, needed extensive preparation. First they were thoroughly washed in cold running water, and then soaked for up to ten days in wooden or stone vats of lime solution. Any hair was scraped off the skin before it was washed again. It was then stretched on a wooden frame and the scraping repeated, and once dry, the skin was rubbed with chalk and pumice stone 72

until smooth. For a work of 340 leaves, such as the 8th-century masterpiece of Celtic art, the Book of Kells, around 200 calfskins were needed. The scribe marked up the first page of parchment with a master grid that indicated where the lines of text and margins would fall. He might copy the grid by making small score marks with a knife or awl through the first page onto a pile of pages beneath. Next he had to prepare his pen. Although pens made from metal were available, the most common writing implement was the quill, made from a light feather of a large bird, such as a goose. To prepare a quill, the scribe soaked it in the water and then heated it to make it hard and flexible. He then cut the nib to the correct shape for the thickness of the lettering he wished to use. Ink was kept in a hollow animal horn. Black ink was made from lampblack, oak galls or the bark of trees mixed with gum. Red ink, also called “red lead” or “red vermilion”, was made from toasted lead or mercuric sulphide respectively, and was mostly used to write some initial letters or the first lines or titles of some texts. The book to be copied, called the exemplar, was laid open on a lectern arranged close to the scribe’s desk, and copying could begin. One of the great skills of the scribe was the ability to make the text fit the line, and to make blocks of the text fit the page, without obviously bunching or squeezing the letters. The best handwritten texts have a measured regularity, giving a sense of orderliness and poise. Tricks of the trade For most of the Middle Ages, scribes generally used the “Gothic” script, which was designed to be compact so as to save parchment. For the same reason they used abbreviations – such as ampersand (&) for “and” – and joined up letters. The untrained eye often finds medieval manuscripts very hard to decipher. If a scribe made a mistake, he would scratch away the offending letter or passage with his knife – one of the advantages of a resilient surface like parchment. 73

A second scribe or reader checked the text against the exemplar, and the further corrections were then made. Working in the library or, if fortunate, a special scriptorium (writing office) with large windows of clear glass, a skilled scribe could produce up to four sides of a page a day, depending on how complex the work was. A Bible could take a team of monks many months to produce. Once the text was finished, the scribe passed the pages to the artists for illumination.

When this was finished, the completed pages were folded and

arranged in the correct sequence for binding between boards covered with leather. VOCABULARY Abbreviation n.

Сокращение, аббревиатура

Ache n.

Боль

Angled desk n.

Наклонный стол

Arduous adj.

Трудный

Awl n.

Шило

Bunch v.

Сбивать(ся) в кучу

Calfskin n.

Телячья кожа

Confident adj.

Уверенный

Decipher v.

Расшифровывать, разбирать

Dim v.

Затуманивать, затемнять

Flexible adj.

Гибкий

Fold v.

Обхватывать

Gall n.

Чернильный орешек

Gum n.

Смола

Hollow n.

Углубление

Holy adj.

Святой, священный

Horn n.

Рог

Hunch v.

Горбиться, сгибаться

Illumination n.

Украшение 74

Implement n.

Инструмент

Knit v.

Соединять, скреплять

Lampblack n.

Ламповая копоть

Lectern n.

Аналой (в церкви)

Lettering n.

Надпись

Master grid n.

Основная разметка

Offending letter n.

Буква с погрешностью

On loan

Заимствованный, взятый на

Ordeal n.

Тяжелое испытание

Painstaking adj.

Старание, усердие

Poise n.

Равновесие

Psalter n.

Псалтырь

Pumice stone n.

Пемза

Quill n.

Перо для письма

Resilient adj.

Эластичный

Rub v.

Натирать

Sacred adj.

Священный

Score mark n.

Метка

Sequence n.

Последовательность

Set smth. apart

Отделять, зд. выделять

Solution n.

Раствор

Squeeze v.

Сжимать, стискивать

Stretch v.

Растягивать, натягивать

Touch n.

Штрих, манера

Vat n.

Чан

Vermilion n.

Киноварь (ярко красный цвет)

75

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

How did medieval monks copy manuscripts?

2.

What kind of books was first copied?

3.

Where were the first libraries housed?

4.

What was the most expensive component of a book? Why?

5.

How many calfskins may be needed for a book?

6.

What was a master grid for?

7.

What kind of writing instrument was used at that time?

8.

What substance was used for writing? What colours were available?

9.

What skills did a scribe have to possess?

10.

Why were the “Gothic” script and abbreviations used in the Middle Ages?

11.

Was it allowed for a scribe to make a mistake?

12.

How were the texts checked for mistakes?

13.

How long did it usually take to copy a book?

14.

How was the book finally made from the separate sheet

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. великий подвиг; 2. ужасное испытание; 3. копии, переписанные слово в слово; 4. священный труд; 5. самый высокий уровень; 6. усердная тренировка; 7. уверенная манера письма; 8. выделять из; 9. размечать страницы;

10.

большое

мастерство;

11.

готический

шрифт;

12. нетренированный глаз; 13. неправильная буква; 14. сверить текст с оригиналом; 15. сложить в нужной последовательности. Ex. 3. Retell the text.

76

Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Самым распространенным в то время инструментом были перья крупных птиц, например, гусей, а чернила делались из ламповой копоти.

2.

Большинство средневековых писцов пользовались «Готическим» письмом (шрифтом), поскольку оно было наиболее компактным и экономило пергамент.

3.

Как только писец заканчивал работу, он передавал страницы художнику, который украшал их, и только потом все страницы сшивались в нужной последовательности между двумя досками.

4.

Во 2 тысячелетии нашей эры все книги в Европе писались монахами и предназначались для религиозных целей, большей частью это были Библии и псалтыри.

5.

В большинстве монастырей в Европе были прекрасные библиотеки, содержащие сотни рукописных книг.

6.

Копирование считалось священным ремеслом, требующим многолетней подготовки.

7.

Самым дорогим в книге был материал, из которого были сделаны ее страницы.

8.

Чтобы добиться высочайшего уровня копирования, переписчик всегда делал основную разметку на первой странице.

77

UNIT 12 GOLDEN LETTERS THAT LIT UP THE PAGE How Medieval artists Illuminated Manuscripts

The word “illumination” aptly describes the art of medieval book illustration: the elegant, handwritten texts are complemented by brilliant images that light up the pages with a dazzling mixture of delicacy, colour and imagination. Applying gold and precious stones Illumination generally took place only after a scribe had finished writing the text. It was usually carried out by one or more specialist artists – although some scribes were also illuminators. Some were monks, others professional artists, and a few were women. Using the spaces left blank by the scribe, the illuminator would draw a delicate outline of the design, employing compass and ruler for geometric shapes. Next, the artist would apply gold leaf by painting gum or gesso onto the areas to be covered, then rubbing a delicate sheet of the thinnest beaten gold onto the page with a smooth stone. After this, the artist applied paint with brushes, usually in two or more stages. First he put on a layer of background colour, then the final colour at full strength. The colours were made up of natural plant and mineral pigments, such as iris sap (green) and madder root (deep red). Some were imported from afar: ultramarine blue, for example, was made from semiprecious lapis lazuli, which came all the way from Afghanistan. To make the pigments stick to the page, and to make the colours fast, they were mixed with water and egg white. Illumination was already a highly sophisticated art by the 8th century AD; later in the Middle Ages wealthy private clients created a demand for ever more 78

lavish picture books, such as illustrated Lives of the Saints, Apocalypses (visions of the end of the world), Bestiaries (encyclopedias of animals, real or imagined), and the collections of private devotions known as “Books of Hours”. The illuminators’ art became ever more ambitious, encompassing scenes of domestic life and biblical narrative. VOCABULARY Afar adv.

Издалека

Aptly adv.

Удачно, подходяще

Background n.

Фон

Blank adj.

Пустой, незаполненный

Complement v.

Добавлять

Dazzling pr.p.

Ослепительный, великолепный

Delicacy n.

Утонченность, нежность

Encompass v.

Заключать, окружать

Fast adj.

Прочный, крепкий

Gesso n.

Гипс (для скульптуры)

Gum n.

Смола

Iris sap n.

Сок ириса

Lapis lazuli n.

Ляпис-лазурь

Lavish adj.

Щедрый, расточительный,

Madder root n.

Корень марены

Narrative n.

Рассказ, повесть, изложение

Outline n.

Набросок, чертеж

Space n.

Пространство

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions:

79

1.

Why was the word “illumination” used instead of “illustration” in the medieval ages ?

2.

Who usually did illumination?

3.

What did the job of illuminating a book consist in?

4.

How did an ancient illuminator apply paint?

5.

What were the colours made of at that time?

6.

What was used to make the pigments stick to the page?

7.

When did more lavish picture books appear?

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. рукописный текст; 2. дополнять; 3. пустое пространство; 4. тончайшее сусальное золото; 5. в два захода или более; 6. фоновый цвет; 7. издалека; 8. закреплять краски; 9. обильно иллюстрированные книги; 10. частная религиозная библиотека; 11. искусство иллюстратора; 12. сцены из повседневной жизни; 13. библейское повествование. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Средневековые

художники

превращали

рукописные

тексты

в

ослепительно иллюстрированные книги. 2.

Иллюстраторы приступали к работе после того, как писцы заканчивали переписывать текст.

3.

Иллюстраторы часто использовали листики золота для украшения книг.

4.

Художники использовали краски, сделанные из растений и минеральных пигментов.

5.

Со временем рукописные книги становились все более великолепными, полными утонченных многоцветных образов. 80

UNIT 13 CASTING THE TYPE THAT WOULD SPREAD THE WORD

How Gutenberg created Europe’s first printing press It was one of the great triumphs of the Western world. In 1455, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, produced the first printed book in Europe using movable type – rows of reusable metal letters. Up until the mid 15th century, all books had been handwritten – a highly labour-intensive and time-consuming process. By making it possible to produce multiple copies of books, Gutenberg’s printing presses enabled new ideas in politics and religion to spread rapidly across Europe. His great achievement went beyond technological ingenuity and opened the floodgates of literature to a Renaissance world eager for knowledge. Gutenberg’s first major work was no ordinary book, but a Latin Bible – a vast project that had taken 15 years of toil. Furthermore, he was determined to keep his revolutionary invention a secret until his work was complete. Striking the master-set Gutenberg’s first challenge was to produce a complete master-set of letters and characters – some 270 in all, including capitals, lower case (small) letters, punctuation marks and various special characters and abbreviations. The letters and characters were carved in relief and reverse on the tips of steel rods, which were later hardened by heating and then plunging into cold water. Gutenberg could now cast individual letters and characters comparatively quickly. The next stage was to sort the letters into compartments in a tray. The printer then picked out the letters and assembled the words line by line, ensuring that each line was the same length. This process could take a whole day to complete. When

81

the text was ready, it was fitted into a frame to produce a stable, portable “form” which was then laid on the base of the press. Printing the pages The next job was to ink the form, using a blend of clear linseed oil varnish – which helped the ink to stick to the metal type – and lampblack for the black colour. A pair of “inkballs” – leather pads, filled with wadding, attached to wooden handles – were lightly coated in the ink, then dabbed onto the type. The printer laid the paper over the form, then turning a handle on the press, moved it into position. He then pulled a bar on the press, which operated the screw and applied even pressure over the form, peeled back the paper and stacked it next to the press. Gutenberg printed around 16 copies an hour in this way, and some 20 men kept six presses working full time for more than a year to produce the Bible. Pioneers of printing in ancient China In AD 868, nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese printers produced the Diamond Sutra – a collection of Buddhist scriptures and illustrations – and the earliest known printed item. It was part of an established printing tradition, the origins of which can be traced back to the small jade, ivory or bamboo seals, that were used to authenticate documents much as signature is used today. The raised characters embossed on these seals were smeared with ink and then printed onto the documents. Letters carved in wood This same principle was later adapted for woodcuts. Chinese characters and pictures were delicately carved in reverse out of a block of wood, then inked. Paper – another Chinese invention dating back to c.AD 100 – was rubbed over the 82

woodblock to transfer the image. By the 9th century AD, sheets of text and illustrations were frequently prepared on single blocks of wood and used to produce books (in the form of scrolls),calendars, religious images, greetings cards and even newsletters. Letters baked to order However, Chinese printing was a slow process. Because each written word in Chinese consists of an individual character or symbol, rather than a series of letters corresponding to sound, printers needed thousands of letters. An early form of movable type, invented in c.AD 1040 by Bi Sheng, solved the problem. Baked clay was used to create a bank of the most common characters, and additional characters were fashioned and baked when they were needed. The characters were assembled in wooden frame for printing. It was, none the less, a cumbersome process, and the crude print failed to reach the standards of traditional calligraphy. VOCABULARY Bake v.

Печь, сушить, обжигать

Challenge n.

Стремление

Compartment n.

Ячейка, перегородка

Crude adj.

Грубый

Cumbersome adj.

Громоздкий, обременительный

Dab v.

Прикладывать (мягкое, мокрое)

Eager adj.

Стремящийся, жаждущий

Emboss v.

Выбивать рисунок

83

выпуклый

Even adj.

Равномерный, ровный

Fit into v.

Вставлять в

Floodgate n.

Шлюз, ворота

Ingenuity n.

Изобретательность, искусство

Ivory n.

Слоновая кость

Jade n.

Нефрит

Labour-intensive adj.

Трудоемкий

Linseed n.

Льняное семя

Origin n.

Происхождение

Peel back v.

Снимать

Pick out v.

Выдергивать, выбирать

Plunge v.

Погружать(ся)

Rod n.

Стержень

Screw n.

Винт, болт

Scroll n.

Свиток

Seal n.

Печать

Spread v.

Распространять(ся)

Steel n.

Сталь

Time-consuming adj.

Долгий

Tip n.

Кончик

Toil n.

Тяжелый труд

Tray n.

Лоток

Vanish n.

Смазка

Wadding n.

Вата, шерсть

84

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

Who produced the first printed book in Europe?

2.

When was the first printed book produced?

3.

What did this invention lead to?

4.

What was the first book printed?

5.

How much time did it take to print the first book?

6.

How did it become possible to produce multiple copies?

7.

How was the master-set of letters made?

8.

What simplified the process of printing letters on the paper?

9.

What inks were used for printing?

10.

By means of what instrument was printing done?

11.

When did the first Chinese printed book appear?

12.

What can the origin of the printing tradition in China be traced back to?

13.

What differentiated Chinese and European printing technology?

14.

Why was printing in China a slow process?

15.

When and how was the problem of time-consuming printing solved in China?

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. многоразовые металлические буквы; 2. очень трудоемкий и длительный процесс; 3. открыть шлюзы; 4. жаждущий знаний; 5. 15 лет тяжелого труда; 6. сохранить изобретение в секрете; 7. полный набор букв и знаков; 8. гравировать выпукло и в зеркальном изображении;

9. формовать

отдельные буквы; 10. раскладывать буквы по ячейкам на лодке; 11. вставлять в рамку; 12. покрыть форму чернилами; 13. снять лист и положить в стопку рядом с прессом; 14. обожженная глина. Ex. 3. Retell the text.

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Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

Первая печатная книга появилась в Европе только в XV веке.

2.

Первая печатная книга была произведена в Германии Иоганном Гуттенбергом из Майнца.

3.

Естественно, что первой печатной книгой была не какая-то обычная книга, а латинская Библия, производство которой потребовало пятнадцати лет тяжелого труда.

4.

То, что позволило Гуттенбергу производить множественные копии книг, был изобретенный им переносной основной набор металлических букв и знаков.

5.

Буквы и символы зеркально и рельефно вырезались на концах стальных стержней, которые затем помещались в отдельные ячейки лотка.

6.

Печатник мог легко вынимать буквы из ячеек и собирать слова и предложения внутри специальной рамы, которая затем укладывалась на пресс.

7.

Копия

делалась

путем

давления

пресса

на

бумагу,

которая

накладывалась на смазанную чернилами форму. 8.

Такая технология позволяла печатать около шестнадцати копий в час.

9.

Как оказалось, Гуттенберг не был первым; самой ранней печатной книгой была «Бриллиантовая Сутра», напечатанная в Китае почти за 600 лет до Гуттенберга.

10.

Однако, печатный процесс в Китае был медленным, поскольку китайское письмо не имело букв, а отдельный знак или символ обозначал целое слово.

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UNIT 14 A CODE FOR SPIES AND PLOTTERS By the late 15th century, the great cities of Europe were thriving cosmopolitan centres. The major nations had ambassadors at each other’s courts: the big trading companies and banks had representatives in foreign commercial centres. Voyages of exploration were opening lucrative new trade routes. The nations of Europe were engaged in tense games of economic rivalry and squabbles for territory. Spies, plots and intrigue abounded. Merchants and politicians communicated through a network of private messengers and public couriers. These services, however, were easily intercepted. All important, confidential documents were sent in code. By the middle of the 16th century major European courts had secretaries employed specifically to create, break and send messages in code. The most basic codes, in which one set of letters is substituted for another, are known as ciphers. In the simplest of these, the normal alphabet is just replaced by another alphabet. In the first century AD, Julius Caesar used this code to send secret messages: by substituting all the letters of his text with letters three places down the alphabet. But these ciphers are comparatively easy to break. Because the substitution of letters is always the same, the code breaker can identify familiar patterns. By the 15th century, more complex tables of signs and symbols were being used to represent the letters of the alphabet. Yet even these codes could be deciphered. Some of the brightest minds of the time were engaged in perfecting an impenetrable code. The first of these was the Florentine artist, musician, architect and athlete, Leon Battista Alberti. He believed the answer lay in a “polyalphabetic” cipher - in which the letters of the alphabet were represented by a series of other alphabets that changed as message progressed.

87

A code they could not track Alberti developed a disc made up of two dials fixed in the centre. Twenty letters of the alphabet (excluding H,J,K,U,W and Y) and the numbers 1-4 were written around the edge of the outer plate. A jumbled Latin alphabet was written around the edge of the inner plate. To create a message, the sender took a letter from the outer plate, then

read off the cipher equivalent from the inner plate.

After a given number of letters, the inner plate was turned an agreed number of positions so that the alphabet was represented by a different set of ciphers. The recipient, of course, had to be equipped with the same cipher disc and know when to turn the plate. Another polyalphabetic system involved writing out the letters of the alphabet repeatedly in a table. At its simplest, the first line was the normal alphabet (a-z); the second line began the alphabet with “b” and ended with “a”, the third ran from “c” to “b” and so on. The sender and the recipient agreed on a secret “keyword”- usually a term or a phrase. To stop keywords from falling into the wrong hands, French diplomat Blaise de Vegenere developed the “autokey”. The message itself contained the keyword, signalled by a “priming key” – a letter or letters recognised as such by the recipient. In this way the keyword changed with every message. Polyalphabetic ciphers were considered uncrackable. However, if either the sender or the recipient made an error, the text became nonsense. It was until the age of machine-generated codes that they came into their own. The English system, used by the Germans during the Second World War, was based on such a system, as are many computer-generated codes used today – which because of the speed at which they can be altered, are virtually impossible to break. VOCABULARY Abound v.

Изобиловать, кишеть

Break v.

Расшифровывать, разгадывать

88

Cipher n.

Шифр

Come into one's own v.

Получить должное

Decipher v.

Расшифровывать

Dial n.

Диск, шкала

Edge n.

Край, кромка

Equip with v.

Оборудовать чем-то

Exploration n.

Исследование, разведка

Intercept v.,n.

Перехватывать, перехват

Jumble v.,n.

Смешивать, путаница, беспорядочная смесь

Lucrative adj.

Прибыльный, выгодный, доходный

Network n.

Сеть

Plot n.

Заговор

Priming key n.

Главный ключ

Representative n.

Представитель

Rivalry n.

Соперничество

Route n.

Путь, маршрут

Spy n.

Шпионаж

Squabble v.

Ссориться

Substitute v.

Заменять

Thrive (throve, thriven) v.

Процветать, преуспевать

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

When did commerce begin to flourish in Europe?

2.

What were voyages of exploration made for?

3.

Why were spies, plots and intrigues abundant at that time?

4.

How did merchants and politicians manage to communicate? 89

5.

Why did people have to invent codes?

6.

How were the most basic codes called?

7.

What kind of code did Julius Caesar use?

8.

Who was the first to work out the perfect impenetrable code?

9.

What was Alberti’s code like?

10.

What did Alberti develop for coding messages?

11.

Were there any other polyalphabetic coding systems?

12.

What did the French diplomat Vegenere invent?

13.

Could polyalphabetic ciphers be broken?

14.

What was the drawback of the polyalphabetic cipher?

15.

When did machine-generated codes appear?

16.

What system was used in machine-generated codes?

17.

Could the machine-generated codes be broken?

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. процветающий мировой центр; 2. прибыльные торговые маршруты; 3.

экономическое

соперничество;

4.

территориальные

притязания;

5. создавать и расшифровывать коды; 6. вырабатывать секретный пароль; 7. эти шифры легко взламываются; 8. беспорядочные буквы латинского алфавита; 9. многоалфавитные шифры; 10. их практически нельзя взломать. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

XV век стал веком бурного расцвета городов и торговли между государствами.

2.

Народы Европы в это время спорили за территории, что привело к процветанию шпионажа, заговоров и интриг. 90

3.

Торговцы и политики разных стран активно общались друг с другом посредством сети частных курьеров.

4.

Вся важная информация должна была защищаться, поэтому появились шифры.

5.

Уже в XVI веке во многих странах при дворах были секретари, которые создавали коды, шифровали и расшифровывали информацию.

6.

Еще в 1-м веке нашей эры Юлий Цезарь пользовался шифром, когда посылал секретные письма.

7.

Как только возникли шифры, появились люди, которые занялись их совершенствованием, создавая сложные «невзламываемые» шифры.

8.

Первым, кто сумел создать невзламываемый шифр, был флорентийский художник, музыкант, архитектор и спортсмен Леон Батиста Альберти.

9. 10.

Альберти был первым, кто использовал многоалфавитный шифр. Шифровальная система, которую использовали немцы во время Второй мировой войны, была также основана на многоалфавитном шифре.

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UNIT 15 THE WORLD IN SO MANY WORDS How the first newspapers were published One chilly November evening in1588, a village tavern in the heart of rural Somerset was busier than usual. Many people were speculating about the outcome of the battle between the English fleet and Philip II’s Armada. One gentleman in the crowd was a wealthy lawyer who read aloud a newsletter he had received by courier from London that morning. When he confirmed the good news that the English had in fact defeated Spain, the villagers burst into cheers – their fears of an invasion were over. Gossip in the cathedral Only the wealthy few could afford to enjoy the benefit of such a news service in the 16th and17th centuries. For an annual fee of around £5, subscribers employed intelligencers – private news writers – to keep them informed of the latest city gossip while they were at their county retreats. The intelligencers gathered their information at the meeting places in the city: the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral was one of the main haunts, hence the later establishment of printing offices in nearby Fleet Street. Once they had pieced together the most important stories of the day, they returned to their offices, where they dictated their reports to a group of clerks who wrote out the news by hand. Depending on the circumstances, a subscriber could receive as many as three newsletters from the same intelligencer in a week. Others had to rely on sporadic newsletters, often religious in nature, which focused on battles, or natural disasters, such as fires and floods, and were illustrated with vivid woodcuts.

92

In England the publication of news was regarded as an interference with the affairs of the state and was not allowed without royal permission. For foreign news people had to turn to the so-called newsbooks, or Corantos, that were exported from the Netherlands to England, having been translated into English first. The first of these arrived in 1620, but soon English publishers began to produce their own versions. Only a year later, Thomas Archer, a London stationer, printed translations of foreign news in England’s first regular publication, Cjranter or Weekly News from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spain and France. Other newsbooks followed, but in 1632 they were all banned by the Court of Star Chamber – a royal court which protected the security of the state – after a news item had offended both the Spanish and Austrian ambassadors. The ban lasted until 1638 when, for the first time, parliament allowed the publication of domestic political news. During the Civil War (1642-9) an average of ten newsbooks appeared each week. News of the dramatic clashes between the Cavaliers and Roundheads was spread throughout the country by partisan publishers. Daily newspapers appeared from the beginning of the 18th century. The first of these, The Daily Courant, published between 1702 and 1735, cost a penny. The news was printed in two columns on one side of a sheet. At the same time, some of the Britain’s finest periodicals first appeared. Taxed and banned, but never silenced Despite the increasing numbers of journals, the government continued to restrict access to news, particularly of home politics. In 1712, a stamp tax added a penny per sheet to the price of newspapers, making them too dear for most people. However London’s coffee houses – the popular meeting places for businessmen – displayed papers which the customers could read free. In 1738, the House of Commons passed a law forbidding the publication of parliamentary reports; it remained in force until 1771 when the radical publisher 93

John Wilkes engineered a showdown between the press and parliament and successfully contested the law. In the intervening years, publishers used fictitious names and anagrams to thinly disguise news of parliament, while journalists, who were not allowed to take notes in the public gallery, wrote the news from memory. The astonishing power of recall of the editor of the Morning Chronicle earned him the nickname of William “Memory” Woodfall. VOCABULARY Afford v.

Позволять (себе)

Annual adj.

Ежегодный

Ban v.

Запрещать

Burst into cheers v.

Разразиться криками одобрения

Circumstance n.

Обстоятельство, случай

Clash n.,v.

Столкновение, сталкиваться

Contest v.

Оспаривать

Defeat n.,v.

Поражение, наносить поражение

Disguise v.

Маскировать

Employ v.

Нанимать

Fee n.

Плата

Fine adj.

Хороший, превосходный

Gossip n.,v.

Болтовня, сплетни, болтать, сплетничать

Haunt v., n.

Часто посещать, любимое место

Intelligencer n.

Информатор, осведомитель

Intervening years n.

Годы запрета

Natural disaster n.

Природное бедствие

Nave n.

Неф

Outcome n.

Результат, последствия, исход

Piece together v.

Соединять 94

Restrict v.

Ограничивать

Retreat n.

Уединение

Showdown n.

Откровенный обмен мнениями

Speculate v.

Размышлять, делать предположения

Stamp tax n.

Налоговая марка

Thinly adv.

Утонченно

Vivid woodcut n.

Яркая гравюра

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions: 1.

When did the first newsletters appear in England?

2.

Who could receive the newsletters at that time in England?

3.

How much did the newsletters cost?

4.

Who gathered the information for the newsletters at that time in England?

5.

Where was the information gathered? What was it mostly about?

6.

How often were the newsletters delivered?

7.

What was the attitude of the English government to the publication of news?

8.

Where did the people in England learn foreign news from? When did this happen for the first time?

9.

When did English publishers begin to produce their own versions of foreign news?

10.

When did the first regular publication appear in England? What was it called?

11.

When were the newsbooks banned in England and why?

12.

How long did this ban last?

13.

When did the first newspaper appear and what was it called?

14.

How did the government try to restrict access to news?

15.

What way out was found from this situation?

16.

What law did the House of Commons pass in 1738?

17.

When was the ban on publication of parliamentary reports abolished? 95

18.

Why did the editor of the Morning Chronicle earn the nickname “Memory”?

Ex. 2. Find equivalents of the following expressions in the text: 1. разразиться криками восторга; 2. держать в курсе последних сплетен; 3. главное излюбленное место; 4. в зависимости от обстоятельств; 5.

рассчитывать

на

нерегулярные

новости;

6.

вмешательство

в

государственные дела; 7. первое регулярное издание; 8. запрет продлился до; 9. внутренние политические новости; 10. распространиться по всей стране; 11. подпольные издатели; 12. ограничить доступ к новостям; 13. вывешивать газеты; 14. принять закон; 15. поразительная способность воспроизводить по памяти. Ex. 3. Retell the text. Ex. 4. Translate into English: 1.

В XVI веке появились первые листы новостей, которые позже превратились в газеты.

2.

Только

богатые

люди

могли

нанять

осведомителей,

которые

информировали бы их обо всех новостях и городских сплетнях. 3.

Информаторы собирали новости в людных местах, соединяли самые важные новости вместе и выпускали листы новостей, написанные от руки.

4.

Каждый информатор мог выпустить примерно три листка в неделю.

5.

Правительство Англии не позволяло публиковать новости без королевского разрешения.

6.

Новости из-за рубежа приходили в Англию из Голландии и переводились на английский язык.

96

7.

В 1621 году Томас Арчер, книготорговец из Лондона, начал регулярно публиковать переводы зарубежных новостей.

8.

После того как в новостях были оскорблены послы Испании и Австрии, королевский суд запретил публикацию книжек новостей (newsbook).

9.

Но уже в 1638 году английский парламент вновь разрешил публикацию местных политических новостей.

10.

Во

время

гражданской

войны

(1642–1649)

книги

новостей

публиковались регулярно, рассказывая о драматических событиях войны. 11.

Ежедневные газеты появились в начале XVIII века, и одной из первых была The Daily Courant.

12.

С самого начала правительство пыталось ограничить доступ к новостям, поднимая цену газет и делая их слишком дорогими для большинства людей.

13.

Для того чтобы люди, которые не могли позволить себе купить газету, смогли прочитать ее, газеты стали вывешиваться в кофейнях, самых популярных местах в городе.

14.

Когда Палата Общин приняла закон, запрещающий записывать чтолибо в публичной галерее парламента, журналисты писали новости по памяти.

15.

Издатель газеты the Morning Chronicle Уильям Вудфол имел потрясающую способность запоминать, за что получил кличку «Память».

97

APPENDIX HISTORY OF WRITING Ogham writing Ogham also spelled Ogam, or Ogum, alphabetic script dating from the 4th century AD, used for writing the Irish and Pictish languages on stone monuments; according to Irish tradition, it was also used for writing on pieces of wood, but there is no material evidence for this. In its simplest form, ogham consists of four sets of strokes, or notches, each set containing five letters composed of from one to five strokes, thus giving 20 letters. These were incised along the edge of a stone, often vertically or from right to left. A fifth set of five symbols, called in Irish tradition forfeda (“extra letters”), is seemingly a later development. The origin of ogham is in dispute; some scholars see a connection with the runic and, ultimately, Etruscan alphabets, while others maintain that it is simply a transformation of the Latin alphabet. The fact that it has signs for h and z, which are not used in Irish, speaks against a purely Irish origin. The inscriptions in ogham are very short, usually consisting of a name and patronymic in the genitive case; they are of linguistic interest because they show an earlier state of the Irish language than can be attested by any other source and probably date from the 4th century AD. Of the more than 375 ogham inscriptions known, about 300 are from Ireland. Most of those found in Wales are accompanied by Latin transliterations or equivalents. OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE The Ketuvim The Ketuvim (the Writings or the Hagiographa), the third division of the Hebrew Bible, comprises a miscellaneous collection of sacred writings that were not classified in either the Torah or the Prophets. The collection is not a unified 98

whole: it includes liturgical poetry (Psalms and Lamentations of Jeremiah), secular love poetry (Song of Solomon), wisdom literature (Proverbs, Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes), historical works (I and II Chronicles, Book of Ezra, and Book of Nehemiah), apocalyptic, or vision, literature (Book of Daniel),a short story (Book of Ruth), and a romantic tale (Book of Esther); it ranges in content from the most entirely profane book in the Bible (Song of Solomon) to perhaps the most deeply theological (Job); it varies in mood from a pessimistic view of life (Job and Ecclesiastes)to an optimistic view (Proverbs). Psalms, Proverbs, and Job constitute the principal poetic literature of the Hebrew Bible and, in many respects, represent the high point of the Hebrew Bible as literature; in fact, Job must be considered one of the great literary products of man's creative spirit. Although portions of some of the books of the Ketuvim (e.g., Psalms and Proverbs) were composed before the Babylonian Exile (586–538 BCE), the final form was post-exilic, and Daniel was not written until almost the middle of the 2nd century BCE. The books were not included in the prophetic collection because they did not fit the content or the historical-philosophical framework of that collection, because they were originally seen as purely human and not divine writings, or simply because they were written too late for inclusion. Although some of the books individually were accepted as canonical quite early, the collection of the Ketuvim as a whole, as well as some individual books within it, was not accepted as completed and canonical until well into the 2nd century CE. As noted above, there are several indications that the lapse of time between the canonization of the Prophets and of the Ketuvim was considerable; e.g., the practice of entitling the entire Scriptures “the Torah and the Prophets” and the absence of a fixed name. The needs of the Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere in the Greekspeaking Diaspora led to the translation of the Bible into Greek. The process began with the Torah about the middle of the 3rdcentury BCE and continued for several centuries. In the Greek canon, as it finally emerged, the Ketuvim was eliminated as a corpus, and the books were redistributed, together with those of the prophetic collection, according to categories of literature, giving rise to a canon with four 99

divisions: Torah, historical writings, poetic and didactic writings, and prophetic writings. Also, the order of the books was changed, and books not included in the Hebrew Bible were added. The early Christians of both the East and West generally cited and accepted as canonical the Scriptures according to the Greek version. When Protestants produced translations based upon the Hebrew original text and excluded or separated (as Apocrypha) the books not found in the Hebrew Bible, they retained the order and the divisions of the Greek Bible. Thus the Ketuvim is not to be found as a distinct collection in the Christian Old Testament. An ancient tradition, preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, prescribed the following order for the Ketuvim: Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra (which included Nehemiah), and I and II Chronicles. This sequence was chronological according to rabbinic notions of the authorship of the books. Ruth relates to the age of the judges and concludes with a genealogy of David; the Psalms were attributed, for the most part, to David; Job was assigned to the time of the Queen of Sheba, although the rabbis differed among themselves about the date of the hero; Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon were all attributed to Solomon; Lamentations, which was ascribed to Jeremiah, refers to the destruction of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Babylonian Exile; the heroes of Daniel were active until early in the reign of Cyrus II, the king of Persia who ended the exile; Esther pertains to the reign of Xerxes I, later than that of Cyrus but earlier than that of Artaxerxes I, the patron of Ezra, reputed also to have written I and II Chronicles. Despite this tradition, however, it would appear that the sequence of the Ketuvim was not completely fixed, and there is a great variety in ordering found in manuscripts and early printed editions. The three larger books–Psalms, Job, and Proverbs–have always constituted a group, with Psalms first and the other two interchanging. The order of the five Megillot, or Scrolls (Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations , Ecclesiastes, and Esther), has shown the greatest variations. The order that has crystallized has a liturgical origin; the books are read on certain festival days in Jewish places of worship and are printed in the calendar order of 100

those occasions. Chronicles always appears at either the beginning or the end of the corpus. Its final position is remarkable because the narrative of Ezra and Nehemiah follows that of Chronicles. The final position may have resulted from an attempt to place the books of the Hebrew Bible in a framework (Genesis and Chronicles both begin with the origin and development of the human race, and both conclude with the theme of the return to the land of Israel), but it was more probably the result of the late acceptance of Chronicles into the canon. Psalms The Psalms (from Greek psalmas, “song”) are poems and hymns, dating from various periods in the history of Israel, that were assembled for use at public worship and that have continued to play a central role in the liturgy and prayer life of both Jews and Christians. Known in Hebrew as Tehillim (Songs of Praise), the Psalter (the traditional English term for the Psalms, from the Greek psalterion, a stringed instrument used to accompany these songs) consists of 150 poems representing expressions of faith from many generations and diverse kinds of people. These unsystematic poems epitomize the theology of the entire Hebrew Bible. Hebrew poetry has much in common with the poetry of most of the ancient Near East, particularly the Canaanite poetic literature discovered at Ras Shamra. Its main features are rhythm and parallelism. The rhythm, which is difficult to determine precisely because the proper pronunciation of ancient Hebrew is unknown, is based upon a system of stressed syllables that follows the thought structure of the poetic line. The lines present various kinds of parallelism of members, whereby the idea expressed in one part of a line is balanced by the idea in the other parts. The classical study on Hebrew parallelism was done by Robert Lowth, an 18th-century Anglican bishop, who distinguished three types: synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic. Synonymous parallelism involves the repetition in the second part of what has already been expressed in the first, while simply varying the words. 101

In antithetic parallelism the second part presents the same idea as the first by way of contrast or negation. Synthetic parallelism involves the completion or expansion of the idea of the first part in the second part. Synthetic parallelism is a broad category that allows for many variations, one of which has the picturesque name “staircase” parallelism and consists of a series of parts or lines that build up to a conclusion. Although it is evident that Hebrew poetry groups lines into larger units, the extent of this grouping and the principles on which it is based are uncertain. The acrostic poems are a notable exception to this general uncertainty. The superscriptions found on most of the psalms are obscure but point to the existence of earlier collections. Psalms are attributed to David, Asaph, and the sons of Korah, among others. It is generally held that Asaph and the sons of Korah indicate collections belonging to guilds of temple singers. Other possible collections include the Songs of Ascents, probably pilgrim songs in origin, the Hallelujah Psalms, and a group of 55 psalms with a title normally taken to mean “the choirmaster.” It is evident that the process whereby these various collections were formed and then combined was extremely complex. The investigation of the process is made difficult because individual psalms and whole collections underwent constant development and adaptation. Thus, for example, private prayers became liturgical, songs of local sanctuaries were adapted to use in the Temple, and psalms that became anachronistic by reason of the fall of the monarchy or the destruction of the Temple were reworked to fit a contemporary situation. Such problems complicate the determination of the date and original occasion of the psalm. For centuries both Jews and Christians ascribed the whole Psalter to David, just as they ascribed the Pentateuch to Moses and much of the wisdom literature to Solomon. This was thought to be supported by the tradition that David was a musician, a poet, and an organizer of the liturgical cult and also by the attribution of 73 psalms to David in the superscriptions found in the Hebrew Bible. These 102

superscriptions, however, need not refer to authorship. Moreover, it is clear that David could not have written all the psalms attributed to him because some of them presuppose the existence of the Temple in Jerusalem, which was not constructed until later. Contrary to the long-established Davidic authorship tradition, at the end of the 19th century most biblical critics spoke of a Persian date (539–333 BCE) and even of the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century BCE) for the majority of the psalms. In the 20th century the Psalter has been considered to be a collection of poems that reflect all periods of Israel's history from before the monarchy to the post-exilic restoration, and it is thought that David played a central role in the formation of the religious poetry of the Jewish people. Scholars, however, are reluctant to assign precise dates. The most important contribution to modern scholarship on the Psalter has been the work of Hermann Gunkel, a German biblical scholar, who applied form criticism to the psalms. Form criticism is the English name for the study of the literature of the Bible that seeks to separate its literary units and classify them into types or categories (Gattungen) according to form and content, to trace their history, and to reconstruct the particular situation in life or setting (Sitz im Leben) that gave rise to the various types. This approach does not ignore the personal role of individual composers and their dates, but it recognizes that Hebrew religion, conservative in faith and practice, was more concerned with the typical than with the individual and that it expressed this concern in formal, conventional categories. The study is aided by viewing them in the context of similar literary works in the earlier or contemporary cultures of the ancient Near East. Gunkel identified five major types of psalms, each cultic in origin. The first type, the Hymn, is a song of praise, consisting of an invitation to praise Yahweh, an enumeration of the reasons for praise (e.g., his work of creation, his steadfast love), and a conclusion which frequently repeats the invitation. The life setting of the hymns was generally an occasion of common worship. Two subgroups within this type are the Songs of Zion, which glorify Yahweh's presence in the city of Jerusalem, and the Enthronement Songs, which–though their number, setting, and 103

interpretation have been the subject of much debate–acclaim Yahweh's kingship over the whole world. The second type is the Communal Lament. Its setting was some situation of national calamity, when a period of prayer, fasting, and penitence would be observed. In such psalms Yahweh is invoked, the crisis is described, Yahweh's help is sought, and confidence that the prayer has been heard is expressed. The Royal Psalms are grouped on the basis not of literary characteristics but of content. They all have as their life setting some event in the life of the pre-exilic Israelite kings; e.g., accession to the throne, marriage, departure for battle. Gunkel pointed out that in ancient Israel the king was thought to have a special relationship to Yahweh and thus played an important role in Israelite worship. With the fall of the monarchy, these psalms were adapted to different cultic purposes. In the Individual Lament an individual worshipper cries out to Yahweh in time of need. The structure of these psalms includes: an invocation of Yahweh, the complaint, the request for help, an expression of certainty that Yahweh will hear and answer the prayer, and in many cases a vow to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice. Three aspects have been the subject of extensive study: the identity of the “enemies” who are often the reason for the complaint; the meaning of the term poor, which is frequently used to describe the worshipper; and the sudden transition in mood to certainty that the prayer has been heard. Psalms of this type form the largest group in the Psalter. The final major type is the Individual Song of Thanksgiving, which presumably had its setting in the thanksgiving sacrifice offered after a saving experience. These psalms begin and conclude with an exclamation of praise to Yahweh. The body of the psalm contains two elements: the story of the one who has been saved and the recognition that Yahweh was the rescuer. Gunkel also distinguished several minor types of psalms, including Wisdom Poems, Liturgies, Songs of Pilgrimage, and Communal Songs of Thanksgiving. For Gunkel, although the types of the psalms were originally cultic, the majority of the poems in the existing Psalter were composed privately in imitation of the cultic 104

poems and were intended for a more personal, “spiritualized” worship. Most biblical scholars since Gunkel have accepted his classifications, with perhaps some modifications, but have focussed increased attention on the setting, the Sitz im Leben, in which the psalms were sung. Sigmund Mowinckel, a Norwegian scholar, explained the psalms as wholly cultic both in origin and in intention. He attempted to relate more than40 psalms to a hypothetical autumnal New Year festival at which the enthronement of Yahweh as the universal king was commemorated; the festival was associated with a similar Babylonian celebration. Artur Weiser, a German scholar, sought the cultic milieu of the Hebrew psalms especially in an annual feast of covenant renewal, which was uniquely Israelite. Psalms is a source book for the beliefs contained in the entire Hebrew Bible. Yet, doctrines are not expounded, for this is a book of the songs of Israel that describe the way Yahweh was experienced and worshipped. Yahweh is creator and saviour; Israel is his elected people to whom he remains faithful. The enemies of this people are the enemies of Yahweh. In these songs are found the entire range of basic human feelings and attitudes before God–praise, fear, trust, thanksgiving, faith, lament, joy. The book of Psalms has thus endured as the basic prayer book for Jews and Christians alike.

HERMETIC WRITINGS Hermetic writings are also called Hermetica. They are works of revelation on occult, theological, and philosophical subjects ascribed to the Egyptian god Thoth (Greek Hermes Trismegistos [Hermes the Thrice-Greatest]), who was believed to be the inventor of writing and the patron of all the arts dependent on writing. The collection, written in Greek and Latin, probably datefrom the middle of the 1st to the end of the 3rd century AD. It was written in the form of Platonic dialogues and falls into two main classes: “popular” Hermetism, which deals with

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astrology and the other occult sciences; and “learned” Hermetism, which is concerned with theology and philosophy. From the Renaissance until the end of the 19th century, popular Hermetic literature received little scholarly attention. More recent study, however, has shown that its development preceded that of learned Hermetism and that it reflects ideas and beliefs that were widely held in the early Roman Empire and are therefore significant for the religious and intellectual history of the time. In the Hellenistic age there was a growing distrust of traditional Greek rationalism and a breaking down of the distinction between science and religion. Hermes-Thoth was but one of the gods and prophets (chiefly Oriental) to whom men turned for a divinely revealed wisdom. In this period the works ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos were primarily on astrology; to these were later added treatises on medicine, alchemy (Tabula Smaragdina [“Emerald Tablet”], a favourite source for medieval alchemists), and magic. The underlying concept of astrology–that the cosmos constituted a unity and that all parts of it were interdependent–was basic also to the other occult sciences. To make this principle effective in practice (and Hermetic “science” was intensely utilitarian), it was necessary to know the laws of sympathy and antipathy by which the parts of the universe were related. But because these assumed affinities did not,in fact, exist and hence could not be discovered by ordinary scientific methods, recourse had to be made to divine revelation. The aim of Hermetism, like that of Gnosticism (a contemporary religious-philosophical movement), was the deification or rebirth of man through the knowledge (gnosis) of the one transcendent God, the world, and men. The theological writings are represented chiefly by the 17 treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, by extensive fragments in the writings of Stobaeus, and by a Latin translation of the Asclepius, preserved among the works of Apuleius. Though the setting of these is Egyptian, the philosophy is Greek. The Hermetic writings, in fact, present a fusion of Eastern religious elements with Platonic, Stoic, and Neo-

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Pythagorean philosophies. It is unlikely, however, that therewas any well-defined Hermetic community, or “church.” Hermetism was extensively cultivated by the Arabs, and through them it reached and influenced the West. There are frequent allusions to Hermes Trismegistos in late medieval and in Renaissance literature. HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING Hieroglyphic writing is a system that employs characters in the form of pictures. These individual signs, called hieroglyphs, may be read either as pictures, as symbols for pictures, or as symbols for sounds. The name hieroglyphic (from the Greek word for “sacred carving”) is first encountered in the writings of Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC).Earlier, other Greeks had spoken of sacred signs when referring to Egyptian writing. Among the Egyptian scripts, the Greeks labeled as hieroglyphic the script that they found on temple walls and public monuments, in which the characters were pictures sculpted in stone. The Greeks distinguished this script from two other forms of Egyptian writing that were written with ink on papyrus or on other smooth surfaces. These were known as the hieratic, which was still employed during the time of the ancient Greeks for religious texts, and the demotic, the cursive script used for ordinary documents. Hieroglyphic, in the strict meaning of the word, designates only the writing on Egyptian monuments. The word has, however, been applied for about 100 years to the writing of other peoples, insofar asit consists of picture signs used as writing characters. The name hieroglyphics is, for example, always used to designate the scripts ofthe Indus civilization and of the Hittites, who also possessed other scripts, in addition to the Mayan, the Incan, and Easter Island writing forms, and also the signs on the Phaistos Disk on Crete. Colloquially, the word hieroglyphics has been extended to mean any sort of illegible or barely legible writing.

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Because of their pictorial form, hieroglyphs were difficult to write and were used only for monument inscriptions. They were usually supplemented in the writing of a people by other, more convenient scripts. Among living writing systems, hieroglyphic scripts are no longer used. RELATIONSHIP OF WRITING AND ART The form of these hieroglyphs of the archaic period (the 1st to 2nd dynasty) corresponds exactly to the art style of this age. Although definite traditions or conventions were quickly formed with respect to the choice of perspective–e.g., a hand was depicted only as a palm, an eye or a mouth inscribed only in front view– the proportions remained flexible. The prerequisite of every writing system is a basic standardization, but such a standardization is not equivalent to a canon (an established body of rules and principles) in the degree of stylistic conformity that it requires. A recognized canon of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing arose in the 3rd dynasty and was maintained until the end of the use of the script. In that hieroglyphic signs represented pictures of living beings or inanimate objects, they retained a close connection to the fine arts. The same models formed the basis of both writing and art, and the style of the writing symbols usually changed with the art style. This correspondence occurred above all because the same craftsmen painted or incised both the writing symbols and the pictures. Deviations from the fine arts occurred when the writing, which was more closely bound to convention, retained patterns that the fine arts had eliminated. The face in front view is an example of this. This representation, apart from very special instances, was eventually rejected as an artistic form, the human face being shown only in profile. The front view of the face was, however, retained as a hieroglyph from the archaic period to the end of the use of hieroglyphic writing. Similar cases involve the depiction of various tools and implements. Although the objects themselves fell out of use in the course of history–e.g., clubs used as weapons– their representations, mainly misunderstood, were preserved in the hieroglyphic 108

script. The hieroglyphs corresponding to objects that had disappeared from daily life were therefore no longer well known and were often distorted beyond recognition. But the style of representation in the hieroglyphs still remained closely bound to the art of the respective epoch. Thus there appeared taut, slender forms or sensuous, fleshy ones, or even completely bloated characters, according to the art style of the period. Media for hieroglyphic writing In historical times (2800 BC–AD 300), hieroglyphic writing was used for inscribing stone monuments and appears in Egyptian relief techniques, both high relief and bas-relief; in painted form; on metal, sometimes in cast form and sometimes incised; and on wood. In addition, hieroglyphs appear in the most varied kinds of metal and wood inlay work. All of these applications correspond exactly with the techniques used in fine art, and the same craftsmen who produced the works of art painted or incised the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Hieroglyphic texts are found primarily on the walls of temples and tombs, but they also appear on memorials and gravestones, on statues, on coffins, and on all sorts of vessels and implements. Hieroglyphic writing was used as much for secular texts–historical inscriptions, songs, legal documents, scientific documents– as for religious subject matter–cult rituals, myths, hymns, grave inscriptions of all kinds, and prayers. These inscriptions were, of course, only a decorative monumental writing, unsuitable for everyday purposes. For popular use, hieratic script was developed, an abbreviated form of the picture symbols such as would naturally develop in writing with brush and ink on smooth surfaces like papyrus, wood, and limestone. Direction of the writing The lines of hieroglyphs were written from right to left or, less frequently, from left to right. Vertical rows of signs could be placed next to horizontal rows, according to the particular demands of the architectural setting. The direction of 109

the writing is immediately ascertainable because the signs almost always face the beginning of the row. Occasionally, some signs are turned around in the row, presumably so that two human figures can face one another and thus avoid standing with their backs toward each other. These rotations of signs are infrequent, however, and are found almost exclusively in the names of kings. Royal names were enclosed in a ring, the so-called cartouche. This ring, originally a rope, was supposed to protect the bearer of the enclosed name from injury and, in particular, from harmful magic. Egyptian pedagogical traditions To understand hieroglyphic writing, one must know about its tradition within Egypt. The Egyptian student of writing, who brought with him a knowledge of the spoken language as his mother tongue, began by learning the script picture corresponding to each word without having isolated its elements; i.e., its individual signs. Through centuries this pedagogical tradition in the schools helped Egyptian words retain the original established spelling, with only minor–usually stylistic– changes, even when the phonetic form had radically changed. Hieroglyphic writing thus conceals historical sound changes. The mistakes in hearing made by pupils in the writing schools have helped scholars to understand the phonetic changes that occurred in the development of the Egyptian language. When the pupil who was learning to write the hieroglyphic script did not recognize a word dictated to him, he wrote it badly–that is, just as he heard it. Because he had not yet learned to spell in the orthodox manner, what appeared on his papyrus was usually a word that sounded similar to the dictated but misunderstood term and whose word picture was familiar. Thus, although Egyptian writing was originally composed of symbols that represented a phonetic value, the system was transmitted in the form of word pictures–that is, closed or indivisible groups, generally of several signs per word.

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NEWSPAPER SYNDICATE Newspaper syndicate is often called Press Syndicate, or Feature Syndicate, agency that sells to newspapers and other media special writing and artwork, often written by a noted journalist or eminent authority or drawn by a well-known cartoonist that cannot be classified as spot coverage of the news. Its fundamental service is to spread the cost of expensive features among as many newspapers (subscribers) as possible. Press syndicates sell the exclusive rights to a feature to one subscriber in each territory, in contrast to the wire news services (see news agency), which offer their reports to all papers in a given area. Some syndicates specialize in such entertainment features as comic strips, cartoons, columns of oddities or humour, and serialized novels. Typical syndicated features are columns of advice on child rearing, health, running a household, gardening, and such games as bridge. Syndicates came into being in the United States at the end of the Civil War. Individual features, however, had been syndicated as early as 1768 in the Journal of Occurrences, which was circulated by a group of “Boston patriots.” The syndicate filled a need among rural or small-town weekly and daily papers for material that would help them compete with big-city papers. Three syndicates were in operation in 1865, supplying miscellaneous feature news items and short stories. In 1870 Tillotson & Son, publishers in Bolton, Eng., began to supply some British papers with serialized fiction. By 1881 Henry Villard, a reporter for the Associated Press (AP), had founded his own syndicate in Washington, D.C., and was soon sending material to the Cincinnati Commercial, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Herald. About 1884, Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun formed a syndicate to sell short stories by Bret Harte and Henry James. Samuel S. McClure launched a similar venture in the same year. He first offered fiction and secured the rights to several stories by Rudyard Kipling. He also helped to introduce the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others into the United States. The features offered at that time were mostly literary material and pictures. An important change came 111

in 1896, however, when the big New York City Sunday newspapers began to produce and publish comic pages. In 1907 the comic strip was introduced in daily papers. This form of art gradually changed the whole character of the business and made it more profitable. The strips were shipped in matrix form to the subscribers for simultaneous publication. Originally, they were truly “comics” in that they were intended to make readers laugh, but later many became continued stories with no humour. When Bud Fisher's “Mutt and Jeff” was first bought and published in England in 1920, many British readers scoffed at the idea. It proved successful, and British editors later originated many strips in competition with the American products. By the late 1950s American comic strips were being translated into several languages and sold all over the world. Many writers, photographers, and graphic artists syndicate their own materials. Some newspapers with especially strong resources syndicate their own coverage, including news, to papers outside their own communities. Examples include the New York Times, with major resources in every news department, and the defunct Chicago Daily News, which was known for its foreign coverage. Papers sometimes syndicate as a team with another newspaper–e.g., the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post syndicate. NESPAPER PUBLISHING Commercial newsletters in continental Europe The newsletter had been accepted as a conventional form of correspondence between officials or friends in Roman times, and in the late Middle Ages newsletters between the important trading families began to cross frontiers regularly. One family, the Fuggers, were owners of an important financial house in the German city of Augsburg; their regular newsletters were well-known even to outsiders. Traders' newsletters contained commercial information on the availability and prices of various goods and services, but they could include political news, just as the financial editor of today must consider the broader sweep 112

of events likely to influence economic transactions. The commercial newsletter thus became the first vehicle of “serious” news, with its attempt at regular, frequent publication and concern with topical events generally. The newsletter usually accorded primacy as a definite newspaper is the Relation of Strasbourg, first printed in 1609 by Johann Carolus. A close rival is the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung (Zeitung is the German word for “newspaper”), founded in the same year by Heinrich Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. In 1605, in the Low Countries, Abraham Verhoeven of Antwerp had begun publication of the Nieuwe Tijdingen, although the earliest surviving copy is dated 1621. In any case, this historical rivalry is evidence of a fairly sudden demand for newspapers at the start of the 17th century, and the continuous publication of the Nieuwe

Tijdingen

indicates

that

this

demand

soon

became

well-

established. Although these publications were emerging throughout western Europe, it was the Dutch, with their advantageous geographical and trading position, who pioneered the international coverage of news through their “corantos,” or “current news.” The Courante uyt Italien, Duytsland, & C., began to appear weekly or twice-weekly in 1618. Similar rudimentary newspapers soon appeared in other European countries: Switzerland (1610), the Habsburg domains in central Europe (1620), England (1621), France (1631), Denmark (1634), Italy (1636), Sweden (1645), and Poland (1661). English and French translations of Dutch corantos were also available. But signs of official intolerance emerged fairly soon, and censorship stifled newspaper development in the late 17th century and into the 18th century in continental Europe. In Paris in 1631, the Nouvelles Ordinaires de Divers Endroits, a publishing venture by the booksellers Louis Vendosme and Jean Martin, was immediately replaced by an officially authorized publication, La Gazette, published under the name of Théophraste Renaudot but with influential backing by Cardinal de Richelieu. The new publication was to continue (as La Gazette de France) until 1917, casting the shadow of authority over nonofficial newspapers throughout its life. The first French daily–Le Journal de Paris–was not started until 1777; and 113

although the Revolution of 1789 brought a temporary upsurge in newspaper publishing, with 350 papers being issued in Paris alone, the return to monarchy brought another clampdown. Napoleon I had his own official organ–Le Moniteur Universel, first published by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (one of a family of booksellers and writers) in 1789 and lasting until 1869–and there were only three other French newspapers. In Germany, early newsletter development was soon hampered by the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), with its restrictions on trade, shortage of paper, and strict censorship. Even in peacetime censorship and parochialism inhibited the German press. Among the important regional newspapers were the Augsburger Zeitung (1689), the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin (1705), and the Hamburgische Correspondent (1714). In Austria the Wiener Zeitung was started in 1703 and is considered to be the oldest surviving daily newspaper in the world. The oldest continuously published weekly paper is the official Swedish gazette, the Post-och inrikes tidningar, begun in 1645. Sweden is also notable for having introduced the first law (in 1766) guaranteeing freedom of the press, but the concept of an independent press barely existed in most of Europe until the middle of the 19th century, and until then publishers were constantly subject to state authority. Early newspapers in Britain and America The British press made its debut–an inauspicious one–in the early 17th century. News coverage was restricted to foreign affairs for a long time, and even the first so-called English newspaper was a translation by Nathaniel Butter, a printer, of a Dutch coranto called Corante, or newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France, dated Sept. 24, 1621. Together with two London stationers, Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer, Butter published a stream of corantos and avisos, including a numbered and dated series of Weekley Newes, beginning in 1622. But a number of difficulties confronted a prospective publisher: a license to publish was needed; regular censorship of reporting was in operation from the earliest days; and foreign news no longer appeared because of a Star 114

Chamber decree (in force from 1632 to 1638) completely banning the publication of accounts of the Thirty Years' War. Between the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 publishers enjoyed a short spell of freedom from strict official control. Publication of domestic news began to appear more regularly, shedding the original book form. News and headlines increasingly replaced the old title page. The Civil Wars (1642–51) acted as a stimulus to reporters and publishers, and 300 distinct news publications were brought out between 1640 and 1660, although many of these were only occasional reports from the battle front, such as Truths from York or News from Hull. The names of some contemporary publications, like the Intelligencers, Scouts, Spys, and Posts, reflected the bellicosity of the times, but the Mercurys still abounded, including the propaganda papers

Mercurius

Academicus

(Royalist)

and

Mercurius

Britannicus

(Parliamentarian). The Parliamentarian victory brought strict control of the press from 1649 to 1658, and the restored monarchy was even more absolute, with the press being restricted to just two official papers. During the period of the Licensing Act (1662–94), an official surveyor of the press was given the sole privilege of publishing newspapers. The Revolution of 1688produced a return to more permissive publishing laws and the first provincial presses were set up, starting with the Worcester Post Man (1690) and, in Scotland, the first Edinburgh Gazette (1699), although the British press was to remain principally a national one, centred on Fleet Street in London. Appearing briefly was Lloyd's News (1696), issuing from Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, which had become a centre of marine insurance. The subsequent Lloyd's List and Shipping Gazette (from 1734), with its combination of general and shipping news, exemplified both the importance of the City of London's financial activities to the newspapers and the importance of a reliable and regular financial press to business. In the early years of the 18th century the British newspaper was approaching its first stage of maturity. After 1691, improvements in the postal system made daily publication practical, the first attempt at doing so being the single-sheet Daily 115

Courant (1702–35), which consisted largely of extracts from foreign corantos. A more radical departure was the triweekly Review (1704–13), produced by Daniel Defoe, in which the writer's opinion on current political topics was given, introducing the editorial, or leading article. Defoe had been imprisoned, in 1702, for his pamphlet “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” but many eminent British writers were being attracted to the newspapers. Henry Muddiman had gained eminence as the “journalist” who edited the London Gazette (from 1666). John Milton had edited the Mercurius Politicus under Oliver Cromwell, and Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, The Spectator (published daily1711–12). The Spectator and The Tatler (triweekly, 1709–11, also written by Steele) are commemorated in the modern magazines of the same name (see below Magazine publishing), but their incorporation of social and artistic news and comment influenced the content of the contemporary newspaper permanently. Sales of the popular Spectator sometimes ran as high as 3,000 copies, and already this circulation level was enough to attract advertising. An excise duty on advertisements was introduced by the Stamp Act (1712), along with other so-called taxes on knowledge aimed at curbing the nascent power of the press. The rate of duty, at one penny on a whole sheet (four sides of print), was the same as the cover price of The Spectator, and this effective doubling of the price killed it, along with many other newspapers. But the newspaper had already become a permanent part of the social and literary life in London, and not even higher duties could prevent the proliferation of newspaper titles throughout the century. Typical of the new breed of English papers was The Daily Advertiser (1730– 1807), which offered advertising space along with news of a political, commercial, and social nature. An important gap in the political pages was filled from 1771, when the right to publish proceedings in Parliament had been granted. This right was not won lightly, for illicit accounts of debates in the House had appeared in the monthly Political State of Great Britain (1711–40) and every effort had been made to stop them. But campaigners such as the political reformer John Wilkes (with the North Briton, 1762) eventually won out. Politicians of both Whig and Tory 116

sympathies ran their own often scurrilous newspapers or simply bribed journalists with occasional handouts and annual stipends, but later in the century there emerged a more sophisticated reader who demanded, and received, an independent viewpoint. Eminent newspapers of the time included the Morning Post (1772), The Times (from 1788, but started as the Daily Universal Register in 1785), and The Observer (1791), each of which is still published (although the Morning Post was later merged with the Daily Telegraph). Censorship continued in the guise of frequent libel prosecutions, and as late as 1810 the radical political essayist William Cobbett was imprisoned and fined for denouncing flogging in the army, but the principle of a free press, at least in peacetime conditions, had been firmly established. The need of news “A community needs news,” said the British author Dame Rebecca West, “for the same reason that a man needs eyes. It has to see where it is going.” For William Randolph Hearst, one of America's most important newspaper publishers, news was “what someone wants to stop you printing: all the rest is ads.” Both idealistic and mercenary motives have contributed to the development of modern newspapers, which continue to attract millions of regular readers throughout the world despite stern competition from radio and television. Modern electronics, which has put a television set in almost every home in the Western world, has also revolutionized the newspaper publishing process, allowing many more newspapers tobe born. An increasing number of these new newspapers are given away free, their production costs being borne entirely by the revenue from advertisements, which are of much greater importance than they were in Hearst's day. Newspapers can be published daily or weekly, in the morning or in the afternoon; they may be published for the few hundred inhabitants of a small town, for a whole country, or even for an international market. A newspaper differs from other types of publication by its immediacy, characteristic headlines, and coverage of a miscellany of topical issues and events. According to the Royal Commission 117

on the Press in Great Britain, to qualify as news “an event must first be interesting to the public, and the public for this purpose means for each paper the people who read that paper.” But the importance of newspapers stretches far beyond a passing human interest in events. In the 19th century the first independent newspapers contributed significantly to the spread of literacy and of the concepts of human rights and democratic freedoms. Newspapers continue to shape opinions in the “global village” of the late 20th century, where international preoccupations are frequently of concern to the individual, and where individual tragedies are often played out on an international stage. Since it is commonly held that individuals have a right to know enough about what is happening to be able to participate in public life, the newspaper journalist is deemed to have a duty to inform. Whenever this public right to know comes under attack, a heavy responsibility falls on the journalist. Origins and early evidences The daily newspaper is essentially the product of an industrialized society. In its independent form, the newspaper is usually integral to the development of democracy. The newspaper thus defined was fairly late in emerging, since it depended on a certain basic freedom of speech and relatively widespread literacy. THE MODERN ERA OF NEWSPAPER PUBLISHING Since World War II, there have been radical changes in newspaper production on a par with those brought by the Industrial Revolution. Electronic technology has revolutionized the ways in which newspapers are written, edited, and printed, while radio and television have developed into serious competitors as sources of news, official information, and entertainment and as a vehicle for advertising.

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Technological developments Computers and telecommunications have transformed the production process for the modern newspaper. They have also led to changes in the quality of the newspaper itself, but their real impact has been on the finances of the newspaper industry and on the relevance of the traditional print workers. One of the first signs of technology's potential for change came in the 1930s, when Walter Morey developed the Teletype setter (first demonstrated in 1928). This machine was an improvement on the telegraph, which was widely used by reporters in the field and by the wire services, such as Reuters and Associated Press, to send news items in draft form to editorial offices miles away. With the Teletype setter, the impulses sent over the wire included encoded instructions to Linotype machines. The machines could then decode the instructions and automatically prepare whole pages ready for printing. It was therefore envisaged that the reporter would have the facility for “direct input” into the printing room, which would eliminate the need for retyping by a Linotype operator and thus save newspapers both time and money. But direct input had to await the development of sophisticated computers and computer programs, which did not materialize until after World War II. In 1946 the first techniques of photocomposition were developed. With this method of typesetting, the images of pages are prepared for the printer photographically, as on a photocopier, instead of in lines of metal type. The new method was introduced gradually in newspapers, where the Linotype machines had worked well enough for more than half a century and where union opposition to the new technology was deeply entrenched. Technological advances were accelerated in the 1970s, introducing computers and computer programs that were tailor-made for the newspaper publisher, and many newspaper companies replaced their 19th-century printing systems with the new technology almost overnight. In a modern newspaper office each journalist has a desktop terminal–i.e., a keyboard and a visual display screen connected to the main computer. The visual display shows the current article or, in the case of a copy editor, the whole of the 119

page being composed from various articles and pictures. While writing, the reporter can retrieve information stored in the computer, such as any previous articles on the same subject, which can be displayed on the screen alongside the new copy. This split-screen technology also allows the copy editor to move copy around the screen on special page-layout terminals until the copy fits the page. Once it is ready, a push of a button sends the complete page to the main computer for eventual transformation into an aluminum printing plate. By this direct-input process the production of a page of news is accelerated. But the new technology can serve other production purposes. On some papers it is possible for an advertiser to send copy via the telephone to the newspaper office, where the computer automatically finds a suitable space for it and transmits it to the copy editor's screen. The reporter in the field, equipped with a portable terminal, can also input a story to the newspaper's computer directly and can gain access to the computer's library of information in the same way. If necessary, the editor can discuss the article with the reporter over the telephone as they both look at it on their screens. Similarly, items from press agencies can be located instantly; these may be transmitted to the computer terminal via cables or over the air by satellite, enabling news to reach the other side of the world within minutes. The electronic transmission of whole pages of news between remote locations also means that the printing plant does not have to be situated near the editorial offices. This can decrease real estate or rental costs, and it allows simultaneous editions of the same newspaper to be printed in different cities and even on different continents, an advantage that has been exploited by the British-based Financial Times and U.S.-based Wall Street Journal. ERA OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Foundations of modern journalism The creation of new industrial occupations in society as a whole was reported by a new set of newspapermen who had far more specific jobs than their 120

18th-century predecessors. Earlier journalists might write, edit, and print each copy of the paper by themselves. With the expansion of newspapers, full-time reporters, whose job was to go and get the news, were recruited, and they replaced many occasional correspondents, although there was always room for the stringer, a parttime reporter based in a small town or a remote region. William Howard Russell, a reporter for the London Times during the Crimean War (1853–56), became famous as one of the first war correspondents, and his writings inspired Florence Nightingale to take up her mission to the Crimea. More than 150 war correspondents reported on the U.S. Civil War (1861–65). The reporter could become as celebrated as the soldier, and vigilant reporting could perhaps prevent some of the atrocities perpetrated in wartime. In peacetime the fearless on-the-spot reporter hoping to “scoop” rival papers for a big story also became a folk hero, and his byline (the name or nom de plume published with the article) could become better known than that of the editor. The expense of employing a large team of reporters, some of whom could be out of the office for months, proved impossible for smaller papers, thus paving the way for the news agency. The French businessman Charles Havas had began this development in 1835 by turning a translation company into an agency offering the French press translated items from the chief European papers. His carrier-pigeon service between London, Paris, and Brussels followed, turning the company into an international concern that sold news items and that, eventually, also dealt in advertising space. Paul Julius Reuter, a former Havas employee, was among the first to exploit the new telegraphic cable lines in Germany, but his real success came in London, where he set up shop in 1851 as a supplier of overseas commercial information. Expansion soon led to the creation of the Reuters service of foreign telegrams to the press, an organization that grew with the spread of the British Empire to cover a large part of the world. In the United States, meanwhile, a very different type of agency–the newspaper cooperative–had arisen. Six New York City papers were the founding members; they suspended their traditional rivalries to share the cost of reporting the war with Mexico (1846–48) by 121

establishing the New York Associated Press agency. Between 1870 and 1934, a series of agency treaties divided the world into exclusive territories for each major agency, but thereafter freedom of international operation was reinstated. The press agencies ensured a continuous supply of international “spot news”–i.e., the bare facts about events as they occur–and raised standards of objective news reporting. For their feature pages, American newspaper editors came to rely on the feature syndicates, which supplied ready-to-use material from medical columns and book reviews to astrological forecasts and crossword puzzles. Growth of the newspaper business in the English-speaking world Advances in newspaper production matched a quickening in the pace of life for the millions of people who read newspapers in the late 19th century. The railways, which transported newspapers rapidly from town to town, contributed to the breakdown of rural isolation, while the steamship and the telegraph brought nations closer together. Mass-produced newspapers with a broad appeal became available for the newly literate or semiliterate industrial worker. Circulations of some popular papers were climbing toward 1,000,000 by the end of the century, and newspaper publishing and advertising had become big business. CONTROLS OVER PRINTING The church at first had every reason to welcome printing. Bibles (preferably in Latin), missals, breviaries, and general ecclesiastical literature poured from the early presses of Europe; and the first best-seller in print was a devotional work by Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi (Imitation of Christ), which went through 99 editions between 1471 and 1500. Such sales were matched, however, between 1500 and 1520 by the works of the humanist Erasmus, and, after 1517, by those of the “heretic” Martin Luther. The church had always exercised censorship over written matter, especially through the universities in the late Middle Ages. As the works of the reformers swelled in volume and tone, this censorship became 122

increasingly harsh. The Inquisition was restored, and it was decreed in 1543 that no book might be printed or sold without permission from the church. Lists of banned books were drawn up, and the first general Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) was issued in 1559. Dutch printers in particular suffered under the Inquisition and a number went to the stake for publishing Protestant books. To avoid such a fate, some resorted to the fake imprint, putting a fictitious printer or place of publication on the title page, or omitting that information. Censorship also began to be exercised in varying degrees by individual rulers, especially in England, where church and state had been united under Henry VIII after his defection from Rome. The Tudors, with little right under common law, arrogated to themselves authority to control the press. After about 1525, endless proclamations were issued against heretical or seditious books. The most important was that of 1538 against “naughty printed books,” which made it necessary to secure a license from the Privy Council or other royal nominees for the printing or distribution of any book in English. In this attempt at control, an increasingly prominent part came to be played by the Stationers' Company. Since its formation in 1403 from the old fraternities of scriveners, limners, bookbinders, and stationers, it had sought to protect its members and regulate competition. Its first application for a royal charter in 1542 seems to have gone unheeded; but in 1557, an important date in the English book trade, the interests of the crown (then the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor), which wanted a ready instrument of control, coincided with those of the company (under a Roman Catholic first Master), and it was granted a charter that gave it a virtual monopoly. Thereafter, only those who were members of the company or who otherwise had special privileges or patents might print matter for sale in the kingdom. Under the system of royal privileges begun by Henry VIII, a printer was sometimes given the sole right to print and sell a particular book or class of books for a specified number of years, to enable him to recoup his outlay. This type of regulation now came into the hands of the Stationers' Company. After licensing by the authorities, all books had to be entered in the company's register, on payment 123

of a small fee. The first stationer to enter a book acquired a right to the title or “copy” of it, which could then be transferred as might any other property. As the beginning of a system of copyright, this procedure was an admirable development; but the grip that the company obtained and its self-interested subservience to authority were to stunt the free growth of the English book trade for the next 100 years. The flourishing book trade: 1550–1800 From the mid-16th through the 18th century, there were virtually no technical changes in the methods of book production, but the organization of the trade moved gradually toward its modern form. The key functions of publishing, selecting the material to be printed and bearing the financial risk of its production, shifted from the printer to the bookseller and from him to the publisher in his own right; the author, too, at last came into his own. The battle with the censor became increasingly fierce before any measure of freedom of the press was allowed. Literacy grew steadily and the book trade expanded, both within and beyond national boundaries. PRINTED ILLUSTRATIONS Although 15th-century printers characteristically were content to exploit the existing book format, their use of printed illustrations in fact produced a new means of expression. Printers used woodcuts to print illustrations by the relief process and experimented with intaglio in copper engravings. Woodcut pictures were produced before metal types, and it was a simple development to make woodcuts in appropriate dimensions for use with type to print illustrated books. Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg was printing books illustrated with woodcuts about 1461. Copper engravings, which were better able to produce fine lines, were especially suitable for the reproduction of maps; among the few incunabula illustrated with engravings is a Ptolemy Geographia printed at Rome by Arnoldus 124

Buckinck in 1478. But because engravings required a different press and introduced a separate process into printing, and because experiments with woodcut illustrations were so satisfactory, there was no extensive use of engravings before 1550. Once a picture was prepared for printing, it could be repeated an indefinite number of times with little loss in detail, accuracy, form, or original vigour. When great artists such as Albrecht Dürer designed woodcuts the result was books of high aesthetic value that could be produced in great numbers. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499, is a monument to the early perfection of the woodcut and to book illustration in general. Equally as important as the reproduction of great art was the opportunity that printed illustrations offered for the faithful reproduction of pictures and diagrams in scientific books. The dawning scientific scholarship profited from the development of printed illustration; it is significant that studies in both anatomy, with its need for precise illustration of the human body, and cartography greatly expanded after development of printed illustrations. THE BOOK TRADE The book trade during this early period showed enormous vitality and variety. Competition was fierce and unscrupulous. A printer of Parma in 1473, apologizing for careless work, explained that others were bringing out the same text, and so he had to rush it through the press “more quickly than asparagus could be cooked.” Though most of the early firms were small printer-publishers, many different arrangements were made and at least one businessman, Johann Rynmann of Augsburg, published nearly 200 books but printed none of them. Publishing companies, which both financed and guided the printing enterprise, were also tried, as at Milan in 1472 and at Perugia in 1475. Publishers were not slow to promote their books. The medieval scribes had placed their names, the date when they finished their labours, and perhaps a prayer or a note on the book, at the end of 125

their codices. From this grew the printer's colophon, or tailpiece, which gave the title of the book, the date and place of printing, the name and house device of the printer, and a bit of self-advertisement. By about 1480, the information of the colophon began to appear at the front of the book as a title page, along with the title itself and the name of the author. Advertisements for books, in the form of handbills or broadsheets, are known from about 1466 onward, including one of Caxton's of 1477, ending with a polite request not to tear it down, Supplico stet cedula (“Please let the poster stand”). Publisher's lists and catalogs occur almost as early. Distribution of books along the trade routes, with their courier services, appears to have been highly effective. In 1467, for instance a bookseller in Riga on the Baltic coast had a stock of books issued by Schöffer in Mainz on the Rhine. Another effective channel for the distribution of books was the regular trade fairs, especially those at Frankfurt and at Stourbridge in England. Besides the stationers, who may sometimes have functioned as wholesalers, there were also retailers known as “book-carriers.” Early publishing had a profound effect on national languages and literatures– it began at once to create, standardize, and preserve them. Caxton, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid, after telling a story of confused dialects, ended up “Lo! what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?” By choosing words “understood of common people” and by printing all he could of English literature, he steered the English language along its main line of development. The early printing of great vernacular works, such as those of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, or a vernacular Bible, such as that of Luther in Germany, gave many languages their standard modern form. The French language owes much to the early printer-publisher Robert Estienne, who is known not only for his typographical innovations of the 1530s but also for his dictionaries. His work in the latter field caused him to be known as the father of French lexicography. Up to 1500, about three-quarters of all printing was in Latin, but thereafter that proportion steadily declined as books appeared in the vernacular and reached an ever-widening public. 126

Italy It may be said that book printing, after its birth in medieval Germany, was carried to maturity in humanistic Italy. The printing press reached Italy very early (1462–63), via the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, near Rome, which had strong German connections and a famous scriptorium. Two German printers, Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who had settled there, soon moved to Rome (1467), where the church encouraged the production of inexpensive books. In Italy as in Germany, however, it was the great commercial towns that became centres of printing and publishing. By 1500, Venice had no fewer than 150 presses; and two Venetian printers exercised a decisive influence on the form of the book: Nicolas Jenson, an outstanding typographer who perfected the roman typeface in 1470, and Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer-publisher of his time. Aldus began printing in 1490 with a series of Greek texts. He then hit on the idea of bringing out inexpensive “pocket editions” for the new readers produced by the humanist movement. Beginning in 1501 and continuing with six titles a year for the next five years, he issued a series of Latin texts that were models of scholarship and elegance. To keep down the cost, Aldus printed editions of 1,000, instead of the more usual 250; and to fill the page economically, he used an italic type designed for him by Francesco Griffo. The Aldine editions were widely copied, by pirating (i.e., without permission from the publisher or payment to him) and other methods, and their dolphin and anchor was one of the first instances of a publisher's device (roughly equivalent to the modern logo). France The way in which printing came to France is of special interest because it shows a publisher (rather than a printer-publisher) in command from the start. In Paris in 1470, the rector and librarian of the Sorbonne invited three German printers to set up a press on university premises. The scholars chose the books and supervised the printing, even to specifying the type. Their preference for roman 127

type greatly helped the eventual defeat of black-letter, or Gothic, type. Among the early French printers were Jean Dupré, a businessman publisher of éditions de luxe (“luxury editions”), who set up in 1481, and Antoine Vérard, who began printing in 1485. Vérard was the first to print a Book of Hours, a book containing the prayers or offices appointed to be said at canonical hours, and his work set a standard of elegance for French book production. After 1500, when the full force of the Renaissance began to be felt in France, a brilliant group of scholarly printers, including Josse Bade, Geoffroy Tory, and the Estienne (Stephanus) family, who published without a break for five generations (1502–1674), carried France into the lead in European book production and consolidated the Aldine type of book–compact, inexpensive, and printed in roman and italic types. The golden age of French typography is usually placed in the reign of Francis I (1515–47), one of the few monarchs ever to take a keen personal interest in printing. He was the patron and friend of Robert Estienne. In 1538 he ordered Estienne to give a copy of every Greek book he printed to the royal library, thus founding the first copyright library. In 1539 he laid down a code for printers, which included a prohibition on the use of any device that could be confused with another. Outside Paris, the only significant centre of printing in France was Lyon. While Paris was under the watchful eye of the predominantly Roman Catholic theologians at the Sorbonne, Lyon was able to publish humanist and Protestant works more freely. Among its foremost printers were Johann Trechsel and his sons, Melchior and Caspar; Sebastian Greyff, or Gryphius; and a fine typographer, Robert Granjon. By about 1600, however, religious pressure and the competition of Paris had put an end to printing in Lyon. Thereafter, the French book trade was based entirely in Paris. Other continental printers Other parts of Europe established presses quickly; e.g., Utrecht (1470), Budapest (1473), and Cracow (1474), in each case through Germans. In Spain the German connection is particularly evident. The first Spanish press was set up in 1473 at Valencia, where the German trading company of Ravensburg had an 128

important base. Though Madrid became dominant after 1566, publishing flourished in the early period at Barcelona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Seville, and the university towns of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Spain quickly evolved its own distinctive style of book, full of dignity and printed largely in black-letter types. The most remarkable production of the period was the magnificent Complutensian Polyglot Bible (which presented the text in several languages in adjacent columns), sponsored by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros “to revive the hitherto dormant study of the scriptures,” which it effectively did. It was printed at Alcalá de Henares, in Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, by Arnaldo Guillermo de Brocar, the first great Spanish printer. Editorial work was begun in 1502, the six volumes were printed in 1514–17, and the book finally was issued in 1521 or 1522. In Lisbon, the first printed book was a Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) produced in 1489 by Eliezer Toledano; he was reinforced in 1495 by two printers summoned by the Queen of Portugal. From Spain, printing crossed the Atlantic during this early period. In 1539 Juan Cromberger of Seville, whose father, Jacob, had set up a press there in 1502, secured the privilege for printing in Mexico and sent over one of his men, Juan Pablos. In that year, Pablos published the first printed book in the New World, Doctrina christiana en la lengua mexicana e castellana (“Christian Doctrine in the Mexican and Castilian Language”). England Compared with the Continent, England in the early days of printing was somewhat backward. Printing only reached England in 1476, and in 1500 there were still only five printers working in England, all in London and all foreigners. Type seems to have been largely imported from the Continent until about 1567, and paper until about 1589 (except for a brief spell during 1495–98). In an Act of 1484 to restrict aliens engaging in trade in England, Richard III deliberately exempted all aliens connected with the book trade in order to encourage its domestic development. In the following year, Henry VII appointed a foreigner, Peter Actors of Savoy, as royal stationer, with complete freedom to import books. 129

For about 40 years, England was a profitable field for continental printers and their agents. This necessary free trade was brought to an end and native stationers protected under Henry VIII, whose acts of 1523, 1529, and 1534 imposed regulations on foreign craftsmen and finally prohibited the free importation of books. It has been estimated that up to 1535 two-thirds of those employed in the book trade in England were foreigners. It is thus all the more remarkable that the man who introduced printing to England was a native, William Caxton. After learning to print at Cologne (1471– 72), Caxton set up a press at Bruges (about 1474), where he had long been established in business. His first book, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was his own translation from the French, and its production was probably the main reason why this semiretired merchant gentleman took to printing at the age of 50. He then returned to England through the encouragement of Edward IV and continued to receive royal patronage under Richard III and Henry VII. Caxton is important not so much as a printer (he was not a very good one) but because from the first he published in English instead of Latin and so helped to shape the language at a time when it was still in flux. Of the 90-odd books he printed, 74 were in English, of which 22 were his own translations. Some, such as the Ordre of Chyvalry and the Fayttes of Armes, were for the pleasure of his royal patrons; but his range was wide and included Dictes and Sayenges of the Philosophers (1477; his first book in England); two editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the second undertaken because a better manuscript came to hand); The Fables of Aesop (in his own translation from the French); Sir Thomas Malory's Kyng Arthur; and his largest work, The Golden Legend, a compilation of such ecclesiastical lore as lives of the saints, homilies, and commentaries on church services, a considerable editorial labour apart from the printing. Caxton's press was carried on after his death by his assistant, Wynkyn de Worde of Alsace. In the absence of court connections and also because he was a shrewd businessman, he relied less on the production of expensive books for the rich and more on a wide variety of religious books, grammars and other 130

schoolbooks, and collections of popular tales. He published more than 700 titles, mostly small volumes for the ordinary citizen, and continued Caxton's standardizing of the language, a solid contribution to the native book trade. The best of the early printers was Richard Pynson of Normandy, who began printing in 1492 and became printer to the king in 1508. Pynson, the first to use roman type in England (1509), published the first English book on arithmetic (1522). After his early liturgies and some fine illustrated books, he concentrated mainly on legal works. In 1521 he published Henry VIII's answer to Luther in defense of the papacy, for which the King received the title of fidei defensor (“defender of the faith”) from the Pope. THE AGE OF EARLY PRINTING: 1450–1550 Before the invention of printing, the number of manuscript books in Europe could be counted in thousands. By 1500, after only 50 years of printing, there were more than 9,000,000 books. These figures indicate the impact of the press, the rapidity with which it spread, the need for an artificial script, and the vulnerability of written culture up to that time. The printed books of this initial period, up to 1500, are known as incunabula; i.e., “swaddling clothes” or “cradle,” from a Latin phrase used in 1639 to describe the beginnings of typography. The dividing line, however, is artificial. The initial period of printing, a restless, highly competitive free-for-all, runs well into the 16th century. Printing began to settle down, to become regulated from within and controlled from without, only after about 1550. In this first 100 years, the printer dominated the book trade. The printer was often his own type founder, editor, publisher, and bookseller; only papermaking and, usually, bookbinding were outside his province.

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Early printer-publishers in Germany Printing has been called the great German contribution to civilization; in its early days it was known as the German art. After its invention (about 1440–50) by a goldsmith of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, it was disseminated with missionary zeal–and a keen commercial sense–largely by Germans and largely along the trade routes of German merchants. Gutenberg himself is usually credited with what is known as the 42-line Bible (1455; see photograph); the 36-line Bible; and a popular encyclopaedia called the Catholicon (1460); however, he lost control of his assets in collection proceedings brought against him by his business partner in 1455. Gutenberg's partner, Johann Fust, and his employee, Peter Schöffer (later Fust's son-in-law), continued the business together after 1455; but Mainz itself never became a major centre of the book trade. It was soon challenged by Strassburg (Strasbourg) where, in 1460–61, Johann Mentelin, with an eye for the lay market, brought out a Bible compressed into fewer pages and followed this with the first printed Bible in German or any other vernacular. A few years later, Cologne had its first press (1464) and became an important centre of printing in the northwest. Cologne's early production was almost entirely in Latin because of the heavy bias of its university toward orthodox Thomist theology. In the south, printing quickly spread to the other great trading centres, Basel (1466), Nürnberg (1470), and Augsburg (1472). Basel became famous for the scholarly editions of Johann Amerbach and Johann Froben, who had the benefit of distinguished advisers, including the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. In Augsburg, the first press was set up alongside the renowned scriptorium of the Abbey of SS. Ulrich and Afra; and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript was carried over into equally sumptuous editions of illustrated printed books. At Nürnberg, which soon took the lead in the book trade, Anton Koberger operated on a large, international scale. At his peak, he ran 24 presses and had links with Basel, Strassburg, Lyon, Paris, and many other cities. He could be called the first great businessman publisher and the first publisher to rise socially–to membership in the town council. By 1500 there were presses in some 60 German towns, including 132

Lübeck (1475), the head of the Hanseatic League. From there, printing spread to Denmark, Sweden, Rostock, Danzig, and Russia, though the first printer who went to Russia was apparently murdered before he could achieve anything. Printing first began in Russia in 1552, with the help of a printer from Copenhagen. MODERN PRINTING TECHNIQUES Electrostatic printing Electrostatic printing is a process of printing without contact, without a type form, and without ink. The paper is coated with a very thin layer of zinc oxide, which makes it an insulator while in the dark and a conductor of electricity when exposed to light. This paper is given a negative electrical charge in the dark. It is then exposed by light projected through a positive film of the document to be reproduced. The zinc oxide layer becomes conductive wherever it is illuminated, and the negative charge is dissipated in those areas that correspond to the blank surfaces of the document. Finally, the paper goes through a bath containing pigmented particles that are attracted by what remains of the negative charge and are fixed by drying. Electrostatic machines have been designed for printing geographic maps. These are composed of five successive units, each carrying out the same complete cycle of processing the paper to produce an edition in five colours at speeds of about 2,000 copies per hour. Improvements in the bath of pigmented particles are making possible the application of the electrostatic process to printing small books. Printing inks Printing inks contain three components: the vehicle, the colouring ingredients, and the additives. The vehicle, responsible for transferring the colouring ingredients from the ink fountain to the type form, can be either a vegetable base (linseed, rosin, or wood oils), which dries by penetration and oxidation and at the same time ensures fixation, or a solvent base derived from 133

kerosene, in which case drying takes place by evaporation. The colouring ingredients come in several forms: pigments, which are fine, solid particles manufactured from chemicals, generally insoluble in water and only slightly soluble in solvents; agents made from chemicals but soluble both in water and in solvents; and lacquers, obtained by fixing a colouring agent on powdered aluminum. The additives stabilize the mixture and give the ink additional desirable characteristics. The nature and proportions of the ingredients vary according to the printing process to be used and to the material to be printed. The proportions must be checked and sometimes modified during printing. Letterpress and offset use greasy inks. For printing on sheet-fed presses, thick greasy inks are used in which the vehicle is generally made of vegetable oils with the addition of hard natural or synthetic resins dispersed in mineral oils. Rollfed rotaries use fluid greasy inks in which the vehicle is made up of heavy mineral oils. The colour black is generally obtained from an organic pigment, carbon black, derived from the incomplete combustion of oils or of natural gas. Coloured pigments are inorganic compounds of chromium (yellow, green, and orange), molybdenum (orange), cadmium (red and yellow), and iron (blue). Inks for offset are more highly coloured than those used in letterpress, because they must be transferred to the blanket before they reach the paper. Furthermore, the pigments must resist being picked up by the water from the dampening system. Inks with various special qualities exist for both letterpress and offset. In high-gloss inks, the vehicle is not homogeneous, as with ordinary inks, but heterogeneous, based on synthetic resins dissolved in a solvent, with lead and cobalt additives. This ink glazes as it dries. When printing several colours, the whole series of operations must be finished before the ink has time to dry so that the inks can attach themselves to the surface. Quick-setting inks utilize a vehicle that also has a base of resins dissolved in a quick-drying solvent. 134

Heat-set inks require the application of heat to facilitate both the oxidation process and the evaporation of the solvent, as well as the penetration of certain elements that had rendered the ink more fluid. Cold-set inks are hardened by chilling after printing, having been kept fluid by heat until they were applied to the type form. Moisture-set inks become fixed when they are applied directly to damp paper or upon exposure to a water-spray after they are applied to dry paper. In such inks, which are used more in the United States than they are in Europe, the vehicle is a solvent, soluble in water,that, on contact, penetrates the paper, leaving the pigment on its surface. Odourless moisture-set inks are used for printing food packaging. Among other special-characteristic inks are metallic inks containing powdered copper, bronze, aluminum, or gold mixed with the pigment; magnetic inks, containing a powdered magnetized iron mixed with the pigment for “recognizing” the shape of printed characters as they pass before electronic reading equipment; and fluorescent inks. Rotogravure uses fluid inks in which the colouring agent, fixed on a natural or synthetic resin, is integrated in a fluid solvent to which, just before printing, a second, extremely volatile solvent is added. Flexography also uses fluid inks whose pigments or colouring agents are dissolved in pure alcohol, in alcohol solutions, or in water. Serigraphy uses inks of extremely varied consistency, depending on the surface to which they are to be applied; some are little different from ordinary paint, except that their composition must not be such that rapid drying would clog the mesh of the screen.

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A HISTORY OF READING ALBERTO MANGUEL “A delightfully wide-ranging, beguiling study of a small daily miracle” Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph WE ARE ALL READERS All people are readers, and the pleasure, responsibility and power they derive from reading, are common to all. I am not alone. I first discovered that I could read at the age of four. What that word was on the long-past billboard I no longer know, but the impression of suddenly being able to comprehend what before I could only gaze at is as vivid today as it must have been then. It was like acquiring an entirely new sense, so that now certain things no longer consisted merely of what my eyes could see, my ears could hear, my tongue could taste, my nose could smell, my fingers could feel, but of what my whole body could decipher, translate, give voice to, read. Reading is the craft of deciphering and translating signs. Some of these readings are coloured by the knowledge that the thing read was created for this specific purpose by other human beings – music notation or road signs, for instance – or by the gods – the tortoise shell, the sky at night. Others belong to chance. And yet, in every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability. It is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function. I didn’t learn to write until much later, until I was seven. I could perhaps live without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading. Reading – I discovered 136

– comes before writing. A society can exist – many do exist – without writing, but no society can exist without reading. Experience came to me first through books. When later in life I came across an event or circumstance or character similar to one I had read about, it usually had the slightly startling but disappointing feeling of déjà vu, because I imagined that what was now taking place had already happened to me in words, had already been named. Reading gave me an excuse for privacy. I lived apart from the rest of my family, looked after by my nurse in a separate section of the house. My favourite reading-place was on the floor of my room. Afterwards, my bed late at night became the safest, most secluded place for reading. I don’t remember ever feeling lonely. In fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. The psychologists think that those who have read stories or had stories read to them in childhood are in better shape and have a better prognosis than those who haven’t. *** I wanted to live among books. When I was sixteen, I found a job, after school, at Pygmalion, one of the three Anglo-German book-stores of Buenos Aires. The owner was Lily Lebach, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis and settled in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. She set me the daily task of dusting each and every one of the books in the store – a method by which she thought I would quickly get to know the stock and its location on the shelves. Unfortunately, many of the books tempted me. They wanted to be held and opened and inspected, and sometimes even that was not enough. A few times I stole a tempting book and took it home with me, because I not only had to read it, I had to have it, to call it mine. The novelist Jamaica Kincaid, confessing to the similar crime of stealing books from

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her childhood library in Antigua, explained that her intention was not to steal; it was “just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it.” Miss Lebach must have known that her employees pilfered books, but I suspect that, as long as she felt we did not exceed certain unspoken limits, she would allow the crime. Once or twice she saw me engrossed in a new arrival, and merely told me to get on with my work and to keep the book and read it at home, on my own time. I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before. The progression of my reading never followed the conventional sequence of time. For instance, reading something out loud to somebody that I had read before on my own modified those earlier readings, widened my memory of them, made me perceive what I had not perceived at the time but seemed to recall now, triggered by the person’s response. And now I ambitiously proceed from my history of a reader to the history of the act of reading, or rather to a history of reading. Any such history must be only one of many, however impersonal it may try to be. Ultimately, perhaps, the history of reading is the history of each of its readers. First, we, today’s readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Our future – the future of the history of our reading – was explored by Saint Augustine, who tried to distinguish between the text seen in the mind and the text spoken out loud; by Dante, who questioned the limits of the reader’s power of interpretation; by Lady Murasaki, who argued for the specificity of certain readings; by Pliny, who analyzed the performance of reading; by Sumerian scribes, who imbued the act of reading with political power; by the first makers of books, who found the methods of scroll-reading (like the methods we now use on our computers) too limiting and cumbersome, and offered us instead the possibility of flipping pages. Like the act of reading itself, a history of reading jumps forward to our time – to me, to my experience as a reader- and then goes back to an early page in a distant foreign century. 138

THE VITAL QUESTION In 1984, two small clay tablets of vaguely rectangular shape were found in Tell Brak, Siria, dating from the fourth millennium BC. They are in the Archaeological Museum of Baghdad. They are simple, unimpressive objects, each bearing a few discreet markings: a small indentation near the top and some sort of stick-drawn animal in the centre. One of the animals may be a goat, in which case the other is probably a sheep. The indentation, archeologists say, represents the number ten. All our history begins with these two modest tablets. They are among the oldest examples of writing we know. There is something intensely moving in these tablets. Perhaps, when we stare at these pieces of clay carried by a river which no longer exists, observing the delicate incisions portraying animals turned to dust thousands and thousands of years ago, a voice is conjured up, a thought, a message that tells us, “Here were ten goats,” “Here were ten sheep,” something spoken by a careful farmer in the days when the deserts were green. By the mere fact of looking at these tablets we have prolonged a memory from the beginnings of our time, preserved a thought long after the thinker has stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of creation that remains open for as long as these images are seen, deciphered, read. Like the Sumerian ancestor reading the two small tablets on that inconceivably remote afternoon, we too are reading , here in our room, across centuries and seas. Abstracted for a moment from the changing light outside and the sounds that rise from the street, we are following a story, a description, an argument. Nothing moves except our eyes and our hands occasionally turning the pages. But how does this process take place? Reading begins with the eyes. “The keenest of our senses is the sense of sight,” wrote Cicero, noting that when we see a text we remember it better than when we merely hear it. Saint Thomas Aquinas called sight “the greatest of the 139

senses through which we acquire knowledge”. This much is obvious to any reader: that letters are grasped through sight. But by what alchemy do these letters become intelligible words? What takes place inside us when we are faced with the text? What in fact, is the act we call reading? There existed a lot of different theories. Beginning with Empedocles who lived in the fifth century BC, Epicurus and Euclid who lived a century later, then Medieval scholars Galen and Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci (around the year 1508) – all were trying to understand how the surrounding objects were imprinted in the memory and became more or less fixed. The human mind, in Leonardo’s time, was seen as a small laboratory where the material gathered in by the eyes, ears and other organs of perception became “impressions” in the brain that were channelled through the centre of common sense and then transformed into one or several faculties – such as memory – under the influence of the supervising heart. But the fundamental question remained unsolved. In the modern study of neurolinguistics, the connection between brain and language was made in 1865. That year, two French scientists, Michel Dax and Paul Broca, suggested in simultaneous but separate studies that the vast majority of humankind, as a result of a genetic process is born with a left cerebral hemisphere that will eventually become the dominant part of the brain for encoding language. A much smaller proportion, mostly left-handed people, develop this function in the right cerebral hemisphere. In a few cases (in people genetically predisposed to a dominant left hemisphere), early damage to the left hemisphere results in a cerebral “reprogramming” and leads to development of the language function in the right hemisphere. But neither hemisphere will act as encoder and decoder until the person is actually exposed to language. By the time the first scribe scratched and uttered the first letters, the human body was already capable of the acts of writing and reading that still lay in the future. That is to say, the body was able to store, recall and decipher all manner of sensations, including the arbitrary signs of written language yet to be invented. 140

So, it is impossible to completely analyze what we do when we read. We are still far from the answer. Mysteriously, we continue to read without a satisfactory definition of what it is we are doing. THE SILENT READERS. In AD 384, almost half a century after Constantine the Great, first emperor of the Christian world, was baptized on his death-bed, a twenty-nine-year-old professor of Latin rhetoric whom future centuries would know as Saint Augustine arrived in Rome from one of the empire’s outposts in North Africa. He rented a house, set up a school and attracted a number of students who had heard about the qualities of this provincial intellectual, but it wasn’t long before it became clear to him that he wasn’t going to be able to earn his living as a teacher in the imperial capital. So when, a year later, the Prefect of Rome offered him the opportunity of teaching literature in the city of Milan, and included travelling expenses in the offer, Augustine accepted gratefully. Perhaps because he was a stranger to the city and wanted intellectual company, in Milan Augustine paid a visit to the city’s bishop, the celebrated Ambrose. Ambrose (who, like Augustine, was later to be canonized) was a man in his late forties, strict in his orthodox beliefs and unafraid of even the highest earthly powers. Ambrose was an extraordinary reader. “When he read,” said Augustine, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” To Augustine such reading manners seemed sufficiently strange. The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out 141

loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West. Augustine, a professor of rhetoric who was well versed in poetics and the rhythms of prose, a scholar who hated Greek but loved Latin, was in the habit – common to most readers – of reading anything he found written for sheer delight in the sounds. For Augustine the spoken word was an intricate part of the text itself. Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit meaning, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet,vebra volat – which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air” – used to express the exact opposite. It was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to the silent letters, the scripta, and to allow them to become, verba, spoken words – spirit. Observing the reading of Saint Ambrose that afternoon in 384, Augustine could hardly have known what was before him. He thought he was seeing a reader trying to avoid intrusive visitors. In fact, he was seeing a multitude, a host of silent readers who over the next many centuries would include many, would include us, reading him today. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind – in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading – is a late development in humankind’s evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing. He suggested that the earliest instances of reading might have been an aural rather than a visual perception. “Reading in the third millennium BC may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.”

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LEARNING TO READ Reading out loud, reading silently, being able to carry in the mind intimate libraries of remembered words, are astounding abilities that we acquire by uncertain methods. And yet, before these abilities can be acquired, a reader needs to learn a basic craft of recognising the common signs by which a society has chosen to communicate: in other words, a reader must learn to read. The methods by which we learn to read not only embody the conventions of our particular society regarding literacy – the channelling of information, the hierarchies of knowledge and power – they also determine and limit the ways in which our ability to read is put to use. In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication. The child learning to read is admitted into the communal memory by way of books, and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews, to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading. In medieval Jewish society, for instance, the ritual of learning to read was explicitly celebrated. On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses receives the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words “May the Torah be your occupation.” The teacher read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hardboiled eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher. Though it is difficult to generalize over several centuries and across so many countries, in the Christian society of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance learning to read and write – outside the Church – was the almost exclusive privilege of the aristocracy and (after the thirteenth century) the upper 143

bourgeoisie. Most boys and quite a few girls born to these classes were taught their letters very early. The child’s nurse, if she could read, initiated the teaching, and for that reason had to be chosen with utmost care, since she was not only to provide milk but also to ensure correct speech and pronunciation. Children learned to read phonetically by repeating letters pointed out by their nurse or mother in the book of alphabet sheet. They were made to repeat the sounds again and again. The image of a teaching mother-figure was as common in Christian iconography as the female student was rare in depictions of the classroom. There are numerous representations of Mary holding a book in front of the Child Jesus, and of Anne teaching Mary, but neither Christ nor his mother was depicted as learning to write or actually writing. After the letters had been learned, male teachers would be brought in as private tutors (if the family could afford them) for the boys, while the mother busied herself with the education of the girls. By the fifteenth century, most wealthy houses had the quiet space and equipment to provide teaching at home. Most scholars recommended that boys be educated away from the family, in the company of other boys. It was not appropriate for girls to learn to read and write unless they wished to become nuns. In the sixteenth century, the scholastic method was prevalent in universities and in church schools throughout Europe. The physical aspect of the schools did not change much from those times. Classes were conducted in a large room. The teacher usually sat at an elevated lectern, or sometimes at a table and on an ordinary bench (chairs did not become common in Christian Europe until the fifteenth century). The students sat on benches, holding lined pages or wax tablets for taking notes, or stood around the teacher with open books. The passage from the scholastic method to more liberated systems of thought brought another development. Until then, the task of a scholar had been – like that of the teacher – the search for knowledge, inscribed within certain rules and canons and proven systems of learning. The responsibility of the teacher had been felt to be a public one, making texts and other different levels of 144

meaning available to the vastest possible audience, affirming a common social history of politics, philosophy and faith. The teachers of the Latin school passed on orthodox precepts that implied an established “correct” and common reading but also offered students the vaster and more personal humanist perspective. As for the students, they eventually reacted by asserting their authority as individual readers over every text. PICTURE READING One summer afternoon in 1978, a big parcel arrived in the offices of the publisher Franco Maria Ricci in Milan, where I was working as foreign-language editor. When we opened it we saw that it contained, instead of manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages depicting a number of strange objects. The accompanying letter explained that the author, Luigi Serafini, had created an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world. Serafini had also invented an alphabet during two long years in a small apartment in Rome, which was meant to explain the illustrations’ intricacies. Ricci published the work in two luxurious volumes with a delighted introduction by Italo Calvino. They are one of the most curious examples of an illustrated book I know. Made entirely of invented words and pictures it must be read without the help of a common language, through for which there are no meanings except those furnished by a willing and inventive reader. This is, of course, a brave exception. Most of the time, a sequence of signs follows an established code, and only our ignorance of the code makes it impossible for us to read it. What would a Christian, looking upon the doors of St. Sabina in the midfifth century, have read? The tree with which Moses sweetened the bitter waters of Marah would have been recognized as the Cross, symbol of Christ Himself. The spring, like Christ, was a fount of living water giving life to a Christian flock. An unbeliever, however, not instructed in the Christian faith, would read the images on 145

the doors of St. Sabina much as Serafini intended his readers to understand his fantastical encyclopaedia: by making up, from the depicted elements, a story and vocabulary for themselves. When Gothic art began to flourish in the thirteenth century, and painting on church walls was abandoned in favour of pictorial windows and carved columns, the biblical iconography was transferred from plaster to stained glass, wood and stone. Then sometime in the early fourteenth century, the images that had been intended for the faithful to read on the walls were reduced and collected in the shape of a book. These books were made most entirely out of pictures with just a few words, sometimes as captions on the sides of the page and sometimes issuing from the mouths of characters, like the balloons in today’s comic strips. By the end of the fourteenth century these books of images had become hugely popular, and they were to remain so throughout the Middle Ages. Essentially, the “Bibles” were large picture-books in which each page was divided to allow for two or more scenes, for instance, the so-called Biblia Paurerum of Heidelberg , from the fifteenth century. For the literate Christian of the fourteenth century, a page of an ordinary bible had a multiplicity of meanings through which the reader could progress according to the guiding gloss of the author or the reader’s own knowledge. A reader would pace this reading at will, over an hour or a year, with interruptions or delays, skipping sections or devouring the whole page at one sitting. But the reading of an illustrated page in the Biblia Paurerum was almost instantaneous, since the “text” was offered iconographically as a whole, without semantic gradations, and the time of the narration in pictures necessarily coincided with that of the reader’s own reading. The viewer, or

reader, is compelled to participate in completing and

interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data

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on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots.

PRIVATE READING. It is summer. Sunk deep in the soft bed among feather pillows in the grey village of Saint-Sauveur-en -Puisaye, an eight-year-old girl is silently reading Vitor Hugo’s Les Miserables. She doesn’t read many books; she rereads the same ones over and over again. She feels she can nestle in its pages “like a dog in its kennel.” Now, stretched out in the muffled bed, holding the treasured book in both hands and propping it up on her stomach, she has established not only her own space but her own measure of time. She doesn’t know it, but in the Abbey of Fontevrault, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who died in 1204, lies sculpted in stone on the lid of her tomb, holding a book in exactly the same manner. I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms, in houses whose smells and sounds were unfamiliar to me, the combination of bed and book granted me a sort of home, which I knew I could go back to, night after night, every day. What took place, took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I turned the pages. I knew that not every book was suitable for reading in bed. Detective stories and tales of the supernatural were most likely to grant me a peaceful sleep. There is no doubt that the act of reading in time requires a corresponding act of reading in place, and the relationship between the two acts is obvious. There are books I read in armchairs, and there are books I read at desks, in subways, on streetcars and on buses. I find that books read in trains have something of the quality of books read in armchairs, perhaps because in both I can easily abstract myself from surroundings. “The best time for reading a good stylish story,” said the English

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novelist Alan Sillitoe, “is in fact when one is on a train travelling alone. With strangers roundabout, and unfamiliar scenery passing by the window.” But there is something other than entertainment, which one derives from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centred act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden. The notion of reading in bed is not an ancient one. The Greek bed was a wooden frame and not really practical for reading. It had a low head-rest but no foot-board, a mattress and pillows, and was employed both for sleeping and for reclining at leisure. In this position, it was possible to read a scroll by holding one end with the left hand while the right elbow supported the body. But the procedure, cumbersome at the best of times, became frankly uncomfortable after a short while, and ultimately unbearable. The Romans had a different bed for each of several different purposes, including beds for reading, but Roman sleeping- bed would sometimes serve as a reading-bed. In the early years of Christian Europe, and well into the twelfth century, ordinary beds were simple objects, often left behind during the forced retreats from war and famine. Since only the rich had elaborate beds, few but the rich had books. To be seen owning books and elaborate beds became indicative of one’s social standing. The bedroom became not only the room in which the bourgeois slept, it became the repository of collected goods – books included. In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bedrooms – like almost every other room in the house – were also passageways, so that a bedroom did not necessarily guarantee peace and quiet for such activities as reading. By the eighteenth century, even though bedrooms were still not undisturbed spaces, staying in bed to read had become common enough. Complete privacy in the bedroom, even privacy in bed, was still not easy to come by. Even if the family was rich enough to have individual beds and bedrooms, social conventions 148

demanded that certain communal ceremonies take place there. For example, it was customary for ladies to “receive” in their bedchambers. Even the nineteenth century was reluctant to recognize the bedroom as a private place. But in the twentieth, when the bed has become at last so private, so intimate, that it is now a world unto itself, where everything is possible. THE AUTHOR AS READER In one event at the end of the first century AD, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secoundus (known to future readers as Pliny the Younger to distinguish him from his erudite uncle, Pliny the Elder) left the house of a friend in Rome in a state of righteous anger. As soon as he reached his study, Pliny sat down and, in order to collect his thoughts, wrote about that night’s events to his friend. “I have just left in indignation a reading at a friend of mine’s, and I feel I have to write to you at once, as I can’t tell you about it personally. The text that was read was highly polished in every possible way, but two or three witty people – or so they seemed to themselves and a few others – listened to it like deafmutes.” It is somewhat difficult for us, at a distance of twenty centuries, to understand Pliny’s dismay. In his time, authors’ readings had become a fashionable social ceremony and, as with any other ceremony, there was an established etiquette for both the listeners and the authors. The listeners were expected to provide critical response, based on which the author would improve the text. That is why the motionless audience had so outraged Pliny. The author too was obliged to follow certain rules if his reading was to be successful, for there were all sorts of obstacles to overcome. First of all an appropriate reading-space had to be found. Rich men fancied themselves poets, and recited their work to large crowds of acquaintances at their large villas, in the auditorium – a room built specially for that purpose. Once his friends had gathered at the appointed place, the author had to face them from a chair, wearing a new toga and displaying all his rings. Oratorical skills were therefore essential. Praising 149

one reader for his performance, Pliny noted that “he showed an appropriate versatility in raising or lowering his tone. His remarkably pleasant voice was another advantage, and was improved by his modesty, which always adds charm to a reading. I don’t know why, but shyness suits an author better than confidence.” Pliny suggested a number of reasons why reading in public was a beneficial exercise. Celebrity was no doubt a very important factor, but there was also the delight of hearing one’s own voice. Moreover, reading publicly was, in his view, the best way for an author to acquire an audience. In fact, reading publicly was in itself a rudimentary form of publishing. As Pliny had explained, public readings by the author were meant to bring the text not only to the public but back to the author as well. Throughout Europe, the nineteenth century was the golden age of author’s readings. In England the star was Charles Dickens. Always interested in amateur theatrics, Dickens used his histrionic talent in readings of his own work. These, like Pliny’s, were of two kinds: reading to his friends to polish his final drafts ; and public readings, performances for which he became famous in later life. This was, in part, what Dickens’s audience came for, and what brings the audiences of today to public readings: to watch the writer perform, not as an actor, but as a writer; to hear the voice the writer had in mind when a character was created; to match the writer’s voice to the writing.

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Библиографический список

1. Мюллер, В. Новый англо-русский словарь / В. Мюллер. – М. : Диалог, 2002. 2. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading / A. Manguel. – London : Flamingo, 1997. 3. Encyclopedia Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite CD-ROM, 2003 4. The Oxford Russian Dictionary. Third edition: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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