Ong Ch. 1-3

Chapters 1-3 of Ong brought up three very interesting concepts to me.  First, that writing makes words seem like things because they become a picture on the page.  I’ve discussed this in my classes before and I think it’s really interesting.  Words have no meaning until we as a society assign them one.  If we were to look at foreign languages like Hindi or Russian that use characters completely different from the English alphabet the characters would probably look like pictures to us.  Also, the writing is completely meaningless unless you speak the language.  Written language requires definition and interpretation.  Oral language does as well, but in an oral culture you would most likely be communicating with people speaking your own language.

The second interesting point was that thought requires continuity so in an oral culture you need redundancy.  In text, you can easily refer to something earlier in the text if you forget something or if you want to understand something better.  However, if communication is only spoken you have to repeat things to remember them.  Think of how many times you’ve asked someone to help you remember something.  I do that all the time if I’m worried about remembering something because the chances of two people remembering something are far greater than you alone.  This also relates to oral history where stories get repeated from generation to generation in order to preserve the history of a culture.

The third interesting point relates back to the first one.  Ong mentions that worlds are abstract and the word tree doesn’t represent a concrete thing.  Once again this shows how words need to be defined to be meaningful.  Language isn’t necessarily concrete and especially since words are more or less smaller visual representations of things, confusion can easily occur.  Without any explanation, there aren’t very many pieces of art that I would understand the concept of fully without having some explanation for the artist.  Words aren’t as open ended as art is, but they are still not concrete.  Every time you say tree you’re not talking about one thing, but many different things.