A Discussion With a Friend....

[Misty_Morning]

Earlier this evening I had the great fortune to tell a beloved friend she was dead ass wrong.

We had been discussing "native american" civilization, and the apparent lack of written language.

My opinion is that there is no way in hell that vast civilization such as Cohochia could ever exist without some form of written language.

It is my opinion that the language was written on some form of media that was organic and thus has decayed ....or... that the language has yet to be deciphered on the fragments pottery and bones that have been recovered from aercheaological digs across western hemisphere.


Think about it....a civilization that exsisted for hundreds of years....that was centered around agricultural harvests and a vast network of trade from hundreds of miles away...

No my dear Cloudy.....written language in this continent existed long before the europeans came along.

It had to.

We just haven't discovered it.....

Damn ....can't believe I just said that...we haven't discovered it yet.....what a pompus attitude we still have today in regards to native cultures....

 

[MrsDeathlynx]

I'm not trying to be argumentative so please don't take me wrong or in an offensive manner...

If you have read "Roots" by Alex Haley he mentions that stories are passed down from generation to generation, a specific person in an African village (I can't remember the name of the person) who's job it is to remember these stories and pass them on. I don't see why this couldn't be true for any native culture. Some of these villages only learned to read when the europeans came to visit them, writing isn't necessarily a requirement for any culture...

 

[cloudy]

If you have read "Roots" by Alex Haley he mentions that stories are passed down from generation to generation, a specific person in an African village (I can't remember the name of the person) who's job it is to remember these stories and pass them on.

It was true for our cultures, but they were two people: the history keeper, and the story teller.

Misty may be right, I don't know, but I do agree that writing isn't necessary for us to have a culture, no matter what Roxanne or amicus says.

 

[rgraham666]

Well, I do know that the bards of Europe, back in the Dark Ages, were the record keepers and news spreaders of the time.

I understand they could replay a 1,000 line song perfectly after hearing it once.

So I don't believe a written language is all that necessary.

 

[Carnevil9]

You can't have a vast civilization without a written language? How delightfully parochial of you! I suppose you also believe that they must have had NPR and the New York Times?

 

[cloudy]

You can't have a vast civilization without a written language? How delightfully parochial of you! I suppose you also believe that they must have had NPR and the New York Times?

That's not how the discussion went at all. Maybe you act like a dickwad when you discuss things with your friends, but we don't.

 

[Carnevil9]

That's not how the discussion went at all. Maybe you act like a dickwad when you discuss things with your friends, but we don't.

I love you too, Angel Cake.

 

[john-the-author]

It was true for our cultures, but they were two people: the history keeper, and the story teller.

Misty may be right, I don't know, but I do agree that writing isn't necessary for us to have a culture, no matter what Roxanne or amicus says.

The tribes in the Washington Peninsula were a going concern until about, oh, 70 years ago, after which the incursion of European civilization had gotten to the point in that part of Washington State that the native populace and their societies were permanently disrupted.

There wasn't a written language when they were first contacted in the 1830s and 1840s as I recall, but they still had a vibrant and functional culture going. Moreover, the tribes around here have oral traditions that go back several thousand years. It can be done.

As a similar example, the native peoples of Australia have an enormously strong oral culture (again, being damaged considerably by Western culture) that's lasted for a long, long time without any apparent written language.

One of my writers was a Ph.D. in Linguistics. His dissertation was writing a couple of dictionaries of two tribes' languages that had never been documented before. The languages were strong although there weren't as many speakers these days. But there wasn't a written component.

It happens.

 

[Liar]

The main differences between oral tradition and written tradition cultures:

Oral:
-Difficult to store knowledge over time. Your media is the human brain, which can forget, distort and confuse information.
-Difficult to transport knowledge over space. You have to take a Guy Who Knows with you.
-Easy to transfer knowledge. The reciever is right in front of you, and you can have a dialouge to ensure he got the point.

Written:
-Easy to store knowledge over time.
-Easy to transport knowledge over space.
-Difficult to transfer knowledge. Learning from a text is a blunter tool than learning from a person. It's much easier to misunderstand. Which is why we still have teachers.


Is a culture like Cohochia impossible with Oral Tradition? I think not. Less probable, yes. And probably slower to build up and more difficult to maintain over long time. But not impossible.

 

[keeblercrumb]

The main differences between oral tradition and written tradition cultures:

Oral:
-Difficult to store knowledge over time. Your media is the human brain, which can forget, distort and confuse information.
-Difficult to transport knowledge over space. You have to take a Guy Who Knows with you.
-Easy to transfer knowledge. The reciever is right in front of you, and you can have a dialouge to ensure he got the point.

Written:
-Easy to store knowledge over time.
-Easy to transport knowledge over space.
-Difficult to transfer knowledge. Learning from a text is a blunter tool than learning from a person. It's much easier to misunderstand. Which is why we still have teachers.


Is a culture like Cohochia impossible with Oral Tradition? I think not. Less probable, yes. And probably slower to build up and more difficult to maintain over long time. But not impossible.

From every anthropological work that I have ever read(sic), the lack of a written lanquage may inhibit technological development but is otherwise unrelated to the richness or success of a culture.

Clearly the adaptation of written lanquage gives a given culture advantages in maintaining large civilizations, but absent a competitive culture so imbued, relying on oral tradition can certainly be successful, as any number of large and successful cultures throughout the world can attest to.

What inherently skews our undestanding of this phenomena is that our understanding of earlier civilizations is heavily biased, almost by definintion, toward those which left a written record of their explpoits....

-KC

 

[damppanties]

The main differences between oral tradition and written tradition cultures:

Oral:
-Difficult to store knowledge over time. Your media is the human brain, which can forget, distort and confuse information.
-Difficult to transport knowledge over space. You have to take a Guy Who Knows with you.
-Easy to transfer knowledge. The reciever is right in front of you, and you can have a dialouge to ensure he got the point.

Written:
-Easy to store knowledge over time.
-Easy to transport knowledge over space.
-Difficult to transfer knowledge. Learning from a text is a blunter tool than learning from a person. It's much easier to misunderstand. Which is why we still have teachers.

A very fascinating book about the differences between oral and written cultures is Orality and Literacy. I had it as course material for one of my courses last semester and couldn't put it down. I don't agree with everything the author says in it (he seems to be of the opinion that literacy, or the act of reading and writing, is more 'intelligent' than oral tradition) but it was a fascinating read nonetheless.

 

[Liar]

A very fascinating book about the differences between oral and written cultures is Orality and Literacy. I had it as course material for one of my courses last semester and couldn't put it down. I don't agree with everything the author says in it (he seems to be of the opinion that literacy, or the act of reading and writing, is more 'intelligent' than oral tradition) but it was a fascinating read nonetheless.

I read some essay of Ong in my epistemology courses, but I haven't seen this book. Like you say, he's a bit normative, he also holds the Western Socratic idea-tradition as superior to anything sprung from any other tradition. But yeah, interresting stuff.

My professor, who looks at it more philosophically than anything defines the difference as this. I paraphrase:

As an animal or as a solitary human, you can only know those things that you have experienced or can deduct.

As a human with language and story-telling abilities, you can also know things that other people have experienced or deducted. The total knowledge of all the people in the tribe, becomes it's collective consciousness. The bigger the tribe and the more versatile roles therein, the more potential knowledge.

As a human with a written language, you add another dimension to your tribe's total knowledge - everything it has ever written down. Writing gives the tribe new means to preserve and ackumulate collective knowledge over time. And the tribe consciousness can expand beyond the totality of it's members. If it's written down, you don't have to remember it. So you can afford to fill your head with other things.

 

[R. Richard]

AFAIK, the only pre-columbian Amerinds who had a written language were the Maya. The Amerind tribe headed by the Inca had a sort of language using knotted strings. However, the language is not regarded as a full language.

[To the best of my knowledge, the Amerinds usually called Inca are not properly called that. Only the leader was the Inca.]

 

[cantdog]

I'm not trying to be argumentative so please don't take me wrong or in an offensive manner...

If you have read "Roots" by Alex Haley he mentions that stories are passed down from generation to generation, a specific person in an African village (I can't remember the name of the person) who's job it is to remember these stories and pass them on. I don't see why this couldn't be true for any native culture. Some of these villages only learned to read when the europeans came to visit them, writing isn't necessarily a requirement for any culture...

You mean griots. Griot clans and families are still there in West Africa. Most popular music is from griots, in the region.

The druids were also bards, trained to remember and declaim oral history, song, ritual. There was Ogam, but the larger part of the tradition passed by teaching of pupils and epic songs.

Songlines among the Aboriginal Australians, shamanic tales and songs across Siberia and Alaska-- it's just a different way of doing these things.

But the Maya used writing.

 

[R. Richard]

I'm not trying to be argumentative so please don't take me wrong or in an offensive manner...

If you have read "Roots" by Alex Haley he mentions that stories are passed down from generation to generation, a specific person in an African village (I can't remember the name of the person) who's job it is to remember these stories and pass them on. I don't see why this couldn't be true for any native culture. Some of these villages only learned to read when the europeans came to visit them, writing isn't necessarily a requirement for any culture...

In what used to be call Rhodesia and is now called Zimbabwe is a large stone structure, probably a palace. The structure is called Zimbabwe, which means 'great house.' When the first Europeans arrived and viewed the structure, they decided that it couldn't have been built by the natives they saw in the area. Thus, the idea of a lost white civilization in the jungle was born. Of course, the structure was built by black Africans.

Yes, it's possible to have a civilization without a written language. The people who built Zimbabwe proved that.

 

[Equinoxe]

There is no evidence of a written language for any Native American culture in the United States or Canada, though several Mesoamerican cultures did possess written languages (the Maya being the most famous, but not the only example).

I disagree that the extent and technological sophistication of certain Native American cultures is a reason to assume that they possessed a written language. None of the Andean civilisations are known to have had one and neither did the Mexica—and they consituted some of the most technologically advanced peoples of the Americas.

 

[MrsDeathlynx]

You mean griots. Griot clans and families are still there in West Africa. Most popular music is from griots, in the region.

The druids were also bards, trained to remember and declaim oral history, song, ritual. There was Ogam, but the larger part of the tradition passed by teaching of pupils and epic songs.

Songlines among the Aboriginal Australians, shamanic tales and songs across Siberia and Alaska-- it's just a different way of doing these things.

But the Maya used writing.

Thanks! I have watched "Roots" numerous times and couldn't think of what the term was. Thank you!

 

[Equinoxe]

[To the best of my knowledge, the Amerinds usually called Inca are not properly called that. Only the leader was the Inca.]

Tawantinsuyu is the proper Quechua name for the Inca polity, which was ruled by the Sapa Inca and was in any case a multi-ethnic empire dominated by Quechua-speakers and not specifically an ethnic group.

 

[R. Richard]

Tawantinsuyu is the proper Quechua name for the Inca polity, which was ruled by the Sapa Inca and was in any case a multi-ethnic empire dominated by Quechua-speakers and not specifically an ethnic group.

Thank you for the name information.

Yes, the empire ruled by the Inca consisted of many tribes who were usually assimulated into the empire by means of negotiation, rather than warfare. However, if there was a group that posed a threat to the empire ruled by the Inca [e.g the Chachapoya] then there was warfare. Once a tribe became a part of the empire ruled by the Inca, then it was of great advantage to learn Quecha.

The Inca did posssess at least the beginning of a written language involving knots in an array of strings.

 

[cantdog]

Equinoxe!

Wow. I love the way you speak.

I'm a language and linguistics major, minor in history. We need to know each other better.