The Invention of the Alphabet

The most momentous development, and perhaps the greatest invention of all time (across all domains of human invention), was the alphabet, because this opened the doorway to an explosion of writing that would lead ultimately to the written forms of the digital age, including the use of the English language. Research currently dates the origins of alphabetic writing to between 2000 BC and 1500 BC in Egypt. As carvings in rock have revealed, early alphabetic signs were derived from hieratic and hieroglyphic Egyptian writing.Footnote ²¹ However the first known alphabet, which was an alphabet of consonants, was the Phoenician/Proto-Canaanite script. This was adapted by the Greeks, from the eighth century BC onwards, who added their own five characters to represent vowels.Footnote ²² The development of the modern alphabet came from both Greek script and the Roman alphabet, and can be seen in the use of the Latinised form of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet in the word itself, ‘alphabet’. Alpha was derived from the Semitic ‘aleph’ and ‘beta’ from ‘beth’.Footnote ²³

The earliest example of Greek alphabetic writing found so far is Nestor’s CupFootnote ²⁴. The script written on the cup means:

The addition of the written text transformed the cup from a functional object only, to one that also communicates the power and potential of the supernatural and the power of love.

Ancient Greece also provides the first examples of the writing of music although the separation of written music and language that is so distinct in modern times was not so at the inception of notated music in Greece. The earliest musical notation is in fragments: such as The First Delphic Hymn – late second century BC; the Second Delphic Hymn – 128–127 BC.¹⁴ The first example of a complete whole written musical composition in the world is the Epitaph of SeikilosFootnote ²⁶ (Figures 2.2 and 2.3), which it has been suggested is from the first century AD.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 2.2 The Seikilos stelae. The Seikilos stelae: CC-BY-SA Lennart Larsen, The National Museum of Denmark.

Figure 2.3 The Seikilos stelae. The National Museum of Denmark.

On the stone there are 12 lines of text (the thirteenth line was ground off so that the object could serve as a pedestal for a vase). The first five lines explain the purpose of the object: ‘I am a tombstone, an image. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance.’ The next seven lines are the words of a song of which the approximate translation is:

One of the reasons the Epitaph of Seikilos is so significant is that it contains written language and musical notation. The musical ‘notes’ appear between the lines of text. The notes are symbols (which to modern readers of English could almost be letters of the English alphabet) from the Ionian alphabet that was used to represent the notes in vocal music. Instrumental music had a different notation for musical notes.Footnote ²⁹ The rhythms of the notes are marked similar to the modern western musical notation, for example, a dot to indicate a longer note like a dotted crotchet, and slurs to indicate moving note patterns while syllables are held by the singer.

The use of written letter-like symbols for music was a major deviation from the use of letters as representing oral speech sounds. The idea that letters when combined as in the word ‘ace’ represent the meaning of the number one in a deck of cards (or high achievement) is radically different from the three musical notes A C and E played, for example, in sequence as part of a melody, or played together as the most basic musical chord, C Major in western music. The emergence of musical notation based on philosophical theories represented in texts, and the derivation in the Ionian alphabet, shows the original close links between written language and music.

Another of the interesting connections between text and music is that the inclusion of the music on the Epitaph allows us to understand aspects such as the length of pronunciation of spoken syllables at the time because of the information implied by the rhythms of the musical notes. The character of the music, including its musical range of an octave, and emphases on the notes ‘e’ and ‘a’, seems appropriate to the contemplative nature of the text.

There are many sources of information about language, and music, in ancient Greece including accounts by philosophers but also depictions through stories such as The Iliad and The Odyssey. The works include depictions of music and text. For example in The Iliad, Hephaestus’ creations include a wedding accompanied by pipes and lyres: a very early juxtaposition of musical meaning and the meaning of words in a hymn. Later in the same section we read that ‘a godlike singer of tales sang with them to the lyre, while a couple of solo dancers led off and spun round among the people.’Footnote ³⁰ Evidence of the semantic importance of music also came from the philosophers:

Although many fragments of music notation have been found, there are no surviving treatises (theories) contemporary with the fragments, leading to the suggestion that ‘it is not unreasonable to assume that musical notation was largely the province of the practising musician rather than the theorist and came to be recorded in later theory only as a way of preserving (or recovering) a dying tradition.’Footnote ³² The Epitaph of Seikilos uses the composition of writing enhanced by the composition of music to express, in multiple meanings, powerful aspects of the human condition.

The use of the alphabet in ancient Greece was remarkable historically not only for its own sake but also because of the unique context of its emergence. HavelockFootnote ³³ identified five things that made the context for the creation of the alphabet unique:

1. 1. Greek society was free from contact with any other literature culture.

2. 2. Political and social autonomy meant a firm consciousness of its own identity.

3. 3. Maintaining a record of this identity was exclusively oral until the advent of the alphabet.

4. 4. The invention of the alphabet was made by the speakers of the language.

5. 5. The application of the alphabet was controlled by Greek speakers.

No other instance of transition from orality to literacy (e.g. Scottish; African) can meet all these five requirements. Another unique feature of the alphabet was the completeness of the record that it enabled, and the complete visibility of language. This was not the case for the Sumerian or Babylonian scripts, such as the epic story Gilgamesh which included economisation of details because they were intended to be read aloud (and perhaps intoned), not just read in their written form.

Historically, the alphabet has been at the heart of some of the most enduring debates about the development of written communication, for example whether the alphabet simply emerged from logographic or pictographic forms (the alphabet at the heart of debate in modern times can be seen in Chapter 7). In Richard Harris’s examination of the origins of writing,Footnote ³⁴ he called this particular idea of emergence an evolutionary fallacy, arguing that the alphabet was ‘the great invention’ because unlike logos or pictographs its graphic signs have almost no limitations for human communication. David Olson thoroughly reviews the arguments about historical developments and concludes that,

The ancient Greeks’ development of the alphabet enabled the expression of an infinite number of meanings through the most efficient means. Its development was the catalyst for a process of linguistic change that continues to the present day.

The Emergence of English

The invention of the alphabet paved the way for writing in many languages, not least the English language, which was to become the world’s most used. The earliest indigenous writing found in England was a runic inscription known as the Caistor rune (from the name of the town Caistor-by-Norwich) dated from 400 AD. The origin of the word ‘rune’ is secret or mystery. The shape of the rune ‘H’ suggests that the runes were carved by someone originally from Scandinavia who was living in East Anglia, considerably before the date usually given for the arrival of Anglo-Saxons.Footnote ³⁶

The Caistor runes were written on the ankle bone of a roe deer. The meaning of the runes is raihan an early form of the Old English word raha that probably meant ‘from a roe’. The bone could have been one of the pieces for a game. The identification of the source of the object (the roe) as the meaning of writing was common at the time. The runes, derived from an ancient Germanic alphabet (that grew out of a Roman alphabet), were used by Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons. At the time of their use in England, there were only 24 graphemes (letter symbols) to represent 40 phonemes (sounds). Later ‘i’ and ‘j’, ‘u’, and ‘v’ were changed from being interchangeable to having distinct functions, and ‘w’ was added, but many sounds still had to be signalled by combinations of letters.

From AD 450 to 480 in England the first Old English was being written. The Undley bracteate (a gold medallion) includes the earliest example of Old English found so far. The bracteate was found in 1982 in the county of Suffolk. A translation of the runes on the Undley bracteate (which surround the helmeted head, and a she-wolf suckling in the centre of the bracteate) that read ‘gægogæ mægæ medu’ is ‘this she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman’.Footnote ³⁷

The few texts that have survived from the period AD 675 to 975 are in four main dialects: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian, and Northumbrian. The last two are sometimes grouped together and called Anglian. West Saxon became the standard dialect at the time but is not the direct ancestor of modern Standard English, which is mainly derived from an Anglian dialect.Footnote ³⁸ If you take the modern word ‘cold’ as an example, the Anglian ‘cald’ is a stronger influence than the West Saxon version, ‘ceald’.

The period from William the Conqueror in 1066 to the death of Edward I in 1307 marked a dramatic increase in the amount of writing in England.Footnote ³⁹ The quantitative evidence for this increase is in the growth from 2,000 charters and writs in Anglo-Saxon England to tens of thousands that survive from thirteenth-century England. The quick increase in the number of texts from the Middle English period can also be seen in a study of medical texts written in English: 20 medical texts in the thirteenth century; 140 in the fourteenth century, and 872 in the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ The spread of documents such as charters to convey property meant that the main authorship of documents by royalty and other elites, in major urban settlements, adjusted so that literacy spread to rural areas. An important part of this spread was the development in the practice of signing a name. ‘In Edward the Confessor’s reign only the king is known to have possessed [a seal or signum] for authenticating documents, whereas in Edward I’s reign even serfs were required by statute to have them.’Footnote ⁴¹ One of Clanchy’s cautions is that we should not conceive causal connections between literacy and an approbatory sense of civilisation. More controversial is the claim that supporting evidence for this lack of causal connection is that only a minority of people can be proven to benefit in economic or cultural terms from literacy teaching at state schooling. There is now robust evidence, for example from cross-sectional analyses, of education as a causal factor in people’s life time earningsFootnote ⁴². It is true that beyond the literal meaning of the word ‘literacy’ there lie cultural assumptions and value judgements, and as I show in chapter 6, the role of the state in influencing literacy in national curricula remains contentious.

The very first concepts related to the idea of standardising language were seen in the ancient Greek philosophers’ explanation of signification as convention. The conventions that ultimately led to the modern idea of standard English began as early as the fourteenth century. The interaction of people with shared interests, such as those in guilds, was an example of social and cultural influences on the development of a standard language. For example, as early as 1373 the Writers of Court Letters was established as a guild for scriveners. In addition to the importance of lawyers, and the scriveners who worked for them, influencing the development of a standard English, other professional groups developed writing for their own purposes. The social contact of these groups accelerated the drive towards agreed conventions and hence standard forms.Footnote ⁴³

The influence on standardisation of English by people in southern parts of England, particularly East Anglia, the south-east of England, and London was strongly linked to trade. In the late fourteenth century Norwich was the second-largest city in England, in part because of the concentration of cloth manufacturers who supplied the continent. However, as the century progressed people moved to London, a journey made easier by the Great North Road (now the A1 M Motorway in England) and Watling Street. The influence of the East Midlands accent on London became significant, as a result of population movements, and high-status institutions such as the University of Cambridge. As Crystal makes clear,

As I have shown, much more common use of written English had been well established by the early part of the fourteenth century, for example as a result of charters and writs documenting property transactions. More consistent processes and hence the development of shared conventions of English were emerging as a result of the social interaction of individuals and groups. These were the beginnings of a standard English. But the English language was to continue to be subject to dramatic changes, more than any other major European language.Footnote ⁴⁵ The development of printing resulted in another large expansion of writing and reading.

The Advent of Printing

From the fifth century BC to the fifteenth century AD the role of scribes was the dominant one in production of books.

McLuhan claimed that in the middle ages scholars were largely indifferent to the identity of the authors whose books they studied. The writers did not see the need to give citations of authors of the quotes they took from other books. They were even indifferent to putting a signature to their own work. Also there was no reading public in the modern sense because in the world of manuscripts an author could not have a public. But all of this was to change when a revolution of the magnitude of the invention of the alphabet was to take place, the development of the printing press.

In 878 AD, the Chinese printed the earliest known book, The Diamond Sutra, using inked wooden relief blocks. By the beginning of the fifteenth century the printing process had developed in Korea to the extent that printers were manufacturing bronze type sets of 100,000 pieces. In the West, Johannes Gutenberg (1390s–1468) is credited with the development of moveable metal type in association with a hand-operated printing press.Footnote ⁴⁷ Printing in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards was a combination of technologies: wine/oil press; chemistry of ink; metallurgy of casting; and the goldsmiths’ ability to make the tiny elements of type sets.Footnote ⁴⁸

In England it was William Caxton (1422–1491) who produced the first printed book in English which was, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy [The compilation of the histories of Troy]. Ironically Caxton’s, and England’s, first book was translated from French. It was started when Caxton was living in France, continued when he moved to Ghent, then finished by him in Cologne on 9 September 1471. The French original by Raoul Lefèvre was a collection of popular stories very loosely based on the tales of the Trojan Wars.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the prefaces to the books that Caxton printed he included his own reflections on the book:

The printing process involved estimating the number of lines per page (casting off), making up a page by ‘composing’ the metal type into a holding frame (a forme), then making textual corrections. A book was broken down into sections called signatures. Each section would be composed and printed. Then the type would be removed from the forme and recomposed for a different section. Several people would work at the same time on each signature so it is easy to see how personal preferences over things such as spelling could emerge, hence a need for standardisation. Use of foreign compositors meant introduction of influences of other languages, and lack of full understanding of the emerging standard of English. For example, they may have assumed that some silent letters were random rather than standard, such as ‘e’ at the end of some words, and as a result did things such as add an extra letter at the end of a line to fill the type line.Footnote ⁵¹

The advent of printing was a highly significant acceleration of the standardisation of written English, not least because it stimulated the first books that aimed to prescribe and/or describe the English language and hence seek to contribute to a standard form. One of the first printed educational guides written in English, about English, was by Richard Mulcaster a teacher and headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in LondonFootnote ⁵². It was called, THE FIRST PART OF THE ELEMENTARIE WHICH ENTREATETH CHEFELIE OF THE right writing of our English tung, set furth by RICHARD MULCASTER. Mulcaster explained that the purpose of the Elementarie was to help teachers working in elementary schools, and parents, to help young children learn by providing elementary educational principles:

Beyond the importance of helping young children learn Mulcaster argued that the principles of the Elementarie needed to be warranted ‘by generall autoritie of all the grauest writers’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He reminds the reader that Plato stressed the importance of gymnastic for the body and Music for the mind, noting that music was considered much more important in Plato’s time than Mulcaster perceived it to be in the school curriculum of his own time. Plato saw music, and comprehension in reading and writing, as important to support speech. He also emphasised singing and playing for the utterance of harmony. Other ancient writers are also cited in the Elementarie: for example, Pamphilus on drawing as part of liberal science; and Quintilian’s mastery of rhetoric in support of reading, writing and music. Mulcaster’s main purposes or principles for his Elementarie are summarised as follows:

Mulcaster was the first to put forward the case for sticking with the long established alphabet and emerging spelling, rather than creating any kind of new or simplified system. In general, spelling reforms, such as new symbols and conventions, were not taken up apart from the vowel ‘i’ distinguished from the consonant ‘j’, and ‘u’ from ‘v’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Linguistic descriptivism is seen in Mulcaster’s attention to language being used, linked to his enlightened views about young children’s learning, although his drive for correct language use is also clear: ‘is it not a verie necessarie labor to set the writing certain, that the reading maie be sure?’Footnote ⁵⁶

At first the development of standard English was not due to high-prestige institutions and individuals, but was more a result of multiple influences including population movements, trade, and social groupings. Much later in the eighteenth century, more systematic attempts were made to standardise the language. In my introduction, I drew attention to John Walker’s book, planned in 1774 then finally published in 1791, which focused on pronunciation (his theory of inflections), but one of the first most influential guides was Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes, first published in 1762.

The book begins with a preface which contains Lowth’s arguments for why his book was needed (consistent with printing practice at the time there is, incidentally, no contents page for the book). Lowth begins his preface by acknowledging the development of the English language over the preceding two hundred years. He noted the great enlargement of the language, and that its energy, variety, and richness had been proved in verse and in prose, in all subjects, and styles. Like so many prescriptivists who would come after him, he notes with admiration the writing of an earlier period, in particular the writings of Richard Hooker (the priest and theologian). Jonathan Swift is also noted as ‘one of the most correct, and perhaps the best, of our prose writers’, not least because of his knowledge of Swift’s famous letter on the same topic: A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue in a Letter to the Most Honourable Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain. Lowth puts forward his major criticism: ‘whatever other improvements it may have received, it [the English language] hath made no advances in Grammatical Accuracy’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The specifics of Lowth’s argument were that even the most recognised authors, and the ‘politest part of the nation … often offends against every part of grammar’.Footnote ⁵⁸ He goes on to say that this is no fault of the language itself, because it was in Lowth’s opinion the simplest of all European languages. His evidence for this point is based on grammatical aspects such as the very few nouns (what Lowth calls ‘substantives’) in English that have different forms according to case or gender. Ironically Lowth’s view of the main reason for poor grammar seems to be a rather good account of the way in which meaning is at the heart of language use, and how we don’t actually need rules because people are able to communicate without knowing prescriptive ‘rules’:

A rather more convincing point that Lowth made was his view that even the experts in language from a previous time, for example experts in ancient languages and ancient authors, had not, or were not able to analyse language of ‘ordinary use and common construction in [the] VERNACULAR IDIOM’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lowth did attempt to apply his rules to examples of language in use, although these were of written language not spoken language.

The understanding of language in the context of education is seen in Lowth’s argument that the investigation of the principles of language, and the study of grammar, should be expected of ‘every person in a liberal education, and it is indispensably required of every one who undertakes to inform or entertain the public, that he should be able to express himself with propriety and accuracy’.Footnote ⁶¹ He then goes on to accuse the best authors of the day of ‘gross mistakes’ because of their poor knowledge of English grammar. Lowth admits that his examples of authors’ poor grammar were simply ones that he came across in his own reading. Like so many who have followed in Lowth’s footsteps he confused the communication of meaning with correctness:

Lowth then went on to suggest a secondary use of his grammar, its application to the learning of other languages. The use of grammatical knowledge to inform the learning of other languages may have been more accurate than some of his other points. However he saw the practical outcome of this foreign language learning as school children using his grammar in order to learn Latin. Unfortunately the closing remarks of Lowth’s preface make clear that he preferred ‘easiness and perspicuity’ to ‘logical exactness’, and ‘All disquisitions, which appeared to have more of subtlety than of usefulness in them, have been avoided. In a word, it [Lowth’s grammar] was calculated for the use of the learner, even of the lowest class.’Footnote ⁶³ And so the links between identity (e.g. social class) and standards of language (‘politeness’) at this time were clear. The negative portrayal of almost all language users (apart from Lowth himself) is another common element of prescriptivist approaches to language.

Lowth’s list of poor users of language was pretty impressive: Swift, Dryden, Bolingbroke, Bentley, and Pope! Lowth consistently confuses description of the language with prescription about how he thinks others should use the language. So with regard to verbs we see Lowth’s not unreasonable ideas about a relationship between verbs and prepositions, and the way that changes in placement of grammatical forms will affect meaning. But in his extensive footnotes, which are often longer than the main text, he attack’s Swift’s use of language; the language that Swift used in his own letter about the English language. Lowth claims that Swift’s use of,

Should be,

And hence, according to Lowth, Swift’s use of language is wrong, or at least showed ‘impropriety’.

The links between language and music are wonderfully and very specifically recorded by Lowth in the section on punctuation:

Lowth also gives an account of the way in which punctuation is linked to his view of grammar, for example the particular ways in which he sees sentences demarcated by imperfect phrases, simple sentences and compounded [sic] sentences. But what he fails to do is identify the main role of punctuation, for example commas, in making clear the meaning, and helping to avoid ambiguity; the kind of ambiguity captured memorably in Eats, Shoots & Leaves.Footnote ⁶⁴ Since the time of Lowth’s book the idea of punctuation demarcating pauses, a remnant of Roman oratory, has become less and less tenable because punctuation’s functions are closely tied to sentence structure.

In 1755 the book that would have one of the most profound impacts of any book on the standardisation of the English language was published: Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Although the dictionary wasn’t the very first, it was unique because of Johnson’s linguistically rigorous approach. It was more comprehensive than any that had gone before: ‘42,773 entries in the first edition, with 140,871 definitions and 222,114 quotations’.Footnote ⁶⁵ His approach was comprehensive, so included attention to orthography (letters and their sounds), pronunciation, etymology (derivation of words), analogy, morphology (the forms of word e.g. singular/plural), syntax, phraseology (collocation: the juxtaposition of one word with another word); distribution (usage, such as the concept of ‘obsolete’). The overall keys to Johnson’s impressive contribution were firstly his recognition that all language is of value, and worthy of study for that reason. And secondly that some variants of a language carry particular prestige in the eyes of some in society.

The dictionary as style guide raises questions of identity, authority, elitism, and democracy that are part of the consideration of language. Johnson’s accurate linguistic approach to his subject should have established the path for all who followed. For some it did, but for others, who perhaps saw Johnson’s recognition of the equality of language as a threat, the grammar wars had started:

The gradual emergence of linguistically informed standardisation was accompanied by the dramatic impact of printing. McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy was built on the idea that the study of form had been neglected by historians. A consequence of the printing press was to remove many of the technical causes of anonymity, and at the same time, in this the Renaissance period, new ideas of literary fame and intellectual property were building. The printing press resulted in a new kind of consumer world. As McLuhan made clear, the entire production of books up to 1500 AD was 15 to 20 million copies representing 30,000 to 35,000 separate publications. The majority of these publications were in Latin. Just as the printed book revolutionised manuscripts so the vernacular language superseded Latin. As part of this process, print contributed to the standardisation of language. Prior to the printing press a Latin dictionary would have been impossible as medieval authors changed definitions according to the context of their thinking.

And while McLuhan was right that the medium has a profound social impact its function is always to serve the message rather be the message. His suggestion that the changes in humans’ senses, that result from technology extending the physical reach of the human body, are ‘comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody’Footnote ⁶⁷ was not fully explained. Nevertheless the failure to understand the profound connections between medium and message is at the heart of many modern problems with writing.

Somewhat like the dramatic rise in written texts that began around 1066, the advent of printing gave access to texts to vastly increased numbers of people. This enabled them to access a much greater range of meanings, including in the form of stories written down. The result of building a reading public challenged writers to write for this new ‘audience’. The need for standardisation of language became more pressing, both from the ground up as people’s need for unambiguous messages increased but also from the top down from those who wished to impose order and control language.

The Digital Age

The advances in writing that came as a result of the alphabet and the printing press are now seen from a considerable distance in time. There have only been a limited number of accounts of such developments written by people who lived through such revolutions. But for the final revolution covered in this chapter, the issue of documenting change at the time of the change itself is currently more straightforward, for myself as a writer and for all, because we live in the digital age.

During the late twentieth century the invention of personal computers, and crucially, the development of the internet were to be even more profound than the development of the printing press. Understanding the influence of digital developments on writing is necessarily a work in progress. The importance of studying the digital world, by using ‘media archaeology’, is perhaps more important than ever, as electronic interfaces both provide access to previously unimaginable sources of information and opportunities for writing online. These interfaces also conceal more, partly as a result of the growth of the user-friendliness and affordances of touch screen technology and apps.Footnote ⁶⁸

The internet as we know it today emerged from a series of technological breakthroughs. One of the first electronic networks was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET developed in 1969. Len Kleinrock’s group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) first tried to log on to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock described what happened:

How familiar the idea of a computer system crashing still is to many of us! But also how exciting technological discoveries can be when people have the vision to accurately predict their potential.

The invention of the internet was made possible by discoveries in computer science laboratories. For example the idea of packet switching is essential to the channels of communication that make up the internet. Packet switching is a method of structuring digital data into blocks called packets that are suitable for communication across digital networks. The structure of packets is a system of seven layers called Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). The simplest way to understand packets and OSI is to think of them as analogous sending a letter. The letter writer has a message to send to a particular person. OSI layer 7 (the application layer) opens the channel for the communication.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is equivalent to the structure of a postal service including post offices, addresses of houses, and letter boxes. The actual words of the letter have to be translated in various ways into appropriate digital formats, ultimately into binary code (OSI layers 6 to 2). Finally OSI layer 1 conveys the message in its final physical form in electrical, optical, or radio form through hardware.

The ARPANET was only the first of many network methods developed internationally. In time it was realised that these multiple methods needed to be unified. The beginnings of the internet were seen in the first internet protocol, the unglamorously named text called RFC 675 – Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program developed in December 1974.Footnote ⁷¹ This is regarded as the first use of the term internet which at that time was used as an adjective unlike its use as a noun now.

Development of an internet paved the way for the World Wide Web (WWW) which provides access to text globally, and which enables people to communicate through the development of web pages and formats such as blogs. The WWW was invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee who wrote his proposal for an information management system on 12 March 1989.Footnote ⁷² The description by Berners-Lee and colleagues in their later formal document the Architecture of the World Wide Web provides a very useful definition:

As part of opening up the world to electronic communications the development of the World Wide Web and the internet have had implications for language spread. The most powerful evidence that the desire to express meaning drives language change can be seen in the way languages spread globally. In a world of international communications through the internet, and a world of international trade, one language shared by all would be very convenient. This phenomenon appears to be happening in the form of the English language, which it is argued has become a world lingua franca (WLF). The expression lingua franca is defined by the OED as ‘Any language that is used by speakers of different languages as a common medium of communication; a common language.’ For example in some African countries Swahili is used as a common language in the context of many different tribal languages. However, my interest is with the idea of a world lingua franca rather than a regional lingua franca.

To be described as a WLF the language concerned must have a reasonable claim to have the highest number of speakers globally, and to have very wide geographical spread. Arriving at accurate figures is complicated as Crystal explains.Footnote ⁷³ The first problem is the world population growth of about 1.2% per annum, which means that figures for numbers of speakers in less-developed nations in particular will change rapidly because it is in these countries that population growth is at its most rapid. Even in more stable populations, acquiring information is difficult. The most extensive information comes from a census because these are completed by nearly every member of a population. But most census questionnaires do not include questions about linguistic background. Even if you can ask people about their language(s), there are difficulties. For example, it is difficult to establish the extent of language proficiency. Only being able to speak a few words and phrases perhaps would not count as speaking a language. Ability to write a language is subject to similar problems of level of use, and particular difficulties for surveying use of writing and skill levels. Also, if a language has particularly high status in a country, survey respondents may feel obliged to exaggerate their familiarity with the language. Allowing for these caveats Crystal estimated that the figures for the languages spoken by the largest numbers of speakers globally were as follows:

A further problem for estimating the growing use of English is that there are no figures available for people who have learned English as a foreign language in countries where English does not have special status (including in China where anecdotal accounts suggest that numbers of people learning English continues to grow dramatically).

Technological inventions by scientists in English-speaking nations, such as the internet and the World Wide Web, have also resulted in infrastructure and prototypes being based on English. The USA’s continuing dominance in world markets is now linked with global digital communications as companies such as Apple Computers; Microsoft, IBM, and so on continue to dominate world markets. The links between global commerce, digital communication, and language are to some an example of a new form of imperialism.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is certainly true that one of the reasons for the spread of English round the world is as a result of the British Empire and the imposition of English in countries such as India, Tanzania, or the 58 countries where English is an official language.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is also pointed out that such developments can be linked with the extinction of some languages, which again is seen by some as a form of imperialism because of the close links between language, identity, emancipation, and democracy. Yet while all these factors are real, although the extent of an active form of imperialism is a moot point, language spread is driven primarily as a result of people’s desire, enthusiasm, curiosity, and need to communicate, hence my description of language spread as organic. Language spread brings with it the twin phenomena of variation in language, and in a seeming contradiction, standardisation of language. Variation in language arises because the geographical spread results in people who use a range of other languages and dialects altering the new language to fit their own needs for expression. Linked to this, the pressures towards standardisation come from two sources: (1) efficiency and clarity of communication that requires the reduction of ambiguity though standardisation; (2) as a result of the first factor guides to standard language use, of a wide range of kinds, are established.

Consistent with other social science research, the digital world, and its affordances, is now being studied through large-scale quantitative work and in-depth qualitative work. For example, the use of big data supported by the use of supercomputers has enabled a new approach called Culturomics. In one study, more than five million books, approximately 4% of all books ever published, were analysed. The units of analysis in this study were the 1-gram and n-gram. The 1-gram is a meaningful sequence of characters not separated by a space that includes words, part-words (such as SCUBA), numbers, and typos (such as ‘excesss’).Footnote ⁷⁷ The analyses revealed significant results in relation to the ways in which the English language continues to change. At the time the study was published the size of the language had increased by more than 70% in the past 50 years, adding about 8500 words per year. An analysis of irregular verbs showed much stability over a period of 200 years but also that 16% went through change of grammatical regularisation:

Writing Computer Language

Parallel to the development of the internet, computers and computer languages were also developing. The term ‘language’ in relation to computer language prompts reflection on the similarities and differences with the language of writing that is the subject of this book. For some people a computer language is perhaps seen purely as a technological phenomenon unrelated to the meaning-making of human interaction. Yet these languages not only facilitate the human interaction through computers but increasingly engage with humans using their language, for example, Apple Computer’s Siri which can understand simple oral commands to launch applications and find information. Some scholars have emphasised the need to understand computer languages like any other important human tool and sign system: the computer programme can be seen ‘as a distinct cultural artefact, but it also serves as a grain of sand from which entire worlds become visible; as a Rosetta Stone that yields important access to the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.’Footnote ⁷⁹

The vital place of both instrumental and consummatory (creative) meanings as part of the process of programming has been powerfully evident since the development of the very first ‘high-level computing language’ in the 1950s. High-level computing languages are those languages that allow programmers to be able to read and understand the meaning of the language in a more straightforward way than working with the computer’s first language known as ‘machine code’ (or mother tongue perhaps), the mathematical language of binary: zeros and ones that relate to electronic micro switches that are either on (one) or off (zero).

The first high-level computer language was Fortran, which stands for ‘Formula Translation’ because Fortran included a ‘compiler’, part of the programme that translated the meaning of Fortran language into the meaning of machine code.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Oxford University–educated scientist Barbara Alexander, who worked with machine code prior to the invention of Fortran, described Fortran as ‘absolute bliss’ compared to working with machine code. Alexander worked at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research establishment, in Oxfordshire, England, which included what is now the world’s oldest original working computer, the Harwell Dekatron that, like most early systems, filled a whole room with its 738 Dekatron electronic tubes.Footnote ⁸¹ The invention of Fortran enabled computing tasks that would have taken one year to be done in about two weeks. One of Fortran’s most important features was that it was more meaningful to the programmer, so it could be read more efficiently.

Questions about standards, power, and identity are a feature of all languages, and computer languages are no exception. Fortran was, and still is, a language for the elite. At the time of its invention, programmers used to compete, shown for example in the idea that ‘real programmers don’t use Pascal they use Fortran’ (admittedly a joke for computer scientists!).Footnote ⁸² Fortran was a language developed and used initially by the gifted elite mathematicians and scientists from US and UK universities. It was invented by the Columbia University graduate John Backus with help from his team at IBM. Fortran was used to develop nuclear weapons and NASA space exploration, and in other research such as survey work that contributed to establishing the links between smoking and cancer.Footnote ⁸³ Fortran is still used today, and is a requirement if you want to be an astronomer. It is unsurpassed if raw power for mathematical calculations is what is needed.

The story of Fortran includes a moment when the links between the smallest elements of language, such as particular symbols, are linked directly with meaning, with profound consequences for society. The space shuttle disaster that I described in the opening chapter shares some similarities with what happened in relation to the Mariner 1 spacecraft although fortunately no lives were lost. Mariner 1 was designed by NASA as part of its programme to explore planets in our solar system such as Mars, Venus, and Mercury.Footnote ⁸⁴ Unfortunately only a few minutes into its first launch it veered dangerously off course, and so a self-destruct instruction was issued by the Range Safety Officer.

The problem has been attributed to the omission of an ‘overscore’ line above the dot in the extract of computer code (see below) in the course of transferring the handwritten code to computer.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark called this, ‘the most expensive hyphen in history’ because the crash cost something in the region of $1,017,000 at today’s values. Although the error was not a hyphen (it was an overscore), the media were attracted to the more widely understandable imagery of the hyphen. And even some official reports attributed the failure to a hyphen.Footnote ⁸⁵

The elitist nature of computer programming was to be comprehensively routed by a new language called BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), which as you saw in the first chapter drew me into computing when younger. The rationale for the study of BASIC by Nick Montfort and colleagues,Footnote ⁸⁶ whose work I build on here, was that computer languages are a cultural resource, complete with both machine and human meanings, that should be studied just as other cultural resources are. In contrast to the quantitative analysis of big data, an alternative approach is great depth of analysis of one particular phenomenon. The extreme depth of their approach is reflected in their analysis of just one line of BASIC programme code that also is the title of their book. The line of code was regarded as important partly because it represents a complete computer programme in one line. As Montfort and his colleagues explain,

The first example of an emphasis on cultural resource, in studying computer programming, in their book can be seen in the authors’ attention to history, including the beginnings of programming. Many regard Ada Byron (1815–1852) as the first computer programmer. Ironically Ada’s mother’s encouragement for her to understand mathematics and logic was a reaction against following the route of Ada’s father, Lord Byron, into the writing of poetry.

Education is also part of the story of BASIC. BASIC was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, who in 1964 shared a working version for all who were interested. By 1971 90% of students at Dartmouth College received computer training. It was also shared with other colleges and with high schools. Kemeny’s liberal approach to computing, in what was a liberal arts college (a significantly different location to the most typical emergence from science institutes) had other highly significant results:

Another aspect of BASIC’s success was its link with Microsoft. In 1975 Paul Allen saw the Popular Electronics advert for the ‘Altair 8800: The most powerful minicomputer project ever presented – can be build for under $400.’Footnote ⁸⁸ He showed it to his friend Bill Gates who was at Harvard University. Allen’s and Gates’s software interpreter (of the original BASIC) was licensed by MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), and hence Microsoft was up and running. The key changes to the software that Allen, Gates, and their collaborator Monte Davidoff made were crucial for use of home computers and would have made little sense in relation to the original ‘time-sharing’ use of computers at Dartmouth College. The changes included the introduction of the statements called PEEK and POKE. In the introduction to this book a POKE command was included in the extract of basic programming language. In my extract the function of POKE was to prompt the amplifier to make a sound to confirm the correct selection of the number for a particular bell in the change sequence.

The new field of media research called platform studies, which can be seen as connected to the methodology of media archeology, makes clear the importance of social and cultural developments in computing. A significant example that linked language, technology, creativity, and education was the BBC Micro Computer that ‘became a machine of many possibilities rather than one directed solely at education’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Seen by some simply as a hardware development, Alison Gazzard makes it clear that the Computer Literacy Project (which contextualised the hardware of the BBC Micro) linked broadcast media (television and teletext: CEEFAX; radio); print media (books, software, and magazines); and education and society (schools, colleges, and government departments for education). The idea of computer programming as a language, and something to be understood as part of wider understanding of written language, continues to be important as this quote from the originators from MIT of a current simple programming language attest:

Meanings in Digital Media

So far in this section of the chapter, I have looked at some underlying processes, including technical ones, that have allowed digital communication to flourish. These tools are, of course, there to facilitate the generation of meanings through text and images. So now I turn briefly to an example of the kinds of meanings that are being expressed, in one of the most popular new forms of communication. If blogging facilitated ease of publication of written text and still images then vlogging has facilitated video production and consumption. At the time of writing the first draft of this section of the chapter, the most subscribed vlog by highest number of subscribers was ‘BF vs GF’ (Boyfriend vs. Girlfriend) at 5,501,357 subscribers according to the VidStatsX website. Only about one year later (October 2016), the subscribers had increased to 9,164,902 subscribers. But the site had also been relegated to number two in the one hundred most subscribed list because Good Mythical Morning had replaced it, with 11,299,723 subscribers.Footnote ⁹¹

The numbers of subscribers to such sites are one example of the scale of the composition, production, and publication of meaning that is available to be written and read in the twenty-first century. The affordances of these new digital forms of authorship include the combination of multiple modes. BF vs. GF features two young people who record light-hearted videos that feature ‘challenges’. For example, the ‘Touch my body challenge’ required one partner to take the blindfolded partner’s finger and touch a part of the non-blindfolded partner’s body which the blindfolded partner has to guess. The ‘set’ for this YouTube video was an expensive-looking apartment. A cat wandered around in the background and sometimes became part of the story of the Vlog. The ‘challenge’ might be described as a party game, something that has in the past been described in traditional print magazines. But the video format, of course, offers direct physical representation of any bodily movements required for a game, the non-verbal aspects such as laughter while playing the game, physical appearances of the vloggers (young, American, and photogenic in this case), and over time an understanding of the on-screen personalities of the vloggers.

The close links between printed text and image that have been part of written composition for hundreds of years are also part of digital video, but with enhancements. The YouTube site that hosts the BF vs. GF vlog also features text-based comments from viewers. When the video is not playing, the YouTube site is packed with a mixture of text, images, and icons many with hyperlinks. Adverts constantly appear on top of the videos. BF and GF also have Twitter accounts where they maintain communication with their followers. Jeanna@PhillyChic5 (GF) had 583,000 ‘followers’ when I viewed the Twitter site. One of her tweets (‘Took the Christmas tree down today. Boy that was a lot of work.’ [icon of xmas tree and hand]) was directly related to one of the BF GF videos called ‘Upside down Christmas Tree’ that included taking down a Christmas tree. During the video they decide that they wanted to watch a movie. GF says that she tweeted her followers to ask what they should watch (‘I wanna watch a movie. Any recommendations?’). BF played with Siri on his Apple IPhone and was amused by Siri saying ‘Brrr’ in relation to the outside temperature. This particular Vlog ended with GF saying they had fallen out.

The most popular Bloggers are making significant sums of money that are paid to them by YouTube, and by advertisers who they agree to work with (under rather different production control conditions compared to old media television advertising).Footnote ⁹² The links with older forms of communication are also evident in the opportunities to, for example, publish books as a result of the fame that the Vloggers have attracted.

One indication of the scale of change that digitisation has brought can be seen in statistics on worldwide usage. Rather disconcertingly these statistics can be seen changing before our very eyes. The internet live statistics site has changing counts which use robust data sources as the basis for models which inform the estimates. For example, the changing count of numbers of ‘Internet users in the world’ was increasing at a rate of approximately 500 users per minute. In September 2016, at the time of writing, the estimated population of the world was 7,457,904,000 people and constantly increasing at a rate of about 3 births per second.Footnote ⁹³ For July 2016, the total number of internet users was fixed at 46.1% (3,424,971,237 users). Only 14 years earlier, in 2000, the estimate of internet users was 5.9% of the population. The percentage of growth between 2000 and 2014 is estimated at 741.0%. However, these internet figures hide enormous regional disparities. For example as of July 2013 the region with the highest number of internet users was Asia with 87.7%. The lowest was Oceania with 0.9% followed by Africa with 9.8%.

The global nature of growth in social media use including across multiple apps used for information, entertainment, and intimacy is clear, as an in-depth anthropological approach comparing social media use in different countries of the world has shown.Footnote ⁹⁴ This is an area where research struggles to keep up. For example although the phenomenon of Facebook, with its 1.25 billion users, has attracted research, the Chinese sites QQ (820 million users), QZone (625 million), and WeChat (355 million) had not been mentioned in any published research publications listed in a well-regarded research bibliography. Much of the use of new social media across the world is by young people. Research on young people’s education in relation to ‘media literacy’ is regarded as exemplary research, which most of all has shown the need to equip young people with the skills to both produce meaning through new media, in other words to actively author and compose texts, but also to be critical consumers. And the most important tool worldwide, including low-income countries, is the mobile phone. This is the personal computer that allows composition in multiple modes, including composition of text, music, and image across multiple apps and platforms, from just one small device.

The medium perhaps never was the message because, ‘It is the content rather than the platform that is most significant when it comes to why social media matters.’Footnote ⁹⁵ This is why a focus on the processes of meaning-making in composition is so important. The signs of digital language are facilitated by the technological tools of language, and these tools are nothing more nor less than tools. The writer’s task is to select and use tools to serve her intent to create meaning, and to beware the potential distraction that misplaced focus on the software and hardware, for their own sake, presents.

*

This brief selective history of writing has shown some of the ways that efficiency of communication, minimisation of ambiguity, and constant growth in speed and range of communication have driven the development of writing in an organic way. Over many hundreds of years, periods of incremental change are disrupted by profound developments, paradigm shifts, that result in significant increases in the numbers of writers and readers. The solving of the mystery of the Rosetta Stone typified the ways in which meaning is a driving force in human endeavours. It also helped us understand much more about some of the ways in which language developed from signs on clay to the infinite abstraction of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

The development of the alphabet had two overarching consequences for humans. Prior to the detailed meanings available from advanced writing systems, oral language was the only way to communicate complex meanings. Hence human culture as an oral culture was transformed to an oral and written culture, although it would be many hundreds of years before the distinctions between oral language and written language would be better understood. For the first time, meaning became something that was not only an instantaneous sharing with another human, within earshot, but something that could be crafted, reflected on, and communicated to a human at a distance. The new kinds of meanings this facilitated also had a reverse effect: expression of meaning through writing influenced oral expression of meanings, and enabled metacognitive thinking. The second overarching consequence was to change ideas about teacher and learner, teaching and education. Knowledge was increasingly to move from the preserve of the elite teacher to be accessible by a wider range of learners without the direct intervention of a teacher.

The invention of the alphabet paved the way for English as a language. Language is an inherently social phenomenon, and the emergence of English in the East Anglian region of England, in close proximity to London, brought new structures to the social nature of language. The idea of a standard language was born, and with it the first instructional books to attempt to prescribe a standard English. The debates about standards of language have raged ever since. The writer’s challenge is to develop appropriate levels of understanding of the significance of both stability and change in the social context where their writing is enacted.

The advent of printing at a much larger scale than had previously been possible created a new reading public who required more writers. Caxton’s role in the printing press is perhaps better known than his engagement with the whole process of writing, including his role in the first book in England. Accompanying the change in scale of writing was a renewed need to maintain and establish standards of language. And here, through new books, the educators made their presence known, as some of the first self-appointed guardians of the English language.

The speed of digital technological change is concurrent with the stability of other aspects of language. New forms of social media still rely heavily on the alphabetic language of English. And new developments such as emoticons and images have been reunited with written language perhaps as an echo of the hieroglyphic past. At the same time the global spread of language, and particularly the English language, as a result of the internet, including in juxtaposition with still and moving images, music and sound, is on a quite extraordinary scale. The extent to which English establishes itself as a digital lingua franca remains an open question. One trend that we can be sure of is the debates about what standard written language is, and should be, will continue. But I hope that the debates may move away from repetitive complaints about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ use of language towards ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’. So it is to these debates, as represented in modern guides to writing, that I turn next.