Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

WRITING RESTRUCTURES CONSCIOUSNESS 111
unintelligible ways but always written the same way, Learned
Latin was a striking exemplification of the power of writing for
isolating discourse and of the unparalleled productivity of such
isolation. Writing, as has earlier been seen, serves to separate and
distance the knower and the known and thus to establish
objectivity. It has been suggested (Ong 1977, pp. 24–9) that
Learned Latin effects even greater objectivity by establishing
knowledge in a medium insulated from the emotion-charged
depths of one’s mother tongue, thus reducing interference from the
human lifeworld and making possible the exquisitely abstract
world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical
modern science which followed on the scholastic experience.
Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have
got under way with greater difficulty, if it had got under way at
all. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and
scientists through the time of Sir Isaac Newton commonly both
wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin.
Interaction between such a chirographically controlled language
as Learned Latin and the various vernaculars (mother tongues) is
still far from being completely understood. There is no way simply
to ‘translate’ a language such as Learned Latin into languages like
the vernaculars. Translation was transformation. Interaction
produced all sorts of special results. Bäuml (1980, p. 264) has
called attention, for example, to some of the effects when
metaphors from a consciously metaphorical Latin were shifted into
less metaphoricized mother tongues.
During this period, other chirographically controlled, sexlinked
male languages developed in Europe and Asia where sizable
literate populations wanted to share a common intellectual
heritage. Pretty much coeval with Learned Latin were Rabbinic
Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese, with
Byzantine Greek a sixth, much less definitively learned language,
for vernacular Greek kept close contact with it (Ong 1977, pp. 28–
34). These languages were all no longer in use as mother tongues
(that is, in the straightforward sense, not used by mothers in
raising children). They were never first languages for any individual,
were controlled exclusively by writing, were spoken by males only
(with negligible exceptions, though perhaps with more exceptions
for Classical Chinese than for the others), and were spoken only by
those who could write them and who, indeed, had learned them
initially by the use of writing. Such languages are no more, and it