Ong, Whorf, and the Test Craze

And now a word (or two) about Ong’s “The Orality of Language” from Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word:

I found it interesting to consider the ways in which we can never leave our literacy, such as the example Ong provides with the word nevertheless. It’s true—I cannot think of a word like that without thinking of what the word looks like. However, with nouns, I believe it’s different. I would imagine that most people who are familiar with a noun would conjure the picture in their mind. But if one is not familiar, than the brain would attempt to form the word in the mind’s eye, ready to make some connection to a picture as soon as the opportunity arises. Additionally, I found it intriguing that although we have made great technological strides by the invention of the telephone to be able to communicate using oral verbalization only, many of us insist on texting and emailing to communicate, keeping us tethered to our need for the written word. And, I just noticed as I was typing this blog, that texting is not part of acceptable grammar according to my software. And, for the record, blog also falls into that category. Is our grammar even able to keep up with our literacy?

But isn’t it interesting, though, how a great deal of meaning can get lost in written verbalization? Think about how many times you’ve received an email, not really certain of the tone or intention. Or, when you send an email, you are ever so careful to word it, because you do not want your message to be misconstrued or misjudged. Or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, this essay also made me think about poetry and song lyrics and how much is lost with just reading the words, rather than gathering all the beautiful sounds and figurative language and allowing them to blossom in your mind.

This essay tapped into a world I had not previously considered, a place where written verbalization had never existed and, thus, where those functions derived from literacy had not developed. It’s difficult to imagine a world where orality is primary, just as it would be difficult to perceive a horse having only seen or had contact with automobiles using only automobiles as the reference point (I’m such a nerd that I loved Ong’s “punnage” here). I’m not sure as a literate society that we can truly perceive a world without the written word, but I can fully appreciate that “without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations” (14-15). But “to die to continue living” (15)? How would entering literacy create a death for those living in such a world? Friere would likely cringe at the thought.

Now onto Mr. Whorf’s thoughts in “An American Indian Model of the Universe”:

Personally, I think he could have explained the premise as he did through perhaps page 58 or even 59 and concluded that “the Hopi language gets along perfectly without tenses for its verbs” and I would have been perfectly content. I don’t think I would have missed the references to geometry, phenomena of the universe (seriously, what is a nadir—in layman’s terms?), metaphysics, manifested and manifesting as objective and subjective, the realm of expectancy, Whorf’s terminology of Hopi grammar, and some Hopi words translated to some verbose English as the message would have been delivered to me. I did find some of the discussion on the absence of Hopi words for time and space to be fascinating, especially on page 59, where Whorf describes the Hopi’s “definition” of the future. We are all connected, and this philosophy, so to speak, puts the future into a fascinating perspective.

Interestingly, I thought of Friere as I read the following on page 60: “It is the realm of expectancy, of desire and purpose, of vitalizing life, of efficient causes, of thought thinking itself out from an inner realm (the Hopian heart) into manifestation.” Isn’t this what becoming fully human is all about? I think many of us have lost this ability or perhaps it’s just the desire that’s missing. Where do I sign up for some "Hopi" training?

Imagine English without all those irritating tenses! Could it work? Could we speak without tenses? Could we write without tenses? Likely, we could speak without them because we would have other ways of communicating at our disposal. But writing without tenses? Interesting point to ponder. Could we, as a society, be less annal about time? Likely, no.

Test Craze:

I wasn’t sure whether we were to blog about the articles Julie gave us, but I did find them interesting and enlightening. I must admit, some testing is important, but I guess it’s this craze that we find nowadays in many schools is what makes teachers throw up their arms in confusion and disgust. I do know that many schools have these “test pep rallies,” and I thought they were silly when I first heard about them. During my first year of teaching, when I was a PSSA coach (and yes, my salary was funded by a grant from the state), we administered Foresight tests to our 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Not only did I get sick of collecting the data, but the students certainly tired to taking basically the same test five times. The only way I found that truly motivated most of the students was to offer some extrinsic reward. Most of these “remedial” students could easily score proficient, but were just didn’t care. The tests were annoying and meant nothing, to them anyway. When we offered monetary and other types of rewards for score improvement, we typically got them. Only a few tried, but they just didn’t have the skills. Motivation seems to be the key, and that’s where it can get tricky. More tests and rallies are definitely not the answer, in my humble opinion. Finding a way to motivate is where it’s at, and that won’t be found in teaching to the test or in LFS.

I like the idea of "availing ourselves of such concepts" (58) when referring to our own cultural norms, in the attempt to understand concepts outside of our own social construction. It has interesting implications, not just between disparate linguistic groups, but between differing groups within the same social construct. In understanding that groups of people can conceive of time and space in opposite, yet valid, ways between cultures, we can extend that principle to people within one culture, learning that perception of the same world often results in differing views of that world.

Considering from where our concepts of our world are generated is a helpful exercise towards a goal of understanding the world of others. Whorf mentions the invalidity of intuition as a source of knowledge when discussing the Hopi concepts of space. Can knowledge really be intuitive or innate? Is anything learned outside of one's social construct. Hence the supremacy of "functional" literacy, and the literacy of dominant ideologues? Concepts of space and time are just as dependant upon one's positional culture as are religion and politics. As strongly as one may believe in the existence of past, present, and future, we see the equal existence of manifested and unmanifest. So, a Christian vehement in his or her beliefs may be equally vehement in the belief of Islam had their cultural position originated in a Muslim family.

The value humans place on the concepts that constitute their reality differ between and among cultural groups. This value system is expressed through language, naming what is important and focusing attention on what knowledge is needed for one's ability to function. The Hopi language reflects the value system and social construction of its people, as every language does for its people. One's ability to understand the value system of a particular society, use its language, and obey the social 'norms' establishes their cultural, social and functional literacy.

Can't think of a catchy title

So, let me get this straight. The Hopi essentially have no concept of time (60-61). What a wonderful culture to be part of. They must not rush to go anywhere or do anything. They all just wait for each other. Eventually, someone will show up...for something. It's their cultural literacy. I'd go crazy. My cultural literacy is time-driven. So is the cultural literacy of everyone I know. Even if they are on vacation. It's still rushed and time-driven and can potentially be unenjoyable if too much is planned. The Hopi do not question where they are, how they ended up there, or where they are headed (61). They go with the flow. I really wish I could do that. But I, along with countless others, overthink everything. What a great world they live in...no concept of time, including past, present, or future. Just hope. Interesting and scary. This must be the fear of freedom Friere was referring to.

I read the Ong chapter on the heels of having visited the urbandictionary.com website. As a side note, I have officially dubbed a teacher as Lego Hair. This means: a particularly shitty male haircut in which the sides cover the ears and the hair appears to be "snap on". Perfect. Now I can make a seamless transition to orality. I usually do not latch on to something in the reading as early as the second page, but I really connected with Saussure's definition of writing: "a compliment to oral speech." Writing is not merely expressing thoughts in words on paper. Communicating is not just talking. (7) I suppose, like I've said before, that this is one of those things that we all know, but just don't articulate often, if at all. Seeing it in writing clarifies it, for me anyway. It's all related to cultural literacy.

I thought of my grandmother's stories and Italian translations of stories and her hand motions when I read certain portions of this article. I made a Heritage scrapbook of photos and stories and family trees for her before she died while she was in a nursing home. The pages were well worn and viewed. After she died and I read the things I had written with her help, I knew that the true story was not there. No hand motions. No faces. No broken English imitations as she imitated her mother's accent, who came right from Belvedere, Italy to Ellis Island. No imitating her mother crawling down the fire escape in the No Hair story. All of that escapes in my written translation of her words. I never did ask why my great-grandmother was doing that, but anyway, her mother came down the escape and back into their Brooklyn apartment and in shocked Italian exclaimed that she saw her upstairs male neighbor through his window...naked...no hair! Anywhere! No hair no hair no hair. And she pointed to various locations on the body that needed hair. I heard the story dozens of times, laughed hysterically each time watching my short Italian grandmother get up and do the no hair no hair no hair hand gestures. I laugh when I read it, but nobody else will see what I saw when the story was told each time. We really are a culture of "orality."

Ong widda ong, dang a dang Hopi Hopi

Cheesiest title yet. Moving on...

"We are not concerned with the so-called computer languages..." (Ong 7) But perhaps we should be. My co-worker, Victor, is a self taught wizard at any sort of computer based editing. Video, audio, digital imaging. And before everyone relegates that to pasting Sarah Palin's head on a gun and bikini body, I want to point out a feature of some new software he got the other day. It allows him to type in a phrase (e.g. "and then Bam fell of the wall") and it can search through a collection of audio and video clips for every oral instance of that phrase. Here's why this is significant: Ong's intoduction portays a linear development from oral, to written, to electronic. No problem there. We must not confuse development with purpose and usage though. The secondary reality of the electronic medium is circling us back into the oral, from storytellers, to novelists, to YouTube, as it were. What could the next development possibly be? Each medium depends on the chronologically prior to come into existence, but the danger lies in assuming that a new development makes the earlier ones obsolete.

Whorf (I'm sorry, I'm not going to make the Star trek joke, but I couldn't get it out of my head.)

I'm not going to be quoting Whorf's Data (or his Ryker, or his Picard. Ok, sorry, I'll quit it, a little punchy this week).

2 points: Maybe I've got a little Hopi in me, I've argued for the non-existence of time since my undergrad metaphysics course 14 years ago. Their spatial concept being wrapped up in the relation of manifesting to manifested is actually more coherent than our view of space and time as entirely different kinds of conceptual fields. Ours space and time may interpenetrate each other; their manifesting and manifested actually touch each other.

Point 2: What does this reading have to do with a classroom, or Literacy discourse, anyway? Here's my take. I doubt I'll frequently have a Hopi in my classes. However, I will have people with different weltanshauungs shaped by their out of school language. I need to be ready to for the confusion I and they will experience when our linguistic universes don't match, and treat those instances as opportunities for both our worlds to grow. Otherwise, I'll become a Freirean oppresor-educator, by forcing the student to accept my language as the "proper" one.

Write about Talking

I enjoyed Ong's piece on orality and literacy. He made me reconsider my views about what literacy really is. Many personal moments came to me as I read this...

I teach Beowulf to seniors in high school. We read the written word and it's a great story. Wouldn't it be a bigger and more genuine story if we were to hear it from a storyteller as it was intended to be told? What would those nuances that Ong discussed be like? What gestures would accompany the story of Grendel coming into the mead hall to feast on human flesh? What inflections would the storyteller use as Beowulf fights his last battle as a broken man? The story changed over time, and I imagine some of those changes had to come about as a reaction to what was going on in the world around them. Once it is written it stays in the same basic form. Is this a loss or a gain?

My father is from a VERY rural part of Virginia. I'm always at a loss for words (pardon the pun) when I try to describe it to others. You have to see it and hear it. My uncle Albert was a great storyteller. At family gatherings, we would sit on my Aunt Rena's front porch and listen to stories. Albert always had the biggest and the quietest audience. My dad was the youngest of ten children, so Albert's stories often revolved around siblings, their parents, or life on the farm...but they were riveting. You can't copy that with words on a piece of paper. There are no films or voice recordings of his stories and I feel a great loss there. So even if I do write down what I remember from him, something is lost in that oral tradition.

That culture was and still is an oral culture. Farmers still gather at breakfast and discuss the weather and its effects on the crops. To listen to the cadence, the pauses, the music of their oral language is an education. You don't see someone pulling out a manual to fix a broken tractor. A father teaches his kids by explaining and showing them how to do it. There aren't a lot of books in their homes. I'm not saying they're stupid or uneducated. On the contrary. The language of their lives is rich. The culture I'm used to seems more sophisticated, but I'm not convinced it's better.

I thought Whorf's piece was more difficult. I loved his discussion of the two cosmic forms in the Hopi language, manifested and manifesting. He says, "The subjective or manifesting comprises all that we call future, BUT NOT MERELY THIS, it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental - everything that appears or exists in the mind..." (59). He ties this in with the "striving of purposeful desire" (60). Here again, language seems to have this possibility for change in its matter. The oral language cannot be contained like the written word. That expectancy is just not inherent in written language.

I recently took some students to the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. I got to hear Joy Harjo speak about language and poetry. She's from New Mexico, a member of the Muskogee people. She said that she has to hear the music of a poem before she can write it. Seeing her perform a poem is nothing like you've seen before. She begins with what you would expect, words from the page, but then she is casually shifts to the voice, the song, of the Muskogee people. This oral presentation of her work is much more alive than the words on the page. She spoke about language and our modern use of it. She said that with cell phones and computers, we are distilling language, compacting it to suit our needs and in the process we are losing the inherent metaphors that she thinks are so much a part of our language.

For me, the most important words she spoke that day were her ideas about the spoken word. She said that we gain nourishment from speaking to each other and being near each other, and you can't get that from words on a paper. I know that books help us realize that we are not alone. All kinds of emotions are communicated in books and poetry. But there's nothing like sitting with actual human beings and sharing an oral tradition. That will cure your feelings of angst in the 21st century.

oral, the poetry of words

I have been doing a bit of reading that includes Native American poetry of the 20th Century and a great little book This Craft of Verse, Jorge Borges lectures @ Harvard from the late 60's. They both fit into the work by WJO. The overlapping and disconnects of oral cultures and chrographic(what an exclusive term) cultures today seem to center around the purpose of the communication. The face-to-face basis of both are still communication. I love his comment, "Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure" and then the key, "restructures thought" (7). What is the word meaning? What might be lost in the translation from the verbal to the written? Sometimes in the judgement of "literacy" possibly we make a judgement of higher and lower, more intelligent and less intelligent with the written word. But without the possibility of oral and the verbal art, might there not be disconnect in our communication with others? Speech sets the spoken word in a time, place,with a person and purpose. Can not the written change? Yet, the variances of an oral story can switch meaning with a gestures, an intonation, the audience, the occasion. Perhaps the variance in written is more academic? "Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever"(12). And yet the many different languages that are written must be translated when those of us not fluent in the original language must depend on others for placing the word choice and even the nuances into the words and therefore the meanings. There can be no denying the importance of the written word in our modern world. We need to read and write on some level to live in our lives, but the face to face of oral communication even today needs to be cultivated.
Just a short mention of some of the connections between "Orality and Literacy" and Borges lectures. [ties to the theories of dialogue from Freire?} He is discussing the contribution of poetry (a written verbal art, if that can exist?) when he recollects, "I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a magic cavern which is full of dead men. And those dead men can only be reborn, can be brought back to life when you open their pages". It is then that we have a resurrection of the words. Even those words that are resurrected through time, place, and person find another expression in the life or the oral use of the written word.
Well, I am rambling ...but check out some Native American poetry, The Iliad, Odyssey, The 4 Gospels, and perhaps 1001 Arabian Nights and the words will become oral even if only in your head. Written Words of hope, courage, remembering, and fun-"the voices of Humankind" put into a time and space. That is how the oral and the written connect for me. In our place and time there is value in the beauty of the oral and the written. Neither one is "more literate than the other"-just set in a time and place based on our purpose.

"Writing can never dispense with orality" Yep.

I liked Walter Ong much more than Benjamin Whorf. He hooked me in his introduction where he mentioned the synchronicity factor between orality and script and our need to keep time as a frame of reference in order to absorb the idea that cultures survived without writing for at least 24,000 years. Wow! I stayed with Whorf while he discussed the lack of "time" words in the Hopi language. I understand his points about the non-existence of "time" words in the Hopi language. Therefore, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to study orality and script diachronically from the Hopi perspective. (!)

So, let's talk Ong and some of his most thought-provoking lines:

"Language is so overwhelmingly oral..." I completely agree. I see this regularly when working with my students. Their fluency with written language (whether reading it or writing it) pales in comparison to their fluent use of oral language. I've had more than one student tell me that he'll (it's usually a male) never read once he leaves school. Well, I guess in some cultures, he could seriously survive that way.

"Of the some 3000 languages spoken that exist today only some 78 have a literature" WOW! I think they're missing out on a powerful component of language. I wonder if they'd agree.

"The basic orality of language is permanent." I never really thought of it that way, but duh. Yeah. We obviously can survive without the written component (as many cultures have proven over time), but it's the orality that we can't live without. That's the human's primary means of communication.

"Writing, commitment of the word to space..." Deep.

"Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound...Reading a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination..." I am going to discuss this with my students. They read aloud daily in class but it's not their favorite activity. However, it's the sense of hearing that is most important in the delivery of language. Reading aloud is yet another way to sharpen that sense.

"Writing can never dispense with orality." Yep.

"Rhetoric was and had to be a product of writing." I thought it was interesting to note that, back in "the day", the sign of a poor orator would have been his need to write things down before speaking. It's funny how things reverse in time - now it's often the opposite. Shooting from the hip (no matter how thoughtful or planned) is often seen as less professional than the polished written speech.

"Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit." It makes writing sound so dirty.

"A literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people." I don't think I can.

..."to disassociate words from writing is psychologically threatening, for literates' sense of control over language is closely tied to the visual transformations of language: without dictionaries, written grammar rules...how can literates live?" Here's another indication that I'm a control freak. I think I could live - but it doesn't seem like it'd be nearly as much fun or rewarding.