История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 141 стр.

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loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not

until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.

Augustine, a professor of rhetoric who was well versed in poetics and the

rhythms of prose, a scholar who hated Greek but loved Latin, was in the habit –

common to most readers – of reading anything he found written for sheer delight in

the sounds. For Augustine the spoken word was an intricate part of the text itself.

Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be

pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit meaning, as if it were their

soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet,vebra volat – which has

come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into

air” – used to express the exact opposite. It was coined in praise of the word said

out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page,

which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend

voice to the silent letters, the scripta, and to allow them to become, verba, spoken

words – spirit.

Observing the reading of Saint Ambrose that afternoon in 384, Augustine

could hardly have known what was before him. He thought he was seeing a reader

trying to avoid intrusive visitors. In fact, he was seeing a multitude, a host of silent

readers who over the next many centuries would include many, would include us,

reading him today.

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the

origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind – in which one of the

hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading – is a late development in

humankind’s evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still

changing. He suggested that the earliest instances of reading might have been an

aural rather than a visual perception. “Reading in the third millennium BC may

therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the

speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables

in our sense.”