История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 40 стр.

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UNIT 6

THE RISE OF LITERACY

Competence with written language, both in reading and writing, is known as

literacy. High levels of literacy are required for using scripts for a wide range of

somewhat specialized functions. When a large number of individuals in a society

are competent in using written language to serve these functions, the whole society

may be referred to as a literate society.

Just as scripts have a history, so, too, does literacy have a history. This

history closely reflects the increasing number of ways in which written materials

have been used and the increasing number of readers who have been able to use

them. Scripts were elaborated to serve new purposes; more importantly, new kinds

of writing systems permitted them to serve a wider range of purposes by a larger

number of individuals.

Although the uses of writing reflect religious, political, and social factors

and hence are not determined simply by orthography, two dimensions of the script

are important in understanding the growth of literacy: learnability and expressive

power. Learnability refers to the ease with which the script can be acquired, and

expressive power refers to the resources of the script for unambiguously expressing

the full range of meanings available in the oral language. These two dimensions

are inversely related to each other. Simple, restricted scripts are readily learned.

Pictographic signs such as those used in “environmental writing” and logographic

scripts with a limited set of characters are easiest to learn and, indeed, are acquired

more or less automatically by children. Syllabaries are reported to be learnable in a

day, or in a few days. Consonantal scripts and alphabets are difficult to learn and

usually require a few years of schooling. Full logographic systems, such as

Chinese, or mixed systems, such as Japanese, are difficult to acquire because they

require the memorization of thousands of distinctive characters. Once learned,

however, they appear to function as well as alphabets.