История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 42 стр.

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scripts, such as the alphabet, in the evolution of these more specialized uses of

language. If the alphabet were decisive, one could look for the basis of many of the

particular features of Western culture in the invention of an alphabetic

orthography.

This question is far from resolved. Historically, the rise of cities coincided

with the development of a script suitable for serving bureaucratic purposes. Later,

the scientific and philosophical tradition that originated in classical Greece and that

prevails in the West to this day developed along with the alphabet. Many writers,

including Eric Havelock, have maintained that the alphabet was a decisive factor in

the cultural development of the West. Scientists have claimed that the rise of

literacy in the later Middle Ages was fundamental to the cultural flowering known

as the Renaissance.

It is perhaps characteristic of alphabet-based conceptions of literacy to draw

a strict distinction between reading and interpreting. As interpretation came to be

seen as interpolation into or distortion of the text, the attempt was made to write

texts in such a manner as to reduce the possibility of variant interpretations. This

resulted in the attempt to write texts with univocal meanings, texts that mean

neither more nor less than what they say. To achieve this required the

formalization of grammatical structures, the conventionalization of meanings of

terms, and the invention of standard punctuation. Such textual developments were

especially important for the specialized functions of science and philosophy. The

distinction between meaning and interpretation fostered the idea that texts have a

literal meaning, that knowledge can be completely expressed by means of such

literal meanings, and that texts can be autonomous and objective. In the Western

tradition, knowledge is treated as if it were an ideal text, as something that is

regarded by most learners as given rather than created. These assumptions about

meaning were important to both the literary and the scientific traditions that took

form in western Europe in the 17th century and that continue to this day.

When writing becomes a predominant institutional and archival form it has

contributed to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by