История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 50 стр.

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literacy involves competence in reading, writing, and interpreting texts of various

sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher levels of comprehension and

interpretation. These higher levels depend upon the knowledge of specialized uses

of language. The intimate relations among language, literacy, and knowledge have

contributed to the identification of literacy with schooling.

As different scripts serve different functions and make different demands

upon readers, it is a complex matter to define literacy in universal terms and so to

judge the literacy levels of a society at different periods or to compare one society

with another. Scripts that,because of incompleteness or inexplicitness, rely heavily

upon the prior knowledge of reader and writer remain the domain of a specialized

elite, as did cuneiform, or they are used for rather restricted purposes, like for

example a syllabic system. Scripts that are relatively explicit and complete permit a

reader who is unfamiliar with a text to read it in a reliable way and hence they can

be used for a much broader range of functions.

The form of the script may be less crucial than the range of functions a script

serves. With the growth of readership there came an increased production of

materials to be read, an increased number of social functions the script is used for,

and the invention of new, more specialized genres of writing. The novel form, for

example, was invented in Europe only in the 17th century. Other specialized uses

of writing developed much earlier. As European societies became more literate

during the Middle Ages, writing came to be used for functions that earlier had been

performed by oral language and by ritual. Indenture of servants, deeding of

property, evidence at trials, and accounts of the lives of saints all came to be

functions of written texts. As literacy began to be required for these vital social

purposes, oral language came to be seen as loose, unruly and lacking in social

authority. And people who could not read and write came to be regarded as simple

and ignorant–in short, unlettered.

Rising levels of literacy in Europe were closely related to great social

transformations, notably the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern

science. The right to read the Bible for oneself and to discover its meaning was the