What I found most interesting and inspiring about this week’s
reading was how the evolution of the alphabet, and grammar for that matter, was
directly related to communication’s ability to be written and understood more
efficiently.
An alphabet’s advantage over prehistoric forms of written
language (simple pictures) stems from its evolving structure and design. Even
early forms of the alphabet, such as the Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, were
specifically designed with a consistent structure of not only the individual
symbols but also the possible combinations of these symbols to form specific
words. This advancement from the earlier phonograms, basically pictures on
stone walls and tablets, was simpler because of its structure and therefore was
easier to learn. Phonograms could be drawn in different styles and those styles
could be interpreted differently by various people, which made it difficult to
learn.
The alphabet’s advancing design, contributed to by the
Greeks and Romans included vowels, capital letters and ease of writing. Vowels
allowed humans a more sophisticated interpretation of written language by
adding a crucial element in how words sound. Capital letters evolved the
structure of a written sentence. With this advanced structure, and writing
implements, written communication was now faster and more portable than the
early chisels and stone forms of the petroglyph era.
This evolution led me to think of advancements in the written
communication in my lifetime. Since I’m 33 years old, email and text messaging
have become popular within my adulthood and the alphabet has evolved yet again
to accommodate these light-speed formats of written communication. Texting and
emails have popularized SMS and emoticons. SMS or short message service is the
acronyms we all know that make our messages faster to type but get the message
across (e.g. lol, btw, ttyl). Emoticons are the emotions we express in written messages
using various punctuation marks that can be deciphered, with a little
imagination, as facial expressions (e.g. happy :), sad :(, sad with a tear :’().
Damn, my actual punctuation marks have distorted my example emoticons. In any case,
these relatively new additions to written communication have been invented to
speed up writing and reading, a lot like the addition of vowels and capital letters
were during the ancient Greek and Roman times.
In his paper, “A Critical Review of Information Visualizations for
Natural Language,” Christopher Collins explains that humans are visual
communicators primarily due to our advanced sight capabilities. Collins notes
that throughout history, since the first known attempts at visual communication
of cave drawings in Lascaux caves in France, information visualizations have evolved by “increasing the efficiency
of information delivery, and reducing interpretation errors.” It’s this last
bit that intrigues me because I often misinterpret an emoticon, as my
girlfriend tells me. Sometimes I use the smiley face to indicate sarcasm, and sometimes
I use it to show happiness. Therefore, I’m
not so sure that emoticons and SMS has truly helped humans communicate better. By
monitoring subject’s texting habits and evaluates their writing skills through
grammatical tests Solomon Ali Dansieh, in his paper “SMS Texting and Its
Potential Impacts on Students’ Written Communication Skills,” found that on
average his subject’s grammatical skills did not meet the standards set by his
affiliated institution, Wa Polytechnic, when engaging in regular SMS practice
through text messaging. Dansieh goes to offer several potential reasons for
this correlation, like lack of saturation of SMS in the culture, not to mention
there is a wide breadth of research on this phenomenon that I cannot cover here.
But it begs the question, is written communication continuing to evolve in
order to increase its efficiency as it's originators intended?
Works Cited:
