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Human Language And Human Languages Video

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In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the study of writing systems. Much of the new impetus has come from linguists investigating the interactions between graphic structure and linguistic structure.

Yet practitioners hailing from classics, archaeology, anthropology and elsewhere are examing writing as a social as much as a linguistic phenomenon. These developments have not been universally welcomed.

As it happens, anthropologists and archaeologists were once seriously invested in the relationship of writing to society, a relationship that was unfortunately theorised and systematised to support 19 th -century social evolutionist theory. While this progressivist paradigm has long been discredited, it is only recently that Human Language And Human Languages have returned to the social dimension of writing with here eyes, better information and new theoretical insights.

In this blog post I want to try to make sense of this positive moment and to try to chart a way forward. Part of the difficulty in tracing any paradigm shifts, let alone slow-moving research trends in this area, is the fact that the study of writing does not keep within established disciplinary boundaries. Writing is taught and researched within linguistics, art history, archeology and area studies, as well as in the study of specific languages that have strong written traditions, such as Chinese.

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This does not mean that scholars of writing systems are confused about their field of study. If anything the intersections between adjacent fields of study have simply opened up new perspectives and productive modes of analysis. But in the shadow of better-established disciplines that have their own course codes and departmental tea rooms, it is harder to project a sense of coherence Human Language And Human Languages shared destiny.

I want to make the case that despite such administrative invisibility, and the comparatively low number of people working in this field, there has been a concerted turn towards the human at the centre of written production. This is a turn that appears most pronounced in the study of ancient as opposed to modern writing systems, perhaps because these require more critical attention in terms of recovering the societies and environments in which they were used. A glance at their blog, especially this post by group leader Pippa Steelereveals an emphasis on written practice not to mention hands-on experimentation served Human Language And Human Languages a side order of gingerbread and Lego. Yet in addition to exploring the mechanisms of how visual signs model language, the group is concerned with contextual and cognitive preconditions for writing as well as the real-world applications of written practice.

Tellingly, INSCRIBE has brought undeciphered writing systems into this conversation, highlighting the fact that non -linguistic evidence has a great deal of relevance to the question of how writing relates to society.

Meanwhile, the Scripta group in Paris has set out five Unexpected Experience areas that are all concerned with social practices and productions of writing.

What these research groups have in common is an emphasis on context and practice, and an understanding that writing is just one aspect of a bigger story of how people organise and understand their worlds. On its own, none of this is necessarily new of course. In fact, earlier theorists in a more materialist mode were squarely fixed on the relationship between writing and society, and that their efforts did not produce a proud intellectual legacy. Consider, for example, the ways that 18 th — and 19 th -century thinkers in Europe drew a deterministic line between writing and social organisation, and used the presence or absence of writing as a diagnostic marker for sorting human societies into racial hierarchies.

A similar argument was made much later by O. Crawford By the post-war period, the social evolutionist model had become an embarrassment to anthropology, yet it was at this time that I. Gelb produced his A Human Language And Human Languages of writingan influential book built on unambiguously progressivist foundations.

Within archaeology, neo-evolutionists like V.

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Gordon Childe and colleagues repackaged social evolutionist ideas into a new stadialism in which writing was again proposed as universal telos among other technologies. For these thinkers, the invention of writing was represented as the https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/purpose-of-case-study-in-psychology/explain-and-describe-the-fad-diets-and.php outcome of the economic circumstances that demanded it, rather than the product of any creative human effort.

But because Childe insisted that writing was a civilisational milestone that could only be reached after societies had acquired a degree of technological complexity he was Human Language And Human Languages be utterly confounded by the ancient Maya who apparently had a calendar and writing system, but lacked metal tools, wheeled vehicles and intensive agriculture Childe In post-war archaeology, a widening gap between materialist and idealist positions preceded a flowering of new methodologies and perspectives and a general uptick in the sophistication of middle-range theory.

These bold new ideas did not seem to get any real purchase in writing systems research. I have a vision of mild-mannered epigraphers tracing over their inscriptions while the archaeologists next door were forming themselves into warring bands of processualists, postprocessualists, Marxists, feminists and poststructuralists.]