The origin of Classical Greek culture: Hunter-gatherers of the alphabet.

Abstract

Introduction.

Though important the problem of the origins of the Classical civilization have been thought inexplicable: "Just what circumstances, environmental, cultural, and biological, gave rise to this brilliant flowering of the human intellect in the Greece the classical age we shall never know with certainty." (Robins 1967:10). "The phenomenon of the Greek intellectual revolution was, therefore, unique. But when we try to account for the Greek intellectual revolution--or at least to establish some dominant cause--historians have been baffled". (Albright, 1972:225). "The research into the prehistory of Greek democracy and autonomous intelligence [rational intellect] was largely hampered by the fact that a prior these Greeks are traditionally considered to be so extraordinary that their actual evolution does not seem to give much cause for thought. Often--though by no means always--it looks as if nothing else could have happened to the Greeks but to create democracy and philosophy." (Meier 1986:67).

In spite of these comments one factor has been singled out as important. Several people have proposed a role for the Greek alphabet: Innis (1950:66-100), Eric Havelock (1963, 1976, 1986), Marshall McLuhan (1969:18); Jack Goody (1962, 1977), Walter Ong (1982), David Olson (1977; 1986) and Derrick de Kerchhove (1986; with Lumsden 1988). Others have suggested more general and less specific connections for instance Coomarasway (1949); Derrida (1976); Illich and Sanders (1988) and Radin (1957:57-62). Others have suggested no or little contribution (Lloyd, 1979: 240; Murray, 1980:95-97; Thomas, 1989). This speculation upon the Greek alphabet has attributed much to the Greek invention of vowels letters, imputing to them important effects upon the nature of reading and thought. However, all theorists have been limited by lack of empirical research as to whether they effect reading, and if so, in what ways. This has severely limited the scientific development of theories attributing the rise of Greek culture to its alphabet.

In recent years research has been carried out cross culturally upon the effects of the presence and absence of vowels upon word recognition. At present this research is not known outside reading researchers. Though a review, this paper seeks to bring this research and its implications to the wider attention of anthropologists, sociologists, historians, Classicists and others interested the Greek alphabet and the effects of literacy upon culture. This is its first part. The paper has a further objective. The main significance of this reviewed work is its potential to link literacy/culture interaction and Greek culture. I shall suggest a theory of such a link.

Readers of earlier drafts regularly make two misinterpetations: (a) that I follow Havelock and Goody in suggesting literacy changed thought processes; and (b) that my interpretation of Classical Greece is ethnocentric. Some preliminary comments will help the reader avoid them.

(A) Eric Havelock and Jack Goody take what could be called following Gellner (1974:150) the "drunkenness" approach - literacy changed how people thought in much the way a drug can change the way the mind works. But instead of making people "drunk" literacy sobered people up into "rationality". An approach familiar to anthropologists in non-literacy contexts exists with the work of Levy-Bruhl (1985), Jaynes (1977), and Carothers (1959). My approach might be rather poorly described upon analogy as "metallurgical".

Anthropologists and archaeologists call certain societies "iron age" or "bronze age". In doing this they recognise that the properties of the main metal used by a society's technology greatly affect both its use and through this the nature of that society. For instance, bronze unlike iron is too soft to be used for ploughing; its is an alloy - one of whose components - tin - is found in few places (unlike iron whose ores are widespread); bronze can be smelted at lower temperatures than iron which need specialised supplies of charcoal. All these facts affect societies which use bronze and iron. For instance, since bronze cannot be used for ploughing these societies cannot produce in many regions the large agriculture surplus iron societies can; since bronze requires tin bronze age societies had to trade, etc.

I suggest a parallel relationship between the different characteristics of reading of different writing systems and its use as a communication technology in a society. In particular, because different writing systems are read differently they have very different effects upon the technology by which power is delegated by ordinary people to those elites which lead and control them. Rather than developing the ideas of Havelock (1967, 1976, 1986) or Goody (1962, 1977) my thesis applies the ideas of Holton (1967) to a literary context. This claim does not involve me suggesting literacy makes people somehow more rational. I am not in favour (at least in any simple sense) that it did. If it did then dyslexics would be expected to be less rational people than normal readers but they are not - at least I am not and this would be the case if dyslexics were not rational since I am one.

(B) My analysis may look "ethnocentric" (Bernal, 1987). I am not interested in praising Greek culture above that of other societies. My concern, I hope, is scientific. I think a unique phenomena occurred roughly around 500 - 300 in Greece. The phenomena which I see unique to the Greeks is not related to them having made greater achievements than other societies - that phenomena relates to the different problems which shaped what they did culturally, intellectually and politically.

My examples of art and mathematics are chosen since these are ones where I can show a dissociation between achievement and problems. China (as Needham has shown) was clearly the technical equal or better to the Greeks in them. However, though technically equal they produced very different work since the problems which shaped them were very different - the Greeks by individualistic ones the Chinese by practical and traditional ones.

A review of the cognitive psychology of the alphabet

The two alphabets

The Semitic alphabet is not vowelled[1]. But a few signs of the Semitic alphabet could be used to represent some vowel information by the technique of mater lectionis. This enabled (though irregularly and only in some circumstances) weak consonants to represent long vowels (Gelb, 1958; 1963; Segert, 1978). For this reason it is not accurate (as it is sometimes done and which for convenience sometimes I shall follow in this paper) to call the Semitic alphabet the "consonantal" alphabet.

The Semitic alphabet originated in the 18th or perhaps 17th centuries BC (Naveh, 1982). Its origins lie further back in the Hieroglyphic and cuneiform practice of polyphony - representing several syllables beginning with a common consonant by one sign (Driver, 1954:139). In cuneiform writing this practice is inconsistent and mixed with different forms for representing words including determinatives, ideographs (Driver, 1954; Gelb, 1958; Jensen 1970:94-97). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing also mixes polyphonic signs with determinatives. However, they are not necessary: ancient Egyptian, for instance, had a purely phonetic system for writing foreign names (Gelb 1952:168). It has been suggested (Hodge, 1975:345) they were on the verge of inventing the alphabet. This step was taken by Semitic people neighbouring ancient Egypt (whose language is closely related to them) by omitting of Hieroglyphic determinatives and extending its principle of polyphony (Driver, 1954:139-140; Naveh, 1982)[2]. The Greek alphabet is a modification of the earlier Semitic one[3]. This was the Greek's own theory for instance in Herodotus Histories book five 60 (1954) and the name the Greeks gave to their letters - phoinikeia. The Greeks when they took over the alphabet extended its vowel representation making it full and consistent[4]. This was done by developing the mater lectionis principle by which consonant letters could additionally represent weak vowels to one where formerly Semitic letters solely represented Greek vowels (the vocalisation of speech). The invention of vowel letters happened once: in spite of the existence of several local varieties of Greek alphabet evidence concerning the transpositions of the phonological values of sibilants between the Semitic and the Greek alphabet is consistent only with a single origin, (Jeffery, 1961:6).

Differences between the two alphabets are small compared between them and other writing systems. Most of the letters in the Greek alphabet are present (in a slight changed form) in the early forms of the consonantal alphabet (Naveh 1982) (and also the one you are reading now). Each is purely phonetic and contain respectively 27 and 22 signs. The small number of their phonetic signs separates them from other ancient writing systems which contain large numbers of signs many of them of nonphonetic: Sumerian (600, 100 phonetic); Egyptian Hieroglyphics (700, 100 phonetic) and Hittite Hieroglyphics (450+, 60 phonetic), Mesopotamian cuneiform (570 - but only 300 used frequently), Indus writing (300) and Chinese logographs (in 200 BC around 3000; in 121 AD 10,000 and 1700 AD 44,000; modern logographs can be reduced to 224 radicals) all figures from Gelb, (1958: 115) Diringer (1968) and Jensen (1970). The similarity of the two alphabets raises a question: are they different in how they are read? This is important to the question whether the two forms of the alphabet had different or similiar affects upon Semitic and Greek societies. One might simplistically suppose that more similar a script the more likely that they were by similiar processes.

One factor, however, separates them[5]: the limited use of vowel representation in the consonantal alphabet compared to the Greek (Gelb, 1963). This has a potentially important consequence: it means they differ in the ease with which the phonetic information contained in a written word's spelling can be used to accurately and unambiguously to create its pronunciation. Without vowels the Semitic alphabet omits information needed for guiding the spoken vocalisation of consonants. In contrast, the vowels of the Greek alphabet make the spoken vocalisation of consonants transparent.

Does this effect how the two alphabets are read? The question cannot be inferred from orthography. The transparency of Greek, while good, is still only partial as it ignores some aspects of pronunciation such as allophones, Sandhi rules, stress and breathing (Allen, 1973) (at least in early Greek since marks for some of these were developed by Alexandrian grammarians in the third century BC (Pfeiffer, 1968:178). Further, the speech and hearing systems have abilities to correct for missing information in the production (Dell, 1988) and perception of speech (Milberg, Blumstein, and Dworetzky, 1988; Warren, 1970). Vowel information may therefore not be critical for pronouncing or recognising words. Whether it is or not is an empirical question. Understanding how this problem has been approached by research requires some background knowledge upon the various ways speech can be preserved by writing.

Lexical and phonological reading.

Speech frozen at the vocabulary level is lexical (concerned with words). Its preservation requires the creation of a set (a "mental dictionary") of signs and associations learnt between them and the corresponding spoken words. These associations are in most respects arbitrary. Consider the set of numerals less than ten. For each spoken numeral - "one", "two", "three" and so on a sign representation exists - "1", "2", "3" etc. The sign- word associations used to represent these numerals could be rearranged or different. The link between a numeral and spoken word therefore is a convention. This has the consequence that without prior knowledge no way exists to guess which sign associates with which word. A consequence of this is that a reader must learn a set of sign/word associations to read speech preserved at the level of vocabulary.

Alternatively, speech can be preserved through its pronunciation (phonology). Consider tape recorded speech, this freezes speech through its medium of communication. Tape the spoken numeral "three" and play it back. Provided its listeners can hear English they will recognise it. In taped speech no representations are deliberately recorded but hearers are able to pick out them. This they can do spontaneously as it uses a skill they already possess. The skill is limited to words in our spoken vocabularies. Play it to monolingual French person and they will not understand it. This limitation does not apply to lexical presentation if the numeral "3" is drawn instead upon

a page, people of many different languages will now be able to recognise this though they could not recognise the tape recorded word "three". But this is restricted to those which have learnt the arbitrary convention linking the numeral "3" and the appropriate concept or word of their language. The significant point is that phonological preservation of language differs markedly from lexical preservation in the skills needed to decode it: the phonological representation of speech reuses associations already possessed by its readers while its lexical representation involves an investment in learning entirely new ones. The lexical representation of speech applies to writing as much as hearing speech recorded on tape. In this case, pronunciation instead of being frozen on tape is frozen in terms of signs representing fragments of their phonology. This involves a small investment: a person has to learn the appropriate sign sound associations. While learning these takes some time and effort this learning investment is not comparable to that needed to learn a sign for every word in a spoken vocabulary. Prior to completing this investment a reader can read little but once completed they can read any word by sounding it out. In contrast, lexical readers acquire a reading vocabulary proportional to the investment in acquiring sign-word associations. This has the important consequence: novice lexical readers are very unskilled compared to readers with expertise; but novice phonological readers after learning the sounding out of words are near as good as experts.

Phonological reading has other advantages and some disadvantages as the basis for literacy. These effect its use by various cultures. Its main disadvantages is that it ties the capacity to read a text to the capacity to understand the spoken form of its words. For some societies, for instance China, with many mutually unintelligible dialects and languages (Jensen, 1970:179; Sampson, 1985:170) this would bar readers in one region reading something written by writers in another. Chinese of different dialects may mutually not be able to understand each other's speech but may read, because it is lexical, each other's writing. A further problem is that phonological reading is only effective with language not dominated by homophones (words sounding alike such as burry and berry). Sixty-nine Chinese words are pronounced /i/, the average word shares the same pronunciation (including tone) with ten others (Diringer, 1968:64). This is one reason for the retention of non- phonological writing in both China and Japan (Diringer, 1968:64; Sampson, 1985: 178-9). The advantages of phonological reading relate to learning it. First, as noted, it involves a minimal investment to gain the ability to read a wide vocabulary of written words. For instance, both Japanese and Chinese children learn phonological (hiragana and katakana) and logographic scripts (kanji). Reading the phonological one occurs within or before the first year of school (Sakamoto & Makita, 1973: 446- 448). That of the logographic one takes many years to acquire - indeed many of its rarer logographs might not be fully learnt (Unger, 1987:92-93). Second, once phonological reading is learnt nearly every word in a text becomes readable - the exceptions are words absent from the reader's spoken vocabulary - for instance the names in foreign novels. Even a rare word seldom pronounced can be read. The size of the "mental dictionary" used to recognise words is their spoken one.

How far does the different transparency of the Semitic and Greek alphabets effect their use of a phonological or lexical mode of word recognition? Unfortunately, the psychological processes cannot in this case be directly inferred from orthography. There are two major problems.

First, nearly all writing contains some information as to its pronunciation. Chinese characters for instance contain phonological information through phonological radicals (Sampson, 1985:156). But a far more important point is something which should be but is not immediately obvious: that any script which represents speech phonologically also associates with each spoken word a unique visual image. This can be used to recognise it lexically. The phonological representation of words consequently is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for their phonological recognition.

Second, phonological information has other advantages which might cause its development in a writing system even though it does not get used in word recognition. One relates to acquiring lexical reading abilities. These depend upon a "mental dictionary". Phonology effects the ease of its creation. Dictionary entries somehow have to be entered or trained[7] before they can be used to recognise words. But this training can be only done if the identity of a written word somehow is already known. This means those learning lexical reading skills must use independent source of information for learning how to identify written words. Phonology with other kinds of information provide such sources of word identification. A reader facing an unknown word can guess its identify using the limited phonological and semantic information present in many scripts and surrounding text. In these circumstances a reader can identify words much as a word is found to fit a cross word puzzle from various clues provided by surrounding words, context and other bits of information which narrow down its identity. This would be a particularly useful strategy in the ancient world where the contents of most texts would already be familiar from memory or (as with legal documents) standard phraseology. But guessing word using phonological clues differs as an activity to using phonological information to read whole texts. Reading involves recognising words sufficiently quickly and efficiently that sentences made up of them can be comprehended. If word recognition is slow or involves repeated guessing of words then this comprehension process is compromised. Phonological decoding processes of an inefficient kind can be useful for training non- phonological lexical word recognition processes while at the same time being of limited use for word identification in actual reading. The existence of phonology in writing could therefore imply two things: it could have evolved to enable the phonological reading of words or it could be there to train non- phonological word recognition processes[8].

Both the Greek and the Semitic alphabets are phonological scripts. Do they both provide sufficient information to be read phonologically? The assumption made by many is that they dp. For instance psychologists (Baron, & Strawson, 1976; Freebody & Bryne, 1988) have described some English readers as "Phoenician" - those tending to read English phonologically in contrast to others "Chinese" which tend to read it lexically. This presumes that ancient Semitics read their alphabet phonologically - something which need not have been the case. Critical to whether they did this is the need for phonological transparency in a script for the processes used in phonological reading. The Greek alphabet is more transparent phonologically then the consonantal alphabet since it uses a full and consistent representing of vowels which increases the phonological accuracy of its speech representation. In Greek, vowel letters represent only vowels; in consonantal alphabets letters representing vowels may be also representing consonants something which might not be immediately unambiguous. This might determine whether the processes responsible for phonological reading can read it. Spelling when it omits vowels for instance might not be sufficiently transparent for these cognitive processes to function. Full vowel representation in consequence might be necessary for phonological reading.

By themselves, phonological differences in the transparency of ancient scripts does not inform us how they were read. Nor does the existence of spelling errors (Driver, 1976:69), since there is evidence spelling and reading are separate processes - very young children for instance go through a stage of logographic reading but phonetic spelling (Byrant and Bradley, 1980; see Stewart and Coltheart's, 1988 comments on logographic reading). There is a need for empirical evidence to decide the question. But a problem exists: ancient readers are not available for direct study. However two indirect approaches exist which might enable an inference as whether they were read phonologically or lexically.

First, is to look closely at the development of the two scripts. Phonological reading should make scripts responsive to phonological variations in pronunciation. The phonological evolution of the Semitic and Greek alphabets differ with the development of the Greek alphabet being phonological sensitive and that of the Semitic alphabet being insensitive. The Semitic alphabet split very early on into two forms the North with 22 letters and the South with 29 (Diringer, 1968; Naveh, 1982). After this great changes occurred but they were mainly in how the letters were written rather than the phonological transparency of the script (Diringer, 1968; Gelb, 1963; Irwin, 1956, Jensen, 1970; Naveh, 1982). For instance the Hebrews acquired their alphabet from the Phoenicians but though they have more consonants in their spoken language they retained the ones present in the Phoenician script thus representing 27 consonants by only 22 letters (Segert, 1978). In contrast, the Greeks once they had added vowels diverged into various local forms of alphabets adding letters where necessary to represent the local dialect (Jeffery, 1961). This process was so extreme that one early form of the Greek alphabet taken over by Etruscans and then the Romans lost some Greek letters and added others to produce a different script - the one this paper is printed in. In the Semitic alphabet many graphical divergences occurred (its direct descendants, modern Arabic and Hebrew lack any visual resemble to their Semitic progenitors) while in the Greek one there were also phonological ones. Interesting, while phonologically different from their Semitic progenitors Greek Capital letters still bear a visual resemblance to them. The simplest suggestion is that Semitic readers were not reading their script phonologically. If so why did not the Hebrews adopt the Semitic alphabet they took from the Phoenicians to fit their tongue better? In contrast, the Greeks tailored the alphabet to their local tongues adding and ignoring letters as needed to make their script phonologically transparent.

This is of course is a tentative suggestion. The judgement on any argument can, however, rest upon a number of different sources. One of these is modern readers. How are modern readers of vocalised and unvocallised scripts affected by phonological transparency?

The psychology of reading vowelled and unvowelled words.

Ancient Greek was phonologically transparent. Though Greek has many descendants most have lost its transparent regular one phoneme for each letter and one letter for each phoneme. Most modern European scripts including modern Greek lack a one-to-one relationship, as often many phonemes are represented by more than one grapheme. One European script is particularly irregular - English - its graphemes often represents many phonemes - in the case of the letter "a" ten of them. This is unfortunate since most reading research has been carried out upon English. This irregularly of course affects the ease and even possibility of phonologically decoding English words. One country, Yugoslavia has made a deliberate attempt to modify spelling to preserve a one phoneme one grapheme principle. The following research upon vowels for this reason is dependent upon reading research done upon Serbo-Croatian writing.

A similar relationship between a modern and ancient script exists with modern unpointed Hebrew and the ancient Semitic alphabets (though there have been changes see Rabin, 1977; and Sampson, 1985:85-84). Modern Hebrew used in everyday reading is not spelt with proper vowel letters (Rabin 1977) though some vowels as in ancient Semitic writing are indicated matres lectionis by consonant letters. A Hebrew script not in everyday use "pointed Hebrew", it should be noted, exists2. One script is both "Greek" and "consonantal" Persian, uniquely contains a mix of ordinary words some of which like the Greek are spelt with vowel letters and some like a consonantal script spelt without them (Baluch, 1988; Khanlari, 1979).

Word recognition is hidden. But it is not completely hidden. Certain manipulations by psychologists can produce signs of how words are recognised[9].

Hebrew and Serbo-croatian words are read aloud differently. Single Hebrew words written without vowels are affected by their frequency, priming and context (Frost, Katz & Bentin, 1987). In contrast, single Serbo-Croatian words written phonemically like the Greek are unaffected by frequency, priming or context (Feldman, and Turvey, 1983, Katz and Feldman, 1981, 1983; Lukatela, Popadic, Ognjenovic and Turvey, 1980; Lukatela, Savic, Gligorijevic and Turvey, 1987; and Lukatela and Turvey, 1980). This suggests vowelless scripts are necessarily read lexically while vowelled ones can be read phonologically (at least when presented as single words). Because of irregular spelling English readers are intermediate. Further evidence comes from within Hebrew writing. It can be spelt with vowels by means of diacritics called points2. This pointed spelling is not used in everyday writing but when used it affects word recognition - pointed words rarely read are identified faster than their unpointed forms encountered every day (Koriat, 1984 experiment 2; Navon & Shimron, 1981). This evidence is not conclusive - there is evidence that pointing, due to its unfamiliarity, may interfere with word recognition (Bentin & Frost, 1987). Evidence from Persian avoids this problem as transparent and opaque words coexist in everyday writing. Bauman Baluch who has recently researched this script (Doctorial thesis, Institute of Education, London, 1988) has shown the pronunciation of transparent Persian words lacks lexical effects while opaque ones show massive ones. Like pointed Hebrew nonwords, phonologically transparent Persian nonwords are pronounced more quickly than opaque words read everyday - this seems difficult to explain by their recognition through a common reading process. These findings suggest an important conclusion. Only scripts in which pronunciation is transparent can be read phonologically. A phonological script which in spite of representing some speech information lacks transparency cannot be read phonologically. Vowels are essential to transparency. The readers of unvowelled alphabetic writing are restricted to reading lexically.

This research shows only that phonologically transparent writing can be read phonologically. It does not rule out that word recognition in different circumstances for instance the silent reading used by modern readers of these scripts might be lexical. Evidence from English suggests modern readers read with lexical (Coltheart 1978, Humphreys and Evett 1985) and parallel but slower (and so not functional) phonological word recognition (Frost, Repp and Katz, 1988, Perfeti, Bell, and Delany, 1988, Van Orden, 1983). The lexical recognition predominates because it is quicker and more suited to the silent skimming of printed texts a modern form of reading not practised in the ancient world (Saeger 1982)[10]. The main conclusion of the above research is that (1) phonological reading is an option but not a necessary one for readers of phonologically transparent scripts but (2) it is not an option for readers of phonologically opaque scripts. Independent evidence exists that readers of the ancient Greeks alphabet read using the phonological option.

First, lexical processes use end letters more than the middle ones of words (Bruner, and O'Dowd, 1958; Merickle, Coltheart, and Lowe, 1971). These are readily identifiable in modern writing since it (roughly from the time of widespread silent reading) separates words by spaces. The ancient Greeks (Threatte, 1980) and Romans (Wingo, 1972) however wrote words next to each other without spaces - scriptio continua. The beginning and last letters of words in their writing was thus not visually obvious - something disadvantageous to lexical reading. Semitic writing, in contrast, has normally since its beginning divided words (Millard, 1970). Scriptio continua has a major effect upon reading: it prevents skimming - the factor which makes it useful for us. Skimming requires lexical word recognition. Further, evidence for a connection is that scriptio continua in modern writing associates with phonological reading. Japanese is normally written in a mix of phonological and logographic characters. But it can be written purely in the phonological script. When done so it is scriptio continua. There is evidence that the phonological script is read phonologically (Kimura, 1984).

Second, the Greeks placed great emphasis upon teaching phonological decoding skills and none upon lexical ones. A ancient Greek child was given practice in sight reading "phonemic scales" (Davies, 1973:67-68; Marrou, 1956:151-152): in Roman characters BA, CA, DA, FA, .. and various manipulations of them AB, AC, AD, .. and ABA, ACA, ADA.. What they were not taught were the common words they would most likely read. They were just as likely to be asked to read difficult to pronounce rare ones.

Research upon vowels and their effects upon word recognition leads to the conclusion that the ancient Greek alphabet, differs from its progenitor the consonantal alphabet in being read phonologically. Evidence suggests it was the first. Several now extinct forms of phonetic writing Linear B, Cypriot and Mesopotamian syllabaries exist. In spite of the fact that some syllabaries such as the two modern kana Japanese syllabaries can be read phonologically (Kimura, 1984), ancient syllabaries were not. Few languages can be written with phonologically transparent syllabaries for linguistic reasons. Japanese is one of these exceptions. The same linguistics factors responsible for its transparency also make ancient syllabaries opaque. They concern the phonological compressibility of speech into signs. (1) Speech has a very different phonological compressibility through syllables or phonemes signs. The number of phonemes in any language is relative small - 43 in English for instance. But the number of syllables in most languages can be counted in the hundreds if not the thousands (5000 for English according to Rozin and Gleitman 1977:84). (2) The number of speech syllables is language dependent. The vast number of syllables in most languages means that while a single sign can be assigned to each of their phonemes, this is impractical for their speech syllables. A few languages are exceptional in being constructed out a relatively few syllables sounds - for instance over a hundred in the case of Japanese. Its syllabary for this reason can practically represent each of them by a single sign or sign and diacritic. The same effect of limited number of language syllables upon writing in a syllabary applies to some native North American languages such as Cherokee (Walker 1969). (3) The languages of ancient syllabaries were not exceptional. Linear B (Ventis & Chadwick, 1953) and Cyriotic syllabaries (Diringer, 1968:121) wrote Greek - a language like other members of the Indo-european family of languages constructed out of many thousands of syllables. Akkadian (which includes Babylonian and Assyrian) the main language spelt by the ancient mesopotamian cuneiform syllabaries had over thousand syllables. Thus for linguistic reasons it was impractical to represent them all. A consequence of this is that many signs represented more than one fragment of speech. Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary do not differentiate between long and short vowels, nor certain consonants such as /k/ and /ch/ (Diringer, 1968:121). Mesopotamian cuneiform syllabaries never consistently marked such distinctions as between /b/ and /p/ and /t/ and /d/ and /g/, /k/ and /q/ (Walker, 1987:16). Since these were absent the pronunciation of its written words into the Akkadian could not have been transparent (Jensen, 1970:90-91)[11].

Further evidence that ancient syllabaries were not read phonologically is their use of various determines (signs indicating the broad semantic category of the word) to aid word recognition. This suggests the phonological information contained in spelling was insufficient frequently to specify word pronunciation consequently another source of information was needed to compensate for its phonological opaqueness. Sumerian (Driver, 1954:59-60; Diakonoff 1975) and Mayan (Diringer, 1968: 90, 92; Houston 1988) for these reasons could not have been read phonologically.

The psychological and palaeographic evidence suggests that the Greek alphabet was the first script to be phonologically read. This happened as a direct consequence of its innovation of vowel letters - the characteristic many theorists in the past have claimed give it special effects upon reading and thought.

How could phonological reading change society and culture? One aspect[12] of phonological reading would be particularly important. A unique feature of phonological reading is that words are recognised from spellings not learnt associations. This effects not only reading but literacy: phonological readers can read all the words in any text without difficulty. This trait, I suggest, (1) made their literacy unique in the ancient world, (2) and this unique literacy was responsible for an unique interaction between literacy and society which created the novel features of Greek culture. I shall discuss first the nature of this phonological literacy, then its interaction with society and finally supporting evidence from the nature the changes in Greek society.

Transparent and opaque literacy

One factor effecting the social nature of literacy is text opaqueness - the ability of a reader unfamiliar with a text to grasp its contents through reading. The ability to read need not imply the ability to read any text whose oral form is comprehensible.

Several factors can make a text opaque. (a) Visual opacity - certain styles of cursive writing require extensive experience reading them to recognise the words they contain. An example of this is the Japanese grass-style of handwriting (Sampson, 1985:192-193). (b) Lexical opacity - the words in a text though familiar when spoken may not be readily connected by the reader with their written form (several examples are given below). Opaque texts affect not just word recognition but text comprehension. Not being able to read words in a text makes it hard to comprehend or even unreadable. In spite of containing understandable ideas and arguments an opaque text makes them inaccessible for an otherwise competent reader. In contrast, transparent text enables a reader to understand a text's contents as easily as if they were spoken.

Text opaqueness due to lexical difficulties can arise in several ways. One common in the modern world occurs in texts ladened with jargon and abbreviations. A common mistake of technical specialists is to try write pieces for the lay person using abbreviations and "buzz words" with which they are familiar but not to people outside their speciality (Gowers 192:106, Klare 1985). The ideas of such a piece might not themselves be difficult to grasp but outsiders are prevented from doing so by its "buzz words" and abbreviations which fail to relate to their otherwise familiar and comprehensible referents. The existence of these texts have led to campaigns and educational programmes for writing that is easy to read - "plain English".

Another source of text opaqueness is writing itself. The nature of logographic writing biases it strongly towards creating opaque texts. This is because a logograph has to be already familiar to a reader to be identified. If this is not the case readers might find themselves trying to read a text whose words they know in their spoken form but not in their written one. The situation does not exist for phonological transparent writing. Phonological recognition, for these texts, enables a reader to identify its words provided they are in the readers spoken vocabulary. The contrasting effects of these two forms of writing can be seen in Japanese where both kinds of scripts coexist. (a) Before postwar Kanji reforms (which reduced their number from roughly 7-8000 to 1,850 Sampson, 1985:190) Japanese newspapers and magazines contained many rare - and so difficult to recognise logographs. If there was no alternative way of recognising them they would cause problems. But prewar Japanese readers were able to read them because along side them the Japanese print their pronunciation in their phonetic script (Unger 1987: 34). A similar practice for semi-literates using pinyin occurs for slogans on posters, and place-names on road signs in China (Sampson, 1985: 159). (b) Though it is possible, Japanese is not normally written in its phonetic script. However, it is in one circumstance - for Braille. This has lead to a paradoxical situation "The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethren who are endowed with good sight; for the former, by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography ...; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily papers unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters (Nitobe, quoted by Sampson, 1985: 103-4).

Phonological reading therefore minimises texts opaqueness. But not invariably - one condition must be fulfilled: the text must spell words present in the reader's speech vocabulary. Thus even phonological transparent texts can, if they spell words in an unfamiliar dialect or old pronunciation, be opaque. Nonetheless, scripts which offer phonological reading will be considerably more transparent than ones which do not.

The delegation of power to literates.

Writing constructs forms of authority absent in societies without writing. Writing enables a group of people to do something done less easily in an oral society - gain a monopoly on understanding the ideas, narratives and texts vital to that society (Gelb, 1958:231; and Gellner, 1988:23). When these are written, only those who can read can have full knowledge of them. This restriction gives these readers a privileged position to interpret them. This translates into power. As Gellner (1988:23) puts it "a delimited set of divinely uttered propositions .. is socially sustained by the social classes which have privileged access to it through literacy, and an interest in invoking its legitimacy against such groups as would threaten it, and which can elaborate and uphold a corpus of interpretations and application of the initial set of revealed assertions".

Text transparency is closely related to the socio-political process by which texts create power. (1) The more opaque a text, the more restricted the numbers of readers capable of questioning their interpretation of it and so their source of social authority. (2) The more opaque a text the more authority lay readers attribute to it and to its associated readers and writers. In the modern world otherwise competent readers appear to attribute their inability to read opaque texts not to their opaqueness but to their own inability to grasp knowledge "hidden" in it (Armstrong 1980, 1982). This is particularly the case when the reader already on other grounds such as tradition attributes authority to the readers and interpreters of texts. (3) It makes criticism of them difficult particularly by those outside the closed circle of those expert in reading it. Preventing this inhibition of criticism, for instance, is a major factor in science where editors of scientific journals concerned to maximise criticism of scientific papers, for this reason, require the minimal use of abbreviations and technical terms. (4) The greater the investment needed to read and the greater the restrictions upon the number of those with functional literacy the higher status and power literate people have in society. Literacy in the China and Japan has been always highly valued (Unger, 1987:85), in contrast illiteracy was not considered more than an inconvenience in the phonological reading Greek world (Youtie, 1975). There is a notable contrast between the high status of literacy, scribes and writing in the lexically reading Chinese, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Semitic worlds and the frequent delegation of reading and writing in the phonologically reading Roman and Greek worlds to slaves.

The two causal chains of literacy

The opaque chain

The transparent chain

The two chains are fuzzy: though presented as unidirectional later stages in the chain (such as the influence of literacy upon groups acquiring power) can effect earlier links (such as writing) in the chain. Further, many other factors act to cause an otherwise transparent chain to end with a literacy based delegation of power. These must be discussed to model the effects of literacy in the ancient world.

The influence which literate groups have on writing

India is a special case where elites restricted literacy by effecting the means used for preserving tradition. Routes other than opaque literacy exist by which groups gain power. In India the subjugation of the indigenous Dravidian people by invading Aryans led to Aryans making themselves the dominant social group. Traditions arose in India which gave the Aryan derived caste - the Brahmin - a privileged social position as the caste responsible for observing religious rituals. For a long period, after the disappearance of the Indus script (Dani, 1963) India lacked writing. Then probably sometime in the 8th century BC merchants introduced into Indian an semi-alphabet script adapted from the Semitic alphabet (Dani 1963). It was from early times widely used in commerce. But unlike writing in other ancient societies for a long period it was never used to write traditions. Why? One possibility is that the firmly established cultural and intellectual Brahmin caste sought to retain control over the interpretation of Indian tradition. The phonological transparency of the new writing created by merchants threatened this. If the major bodies of tradition in India were written this would risk them and the role of the Brahmins observing them becoming transparent to comment and criticism[14]. The ancient Brahmin elite maintained their authority by preventing them being written. Modern Brahmin retain control by restricting their reading to themselves (Goody, 1987: 119-120). In ancient times, taboos against writing the Vedas and other sacred texts existed. Instead, their preservation was diverted into a highly developed oral technology of memorisation in which they specialised. Indians developed a sophisticated oral preservation of texts. In ancient (and modern India) there exist professionals who sole or main expertise is the verbatim recitation and preservation of texts (Chattopadhyaya, 1986; Oliver, 1979; Smith, 1977; Tambiah, 1986). An interesting consequence of this was that it led the ancient Indians to develop a sophisticated theory of phonology for accurately memorising the pronunciation of the ritual incantation of the four Vedas (Chattopadhyaya, 1986; Oliver, 1979; Tambiah, 1986): the Indians because of this knew more than the Greeks about phonology (Allen, 1973). Combined with this professionalisation of oral preservation of texts there was in ancient India a widespread taboo against writing sacred works such as the Vedas (Oliver, 1979:60). Among Vedic priests, writing was even regarded as an unclean activity which required subsequent ritual purification (Tambiah, 1986:554). This point applies also to Buddhist sacred writing which were not written down for several centuries after their creation (Tambiah, 1986). When sacred and traditional texts were eventually written, language change made their transparent script opaque for most readers: the texts were in a language, Sanskrit or Pali which had ceased to be used except for recording them. This taboo against writing does not only apply to sacred works. The work of Panini, the grammarian is not learnt traditionally in India through writing but by oral memorisation which is then explained by a master (Oliver, 1979).

By inference this attributes to Brahmins ideas of censoring writing. These ideas existed in Greece where Plato in his Phaedrus and Seventh letter (1973) criticised writing. Central to his objection is the fear that writing makes the transmission of ideas open to change - and challenge. If Plato had been more influential, Greek culture would always have been orally passed between master and student - the situation which exists in Indian culture. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Plato's concerns were more general shared by early Brahmins who, unlike Plato, had the opportunity to put them into effect (see also Goody, 1987:120 for the similarities between the Brahmin view of writing and that of Plato).

The rise of Classical Greek culture.

This explains two anomalies facing any account linking Greek culture to the Greek alphabet. First, the most profound cultural changes in Greece occurred during a period 500-400 BC when Greek culture was not fully literate (Havelock, 1963, 1976; Innis, 1985:66-100; Turner, 1951). This would follow if the effect of the Greek alphabet related not directly to literacy but its effect (which might happen at low levels of literacy) in suppressing opaque literacy. Second, one part of Greece. Sparta, failed to contribute to Classical Greek culture even though possessing literacy (Boring 1979). As noted other factors than opaque literacy can create elites, for instance, the social division which follows conquest where the conquers rule over the defeated naive population. This occurred in Greece when the Spartans enslaved around 740 BC a neighbouring people the Messenians. The Spartans there after existed as a military elite.

This thesis has a strong and a weak version: the strong states that transparent literacy had no effect other than displacing opaque literacy, the weak, that though this was the predominant effect it also had positive ones of its own - greater literacy (Harvey, 1966), more critical reflection upon written ideas (Goody 1977; 1986, Goody and Watts 1962) changed conceptualisation about the world (Olson 1977, 1986a, 1986b), changed language (Akinnaso, 1982; Greenfield, 1972), and influence upon brain laterality (Jurdant, 1984; Kerckhove 1986, 1988) - (for views questioning whether writing has special cognitive effects see Scribner and Cole, 1981; Street, 1984 and Tanner, 1985).

Urban culture without elites.

Non-urban human societies however do exist lacking authoritarian elites: hunter-gatherer bands. We might ask (1) what characteristics humans have in them and (2) how might they be affected if put in the material circumstances of urban societies.

Hunter-gatherers and their society are egalitarian, openly debate ideas and individualistic. (a) Hunter-gatherer bands are largely equalitarian Lee, 1979, Marshall, 1976 (but not completely as this does not extend to women see Begler, 1978). Hunter-gatherer bands lack organised social authorities. Individuals do temporarily occupy through personal characteristics positions of social power. But this is a case of people accepting temporary leadership to facilitate social actions that require the organisation offered by a leader rather than compulsion. The freedom not to follow is available to any individual since they can break away and pursue an independent existence (Fried, 1977:83-87; Service, 1975:50-52). (b) People engage in open debate about where all freely contribute arguments (Gould, 1980)[16]. (c) Psychologically, people are individualistic as measured by various psychological measures. The most important of these is Solomon Ashe's paradigm. This requires people to make a visual judgements about the lengths of two lines contrary to that of a group of stooges unbeknown to them arranged by the experimenter to make judgements in conflict with the subject's own perception (Asch 1956). Instead of conforming as members of agrarian societies to the judgement of the group hunter-gatherers make judgements as to how they see the lines (Berry 1967). Apart from people in Western societies they are the only group to do this. They show individualism in another measure field independence (Berry and Annis 1974)[17]. As in the Asch paradigm hunter-gatherers resemble in this respect modern Western people.

Equalitarianism, willingness to debate and individualism are traits with mainly culture and intellectual potentials depending upon material opportunities and circumstances for their social support and development. Those of the hunter- gatherer mode of existence limit them.

(a) There is a lack of technologies in which individualistic demands can express themselves. The plastic and representation arts available to hunter- gatherers are limited by evolved technology, lack of specialist practitioners able to devote their lives completely to developing skills in them, and a non- sedentary existence.

(b) There is a lack of social continuity to enable sustained reflective development of ideas under the influence of sustained debate.

(c) There is a lack of formal means to institutionalise social relationships upon their informal equalitarian lines to prevent the rise of authoritarian elites (Price and Brown, 1985). Hunter- gatherer bands when resources are available degenerate into hunter-gatherer based authoritarian societies (Soffer, 1985). These revert after depleting local resources back to equalitarian bands. This might happen over generations (Soffer, 1985) or seasons (Carneiro, 1967). The importance of agriculture was not to create inequable societies but provide them with a reliable resource base to give them stable continuity.

An urban environment provides these material circumstances lacking in the physical existence of hunter-gatherer bands. Therefore the human traits of individualism, equality, and debate might be expected in urban societies to lead to new cultural forms and products.

(a) Resources would exist for people to specialise in art. Further, sustained individualistic art could evolve as the creations of past generations would not be lost but preserved for improvement.

(b) Debate would not exist between closely related individuals in a small group but among those with no personal connection in a large community. People could specialise in it. The arguments of previous generations would be preserved in writing. Debate could therefore occur across generations accumulating insights through writing.

(c) Writing could enable formal means of preserving equalitarianism from corruption by elites thus ensuring its survival.

Many if not all novelties of Classical Greek culture can be explained by an interaction of hunter-gatherer traits in the resources and material circumstances of an urban environment. Instead of seeing the originality of the Greeks as progressive, this suggests they should be seen as regressive. The "Greek revolution" was a return of human existence to those traits previously found in hunter-gatherer bands but in urban circumstances which could give them new opportunities to realise their cultural potential.

This theory explains one anomaly about the "Greek revolution" - that it did not involve the Greeks making technological progress. Unlike the industrialisation of the modern era; the Greek revolution did not involve technological progress. Though later Western civilization developed upon technological innovations deriving from the ancient world, these were, as Needham (1969) has shown, Chinese not Greek. The Chinese invented the main technologies later exploited by the West: Gun power, paper, printing, and the compass. In contrast, the ancient Greek and Roman world were technological primitives. As Finley observes (1981) "It is a commonplace that the Greeks and Romans together added little to the world's store of technical knowledge and equipment. The Neolithic and Bronze Ages between them invented or discovered, and then developed, the essential processes of agriculture, metallurgy, pottery, and textile-making. With these the Greeks and Romans built a high civilization, full of power and intellect and beauty, but they transmitted to their successors few new inventions".

Instead of technological progress, the changes marking Classical Greek culture from other ancient cultures primarily relate to non-technological novelties in human aesthetics, judgement, and social institutions.

A general survey of Greek culture showing these points is beyond this paper. However, their importance justifies an attempt to show that the distinctively revolutionary aspect of Classical Greek culture is not technological. I shall illustrate it with three examples: naturalistic art, the problem of foundations in axiomatic mathematics, and democracy. Similar points could be made using Greek drama (Snell 1953) and literature (Auerbach, 1953), logic, medicine (Lloyd, 1979), philosophy, history writing (Finley, 1960), Greek competitive sport, public debate (Oliver 1971) and law (Stratton, 1980).

Naturalistic art

Naturalistic art is peculiar in art in being orientated to the experience of the individual spectator - the problem which defines its success is its ability to invite the onlooker into a reality - a portrait or event created by the artist. Greek art seeks to create illusions in paint and form with the immediate visual experience of an actual entity or scene. Greek art raises in people questions that might be asked of an actual person: "why does this individual stand like that?", "what is this person feeling?" and "what might he say". A realistic work seeks not only to create realism but also emotional reactions in the individual spectator for instance of the pathos or beauty, emotions they would feel when physically present with actual people or situations. A non-representative example of this is the distortion the Greek sculptors made to the Parthenon marbles to correct for the effects of perspective on them when seen from below. These corrections only make sense in the context of the need to create convincing realism for spectators. Not all realistic art is Greek. However, exceptions confirm rather than refute the novelty of the Greek aesthetics. The terracotta warriors and horses from Qin Shihuangdi's tomb near Xian are a case of realistic nonWestern art. Qin having conquered this world wanted to prepare himself for conquering the next. He did this by creating an army to share his tomb. Part of any army's power is the visceral response of fear it creates by its appearance upon onlooking opposing forces. His real army was a terrifying sight. The experience of seeing his terracotta army creates much the same a sense of terror as his real one. Qin wanted realism like the Greeks but not for art but a very different reason - evoking the presence of his power. Greek art in contrast chose realistic images because they were judged aesthetically successful through invoking in an individual a personal sensory and emotional experience. There is no technological reason why realism could not have been produced by other societies - such as by Qin if their aesthetic needs had required it.

Debate - the problem of foundations with particular reference to axiomatic geometry

When the past and social superiors fail to provide authority argument must take its place. This is not simple. The contribution of the Greeks was to explore how this might occur. The Greeks were the first to question what in an idea or argument convince us of its truth or validity. This investigation about foundations and justification was raised by the Greeks in mathematics, logic, philosophy, art criticism, the nature of the universe and politics. Philosophers asked what is the nature of goodness, of justice, and the world? People have in other societies speculated to some degree about these issues. The radical difference between them and the Greeks was that the Greeks were prepared to find answers critical or opposed to society while nonGreeks normally answered them in ways compatible, reinforcing of custom or accepted social authority. This questioning of foundations is central to Greek thought. Does this merely reflect the possible fact that the Greeks had a leisure class with the time to ask them? Or that the Greeks were more capable reasoners than other people? This two possibilities can be dismissed. One case - Chinese mathematics shows a dissociation between the presence of leisured class and competence in reasoning and asking problems about foundations.

Geometry is not a Greek invention nor were they its best masters. Chinese not only developed it independently of the Greeks but in some ways were more sophisticated geometricians (Needham & Ling, 1959). If mastery is assessed by accuracy, the Chinese certainly bettered the Greeks. For instance, in the fifth century AD Zu Chong-zhi and his son, Zu Geng-zhi were able to use their geometry skills to calculate that pi was between 3.1415927 and 3.1415926 - an accuracy not equalled by European geometricians for a thousand years. The Chinese are clearly not less skilled at reasoning than the Greeks - if anything they were better. But Chinese geometry never concerned itself with the foundations of mathematical reasoning (Qian, 1985) (being practically orientated). Greek geometry, in contrast, is dominated by this question in the interrelated problems of axiomatization, theorem demonstration and proof.

This concern for foundations arises because individuals need to be able to convince each other deductively through argument why a preference should be made for one idea over another. The mere fact some social superior, or tradition held a theorem as true was not a reason for holding it as true. To the Greeks, rational demonstration was everything: the discovery of irrational numbers (numbers no reducible to the product of other ones) was a major event in Greek culture - it stopped the rise of Pythagorism (a cult based upon number mysticism) and shaped the problems of Plato (Popper, 1963:75).

Democracy

(a) Democracy rests the authority of public decision upon individuals[18]. It is equalitarian[19]. No social elite or individuals have a special ability to make decisions for the rest of the society - these should be made and decided by all those (with the exceptions noted in note 19) which will be affected by them. This decision-making occurred after votes of assemblies of citizens. Greek democracy made real attempts to involve all citizens in this decision making. Payment of monies was made to the poor to enable them attend assemblies (Jones, 1957; Sinclair, 1988: 108-109). The assemblies were run by a large council of 500 chosen annually by lot (Sinclair, 1988: 102-103). One notably effect of this was to ensure all citizens had a chance of running the assemble. Further, since the president of the council (and so the assembly) was selected daily from this 500, they all had a chance of controlling it. This involvement extended to the actual running of the community. Magistrates (who had routine running of the polis) were also selected by lot (from a list of those who put their names forward - and selected citizens were not prevented or penalised by poverty for carrying out this public responsibility since they were paid proportionate to their duties.

(b) It was based upon debate. In Greek democracy, individuals effected policy through convincing other individuals of the merits of a particular course of action. To this end, the assembly met so that each citizen could judge the merits of policy, each person being considered equal to judge it. The Greeks were not only concerned to debate public decisions but welcomed criticism of the assembly and democracy; even free speech against free speech was freely allowed. Indeed by a cruel paradox most of our knowledge about Greek democracy and its free speech comes from those such as Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates who were activity opposed to them (Stone, 1988).

(c) The development of urbanisation leads in some other societies to assemblies. They existed in Archaic Greece as evidenced in Homer (Finley 1978:80-82, Starr 1986:18-25) in Mesopotamia (Jacoben, 1943; Evans, 1958) and Indian republics (Oliver, 1971:24) and some near contemporary societies (Bloch 1975). But emergent democracy in those societies ceases beyond an initial stage of urbanisation[20]. It is possible that urbanisation has several conflicting tendencies (a) both towards more centralization of power and its equalitarianism and (b) both towards greater collectivisation and individualism.

(d) Greek democracy therefore is based upon three characteristics of hunter-gatherers - equalitarian, debate and individualism. Some aspects of urbanisation might have favoured their reemergence in assemblies. But neither hunter-gatherer bands nor early assemblies possessed the formal procedures and institutions to protect them from usurpation by elites. As noted hunter-gatherer bands easily convert, given increased local resources, into complex authoritarian tribes (Soffer, 1985). The early assemblies of other societies gave way to centralised states. The novelty of Greek democracy was the presence of organisational devices to ensure that the participation of the majority in decision making was not subverted by factions and elites. These are closely connected with transparent literacy.

(i) Writing which could by read fluently by all was important to the running of the assembly. The meetings of the assembly and of the agenda of its council were put in prominent places. Motions passed by the assemble could be later quashed by juries (selected democratically by lot) as being contrary to the law. This needed both laws which were written and the writing down of motions voted on by the assemble.

(ii) The laws of the polis (Greek community) were written and displayed in prominent public places.

(iii) Public notices were made of forthcoming trials and those called up for military service (Harvey, 1966:601).

(iv) The laws passed by the assembly under went a written gestation. Special legislative commissions (made up of a cross section of society) prepared new laws and then submitted them to the assembly.

(v) Assemblies delegated power to elected generals who were given precise instructions. Because these were written deviations from them could be easily detected enabling them to be removed from power. Likewise the precise instructions for magistrates enabled anyone to charge a magistrate with inefficiency or abuse of authority.

(vi) Greek democracy had a procedure for temporally exiling people for ten years. Ostracism was carried out by citizens writing the name of the person they wished exiled.

These uses of writing could only protect democratic sharing of power because its contents were accessible to all not a restricted group of readers. Transparent literacy therefore had a third affect in addition to those upon the reflection of ideas and blocking the development of elites through inhibiting opaque literacy. It enabled the creation of democratic procedures and institutions which by themselves inhibited the rise of political elites. It is notable that when elites (due to military conquest) developed in the Hellenistic period, the cultural and intellectual brilliance of Greece stopped.

The limits of this paper must be noted: I am not arguing that phonological reading invariably produces the kind of society which arose in Greece. The situation is more complex: the Greek alphabet effects society through the suppression of elites. This can only occur in the restricted circumstances where other factors causing their rise are absent. The conjecture however suggests within these limitations that the modelling of history must take account of literacy as having two forms, one supportive and the other inhibiting of the rise of elites and that these are closely linked to the psychological processes and ultimately the nature of the script upon which they are based.

Notes.

2. The nature of what this polyphony represents is controversial. There are two possibilities. First, its signs could be proper consonants (Barr, 1974; Driver, 1954, Jensen, 1970:254) or second, elliptical syllables (Gelb, 1958; 1963). For instance, beth in the Semitic alphabet would by the first account represent /b/ or by the second be ambiguous between /ba/, /be/, /bi/, /bo/, and /bu/ with any of these syllables being implied by it. Though the Semitic alphabet borrows the principle of polyphony from Egypt it did this with completely different signs. Back to note position 2

3. The innovation of vowels by the Greeks relates to differences between Semitic and Indo-European languages (of which Greek is one). The lack of vowel in Semitic writing causes no problems for Semitic languages. These languages are based around three and occasionally five consonantal roots. Different grammatical inflexions and semantically related words sharing a common root are differentiated by different vocalisations. For instance, in Hebrew k-t-b can indicate any word having a meaning related to "writing" for instance katab "he wrote", koteb "he is writing, oktob "I shall write (Diringer, 1968) Thus vocalisation of words does not differentiate strong semantic differences between words. However, vocalisation does have this role in other languages particularly Indo-european ones. For instance consider the semantic differences which vowels make to the consonants c and t - in English "act", "cat", "cut" "coot" and "coat". Because vowels do not differentiate strong semantic differences they can be omitted in the written representation of Semitic languages. But this ellipse in the representation of speech vocalisation is not possible for members of other language such as Indo-European ones. To write these language vocalisation must be represented in some form. Back to note position 3

4. The Semitic alphabet represents vowel information by reusing consonant letters for vowel values. In contrast, the Greek alphabet represented vocalization through single vowel letters. They did by modifying six Semitic consonant letters which had no use in the Greek language to represent omitted vowels (Driver, 1954:178-9; Gelb, 1958:181- 182; Sampson, 1985:99-103) "Aleph", for instance, which represented a stop consonant in the Semitic alphabet became the Greek "A" vowel letter - alpha. Another Greek vowel was created by doubling omega (originally the Semitic 'ayin) into omicron. Back to note position 4

5. The issue of direction is important. I have observed (1988) that the leftward direction of writing is odd given the bias of the right handed majority for writing and scanning in the rightward direction. I have suggested the left direction of Semitic scripts may be related to stage when they were read by the right hemisphere. Back to note position 5

6. Strictly expression since gestural languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) exist. Back to note position 6

7. Modern views of the lexicon consider it to represent image-spoken words associations over many subunits in a distributed form rather than decreet as implied by the "dictionary" metaphor (McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981; 1986; Skoyles, 1988). Such associations are trained rather than entered. Back to note position 7

8. Strangely, not only can phonological scripts be read lexically but they more suited for it than logographic scripts. The reason is that best way of training non-phonological word recognition processes is through identifying them phonologically. The English words you are reading now are read with a few exceptions lexically (Coltheart, 1978; Humphreys and Evett, 1985). The few exceptions are very rare regular words which will be read phonologically. The average reader will not notice any switch in their method of word identification. But our lexical reading is entirely rooted in phonological reading. Children start with it. Being good at it is very important for mature reading. Phonological reading ability is the best predictor for success in latter reading. This is dramatically illustrated by reading problems. Many modern people have difficulty decoding phonological information. The effects are disastrous. They cannot read either in the mature lexical way or phonologically. They cannot read phonologically because they lack the phonological skills to do so. They cannot read lexically because lacking phonological decoding they cannot train the lexical processes which could take their place. The vast number of children with reading problems (20 percent might have other difficulties) are in this situation. They do not easily acquire lexical reading even though they are capable them. Back to note position 8

9. Consider the problem of pronouncing a word phonologically. Decoding letters into phonemes takes time. But for similar length words this is fixed. Translating letters into phonemes will proceed the same whether in common words - like "we" or rare ones like - "thou". Familiarity, however effects the lexical identification of words. They are identified through the activation of entries in a reading 'dictionary'. But each time a word entity is activated the threshold for future activation is reduced. Consequently, regularly encountered words will become easier to recognise than infrequent ones. This separates the two forms of reading. If pronouncing a written word varies greatly with frequency (Morton, 1969), they are read lexically; if not but with lengths effects (Foster & Chambers, 1972; Frederiken and Kroll, 1976), then it is read phonologically. Another sign is the effect that reading one word has upon the reading of another. Reading a word lexically affects the recognition of following ones - psychologists call this advantage priming. When a word is "looked up" in a mental dictionary this lowers the activation needed to activate it and semantically close neighbours. Thus they will be activated quicker. This of course will not apply to words identified phonologically. Representations will be activated but these will be those for decoding letter-phoneme pairs. Context is another distinguishing factor. In any text a word is surrounded by clues which are useful in identifying it. A reader can use these to activate it in their mental dictionary. This strategy cannot be used for phonological word identification. A lexical reader will be influenced by context and primes, a phonological one will not. Back to note position 9

10. It has been suggested that at a few ancients read silently (Knox, 1968). This does not go only against the historical evidence reviewed in Hendrickson, 1927 and Saeger, 1982 but psychology. Modern people read in a different world to the ancients. We read print. This has not only vastly increasing the quantity we read but changed how we do it. Print advantages the option of a lexical strategy in reading even though readers could potentially read phonologically. Modern reading (since about the twelfth century, Saeger, 1982) is silent involving much skimming. Phonological reading is ill suited for this kind of reading: it is slow and it does not enable a reader to use contextual clues to aid word identification. Lexical reading does. In terms of reading experience ancient readers are more comparable to modern children (though obviously very different in some ways in their use of literacy). Modern children read phonologically except at a very early stage prior to acquiring phonological decoding skills (Frith, 1981; Stewart, and Coltheart, 1988) or where the development of these skills is impaired (Skoyles, 1988; Snowling, 1987). The later development of lexical reading is built upon intense reading experience. This intense reading experiences is a by product of modern print technology, a technology absent in the ancients world. Back to note position 10

11. These omissions occur also in Sumerian, the language of the script they took over (Driver, 1954). The Akkadians did not make the changes needed to aid the pronunciation of their language. This suggests another for reason for suspecting it was not read phonologically. If they were phonological readers the need for efficient phonology should have determined the distinctions they omitted to ones unimportant in their language not the language they took over. Interestingly, omitting phonological distinctions while it makes phonological reading harder makes phonological spelling easier - since it words are spelt with a many sounds to one sign. Note the opposite situation, many signs to one sound relationship which occurs in many modern European scripts - makes them hard to spell phonologically. Back to note position 11

12. I emphasis the trait of transparency in this paper. Phonological reading has other interesting characteristics particularity how it is learnt. This is not a straight forward matter of its making reading easier to learn. Phonological reading requires learning associations between phonemes and signs. This is quite hard - it has been suggested in requires a special breaking into the speech system (Rozin, 1976:266). One problem is that while people can innately hear speech in terms of its syllables they cannot its phonemes (Morais, Cary, Alegria and Bertelson, 1979). Children seem to learn to recognise a few written words through visual associations prior to phonological reading (Frith, 1981 and Steinberg and Yamada, 1979; see also Goody, 1887:37). However, once this initial investment has taken place phonological reading is much easier than its lexical alternative since readers can then read words present in their spoken vocabulary. Lexical readers are limited to those they have learnt. This could effect such sociological variables as general literacy. People will only learn skills which advantage them. If this is outweighed by the effort needed they will not learn them. That effort for phonological reading is relatively fixed and roughly the same for most people. A consequence of this is that once writing develops to the stage where the gains of learning it outweigh the costs of doing this it will trigger the widespread use of reading. This probably explains why the Greeks possessed the alphabet for a long time before literacy became a widely held skill. Back to note position 12

13. It might be suggested that a reader might nonetheless read through the slower process of guessing unfamiliar words. However, evidence from modern visual dyslexics who suffer from delay (but not accuracy) in recognising words suggest the slow recognition of words profoundly handicaps the comprehension of texts. Back to note position 13

14. A similar situation occurred with the development of the Korean Han'gul script (Sampson, 1985: 122-139). This is undoubtedly a transparent phonologically script. However, (a) the Koreans also use a logographic based script which has only recently been displaced by their phonetic one. (b) Due to the prestige of Chinese the Korean language was not much as a written language until 1880. Han'gul invented in the 15th century was confined to "low-status, 'unofficial' writing (mainly poems and novels)" (Sampson, 1985:122). Therefore the social significant literacy in Korean until recently was opaque even though their Kan'gul script potentially offered a transparent one. Back to note position 14

15. Coastal main land Greece provides physical opportunities for the rise of small independent communities. Since the terrain is mountainous communities communicate mainly through the sea. They thus can communicate with each other (McEvedy, 1967:10-11). However, the ability of one community to conquer another is limited: the mountainous terrain makes land invasions difficult; it also by providing easily defendable hill positions for communities (acropolises) to withdraw made sea invasion difficult. Back to note position 15

16. Debate occurs in other societies but (a) over trivial issues - like riddles. Or (b) in a context where the free express and tolerance of views is not allowed. For the latter, consider Oliver's (1971: 84-85) comments upon Chinese scholar-counsellors "engaged in debates with one another on crucial questions, with the lives of the losers liable to forfeiture and with wealth and power to be gained by the winners". Back to note position 16

17. These human qualities are not usually found outside modern societies. They cease with the development of complex societies where permanent positions of power exist able to enforce obedience. High degree of stratification appears to make human judgement socially deferent: people in the Ashe paradigm in such societies willing to displace what is true perceptually to them to conform with that experience by others (Witkins and Berry 1975). Back to note position 17

18. At least some of them: Greek democracies confined its democracy to male citizens and so excluded resident aliens and slaves and of course females. Clearly, those who made decisions and those who obeyed them did not overlap. In defense of the Greeks it first should be noted unsuccessful attempts were made to enlarge citizenship to slaves - for instance Anthiphon of Athens claimed all men to equal and denounced slavery. Second, no society has achieved a good overlap - the Greeks achieved the best so far. In modern democracies decisions are not made by those who obey them but through representatives. The Greeks would not view modern democracies as democracies as they fail to make citizens deciders of public policies. Back to note position 18

19. As was Classical Greek society in general. There was in effect progressive taxation with the wealthiest bearing disproportionately the running of the Polis. All Greeks roughly dressed the same and lived in similar accommodation. To a degree the rich shared property with the poor (Fuks, 1979/80). The Classical Greek architecture is notably for the absence of palaces. These developed in Greece but only latter in the Hellenic period. Back to note position 19

20. It is not clear why they failed. There are two not necessarily conflicting possibilities. (1) That the individualism and equality which they were moving towards was crushed by the development of stronger centralising force of developing elites. (2) That their function was to enhance the power of an emerging urban elite by informing it where general sentiment of a still incompletely controlled the populous lay and thus enabling it to avoid decisions they could not easily implement. This was an important consideration in societies where centralised authority required the cooperation of a fragmented community. Emerging elites used assemblies as a testing ground to filter out decisions which would meet opposition beyond its power to override (Finley, 1978; Starr, 1986). This functional explanation does not rule out that assemblies could not have developed another function - one inhibiting of elites. Back to note position 20
 
 

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