BLOG ASSIGNMENT TWO

       While reading Ong's handouts it was clear to me that language has been remediated from just spoken, to slowly written with pictures, to actually making letters, then making an entire alphabet with vowels and constants (there might be a few more steps but this is basically the mini history).

      Written text is always going to be related to oral communication by writing down how the sound is heard (or spelled). On page 9 of The Orality of Language, it is said that people learn words through listening and repeating, or through oral speech, rather than studying. Greeks were fascinated by oral speech and believed writing enhanced oral speech rather than reducing it.

        Before words, letters, etc. were created stories were told by word of mouth and if a mouth forgot to tell the story the story/history would be lost once they had passed. There are pros and cons of oral language compared to written such as written you can write down important history and have a larger vocabulary to describe, however oral language uses the persons verbal skills that help explain and interact with the listener as well as socialize with the listener. On page 14 of The Orality of Language it explains that without oral communication written text could not be made, and without written text the human mind could not reach its full potential, so hand in hand both types of languages are important to us and how we communicate as people.

      In The Modern Discovery of Primary Oral Cultures Ong shows an example of how Homer used previous poets works and put them together in the Iliad and the Odyssey. As the handout says poets were educated never to use cliches, so when it was found out Homer used mostly cliches for his poems it was threatening to dead literates. Nonetheless Homeric Greeks embraced cliches before a written language was developed because through oral language if the words had not been repeated they'd be lost.

     The Greek Alphabet was created between 720-700 BC. This creation caused a whole new phenomena. The making of the alphabet allowed Greek poets, philosophers, and even civilians to write down whatever they please no matter how random it was. One philosopher hated writing, his name was Pluto. He hated writing because he felt it was unresponsive and destructed the memory, losing intelligence and social benefits.

     However, after much thought, and actually noticing that my big interest and benefit was knowing that the original alphabet was made by the Semetic people had consisted of only constants and  some semivowels I decided this would be my remediation topic, since it was the thing that came up when I went to ask the question.

     The Semetic people made the first consonantal alphabet back in 2000 BC in Egypt. They derived the alphabet from the hieroglyphics. This is where the Hebrew and Phoenicians lived near the Mediterranean. It had 22 characters in it. It had names and a character list that was easy to memorize. The Greek actually came up with the word alphabet, because the Semetic people hadn't yet created vowels. The Greek made the word from their first two words alpha and beta.

    The Greek alphabet was created by a Greek who had learned the Phoenician script very early on when it was created. The diplyon inscription was the oldest substancial text dated back the the 8th century BC. The need for vowels was infinite for the Greek because so many of their words had vowel sounds in it, or sounds that weren't in the constants.The system of only consonants was called abjad and the Phoenician and Aramic alphabet both had it. The Aramaic alphabet actually occurred after the Phoenician for the script of the Persian Empire.

   The Greek remediated the Semetic people's alphabet because they did not have several Phoenician consonants in their language and many Phoenician letters didn't have Greek sounds, such as, the h sound became alpha instep of alep. So the Greeks made the new alphabet system to remediate, or better, the alphabet made.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet)