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You can make anything by writing.
― C.S. Lewis
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
― William H. Gass
A word after a word after a word is power.
― Margaret Atwood |
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We do it every day. I'm doing it right now. Almost everyone does it, and they have been doing it for most of their lives. It's the reason most of us are here.
I am, of course, talking about writing.
Writing expresses language, but it is not language. Writing seems to have been a relatively recent invention, while language appears to be an inherent trait of humanity and, to some extent, other animals, as a means of direct communication.
Still, because it is so ubiquitous, so woven into the tapestry of modern life, it's easy to forget how very nearly magical it is. A person can say something, and other people can hear it, and perhaps they will remember it, but the sound waves last only a brief moment. However, if you invent a way to represent the speech using symbols, well, they can last a very long time indeed; they can be carried elsewhere, and the words become unbound in time and space.
Writing has become so commonplace that it becomes indistinguishable from language. When I hear words, for example, I don't process them as words; I visualize them as strings of letters, as if I were reading. I have no idea how common that is, or how people in nonliterate cultures interpret words. At the same time, when I read, I hear the sounds of the words in my mind. So language and writing are, for me, inextricably linked, and I have to make a conscious effort to consider how things might be if they were not.
Which brings me to one of the reasons I'm writing this in the Fantasy newsletter editorial: Fantasy is, in part, about considering things that are different from what we're used to.
In most stories that I've read, writing is taken for granted. After all, these stories are written by writers; of course we take it for granted. It's easy to forget that: a) writing as we know it appears to be a post-civilization invention; b) systems of writing can be very, very different (for example the phonetic Western alphabets as compared to Eastern logographic writing) and c) even today, there are cultures without writing systems.
Speaking of Fantasy, a common theme in stories about magic is the power of symbols. Runes, pictograms, summoning circles, warding glyphs, and those sorts of things play an integral part in a lot of stories. That such things are considered magical very well may be a holdover from when writing was a new concept and, as I said above, could have seemed magical to the uninitiated.
So I'm just putting this out here for consideration if you're writing otherworldly, or historical, fantasies. It's something to think about when developing cultures: what kind of writing, if any, do they have? Does it fully realize the spoken language? Can it take into account body language or tone of voice? Is it, like hieroglyphics, representations of objects, or is it mostly symbolic as with the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets?
I've always been taught that even the symbolic alphabets like the latter are derived from earlier pictographs. A drawing of an ox, for example, becomes the Hebrew aleph, the Greek Alpha, and the Roman A. For most letters, this origin is entirely obscured; none of our typography really stands for anything other than a particular sound or set of sounds of the spoken language. But originally, it would have been sketches of objects or people or animals, each conveying their own meaning and, later, developing additional meanings.
So next time you text someone an emoji, keep in mind that you're unwinding the history of language.  |
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Until next time,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: July 01, 2020 Issue [#10250]
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