RE5 Unit 9B · THE POWER OF WRITING (文字的力量)

Reading 9B · THE POWER OF WRITING (文字的力量)

文字如何打破思想垄断、沉淀文明记忆并重塑人类历史的发展轨迹？

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Joel L. Swertlow investigates the history and future of one of humanity's most potent forms of artistic and cultural expression.

文字可以说是人类有史以来发明的最伟大的技术。与说话声在吐出唇齿的瞬间便消散于空气中截然不同，文字能够捕捉思维，将其凝固在特定的时间与空间维度中，并使其跨越浩瀚大洋与数千载光阴代代相传。通过书写符号，早已故去千百年的先贤思想，依然能与今天的我们跨越时空亲切交谈。

No other invention, perhaps only the wheel comes close, has had a longer and greater impact on humanity's development than writing.

Written words have overthrown governments and changed the course of history.

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The transformation of language into written words has immortalized passion, genius, art and science.

如今，全球约有86%的人口具备基本的读写能力。我们终日被文字所环绕——手机屏幕、街头路牌、书本册籍以及食品包装——以至于我们早已对它的存在习以为常。然而在人类漫长历史的绝大部分时期，识字能力是一项极其罕见的特权，被极少数由祭司、书记官和统治者组成的精英阶层严密垄断。

Much of writing's power comes from its flexibility.

Ever since the Sumerians began keeping records by carving signs on clay tablets 5,000 years ago,

humans have searched for the ideal tool to portray words.

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This skill, once known only to a few professional scribes, grew into mass literacy.

文字在世界上至少四个古文明中独立起源：公元前3200年左右的美索不达米亚平原、不久之后的古埃及、公元前1200年左右的中国殷商，以及公元前600年左右的中美洲。在所有发源地，早期文字的诞生并非源于文学创作或吟诵诗歌，而是出自极其务实的记账需求：记录谷物蒲式耳数、橄榄油坛数、牲畜头数以及向神庙缴纳的赋税税单。

More than 5 billion people, over 86% of the world's population, can now read and write.

To understand how writing evolved, I visited Serebit El-Kadeem, a flat-topped, wind-er-roaded mountain of reddish sandstone in the southwestern Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.

Here, in a turquoise mine dug by Egyptians almost 3,500 years ago is one of the earliest examples of a phonetic alphabet.

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Gorin, an archaeologist who supervised excavations in the Sinai for 15 years, was pointing to a wall just ahead of us.

在西奈沙漠一座名为萨拉比特·哈迪姆的狂风呼啸的荒山里，考古学家在古老的绿松石矿坑石壁上发现了石刻铭文。这些凿刻于约公元前1850年的粗糙线条素描，代表了改写人类文明史的划时代突破——字母文字的诞生。在古埃及监工手下劳作的迦南矿工，巧妙借用了埃及象形图画文字，来书写表达他们自己的闪米特语母语。

Carved into the stone were crude sketches of a fish, an ox head and a square.

The simplicity of the marks belied their significance.

The people who made them were among the first to use characters that denote sounds, an alphabet.

The alphabetic symbols each represented the initial sound of an object.

The picture of the square, a house, thus stood for the bee sound because the word for house was bait.

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If these ancient writers were not Egyptians, who were they?

古埃及象形文字极其繁琐深奥，由数以千计融合了表意图像与特定读音的符号混合组成。要想熟练掌握它，需要耗费数年的严酷专业训练。而迦南矿工的天才创举在于他们猛然意识到：根本不需要死记硬背几千个复杂图案！通过确立“首音表音法原则”（即每个图画符号仅代表其名称的首个辅音音素），他们仅用大约二十几个简易符号，就能拼写表达口语中的任意词汇。

Most researchers now believe that this alphabet was invented in Canaan, a region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Most likely Canaanites who were brought into work the mines left these messages.

Egyptian scribes had to master hundreds of symbols.

I asked Gorin if alphabetic writing must have seemed attractive to those scribes.

Probably not, he says.

About 30 of the symbols in Egyptian hieroglyphs represent single sounds, just like the alphabet.

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Gorin warned me against seeing an alphabet as superior to pictographic writing.

西奈半岛考古学家阿夫纳·戈伦指出，古埃及宫廷祭司书记官很可能对迦南人的这项发明嗤之以鼻。在养尊处优的文化精英眼中，将高深莫测的书写体系贬低简化为寥寥数笔粗鄙划痕简直俗不可耐。然而，正是这项富有平等主义色彩的伟大革新，彻底粉碎了统治阶层对文字的世袭垄断。历史上破天荒第一次，一个普通的牧羊人、行商甚至士兵，仅需短短几周便能熟练掌握读写，而无需皓首穷经耗费数十载。

If you came from outer space and wrote a report, you'd give the alphabet high marks, he says.

It's flexible and easy to learn.

But what actual effect did that have?

There was no mass literacy until after the development of the printing press in the mid-15th century.

Nevertheless, although it took hundreds of years, alphabets would eventually change the way people thought.

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taking root first among the Greeks, who adapted some characters into written vowels.

活跃在地中海东部的航海贸易民族腓尼基人吸收了这一字母系统，并沿着繁荣的海上商路将其远播至古希腊、北非以及伊比利亚半岛。约公元前800年，古希腊人进行了一项至关重要的创造性改良：他们借用了腓尼基语中希腊语无需发音的若干辅音字符，将其改造用来表示元音。至此，希腊字母成为了人类历史上首个辅音与元音完全独立分工的现代全音素拼音系统。

The Latin alphabet of the Romans evolved from the Greek around the 6th century BC.

By the 9th century AD, Japan had integrated phonetic components into its written language.

Korea did so by the 15th century.

Indeed, of the several hundred written languages in the world today, only Chinese still relies on a traditional writing system,

whereby individual characters represent individual words.

These characters often mean one thing when used alone, but something else when combined.

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The Chinese character for trust, for example, shows the character for man alongside the one for word,

古罗马人通过伊特鲁里亚人转借了希腊字母，并将其演进为拉丁字母。随着罗马帝国的疆域向外急剧扩张，拉丁书写体系迅速风靡全欧洲。数百年后罗马帝国虽覆灭瓦解，但拉丁字母依托基督教修道院的抄经传统坚韧地薪火相传，最终奠定了全球数百种语言的书写基石，包括今天的英语、西班牙语与法语。

literally a man standing by his word.

Since it's beginning as a means for keeping records, writing has evolved into one of humanity's most powerful forms of self-expression.

People have used writing to counter loneliness and to establish a sense of self.

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle saw writing as a way to express affections of the soul.

Recent studies have shown that writing about feelings can alleviate depression, boost the immune system, and lower blood pressure.

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How then do people in societies without writing express themselves?

书写载体的演变与文字符号的发展并驾齐驱。古美索不达米亚人用芦苇秆压刻潮湿黏土泥板，坚固耐磨却沉重不堪。古埃及人发明了用纸莎草茎髓压榨的纸莎草纸，轻巧柔韧便于卷轴携带。公元前2世纪，用羊皮与牛皮鞣制的羊皮纸成为了更结实耐用的替代品。最终，在公元105年左右的中国，蔡伦改进了用树皮、麻头与破布造纸的技术；这项东方瑰宝在12世纪西传至欧洲，引发了文字载体的技术风暴。

We talk to each other, listen, visit, and trust the spoken word, says Gujayu, a leader of the Haida nation.

Writing is not essential to living.

Expressing yourself without writing is natural.

The Haida have lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia for more than 10,000 years.

I suggest to Gujayu that things get distorted when people repeat them to one another, especially over a long duration of time.

Things get distorted in writing as well, he says.

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People with writing are a brief chapter in our history, but oral histories from our people go back thousands of years.

从连绵卷轴向现代“手抄本册籍（Codex）”（由折叠成页并在一侧装订成册的书本）的跨越，极大地提升了阅读查阅效率。读者可以随心所欲前后翻页对比、插入书签，并在宽阔页边空白处撰写批注心得。在早期的中世纪手稿中，词与词之间毫无空格、混作一团；直到公元8世纪引入词间空格、标点符号以及大小写分工后，默读才真正成为可能并蔚然成风。

They are a living history and provide a link between storyteller and listeners that written stories cannot.

In fact, human intimacy and community can best come through oral communication.

Plato, Aristotle's teacher, would probably agree.

Living at a time when writing began to challenge Greece's oral based culture,

he warned that writing would make people trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

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But Plato lived in the 5th century BC.

15世纪40年代，德国美因茨的约翰内斯·古腾堡将活字金属字模、油性墨水与螺旋压榨机巧妙融合，发明了现代机械印刷术。在此之前，一名手抄僧侣整整耗费一年光阴方能手抄一部《圣经》；而古腾堡的印刷机在几周之内就能批量产出数百本。书籍价格断崖式暴跌，点燃了人类知识与思想大爆炸的引信，直接催生了近代科学革命与现代民主社会。

When reading was physically difficult, books were papyrus scrolls, often more than 15 meters long.

The idea of pages only emerged in Europe in the 2nd century AD.

Spaces between words did not become standard in Western society until the 7th century.

Long after Plato's time, writing served mostly as an aid to memory, something to stimulate the spoken word.

The transition from the spoken to the written word occurred because writing meets certain needs so much more effectively.

💡 审辩式思维 (Critical Thinking: Evaluating Technologies)

1. What are the pros and cons of electronic e-paper and digital writing versus traditional paper and pen?

电子书写与传统纸笔相比，各有哪些优势与潜在缺失？数字化对人类读写文化长远而言利弊如何？

思维指引 (Sample Perspective):
• 数字书写优势：海量便携存储、可随时无限次修改擦除、支持全文高速检索与全球即时分发，极大减少了砍伐树木造纸的生态足迹。
• 传统纸笔魅力：纸张书写具有无可替代的触觉反馈（haptic feedback）与心流沉浸感；古老纸质书籍即使断电断网数百年依然能够被阅读，而数字文件格式极易随着软件迭代与介质老化而彻底灭失。

2. In an era dominated by voice assistants, speech-to-text, and video, will traditional writing lose its primary role?

当语音识别与视频媒介日益普及，文字在未来社会是否会被压缩成简化速记或失去主导地位？

思维指引 (Sample Perspective):
• 深度思考的基石：语音和视频属于线性流媒体，接收效率远低于视觉默读；文字具有超高的信息密度与精确的逻辑结构，在严谨法律、科研论文、代码开发与深度哲学思辨中，文字无可替代。

📝 课文理解深度练习 (Comprehension & Skills)

Reading Comprehension: Multiple Choice (P.191) Reading Comprehension: Sequence of Developments (P.192) Reading Skill: Graphic Organizers (P.193)

预习练习得分: 0 / 21 题

Reading Comprehension Part A: Multiple Choice (P.191)

READING COMPREHENSION · DETAIL

1. What percentage of the world's population today cannot read or write?

READING COMPREHENSION · VOCABULARY

2. The phrase 'crude sketches' in paragraph D is closest in meaning to:

READING COMPREHENSION · DETAIL

3. What was the probable occupation of the Canaanites who carved the inscriptions in Serabit el-Khadim?

READING COMPREHENSION · INFERENCE

4. According to Avner Goren, how did Egyptian scribes probably feel about the Canaanite alphabetic writing?

READING COMPREHENSION · DETAIL

5. What was the Greek civilization's revolutionary contribution to the Phoenician alphabet?

READING COMPREHENSION · DETAIL

6. Why was the invention of word spaces in medieval manuscripts so significant?

READING COMPREHENSION · MAIN IDEA

7. What was the most profound social consequence of Gutenberg's movable type printing press?

Reading Comprehension Part B: Chronological Sequence of Developments (P.192)