Bookworm.gr

Όσο περνούν τα χρόνια η ανθρωπότητα διαβάζει όλο και λιγότερο -όχι μόνο βιβλία, αλλά και εφημερίδες, και περιοδικά. Στο καταπληκτικό άρθρο του New Yorker μαθαίνεις τα απαραίτητα στοιχεία, τις πιθανές συνέπειες, και την επίδραση της γλώσσας, του ίδιου του αλφαβήτου, στην ανάπτυξη της ανθρώπινης διανόησης. Να τι γράφει για την σημασία της ανάπτυξης της Ελληνικής γλώσσας:

Complex scripts like Sumerian and Egyptian were written only by scribal élites. A major breakthrough occurred around 750 B.C.E., when the Greeks, borrowing characters from a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician, developed a writing system that had just twenty-four letters. There had been scripts with a limited number of characters before, as there had been consonants and even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it. The classicist Eric A. Havelock believed that the alphabet changed “the character of the Greek consciousness.”