On the Evolution of Writing

“In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. ‘Look!’ said the spectral visitor. ‘These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.’ Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing. This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone… Unlike ancient peoples, early Vai script adopters recognized the social, cultural, and political importance of writing and applied the new script straightaway to a wide array of practical concerns. From shopping lists to high literature, their constant use gave it regular opportunities to change and adapt quickly. Every time Vai writers dashed off a note or wrote out a homework exercise, they introduced tiny personal idiosyncrasies, some of which were assimilated by readers and reproduced, while others failed to catch on. The bottom line: Written letter shapes evolve over time, but so do the purposes and technologies of writing itself. The continued endurance of the Vai script of Liberia is a monument to the brilliance of its first creators who retrieved writing from a dream, then let it free to trace its own successful path.”

Piers Kelly, “What the Vai Script Reveals about the Evolution of Writing,” sapiens.org/language/vai-script-evolution/. Such accounts of the relation between orality and writing always reminds me of Derrida’s early Of Grammatology. As I noted in my recent Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, “Derrida’s expanded notion of writing undercuts any privileging of written cultures precisely because language itself always already includes the logic of writing. Deconstruction applies to any culture with linguistic signification and its multiform relation to material artifacts” (p. 117). Derrida discussed these interconnections in terms of his notion of “arche-writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 60). What’s often missed is that he developed it as a “new concept . . . which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 56). It seems to me to be an underutilized empirical resource when considering the evolution of writing.