From GthomGt@cs.com Tue Mar 7 03:49:56 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id DAA56190 for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 03:49:55 -0800 From: GthomGt@cs.com Received: from csimo02.mx.cs.com (csimo02.mx.cs.com [205.188.156.53]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id DAA09095 for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 03:49:54 -0800 Received: from GthomGt@cs.com by csimo02.mx.cs.com (mail_out_v25.3.) id d.6f.1fa2263 (4237) for ; Tue, 7 Mar 2000 06:49:45 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <6f.1fa2263.25f646d9@cs.com> Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 06:49:45 EST Subject: Re: Vedas and orality To: classics@u.washington.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: CompuServe 2000 32-bit sub 76 In a message dated 3/6/00 1:39:19 AM Eastern Standard Time, akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu writes: > Considering the Indus Valley scripts that were used between around 2500 > BCE and 1900 BCE, one might say they (or perhaps the geographical area) > were postliterate. I mean, the cultural effects of writing might last > longer than the practice of writing. This seems implicit in the > arguments of some of those who claim a large literacy effect; for example, > Ong's great introspective religions were practiced largely by illiterates. > If the literate elites of those religions had vanished, ways of thinking > putatively associated with literacy would presumably still have persisted. > A place to look for examples might be in Jewish groups like the Babu of > Southern Africa and some of the isolated communities of Indian port > cities and China, which retained a distinctive identity and some > historical narratives for say 1000 years after losing all original > scriptures (and sometimes literacy as well). Yes, when I first learned of these people [the Babu of Southern Africa] and the remarkable story of their wanderings and their 'oral memory', the analogy with Vedic orality immediately struck me. However, there is an important difference: there is no memory whatsoever in Vedic not only of writing; there is no memory whatsoever of the Indus Valley Civilization [= IVC] either. IVC is one of the great mysteries of antiquity. In spite of what one reads in the reference books, we know very little about this culture. Because we have not discovered a Rosetta Stone, we haven't a clue about the nature of this 'script.' I myself am not persuaded that this IVC 'script' is a script. Last year, at a seminar on this civilization at Harvard, I posed the question to the assembled cognoscente: do we really know that this is a writing system that is correlated with a particular language? Isn't it possible that the IVC script is pictographic rather than logographic? No one was able to exclude this possibility. What this means is that the IVC script may not be tied to a particular language at all. It may be little more than the sign system that we see at international airports: women's restroom here, men's there; this airline in this direction, that airline in that one. > > Returning to the parenthetical I emphasized ("===>"): George Thompson > may have selected evidence that came readily to mind, but the nonmention > of writing in Vedic, um, literature, seems slightly weak as evidence. I > grant that the absence is significant in view of the grammatical, phonetic, > and other detailed linguistic material. But perhaps its significance is > that the culture valued orality and memorization, and in a complementary > way disparaged or ignored writing. We know that writing was in use in > 2000 BCE and say 300 BCE, and that the earliest Vedas were probably > composed around 1500-1000, but apparently a date as early as 2000 can't > be ruled out, and still less can an early origin be ruled out for the raw > material that the Vedas organize. > > How accurately do we know when the Brahmi scripts (currently dated to > 3-4 c. BCE) originally came into use? Given the popularity of palm > leaves for Indian writing, and mixing into the argument a bit of local > disdain for the written form, it's not hard to imagine that some of the > more technical material in the Vedas was written in a period when > literacy was again becoming relatively common. > > For comparison, one might consider runes. The runic material that has > survived to us (on stone, bone, metal, and a bit of wood) has usually > been dated no further back than 0-200 CE (and usually towards the end > of that period, but discoveries since 1979 have pushed the date back). > Elmer Antonsen argues [[3]] > > | If we take into consideration all of the evidence available to us, > | including shapes and sound-values of the runes themselves, the rune > | names, inverse spellings, the known historical development of the > | Germanic languages, and the peripheral features that runic writing > | shared only with the Mediterranean writing practices of the Archaic > | period, then the conclusion is inescapable that runic writing must > | have arisen during the proto-Germanic period, at a time when the > | standardizations characteristic of the classical periods of Greek > | and Latin had not yet been fully carried out. > > In other words, Antonsen argues that the datable physical evidence > is too thin, so it provides only a terminus ante quem. It seems to > me that the status of Indian alphabetic writing is similar. > > (Another minor similarity is between the absence of horizontal lines > in runes and the nonadoption of the horizontal overbar in Oriya, both > credited to the writing material -- wood and palm leaf, resp.) > > [[1]] > gopher://140.142.56.13/0R215520-219983-/public/classics/classics.log200002d > > [[2]] > gopher://140.142.56.13/0R109388-115496-/public/classics/classics.log200002d > > [[3]] Elmer H. Antonsen: "The Runes: The Earliest Germanic Writing System" > in _The Origins of Writing_, ed. Wayne M. Senner (U. Nebraska Pr., 1989), > pp. 137-158. > > .