Speech and Writing
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:
- Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication
- Speech evolved before human beings invented writing
- People learn to speak and process spoken language more easily and much earlier than writing.
Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is, in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.
Read more about this topic: Linguistics
Famous quotes containing the words speech and, speech and/or writing:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)