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 writing, speech and/or writing:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b.1927)