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Do you have news you would like to publish? If so enter it using our news form. Palamedes – Gutenberg – Bill GatesLetters are smart. Smarter, perhaps, than the people who use them. It's the combinatbility of letters into an infinite pattern of new words that gives them their power. Ivar Gjørup's talk featured an anecdote about the supposed inventor of the Greek alphabet to make the point. Palamedes brings his invention to the king of Egypt – and is accused of destroying human memory. Written words will be accessible long after the writer has departed, and there will be no need to commit knowledge to memory. An the ramifications of the invention of the alphabet were immense. You didn't need to accumulate knowledge yourself, in your own memory, to use it. You could access anyone else's learning – through their writing. Ivar, a political cartoonist and classical scholar, cited Stephen Pinker. Spoken language explodes in every 3-year-old: we're programmed to speak, the speaking ape. Writing takes us one step further. Written ideas are open to scepticism and doubt: what's written can be contrdicted later. Letters are the building blocks of our knowledge. And like a lawnmower that knows which piece of grass needs cutting without our guidance, the aphabet is a smart machine that can function in contexts unforeseen by its makers. Smart letters can think in our place, addressing their thoughts to future generations. Ivar sketched three ages of information, extending from the invention of script to the present day. Augustus developed a buraucracy based on scribes which, after the fall of Rome was preserved in the Roman church. Until the middle ages, the preservation and transmission of classical learning was paramount. Gutenberg's invention was the invention of the combinability of letters, of the generative power of typography. A block-book page is fixed, while lead letters can be combined infinitely. Writing, Ivar argued, created a demand for provable, undisputable facts – the rise of the scientific method, which replaced the unwritten rhetoric of the pre-mass-literate past. Smart letters need more work: type designers should look at font systems to transliterate between scripts. Ivar showed an example: screens that showed Greek text in the original, with a transcription in a contempory font, plus a transliteration. Making texts accessible across script boundaries, Ivar argued, was the task for the future. Posted on: 12:54, 21 September 2001 |