silent reading

One of my favourite journal article titles is: Writing is a Technology which Restructures Thought. It was written by Walter J Ong, who turned out to be a Jesuit priest, and it's full of fascinating insights into how much our understanding of what language is like is shaped by our familiarity with written language. It's roughly in the same category as Jack Goody's Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and, even better for my purposes, Per Linell's Written Language Bias in Linguistics. It had such a reassuring and thought-provoking effect when I read it, and I read it at a particularly useful time for deciding what sort of things to do research about.

However, it turns out that there is one thing which Walter J Ong may have been misguided on, and that is his view of the way that people used to read their literature in ancient times. He suggested that people didn't use to read things silently to themselves the way we do - instead they would read out loud, at least till after printing was invented and printed text became more widely available.

This strikes me as quite a widespread belief - I'm sure I was vaguely familiar with the suggestion before reading it there, from sources outside of the linguistics world which I've no recollection of processing, and any fleeting scepticism I might have had would have been stifled by considering that silent reading must just be one of those skills of the contemporary world which is only easy when you know how.

But it turns out that the evidence in favour of this suggestion is really pretty scarce - and in fact it's probably not true at all. In the Books supplement of last Saturday's Guardian there was an article by James Fenton which puts the record straight. (Yes, I had been planning to say something about this since last Saturday.) He gives enough information in the article to make it possible to track down two published articles which argue that people like Augustine, Ambrose, and Alexander the Great were all in the habit of reading silently, and that it's a myth that their contemporaries were surprised to see it. He even mentions that a key moment in Augustine's conversion occurred through a time of silent reading (disappointingly, he doesn't say what specifically he was reading!).

I'm very much attracted to this version of events, partly because it rescues 'the ancients' from one more opportunity to denigrate their intellectual and cognitive achievements, but also because it's more consistent with the point (made from the 1910s onwards by an English scholar called Henry Bradley) that skilled reading does not necessarily depend on particularly close links between written symbols and their pronunciation - no transcription system known to mankind is capable of rendering speech exactly, and being able to produce a spoken version of printed symbols isn't even a particularly efficient way of recovering meaning from text.

James Fenton's article is available here, and these are the two articles which he cites:

• AK Gavrilov (1997), 'Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.' Classical Quarterly 47: 56-73
• 
  MF Burnyeat (1997), 'Postscript on Silent Reading.' Classical Quarterly 47: 74-76

(They're both in JSTOR, the digital archive of academic journals, but you'll need a subscription to access them.)

It's not exactly central to my thesis to establish the answer to this point definitively, but I'm already planning to get a footnote out of it somewhere along the line. If I ever get to the stage of writing up, that is.