When the written text records a vernacular – that is, the primary language spoken by its readers – it is natural to read it as a script for speech. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10, fol.
Indeed, punctuation (medieval ‘pointing’) itself developed as a way of reinvesting writing with some of the richness of speech. Emoticons and other devices came to carry some of the meaning in these forms of digital communication that body language and intonation carry in face-to-face spoken communication. When email, then text messaging, then Twitter became common forms of written communication with the temporal but not the physical immediacy of speech, writers using these digital platforms had to be careful to clarify sarcasm, humour, level of urgency, and other aspects of spoken communication that were stripped out of written messages. However, we know that writing does not record all the nuances of spoken communication. That is one reason why, in many circumstances, the visual form of a written text cannot in itself provide definitive evidence as to whether it was intended to be, or actually was, read aloud or silently. There are good reasons for this idea, not least a cognitive one: current psychological research suggests that reading always involves phonological processing at some level. This model suggests that writing encodes whatever can be read aloud. Indeed, this model of text was prominent in the Middle Ages and continues to be assumed today: writing as a script for speech. It is easy to think of writing only as a representation of language, and of spoken language in particular.
Since the most commonly and frequently used method that humans use to create, store, transmit, and process information is verbal – that is, humanly usable information is mostly linguistic – this tight linkage of writing and language became overwhelmingly powerful. This is perhaps a semantic quibble, but it underlines a very important historical development: at some point, every writing system commonly used today was adapted for linguistic information. However, there is some debate among historians of writing over whether visual semiotic systems that encode non-linguistic information should be considered ‘writing’.
The earliest forms of writing seem to have been used for accounting. The easy answer is that writing encodes information. But what, exactly, does writing encode? Answers to this question are complex, significant, and richly productive. This project explores the history of medieval information technology by modelling writing as code.
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