Sunday, May 8, 2016

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)

First published in 1982 by Methuen & Co. Ltd, Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong's classic study of the development from orality to literacy has been a constant reprint for the past three decades.

This cover (photo left) is from the edition of 2002. Amazon is selling a yet new edition celebrating the book's thirty-year anniversary.

Ong premises that primarily orality society is a society "totally unfamiliar with writing" (p. 6), whose "oral university of communication or thought" (p. 2) is very difficult for readers like us born in the age of 'secondary orality' to conceive.

In order not to mistaken oral societies for being inferior or secondary to chirographci (writing) and typographic (print) societies, which is absolutely incorrect too, it is essentially approach them diachronically or historically. That is what Ong did in this book by contrasting "orality with alphabetic writing...as used in the West" (p.3).

Paiwan Every Day 668: pai

pai, kinemnemanga tiamadju tu kemacu tua ljigim nua kakinan.   Free translation : Now, they decided to take their mother's sewing needle...