‘Writing is not something natural’ may seem a weird assertion or a sweeping statement. But it’s not. Writing is not an instinctual part of our being. It’s totally different from other things called natural such as eating, sleeping and procreating. It’s something we don’t share with natural world or animal kingdom which we are part of.

Writing is purely a human product. It defines us more than anything else. Even our tool making ability is not as significant as our art of writing. “Of all mankind’s manifold inventions, language must take pride of place. Other inventions – the wheel, the agriculture, sliced bread – may have transformed our material existence, but the advantage of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over other animals, and even over nature itself”, writes Guy Deutscher in his thought-provoking book The Unfolding of Language.

We have been here on this planet for millions of years while the history of language is considered by language historians a little more than ten million years old. And this guess is about spoken language. Written language evolved much later. The skill of written language is about 7,000 years old. Archaeologists and historians have found monuments and other traces of human civilisation which are much older than 7,000 years but no signs of written language.

In the greater part of our evolution the communication has been verbal and through specific sounds created by us. Creation of spoken language - spread over a long period of time - was the first great leap forward as it separated us from other animals.

“Inarticulate cries, plenty of gestures, and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long time the universal language…,” writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in On the Origin of the inequality of mankind. It implied that not only we could communicate but would also retain the memory of what we thought and did in our struggle for survival in the midst of uncontrollable natural forces.

Collective human memory that increased incrementally laid the solid foundation of what later came to be known as knowledge at our early stage. Such a process had a further cumulative effect on the cerebral and intellectual development of humankind gradually leading to the creation of signs and symbols that provided the material for emergence of written language. This was undoubtedly the second great leap forward. Written word eased the immense pressure that was there on our memory. One can make a guess that at some point human memory started showing the weary signs of not keeping pace with the data, information and experience which were being accumulated and needed to be sorted and stored.

It is believed that Sumerians in Mesopotamia invented writing around 3,500 BC. What is now known as Sumerian script used two things; clay for tablets and reeds for writing tool. The earliest writings employed systems of markings. The Sumerian practice of writing provided impetus to writing in Egypt, Iran, China and India. So we see multiple forms of scripts.

The most intriguing secret about the writing/script is a mysterious fact that a series of simple sounds forms the basis of a highly complex system that is capable of producing countless meaningful expressions. “This marvelous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul,” Guy Deutscher quotes Arnauld and Lancelot, the grammarians of Port-Royal abbey (1660), France. Apart from human ingenuity what it proves is that language is not intrinsic to us, nor it is natural for humans. It has been created or it has evolved over a long stretch of time with human effort. A child learns it and learns it slowly and gradually with some effort. But once one learns it, they forget that they learnt it because it becomes part of their being in a manner that it seems something connected with their instinct. Hence the naturalness of the unnatural! You need not to be a Panini to speak a language. Even the dumbest among us can speak, can make louder noise in fact. Language is accessible to all humans. It’s taken for granted as much as our breathing, something natural while it’s not so. That’s the paradox. If spoken language is human invention, written language is doubly so. By being so, it is doubly removed from our instincts and natural habits. Hence it is doubly difficult to learn the art of writing/skill of written language, and master it. The evidence for the validity of the assertion is hard to miss; everyone can speak language but how many can write? Hardly some millions among billions who chatter on day in day out. Look at human history. The number of people who lived on this planet is beyond count but those who wrote can be easily counted and catalogued.

In a nutshell, language is what makes us human but it’s writing that makes us superhuman in terms of an exclusive intellectual quality we have developed. That’s why less developed human societies speak more and write less. In such societies orality rules, not the written word. Writing is the developed stage of orality, one may say. In our culture a person can talk nonstop for hours but if you request him to write a few lines, he would start yawning. Yawning is a habit shared by animals, social and wild. But writing? It’s purely a human act. Even our elders, who suffered from the constraints of oral tradition, knew what made us human. Having empathy for animals they called them ‘gung daam’, the dumb animals.

Animals’ inability to speak evokes pity. Among humans not being able to write should evoke what? Fortunately, you can live happily for one hundred years without writing a single word. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2023