The Alphabet and Our Brain

I believe the best example of "writing restructures consciousness" would be the alphabet. There were many early scripts, such as cuneiform, Arabic, Hebrew, but there wasn't a "proper" alphabet until Greek. The Greek alphabet was different because it had symbols for vowels and that the letters did not stand for words. (The example from the article was aleph meant ox while alpha had no meaning) It was at this point that writing stopped being a purely bureaucratic venture and began to record stories, poems, and other forms of literature.

The advent of the Greek alphabet was a major paradigm shift when it came to orality versus literacy in that it made it so anyone who could sound out the letters could read what had been written. We might not speak Spanish, but with a few simple pronunciation lessons we could read it just fine. On the other hand I don't think many people could gather that 女(nü)+ 子(zi) = 好(hao). I believe that the alphabet restructured our consciousness because it gave the ancient Greeks a 1:1 ratio with sight to sound. It could be easily taught and helped bring about a much higher literacy rate. Ong said that "The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. This ease of access and use started changing us into a more literature based society and species. The alphabet allowed us to be a society that seems to value text over speech. The Ong article also had part about the neurophysiological aspect of the alphabet. Kerckhove (1981) found a phonetic alphabet increases left-brain activity helping increase abstract and analytical thought.