Speechwright.

I revisited the dream I had last week. I spent over two hours two days ago transcribing what I recorded onto a Word document. It took that long because I wanted to get it as close to verbatim as possible. I say "as close to verbatim" because I realized the impossibility of typing a pure transcription of what I spoke into the recorder. There was first the problem of the excess "ands" and "ums," and then the added difficulty of deciding where sentences ended (exacerbated by the superfluous ands). I did not complete sentences that I could have sworn I did. I trailed off, changed directions, and interrupted myself. I could not discern which punctuation mark to use for each pause. I also discovered that, when speaking into a mechanical device, I use the word "like" profusely. I sounded a lot like a valley girl stuck in the year 1985. I used the word like so much that it became an interjection--a major no-no in the world of grammar. This bothers me.

There is, however, an interesting point here. The spoken and written word are different things. Something spoken that needs to be converted into written form must undergo translation. Looking back, all the jobs that I had that required me to take dictation (which is about two jobs total) also required me to interpret what the speaker was thinking and make changes. I often spelled things incorrectly, especially when I was unfamiliar with the subject (for instance, I would often misspell names of people in divorce cases until I became familiar with the cases). I also inserted commas, semi-colons, and periods where I thought they were necessary, regardless of the directions of the speaker. I was translating and modifying when I transcribed the voice recording onto paper.

Likewise, something written that needs to be converted into something spoken also needs translation. All it takes is one monotone speech or presentation to realize that the written word is not the same as the spoken one. When we speak we add tone, pitch, and ungrammatical pauses wherever necessary. While there are punctuation marks that indicate tone, italics, question marks, and exclamation points are too simplistic to capture the wide range of sounds humans are capable of making. For instance, there is no punctuation mark to connote irony. It is only when we translate the written word into the spoken that we can get the precise sound that connotes irony. This is why great actors get a lot of credit: their translation of the script is convincing and moving, something that is more difficult than it appears at first.

I had to translate myself. This was easier than translating another, because I knew what I was thinking at the time and what I meant. Still, it was quite surprising to hear me utter a twenty line sentence strung together with ands and ripped to shreds with likes. The thing that was the most surprising was the realization that I do not even listen to myself say these things. I gloss over these gross grammatical and nearly incomprehensible errors. I am sure I forgive others for the same violations of the language in speech that I would reprimand them for unmercifully in their writing. It is quite amazing how we ever got a written language. It is almost as if we translate what we hear in speech to something more comprehensible, and from that comprehensible thought we developed writing.

I believe it was Nietzsche who preferred the oral to the written (though please let me know if I'm wrong), and it is generally assumed that spoken language preceded the written word. But, in order to have a written language that made sense, man would need to already have written language prefigured in some way. Take oral epics for example: Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, and the anonymous epic Beowulf. These are thought to have been oral traditions, but they are so polished and so coherent that it is hard to fathom how they ever could have been transmitted by mouth alone. These poems are far beyond my stuttering, muttering recording. But that's how I talk.

I am assuming, of course, that man's speech is constant; that in all ages people spoke with awkward pauses and ungrammatical constructions. I'm even assuming that everyone speaks as I speak, and that we collectively as humans ignore the inherent errors in speech and remember only the polished, written-like word. It very well could be that in the time Beowulf was being related, people spoke perfect epic and hesitated not. The words which they thought were without question the words that they spoke; that nothing was lost in the migration. (Thought is also an unclear subject, but one I will not get into now.) If this were so, then my entire theory is dashed, for that would mean that the spoken word is superior to the written and it would make sense that we would have a written language after the spoken; possibly the written word has deteriorated our once perfect handling of the spoken. Luckily, there is no way to definitively determine that because we are behind the cloud of the written word: when we do not have historical records (i.e. written documents) then we cannot make assumptions about the past.

Strange. Certainly something to think about.

I will be sure to post more on the progress of my experiment.