Workshop | Workshop on Non-Lingual Writing and Reading

About this event

Research on writing and reading in pre-modern worlds often assumes some dependence of writing upon language. Although awareness of nonlinguistic signs is not new, and is not surprising to anyone who adds a GIF, emoji, or a humble smiley to a text message from time to time, ma ny times these phenomena are regarded as the exception to the rule. The attention given in recent years to the cross-cultural nature of what Houston called "writing that isn't," that is, graphic marks that evoke script but do not convey linguistic meaning (Houston 2018), complicates this picture. Such writing in some cases targets "meaning by direct entrée, without passing through records of sound" (Houston and Bodel, 2021) or it traverses to the world of languageless sound in the case of musical notation - and in any case, it operates beyond language. Rather than def ining non-lingual writing and reading as a problem, a new framework that problematizes the relationship of linguistic signs to their extralinguistic counterparts is called for. Humans have made graphic marks for tens of thousands of years, but among these varied graphs, linguistic signs are a relative newcomer. In a sense, such a subversion of signs to language does not fully define modern writing systems, given how writing "figures into assertions of identity" (Houston and Rojas 2018, 255) and the role of stigmatology in modern writing (Szendy 2018). This is all the more true in the cultures dealt with in this workshop, where the same verb is used for some or all the actions differentiated in English as "writing," "drawing," "punctuating," and "marking." This workshop, org anized by Lilla Attar and Paul Tamburro, will the explore the topic of these "non-lingual" marks.