Literacy in the Roman Empire

[HVC]

As an example, i know portuguese and can read it. same letter as english, and most letters sound (relatively) the same, but every once ina while i'll look at some writing and it'll take a while to click. it's just a jumble of letters. representative symbols are hard to make out if you don't understand them. stringing them together makes it even harder. i think of it like math. most illiterates can read simple words (cat for example) and most people can do simple math (1+1=2) but start adding those simple things together and it gets complicated. A mathematician might look at what he considers an easy equation and solve it in a few seconds in his head. however you and i can look at the same equation and have no idea where to start. it's not that we don't have the intelligences, just that we don't have the experience and understanding. Now specifically words are abundant and everywhere. it's easier to get practise and exposure. that was not so in the past.

[Admiral Yi]

(1+1=0)

[Siege]

Alt-Math?

[HVC]

(1+1=0)

d'oh

[Ideologue]

As an example, i know portuguese and can read it. same letter as english, and most letters sound (relatively) the same, but every once ina while i'll look at some writing and it'll take a while to click. it's just a jumble of letters. representative symbols are hard to make out if you don't understand them. stringing them together makes it even harder. i think of it like math. most illiterates can read simple words (cat for example) and most people can do simple math (1+1=2) but start adding those simple things together and it gets complicated. A mathematician might look at what he considers an easy equation and solve it in a few seconds in his head. however you and i can look at the same equation and have no idea where to start. it's not that we don't have the intelligences, just that we don't have the experience and understanding. Now specifically words are abundant and everywhere. it's easier to get practise and exposure. that was not so in the past.

Fair enough.  I think we actually read familiar words as ideograms, not individual symbols, which may point to the dividing line between barely literate ("c... a... t...") and actually literate ("cat").  We've all seen this:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Thing is, as an Eggplant whose first language is not English, this might not be at all parsable to you, but as a native Anglophone I read it with hardly a pause; the ideograms are simply crudely rendered.

(And vice versa: do the same thing with Spanish, I'd probably have a very hard time.)

Maybe that's the missing piece of the puzzle for me?  Without foundational instruction at a young age in the phonogrammatic rendering of words, leading to me being able to read thousands of different words and memorize their appearance, usual context, and ordinary meaning, perhaps it becomes much more difficult to reach that "ideogrammatic" stage where I can read properly rendered words quickly and read shit that's all fucked up without much additional effort.

[Siege]

Whatever.
You don't need to be literate to be succesful in life.

[PRC]

Whatever.
You don't need to be literate to be succesful in life.

Yes you do... but sure the military is always an option yeah.

[Razgovory]

English isn't phonetic.

Most English phonemes map pretty closely to their graphemes--or at least it seems that way to me.  If you know English, and you can learn the letters, the varying values for and combinations of vowels, and the dipthongs, you're going to be able to understand most written material.  The words you'd get wrong are likely to be foreign anyway (and thus are unlikely to be important; I've met exactly zero people who pronounce Latin terms correctly, for example, but then again that's because one, it's pretentious, and two, it tends to be spelled incorrectly in the first place, like these motherfuckers have never even seen the Last Crusade).

I'm not talking about learning English as a foreign language here, though, I'm talking about someone with a preexisting fluency in English but cannot read or write.  Why can he not learn to read or write?

I don't know if that's actually true.  English is pretty screwy.  You have silent letters and all kinds occasions where letters make a sound other then the one typically.  So a lot of rote memorization is required.  Words like "Enough" or "Thought".  Or looking at a word like "toe" and compared it to "tow".  English is a language that has been stitched together from the parts of other, better organized languages.

[The Brain]

What's the discussion about? Learning to read and write multiple languages is so easy that little kids do it.

About the cost of basic education in Rome: there is no hard reason why it would be expensive. You need to support one guy who can read and write, and he can teach hundreds of kids. And as soon as guys who can read and write become common they'll be fairly cheap.

[Malthus]

Can someone answer a question for me: why has widespread literacy been so hard to achieve, anyway?  Like, if you're in China, sure, I can see being functionally illiterate without a formal course, but the shit seems pretty simple for a phonetic language.  26 symbols in the modern Roman alphabet, few more in Greek or Cyrillic.  I mean, I dunno how long it took me to learn my native script, but even as an adult I learned Cyrillic an hour and most of Hangul in a morning.  I can't read either very fast but I can read them well enough that, if I understood the respective languages, it would present no difficulty amounting to illiteracy.

Learning a skill like literacy is relatively easy for young children and once learned, learning literacy in a similar-type language is not all that hard even for adults.

However, I have heard that learning literacy for the first time as an adult is reasonably difficult.

[crazy canuck]

However, I have heard that learning literacy for the first time as an adult is reasonably difficult.

Yeah, there is definitely a critical window of opportunity theory for literacy.  If one language is learned during that time then the ability to learn a second language lasts a life time but if that windo is missed then obtaining literacy in just one language becomes very difficult.

The theory could explain widespread illteracy in cultures where children were not taught literacy during that critical period.

[Solmyr]

My guess is that it was more to do with the perception, and probably the reality, that literacy would add very little value to one's life if one were of crummy social status, as most were.  "Great, I can read.  Of course, I have no money so I can't buy books, no time to read them because I work dawn to sunset, and the Bible frankly seems kind of boring anyway."

Pretty much this. Dirt-farming peasants don't need to read anything. Hell, even nobles don't need to read anything, only tell one coat of arms from another. So you pretty much have only the clergy and merchants who learn it.

[Malthus]

My guess is that it was more to do with the perception, and probably the reality, that literacy would add very little value to one's life if one were of crummy social status, as most were.  "Great, I can read.  Of course, I have no money so I can't buy books, no time to read them because I work dawn to sunset, and the Bible frankly seems kind of boring anyway."

Pretty much this. Dirt-farming peasants don't need to read anything. Hell, even nobles don't need to read anything, only tell one coat of arms from another. So you pretty much have only the clergy and merchants who learn it.

You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.

Hense such Medieval documents as the "Domesday Book" - the whole point of which was to make sure William the Bastard got what he was owed.

Illiterate nobles there may have been, but that put them at the mercy of their clerks, a major disadvantage.

[jimmy olsen]

You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.

When calculating how many cows someone owes me do I carry the remainder with chickens or pigs? 

[Razgovory]

You guys are forgetting that the main use of literacy aside from religion is to do accounting, basically so that nobles can extract their share from the peasants, higer nobles from lower, and the king from everyone; and that this task is more complex and not simpler in cash-poor economies.

When calculating how many cows someone owes me do I carry the remainder with chickens or pigs? 

How much grain to store and how much to plant is sort of important.  Also calenders are important and are a function of literacy.