Literacy in the Roman Empire

[Eddie Teach]

I'm iliterate.

So you've got your computer reading posts to you and entering your replies? Cool.

[Siege]

I'm iliterate.

So you've got your computer reading posts to you and entering your replies? Cool.

Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]

[Razgovory]

Paul of Tarsus did the same thing.

[Eddie Teach]

Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]

[Slavery is illegal you know. You should report Siege to his CO.]

[Siege]

Nah, I got an slave reading and writing for me.
[Hello everyone, I am Siege's slave!]

[Slavery is illegal you know. You should report Siege to his CO.]

[But I enjoy doing things for Siege!]

[Here is a picture of me.]

[Eddie Teach]

Looks like a porno actress. 

[Viking]

Looks like a porno actress. 

nonono... It's The Girl Next Door, eh, oh, yes, pron... 

[Ideologue]

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.

[Razgovory]

English isn't phonetic.

[Ideologue]

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?

[Admiral Yi]

AFAIK, he's right about the private part, but who knows about the expensive part.  Sure, probably it was expensive to acquire a full classical education, but basic literacy?  I'm not so sure.

Fair enough.

And that OP graph tosses my elites-only education theory right out the window anyway.

[Barrister]

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.

I learned the phoenetics of cyrillic in a few days.

It may have had something to do with the fact I was already literate in latin though.

[Ideologue]

Yeah, I suppose once you already have a "orthographical" worldview, it's just simply adding entries to an already established category.  "Y" is now a close back rounded vowel as well as a palatal approximate and analogue for various real vowels.  "X" is now a voiceless velar fricative instead of a useless redundancy.

That's the explanation I've been given before, but it seems strange.  Like, even a dumb person--and in the olden days, you'd have plenty of smart people who were still illiterate--should be able to piece together a functionality with written language with little more than the alphabet song and a list of example words.  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."

[HVC]

letter look easy to you becasue you know them. if you don't have a basic understanding it's harder then you'd think.

[Ideologue]

I dunno, I've never said learning the English language was easy, or learning to draw a representational picture was easy, even though I know how to do these things.  I admit the possibility, but I'm not sure it's just my own bias.