This reminds me of how there are certain vowel sounds in German that we as English speakers can't hear or make as well (ü), and similarly there are consonant sounds in English that German speakers cannot easily hear or produce (w). p. 6
7 Matching Annotations
- Sep 2020
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classroom.google.com classroom.google.com
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Nothing important here, I just like the fact that Steven Pinker is mentioned here because I'm about to start reading a book by him. (p. 6)
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It still amazes me how primed our brains are for language even at such a young age. p. 5
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I genuinely believed this, too, or at least that you could never fully learn another language unless you learned by a certain age. p. 3
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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In the course of the 4th and 5th century the Churches made efforts to ensure a better clergy in particular among the bishops who were expected to have a classical education, which was the hallmark of a socially acceptable person in higher society (and possession of which allayed the fears of the pagan elite that their cultural inheritance would be destroyed)
The article mentions the spread of Arabic with Islam above, but this too shows the impact religion has had on the spread of literacy. For many Americans in the past, reading the Bible was a primary manner of learning English, at least in the home. Also at this specific time in history, Saint Augustine eloquently expressed his knowledge of both classical and Christian teachings in works such as "The City of God", and he can easily be seen as a paragon of this virtue of education.
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The earliest forms of written communication originated in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia about 3500-3000 BCE. During this era, literacy was "a largely functional matter, propelled by the need to manage the new quantities of information and the new type of governance created by trade and large scale production"
Fun fact, this development of literacy was also tied to the invention of beer. For more on this, see "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" by Tom Standage.
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The view that literacy always involves social and cultural elements[
I think this is important to understand when we consider varying levels of literacy among different groups of people. For example, if we were living in the mid-20th century, literacy discrepancies would be very great between states which have a long history of public education such as Massachusetts and others such as Tennessee which were only then fully adopting public education. These kind of discrepancies may seem bad to us today, but we must always consider the cultural context, Tennessee being an agricultural state primarily while New England was steeped in an educational tradition dating back to the Puritans with an economy of the kind necessitating such emphasis on education.
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