Language

To start off the exploration of orality, I want to play a clip from the movie Waking Life. Check it out:

The speaker touches on a few different topics in the video that are relevant to the discussion on orality and how it ties to literacy. One big one is the discussion on semiotics and the idea of the linguistic sign.

This term developed by Ferdinand de Saussure deals with the idea of language being broken up into the signifier and signified. Another name for these terms would be sound image (signifier) and the concept (signified). The Sign is then made up by an interplay between the signifier and the signified.

This idea is what the woman in the video is referring too when she talks about "love," or "saber-toothed tiger right behind you!" It's the idea that we assign certain concepts to the way our brain processes sound. The problem, as she says, is when we start to explain all the abstractions in our lives through the use of these terms that are just as abstract. Because the terms by which we define the abstractions (such as love or fear or thought) are just as abstract, the entire notion of understanding someone, while still relevant, has been made completely subjective.

This leads to frustration and getting lost in translation, but without that frustration, humans would have no desire to communicate. We naturally have a need to express emotions or thoughts, and the only way to do that is through our uses of language in all of it's confusing, entwining, convoluted glory.