OVERLAPPING VOICES READING THE WORDS
GIRL SPEAKS SPANISH
Martha is reading from The Book from the Ground -
a novella by the famous Chinese artist Xu Bing.
He has assembled hundreds of emojis and icons
into a script that can be read by anyone, of whatever nationality,
because it is freed from the words of any particular language.
Is this a glimpse of our future?
For 5,000 years, the technology of writing
has allowed people to communicate across space and time
and made civilisation itself possible.
From common roots,
writing developed into a myriad of distinct scripts.
But, today, a new digital communication technology
is becoming universal across the globe.
Will this new technology bring a new universal way of writing?
And as writing changes, will we change with it?
CROWD CHANTS
This is Dolmabahce Square in Istanbul.
Every year, Turks gather here to mark the anniversary
of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Mustafa Kemal was the founder of modern Turkey
and his influence is still felt on many aspects of Turkish life,
not least whenever anyone here picks up a pen,
because, in 1928, Mustafa Kemal did something extraordinary.
He changed the way that Turks write.
The written word is so important in everyday life
that there can be few more radical acts
than forcing an entire nation to learn a new script.
Yet what happened in Turkey in the 1920s
was just part of a movement that swept across the world
in the 20th century.
A series of script reforms that threatened to replace
the multitude of traditional writing systems
with a single, universal script -
the Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet was the script of the Roman Empire.
But its global spread was due to printing.
It was because Latin letters turned out to be easier to print
than other scripts...
..that printing took off in Europe in a way it did not elsewhere.
The resulting explosion in information
led to scientific and industrial revolutions that,
by the early 20th century,
had taken Europe to unprecedented levels of wealth and power.
This link between the Latin alphabet
and the rise of Western industrial society...
..led leaders in other parts of the world
who wanted to take their countries down the same path...
..to see, in the Western script, a key to modernity.
The Latin script, it's a Western thing,
and even the idea of modernisation
is so much geared towards the West.
Could adopting the Latin alphabet be a shortcut to mass literacy,
mass communication and a modern society?
Or was changing the script a recipe for confusion and conflict?
The story of script reform in Turkey
begins with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
For more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks had ruled vast territories
that, at times, included much of south-eastern Europe,
West Asia and North Africa.
But then came the First World War.
With military defeat at the hands of the Western Allies,
Turkey lost its empire and gained a new reformist leader
in the shape of Mustafa Kemal.
Mustafa Kemal is an Ottoman officer.
His project is basically to combine his own political ambitions
with some kind of a modernising agenda
for what remains of the Ottoman Empire and, hence, the desire
to set up a modern, Westernised writing system.
Mustafa Kemal's plan to Westernise the Turkish writing system
built on decades of dissatisfaction
with the way that Turkish was written.
Since the very beginnings of the Ottoman Empire,
its rulers had chosen to represent the Turkish language
with the script of the Quran, the Arabic alphabet,
but spoken Arabic and spoken Turkish
are two very different languages.
The problem for Ottomans is that Turkish
is not very compatible with the Arabic script.
I mean, it's almost diametrically opposed
in the sense that Arabic has an incredible number of consonants
and, on the other hand, it has a very limited number of vowels.
By contrast, spoken Turkish employs limited consonants
but a large diversity of vowels.
Vowels which are not represented in the Arabic alphabet.
The idea that the Arabic script was a mismatch
was something that was more or less recognised by members of the elite.
The Ottomans had been toying with the idea
of reforming their alphabet for at least 50, 60 years.
But Mustafa Kemal was not a man for half measures.
Rather than reform the Arabic alphabet,
he decided to replace it completely with the Latin alphabet of the West.
It's in the summer of 1928 that he came up with the idea
and then it's like a PR campaign,
because he travels through Anatolia and his instrument is a blackboard.
There's a fascinating photograph, it's become iconic,
where you have him pointing at the new letters.
With the Latin alphabet,
it was easier to spell Turkish words phonetically,
which it was felt would make it easier to learn to read.
There was little ground to really
oppose the logic behind this transformation,
given that 90% or even more of the population was illiterate.
It was very rapid - almost overnight.
I think it took one year for everybody to address,
including the press.
Overnight, you are told that you should insert
more and more Latin scripts,
so you can still keep, you know, the usual Arabic alphabet,
but, at the end of the year,
you're going to have to have it all in the Latin script.
For Mustafa Kemal was not content with introducing a new script,
he was also determined to ban the old one.
And, by 1929, Arabic script is outlawed.
It is outlawed. You cannot use it.
MUSIC
At first sight, it seems unnecessary to ban a script
which literate Turks have been using for centuries,
but Mustafa Kemal was aware that the meaning of the Arabic script
was not confined to the words it represented.
SINGING
Sufis are a case in point.
They are famous for their whirling trance
and their deep study of Islam.
Sufis try and achieve a direct communion with God
through rituals such as these.
But also through the text of the Quran.
They believe that there are hidden meanings not just inside the words,
but inside the very letters of the Arabic alphabet.
SINGING
Cemalnur Sargut, a renowned Turkish Sufi writer,
told me something about the sacred significance of Arabic letters.
And the meanings multiply.
For example, many chapters of the Quran begin with Muqatta'at.
Mysterious groups of three, four or five letters
that do not spell any known word in Arabic.
The most common Muqatta'at is Alif Laam Meem -
the equivalent of A, L and M in the Latin alphabet.
As Cemalnur explained,
to Sufis, these letters are a sort of spiritual code.
The spiritual connection between script and religion
extends to the act of writing itself.
Mahmut Sahin is a Turkish calligrapher
but, 80 years after Mustafa Kemal's script reform,
he still writes mostly in Arabic letters.
Even the materials used in writing acquire sacred significance.
Whatever the practical justification,
discarding the Arabic alphabet came at a high cost to many Turks.
There is, of course, the psychological, cultural trauma
of people who are highly attached to their religion,
for whom the language, the script, is not just a script,
it is the script of the Quran.
But, for Mustafa Kemal,
this brutal rupture with the past was precisely the point.
The adoption of the Latin script was not just a practical matter
of improving literacy,
it was also an attempt to alter the trajectory of Turkish history
away from its Islamic past towards the kind of secular,
technological society that was being created in Europe.
For Mustafa Kemal, it's really the appeal of the West.
There's a linguistic justification for the, erm...for the reform,
but there's also a civilizational one.
It is because you want to become European.
So the script is crucial.
It's one of the most daring reforms
because it really touches...
And it has a promise of enlightenment.
I mean, viewed from the perspective of the 1920s,
this is a way of saying,
this is our first step towards creating a nation
and of spreading literacy and education to the masses.
The script in itself is so symbolic.
It's something that everybody recognises.
Symbolically, I think it's a very powerful move,
and it's very well received by the West.
It's a huge PR thing.
REPORTER:Ataturk lives quietly, spends time teaching the youngest
of his six adopted daughters the alphabet he made all Turkey learn.
But Turks were not the only people having to learn a new way to write.
In the 1920s, the Latin alphabet,
with its promise of modernity, was on the march across Asia.
The story of what happened next
illustrates the power of script to shape who we are.
# Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
# Allahu Akbar
# Allahu Akbar... #
There is nothing more evocative of the Islamic world
than the call to prayer.
But there's something else that tells us
that we're in a Muslim country.
The Arabic script is everywhere,
because script isn't just a means of communication,
it's a badge of identity,
and with a change in script comes a fundamental change in identity.
This is Bukhara in Uzbekistan.
Once an important oasis city on the Silk Road
between China and the Mediterranean.
In the 19th century, it, like most of the Islamic states
of Central Asia, was absorbed by the expanding Russian Empire.
Under the tsars, the Turkic languages of the region
continued, however, to be written in the Arabic script,
which had been used here since the Muslim conquests of the 8th century.
But, in 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed
and power was seized by the Communist Party.
Their leader, Lenin, was determined to modernise and secularise
every aspect of society across the new Soviet Union
and, in Central Asia, as in Turkey, that meant changing the script.
Shahnoza Soatova is a philologist
and an expert on script reform in Uzbekistan.
As in Turkey, the new script was part of a literacy drive.
But, as in Turkey also, it created a brutal rupture with the past.
For the Arabic script is quite literally woven into the fabric
of cities like Samarkand.
Practically every panel of every building in this magnificent place
is covered in writing.
It's a masterpiece of Arabic calligraphic art
expressed in architecture.
Some of the panels look like geometric patterns
but are, in fact, also writing in the angular Kufic script.
For example, in the very middle of this pattern above the gate
is a lozenge where, in the middle, in dark blue,
is the name of Allah four times,
made to look like a repeating pattern.
And around the side of that lozenge, picked out in turquoise,
is the name of Muhammad.
Latinisation was, at heart, a political project.
But, back in Moscow, politics were changing.
Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin,
was less interested in world revolution
than in consolidating his total control
over all the subject peoples of a new Russian empire.
And, once again, new politics meant a new script.
The Russian Cyrillic alphabet remained the script of Central Asia
for five decades,
but then the politics of Russia changed again.
In 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart
and Uzbekistan became an independent country.
Uzbeks now had a new political identity
and for the nation's leader, Islam Karimov,
there was no stronger way to signal this change
than to change the script yet again.
Out went Cyrillic, but it wasn't Arabic that returned.
No country has changed its script more often
in such a relatively short period as Uzbekistan.
But, through all these dizzying changes,
there has been one constant.
The pull of the Latin alphabet as a means of connecting
with the wider world and as a symbol of a nation that embraces modernity.
But the eastward march of the Latin alphabet would eventually bring it
into contact with a culture with writing at its heart.
In any park in China, it's not unusual
to find people of all ages writing words in water.
They are not using an alphabet
but writing characters in China's ancient pictorial script.
The Chinese script has been in continuous use
for more than 3,000 years.
But, for much of the last century, those who ruled China
were determined that the ancient Chinese script would fade away,
to be replaced by something simpler.
China had yet to industrialise.
The people were still living a traditional way of life.
The resulting economic weakness made the country prey to Western powers.
Popular discontent of the decline of China
exploded on May 4th, 1919.
The streets of Beijing were filled with protesting students
demanding radical change.
It was a moment that heralded 30 years of political turmoil
that would lead to civil war in China and a war between scripts.
The most enthusiastic partisans of script reform
were the Communist Party of China.
They turned to their ideological allies in the Soviet Union
who had already Latinised the scripts of Central Asia.
The new system was designed to make reading and writing easier
by spelling out words phonetically.
It was called Latinxua Sin Wenz - Latin new writing.
As Mao's forces marched south, conquering more and more territory,
Latinxua Sin Wenz followed behind.
It was used in newspapers, books, in school textbooks
and in railway timetables.
Kept in the National Library of Beijing,
thousands of publications attest to the Latin push
throughout the country.
The librarians were kind enough to let me look at a few of them,
dating from the 1930s to 1950.
It's fascinating to see Chinese written in Latin letters,
the Latinxua Sin Wenz,
because you get the feeling you can understand it,
which isn't usually the case when you see
a page of Chinese characters.
It feels more familiar, and that's made more so by the fact
that this content is sprinkled with words that I can understand.
"Stalin." "Trumen."
But there is a range of content.
There is a lot of poetry and there are a lot of articles
on how to write the new Latin script,
including little pictures on how to hold the pen
and also how to form the cursive of the Latin letters.
Interestingly, a lot of them have the order of the strokes,
one, two, three,
which is something you see in school books for Chinese characters,
where the order of the strokes is very important,
but not something so common in the West.
What is obvious is the overtly political nature of all of this.
Here we have Gorky
stabbing a fat capitalist with an enormous pen,
giving the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword
and perhaps underlining the need for mass literacy.
But even into the 1950s,
all the content is written in both systems -
the Latin letters and the Chinese characters -
which shows that, even after decades of publishing,
the editors can't be sure that the readers
will understand the new system.
The revolution might have triumphed by this time
but the new writing has not.
Dozens of dialects are spoken across China
and the pronunciation of words varies greatly.
For example, in the Mandarin-speaking areas,
the word for love is "ai",
but in the Cantonese dialect, love is pronounced "nuo".
Rendered phonetically, the two words would look quite different,
but, in the Chinese script, they are both represented
by the same character,
so even if the spoken languages sound completely different,
the written characters are shared everywhere.
In this way, the Chinese script binds the Chinese people together.
And the Chinese people have a deep, emotional attachment
to their ancient script.
Chinese writing is the embodiment of Chinese civilisation.
Every character tells a story
about how the ancestors of the Chinese people
saw the world around them.
For example, the character for woman...
..is combined with the character for child...
..to give a character which means good.
The character for field...
..when combined with the character which means strength...
..gives the character for a man.
In 1949, Chairman Mao declared the birth
of the People's Republic of China.
The Communists had been victorious.
But, by this time, Mao had quietly buried Latinxua Sin Wenz.
The cultural cost of abandoning the Chinese script was too high
a price to pay for the supposed efficiencies of the Latin alphabet.
But that left the problem of achieving mass literacy
with a complex script which, throughout Chinese history,
had always been the province of the elite.
CHILDREN RECITE TOGETHER
TEACHER SINGS IN CHINESE
To be able to read and write Chinese,
you need to learn several thousand pictorial characters.
It seems like a daunting task for a six-year-old.
I think the Western people
have some illusions about Chinese characters.
In the biggest character dictionary,
we have about...
More than 50,000 Chinese characters.
That's a very big amount.
But if you consider the basic unit,
the basic element, it's not too large.
It's about 300 basic elements,
so it's not so complicated as some Westerners think.
So what is... What is that?
A fruit basket.
Orange.Orange.
Grapes.
Onions.
Dr Thomas Hope is a neuroscientist interested in how we read.
He agrees that it's easy to overstate
the differences between scripts.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between pictographic
and Latin scripts is that the Latin scripts have only 26 letters,
whereas your pictographic scripts appear to have thousands
and thousands of characters.
But of course you can't learn to read just by learning the letters.
I know this. I've been watching my children learn to read.
That is a hat.
It's not enough. You have to learn to understand and recognise
the words, too, and once you've got to recognise the words,
well, there's thousands and thousands of them,
so what that means is that the actual learning problem
you have to solve to achieve skilled reading
is at least roughly similar across these two scripts.
As a scientist, Thomas is interested in whether brain science can
throw light on the question of the accessibility of different scripts.
For him, a key experiment was devised by Dr Tae Twomey,
who came up with a way to compare how the same brain works
when it is reading a phonetic script
compared to when it is reading a pictographic script.
It takes advantage of the fact that Japanese readers
have to learn both types of script.
In my Japanese experiment, we asked the participant to read
a Japanese word written in either kanji characters
or hiragana kana characters,
and we compared whether the brain activation is any different.
To write their language, the Japanese use Chinese
pictographic characters, which they call kanji.
But in most texts, these kanji characters will be found
alongside letters called hiragana kana,
which spell out words phonetically.
For example, the pronoun "I" can be spelt phonetically
with three kana letters.
Or represented by a single kanji character.
There are only 50 or so kana characters
and it's always nearly 100% correspondence
between the letter and the sound,
so once you know what each kana is, you can read everything.
But the kanji characters,
there's no relationship between the print and the sound.
So we're trying to understand whether when Japanese people
read Japanese kanji or Japanese kana,
do they use a different part of the brain?
Three areas of the brain are particularly important for reading.
Two are associated with the senses of sound and vision.
The bit of the brain that does hearing is on the side,
sort of near the ear, and the bit of the brain that does vision
is on the back, basically where the optic nerve goes in.
The auditory area is part of a larger brain structure
called the temporal lobe.
A place where sensations are combined with memories
to create meaning out of our experiences.
All reading starts with a stimulus to the visual region
and ends with that stimulus being interpreted in the temporal lobe.
But that stimulus can travel down two different pathways,
directly from the vision area to the temporal lobe
or via the auditory area.
It's tempting to assume that reading phonetic hiragana kana characters
would activate the auditory pathway,
whereas the direct vision to meaning pathway
would be activated by picture-based kanji characters,
but that's not quite what the experiment showed.
I did assume that the way that we read sound-based
versus a pictographic language would just be completely different,
erm, and it just turns out maybe not so much.
Instead, all three areas are active
irrespective of which type of script is being read.
We use the same set of regions, so the network itself is the same,
but the use of the component was slightly different
depending on the script.
When the subjects were reading the more phonetic scripts,
they tended to prefer just a little bit more the sound pathway,
and when they were reading the pictographic script,
they tended to prefer just a little bit more the visual pathway,
but were still using them both.
Dr Twomey's experiment suggests that our brains are doing similar work
whether reading words represented by Chinese characters
or spelt with a phonetic alphabet.
The two writing systems are equally easy or hard to learn.
Revolutionary political leaders like Lenin and Mao
once saw the Latin alphabet as a necessary ingredient
of a modern society.
But it seems that the key to mass literacy
is, after all, not the alphabet,
it's mass education.
Just send people to school and, if you send people to school,
it turns out they can learn to read pictographic scripts
as well as we can learn to read an alphabetic script.
But, today, it is not just human beings
who have to be able to interpret a script.
REPORTER:While it is true that the computer can be called
a kind of brain, although a very limited one,
in order to solve any problem, the computer must first be
instructed by a human programmer, who has painstakingly
and logically analysed the problem.
In America in the 1960s,
the foundations of the internet were being laid.
The native script of computers is a simple binary code
of ones and zeros,
but, in order to facilitate human interaction with computers,
American computer scientists developed ASCII -
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange,
which allows communication with computers using human language -
language written in Latin letters.
This universal standard meant that, for many decades,
using a computer meant using the Latin alphabet.
That legacy is still powerful today.
In this cafe in a district of Cairo,
a group of young people are using Latin letters to write Arabic words.
This new way of writing a language that has always been written
using the Arabic script is called Franco.
The beginning of the Franco Arab was the Arab gamers.
They didn't have the Arabic keyboard
so the Arab gamers just invented the Franco Arabic.
I just don't like to use it.
I really love talking in Arabic, writing in Arabic.
This is, like, me, this is who I came from,
and the whole thing is about...
I don't like talking in Franco Arabic. It's so weird.
It really destroys my culture.
The desire to use computers pushed young Egyptians
into using a Latin script.
And something similar is happening in China,
where technology threatens to do what even Chairman Mao could not -
persuade the Chinese people to embrace the use of Latin letters.
They are the basis of the successor to Latinxua Sin Wenz,
another phonetic script called pinyin.
For young Chinese especially,
using the Latin alphabet has become second nature.
As a simple phonetic system, pinyin is attractive,
but it poses a threat to traditional Chinese writing.
At school, children learn how to write Chinese characters
by repetition, which builds muscle memory.
But, in the adult world, thanks to computers,
writing by hand is becoming a rare occurrence
and so muscle memory starts to fade.
The seductions of technology are leading even highly educated Chinese
to forget how to write their ancient script.
Could what's happening today in China
be the future of writing everywhere?
With new ways of creating text becoming ever more popular,
will there soon be any need to learn to write at all?
The Chinese artist Xu Bing has explored the future
and the past of writing in two remarkable works.
The Book from the Ground is a project in which Xu Bing
created a pictographic script from emojis and icons
and then wrote a short novel entirely in his new script.
His work explores the idea that modern life
has finally allowed the creation of a universal script of images.
The story, a comic tale of the day in the life of an office worker,
can be understood by anyone,
regardless of what language they speak,
because the icons are designed to be universally recognisable.
But The Book from the Ground suggests that a world
of perfect communication is also a world of cultural uniformity.
This connection between script and culture
is also the theme of Xu Bing's most famous work,
The Book from the Sky.
The Book from the Sky consists of thousands
of traditional wood block prints,
but the characters that Xu Bing carved were all made up by him
and have no meaning.
We think of writing as a means of communicating what we want to say.
Looked at in this way, all that really matters is efficiency.
But there has always been more to script than language.
For 5,000 years, scripts themselves have been a repository
of cultural and religious identities
that cannot easily be put into words.
This is the hidden power and value of script,
for when we write, we express who we are
in every word and in none.
The Book from the Sky says nothing...
..but nothing could be more expressive of Chinese culture.