Literacy and Social Fluctuation in the Mediterranean World

当我们让自己被理解时，书面语言不能比口头语言更好地表达我们的感受。但是人类是一种会思考的动物，因为他/她可以控制他/她的感觉。这种“思考”的智慧工作对书信或书面语言的诞生产生了很大的影响。因此，只有当我们发现如何用字母表这样的小字母书写时，我们的识字能力似乎才有所提高。值得注意的是，这种字母书写系统是由居住在迦南的腓尼基人建立的，迦南位于美索不达米亚的楔形文字和埃及的海罗文之间。我们可以在注意到他们的音素的情况下找到线性B和希腊字母之间的任何连续性，我们意识到在古希腊社会中有他们的口头文化传统。在古典社会中，情况也几乎没有改变。从那时起，口头社交就一直在进行，没有发生根本的变化。但城市和农村社会之间出现了任何差异，…更多的沿海和内陆地区，上层和下层阶级，男性和女性等等。我们可以猜到相当高的识字水平，例如，在犹太社会，有自己的圣书，或者在意大利当地城市庞贝，墙上有很多涂鸦。但我们必须考虑到，这一猜想往往取决于我们对生活在沿海城市的男性的印象。尽管我们观察到古代晚期和中世纪早期的识字水平略低，但也有人因为文献资料的透彻而希望通过书面技能来促进。但我们不能否认，识字的人往往会减少。然而，自11世纪以来，出现了一种文字更容易阅读的设备的趋势，尤其是在一些商人和工匠具有相当好的识字水平的城市。例如，在西西里岛，我们可以看到多语言(拉丁语、希腊语和阿拉伯语)社会的官僚作风。显然，书面语言使我们的思维密度很高，但文献的渗透并不一定会使我们的社会行为更加生动活泼。然而，我们可以看到，书面语的传播是社会制度化的主导作用之一。较少

When we make ourselves understood, written language cannot express our feeling better than oral language. But human being came out as a thinking animal, because he/she can control his/her feeling. This intelligent work of ‘thinking' had given a lot of influence on the birth of letters or written language. Therefore our literacy seemed to have gone up only when we found how to write by small numbers of letters such as Alphabet. Remarkably this writing system of Alphabet was established by the Phoenicians as they lived in Canaan which was located between Mesopotamia with cuneiform and Egypt with Hieroglyph.We can find any continuity between Linear B and Greek Alphabet in the case that we make notice of their phonemes and we realize that there was their tradition of oral culture in archaic societies of the Greeks. Things hardly changed also in Classical societies. Since then oral societies went on without basic change. But there had appeared any variations between urban and rural society, … More coastal and inland area, upper and lower class, male and female sex etc. We can guess rather high levels of literacy, for example, in Jewish society with their own sacred book or in Italian local city as Pompeii with a lot of graffiti on walls. But we must consider that this conjecture tends to depend on our impression of male people living in coastal city.Though we observe a little less level of literacy during the period of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Times, there were also people who hoped to promote with written skill because of thoroughgoing of documentation. But we cannot deny that there tend to decrease people who could read letters. There appeared, however, a trend of devices with more easily readable texts since 11 century, above all in cities where some merchants and craftsmen had a rather good level of literacy. For example, in Sicily, we can see multi-linguistic (Latin, Greek and Arabic) society with bureaucracy.It is clear that written language make our density of ‘thinking' high, but penetration of documentation is not sure to lead our social behavior to be more vivid and lively. However we can see that spread of using written language is one of leading roles for systematization of society. Less