Neurobiological alphabets: Language origins and the problem of universals

• Published in: Postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 3; no. 3; pp. 272 - 289
• Main Author: Goldie, Matthew Boyd
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan UK 01-09-2012; Palgrave Macmillan
• Subjects: Alphabets; Cultural and Media Studies; Digital Humanities; Grapheme phoneme correspondence; History of Medieval Europe; Isidore, of Seville, Saint (560-636); Language culture relationship; Letters; Literature; Medieval Literature; Neurosciences; Original Article; Phonemes; Semantics; Syntax; Writers; Writing
• ISSN: 2040-5960; 2040-5979
• DOI: 10.1057/pmed.2012.17

A comparison among neuroscientists on reading, medieval discussions about ancient and foreign alphabets, and modern scholarly interpretations of those discussions provides a lens on two topics: the origins of human languages and the universality of alphabets.
Priscian
, Isidore of Seville, and others turn away from theological accounts of the origins of language and posit instead that phonemes and graphemes in part imitate sounds and objects in the world. Rabanus Maurus, Giovanni Boccaccio, Sir John Mandeville, and others state that different languages’ graphemes – and by extension the languages and the cultures that use them – are scarcely, if at all, able to be equated. Neuroscience goes much further with both ideas, emphasizing universals and stronger cross-linguistic parallels.