“Writing has always been a political issue”

2023-12-09 23:37:22

Takatakakatak… ¡Clic!… Tikitikitiki… Clac, clac, clac… ¡Piuh!

The dry tapping of the keys of computers, cell phones, tablets and all digital devices were replacing the scratching sound of pencils and pens on paper.

You could barely hear the lines of handwriting and that feeling of continuity, that txachacatxacachá that only stopped when suddenly, pop!, the dot of a letter appeared. i or an end point. That fluid sound, linked, linked, was increasingly strange. He was being silenced by the pounding of isolated keys, clack! clack! clack!, with no other connection than going one after the other, without holding on to each other, as the he and the e of the lentils from the shopping list.

Were we heading towards a world without handwriting? And then, in that case, could it happen that someone who didn’t have a keyboard couldn’t communicate with anyone? What would you do if you didn’t have a voice-to-text transcription device? Should we invent a new concept of “digital mute”? Maybe “keyboard outcast”?

The concern caused them to call one of the leading experts in handwriting. They went to look for the linguist and doctor in Comparative Literature José Antonio Millán, because, in addition, he had just published a book titled The lines that speak, from the Ariel publishing house. They barely gave him time to sit down when the first question was thrown at him at point-blank range.

—Please tell us without delay! Do you think humanity needs handwriting?

—Yes, it is a key question. Handwriting gives us autonomy. It is a communication towards the future or towards the distance. You can write a little note and have it reach another person at another time and in another place. And the difference with digital writing is that it does not depend on energy, nor on coltan mines, nor on a solar storm not occurring and the entire internet going to hell. That’s why it’s worth preserving. We, in general, are very satisfied with our technological development, but we constantly receive warnings that our current situation could change for any reason.

And there was no need for a major blackout. Not a FOOM (Fast Onset of Overwhelming Mastery, a very fashionable type of apocalypse that alludes to the moment when Artificial Intelligence violently takes control of the world, and which, by the way, the acronym itself already represents visually in a scandalous way). Millán mentioned a current tragedy to show that there are many situations in which the internet and data and plugs are of little use: “Today, in the heart of Gaza, those who know how to write better have something to gain, right?”

But you didn’t have to go to critical moments to appreciate the value of handwriting.

Writing is not something that comes standard to a wise man. It is, in Millán’s words, a great “intellectual achievement.” Because speaking yes is “a natural capacity in human beings” and we have been doing it for about 100,000 years. Writing, on the other hand, is an invention, it is a technology, and we have only been tracing signs and letters for about 5,000 years. And that is not much time in the history of humanity, although it is enough to recognize its importance in the education of children.

—Teaching to read and write by hand promotes greater child development than children would have if we only taught them to press letters. There is such a gap between stretching your finger to press the b and knowing how to draw it, how to link it to another letter, how to draw it at one size or another… The finesse in handling the hand to write becomes finesse to manipulate many other things. Handwriting promotes motor development and neurological development in children.

This matter led us to remember a news item that hit the press in 2014 with these headlines: “Finland, the model country in world education, ends handwriting”, “In Finland children will not learn to write, but to type”… That information produced first a shock and then a great debate. Was the future of writing in machine letters?

But after a while, the Finnish Embassy in Madrid released a statement with a headline that put things in their place: “In Finland, handwriting is taught.” What happened is that they changed the curriculum so that it was no longer mandatory to learn to write in two types of font: cursive (letters linked to other letters) and print (each letter independent of the others). The children would be taught a single type of handwriting: printing, and they would also be taught typing to write better on the computer. But, of course, they would continue learning to write with a pencil because they considered it essential for the development of fine motor skills, memory, and learning in general.

—What happened so that all the Spanish media announced with great fanfare that in Finland they would stop teaching handwriting? —they asked Millán—.

—Perhaps it was a misinterpretation of the news about the change in educational plans. Perhaps there was also a certain techno-optimism. What was proposed in Finland and also in the United States was, basically, to replace the cursive linked letter with a more block type letter for a reason that is not nonsense. The letters that children see around them (in books, on screens, on store signs…) are generally stick letters, they are not linked letters. Is it worth teaching something that children will think is crazy because they only see it in class? Well… there are those who have decided that it is better to teach only the letter that is most used and others who maintain the teaching of both types of calligraphy.

The geopolitics of typeface

The recommendation of the linguist José Antonio Millán had been very clear. They had to try to keep the teaching of handwriting at all costs. In the days of ChatGPT, in the era in which humans would no longer even need to type as much because they would interact with their devices through voice, it was essential to maintain the ability to trace letters, words, phrases, arrows, underlines and even very old emoticons.

But there was one more issue that this doctor in Comparative Literature, an expert in rhythm and punctuation, had to clarify. in his book The lines that speak, had told the story from a very unusual point of view. She had spoken about the processes of invasion, domination and independence from a place without guns or dungeons. Millán explained geopolitics from the type of writing that was taught in schools.

—Writing has always been a political issue. Writing was the heritage of certain castes (priestly or bureaucratic) that had power and dominion that others did not have. This kind of miracle that is writing has been passing from one town to another. “Look at the lines and lines that these Phoenician merchants make. Wow! “We are going to copy them.” Writing has jumped from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Etruscans, from the Etruscans to the Romans… and since they were jumps between people who used different languages, they had to make adaptations. And who did this work? Well, a small group of wise men, so to speak, and they were the ones who decided how to write.

Millán paused for a second and, with emphasis, introduced the question that everyone expected him to answer:

—And where is the political aspect? Someone had to come along (the city-state government in Greece, for example) and say: “Of the many alphabets that people have invented here, we are going to use only this one.” And that was a decree. And maybe that was followed by plays that taught people how to write. This is clearly political. The Roman emperors did it, the kings of other places…

But the most curious thing is that, according to Millán, in the way of tilting the letters or making them rounder or stretching the stick of the b further here or further there there is also politics.

—The very shape of the handwritten letter has become a hallmark. By the 17th century, the French, English and Spanish made manuscripts differently. Each one evolved in its own way and already in the 18th century, in Spain, there was a form of writing that is specifically Spanish. It was the bastard letter. And what did the Spanish calligraphers say? That it was the best, the clearest, the most beautiful, the one that the Spanish language deserved. That is to say, there was a theme of nationalism in the lyrics.

And that was very common throughout the world. Each nation poured its nationalist feelings into its way of writing.

—The identity of the lyrics becomes a trait of pride and a political trait. And to this is added the issue of spelling. That happened in Spanish-speaking America when they began to want to separate from the metropolis.

Millán had the ability to read and explain history from the lines of the letters and, in his book, he said that at the time when the independence processes arose in Spanish America, one of the forms of uprising was writing. Many colonies adopted the English letter to show that they were breaking with Spain. And later, the countries with the greatest commercial relationship with England (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay) brought English letters to schools.

—There are very few social facts that do not become political. And of course, handwriting is not one of them.

Politics and nationalism did not remain in the lines of handwriting. The fonts used on mobile phones and computers also exuded geopolitics and relationships of dominance and dependency. But what it was about now was preserving the handwriting, that handwriting that was slipping from the hands, that was being erased from communications, that even caused pain in the fingers due to lack of habit. Where? Who? As…? Was there any place where handwriting still reigned supreme? Was there any refuge where handwriting was safe?

—Yes, jail. For the simple reason that prisoners are not given many facilities, right? In the past there are examples of prisoners who made ink with the soot from candles and used fruit peelings to write. Anything you can think of to send a message abroad! There is an exceptional case of some anti-Franco prisoners who, in the 1940s, wrote a newspaper called Working World and they managed to circulate it from hand to hand among the inmate population. It was a newspaper in which everything was done by hand. Even today there are many prisons where they do not allow the use of computers. That is why they continue to be a good refuge for handwriting.

But that could not be the future of the written letter. The future could not confine the manuscripts or leave them for isolated places. Their place had to continue being schools. Even more so in the era of ChatGPT. Because this artificial intelligence application had learned to write, to summarize, to create arguments like a human. But I had a limitation… I could never write with the pulse and heartbeat of a person’s hand; with its uniqueness and individuality. Artificial intelligence could never rob handwritten letters of that push of life and that breath that lies behind every curve of a road. a drawn with hands.