The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet

Bibliographic Data

ID23799650
AuthorsRoger D Woodard (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, corresponding author)
Year2014
Publication date2014-03-24
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueTextualization of the Greek Alphabet (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9781139235693
OpenAlexW4231118121
ISBN9781139235693
LanguageEN
Citations received7

In this book, Roger D. Woodard argues that when the Greeks first began to use the alphabet, they viewed themselves as participants in a performance phenomenon conceptually modeled on the performances of the oral poets. Since a time older than Greek antiquity, the oral poets of Indo-European tradition had been called 'weavers of words' - their extemporaneous performance of poetry was 'word weaving'. With the arrival of the new technology of the alphabet and the onset of Greek literacy, the very act of producing written symbols was interpreted as a comparable performance activity, albeit one in which almost everyone could participate, not only the select few. It was this new conceptualization of and participation in performance activity by the masses that eventually, or perhaps quickly, resulted in the demise of oral composition in performance in Greece. In conjunction with this investigation, Woodard analyzes a set of copper plaques inscribed with repeated alphabetic series and a line of what he interprets to be text, which attests to this archaic Greek conceptualization of the performance of symbol crafting.

Alphabet · Art · Composition (language) · Conceptualization · Greeks · Inscribed figure · Linguistics · Literature · Modern Greek · Poetry · Section (typography) · Symbol (formal) · Classics · Computer Science · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

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