Pick a civilization pre-1500 and give it mass literacy. What would be the effects? Obvioulsy ancient writing was an expensive proposition, but many of those societies were wealthy enough to afford it if they had chosen to pursue it. Would it cause technology to advance faster, religions change, or governments reform?
WI Early Mass Literacy
- Thread starter Dr. Luny
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It would. But mass literacy was an offshoot of the increasing power of the middle classes, and the steam printing press accelerated it.
What's your definition of 'mass' literacy? The Hellenistioc and Roman world may well have been as literate as many places in Europe in the early modern period. The heartlands of the Abbasids probably also were. No idea about Song China, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Either way, I do not think it would make much difference in the technologically advanced and complex social systems. Being able to read and write is useful, but no more than that. In a primitive society, it will be revolutionary (but impossible without ASB intervention).
Either way, I do not think it would make much difference in the technologically advanced and complex social systems. Being able to read and write is useful, but no more than that. In a primitive society, it will be revolutionary (but impossible without ASB intervention).
As I said in another thread, a likely outcome could be a slower pace of linguistic change, in the form of a increased closeness between the written linguistic standards and the spoken dialects. This is not to say that all Europe would be speaking Latin today, but when speaking about literacy almost everywhere before 17th century it should be taken into account that it was not just learning alphabet and ortography, but more like learning a foreign (though usually somewhat related to the spoken one) written high culture language. It is actually quite so in many Arab and Persian speaking countries today, and in many former British and French colonies.
The point of course is that in a mostly rural society, you can have most if not all the URBAN population literate (and at times it was, in Hellenistic, Roman and Islamic times, probably also in some areas of classical India: and i believe there's a connection with the fact that in many parts of Europe and Middle east urban and rural spoken languages tended to differ a bit - or a lot, where cities spoke German and Venetian within a Slavic countryside) but it would be very difficult to make the rural people literate, not to say that the elite would see little profit in it all.
The point of course is that in a mostly rural society, you can have most if not all the URBAN population literate (and at times it was, in Hellenistic, Roman and Islamic times, probably also in some areas of classical India: and i believe there's a connection with the fact that in many parts of Europe and Middle east urban and rural spoken languages tended to differ a bit - or a lot, where cities spoke German and Venetian within a Slavic countryside) but it would be very difficult to make the rural people literate, not to say that the elite would see little profit in it all.
I don't think it can happen very easily prior to the printing press. Clear, accurate copies are really important. That said, I know there are records of people visiting Al-Andalus and finding that 90% of the population was literate. That's probably an exaggeration but I think it you have a concerted effort for whatever reason (and there are reasons for it) you can probably get to around 50-60%.
The Jewish community was 50% literate - all males had to be able to read for their Bar Mitvah, if nothing else.
Making 'the reading of holy scripture' a religious requirement for the laity, and, no, I don't know how to enforce that in a whole community rather than an isolated subset, would give you that required mass literacy.
Of course, this would be literacy in the 'holy language', not in the vernacular, but it should carry over - e.g. Jewish writing their German dialect in Hebrew letters, resulting in Yiddish (OK, gross oversimplification, but there you are).
Making 'the reading of holy scripture' a religious requirement for the laity, and, no, I don't know how to enforce that in a whole community rather than an isolated subset, would give you that required mass literacy.
Of course, this would be literacy in the 'holy language', not in the vernacular, but it should carry over - e.g. Jewish writing their German dialect in Hebrew letters, resulting in Yiddish (OK, gross oversimplification, but there you are).
Well, it is possible that the 90% of the URBAN population in al-Andalus was literate.
Islam more or less makes the knowledge of the Holy Text a religious requiriment for the laity just as Judaism does, if not even more, but this knowledge does not need to be written, even if it usually is.
The root q-r-', from which "Qur'an" comes, conveys both "read" and "recitate" as original meanings. Knowing the text by heart and being able to recitate it orally was at least as important as being able to read it when written.
While the written form has its importance, Islam never gave the letters of it the kind of hermeneutic centrality they enjoyed in the Jewish mysticism, except for some fringe minorities (the so-called hurufiyya).
The fact that Arabic alphabet (abjad, actually) is defective helped in keeping orality important in Islamic contexts.
Notably, Yiddish uses fully vocalized hebrew letters, and so do modern written forms of Aramaic, something that to my knowledge has never been done extensively by no language with arabic-derived alphabets (Possible exceptions: Afrikaans, Lithuanian, Polish)...
Islam more or less makes the knowledge of the Holy Text a religious requiriment for the laity just as Judaism does, if not even more, but this knowledge does not need to be written, even if it usually is.
The root q-r-', from which "Qur'an" comes, conveys both "read" and "recitate" as original meanings. Knowing the text by heart and being able to recitate it orally was at least as important as being able to read it when written.
While the written form has its importance, Islam never gave the letters of it the kind of hermeneutic centrality they enjoyed in the Jewish mysticism, except for some fringe minorities (the so-called hurufiyya).
The fact that Arabic alphabet (abjad, actually) is defective helped in keeping orality important in Islamic contexts.
Notably, Yiddish uses fully vocalized hebrew letters, and so do modern written forms of Aramaic, something that to my knowledge has never been done extensively by no language with arabic-derived alphabets (Possible exceptions: Afrikaans, Lithuanian, Polish)...
Good point. I believe the effects on linguistics would also depend on who controlled the means towards literacy.
Say if it was a decentralised movement, whilst we would not see many changes in the dialects themselves (or at least less drastic ones), we would probably see more dialects develop into actual widely practiced languages.
In many countries at the time of the POD there were in fact many different dialects prevalent in the same nation, it was only through centralised literacy programs that one language really came to dominate.
If literacy is achieved in a decentralised way, then I could easially forsee countries (I'll use France as an example) with huge linguistic differences in their borders, as was in fact the case for most of history.
The urban centers of the Kievan Rus had extremely high rates of literacy, judging from the sheer number of birch bark documents, along with personalized belongings. Furthermore, the vast majority of these artifacts were created by and for ordinary people. And they were *all* made before your cut off date.
It depends also of the kind of writing you are using. Most of non-european countries prior 1800 or so had literacy based upon writings that are not entirely alphabetic: logographic systems, abjads, consonant-based abugidas, or varying mixing of the above (like Japanese). Even alphabet-based sysetmes may shift towards a writing standard removed for actual pronouciation, as it is the case for modern French, English and, AFAIK, Gaelic.
Most of such systems are more conservative and, OTOH, more difficult to learn than phonetically-based systems, but are also more free from dialectal influx, or, better said, they are less prone to feel pressure from below.
Arabic has a great variety of dialects, but the nature of its writing systems makes differences far less apparent in a written form, even if some are still there to be read.
The problem with a dialect-based widespread literacy is that there may be not that much worth reading in a single dialectal area of mutual understandability, since cultural production will likely still be an elite thing.
Literate farmers would still need to be farmers.
Such a literacy would also mean that atext written relatively few hundred miles away would unavailable to the majority.
Dante's Comedy would be understood only in Tuscany and neighboring areas, Shakespeare might write in a Stratfordian vernacular hardy intelligible in London, nobody in Lyon would understand Rabelais. Not that Dante, Shakespeare or Rabelais could write in this world what they wrote OTL, actually.
LATE Byzantine empire was little more that Constantinople itself. So of course it had probably a very high literacy rate for the time
. Don't know about Byzantine empire in earlier phases, but i'd bet it had literacy rates far higher than Western Europe for most time. Probably it was even higher in core Abbasid lands and in other Muslim states of the time, though, especially between 7th and 10th centuries. I think literacy increased from around 900 to 1204 in the Byzantine Empire actually (not sure).
Edit: someone who knows better tells me that literacy rates in the West around, say, 1100 AD ranged from 3 to 10 percent approximately, in Byzantine lands were possibly around 20% perhaps.
To my knowledge they were significantly higher in Middle East and al-Andalus, but I don't have figures. No idea about China and India, I expect China to be around the the Byzantine rate approximately.
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archaeogeek
Banned
No, they weren't. By the middle ages Constantinople was a shadow of its former self, the city had a fraction of its original population and the population was not particularly literate by the end of the middle ages. To be fair one of the problems with early mass literacy is not having people be literate, it's easy enough and large parts of even medieval Europe had literacy rates above 50%. The problem is the goalposts - true literacy at the time meant knowing latin and classical greek (and classical arabic or hebrew), something which indeed nowhere near half the population knew. When I say medieval byzantium was not particularly literate that's what I mean.
Oh ok. Well then what about the Ottomans didn't they have a high literacy...
archaeogeek
Banned
See edit: or tl;dr - the problem with medieval literacy is that it means literacy in the main classical languages of the mediterranean, not literacy as in knowing how to read and write your mother tongue.
archaeogeek
Banned
There's a difference between speaking arabic, which has a lot of vernacular variants, and being able to read classical arabic.
Not sure either, but not very high in comparison with the same areas some centuries before.
Ottoman subjects, with vassal states included, had a plurality of Arabic speakers. Most of them had a very basic literacy in Classical Arabic through the Qur'an, as had most of non-Arab speaking Muslims. A significant portion of the elite was fully literate in Ottoman Turkish, a court language spoken almost nowhere outside formal and official contexts. The cultivated also knew Persian, and was a significant minority of literates in Kurdish, since the Kurdish ottoman vassals were sponsoring a local literature. In late Ottoman empire printing and schooling changed things, though.
Yes, good luck getting the Turkmen population of the OE to understand anything Constantinople/Istanbul tells you in that language. I created an alagous type language for my own TL and that it spoken by the court, the officials and for record keeping purposes because of all the various languages spoken in Alt-Spain. The actual people themselves can read it after a fashion and the basics of Latin are taught in settlements of about 500 or more. It's only with the beginning of printing that literacy going to move beyond 50% having even the basics.
One thing I'm not clear on, when did Persian not become a prestige language in the OE?