Why Historical Linguists Need Children: Birch Bark Letters in Light of Written Language Acquisition

ABSTRACT

Early vernacular writings reveal intriguing similarities to texts produced by modern children. This study shows that these similarities result from the fact that both text varieties are the products of incipient writing. Examining medieval vernacular Russian correspondence and letters written by contemporary Russian children, this study (a) identifies the specific similarities between the two language varieties, (b) formulates a theoretical framework for interpreting these similarities, (c) applies measures of children’s writing competence to medieval vernacular writing, and (d) reevaluates the role of oral strategies in early vernacular writings. The study’s findings provide an important tool for investigations of incipient writing.

Notes

¹ The validity of the approximation of the language of these documents to the actual spoken language and the linguistic situation in the East Slavic area are discussed in Franklin (2002), Lunt (1988), and Živov and Timberlake (1997).

² The historical evolution of writing was admittedly multisource and multilinear, with different principles coexisting within any given writing system. However, there is a consensus on the precedence hierarchy of increasing phonemicity from logography to logosyllabic systems, to consonantal systems, and then to alphabetic writing (Daniels, 2009; DeFrancis, 1989). When children who grow up in an alphabetic language are left to their devices, they seem to replicate the same order proceeding from drawing, through scrawling with elements of iconicity or pictography (Luria, 1929/1978), even through a “syllabic phase” (Tolchinsky, 2003), to letter writing.

³ In this article, the word evolution refers to the historical development of writing (sociogenesis in Vygotskian, 1933/2008, terms) to distinguish it from the development of writing in children (ontogenesis). From the perspective of the Neo-Vygotskian sociocultural model of development, these are two of the four timescales in which any given individual is situated, the two others being the phylogenetic (bioevolutionary) and the microgenetic (learning) (Cole, 1992; Song & Kellogg, 2011).

⁴ Old Church Slavonic belonged to a southern branch of the Slavic languages, whereas Russian is an eastern branch, of which Old Novgorodian was a northern dialect.

⁵ Not all languages value explicitness (Lakoff, 1984). Some cultures (e.g., Oriental) associate explicitness with being unsophisticated, primitive, and even rude. On the linguistic plane this is reflected in nonexplicit relations between the segments of the texts, semantic vagueness, and so on. Russian, like many “Western” languages, is among the “explicit” languages.

⁶ See Hoffner (2009) for Hittite correspondence, Van Den Hout (1949) for Classical Greek, Meecham (1923) and Bagnall and Cribiore (2006) for Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Halla-aho (2011) for Classical Latin, and Halla-aho (2009) for Vindolanda letters. The practice persisted through the Renaissance manuals of letter-writing (Henderson, 1983).