Could Writing Speech As It Is Change the World?

If we could write down speech just as it is, would the world change?

Ever had something you really wanted to say — typed it, deleted it, typed it again, and never sent it? You have, right?

Easy to say out loud — but once it's on paper, it just doesn't sound like you.

In a moment, I'll read you a line someone wrote on a wall, just a few years after the new letters appeared — a line scolding a high minister.

The second lunar month of 1444, in the royal palace of Joseon. Choe Manri, a deputy director of the Hall of Worthies, and others submit a petition opposing Eonmun, the new letters the king has made.

Note · Sangso = a written petition an official submits to the king · Eonmun = a common name for Hangul at the time

Record; Sejong Sillok vol. 103, Sejong 26.2.20 (lunar)

Sejong summoned them and questioned them, had seven of them held in the Uigeumbu, and the next day ordered them released. Jeong Changson, however, was removed from office, and Kim Mun was charged separately.

Note · Uigeumbu = the office that tried offenses on the king's orders

Record; Sejong Sillok vol. 103, Sejong 26.2.20 (lunar)

The petition said that writing down sounds and combining letters went entirely against the old ways. That is how new these letters were.

Record; the petition, article 1; Interpretation; host

About 200 years later, a genius born in Europe would also dream of signs that could write down human thought so that it could be calculated.

Sejong, the fourth king of Joseon, born in 1397 and enthroned in 1418.

Record

In 1432, he proposed that at least the articles of law dealing with serious crimes be put into Idu and made known to the people. To the objection that wicked people would play tricks with the law if they knew it, he answered like this.

Note · Idu = a way of writing Korean by borrowing Chinese characters

Record; paraphrase; Sejong Sillok vol. 58, Sejong 14.11.7 (lunar)

Gottfried Leibniz, born in 1646 in Leipzig, Germany.

Record

In a book he published in 1666, he tried to work out complex ideas as combinations of simple ideas.

Record; De Arte Combinatoria (1666)

In 1673 he took a model of a calculating machine to the Royal Society in London, and he developed calculus independently of Newton.

Record

There was a dream he held on to for a long time. Signs that write down human thought so that it can be calculated. The universal characteristic.

Note · Universal characteristic = signs meant to write thought so that it could be calculated (Latin: characteristica universalis)

Three words are enough for today's story.

Meaning-writing. Like Chinese characters, letters that write meaning instead of sound.

Note · Meaning-writing = letters that write meaning (Chinese characters)

Sound-writing. Like Hangul, letters that write the sounds of speech.

Note · Sound-writing = letters that write sound (Hangul, the alphabet)

And binary. A way of writing every number with just two characters, 0 and 1.

Note · Binary = writing numbers with 0 and 1

The two never met. Leibniz was born 196 years after Sejong died. What follows is an imagined meeting, woven from what the two men wrote. It is less a contest than a chance to look at each other's letters.

He means it is writing that records meaning for the eye, not sound.

Interpretation; host

The Hunminjeongeum Haerye explained it like this. The letter giyeok (g) is the shape of the root of the tongue blocking the throat. The basic consonants, it says, were modeled on the tongue, mouth, teeth and throat that make the sounds, and the three basic vowels on heaven, earth and humankind.

Record; Hunminjeongeum Haerye, Jejahae (1446)

Jeong Inji wrote in his preface that the twenty-eight letters can be varied and used without end, and that even the sound of the wind, the cry of a crane, the crow of a rooster and the bark of a dog can be written down.

Record; Jeong Inji's claim; Sejong Sillok vol. 113, Sejong 28.9.29 (lunar)

He means settling arguments by calculation. Whether that would work in a family quarrel, I'm not so sure.

In 1701, Bouvet, a missionary in Beijing, sent him a diagram of hexagrams. It is a diagram said to have been drawn by the legendary ruler Fuxi. Read the unbroken lines as 1 and the broken lines as 0, and it matched binary.

Record; Bouvet's letter (1701); Leibniz's paper (1703); Tradition; Fuxi

One man read 0 and 1 in the figures of yin and yang, and the Haerye explained the letters through the same yin and yang and through heaven, earth and humankind. You could say that from the same Eastern ideas, one saw calculation and the other saw human speech.

Record; Jejahae; Interpretation; host

One dreamed of signs that write meaning and calculate; the other made letters for people that write sound. Both dreamed of a language to write down the world, but their paths were different.

Interpretation; host

In the ninth lunar month of 1446, the book Hunminjeongeum is completed. Hangul Day, October 9, is a date set by converting the 'first ten days of the ninth month' written at the end of this book into the solar calendar.

Record; Sejong Sillok vol. 113; National Hangeul Museum

The Annals for 1449 contain this record. Someone, it says, wrote on a wall in Eonmun: Minister Ha, do not handle public affairs recklessly again.

Note · Jeongseung = a post at about today's prime-minister level · Gongsa = affairs of state

Record; Sejong Sillok vol. 126, Sejong 31.10.5 (lunar), historian's comment; when it was written is not recorded

In 1504, when an anonymous letter in Eonmun slandering him appeared, Yeonsangun ordered that Eonmun be neither taught nor learned.

Record; Yeonsangun Ilgi vol. 54, Yeonsangun 10.7.19–20 (lunar)

In easy letters that write the sounds of speech, words rebuking a minister and a king alike had been written. The world was changing, little by little.

Interpretation; host

The letters have changed too. Four of the original twenty-eight are no longer used, and the 1933 Unified Spelling System dropped the arae-a, whose sound had disappeared.

Record; Korean Language Society, Unified Spelling System (1933)

Leibniz's universal characteristic was never completed, up to his death in 1716.

Record

Still, scholars see his calculating signs and his 0 and 1 as one of the distant roots leading to today's computers.

Interpretation; scholars

In 2010, a team led by the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene scanned the brains of 63 Portuguese and Brazilian adults, from people who could not read to people who had learned as children.

Record; Dehaene et al., Science 330 (2010)

In people who could read, one spot toward the back of the left brain responded more strongly when they looked at letters. In turn, the response to faces at that same spot was slightly reduced.

The visual cortex, which first receives what the eyes see, also responded more strongly. And most of these changes also appeared in people who learned to read as adults.

Note · Visual cortex = the part of the brain that processes what the eyes see

Dehaene's team sees this as writing, an invention only a few thousand years old, borrowing a part of the brain that originally recognized objects.

Interpretation; Dehaene & Cohen's 'neuronal recycling' hypothesis (Neuron, 2007)

You could say letters are not only on paper; they also take up a place in the brain of the person who has learned them.

Interpretation; host

There is also something a physicist wrote. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, wrote in 1949 that an experiment is a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned.

Record; paraphrase; Bohr, Discussion with Einstein (1949), p. 209

And that it must therefore be written in unambiguous language, using the terms of classical physics.

Record; paraphrase; Bohr, Discussion with Einstein (1949), p. 209

What can be written down can be handed to others, and what can be handed over can be looked at together. Sejong and Leibniz both, as I see it, believed in that power of writing things down.

Interpretation; host

Before I give my own view, let me ask you. Leibniz's signs that calculate thought, or Sejong's letters that write the sounds of speech. Which are you more drawn to? Leave it in the comments, with one line on why.

If everything so far was fact and scholars' interpretation, from here on it is my own view.

If we could write down speech just as it is, would the world change? Sejong knew. That without writing that fits one's own speech, even with something to say, one cannot in the end express what one means.

My view

If even the tiniest subtlety can be put into words, it can be recorded. That is the language of the universe.

My view

In engineering terms, it is resolution. Only a ruler with fine gradations can measure small differences, and only what can be measured can be fixed.

Note · Resolution = how small a difference can be told apart

My view

If letters and expression can express the universe, just as it is spoken, then we see the universe more clearly.

My view

So my answer is: it changes.

My view

We express our will in words, leave it as a record, and so make the world evolve.

Note · Will = what one means to do

My view

Because language, and letters, are the DNA of human civilization.

My view

The genes of living things also copy themselves almost perfectly, but very occasionally get it wrong. Those small mistakes, filtered by nature and accumulated, become evolution.

Record; biology

Being passed from generation to generation. Mistakes arising along the way, and learning and growing from those mistakes. It is how we forgive the past and move forward.

My view

In engineering terms, a record is a log. Only when a log remains can we find mistakes and fix them. Because Sejong's preface and Leibniz's writings both remain, we can seat the two of them face to face today.

Note · Log = a record of what a machine did, written down in order

My view

The DNA called history is written in letters, and that record begins with language.

My view

Leaving my own record in the age of AI. Leaving DNA.

My view

Even if AI learns from it, leaving my own footprints, my own record.

My view

Try just one thing today. Instead of the summarize button, leave one handwritten line, for your child or for yourself.

My view

Use AI, but how far must we not hand things over? The standard for drawing that line comes from history, philosophy and science.

My view

History. Sejong took pity on people who could not express what they meant and made letters that write sound, and some years later, words rebuking a minister were written on a wall in those letters.

Philosophy. Leibniz dreamed of signs that calculate thought, and Sejong made letters that write human speech. Even if I leave calculation to machines, my own words I write myself.

Interpretation

Science. Learning to read changes the seeing brain, even in adulthood. That change took place in the brains of people who learned to read themselves.

So if speech can be written down just as it is, the world changes. That is my answer today.

My view

A preface from about 580 years ago and writings from some 300 years ago: because they remain, we read them again today.

If letters and expression can express the universe, just as it is spoken, then we see the universe more clearly.

My view

One last question. What is the one sentence you would want to write down and leave today, just as you would say it?