This paper by Seth Sanders is being delivered at the University of Chicago’s Digital Genres conference. Snowcrashtastic:

“English speakers generally take the alphabet as a communicative device for granted, but actually the longest-lived ‘information societies’ in history didn’t use it. What difference did that make?

[This] paper will give a very brief introduction to what an alphabet, as a semiotic technology, does (as opposed to other sign systems like the Babylonian Cuneiform syllabary or modern U.S. road signs) and then take a close look at a crucial early moment in the history of the alphabet…

Looking at a single point where several historical paths–traditional law, imperial power, and religious revelation–converged will raise questions about each, and offer some possible solutions.

Decided to try and ferret more of Mr. Sander’s work out… without much success. There are a lot of Seth Sanders in American academia. This however includes an intriging abstract, with a helluva last line [my emboldening]:

“What was the Alphabet For? Textual Artifact, Language Ideology, and Cultural Differentiation in 2nd Millennium Syria-Palestine”

As scribal artifacts, alphabets have complex and reflexive relationships with identity. Indeed, Ugaritic may well represent the first historical instance of the 19th-century nationalist ideal of a single script for a single language, culture and polity. Why? We need to start understanding alphabetic literacy as a second-millennium ideological project.”

“Thought for the day” on BBC Radio4 this morning discussed how the language of business, popculture and war had become interchangeable over the last century. And, how in the recent opening stages of the “war without end”, words from each fuzzily-bordered realm had been furiously-frotting up against each other and cross-pollinating like billy-o.

You know the sort of thing. Fashion reporters relaying the latest on silk tie-up combat pants from their “exclusive position embedded on the front-line of Chloe”. Boardroom-infighting described by jocular nasdaq-backdropped journos as a “blue-on-blue battle” hours after we first heard a military-spokesperson explain the freshly-minted forces slang. “Going kinetic”: could easily be on the battleground or on a basketball court.

Is this the equivalent third-millennium ideological project?

» Digital Genres Conference, Chicago: Seth Sanders : Hebrew and Aramaic as Semiotic Technologies: Toward an Ethnography of Early Alphabetic Writing