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The Planet Word 語言星球
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00:03Language is one of the most amazing things that we humans do.
00:09It separates us from the animals, gives us theatre, poetry and songs.
00:15It shapes our identity and allows us to express emotions.
00:21It makes us laugh.
00:23It makes us cry.
00:25It allows us to record our histories and imagine our futures.
00:30Oh my goodness, this is magical!
00:39In this programme, I'm going to explore language's physical incarnation,
00:44our greatest invention, writing.
00:50Since its birth, 5,000 years ago,
00:53the written word has given us civilisation and technology.
00:57I'm going to reveal how it's transformed the way we interpret and explore our world,
01:01how we organise our religions and governments,
01:04and how we spread our ideas and our laws.
01:07How writing allows us to listen to the past and to speak to the future.
01:13But is writing here to stay, or is it just a flash in the pen?
01:28Learning to talk, like learning to walk, is a natural part of growing up.
01:32It's something that children the world over do instinctively.
01:39But while spoken language is an innate part of the human operating system,
01:44something we've been doing for maybe only 50,000 years,
01:48the ability to read and write is an optional extra.
01:53Reading and writing are not a natural state of affairs,
01:56it's just something that's been invented to complement utterance,
01:59spoken human language.
02:01In fact, it's not necessary or essential for communication at all,
02:05and there are hundreds of societies around the world
02:08which have existed for centuries perfectly happily,
02:11without feeling the need to write down their language.
02:14The Akka here in North Thailand is one such.
02:19While anthropologists might attribute the lack of writing
02:22to the culture's self-sufficient economy,
02:25the Akka have their own story.
02:27According to myth, they were given writing
02:30by the first spirit, Unmar, on a buffalo hide.
02:35But the Akka don't have a written language now,
02:38so what on earth happened?
02:40It was written down on buffalo skin.
02:42Yes, and then take it back home.
02:44Yeah.
02:45And then they, wherever they go, they just carry.
02:47They were buffalo skiing.
02:48Yeah.
02:49And then one day they went out and they were wet by the rain,
02:51hit by the rain.
02:52Right.
02:53And then they're trying to dry nearby the fire.
02:56Yes.
02:56They become a nice smell.
02:58Oh, right.
02:58Because meat.
02:59They ate it up.
03:02So the guardians of the Akka alphabet,
03:05ate up.
03:05Eat up.
03:06I see.
03:08Since last day we don't have, like, we lost.
03:09Since then you rely on your memory.
03:11Yes, yes, yeah.
03:13Traditionally, the Akka keep in their heads
03:16and pass on verbally all their culture,
03:19their myths, stories, and their entire history,
03:23all the way back to their founding father, their Adam.
03:27And so that's all in your head.
03:29How many generations?
03:30For my clan, in this day, 53 generations up to me.
03:38Do you learn songs as well?
03:39Yes, I learn.
03:40But for my generation, the memory, not so good.
03:47Because I learn school system.
03:49Right.
03:50Everything has to be written down.
03:52Yes.
03:54A Jew, like the rest of the literate world,
03:58now uses writing rather than his brain to remember things.
04:02And rather than fight progress,
04:04he wants the next generation to learn to read and write
04:07so they can preserve their culture on the page.
04:11Reading and writing will give them access not just to their past,
04:15but to that of the rest of the world.
04:23Writing lets us discover things about cultures far away in space and time.
04:30And some of the oldest writing is here at the British Museum.
04:34So how and why did it start?
04:40The British Museum has thousands of objects with writing on them.
04:44Some of them more than five millennia old.
04:47It's a matter of intense debate amongst the curators of the various departments here
04:52as to who has the oldest.
04:54The Egyptologists claim that they have the edge,
04:57while the Assyriologists, they maintain that their form, cuneiform writing, is the oldest.
05:05Either way, it seems that writing was not invented for the purposes of writing love poems
05:10or novels or prayers.
05:13But actually for the rather more mundane purpose of taxation and accountancy.
05:20As societies grew and flourished in the cradle of civilization, today's Iraq,
05:26so did the need for bureaucracy and record keeping.
05:30Who owes what to whom?
05:32This early clay tablet records the payment of workers in beer.
05:39Behind the scenes at the museum, Dr Irving Finkel, keeper of the Department of Assyriology,
05:45is giving some students a lesson in writing cuneiform the traditional way,
05:50on a piece of clay with a reed.
05:53I'm attempting to write my name.
05:56So, an upright like that, and then that, and that.
06:03Right.
06:03Sort of more like, well, it's not quite, it's a bit too big.
06:05Well, it's assertive.
06:06Yeah.
06:07It is.
06:08And then, and then one upright.
06:10The first teachers of writing used to beat their students.
06:14I hope Dr Finkel doesn't subscribe to such violent methods.
06:18Stephen.
06:19Yeah.
06:19As you know, cuneiform writing is the oldest form of writing in the history of the world.
06:23Yeah.
06:23I knew that.
06:23Anybody dissuade you of any other truth.
06:25Right.
06:26And it began in ancient Iraq.
06:28Right.
06:28And various remarkable things have to be stressed.
06:31Firstly, that the people who invented writing had no idea what was going to be the consequence.
06:35They did it for local bureaucratic reasons.
06:38Because they had to keep books and accounts and incoming and outgoing goods and so forth like that.
06:42That's how it all began.
06:43And nobody had a vision of giving writing to the world.
06:47That it was going to end up with Shakespeare and Proust and Barbara Cartland.
06:51Precisely.
06:51But, once it started in the world, it never stopped.
06:54And like a snowball, it grew and grew and grew until it's become the kind of intellectual prop of Homo
06:59sapiens.
07:00So it's a very significant thing.
07:02And in our department to do with ancient Mesopotamia, we have the earliest evidence.
07:07Yeah.
07:07So, what I've brought firstly to show you is a real tablet.
07:11This was written by a schoolboy in about 1700 BC.
07:16Good lord.
07:17The most wonderful thing is there is one example of this.
07:20A tablet like this with on the back there is a caricature of the teacher.
07:24Oh.
07:24And this teacher has a goofy kind of tooth and a stupid expression on his face.
07:28And this is clearly a pupil who is fed up to his back teeth.
07:32So, this is his rough book, his exercise book.
07:35Yeah.
07:35And in my view, there's something really important to be learned, which is the human beings who made these things
07:40are absolutely close to us.
07:44That there are voices singing out of these apparently dead objects.
07:48Exactly.
07:49The dazzling wonder of the human mind, as we know it today forcefully, in my view, is there to be
07:55plucked out of these documents.
07:57Of course, cuneiform wasn't just used to write bills and accounts.
08:01In no time at all, people started writing poems, love letters and legends.
08:07Written stories, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, give us a glimpse into a different world.
08:13A world where writing itself was a source of power.
08:17Writing allowed rulers to lay down the first laws, send secret messages in battles and write their own versions of
08:26events.
08:26Only a few highly trained scribes could read and write this complex script, but in doing so, they took humans
08:35from prehistoric times into the pages of history.
08:39Writing was developed separately and independently all over the world.
08:43And by 1200 BC, it was flourishing in India, China, Europe and Egypt.
08:50Now, while some ancient scripts have yet to be deciphered even to this day, the language of the pharaohs, hieroglyphs,
08:58has been successfully translated and transcribed thanks to the Rosetta Stone.
09:03The same inscription on this stone is written three times in ancient Greek, Egyptian demotic script and the original Egyptian
09:13hieroglyphs.
09:14These three scripts allowed hieroglyphs finally to be deciphered.
09:20The phrase Rosetta Stone has become a kind of metaphor for anything that is a key part in the process
09:25of decoding, translating or solving a difficult problem.
09:29But all written language is a form of code, and without the ability to read, it just becomes as incomprehensible
09:36as the marks on this rock are, to me at least.
09:43You probably learned to read and write as I did by using letter tiles or you had those sort of
09:49strips of paper around your primary school classroom with A for apple and B for bear and C for cart
09:56horse or whatever it was.
09:57But the amazing thing about the system of an alphabet is you don't have to learn symbols, you just learn
10:01these individual letters that make the sounds.
10:03And once you do, anything is possible. You can just make up all kinds of fantastic phrases.
10:10I adore playing with, oh look, look what we can have here, playing with letters and words.
10:17The alphabet allowed, I suppose, what you might call a democratisation of reading and writing.
10:22And the alphabet that we use came to us via the Romans from that great democratic civilisation, ancient Greece.
10:34The Greeks were famous for epic stories.
10:38Homer's Iliad and Odyssey told tales of wars and adventures all around the Mediterranean.
10:44But Homer himself didn't write.
10:49Some romantically minded scholars have proposed that a brilliant contemporary of Homer invented the alphabet in order to record the
10:56poets, oral epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
10:59Seems unlikely, but Homer himself does give us a clue as to the origins of writing.
11:05In the Iliad and the Odyssey, he mentions the Phoenicians, traders who travelled the Mediterranean in ships.
11:15The Phoenicians were the great merchants of antiquity, with ports in modern day Syria, Lebanon and Israel, and all over
11:23the Mediterranean.
11:24But they didn't just transport goods, they introduced a whole new way of writing, the alphabet.
11:32Theirs was the mother of all alphabets, including our own.
11:38You're an extraordinarily accomplished fellow, you don't just dig around in sights, you actually can write Phoenicians.
11:44So maybe you can show me the alphabet.
11:46Give me a sense of how it looks.
11:47Shall we have a...
11:49Yeah.
11:49So, just for example, the letter Aleph in Proto-Canonite or in Canonite script, it was in the shape of
11:56a head of an ox.
11:58Sorry for my drawing.
11:59But later, it was transformed in Phoenician or any Phoenician into something like this, which is the shape.
12:07And, of course, if you transform it in the right direction, you get the alpha or the A or other
12:15languages.
12:16Yes.
12:16In later Phoenician description was this symbol, sometimes it even had a small iris.
12:25So, basically, it was transformed into the omicron, the little O.
12:31For the Phoenicians, the more people who could read and write, the better.
12:36The alphabet allowed them to communicate and deal more effectively with foreign trading partners.
12:42Spreading the word made sound economic sense.
12:46The really important point about the Phoenician culture is that being a trading culture,
12:51it wasn't interested in leaving permanent religious memorials in writing.
12:55It was more about taking writing around as a way of facilitating the trade that was the basis of that.
13:03Therefore, they got such a bad press, because in the Bible, they are the bringer of foreign idolatrous cults,
13:11the foreign idols, and Jezebel the queen, the Phoenician queen.
13:15So, these people have never written history, but they got all the bad press from everybody.
13:20And the Phoenicians wrote the records, but they don't survive. For all we know, they had dinner.
13:24It's very likely. It's very likely that much was on papyrus and was lost.
13:30Papyrus, like the alphabet, was another Phoenician export.
13:34We get our word paper from it.
13:36The Greeks gave a collection of papyrus a new name, Byblos, from which we get our word, Bible.
13:44God in mysterious Sinai's awful cave to man the wondrous art of writing cave, wrote Blake in his book Jerusalem.
13:56Writing allowed the priests and the rabbis to set in stone their beliefs.
14:02Once written, customs became religious laws, and the word of God could not be edited.
14:09Writing has allowed one religion, Judaism, to last virtually unchanged for millennia.
14:16Behind me is the Western, or Wailing Wall, one of the most sacred places in all Judaism.
14:22The written word is integral to worship here.
14:25Observant Jewish men have strips of paper with words from Deuteronomy and Exodus on them,
14:29and these are carried in little boxes here, called phylacteries, which they have strapped to their head and to their
14:36left arm as they pray.
14:39Other worshippers write down prayers to God on scraps of paper and push them into the cracks and crevices of
14:44the wall behind,
14:45and it's forbidden to remove them.
14:47Twice a year, the rabbi of the wall takes them and buries them in the Mount of Olives.
14:53It's as if the writing itself is sacrosanct and imbued with a special power.
14:59And when talking about the power of words in religion, you absolutely cannot ignore Islam.
15:07Just behind the Western Wall, yards from it, is the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Sunni
15:14Islam.
15:14It's covered in writings and inscriptions from the Islamic holy book, the Koran.
15:19And for Islam, the Arabic script is more than just a writing system invented by man.
15:24It's a gift from God.
15:25In fact, one of the sayings of the prophet is that the ink of a scholar is holier than the
15:29blood of a martyr.
15:31Now, it may be that the Arabic script plays second fiddle to Hebrew here in Israel,
15:35but on the world stage, it's a very different story.
15:38And in fact, Arabic script is second only to our own Roman alphabet for use.
15:43The spread of religion and the spread of writing have gone hand in hand.
15:48And with writing so fundamental to faith, it's not surprising that people go to such lengths
15:54to protect and preserve the written words of their God.
15:58What Glenn is going to show you now is a sample of the book of Psalms.
16:03And this is one of what we call the big scrolls.
16:05Oh, goodness, now that's the real thing, isn't it?
16:08Yes.
16:08You're looking at it upside down, but this is...
16:11It might as well be upside down to me, but if you want to turn it around the right way.
16:19We have about six such plates, okay, six such pieces.
16:23Again, we keep them as they were found.
16:26And if you look closely here, even if you can't read Hebrew,
16:29every place the name of God is written, exactly,
16:32the Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey, it is written in what we call Palo-Hebrew,
16:37which is Hebrew of First Temple times.
16:40So an ancient Hebrew, an older Hebrew.
16:42An older Hebrew.
16:43And that's God, God, God, God, so you see every time...
16:45And there's quite a lot of him, obviously.
16:47Yes.
16:47He features quite highly.
16:48Right.
16:49Please don't touch.
16:49Sorry, I was touching the glass, wasn't I?
16:52Yes.
16:54These documents are so precious that even touching the glass is forbidden.
16:59And the next scroll is all about rules and regulations.
17:03It's the Ten Commandments.
17:06This is the only copy that contains all of the Ten Commandments.
17:10Oh, my goodness.
17:11So this is...
17:12Is this the oldest record of the Ten Commandments?
17:13This is the oldest record of the Ten Commandments.
17:16Lennon, I want to show them.
17:17Wow.
17:18Amazing.
17:19Amazing.
17:20So that alone, of all...
17:21And of all, yes.
17:22It would be the most...
17:23It's a priceless...
17:24Right.
17:25...document, isn't it?
17:26Amazing.
17:27Every child or every grown-up will, when you say the Ten Commandments...
17:33Is familiar with them, exactly.
17:34...knows what you're talking about.
17:36And breaks one of them every day.
17:37And breaks one of them every day.
17:39And these are 2,000 years old.
17:42Yeah.
17:42That is extraordinary.
17:44Extraordinary.
17:46These ancient words are now being protected with space-age technology, spectral imaging.
17:53By photographing the scrolls under different wavelengths of light, new sections of the text are made visible.
17:59Oh, yes.
18:02Oh, it's even becoming clear in the dark.
18:08Goodness me.
18:09Once digitized, all 900 fragments of the scrolls will be made available online to scholars and members of the public.
18:18Great.
18:18Fantastic.
18:19Isn't it wonderful to think that something so old, so, I won't say primitive, but at the kind of dawn
18:25of writing and everything...
18:28...is dependent on our age of the most extraordinary technological advances in order to preserve it.
18:35It's rather splendid that old meeting new like that.
18:41The city of Norwich has a long history of printing.
18:46It was the first town in Britain to have a provincial newspaper.
18:51English in the Middle Ages was incredibly diverse.
18:55Dialects of different regions had different words for the same thing, and different spellings.
19:00When Caxton brought the printing press to Britain in 1476, he was faced with a dilemma.
19:07He couldn't print all the different arbitrary spellings that were spread around the country.
19:12By setting words in print, Caxton started to make the English language more stable.
19:39Yes, writing utterly changed the human world.
19:43With writing, we could preserve our myths, our stories and our laws.
19:47The alphabet, whether Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Roman, allowed more and more people to read and write.
19:55But there was yet to come another major revolution in writing that would spread the word further than ever.
20:02Printing.
20:08Now, you might think that printing started in Europe in 1450 with Johannes Gutenberg.
20:14But this revolutionary technology, like gunpowder, the compass and papermaking, was invented in China nearly 400 years earlier.
20:23Hi, hello.
20:25Hello.
20:26Hi.
20:26I'm Stephen.
20:27Stephen Fry.
20:29Yeah, nice to see you.
20:31Can you make me one of these chops, one of these with my name?
20:35Once carved, block printing is much quicker than handwriting each complex character.
20:57Chinese is one of the oldest written languages in the world, and we all know these extraordinary characters or ideograms,
21:03and they're familiar almost as works of art.
21:06To the Chinese, they are the start of a lifelong learning process, because you have to learn each one. Each
21:14one has particular meaning.
21:16And the key difference between Chinese and almost all the other languages of the world, certainly ours, is that there's
21:22no hint as to how you say them.
21:25What's that like? Well, look behind me there. You can see the number 60.
21:28Now, that doesn't tell you to say 60. If you're English, you'd say 60. If you're French, you'd say 60.
21:33If you're German, you'd say 60. And so on. It's a symbol.
21:37Imagine that all the numbers from 0 to 2,000 had a separate symbol. You'd have to learn them all,
21:44and there's no hint how to say them.
21:48Unlike most other writing systems which phonetically use symbols or letters to represent the sounds that make up words, Chinese
21:56characters or logograms represent whole words.
22:01I'm given a cursory lesson in how to write this complex script by entrepreneur, philanthropist extraordinaire, Sir David Tang, and
22:09his calligrapher friend, Johnson.
22:13Well, pictograms are basically little pictures. And the Chinese word is composed of radicals, which are the roots that you
22:21use all the time, the small pictures we use all the time to compose words.
22:24Right. And for example, this word moon here, it is sort of a stylized picture of the moon. And then
22:30this word for brightness is a composite of two radicals, the sun and the moon. So it goes on like
22:37that.
22:37So now the ones I think I know, I've seen anyway, is this China? Oh, look, I've got one of
22:44these brush pens. Wait, I know I'm doing it wrong, but basically that.
22:47That will show you up as a very ill-educated boy. Because the way, the order in which you do
22:54the stroke is critical.
22:57Whenever people see my uncle, if he sees me writing a word in the wrong order, he would immediately chastise
23:05me and say,
23:06Hey, you uneducated boy, don't you know how to write that character? So the proper way is one stroke, two
23:15stroke, three and four.
23:18There is no other way of writing this character. And the strokes are very important because that is the way
23:26in which you look up a word.
23:28This word is wood. It looks like a tree. And if you add two more, that's full of trees.
23:44And if you add two more, which means five, that's a forest.
23:52Brilliant.
23:58Traditionally, Chinese children have had to learn the meaning of thousands of different characters.
24:16Decided that he would institute a new way of rendering Chinese into a sort of phonetic alphabet, a romanization, as
24:25it's called.
24:26The challenge was to represent the many tones of spoken Mandarin with just 26 letters of the Roman alphabet.
24:35The system that was adopted was called Pinyin.
24:39Pinyin allows children to learn the sounds of words and their meanings via the phonetic Roman alphabet.
24:47It acts as a stepping stone towards learning the thousands of characters.
25:00The man who invented Pinyin, Zhao Yu Guang, is now 106 and is hailed as a national treasure, but is
25:10incredibly modest about his achievements.
25:13Is Pinyin one of the great achievements of the revolution, do you think?
25:18Is Pinyin one of the great achievements of the revolution, do you think?
25:28One of the great achievements?
25:32One of the great achievements?
25:35It's a modern country, we must have literacy education.
25:41It's very important.
25:43How many were illiterate after?
25:52In Beijing, about 80% of people can read the daily papers.
25:59Was it ever your aim, or is it now your aim for Pinyin to take over from the Chinese character?
26:07It was impossible.
26:10Even if you want, you can't do that.
26:17Pinyin has transformed how people in China use technology.
26:23A traditional Chinese typewriter had over 2,000 characters.
26:27It was slow and unwieldy to use.
26:30But by using Pinyin on computers and smartphones,
26:33people can find the right Chinese character without having them all on a keyboard.
26:39So, on this phone, I can choose Pinyin.
26:42Now, if I type, let's say, a word we know, Beijing.
26:52Or that one there, or that one there, or that one there, that one there.
26:54But that's the point. That allows you to use the Roman alphabet to find the characters. Otherwise, it would be
27:01impossible.
27:03So, it is the simplicity of the alphabet, and the ability easily to rearrange letters, that gives it its potency
27:11as a tool for spreading the word.
27:15Moveable type freed the written word from the drudgery of hand scribing and allowed it to take flight in printed
27:22texts.
27:23There's something magical about a bound volume of printed text.
27:28I can never forget the moment I first saw a novel that I'd written that had arrived from the printers.
27:35I put it on the table, and I looked at it, and I lowered my eyes to its level.
27:39I sniffed it, I opened it, I walked and circled it, and I simply couldn't believe that something I had
27:46written
27:46could end up as that magical thing, bound printed text, a book.
27:53Printing would, after Gutenberg, unleash knowledge and new ways of thinking that would change everything.
28:11The city of Norwich has a long history of printing.
28:15It was the first town in Britain to have a provincial newspaper.
28:21This ivy-clad, willow-lined stretch of the River Wensum, in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral,
28:27was once, hard to believe as it may be, the centre of a kind of Silicon Valley of Europe,
28:33because here was a thriving and prosperous print works.
28:37And that was the industry that changed the world.
28:40Now all that remains is the John Gerald Printing Museum, run by retired experts from the industry.
28:47They're going to help me typeset a poem written by Chaucer, the first English author to be set in print.
28:56I believe that England's first great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, would rather have liked a printing press.
29:00He died just around the time that Gutenberg was being born, so he missed the print revolution.
29:07But he certainly gave us an indication that he was rather fed up with the sloppiness of those who copied
29:12out his works for readers.
29:13In fact, in one of his great poems, Troilus and Cressida, in the Envoir, the bit where he sends his
29:20book out to the public,
29:21he sort of makes a request that it isn't too badly mangled.
29:25He says,
29:26For there is so great diversity in English and in writing of our tongue, so pray I, God, that none
29:33miswrite thee, little book,
29:36neither mismeter for default of tongue, and read, whereso thou be, or else sung, that thou be undestund, God I
29:45beseech,
29:45but yet to purpose of my rather speech.
29:48In other words, he hoped that people would sort of find some way of spelling all the different words,
29:54at least in such a manner that it was generally understood by those who were going to listen or read
29:58it.
29:59And that's what printing allowed.
30:02I'm going to print Chaucer's Envoir with the help of typesetter David Skipper.
30:08What's the plan?
30:09Well, this is the composing case with the characters, capitals, and lowercase.
30:16Is that why we say uppercase and lowercase?
30:19Why you say upper and lowercase and lowercase is that the capitals used to be in the uppercase on the
30:24frame,
30:25and the small letters used to be in the lowercase, and that is upper and lowercase.
30:29So how long did it take for you to train? How old were you when you started?
30:32I was 16 when I started.
30:35So it was a proper apprenticeship?
30:36And I did five years, yes.
30:39So you pick the character up, you fill for the space on top, and you put it in the stick.
30:44Oh, I see.
30:47And for there... we need another E, don't we?
30:50Well, I was doing a piece of text that I saw...
30:54Oh, it's a Chaucerian spelling, is it?
30:56Of course, so we don't need another E.
30:57And for there... let's have a look at what we've got here.
30:59And for there is so great diversity.
31:02Is so...
31:03Is so great, and great doesn't have an A in it.
31:06No.
31:06You've memorized it.
31:09English in the Middle Ages was incredibly diverse.
31:13Dialects of different regions had different words for the same thing, and different spellings.
31:18When Caxton brought the printing press to Britain in 1476, he was faced with a dilemma.
31:24He couldn't print all the different arbitrary spellings that were spread around the country.
31:30By setting words in print, Caxton started to make the English language more stable.
31:38And printed books spread these changes across the country.
31:48He's hoping that when this poem goes out in the world, no-one will mis-copy it, no-one will
31:53mis-write it.
31:54Oh, mis-write, I see.
31:56It reminds one of the World Wide Web, really, that in 1993 Tim Berners-Lee creates this new system, the
32:03World Wide Web, for linking text across different computers.
32:09And then within what seems a heartbeat, there are billions of pages of World Wide Web.
32:16When things take off, they really do take off, don't they?
32:19Yes.
32:24And then when you ink the type, you do it diagonally.
32:27I noticed you're doing that.
32:28Yeah, because it doesn't push it over so much.
32:30And quite firm.
32:31Yeah, and then the other way.
32:33Then you get all the corners.
32:36Right.
32:37That's enough.
32:39And then you just check that that's all pushed up like that.
32:42And then I get a piece of...
32:44Two pieces of card.
32:45And then you use the yellow paper to go on top.
32:47That's right.
32:48Just to...
32:48A couple of sheets, just to give a bit of impression.
32:51I see.
32:52Okay.
32:52Yep.
32:54So, drop your first one on.
32:56That's it.
32:57I see.
32:57Straight-ish.
32:58Then that goes on like that.
33:00That's right.
33:01And then you just...
33:01Just one roll.
33:02One roll.
33:03Straight across.
33:04Ooh!
33:06Still magical.
33:08Then carefully lift it off.
33:09That's it.
33:10And...
33:11Voila!
33:12Oh, that's brilliant!
33:14And for there is a great event.
33:16I think Chaucer would be thrilled at that.
33:19And it does...
33:20Looks like proper printing, doesn't it?
33:21It looks really gorgeous.
33:22It is proper printing.
33:23That's what I mean.
33:24And you can tell.
33:26With printing, the written word truly began to spread.
33:31Printed books, like the Phoenician alphabet millennia before, democratized knowledge.
33:37Reading was no longer just an activity for the elite, but something that ordinary people
33:42could afford to learn to do.
33:47Printing didn't just give rise to greater literacy.
33:51It changed people's very attitude towards learning and knowledge.
33:54Open inquiry and a questioning of received wisdom greatly increased.
33:58And the booksellers of Paris had long been part of a kind of literary underworld, spreading
34:04subversive ideas by printed pamphlets, books, leaflets and newspapers.
34:08The printed word fostered a republic of letters, the age of reason, the Enlightenment.
34:24In London, Oxford, Vienna, Edinburgh, Warsaw and Paris, like-minded thinkers congregated
34:30to read, as well as to learn from and debate with each other in taverns or coffeehouses.
34:36One of the oldest and most famous is the Café Procoupe.
34:42This was the haunt of intellectual giants like Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson and Diderot.
34:50So it seems like a good place to meet Enlightenment scholar Dr. Kate Tunstall
34:56and find out about the book that embodies the Enlightenment project, Diderot's Encyclopedia.
35:04It's an encyclopedia. It's an enlightenment project, so it's covering human knowledge in a rational, ordered way.
35:11And presumably the world of man and letters and music and poetry and so on.
35:16But also the world of nature and sciences.
35:18Could Diderot, was he a master of those subjects as well?
35:21He was a kind of spider at the centre of a web where he was receiving articles from all kinds
35:29of people.
35:29There were about 140, 150 contributors.
35:32And then Diderot receives, we think, all of these articles and produces a whole lot of them himself
35:39and needs to coordinate this.
35:42It obviously relied on a man with an extraordinary mind, as you say, like a spider in a web.
35:46Absolutely, yeah.
35:47To control all these lines of thought and all these cross-disciplines.
35:50Yeah, you can get those things wrong.
35:52I mean, whereas on the web you can alter those things as you go because it hasn't been printed.
35:58As soon as it's been printed, if you've forgotten to put the cross-reference in, you're in trouble.
36:04Diderot's aim for his encyclopedia was to assemble each and every branch of human knowledge,
36:10creating a volume that had the power to change men's common way of thinking.
36:15His project was, in a strictly secular way, as ambitious as the Bible had been.
36:21So a really extraordinary achievement.
36:22And not just a sober, you know, setting in stone of world knowledge, but a kind of mischievous.
36:30Very mischievous.
36:31Undermining of the previous sort of church, the ecclesiastical world.
36:35Should we look something up?
36:36Oh, do. Yes, give me some examples.
36:38So I want to tell you my favourite article, which is...
36:43Aguaxima. Natural history, in brackets afterwards.
36:46Brazilian plant.
36:48That's all this article says about it. I'm quoting.
36:51And I wonder who such a description is made for.
36:56It can't be for people who live in the country because they know what Aguaxima is and that it grows
37:01in their region.
37:02It would be as if you'd said to a Frenchman that pears grow in France.
37:07It's not for us either.
37:09Because what do we care that there's a plant in Brazil called Aguaxima?
37:15This article leaves ignorant people just as ignorant as they were before.
37:18It teaches us nothing.
37:21And so if I have decided to mention this plant, it's just to indulge certain kinds of readers who would
37:28rather find nothing of interest in an article of a dictionary, or indeed something perfectly stupid, than not find the
37:36word in the dictionary at all.
37:37That's fantastic. That's fantastic.
37:39That's fantastic.
37:39You imagine late at night and he's got...
37:41He's had, you know, agave or something, and then he goes, Aguaxima, why should I bother?
37:45But now that I've got the slip of paper that says it's a plant in Brazil, I can't throw it
37:49away.
37:50I promised to write an encyclopedia.
37:51No, but he feels it's a bit stupid just to say plant in Brazil.
37:54Exactly.
37:54No, they're...
37:54That's fabulous insight, isn't it?
37:56They're very good.
37:57The work is of his mind.
37:58So the project to describe all human knowledge and all sciences, all crafts in these volumes is an extraordinary project.
38:11Printing led to an accumulation of knowledge and new ways of thinking.
38:16It triggered revolutions in agriculture, industry and science.
38:20And we had more and more books.
38:24But what to do with them?
38:25The answer was to build more libraries.
38:29For the last 20 years, author Robert Coover has been experimenting with interactive text.
38:36Is this the way of the future or just one of the ways?
38:45Oh, my goodness.
38:47Difference.
38:47Punishment.
38:49Interruptions.
38:50And I'm in a cube.
38:53This is a 3D virtual reality cave.
38:57An amazing interface between writer and reader.
39:00Oh, my goodness.
39:02This is magic.
39:02This is magic.
39:05This is magic.
39:08This is magic.
39:09It's magic.
39:13It's magic.
39:14It's magic.
39:14Almost everything I am, I owe to libraries.
39:17When I was a child, there were no great libraries around.
39:20Certainly nothing like this.
39:21But we did have this thing called the mobile library, a van that would come once a fall, I think.
39:27And I would wait for it like a child waiting for an ice cream van.
39:30And I would get on and I would get my supply of books and they would last me two weeks.
39:34And then when I was older, I could get to Norwich, the local big city.
39:38And I would spend hours and hours and hours there.
39:42It's like a will-o'-the-wisp.
39:43One book lights another book, which lights another one, which lights another one.
39:47I suppose libraries still, for me, have this extraordinary charge.
39:51When I get in one, I feel this buzz.
39:54It's almost sexual.
39:55There's something about the fact that behind all these bound copies, there are voices.
39:59There are people murmuring to you, seducing you, dragging you into their world.
40:04These are wonderful, magical places.
40:06And I suppose if I have a campaign that I'm really behind, it's that of saving our libraries.
40:12Because everyone surely has the right to access the voices of the past.
40:18Although a Cambridge man, I'm exploring one of the oldest and most impressive libraries in the world.
40:25Oxford University's library, the Bodleian.
40:28No one, no matter how important, can actually borrow books from this library.
40:33And in order to become a reader, I have to pledge an oath.
40:37I hereby undertake not to remove from the library, or to mark, deface or injure in any way,
40:43any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody.
40:48The oath was intended to protect the 11 million books and countless priceless manuscripts that are housed here.
40:57So here is a fantastic transition between manuscript and print.
41:02You have handwork for the illumination, and you have print to print the main part of the text, but it's
41:10on vellum.
41:11And so to Ferdinand of Naples, who may well have felt slightly uneasy about the new technology of print.
41:20This would have been much more familiar to him.
41:23But these days, the library has another challenge. How to stay relevant in a digital age.
41:30While the internet has many mundane uses, from booking holidays to doing our weekly grocery shop,
41:36it also has a colossal impact on the way we consume words and knowledge.
41:41We can access, almost instantaneously, an enormous repository of information at the mere click of a button or swipe of
41:49a finger.
41:51What really marks a great library out is how the collections are used, how access is provided,
41:58and the kinds of environments, both physical and virtual, that you're able to provide scholars and the whole interested public
42:07with access to information.
42:10This great archive that we're responsible for and the whole kind of library world is collectively responsible for.
42:16It really needs to be used to be, you know, meaningful.
42:21Will you move in the next hundred years away from receiving atomic matter?
42:25And will you actually ask publishers instead of providing you with physical books?
42:29That process has already begun, and it's really actually driven by the publishers.
42:33So there are now many publishers who only publish electronically.
42:36So we have to do digital preservation.
42:40So you have library shelves, but you also have racks of servers.
42:43We certainly do, and so we also have staff whose job it is to keep stuff safe,
42:48to keep the bits alive, so that scholars in 400 years' time will be able to access the information that's
42:55being produced now,
42:56just as we're able to access the information printed by...
43:00Yes, it's a different expertise.
43:03We're producing and consuming more and more words in a digital form.
43:10But do our technological advances mean that the printed version of the book will become as moribund as the clay
43:16cuneiform tablet?
43:18Professor Robert Danton, director of Harvard University Library, is an expert on the history of books.
43:24Well, I have been invited to so many conferences on the death of the book that I'm convinced it's very
43:31much alive, and we have statistics to prove it.
43:34Each year, more books are produced than the previous year.
43:37There was a dip during the recession, but next year there will be one million new titles produced worldwide.
43:44And yet, at the same time, more digital works are coming out, and the future is decidedly digital.
43:50But I think we're living in a time of transition in which the two media coexist, and I think that's
43:58what makes it so exciting.
43:59And they'll continue to coexist?
44:01Well, one thing we've learned in the history of books, which is a huge expanding field, is that one medium
44:07does not displace another.
44:08So, of course, as you know, the radio did not displace the newspaper, and television did not kill the radio,
44:16and the internet did not destroy television, and so on.
44:20So, I think actually what's happening now is that the electronic means of communication, all kinds of handheld devices in
44:29which people read books, are actually increasing the sales of ordinary printed books.
44:35Well, the same number of people are reading more, one or the other.
44:39I think both. I think both. But that I can't absolutely prove.
44:43However, it's certain, I think, that a lot of people use handheld electronic devices for one kind of reading, and
44:52they use a codex for another kind of reading,
44:54and that the interest in availability of books online is getting people more excited about reading in general.
45:02So, I think it's a fascinating moment when reading itself is undergoing a change.
45:10I like to have a foot in both camps, the shiny new digital world of technology and the traditional path
45:17to knowledge which is embodied by the library.
45:20I do hope that libraries survive. They are more than just buildings, in the same way that books are more
45:27than just print and paper.
45:29As the poet, philosopher, and political theorist John Milton said, books are not absolutely dead things.
45:36They do contain a potency of life. He who destroys a book kills reason itself.
45:41Perhaps that's why, as we all know, one of the first acts of a tyrant is to destroy a library
45:47and to burn books.
45:50They want to control literature, and the elitists want to hoard the power and the knowledge that is contained in
45:57books.
45:58But digital words cannot be burned, and myriad connections of the web make online information mercurial.
46:07The internet is not only radically transforming our way of storing what we write,
46:12it is bringing about a new raft of changes in what is written and who writes it.
46:18A man who has pioneered our exploration of this new technological frontier is the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.
46:26When we look back at the history of the encyclopedia, Diderot, the French encyclopedist,
46:32the basic philosophy of Wikipedia is essentially the same.
46:36They had the idea of collecting the world's knowledge and making it more accessible to more people.
46:41And they did an amazing job.
46:44But one of the problems that the traditional encyclopedia form always had is that, you know,
46:49once it's done and you publish it, it's done.
46:50And it's really hard to revise, really hard to update.
46:53Whereas the next edition of Wikipedia, well, it happened since I started the sentence.
46:59One of the reasons Wikipedia can update so quickly is that it's written by the public rather than a select
47:05group of editors.
47:07That whole process just couldn't exist in the past.
47:11You know, it was a one-way medium.
47:13A few people wrote and everybody else read.
47:15Now everybody's participating in the writing.
47:17And I think that you just can't dismiss that as, you know, it's one thing to read a book and
47:23feel like you understand political philosophy.
47:25It's another thing to go out and have a discussion or a debate about it and realize how little you
47:29actually knew,
47:29how much more deeper and richer your understanding is with other people, you know, discussing things with you.
47:36Wikipedia is a part of the long-term enlightenment trend.
47:40It's part of this idea that everyone should have access to knowledge, that democratization of information is good for the
47:46world.
47:47One type of search that people do is they just want to know something.
47:50You know, you hear on the news in Azerbaijan and you think, oh, Azerbaijan, I kind of sort of know
47:54where that is and I don't really remember.
47:56And you just go and you look it up and you just go and you say, okay, no, I understand
47:59what the situation is there and all those kinds of things.
48:02That's a very human impulse, this desire to know things.
48:05So we are at an event horizon where publishers could disappear and a whole new way of experiencing writing is
48:12in the offing.
48:13I asked the author Hanif Qureshi.
48:16Is it the same thing to read a digital book as a physical book?
48:20Well, I think there'll be new kinds of books made because people will read them on iPads and so on,
48:28which means that they can use bits of film, they can use colour, they can use drawings,
48:35they can introduce footnotes that go on for pages and pages.
48:38So I think the new technology is a fantastic opportunity for new forms, you know, just as the invention of
48:44film.
48:44You know, then we had the cinema digital, then we had new forms of pop music and so on.
48:49I think that the iPad particularly will generate writers to make new forms of books, new forms of writing that
48:57we haven't even thought of yet.
49:00For the last 20 years, author Robert Coover has been experimenting with interactive text.
49:07Is this the way of the future or just one of the ways?
49:10Oh! Oh, this is fantastic. Oh my goodness, indifference, punishment, interruptions.
49:20And I'm in a cube.
49:22This is the 3D virtual reality cave, an amazing interface between writer and reader.
49:30Oh my goodness, this is magical. It's all got huger and it's all...
49:36Coover's work is fascinating but can never really have a mass market, it's just too expensive.
49:46But at the world-renowned MIT in Boston, some of the brightest and most technologically savvy people in the world
49:53are trying to find out other ways we might record and transmit information in the future for all of us.
50:00The researchers at the MIT Media Center are also experimenting with new ways of sharing stories.
50:08So what we have here is called the Neverending Drawing Machine and it's an e-book but an e-book
50:12of a different sort.
50:13It's made out of paper and not only is the book itself tangible but also it's possible to incorporate tangible
50:21objects into it.
50:23So this book is networked and as we turn the pages, what appears on the page...
50:28Oh, a new page comes up.
50:30The idea is that people, even miles apart, could interact via the book, adding their own images and text to
50:38create a communal interactive story.
50:40So part of the idea of the project is to make interfaces for creative collaborations that go across boundaries.
50:49So one is generational, another one is cultural, another one is, yeah, like acquired learning skills, you know.
50:55Like, for example, I could play this with my grandfather, though he was never trained in computer science
51:01The professor would not know how to turn on a computer, but that wouldn't be a problem.
51:05But he can turn a page and he can...
51:07He can turn a page and he can press a button, that's really easy.
51:10And move objects around, yeah.
51:10Exactly, and he can just have the freedom of using stuff that he finds familiar in his environment.
51:15For the researchers here, the key word is interactivity.
51:19The person reading the book is also adding content.
51:23They're also experimenting with new ways of recording and relaying information.
51:28For them, the senses of sight and hearing are just part of the story.
51:32A truly immersive method of communication would also involve the sense of touch.
51:38We want to build technologies that are not just in our world, but they're also intimate with our own bodies.
51:46And they're communicating with us at every millimetre, at every millisecond.
51:51Their idea is to record someone's movements, then allow a second person to feel them via the medium of a
51:58jacket, as a kind of second skin.
52:01And as you say, the implications for gaming and a sort of narrative world in which you can participate.
52:09Absolutely. Imagine, you know, if you can go to, if you can download your data for your grandson, who, you
52:17know, 20, 30, 40 years from now, can actually live through a day of your life.
52:22Oh, my God.
52:22And so you can connect people through space and time and cultures and ages.
52:29Stories is what makes us human, and we need to create new containers to tell the stories is what really
52:35drives me.
52:36Exactly. I suppose it's about it all being human shaped, not technology shaped.
52:40The technology shapes itself to the human, not the human to the technology.
52:44And talking of shaping, I mean, Ken is very slim and properly built, and I'm great.
52:49But is it possible to try this on, do you think?
52:52Yeah, we can try it on.
52:52Shall I have a go? I'd love to just get a feel.
52:55Let's keep it here.
52:56Yeah.
52:57Sort of on, isn't it?
52:58Yeah, exactly.
53:00And so in your hands, if you move your hands, you will feel that it's as if I'm pushing you.
53:10Yes.
53:10And it's not like I'm holding you and moving you. It's just a subtle.
53:14Yeah, almost more like a magnet being in a magnetic field, isn't it? That slight feeling of...
53:18Exactly.
53:20All these technologies are ways of recording and transmitting feelings, ideas and stories.
53:27You could say that they're writing, but not as we know it.
53:30They're the next generation of communication for a world that is transcending the written word.
53:39Even if reading and writing were to disappear tomorrow, I would argue that the changes they
53:43have made to us, technological, cultural, intellectual, and in terms of the adaptation
53:46of memory and the transmission of history, they would remain.
53:50We may have invented reading and writing, but reading and writing have reinvented us.
53:55But one thing that has never changed is our eternal love of storytelling.
54:00And that predates even reading and writing.
54:03And that's what I'm going to be looking at next time.
54:05Thank you very much.
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