An Ear for an Eye: the Visual Listening of Writing in Ancient Greece

Abstract

In archaic Greece writing supplemented existing oral and semiotic practices, and reading involved interpreting meaning from non-alphabetic signs rather than decoding phonetic elements. In such an oral culture, reading written words was understood as visual listening, or “earsight” in which hearing spoken words was akin to visually perceiving them. A debated outcome of this perception is the Greek verb ἀκούω (literally ‘to hear’) to mean ‘to read’ as seen in expressions such as οἱ ἀκούοντες (‘readers of a book’) and the later idiomatic locution ἤκουσα Χ λέγοντος, meaning ‘I have read X in a book’. The rise of multimodal reading practices today, like audiobooks, presents us with a similar problem showing limitations of a reading theory that exclusively focuses on the graphic substance of letters. Cognitive and neurocognitive research supports the intertwined roles of sight and hearing in language perception, confirming that semantic processing occurs independently of sensory modality. As well as raising questions about the way multimodal transformations influence the way we read today, this article also aims to problematize how individuals in the past created representations of what was to be read when writing was accessible through other preferred perceptual channels. perceptual channels.