During this phase that I am going through where I feel like I either have the flu or pneumonia, I sure wish we did not have to talk as a form of communication. It hurts to talk, laugh and cough, and reading about these cultures that are primary oral cultures makes their way of living sound horrible.
Like Ong writes, it is hard to understand a culture that bases their means of dialogue and socialization on only one form of conversing. To be honest, I had never even thought about cultures like these until this class. It is not that I think it is a weird custom, it is just that growing up in a culture where writing takes such precedence in the matter of socializing, it truly never crossed my mind that even existed a place that has not yet formed a method of putting their speech on paper. I say yet because I do believe that with the advancement of a culture/society/country comes an advancement of technology, as well, which is where the whole act of writing started. I feel that other cultures will eventually progress toward the writing trend just as our culture did way back when.
Thinking of cultures that do not put words to paper reminds me of when I was in sixth grade and I was deciding which language I wanted to take the following year. We learned about French, Spanish, Japanese and Latin. The subject of Latin was very interesting to learn about, as I did not see the purpose of a "dead" language existing. I could not comprehend the idea that a language that plays such a big role in so many other languages could exist without being spoken. The point of taking a foreign language, after all, was to sound really cool and intelligent. Why would I take a language that I could not even show off?
Of course, just like Ong writes, only fully literate persons can imagine what a primary oral culture is like (and yet still with great difficulty), so I suppose I was not a fully literate person at the time, as I could just not fully grasp the idea of a language left unspoken.
Today I regret not taking Latin, as it definitely is a great key to learning and understanding languages such as English, French and Spanish--all languages that I study.
I do wonder how Latin became a primarily written language, as it was used by scholars and philosophers until the 17th century. I would think that as more technologies arose, Latin would go along with them, as it is the language of scholarship, but it also makes sense that with the increase of literate people and new cultures, new languages and means of communication would also develop.
Thinking about primary oral culture makes me think that life in these cultures must be much simpler. Honesty must be expected by more, as there are no written contracts or calendars to write dates in. Thoughts must be shared to others around, as there are no written memories, only stories that have been passed through generations.
While I do think that being a part of a primary oral culture would be an extraordinary opportunity, it would be a complete paradigm shift and I am not quite sure I would be able to survive. As someone who started reading early in life and has always relied on writing things down in order to put them to memory, this kind of change is so deep rooted--it would be to change your founding ideals completely.
