Proust and the Squid, Posting #4

For this post I have a new daunting question. This question is does an Alphabet build a different Brain? In my reading of Proust and the Squid, I came across three ways of how the alphabet can help “build” one’s brain. The first explanation is that “the alphabet increases efficiency over other systems” (Wolf, pg. 60). The second reason is, “that the alphabet’s facilitation of novel thoughts, never before articulated” (Wolf, 60). The third and final reason is that “ the novice reader’s ease in acquiring an alphabetic system through their increased awareness of the sounds of speech” (Wolf, 60). All of these explanations are great but there is one in particular that focuses on one of our framing questions for the course.

The one explanation I want to focus on here is the last one, which talks about the alphabet and relating it to sounds of speech. While reading about this explanation in the book, I felt that it covered the question of how someone can become literate. Why I think this you ask? I thought of this because the explanation behind the idea says, and this is my understanding of it, that the alphabet gives readers more “awareness of speech” (Wolf, 66). Now for us who have been speaking English and know the alphabet like the back of our hand can have a hard time understanding this reasoning. This is because we have been around the language long enough that everything is automated and imprinted into our brains. For someone who is learning English as a second language this may not be the case. For an alphabet to be an alphabet it has to consist of certain characteristics in order to be “official”.   These characteristics can include vowels, syllables, ext. This is something that can be hard to grasp when leering English. But by learning the alphabet it causes your brain to “think differently”, as the author Maryanne Wolf would say. It causes a different thinking process because when you start learning different words and how they are pronounced, you see them in a different way. One now sees them as letters that make a certain number of syllables or vowels that make a long or a short sounds. It is just more than seeing letters and knowing how to pronounce them, you “see” the word as a whole and what it is composed of. By seeing this and understanding it, it can help increase your awareness when speaking the word. A great exercise for this when “seeing” the word is sounding it out. It allows you to verbally and visually understand why and what letters make certain sounds. Understanding this idea can help one become literate because it will allow them to understand how and why words sound the way they do. It will give them a different way of thinking and looking at the words, as stated by Maryanne Wolf as she answers her question, if an Alphabet builds a different Brain? Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!