Orality and Literacy Reading Response

In the book "Orality and Literacy", Walter point out how "writing" serves as a technology, how it transformed through times, and how it interact with oral speech. I strongly agree with his opinion that "writing never without orality." When ever people read text we always connect it with oral speech in our mind or speak out loud. The appearance of writing indeed enhance the way we use our language. Furthermore, Walter also mentioned that writing really helps humans to spread knowledge. Unlike ancient times before a written form of language people can get knowledge through reading instead of listen to the old men and women about their experience.

However, I am a little bit disagree with  Ferdinand de Saussure and Henry Sweet's opinion that Walter mentioned in his book. Saussure thought that "writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization"; while Henry insisted that " words are made up not of letters but functional sound units or phonemes. Maybe their opinion might be true based on English or some other languages, but I don't think it applies to all the other languages in the world. At least their opinion won't applied to Chinese language. Foe example, sometimes a Chinese words can represent more than two different pronunciation. Unless we know the meaning of the word in the certain context we probably won't pronounce it correctly. Moreover, Many Chinese dialect such as Cantonese sounds just like a completely different language while we still use the same writing system (Maybe a little bit different.) Yet, the writing form of Chinese language still based on oral speech.

In my opinion, the reason that writing form of a language always exist with oral form is that people always learned how to speak before we learned how to write and read. Further, when we learn how to read and write we always connect to  the word with the way we speak. Therefore, writing will always connect with a oral form of language.