The Evanescence of Sound
What does it mean to exist in a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing? Such people cannot "look up" anything—the phrase itself would be meaningless. Words exist only as sounds, events that vanish as soon as they occur. You cannot stop sound and still have sound; you can only have silence. This evanescence is not incidental but constitutive of how oral cultures experience language and thought.
Words are not things to be examined but happenings that emerge from living bodies. The Hebrew term dabar, meaning both "word" and "event," captures this reality. For oral peoples, words carry inherent power—something must be happening for sound to exist—which explains the near-universal belief in the magical potency of spoken words and names.
Because knowledge exists only when it can be recalled, oral cultures must shape their thinking in memorable patterns. "Think memorable thoughts" becomes the cardinal rule. This means heavy reliance on rhythm, repetition, alliteration, antithesis, formulas, and standard thematic settings. Proverbs are not ornamental but constitutive of law and wisdom. The sophisticated oral thinker differs from the unsophisticated not by abandoning these patterns but by using them more skillfully.
Characteristic Features of Oral Thought
Ong identified nine characteristics distinguishing oral thought and expression, each reflecting adaptation to a world where knowledge exists only in memory.
Additive rather than subordinative. Oral discourse chains clauses with and rather than nesting them in complex grammatical hierarchies. The Hebrew Bible's creation narrative exemplifies the pattern: "And God said... and there was... and God saw... and there was evening and there was morning." When the Douay translators rendered Genesis into English, they preserved this structure; later translators "improved" it by systematically converting coordination into subordination, imposing literate cognitive patterns on oral source material.
Aggregative rather than analytic. Oral thought prefers clusters like "the brave soldier" or "the beautiful princess" to simple nouns. These formulas cannot be casually dismantled because assembling them took generations and there is nowhere outside the mind to store them. The epithets of oral tradition are not ornamental but structural.
Redundant. Oral discourse repeats itself frequently because what cannot be revisited must be reinforced. With nothing outside the mind to consult, speakers must keep restating what they have said to keep both themselves and listeners on track. This redundancy is more natural to thought than the sparse linearity of written prose, which requires the artificial constraint of slow handwriting to achieve.
Conservative. Oral cultures invest enormous energy in repeating what has been learned because unspoken knowledge vanishes. The wise elder who knows the old stories commands respect. Writing transfers this conservative function to texts and frees the mind for speculation.
Close to the human lifeworld. Oral thought cannot generate the neutral lists and abstract categories that writing enables. The Iliad's catalogue of ships presents geographic and political information embedded in narrative and human action, not as detached inventory.
Agonistic. Oral cultures are full of verbal combat, bragging, name-calling, and ritual insults. Knowledge remains embedded in human struggle rather than abstracted into impersonal domains. In "verbomotor" cultures—societies that remain significantly word-oriented and person-interactive—even business becomes rhetoric; a purchase at a bazaar is a verbal duel.
Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. Learning in oral cultures means "getting with it"—merging with the known rather than standing back from it. Performers slip into first person when describing their heroes; audiences merge with narrators and characters.
Homeostatic. Oral cultures live in a present that maintains equilibrium by forgetting whatever has lost current relevance. Genealogies adjust unconsciously to reflect changed social relations; words lose archaic meanings when referents disappear from lived experience. The past serves the present rather than standing as independent record.
Situational rather than abstract. Oral thought organises the world through practical situations rather than abstract categories. This characteristic emerges most vividly in fieldwork.
The Luria Experiments
The most striking evidence for oral thought's distinctiveness comes from fieldwork conducted before the oral-literate distinction was fully theorised. In 1931-32, the Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria studied illiterate peoples in remote areas of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia—communities then undergoing rapid social change but still preserving substantial elements of primary oral culture. His findings, suppressed for decades under Stalin and only published in 1974, reveal a cognitive orientation so different from literate habits that it challenges assumptions about what thinking is.
When Luria showed subjects drawings of geometrical figures and asked them to identify shapes, they named concrete objects. A circle was a plate, a sieve, a bucket, a watch, or the moon. A square was a mirror, a door, a house, or an apricot-drying board. The abstract category "circle" or "square" held no purchase; identification proceeded through concrete resemblance to objects in the lifeworld.
When asked which items in a group belonged together, subjects organised by practical situation rather than categorical class. Presented with drawings of a hammer, a saw, a log, and a hatchet, literate subjects immediately exclude the log—three tools and one non-tool. Luria's illiterate subjects found this grouping senseless. "They're all alike," one explained. "The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw."
The experimenter pressed: what if someone said that the hammer, saw, and hatchet are all tools? "A 'tool'—what good is it if it can't do anything? You need the log for the work."
This is not failure to think. It is thinking organised around action and situation rather than abstract category. The literate mind, trained to sort objects into taxonomic classes, struggles to recognise this as cognition at all—which is precisely Ong's point about how thoroughly writing has restructured our sense of what thought looks like.
Luria's most revealing experiments involved syllogistic reasoning. He presented subjects with premises and asked them to draw conclusions:
In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north and there is always snow there. What colour are the bears there?
The response: "I don't know. I've seen a black bear. I've never seen any others... Each locality has its own animals."
The experimenter tried again, emphasising the premises. The subject replied: "Your words can be answered only by someone who was there, and if a person wasn't there he can't say anything on the basis of your words."
These responses do not indicate inability to reason. They indicate refusal to operate with premises not grounded in direct experience. The syllogism asks subjects to accept a hypothetical starting point and follow its logical implications regardless of personal knowledge. This operation—so natural to literate minds that formal education largely consists of training it—requires treating language as a closed system whose internal relationships can be manipulated independent of experiential verification.
Oral thought resists this move. Words are not objects to be manipulated but events anchored in situations. The question about bears is not a logical puzzle but a request for testimony, and testimony requires presence. "If a person wasn't there he can't say anything on the basis of your words."
Perhaps most striking were the difficulties with abstract self-analysis. When Luria asked subjects to describe their own characters—their strengths, weaknesses, qualities—they deflected into external circumstances:
"What can I say about my own heart? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can't say anything."
"How can I talk about my character? I came here from Uch-Kurgan; I was very poor, and now I'm married and have children."
"We behave well—if we were bad people, no one would respect us."
The question asks for introspective self-characterisation—what kind of person are you? The answers provide social location, reputation, and behaviour observable by others. The interior psychological vocabulary that literate cultures take for granted—"I'm ambitious," "I tend toward anxiety," "I'm an introvert"—was not available, or rather, was not the natural mode of self-description.
Oral Memory and Composition
If oral thought cannot operate with abstract categories, decontextualised syllogisms, or interiorised self-analysis, how does it manage complex knowledge? The answer lies in the oral memory system, which Parry and Lord documented through fieldwork with oral poets in Yugoslavia.
Lord recorded singers who could perform epic poems of thousands of lines—some approaching the length of the Odyssey—without written texts and without verbatim memorisation. When asked, the singers insisted they performed songs "word for word" the same each time. Recordings proved otherwise: no two performances matched exactly. Yet the songs were recognisably the same story, the same characters, the same episodes.
What the singers memorised was not a fixed text but a repertoire of formulas, themes, and narrative patterns. Performance was composition: the singer assembled familiar elements in real time, adapting to audience response, expanding or compressing episodes according to circumstance. "A singer effects, not a transfer of his own intentions, but a conventional realisation of traditional thought for his listeners, including himself." The singer was not transmitting a memorised text but remembering songs heard from other singers, "always differently stitched together for this particular occasion and audience."
Ong cited the case of Candi Rureke, a Nyanga bard in central Africa asked by researchers to narrate all the Mwindo stories in sequence—something never done before. He performed for twelve days before a fluid audience while three scribes took down his words, becoming totally exhausted by the effort. This is not much like writing a novel. The oral epic exists not as a fixed artifact but as potential actualised through performance, shaped by the interaction of singer, audience, and remembered tradition.
Oral memorisation also has a somatic component: bards rock, gesture, and manipulate instruments. The spoken word never exists in merely verbal context but always engages the body.
Sound and Interiority
Ong devoted sustained attention to sound's unique relationship to interiority. Unlike vision, which presents surfaces and works best when objects are still, sound reveals interior structures without violating them—you can rap a box to learn if it is hollow. Sound incorporates rather than isolates: the listener is at the centre of an auditory world that envelops from all directions, unlike vision which comes from one direction at a time. The visual ideal is clarity and distinctness (dissection); the auditory ideal is harmony (putting together).
These characteristics of sound shape oral consciousness toward unification and participation. The spoken word, proceeding from the human interior and manifesting persons to one another, forms close-knit groups in ways that writing and reading—solitary activities—cannot. This connects orality to the sacral: in most religions God "speaks" rather than writes, and the spoken word retains primacy even in textually supported traditions.
Homer called words "winged"—evanescent, powerful, and free, lifting language beyond the static object-world. To construct a logic of writing without investigating the orality from which it emerged is to limit understanding, though freeing ourselves from chirographic bias may be more difficult than any of us can imagine.