Reading is Not Natural

Hi Daniel, what is your thought about the relevance and implication of "Reading is nor natural" in Bible translation context? Orality? Literacy? Recently I have been pondering the question what is natural, what is unnatural, artificial and supernatural? Creator creates human and the nature, human choose to be estrange from the creator and the nature. The babel tower was an artificial or human created project against God with the consequence that Bible translation practitioners need to face. I don't know how important is to be artificial or natural. I think it is important to be redeemed by and be reconciliated with the Creator, and make these opportunities available to those have not been redeemed yet.

Dr. Wolf's work as a reading specialist works within a defined scope of anthropology which includes, in her case, specialized knowledge about childhood development and human evolution. While I think we can make epistemological conclusions and ask theological questions of information from other domains, I think first we have to fully play the game that a scholar sets forth to appreciate how they define their work, and then we can enjoy the fruits of that work, which might be epistemological conclusions. Both Aristotle and Ray Jackendoff talk about how studying one thing in depth can often lead to broader understanding of a domain in general. So, I would like to come back to your question ("what is natural, what is unnatural, artificial and supernatural?") once I have more of a grip of what Dr. Wolf is talking about. The point of saying that reading is not natural is simply to say that reading is not something that humans do naturally, like breathing or walking or talking or eating. In this way, natural means something that is not taught. Reading must be taught. More to Dr. Wolf's specialty, reading is counter-evolution. According to Dr. Wolf, human evolution has developed in a manner so humans can be good at seeing and hearing and running and eating plants and animals (whereas other species can only eat one or the other) and reproducing ourselves. However at some point in human development, humans took time away from food gathering and other essential activities to create and use orthographic symbols to represent the phonetic symbols they used with each other in language. And then they taught it to their kids. Dr. Wolf argues that this interrupts human evolution in a remarkable way by repurposing embodied cognitive abilities (natural) in order to develop new embodied cognitive skills (learned), like reading. So we can think about "speaking" and "reading" (which also implies "writing") as "natural ability" and "learned skill". In this way, the relevance to Bible translation is to consider specifically who we are serving: people with natural abilities, people with learned skills, and people who have abilities and want to learn skills. I think Bible translators are well placed to serve all three groups. I think a criticism often repeated by oralists is that we over-serve people with skills (writing/reading skills) to the neglect of people only with abilities (speaking/hearing abilities). In my organization, we make a focused effort to also serve speakers who want to be readers through Bible-based literacy programs. In this way, we can consider our audience and their user-experience to create the best translations (be they oral, literary, or intended to teach reading/writing) for them specifically.