You can easily get back to that level of memory. Being blind, I have to
remember a lot from where I put my cup of water to the names and addresses
of people when I don't have the time to write them down in braille. It just
takes practice and usage and you'll be able to remember poems and other
sorts of information easily. Now it's no problem at all for me to memorize
things and it sticks until she asks me to tell her the address again, much
like a mental notepad. None of us are very far away from being able to have
that kind of memory.

That said, I've noticed people who have grown up with oral language only
(again pulling my experience from blind people--often the people who are too
blind for print but not blind enough to be considered for braille by blind
specialists have oral language only) tend to have a very continuous way of
writing once they do learn how type on a keyboard.

they'll talk like they're saying it in conversation and have little or no
sense of separate sentences rather they think in chunks of thought that are
already defined by the formation of the words and the rhythm of speech
itself which is what we do in spoken conversation but it just looks a little
weird on the page and often there is little or no regard for punctuation and
other phenomena that are specific to the writing medium even this example
has a lot of remnants of the rhythm of writing over speech it's very hard to
imitate but i've come across it a lot from other blind users who've never
learned braille that have posted on my youtube channel

I didn't emulate any typing errors but often their typing errors have a
pattern to them, like they will not recognize the common roots in two words
with totally different pronunciation, like photograph and photography, so
they'll make a mistake most writing users never would cause they are aware
of the root in writing.

It'd be interesting to see your Conlang have more of the patterns of speech
in it, and maybe even have elements of singsong like when the Qur'an and
Torah are recited. Would it have a see-through (or I guess "hear-through")
root system, where the roots would be distinguishable through speech?

Nika

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Roger Mills <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > Our ability to remember things has been terribly
> > compromised by literacy.
> (snip)
> It was not only their history, but
> > also the laws/customs and their religion that was contained
> > in those texts.
> >
> Further to all that, it's implicit that a functioning oral language needs a
> community!! It takes a village.......Trying to devise an oral-only lang.
> puts one in the position of Last Living Speaker :-((((
>
>
>
>