Ong reports highlights of work done by Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria, who did extensive fieldwork with illiterate people in remote areas of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia (Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, 1976). 

 No abstract objects. Illiterate subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them names of objects. They never referred to them abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle was called a plate or moon; squares were called a door. Designs were considered representations of the things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but with concrete objects.
 No abstract categories. Subjects were presented with drawings of 4 items, 3 belonging to a logical category. The 4th did not. Subjects were asked to identify the items that were associated by naming the activity which involved the items. One series contained a hammer, saw, log, hatchet. We have three tools. The log is excluded. However, the illiterate subjects thought of the group not in categorical terms, but in terms of a practical situation. A 25 yr. old peasant: "They're all alike. The saw will saw the log; the hatchet will chop it. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." Told that the three items are tools, he does not see the point or importance of such categorical thinking. "Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood; otherwise we can't build anything." At times Luria attempted to teach his subjects the principle of abstract classification. Their grasp was never firm and when allowed to work out a problem for themselves, they reverted to situational rather than categorical thinking. A barely literate 56 yr. old was given the series: axe, hatchet, sickle and asked to complete the series by choosing from among: saw, ear of grain, log. He played Luria's game, discerning that "They are all farming tools," but added, "You could reap the grain with the sickle." Subjects found categorical thinking to be trivial.
 No deductive inferences. Formal logic was a Greek cultural invention, which developed from the performance and interiorization of alphabetic writing/reading. Subjects were given two premises: Precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Then asked: Does gold rust? Typical responses: "Do precious metals rust or not? Does gold rust or not?" (18 yr. old); "Precious metal rusts. Precious gold rusts" (34 yr. old). Another example. In the Far North where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears? Typical response: "I don't know. I've seen a black bear. I've never seen any others. Each locality has its own animals." "You find what color bears are by looking at them. Whoever heard of reasoning out in practical life the color of a polar bear? Besides, how am I sure that you know for sure that all bears are white in a snowy country?" The syllogism is presented a 2nd time to a 45 yr. old barely literate farm manager. "To go by your words, they should all be white." The qualification is typical of oral culture where the riddle, rather than formal logical deduction, offers a model of intelligence. To solve a riddle, one must be canny, drawing on subconscious experiences which are not formally specified by logic.
 No/little abstraction. Requests for definitions of even the most concrete and familiar objects met with resistance. Subjects were asked: explain what a tree is. Responses: "Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is. They don't need me telling them" (22 yr. old). Ong comments: There is no way to refute the actual, engaged world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it into literacy. Another example: Say you go to a place where there are no cars. What will you tell people a car is? "If I go, I'll tell them that buses have four legs, chairs in front for people to sit on, a roof for shade and an engine. But when you get right down to it, I'd say, if you get in a car and go for a drive, you'll find out." Contrast with this response by a literate farm worker: "It's made in a factory. In one trip it can cover the distance it would take a horse 10 days to make. It moves that fast. It uses fire and steam. We first have to set the fire going so the water gets steaming hot -- the steam gives the machine its power. I don't know whether there is water in a car. Must be. But water isn't enough. It also needs fire" (30 yr. old, evidently familiar with a steam tractor).
 No self analysis (considering self as an abstract, disengaged entity; or as comparable to a character in a story). Luria asks a 38 yr. old shepherd, What sort of person are you? What's you character like? What are your good qualities and shortcomings? How would you describe yourself? "I came here from Uch-Kurgan. I was very poor. Now I'm married and have children." Are you satisfied with yourself? Would you like to be different? "It would be good if I had a little more land and could sow some wheat." What are your shortcomings? "This year I sowed one pood of wheat and we're gradually fixing the shortcomings." Yes but people are different: calm, hot-tempered; sometimes their memory is poor. What do you think of yourself? "We behave well. If we were bad people, no one would respect us." A 36 yr. old peasant was asked what sort of person he was. "What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others. They can tell you about me. I myself can't say anything."

 Scripts:

  Mesopotamian cuneiform: 3,500 BC
  Egyptian hieroglyphics: 3,000 BC
  Indus Valley (India): 3,000--2,400 BC
  Chinese: 1,500 BC
  Mycenean Linear B (proto-Greek): 1,200 BC

Scripts match symbols to objects (both physical objects and conceptual objects). The symbol-to-object link may be complicated by more than one step. E.g., the Chinese character which depicts 2 trees does not symbolize 2 trees, but the concept of woods or forest. Abstract pictures of a mother and child together represent the concept good or contented. The sound for the word woman is ny; for child dza; for good hau. Thus there is no relationship between the pictorial symbol and the spoken word. Consequently the written symbols proliferate to express concepts. An influential Chinese dictionary of 1716 listed 40,545 characters. Ong says that of Chinese who can write ideograms, few can write all of the spoken Chinese words they understand, and that to become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some 20 yrs.

 The Alphabet:

  The alphabet was invented once. All variants -- Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Korean -- derive from the original Semitic invention around 1,500 BC.
  Hebrew and Arabic do not have letters for vowels. The Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the 1st alphabet complete with vowels. This transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures. The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn vs. Chinese, which because it requires protracted leisure to learn is intrinsically elitist.
  Of the thousands of historical languages, only about 106 have developed a system of writing sufficient to produce literature. Mostly have never been written. Of approx. 3,000 languages spoken today, only about 78 have a written literature.
  English has a vocabulary of at least 1,500,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary traces 600,000 common words back to their earliest written appearance. No other language has such a resource. An oral language will commonly have a few thousand words with no one knowing the semantic history of any of the words.
  Many cultures that have known writing for centuries have never fully interiorized it, such as Arabic and Mediterranean Greek, which rely heavily on formulaic expressions. Writing differs from speech in that it does not spontaneously well up out of the unconscious. The process of putting spoken words into writing is governed by consciously contrived grammatical rules.
  Ong says that abstract sequential thinking, classification, and explanatory examination of experience is impossible without writing and reading. Nothing like Plato's analysis of abstract concepts (like justice) can be found in any purely oral culture. Without this spatial representation, retaining and retrieving information must rely on mnemonic patters, such as rhythm (chanting, music, drums). This determines the kind of thinking/analysis that can be done. Ong mentions these features. The logic of oral cultures is: additive rather than subordinative ("and this happened and the next thing happened and"); aggregative rather than analytic; reliance on formulas (Homer: "Son of Laertes and the gods of old, Odysseus, master mariner and soldier"); redundant; conservative (formulas are reshuffled and combined rather than supplanted; once forgotten knowledge is gone forever); performative/concrete (no statistics or abstractions); the context is always one of struggle and performance; emotional rather than objectively disinterested; situational vs. abstract.
  Artificial languages: Medieval Latin, Rabbinic Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Byzantine Greek. These languages are completely controlled by writing. They were/are learned by males outside the home, with no connection to anyone's unconscious. Ong claims these were prototypes for science. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Newton commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin.