Author: schrisomalis

Anthropologist, Wayne State University. Professional numbers guy. Rare Words: http://phrontistery.info. Blog: http://glossographia.com.

Numerical copyediting follies

A short time ago, I was reading an otherwise pretty good article when I encountered a sentence that was confusing at first:

Large numbers are written in a variety of formats: In English, numbers may be represented as numerals (5,000), as numbers words (5,000), or in what we might call the hybrid system (5,000).

It took me a moment to realize, with a profound sadness that only a professional number guy like myself can appreciate, that what was meant was:

Large numbers are written in a variety of formats: In English, numbers may be represented as numerals (5,000), as numbers words (five thousand), or in what we might call the hybrid system (5 thousand).

No doubt the sentence read properly at first, but then an overeager copyeditor (or perhaps an automated copyediting system?) got hold of the sentence and converted it into house style for the journal, which rendered the entire thing completely meaningless.  Probably the authors should have caught it at proofs, but they didn’t, and there you go.  (I also think numbers words should be number words, but who am I to complain?  Oh, right, almost forgot there for a moment.)

One of the perils of working in a field like numerals is that every journal and publisher has a house style, and numerals are one of those things that authors often throw about casually, thus requiring some attention from editorial staff.  The problem is that when the subject of your research is numerals, you can’t rely on a house style or intuition to figure out what to do.   So, for instance, just to take a very basic example, it’s weird to say that V is the Roman numeral equivalent of five; it is the equivalent of 5.  But almost no style guide permits free-standing numerals less than 10 to be written in numerical notation.

Now, I should say that I have had very positive experiences with copyeditors in general.  The copyeditors who worked on Numerical Notation, in particular, were absolutely superb.   I did, however, write an extensive page-long memo to my main copyeditor, complete with acceptable and unacceptable sample sentences, with all of the little exceptions and pedantries that would have taken hours to undo.   I like to think that they appreciated it but I leave open the possibility that they thought I was an entitled prick.  I also had to contend with around 30 fonts, most of my own creation, with various numerical signs.  I could write a long post about my process for creating numerical fonts, but I fear it would be even more boring than a post about copyediting goofs.  Anyway, the result is fantastic and I have found very, very few editorial issues in the book.

But the authors above should take heart – it can happen to anyone.    Around 2002, when I was finishing up my PhD, I worked as a research assistant for my supervisor, Bruce Trigger.  One day Bruce recounted to me the most remarkable thing about the book he was working on at the time.     Wherever he had written ‘one million’, he got back a version that said ‘ten lacks’, and wherever he had ‘two million’, it said ‘twenty lacks’, and so on.     At first he was extremely confused, and when he got to the bottom of it, it turns out that, like so many things, the copyediting for the book was outsourced to an Indian firm.      In Indian English, the word ‘lack’ or ‘lakh’ (borrowed from Hindi) is frequently employed to mean ‘100,000’, because, as in Hindi, Indian English has a special power term for every other power of ten above 1,000 (thousand, lack = 100K , crore = 10 million ) where American English has one for every third power (thousand, million, billion) and of course British English is even more irregular.  In this case the error was caught and fixed.  It serves, though, as an object lesson that I tell to students today, about mixed languages and Global English and weird numerical anomalies.   It’s a reminder that in the world-system, sometimes the periphery strikes back.

 

Octothorpe, quadrathorpe, bithorpe

Since I am, both by vocation and avocation, a word guy, it’s pretty rare for me to learn new English words.  Since I am, in particular, a number words guy, it is especially rare for me to learn new English numerical words (my personal all-time favourites are tolfraedic and zenzizenzizenzic, for the record).  So imagine my surprise upon reading the latest post from the fantastic Shady Characters blog on punctuation to encounter the word bithorpe, and then after some searching, its cousin quadrathorpe, both of which were new to me.

You won’t find either of these in any dictionary, but you will find them in dark corners of the Internet.    You will find octothorpe (also spelled octalthorpe and octothorp, however – a word that emerged from the folks at Bell Labs in the late 60s / early 70s to refer to the sign #, known to most as pound or number sign or hash(tag).  No one is really clear on its etymology, as there are a number of unconvincing competing theories, but it’s reasonably clear that the ‘octo’ is supposed to represent the eight points on the ends of the four lines.    And thus, by jocular extension, a quadrathorpe is an equals sign (half an octothorpe) and a bithorpe is a hyphen, with four and two endpoints respectively.

Hoping to procrastinate from other, more important things, I spent some time this afternoon poking around on the origin of these strange terms, and the earliest I could find is this Usenet post from the group misc.misc from April 1989 (i.e., several years before most of us even had email and two years before Al Gore created the internet).      Since this list was composed from the results of a survey, someone obviously coined them (in jest) before that time, but probably not much before.    This list appears to have spawned many copies (some exact, others less so), almost all of which reproduce the rhetorical (possibly unanswerable) parenthetical question, “So what’s a monothorpe?”

Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger

small title imageHuman Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger

Stephen Chrisomalis and Andre Costopoulos, editors

Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, which was published recently by the University of Toronto Press, is a book that Andre Costopoulos and I envisioned shortly after the death of our friend and mentor Bruce Trigger, who was my dissertation supervisor.  In helping to sort through his papers, we became aware that he had developed, over several decades, a network of eclectic and important scholars, including many of his own students, whose work did not fit into conventional theoretical or disciplinary categories or whose serious ideas had not received adequate attention.  We also were reminded of how unconventional much of Trigger’s own work was, with articles such as ‘Brecht and ethnohistory’ and ‘Akhenaten and Durkheim’ among his eclectic works.  But the book was created not as a sterile memorial to Trigger, but rather, as a way to think about scholarship that is, “unfinished, unbegun, or even unthinkable, in the present intellectual climate”.

Human Expeditions is a decidedly ‘unfashionable’ book, and we are proud of that fact.  We identified people whose work is poorly characterized by ‘isms’, and asked them to share work that filled gaps in present thinking.  The contributors to the volume come from the philosophy of science, history, and Egyptology as well as anthropology and archaeology.  The result, we hope, will give greater depth to anthropological insights and greater conceptual breadth to the humanistic social sciences.  A number of contributors are very senior figures in their fields, but we believe it is just as critical to include contributions from early-stage scholars, including several who were students of Trigger in his final years.  At minimum, we want to provide immediate venues for important scholarship that lies outside disciplinary norms.  At its most utopian, Human Expeditions allows us to envision, “an alternate history of the social sciences in which conformity to convention is not an expectation,” and to think about different configurations of disciplines than those currently in fashion.   We think that Trigger would have approved heartily.

Coexistence and variation in numerals and writing systems

Well, it only took about 20 minutes for Dan Milton to solve the mystery of the Egyptian stamp: it has four distinct numerical notation systems on it: Western (Hindu-Arabic) numerals, Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, and most prominently but obscurely, the ‘Eye of Horus’ which served, in some instances, as fractional values in the Egyptian hieroglyphs:

egypt-stampAt the time I posted it this morning, it was the only postage stamp I knew of to contain four numerical notation systems.   (As Frédéric Grosshans quickly noted, however, a few of the stamps of the Indian state of Hyderabad from the late 19th century contain Western, Arabic, Devanagari, and Telugu numerals, and also meet that criterion, although all four of those systems are closely related to one another, whereas the Roman numerals and the Egyptian fractional numerals are not closely related to the Western or Arabic systems.    So that’s kind of neat.  I have a little collection of stamps with weird numerical systems (like Ethiopic or Brahmi), multiple numeral systems (like the above), unorthodox Roman numerals (Pot 1999), etc., and am looking to expand it, since it is a fairly delimited set and, as a pretty odd basis for a collection, isn’t going to break the bank.  In case I have any fans who are looking for a cheap present for me.  Just sayin’ …

We in the West tend to take for granted, today, that really there is only one numerical system worthy of attention, the Western or Hindu-Arabic system, which is normatively universal and standardized throughout the world.  We also tend to feel the same way about, for instance, the Gregorian calendar.   That’s a little sad but not that surprising.   But we also take it for granted that, in general, throughout history, each speech community has only one set of number words, one script, and one associated numerical notation system.    Of course, a moment’s reflection shows us this isn’t true: virtually any academic book still has its prefatory material paginated in Roman numerals, not to mention that we use Roman numerals for enumerating things we consider important or prestigious, like kings, popes, Super Bowls, and ophthalmological congresses.   And this is not to mention other systems like binary, hexadecimal, or the fascinating colour-based system for indicating the resistance value of resistors.    I’ve complained elsewhere that we put too much emphasis on comparing one system’s structure negatively against another, but to turn it around, we should ask what positive social, cognitive, or technical values are served by having multiple systems available for use.

We need to be more aware that the simultaneous use of multiple scripts, and multiple numeral systems, simultaneously in a given society is not particularly anomalous.       In Numerical Notation (Chrisomalis 2010), I structured the book system by system, rather than society by society, which helps outline the structure and history of each individual representational tradition, and to organize them into phylogenies or families.  But one of the potential pitfalls of this approach is that it de-emphasizes the coexistence of systems and their use by the same individuals at the same time by under-stressing how these are actually used, and how often they overlap.    Just as sociolinguists have increasingly recognized the value of register choice within speech communities, we ought to think about script choice (Sebba 2009) in the same way.   With numerals, we also have the choice to not use number symbols at all but instead to write them out lexically, which then raises further questions (is it two thousand thirteen or twenty thirteen?) – many languages have parallel numeral systems (Ahlers 2012; Bender and Beller 2007).   We need to get over the idea that it is natural or good or even typical for a society to have a single language with a single script and a single numerical system, because in fact that’s the exception rather than the norm.

The stamp above is a quadrilingual text (French, Arabic, Latin, Egyptian) in three scripts (Roman, Arabic, hieroglyphic) and four numerical notations (Western, Arabic, Roman, Egyptian).    We should think about the difficulty of composing and designing such a linguistically complex text – it really is impressive in its own right.  We should also reflect on the social context in which the language of a colonizer (French), the language of the populace (Arabic), and two consciously archaic languages (Latin and Egyptian), and their corresponding notations, evoke a complex history in a single text.  Once we start to become aware of the frequency of multiple languages, scripts, and numeral systems within a single social context, we have taken an important step towards analyzing social and linguistic variation in these traditions.

 

Ahlers, Jocelyn C. 2012. “Two Eights Make Sixteen Beads: Historical and Contemporary Ethnography in Language Revitalization.” International Journal of American Linguistics no. 78 (4):533-555.

Bender, Andrea, and Sieghard Beller. 2007. “Counting in Tongan: The traditional number systems and their cognitive implications.” Journal of Cognition and Culture no. 7 (3-4):3-4.

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2010. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pot, Hessel. 1999. “Roman numerals.” The Mathematical Intelligencer no. 21 (3):80.

Sebba, Mark. 2009. “Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research.” Writing Systems Research no. 1 (1):35-49.

What makes this stamp unique?: a contest

To the best of my knowledge, this Egyptian postage stamp, along with the two other denominations in the same 1937 series (5 mills and 15 mills), are unique in a very specific way.  My puzzle to you is: what makes these stamps so special?

egypt-stamp

Place your guess by commenting below (one guess per person).  If you are the respondent with the correct answer, your ‘prize’ is that you may ask me any question relating to the themes of this blog and I will write a separate post on that subject.    Happy hunting!

Edit: Well, that didn’t take long.  In just over 20 minutes, Dan Milton successfully determined the answer.  In case you still want to figure it out on your own, I won’t post the answer here in the main post, but you can find it in the comments if you’re stumped.  I will follow up with some analysis later.