Author: schrisomalis

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

Tolkien as translator: the anthropology of Middle-Earth

[Author’s note: Sorry for the great delay in posting! I promise that I am not dead, and neither is this blog – I’ve been involved in an ethnographic project since, well, the day after my last post here, and while it doesn’t end for another two weeks, I thought I might check in, just in case anyone is still reading. Expect a flurry of posts to come in late August once I regain my bearings.]

Several months ago, the Tolkien Studies on the Web blog reported that the Maya epigraphist / linguist / archaeologist Marc Zender, who is a lecturer at Harvard, is currently offering (and presumably is nearly concluded?) a summer course entitled, ‘Tolkien as translator: Language, culture, and society in Middle-Earth‘. It looks like a really fascinating approach, from a scholar whose work on Maya hieroglyphic writing will doubtless provide many interesting parallels and contrasts with Middle-earth.

Tolkienophilia is often associated with medieval historians (and no, I haven’t forgotten about that list of sources on medieval anthropology), understandably given that the man was one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century, but I’ve always felt a kinship with Tolkien from an anthropological perspective, despite any number of rather unsightly issues of class, race, and gender that exist within his oeuvre. His incredible focus on language, his deep concern with genealogy and kinship, and the foundational roles of myth and history in his worldbuilding, were what first attracted me to Tolkien’s writing, and still do.

There is no question that, even though I’ve hardly read any of his actual scholarship (and wouldn’t understand it if I could), Tolkien has been one of the more important scholarly influences on my work as well. One of my good friends (an archaeologist) once described me as a philologist in the style of Tolkien, and while that’s not actually true, I see what he means. I was about two hours away from leading a seminar discussion on the Elvish tengwar script (as well as other fictional writing systems) as part of a course on the anthropology of writing and literacy. That was the day Bruce Trigger died, and I cancelled class that day, and never taught the topic since.

Digital analysis of epigraphic Greek hands

Some very interesting multidisciplinary work is coming out of the intersection of computer science and classical epigraphy. A set of techniques relating to image processing have been applied to classical Greek inscriptions in order to establish the different ‘hands’ in which Greek inscriptions were written (Panagopoulos et al 2009; Tracy and Papaodysseus 2009; see also the news article here). Given 24 high-quality images of classical inscriptions, but no other information about the artifacts whatsoever, the researchers calculated ideal forms for each letter in each inscription, and then analysed the letters from each pair of inscriptions, in order to test statistically the hypothesis that the inscriptions were made by the same writer. The results show 100% agreement with the opinion of Stephen Tracy, the epigraphist associated with the study (who selected the inscriptions but had nothing to do with the image analysis), and apparently with several other epigraphists. Four of the 24 inscriptions were in fact halves of the same inscription, and in both these cases the identification of the writer was correct.

It remains to be seen how widely this technique can be applied; the Greek classical inscriptions are highly regular and the signs are not normally ligatured to one another, while a cursive script would present significantly greater difficulties. It also doesn’t prove that these were written by six individuals – for instance, if two individuals wrote at the same place and the same time in statistically indistinguishable ways, they would be grouped together. This method has equalled expert opinion on a limited corpus, and confirmed these experts’ analysis, but it has not exceeded it. Ideally we would like to be able to apply this to texts in known hands and then to use this to identify the hand of inscriptions whose authorship is completely unknown, or controversial. If in a larger test, it took a batch of inscriptions and put inscriptions thought to be the work of one writer into two different groups, that would not be a refutation of the method – it could in fact suggest that the method is more capable than the epigraphists! While more testing is necessary, this could well prove to be a major advance, not only in Greek epigraphy but in the analysis of all sorts of ancient and modern scripts.

References
Panagopoulos, Michail, Constantin Papaodysseus, Panayiotis Rousopoulos, Dimitra Dafi, and Stephen Tracy. 2009. Automatic Writer Identification of Ancient Greek Inscriptions. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on 31, no. 8: 1404-1414.
Tracy, S. V., and C. Papaodysseus. 2009. The Study of Hands on Greek Inscriptions: The Need for a Digital Approach. American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 1: 99-102.

Cherokee petroglyphs?

My attention has been drawn to a recent article in the New York Times by John Noble Wilford, describing a purported cave inscription in the Cherokee script from Kentucky. If confirmed as accurate, this would be the oldest dated text in Cherokee, and almost certainly would have to be in Sequoyah’s hand or one of the earliest script learners. I’m on vacation right now and don’t have access to all the resources I’d normally have to do a detailed analysis, but here are a few principles to keep in mind as you read the article:

– The photo you see with the ‘characters’ has been highlighted in white in a way that would not be acceptable practice among epigraphers, due to the risk of misreading. We have no way of knowing with any certainty where the boundaries between different characters are.

– The dating is entirely on the basis of a portion of the inscription not shown, which apparently reads either 1808 or 1818 in Western (Arabic) numerals. But we don’t have any knowledge of whether Sequoyah (George Gist) had any knowledge of how to form Arabic numeral dates at this early period. And the fact that we can’t decide, apparently, if the third character is a 0 or a 1, even though the first character is apparently evident as a 1, suggests a problem with the paleography that should make us very wary of the validity of the finding.

– The inscription is not a text in the sense of something that could be deciphered; rather, the signs are a hodgepodge of Cherokee-like syllabic symbols. Kenneth Tankersley, the archaeologist who is making the assertion, argues that this was a sort of practice text, an ABC of the Cherokee syllabary. But this claim raises a warning flag for me – it raises the evidentiary bar needed to conclude that this is, in fact, Cherokee writing rather than some petroglyphs (or natural lines in rock, or a combination of the two) that can be seen to resemble some Cherokee signs post facto by modern scholars. It also makes me wonder why the early design of glyphs would be taking place bye engraving stone (a difficult medium) rather than something easier to work with.

– Even if the signs are (proto-)Cherokee syllabics, and even if the number 1808 or 1818 is written on it, this does not establish that this was the date of the inscription. The number could have a non-calendrical meaning. The number could have been inscribed at a different time from the other characters. The number could in fact have been written at any time in order to give the inscription an earlier date (for purposes of deception or otherwise).

– There are purportedly 15 identifiable Cherokee characters, but there are also many other characters in the cave that do not resemble Cherokee characters. We would need to know a great deal more about the entire sign-inventory before we could conclude that the resemblances were sufficient to identify them as early Cherokee signs.

– Janine Scancarelli, an expert on Cherokee syllabics who is quoted in the article, does not in fact comment on the validity of the interpretation, but simply describes what is known about the resemblance of Cherokee symbols to other symbol systems.

– There is no peer-reviewed research yet on this finding (although I’m hoping that some of you who were at the SAAs this year saw the talk).

Now I’m not saying at all that this is a hoax or fraud. We certainly don’t have any evidence of that. But we also don’t have any good evidence to convince me that this site is radically different from other petroglyphic sites from the 18th and 19th centuries, and certainly not that we have a dated instance of a proto-Cherokee inscription. I’m looking forward to more information coming to light on this very interesting find, nonetheless.

Obituary: Willard Walker

I learned some sad news today from the very small field of Native American writing systems and literacy studies. The linguistic anthropologist Willard Walker, whose prominent work on the Cherokee syllabary is the most serious scholarly study on the subject, passed away late last month. Dr. Walker, who was a professor emeritus of anthropology at Wesleyan University and was one of that department’s founders, was 82.

One of the more remarkable facts about literacy in colonial and pre-modern North America is the extreme paucity of independently developed writing systems and numerical notations. In contrast to West Africa, where there are dozens of examples of individuals creating indigenous scripts after being exposed to the Roman or Arabic scripts, there are relatively few indigenous North American scripts, and of these, the Cherokee syllabary (in which each sign encodes a syllable rather than a single phoneme) has been one of the most successful. Walker’s work was an effort to explain the development of Cherokee writing that was respectful to Sequoyah (George Guest), the script’s inventor, while steering clear of ‘great man’ fallacies and attempting to understand the sociocultural context of the script’s invention and acceptance (Walker 1969, 1984a, 1984b, 1985; Walker and Sarbaugh 1993). A major part of his life’s work was comparative, showing the ways in which Cherokee interest in literacy contrasted with grave ambivalence about the practice of encoding oral traditions in written texts among many other peoples of the Americas.

Over the years I’ve been asked numerous times to name my favourite numerical notation system. At first I thought that was just a bizarre question, but then, I figure that people in film studies must get asked what their favourite movies are all the time, and that people are just looking for a way into my subject area, a hook, if you will. So for the past couple of years, I’ve told them about the Cherokee numerals. My story here, which is one that Walker touched on only briefly, is that where the Cherokee syllabary thrived (and continues to thrive today), the numerals that Sequoyah developed were never accepted. While the syllabary is well-suited for writing the Tsalagi (Cherokee) language, the Western numerals sufficed for writing numbers, so the Cherokee council voted not to adopt them. They survive only in two documents in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma – the only evidence we have for the creation of an indigenous North American numerical notation. Unfortunately, none of the standard texts on numerical notation currently published (ahem) mention them.

The other really neat thing about the Cherokee numerals is that they display a remarkable structural resemblance to the system of numerals used by the Jurchin of northeastern China, who developed a script in the 12th century, and who were later known (famously) as the Manchu when they ruled China. If you follow that link you see that the Jurchin system has special signs for 1-19, then every decade from 20-90, then signs for the higher powers of 10. There is no possibility that Sequoyah knew of this system – really, no one in the Western world did until the 1890s – but the Cherokee system parallels it in nearly every detail – although of course the signs are entirely different. If I were to make the case for cognitive constraints interacting with cultural and linguistic variability to produce remarkable and unexpected parallels, this would be a good example. Theoretically, then, the Cherokee numerals are extremely important even though no one actually used them, as far as we can tell.

I always thought that I might contact Dr. Walker to talk to him about the numerals, which he discussed only in passing. Certainly I would have been thrilled if he read the few pages of my book that I devoted to the subject and had anything to say about them. Alas, that will never happen now.

The clock in my office bears Cherokee numerals – some innovative person sells them through Cafepress. It is the only ‘text’ with the numerals readily available to anyone today. Tomorrow, in honour of the work of Dr. Walker, it will be silent.

Walker, W. 1969. Notes on native writing systems and the design of native literacy programs. Anthropological Linguistics: 148-166.
———. 1984a. The Design of Native Literacy Programs and How Literacy Came to the Cherokees. Anthropological Linguistics: 161-169.
———. 1984b. Literacy, Wampums, the Gúdabuk, and How Indians in the Far Northeast Read. Anthropological Linguistics: 42-52.
———. 1985. The Roles of Samuel A. Worcester and Elias Boudinot in the Emergence of a Printed Cherokee Syllabic Literature. International Journal of American Linguistics: 610-612.
Walker, W., and J. Sarbaugh. 1993. The early history of the Cherokee syllabary. Ethnohistory: 70-94.

More-on-nymous blogging

(but hopefully not ‘moronymous’ …)

Today in the New York Times there is an interesting article relevant to my previous post on pseudonymity in blogging, ‘The Outing of Publius‘. It bears directly on issues relating to identity, contrasting pseudonymity (which inevitably create an online identity that contains elements of the author’s ‘own’) with anonymity (which may, or so it is argued, be used to shield oneself from criticism of one’s opinions).