Author: schrisomalis

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

Five paragraphs on the pentathlon

In news from the burgeoning field of the anthropology of numbers, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne has decided that the pentathlon will now comprise only four distinct events, combining the shooting and running components into a single event. But this change in structure will not be accompanied by a change in nomenclature, sparking a barrage from the linguistic blogosphere, such as this Language Log post, discussing the change and the inevitable cries of etymological impurity. Now Bill Poser at LL has very sensibly pointed out that since the shooting and running event is a two-event sport (thus a biathlon), three events plus a biathlon is still five separate disciplines and the etymological issue is a non-starter.

These issues involving numerical prefixes are very obvious instances where we think that the etymology should correspond to reality. Of course if something involves the prefix penta-, it should involve five, right? Not so fast. This is really a special case of the logical fallacy known as the etymological fallacy: the notion that the current meaning of words ought to reflect their etymology. It rarely does, and there is no reason we should expect every language user to be a language historian.

The etymological fallacy in English is normally applied only to a particular set of words: scientific and technical vocabulary that form part of the Greek and Latin superstrate introduced into the language from the 16th century onward. Latin and Greek vocabulary is often seen to be logical, rational, and predictable, in contrast to wayward Anglo-Saxon and French elements in the modern English lexicon. It isn’t true, as anyone who has studied classical languages for any period of time will attest. Rather, when borrowing and developing this aspect of the English lexicon, early modern wordsmiths borrowed fairly regular elements (predictable morphemes that could be combined with others), and left a lot of the complexity behind, leaving the illusion that Latin is a purely logical language.

I grant that if someone tried to redefine triskaidekaphobia as fear of the number 11, I might feel a bit put out. The semantic transparency of numerical prefixes contributes to the sensible notion that we should know what they mean unambiguously. But by that logic, we ought to insist that decimate be used to describe only the destruction of one-tenth of something (which earned the word a spot on the annual Banished Words List some years back). And don’t even get me started on the debate between biannual and semiannual. In this case, the ‘quinquemation’ of the pentathlon doesn’t bother me in the least.

(Crossposted to the Phrontistery)

Barasque Obasquema?

In thinking about my post on the debunked Basque inscriptions, the thought occurred to me that the Basques are like Barack Obama. Just as Obama describes himself as “an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams,” the Basques are the imperfect vessel for the linguistic and nationalistic dreams of every would-be linguist and pseudoarchaeologist looking for glorious and deep connections to a mysterious past.

Structuralism and comparativism

Yesterday one of anthropology’s most influential and controversial figures, Claude Levi-Strauss, celebrated his one hundredth birthday. Virtually no one is an unalloyed structuralist these days, but Levi-Strauss is nonetheless a figure of unparalleled influence on world anthropology and indeed on much of the humanities and social sciences, more broadly construed. In anthropology, his influence has centrally been in the study of religion and myth, but ranges across fields, from Ian Hodder’s archaeological account of Balkan agricultural origins in The Domestication of Europe (Hodder 1990) to Charles Laughlin’s neurologically-informed biogenetic structuralism (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974).

I’ve never been much of a fan of Levi-Strauss’ work, which I find too arcane to be of much use to me personally (Levi-Strauss 1963, 1966). I do have a background in structuralism, but it’s the British-influenced structuralism of Rodney Needham, which is more accessible to the novice (Needham 1980, 1983). And I’ve also taken to heart the (equally controversial) criticisms of Dan Sperber, who argues forcefully in Rethinking Symbolism (Sperber 1975) that the patterns Levi-Strauss observes are understandable within a cognitive science of religion and myth, one that seeks to transcend simple issues of ‘culture’ and ‘meaning’ and to understand how human beings process information. No one has ever demonstrated to my satisfaction that the ‘structures’ that Levi-Strauss proposes actually exist in the mind or anywhere else.

But, for me, the real value of Levi-Strauss’ work, one that is too often ignored by structuralists and non-structuralists alike, is that it is an attempt (however imperfect) to build anthropological theory through the comparative use of anthropological data. It is neither a narrow particularism, focused solely on single social contexts, nor does it relegate anthropology to be a constant borrower of grand theory in order to explain its evidence. Instead it takes as a foundational assumption the idea that anthropology is a comparative science, and understanding systematically the similarities and differences among human myths can tell us something about the human condition that cannot be learned otherwise. The (literally) hopeless particularism of much of contemporary anthropology leaves us little to contribute to other disciplines, if we have no use for our data except as part of a general enterprise of data collection.

I am an unapologetic comparativist, and in that fact I feel a real kinship (pun intended) with Levi-Strauss and his work. I believe that it is imperative that anthropologists systematically develop a set of comparative methods to allow us to draw reasonable conclusions about patterns of human behaviour, past and present. Until we do such comparisons, we have no way to judge whether such patterns are common or rare; the retreat into particularism is unjustified, absent the sort of work that Levi-Strauss and others have undertaken. For my part, in my own little realm of number systems, I have, I think, put together good evidence that there are patterns, even (dare I say it?) cultural laws, and if these are not in any sense structuralist laws, they nonetheless bear a great debt to the man whose centenary we are celebrating.

Works cited

Hodder, I. 1990. The domestication of Europe. Blackwell.
Laughlin, C. D., and d’Aquili, E.G. 1974. Biogenetic structuralism. Columbia University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. University Of Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Basic Books.
Needham, R. 1980. Reconnaissances. University of Toronto Press.
Needham, R. 1983. Structure and sentiment. University of Chicago Press.
Sperber, D. 1975. Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge University Press.

Debunking and de-Basque-ing

For several years I have been deeply concerned with the proliferation of pseudoscience in anthropology. In 2007 I had the remarkable opportunity to teach a seminar on pseudoarchaeology, leading to the Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive. Of particular interest and concern to me is the use and misuse of inscriptional evidence in pseudoarchaeology, because few archaeologists have any expertise in linguistics, and few linguists have any expertise in archaeology. For instance, it is impossible to deal adequately with the work of the late Barry Fell without the ability to work with both sets of methods and data. Given this blog’s focus on the intersection of linguistic and archaeological anthropology, you should expect to read quite a bit about this subject here. Perhaps someday I’ll even write that article on Barry Fell’s cult of masculinity that I’d been meaning to put together.

There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque. As a language isolate, the ongoing quest to understand the origins and possible cultural affiliations of the Basques, so thoroughly European and yet so foreign, has attracted incredible scholarly attention over the past century and more, with molecular genetics now added to the mix of material culture and historical linguistics as part of the often-misemployed ‘race-language-culture’ triad. One of the more popular theories among some scholars (particularly the geneticists) is that the Basques are the remnants of Paleolithic peoples in Europe who were largely replaced by the Indo-Europeans. This basically relies on the fact that the Basques have higher percentages of certain genetic markers than their neighbours, but there is no other reason to believe that it is true.

Yet there is very minimal textual evidence for the Basque language prior to the eleventh century CE, making it very hard to trace Basque history (and, a fortiori, its prehistory). There are several hundred personal, deity and place-names recorded in Roman inscriptions in a probably-related language called Aquitainian, dating to the 2nd century CE, but no full texts or even phrases. Until 2006, that is, when reports surfaced that a group of 270 inscribed pieces of 3rd and 4th century CE pottery, glass, and brick had been found at the site of Iruña-Veleia in the Basque country with what was clearly Basque(oid) language (see articles here and here).

You will note that the response was not exactly enthusiastic from the academic community. I recall reading the blog post at Language Hat (the second link) and thinking, “Huh, yeah, probably fakes.” This is quite simply the only rational strategy in a field that has been riddled with pseudoscientific language comparison, through the late Dr. Fell’s Epigraphic Society and its claims for widespread pre-Roman transatlantic commerce, through the pseudoarchaeologist Marija Gimbutas’ pseudo-feminist Indo-Europeanism, and many others. And the find was so perfect – evidence not only that Basque was written in the 3rd century CE in quantity, but that the Basques were Christians at a time when most of Western Europe was not. And so when nothing was published following this ‘finding’, and no photos given anywhere (not even in the media) of any of the artifacts, I was neither surprised nor overly disappointed, and presumed that the initial reports were exaggerated and at best, that some new Aquitanian names had been found.

And indeed, word has come out this week in the Guardian that the whole thing is not only a fraud, but a hoax of the most preposterous degree. For instance:

– The glue used on some of the artifacts is apparently modern.
– The Calvary scene depicting the crucified Jesus apparently contains the inscription ‘R.I.P.’, essentially endorsing the heresy that Jesus did not rise from the dead but in fact was dead.
– The presence of (purportedly) Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (essentially extinct by the time) alongside the expected texts in Latin script (recording both Latin and Basque language). This leads to the claim that “The hieroglyphics caused speculation about the existence of third century Egyptologists who might have created the inscriptions to teach children.”
– References to the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and to the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes (!!!).

Now, this is not the first time that a preposterous hoax has been perpetrated. The Davenport tablets ‘excavated’ in Iowa in 1877 exhibit similarly ridiculous characteristics. But given the degree of scrutiny to which archaeological finds are exposed these days, and given the demands for publication, and the risk to the professional reputation of the excavator, such a shoddy hoax is difficult to explain. For his part, the excavator, Eliseo Gil, is maintaining that the finds are genuine (article in Spanish), although if even half of what has come to light is true, this is an utter hoax. Could we have a new affaire Glozel in the making? Not unless things are much muddier than they now seem to be.

Apologies

My apologies for the lack of recent posts. A combination of some busy committee assignments, a public lecture (just finished today), an unexpected grant proposal deadline, an unusually-busy reference letter writing season, and getting the book off to the publisher have occupied my days to an insane degree. Things should calm down over Thanksgiving and I will have some longer posts next week.

For now though, since it’s floating around the blogosphere, I wanted to draw your attention to the Atlas of True Names, which presents place-names by giving their etymology in English (e.g. “Hillfort” for London or “Sibling Love” for Philadelphia or just “Strait” for Detroit). It can be trite, and the etymologies themselves can be questioned. What I find most fascinating (as a Tolkienophile of some decades) is that they use the toponymy of Middle-Earth as an explicit model justifying the aesthetic quality of the enterprise. For me the most compelling aspects of Tolkien’s nomenclature were the untranslated Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdûl, and Adûnaic (among others), whereas formations like ‘Mirkwood’ were merely passably interesting. I freely admit that my old copy of Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-Earth quickly became so worn that I had to discard it a couple of years ago after years of abuse.

All of which reminds me of a sad story that I should get off my chest. In my first term at McGill I taught a class on the anthropology of writing systems and literacy, the last week of which was left open for student-directed topics, and the members of the seminar wanted to study constructed scripts, so I gave them a little piece to read on Tengwar (Elvish) and another on Klingon. But on the day we were to discuss those readings, I learned just hours before class that my mentor Bruce Trigger had passed away, and so I cancelled that class, which remains untaught to this day.