Category: Linguistics

Unsprachlosigkeit

Good news, German speakers!  Despite numerous news stories to the contrary (though apparently none in German?), it is not actually possible to deprive a language of a word just by passing a law!    As it turns out, just because some bureaucrats in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern made the (very sensible) decision to abandon the word Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, you don’t have to stop using it.  What’s that?  You never did use it?  Oh, that’s right, it was made up by bureaucrats in the first place.

Oh, I am sure that someone will mourn this now-abandoned word of 63 letters, 65 if you count the two übers as uebers.  Surely somewhere out there lies a secret society of those dark souls ensnared by the agglutinatavistic splendors of Bandwurmwörter (tapeworm words), the evocative-yet-disgusting (or should I say evocativeyetdisgusting) German term for such morphological monstrosities.    But no sensible people.  And for those who prefer the unpronounceable complexity of its acronym, RkReÜAÜG, which is clearly taken straight from the Acronomicon, truly, you are more dauntless than those benighted souls who insist on pronouncing Cthulhu with not one but two voiceless alveolar lateral fricatives, as Lovecraft himself intended.

In conclusion, as it turns out, the equation “Language = Dictionary + Grammar” is ridiculous, and no one can make or unmake a word by fiat – a metalinguistic assumption that seems to mostly be held by journalists with no major Turkish populist demonstrations to report.

Good graffiti?

There’s a neat article in Slate this week on the defacement of a panel on the Luxor Temple by a teenaged tourist from China.    What interests me most is that instead of the typical ‘woe is me, vandalism’ narrative, the article (without defending the most recent episode) presents the broader social history of tourism-related graffiti and vandalism in Egypt.  Not only is it not unusual (or new), but for decades there was apparently a virtual trade in graffiti tourism in Egypt among wealthy Europeans.   And, of course, when we analyze ancient graffiti on ancient monuments (though alas, never ROMANES EUNT DOMUS), we learn far more about the everyday lives of individuals than would otherwise be possible: about travel practices, literacy rates, informal linguistic registers, naming practices, and so on.   Because Greek and Roman soldiers and traders, two thousand years ago, hastily placed inscriptions on Egyptian monuments, we now have access to thousands of voices that would otherwise be lost.    If the present activity of a tourist at Luxor is so much worse, why is it worse?   Because it’s newer?  Because it’s prohibited now?

Because Allen Walker Read, in his travels through the western U.S. in the early 20th century, thought to record often-crude bathroom graffiti, we now have Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America (even though, at the time of its first printing in 1935, he had to have it privately published in Paris due to its lewd content), and know far more about twentieth-century American English profanity and its folklore than would otherwise be possible.  On the wall of a bathroom stall near my office at Wayne State University is a carefully-curated unit circle, no doubt put there as a mid-test aid for some hapless mathematics student – almost painfully re-inscribed, it seems, every time I return.  We can see the same sort of thing in Quinn Dombrowski’s collection Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur: Confessions of the University of Chicago.   For my own part, I can attest that you learn at least as much about what francophones and anglophones in Montreal think about language policy by studying the graffiti on stop signs than you do from the text on the signs themselves.

Thinking about the production and consumption of these informal texts starts us on an interesting line of thinking about what sorts of textual productions we value, which we ignore, and which we stigmatize as befouling spaces that should remain pure.  There’s no easy answer.  In any case, the superficial scratches made at Luxor have already been repaired with no long-term damage. I’m hardly saying that we should tolerate all forms of vandalism (on public monuments or otherwise), or that there is nothing problematic with writing on ancient temples.   But it’s worth pondering on what principles we decide what types of writing are authorized, and how they become authorized.

It’s just ones and zeroes: the representational power of binary notation

This recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip illustrates a ridiculous, but ultimately profound, issue around how we think about numbers and computers:

Most of us who use computers, regardless of age, do not actually think that there are little physical tokens that look like ‘1’ and ‘o’ physically bouncing around inside the CPU or residing on the hard drive.    We know that that can’t be true.   In some sense, we (hopefully) understand that ‘1’ and ‘0’ are symbols of ‘on-ness’ and ‘off-ness’, conventional representations using binary (a two-state numerical system) of the foundation of  modern electronic circuitry.  And yet, when we talk about how computers ‘think’, we inevitably end up talking about 1s and 0s. Which is why we chuckle when the same idea is used in the Onion article ‘Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes‘ or in the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score, which relies on the conceit of a  series of ones and zeroes tattooed upon someone’s butt that, when read aloud, opens up a time-travelling portal.

https://i0.wp.com/slurmed.com/movies/img/futurama_movie_bender_tattoo_binary_code.jpg

We laugh because, at some level, we know that computers are not really reading ones and zeroes off a page.  But if not, what do we think they’re doing? I think it would be fascinating to figure out what the cultural model is that underlies this – that it would be a nice ethnographic question to ask, “What does it mean when people say that computers use 1s and 0s?”   You would surely get a lot of responses from computer scientists that talk about switches and logic gates, and some blank stares, but it would be very interesting to see how ordinary, average, computer-literate users talk about binary as a language that computers understand.

Like any good geek dad, I spend a lot of time trying to stop my son from spending all day watching Youtube videos of video games, and the solution, fortunately, seems to be that he also likes watching a lot of Youtube videos about science and technology, and so he introduces me to some cool ones, and we watch them together.    So take a few minutes to check out this recent video from the fantastic Computerphile channel, where James Clewett talks about the importance of abstraction as a means of allowing us to talk about  what’s going on in everyday computing in an understandable way:

Let’s focus on the segment starting at around 0:59: “Look, a transistor is just a switch, and that switch can be open or closed, and the electrons travelling down the wire, they’re either there or they’re not there, which is a 1 or a 0,  and in Numberphile we talk about 1s and 0s a lot, so we won’t go back into that, but it’s just numbers travelling down a wire.”

Clewett, who obviously does understand exactly what is going on, starts with a discussion of switches (real objects) which can be in one of two states, on or off, and then moves to electrons (real objects) either being present or absent, then makes an abstracting discursive move to talking about 1s and 0s, which are not real physical objects, but an abstract representation of the states of switches or the presence/absence of electrons.  And then, within twenty seconds, he’s moved to ‘just numbers travelling down a wire’, which is a highly concrete representation indeed, but clearly not a literal one.  And even though we and he know that numbers are abstractions of the properties of the world – that the numbers are not actually little objects moving down a wire – this seems to be a very central way of thinking about how computers think.  We can’t seem to do without it for very long.

I wonder whether this is tied in to the metalinguistic idea that entities need language to communicate or to think – that we need a metaphorical, language-like understanding of how computers process information, and so we build up this understanding that is close to how we imagine a thinking entity must process information, even though we understand at some other level that it cannot actually work this way.    It may be the most apt metaphor for understanding off/on switches (or digital information generally) but it is still a metaphorical understanding constrained by how we think entities that process information analogously to humans must work.

Back on track

As you may have surmised, it looks like I’m back on track here, posting regularly.  My summer is looking pretty light (I’m not teaching this year, and I’ve just prepared my tenure file) and I have some new content that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. I’ve already revised my Numerical Notation book page and updated some of the side links and the blogroll (although I have some cleaning up to do).  For those loyalists who have been waiting for my return, or for any new readers, please feel free to suggest other appropriate blogs or sites that I might link to.    Thanks for bearing with me!

Alice E. Kober papers

For those interested in a more in-depth look at the state of Minoan/Mycenean script decipherment in the late 1940s, or more generally in the life of Alice Kober, here is a link to a wonderful digital collection of her papers, held at the University of Texas.  It’s neat stuff, giving a detailed look at the discipline just prior to the decipherment of Linear B, and involving correspondence with many of the luminaries of the age.