Category: Linguistics

Martin Bernal (1937-2013)

I heard the sad news today that Martin Bernal, the political scientist/historian/classicist and ‘humanist’ in every relevant sense of the word, passed away on Monday at the age of 76 (follow the link for his obituary in the Ithaca Journal).  At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell.  One can only imagine that he was, and will be, the only figure to hold simultaneous professorships in these two fields.  He was also a genial, considerate scholar, and it was my honour to have worked with him.

Bernal is, of course, best known for his three-volume Black Athena (Bernal 1987, 1991, 2006), a massive attempt to show the indebtedness of classical civilization to Egyptian and Phoenician influences and that Greek civilization was only secondarily Indo-European but principally an African and Near Eastern civilization which, due to racism among European early modern scholars, was not recognized as such.  To say that it was controversial is a gross understatement – few claims in the study of the ancient world have attracted as much scorn, including an entire edited volume dedicated to its refutation.  The scholarly consensus today is that Bernal’s linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence is too rough-and-ready and that he was too willing to take coincidence as evidence when considering similarities in the languages and symbolic lives of Greeks and Egyptians.  The Greek pantheon is not simply a set of African deities with a European veneer, any more than the Greek language is some sort of bizarre mixed language full of Semitic and Afro-Asiatic roots.

These are serious problems, and to his credit, Bernal did attempt to address them, not always successfully. I do not, however, agree with the assessment of some that he was credulous.  Rather, I view his work as a conscious attempt to provide a counterpoint to mainstream views, even when – or especially because – the ideas he was proposing were so challenging. He was unafraid to be wrong if the alternative was to be silent.  Unlike, say, Erich von Daniken, to whom he has been most unjustly compared, Bernal’s work was meticulously thorough in its citation, and rather than simply postulating massive conspiracies, asking ridiculous rhetorical questions, and dishonestly ignoring all contrary evidence, he was a very serious scholar, sometimes out of his depth, but never out of his mind.

I corresponded with Martin over the past five years (we never met in person) during the preparation of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger.  His chapter in that volume, ‘The Impact of Blackness on the Formation of Classics’ (Bernal 2013) will surely prove to be one of his final published works.  I do not know if he had an opportunity to read the entire volume prior to his death, but I want to echo the remarks I made in the introduction: there is enormous value in Bernal’s demonstration of the role of implicit and explicit Eurocentric biases in shaping the course of classical scholarship from the 17th century to the present day.  His chapter expands on his earlier work by addressing the role of some key scholars, such as James Bruce, in shaping views of Greece and of Africa, and their interrelations.   He insists that postulating links between societies does not stigmatize borrowing: “I do not accept that hybridity leads to sterility; a culture is not a mule!” (Bernal 2013: 14).  Throughout the process of editing and revision and production, Martin was cheerful, thoughtful, and open, responsive to editorial comment and a true professional.

I wrote Bernal to invite him to participate in the volume, knowing full well that Trigger had been publicly quite critical of Black Athena and its revisionist assertions.  Indeed, that was part of the point.  Bernal exemplified an unflinching willingness to spend decades on an extreme version of a position that, over time and with much refinement and revision, has come to limited acceptance in some scholarly communities, at the cost of great scorn from others.  You might count this in the ‘loss’ column, if scholarship were measured in wins and losses.  But this was never the point.  The point is the process, and both Bernal and Trigger exemplified the principled willingness to present a point of view regardless of its conformity to some present orthodoxy.  In my view, too much anthropology and archaeology, and quite a lot of linguistics, lack this principled willingness to challenge, to doubt even when doubting has costs, to publish the unpublishable – a luxury his position afforded him, but alas, too few of us today enjoy such freedom.

In 2002, when I was just finishing my PhD and writing my first published article, ‘The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals’, I un-courageously felt the need to distance myself from Bernal in writing, “This theory is a further contribution towards delineating the economic and intellectual transfers between Egypt and Greece in antiquity, though of course at a later date and with a more secure contextual foundation than that found in Bernal’s (1987) analysis of the subject.” (Chrisomalis 2003: 58).  It’s a true statement, but at the time, what I failed to recognize is that I could not have had my hypothesis considered fairly without the sort of framing that Bernal’s body of scholarship afforded me.  I am grateful, a decade later, to have had a chance to know the man and return the favour.

Bibliography

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2006. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 3: The Linguistic Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2013. The impact of blackness on the formation of classics.  In S. Chrisomalis and A. Costopoulos (eds.), Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, pp. 12-30.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2003. The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals. Antiquity 77 (297): 485-496.

Visualization of American English dialect data

Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at NC State, has put together a great set of visualizations based on data from Bert Vaux’s Harvard Dialect Survey, and using an algorithm that weights responses by location to produce multicoloured visualizations of variability in individual linguistic features in American English.  If you’ve ever wondered at the diversity of American lexical and phonological variation – for instance, crawfish vs. crayfish vs. crawdad, or whether mayonnaise is pronounced with two syllables or three – you’ll want to check it out.  The full set of maps seems not to be loading right now (possibly due to server / bandwidth issues, if its popularity on my Facebook and Twitter feeds is any guide) but the smaller set is still visible on the Business Insider site.

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.