Category: Linguistics

Counting change: the anthropology of numerical notation

(Not sure if any of my readership is in the Detroit area and might be able to attend, but just in case…)

Counting Change

The anthropology of numerical notation

Stephen Chrisomalis
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Monday, April 5, 12:30 – 2:30 pm
McGregor Conference Center, Wayne State University, Rooms B & C

In his new book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2010), Stephen Chrisomalis presents a linguistic, cognitive, and anthropological history of written numeral systems, comparing over 100 different systems used over the past 5,500 years. He invites members of the community of scholars and the public to join him for this book launch and luncheon.

In this lecture, Dr. Chrisomalis aims his work on numerals at the heart of anthropological theory, seeking to refigure thinking about historical processes in the social sciences. As the integrative core of the social sciences, anthropology has an obligation to compare processes of change across time and space. The richness and time-depth of the evidence in Numerical Notation stand in opposition to narrower visions of anthropology as the study of contemporary life.

Free and open to the public
Lunch will be provided to all guests
Discount flyers for Numerical Notation will be available

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Language evolution lecture

I’m here at the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Society for Anthropological Sciences joint meetings in Albuquerque, NM. Tonight we will have a keynote address by Nobel laureate / polymath Murray Gell-Mann on ‘The Evolution of Languages’. I’ll be very interested to see what Gell-Mann has to say on this issue that is close to some of my own research interests. Stay tuned.

Paleo-Eskimonymy

I don’t normally get too uptight about the names that archaeologists give to ancient humans: Lucy, Otzi, ‘hobbit’, whatever. However, I have a quibble about “Inuk”, the 4000-year old Paleo-Eskimo found in Greenland in the 1980s, and whose DNA was recently sequenced (see the article here from today’s Nature, and a good news story about the discovery here).

The main discovery of this paper (confirming decades-old archaeological thinking about Paleo-Eskimo peoples), derived from DNA taken from strands of hair found in Greenland is that “Inuk” is certainly not Inuit. In fact, he is only very distantly related to the modern peoples of the North American Arctic, and is in fact genetically more closely related to the modern Chukchi, Koryak, and Nganasan of northeastern Siberia. And hence my quibble: “Inuk” is the Inuktitut word for “person” (its plural, Inuit ‘people’, is the well-known ethnonym), and thus they’ve given him a name that doesn’t fit with his ethnolinguistic heritage, and indeed runs counter to the core argument of the study. Given that many Yupik (Alaskan natives, speakers of Eskimo-Aleut languages) find the label “Inuit” inappropriate, one could argue that it’s even more inappropriate to give it to this poor fellow who almost certainly spoke a completely unrelated language. Of course, no one spoke Chukchi 4000 years ago either.

Anyway, anyone want to bet how long it takes before someone starts talking about the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis in relation to this find?

No country for old tongues

Attn:
Discovery News
BBC News
et al.

We all know how obsessed you are with the oldest of anything. But please, stop. You are doing a grave disservice to languages by saying things like ‘A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever’ or ‘Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.’ This is utter nonsense, even if you find a scholar to tell you otherwise. All languages are always changing, and although some may change more rapidly than others, the idea that a language could persist essentially unchanged for multiple millennia is pure bunk. The idea that we can assign exact ages to languages (other than recent inventions) is even more ridiculous. The only ancient languages are the ones actually spoken in the past, and all currently spoken languages have equally long histories. It is a great tragedy that the Bo language has gone extinct, as it is when, every other week or so, another language goes extinct on this planet. It is a tragedy regardless of how long the language has been spoken, because it represents the end of a particular part of the modern world’s cultural diversity. Your attempt to sensationalize this story by exoticizing indigenous peoples as primitives lost in time is unwelcome and counterproductive. Let me help:

The Bo (Aka-Bo) language was a member of the Northern branch of the Greater Andamanese language subfamily. With its extinction, only one Greater Andamanese language, A-Pucikwar, has any remaining known speakers, and it is highly endangered. The ten Great Andamanese and three South Andamanese languages are all related to one another, although the exact relationships among them remain unclear, but there is no known relationship between the Andamanese languages and any other languages of the world. Their importance for linguistics is that they may represent descendants of the languages of the original migrants to the Andaman Islands many millennia ago, and if we were able to reconstruct the Proto-Andamanese language, potentially to better understand the population and migration history of the Indian Ocean. Their importance for their remaining speakers is inestimably greater.

World Loanword Database

The World Loanword Database project (WOLD), edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, is now online and freely available to users. It’s a remarkable resource compiled with the purpose of analyzing language contact at the lexical level. Over fifty linguists (including my colleague Martha Ratliff here at Wayne State) have provided mini-vocabularies of languages (41 in total) including information for thousands of words on borrowing, attested age, and analyzability, creating cross-linguistic indices that measure the degree to which particular words (and types of words) tend to be borrowed, and from which languages they are borrowed. So, for instance, you can find that more languages have a borrowed word for father than for mother, or that Hawai’ian borrowed several terms for continental North American animals (prairie dog, skunk, kingfisher) from Ute (an indigenous language of Colorado). It’s a rich and highly functional database, and my only ‘complaint’ is that I’d like to see hundreds more languages covered! I need to stop playing with it right now or my day is going to be shot.

Of course, being who I am and doing what I do, the first place I turned was to the numerals, and I immediately noticed two significant things:

– Ordinal numerals seem to be less frequently borrowed than cardinals; first is borrowed less often than one; second less often than two; and third less often than three.

– Fifteen is borrowed less often than five or ten. Fifteen is far more analyzable than either ten or five (most often as ’10+5′) – so how does this make sense?) I’ll have to look at the data more closely to figure this one out … but not today, work calls!