Check out a remarkable piece of popular science writing and pseudoscience debunking: Pseudo-Science and Sensationalist Archaeology: An Exposé of Jimmy Barfield and the Copper Scroll Project. It is an accessible point-by-point refutation of a set of claims regarding the Copper Scroll, an aberrant (but still fully comprehensible) text among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one written on copper rather than parchment or papyrus. Those of you who have followed my posts on archaeolinguistics will find Robert Cargill’s debunking of Jim Barfield’s ‘discovery’ to be a telling example of how both archaeological and linguistic expertise are essential when dealing with ancient texts.
Category: Linguistics
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.
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.
Language and Societies
The students in my graduate-level linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written extended abstracts of their research papers, which we have now published at a new blog, Language and Societies. Both I and they would greatly appreciate any comments, questions, or suggestions you have regarding their projects, several of which go well beyond this course and will form the basis for ongoing research leading towards advanced degrees in linguistics or anthropology, and/or (one hopes) peer-reviewed publication. Please comment on the specific posts at the Language and Societies blog. Thanks!
Handbookery
Here are a couple of new publications of which I am very proud and which may be of interest to you. I’ve included them both lest the publishers involved think I’m playing favourites!
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2008. The cognitive and cultural foundations of numbers. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall, eds., pp. 495-517. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Numbers are represented and manipulated through three distinct but interrelated techniques: numeral words, computational technologies, and numerical notation systems. Each of these has potential consequences for its users’ numerical cognition, but these consequences must be understood in terms of the functions and uses of each technique, not merely their formal structure. Most societies use numerical notation only to represent numbers, and have a variety of other techniques for performing arithmetic. The current Western practice of pen-and-paper arithmetic is anomalous historically. The transmission, adoption, and extinction of numerical systems thus depends primarily the social and economic context in which cultural contacts occur, and only minimally on their perceived efficiency for arithmetic.
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2009. The origins and co-evolution of literacy and numeracy. IN The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, eds, pp. 59-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
While number concepts are panhuman, numerical notation emerged independently only in state societies with significant social inequality and social needs beyond those of face-to-face interaction, and in particular with the development of written texts. This survey of seven ancient civilizations demonstrates that, although written numerals tend to develop alongside the first writing, the specific functions for which writing and numerals co-evolve are cross-culturally variable. A narrowly functionalistic approach that generalizes the Mesopotamian case to all early civilizations and proposes that numerals always emerge for accounting and bookkeeping is empirically inadequate. An alternate theory is proposed that regards the emergence of writing and numerical notation as an outgrowth of elite interests relating to social control, but leaving unspecified the particular domains of social life over which those elites use to control non-elites. Numerical notation is a special-purpose representational system that, in its simplest form, unstructured tallying, is a precursor to written communication, and which persists and expands as a parallel notation in literate contexts.
Glossographia 