Category: Linguistics

Eu-philo-logy

In my internettic peregrinations yesterday, I came across a thoughtful personal essay, A Requiem for Philology, by Prof. William Harris of Middlebury College, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year at the age of 83. (I found it through this interesting reminiscence from Steve Cotler, linked yesterday by Mark Liberman on Language Log, and then all those articles were mentioned today on Language Hat. Thus ends my internetymology.) These extended reminiscences concern Joshua Whatmough (1897-1964), a prominent classical philologist of the mid-20th century and an expert on the non-Italic languages of Italy.

Philology is the academic discipline that focuses on the meaning and history of words and the comparative analysis of texts deriving from this analysis. I’m extremely sympathetic to philology as an academic discipline. It is a set of related practices and concepts exported from classics to a whole host of regionally and linguistically specific disciplines. Today, you have Egyptian philologists in Near Eastern studies/Egyptology, Anglo-Saxon philologists in English departments, and of course the classical philologists in classics … and so on. Now it’s not always that way (Whatmough was a true comparative philologist, and indeed his department at Harvard was first classical philology, then comparative philology, and eventually linguistics), and indeed, in the past, philology had much more substance and more impact than it does today. Philology is a set of methods and concepts that hang together quite nicely regardless of regional specializations. It is also extraordinarily useful for the historical and comparative investigation of languages and cultures. So as a discipline, it makes a great deal of sense to me on those grounds. Philological research is of enormous interest and relevance to my own scholarship on pre-modern numerical systems.

It is indeed the case that there are virtually no departments identified specifically with philology in the English-speaking world (although there are plenty in Eastern Europe); the only North American one I was able to find is Columbia’s Department of French and Romance Philology. However, this itself doesn’t tell us very much. The Columbia department is not producing scholarship that is substantially different than other Romance languages / French / comparative lit departments. Conversely, any number of scholars in departments that don’t bear the name ‘philology’ are, effectively, philologists – I can think of a few at my own institution, for instance, and we have a regularly taught Romance philology graduate course. Moreover, much of what was once labelled philology now simply falls under the rubric of historical linguistics – and again, most major institutions have at least one historical linguist, often more.

Indeed, the essay is neither focused on the (true but trivial) fact that there are virtually no philology departments these days or the issue of whether some academics are philologists. It is a lament that the form of close analysis of words and language undertaken by philologists is not taught to undergraduates in the way that Prof. Whatmough and others once did. And that is all it is. No one is asserting that no one does the kind of work that Whatmough once did – this would be ridiculous and patently false. In fact, given the proliferation and expansion of institutions, I’d wager that there are in fact more academics practicing philological research than ever before (even as they constitute an increasingly tiny percentage of the academy as a whole). But Harris is asserting that there has been a decline in the teaching of a set of rigorous methods towards language whose absence is detrimental to the cognition and character of students, who would have profited from it.

And now let’s ask ourselves: why is this so? Surely it was not that every undergraduate was once required to take philology – at least not in the twentieth century! But equally I don’t think it is that we have become distracted at a macrosocietal level, as Harris suggests: “our public eye has become loose, accustomed to glancing at two second flash-shots on block-buster film and TV. We tend to get overall meanings, we think and buy on impulse and we don’t read the fine print on our personal and political contracts well.” At a pragmatic level, declining enrollments in a major over a period of time result in fewer classes being offered in that major, which in turn reduce its visibility – and thus fewer students hear about it. So there is a positive feedback effect going on here that can result in the demise of many a small department or specialty, usually through merging it with another discipline. Indeed, not only did this happen with philology, but it is ongoing with classics as a whole, as many departments merge into history or lit-languages departments and become allied programs with graduate degrees, and then potentially just a few courses.

But at a bigger level, a societal level, the university has become a very different sort of place than it was 50 years ago, at institutions big and small. In an age where postsecondary education has really reached a mass clientele, and where the role of the university has become to a large degree professionalizing and pragmatic, and where very few students come from a life of leisure, it is completely unsurprising that disciplines like philology have difficulty justifying their existence within the social, economic, and political framework of higher ed. Foreign languages and cultures – sure, that’s good for business. Archaeology’s business model works because CRM firms provide jobs to graduates without the PhD. Classics gets by (barely) by taking a ‘cultural turn’ towards the study of race, gender, and class. And linguistics has linked its fate to cognitive science, for better or for worse, and has thus hitched itself to a behavioral-science model of funding and scholarship. Attributing the decline of the discipline to students losing interest is missing the point – it is indeed necessary that the modern university shed disciplines that do not conform to the structural needs of employment markets.

This is not the university that we have chosen – not academics (philologists or otherwise), and not students – not a free choice, at any rate, but one conditioned by an insatiable demand for relevance and applicability that philology simply lacks. And if we want to sit about and lament the loss of the university that once was, that’s all very well. But if we want to make the case for ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inapplicable’ disciplines – and I would insist that we can and must – we need to be cognizant that blaming students or faculty fails to address the larger issues in the contemporary academy.

Copper Scroll mania

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.

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!