In thinking about my post on the debunked Basque inscriptions, the thought occurred to me that the Basques are like Barack Obama. Just as Obama describes himself as “an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams,” the Basques are the imperfect vessel for the linguistic and nationalistic dreams of every would-be linguist and pseudoarchaeologist looking for glorious and deep connections to a mysterious past.
Category: Linguistics
Apologies
My apologies for the lack of recent posts. A combination of some busy committee assignments, a public lecture (just finished today), an unexpected grant proposal deadline, an unusually-busy reference letter writing season, and getting the book off to the publisher have occupied my days to an insane degree. Things should calm down over Thanksgiving and I will have some longer posts next week.
For now though, since it’s floating around the blogosphere, I wanted to draw your attention to the Atlas of True Names, which presents place-names by giving their etymology in English (e.g. “Hillfort” for London or “Sibling Love” for Philadelphia or just “Strait” for Detroit). It can be trite, and the etymologies themselves can be questioned. What I find most fascinating (as a Tolkienophile of some decades) is that they use the toponymy of Middle-Earth as an explicit model justifying the aesthetic quality of the enterprise. For me the most compelling aspects of Tolkien’s nomenclature were the untranslated Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdûl, and Adûnaic (among others), whereas formations like ‘Mirkwood’ were merely passably interesting. I freely admit that my old copy of Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-Earth quickly became so worn that I had to discard it a couple of years ago after years of abuse.
All of which reminds me of a sad story that I should get off my chest. In my first term at McGill I taught a class on the anthropology of writing systems and literacy, the last week of which was left open for student-directed topics, and the members of the seminar wanted to study constructed scripts, so I gave them a little piece to read on Tengwar (Elvish) and another on Klingon. But on the day we were to discuss those readings, I learned just hours before class that my mentor Bruce Trigger had passed away, and so I cancelled that class, which remains untaught to this day.
Genes, languages, and archaeology
John Hawks has a new blog entry entitled ‘Gene-culture models and reductionism‘, which is a thoughtful response to a 2004 letter in American Anthropologist. The letter adopts a highly skeptical view towards the possibility that genetic information can tell us much about prehistoric population history and specifically that it can tell us much about cultural and linguistic prehistory. Hawks, in contrast, takes a more moderate view that leaves open the possibility that we can use genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in tandem, while acknowledging that naively using one as a proxy for the other two is a serious error. Read it, then come back here. It’s short, and I’ll wait.
This is a subject of some interest to me, as a historically and prehistorically-minded linguistic anthropologist (or a linguistically-minded archaeological anthropologist, I don’t care which). The late Bruce Trigger and I published a chapter in 2004 (perhaps we could have found a better venue for it) in which we talk about the naive ways in which Iroquoian studies have used archaeological evidence to attribute ethnic identification (esp. ‘Iroquoian’ vs. ‘Algonkian’) to sites, and linked this problematic issue to broader problems in the use of archaeology to reconstruct language and ethnicity (Chrisomalis and Trigger 2004). The AA letter rightly points out that identifications of tribes or fixed social structures that correlate with genetic populations – or, unmentioned, languages – is problematic, and the notion that any of these must correspond with overarching ethnic identities is doubly problematic, as Barth (1969) argued persuasively decades ago. And yet …
It has long been recognized (since the 19th century at least) that language families are organized phylogenetically and that biological taxa are phylogenetic. This is partly a reflection of reality, and partly a reflection of the mutual reinforcement of phylogenetic models in linguistics and biology through academic interdisciplinary discourse over the past couple hundred years. But the problem noted by Hawks (and which no one interested in the subject can ignore) is that biological transmission (excepting some viruses) is vertical – you get all your genetic material from your parents alone – whereas cultural and linguistic transmission is both vertical and horizontal – that is, you get a lot of your culture from non-kin, including people who may not be part of your ‘tribe’. This is the sort of work that people like Steve Shennan (2002) are doing, and while I am not always convinced by the answers he reaches (particularly, I remain unconvinced that vertical, parent-child linguistic and cultural transmission is as important as he thinks it is), the research deserves more attention than it is getting.
On Tuesday, I am introducing my class to this subject through Colin Renfrew’s (2000) paper ‘At the edge of knowability: towards a prehistory of languages’. Again, I’m not always in agreement with Renfrew (I’m more of a skeptic than he is), but I’m thrilled that people are asking these questions. As social scientists and humanists, linguists and archaeologists need to forcefully assert the relevance of their data, and not let themselves be run roughshod by geneticists who treat their apex of the triad as the cornerstone of all knowledge in the field. One of my hopes for this blog, and for my research in general, is to be able to contribute to ongoing discussions on this issue. This post is, at best, a preliminary introduction to a topic which I suspect you will see here very often in the months (dare I hope for years?) to come.
Works cited
Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Chrisomalis, S. and B.G. Trigger. 2004. Reconstructing prehistoric ethnicity: problems and possibilities. In In J. V. Wight and J.-L. Pilon (eds), A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, pp. 419-433. Mercury Series, Paper No 164. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Renfrew, C. 2000. At the Edge of Knowability: Towards a Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10(1): 7-34.
Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, memes and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames & Hudson.
Wildcat, D., I. Sumi and V. Deloria Jr. 2004. Commentary: A Response to Doug Jones. American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 641.
Translation follies
This BBC News story has been making the rounds on various blogs, but in case you haven’t seen it:
Officials in Swansea, Wales, UK, emailed a translator, requesting a Welsh translation for a bilingual road sign that in English reads:
No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.
Unfortunately, the emailed response they got was:
Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu.
which apparently translates to ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.’
Oops. (see also this example from Language Log)
The linguistic situation in Wales is fascinating due to a strong linguistic resurgence related to Welsh national identity. Although Welsh has never been an endangered language (certain parts of it have a majority of Welsh speakers), it is spoken to widely different degrees in different regions. But by regulation, all road signs in Wales are supposed to be bilingual, creating a huge market for translation. (This stands in direct contrast to my former home province of Quebec, where bilingual public signs are forbidden – they must be in French only). While Swansea is relatively anglophone (only 13% of the city’s inhabitants are fluent in Welsh, according to 2001 census data), the rule applies nonetheless. Whether bilingual public signage actually provides support for language retention is an open and very interesting question, but at the very least it reflects a changing language ideology in the region in favour of Welsh.
Another set of interesting issue around this mistranslation is raised in the comments on the Language Log post. Bob Moore wonders, “I am left wondering who this automated reply could possibly be intended for. Since virtually all Welsh speakers also speak English, surely this person’s clients are mainly English speakers who do not speak Welsh. But those are exactly the folks who would not understand the message.” Bill Poser suggests that it is possible that a Welsh linguistic nationalist would have a monolingual Welsh auto-reply as an expression of identity (a situation that would be quite familiar to anyone who has spent any time in Montreal). However, a couple of other respondents point out that perhaps the auto-reply was bilingual, but that the hapless recipient took the English to be the auto-reply part of the message, and then understood the Welsh part to be the actual translation.
Putting it out there
Tomorrow (well actually later today, now that I check the clock) I’ll be presenting at the Michigan Linguistics Society, discussing the preliminary results of work I and a team of students conducted in the spring into variability in stop signs in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I’m really proud of this work, of which parts are published over at Stop: Toutes Directions, and particularly of the quality of the work of the various contributors, whose ideas have led me to think much more deeply about this subject than I otherwise would have. I’ve been thrilled at the reception this admittedly oddball research project has received from my colleagues at Wayne State. What started as a wacky idea I had a couple of years ago turned into an intensive research methods project, and now into a web site, conference presentations, and hopefully in the near future an edited volume.
Anyway, if by any chance anyone who is reading this is in the Detroit area and would like to stop by, it’s at Wayne State University (where I work) at the McGregor conference center, and there is a lot of interesting work being discussed.
The abstract for my paper follows below:
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What language is ‘STOP’?: language ideology and identity in Montreal stop signs
Due to the complexity of municipal politics, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and provincial language policies and ideologies, public signs are important objects of linguistic discourse in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. A pilot project in ‘contemporary epigraphy’ undertaken in Montreal reveals important spatial patterning in stop signs, one of the more visible objects on the city’s ‘signscape’.
There are three primary types of stop sign in Montreal: unilingual ARRET, unilingual STOP, and bilingual ARRET/STOP. Of these three, ARRET is by far the most common, with STOP predominant in anglophone regions, while ARRET/STOP signs are rare and are generally very worn, reflecting an earlier and rapidly vanishing state of the city’s signage practices. A quantitative analysis of these patterns reveals important disjuncts between the linguistic composition of communities and their signs.
By law, all public signs in the province of Quebec must be in French only, yet the prevalence of STOP signs in anglophone municipalities in Montreal seemingly violates this regulatory framework. The solution to this has been to define ‘stop’ (un stop) as a French word; STOP signs therefore are in fact unilingual French signs, even though they are not used in francophone municipalities. This leaves bilingual ARRET/STOP signs in a linguistically perilous position – which language is STOP in, and are these in fact legal signs at all? The question of whether STOP constitutes ‘good French’ has been an important one in recent public discussions of the subject, and remains an ongoing concern.
There is no overwhelming reason why stop signs should contain any inscription whatsoever, because the red octagon is a nearly universal, trans-linguistic ideogram. In a city such as Montreal, the majority of the populace can read and understand stop sign texts in either of Canada’s official languages. The choice of language usage is thus purely an ideological one, and reflects political interests and linguistic identities among the leaders of Montreal’s boroughs and independent towns.
Finally, important public/private tensions in Montreal’s language ideology are evident in stop signs due to the widespread practice of vandalism. Despite the prevalence of public French on stop signs, the vast majority of linguistically-identifiable vandalism is in English. Moreover, stop signs, as highly visible aspects of the city’s public material culture, are frequently vandalized in ways that reflect dissatisfaction with official language ideologies, and can thus highlight ongoing tensions.
Glossographia 