Category: Linguistics

The politics of pinyin

One of the understudied intersections of linguistics and material culture is what I would call ‘contemporary epigraphy’: the study of modern inscriptions, ranging from traditional subjects (monumental inscriptions) to things like public signs and graffiti.  In my work on numbers, I am constantly on the alert for unusual and interesting uses of number in public texts (see this, e.g.), and recently, I and a group of senior undergraduates at McGill undertook a quantitative, spatial, and linguistically-focused survey of stop signs in Montreal, which has become the ongoing Stop: Toutes Directions project.   This sort of work combines the rigor of linguistics and grammatology (the study of writing systems) with the social analysis of archaeology and urban geography and the textual focus of classical epigraphy and semiotics.

For this reason, I was very interested to see in the news that Taiwan is simplifying its romanization of Chinese writing and will be replacing a huge number of public signs.  Essentially, before now, there was no standard way to transliterate Chinese into a Roman script (not to mention the difficulties in transliterating Chinese into Chinese script).  The existence of multiple standards can lead to all sorts of confusion, because, as the article linked above points out, ‘Minquan Road’ and ‘Minchuan Road’ may in fact be the same road named using two different standards.   This Wikipedia article illustrates the enormous difficulties this might present.  The cost of changing signs that are not in the variant chosen as the new standard (hanyu pinyin) will be considerable.

The pinyin system that has been chosen by the Taiwanese government is probably the most common one used today, primarily due to its official acceptance in the People’s Republic of China (i.e. the mainland) since the 50s and internationally since the 70s.  The article presents the most recent Taiwanese reform as one aimed at international visitors / non-native Chinese speakers, and undoubtedly that is part of the answer.  But any change that brings Taiwan closer to China is not only a business decision but also a sociopolitical one.  The article notes, “Ma’s predecessor resisted the writing system to snub China, which claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island, critics say,” which is no doubt another part of the story.   This change in sign policy is part of ongoing tensions between pro-independence and pro-reintegration factions in Taiwan, and such, echoes the sorts of issues that I have witnessed firsthand in Montreal, where sign texts are important subjects of political and social discourse.

These questions, then, cannot be fully separated from issues of language ideology – how particular languages, dialects, and utterances are conceptualized and evaluated (positively or negatively) both by individuals and by institutions.  It will be very interesting to follow this story as the new changes come into effect.

News: The supernatural and natural selection

A recent book by anthropologists Craig Palmer and Lyle Steadman, The Supernatural and Natural Selection: Religion and Evolutionary Success (Steadman and Palmer 2008) attempts to account for the evolution of religion in a novel way, linking sociality, communicative practice, and reproductive fitness.   I will be very interested to see the book (whose publication date is this week) and may give it a more thorough review then; for now, I am relying on a recent report in ScienceDaily.

The claim that interests me most is the assertion that religion does not primarily serve an individual, cognitive function – that its evolutionary basis is not that it explains the unexplainable or gives comfort in times of need.  Rather, they argue, religious belief serves to increase social cohesion and cooperative behavior among non-kin because of the kin-like model of society it creates.  This, so far, is not a novel claim, and can be found in anthropologists as far back as Edward Tylor (1920 [1871]).

Palmer and Steadman go further, however, using observable instances of communication of the acceptance of supernatural claims as analogues to the way that children accept their parents’ influence.  Rather than focusing about what people say about what they believe as evidence for what they believe, they treat what people say as communicative acts and observe what consequences these acts have on other human beings. In other words, they assert, religion creates kin-like social ties through the mutual acceptance of otherwise unobservable social realities.  Further evidence for this position, they assert, is found in the widespread use of basic kin terms (especially for parents, siblings, and children) in religions throughout the world.  This is an interesting combination of linguistic, anthropological, and evolutionary-psychological insights that deserves

Now, this theory is bound to cause controversy.  I don’t even want to address whether I think it is correct until I have a look at the book.  I’ve been interested in the rather different theory espoused by Pascal Boyer in his The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Boyer 1994), which focuses on the evidence from child development and is essentially a cognitive account rather than a social one.   I’ll be particularly interested to see how Palmer and Steadman have handled the cross-cultural evidence, and the extent to which they are able to deal with differences as well as similarities among the world’s religious systems.

Works cited

Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Steadman, Lyle B. and Craig T. Palmer. 2008. The supernatural and natural selection: religion and evolutionary success. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Tylor, Edward B. 1920 [1871]. Primitive culture. New York: Putnam.

Teaching linguistic anthropology as integrative science

Linguistic anthropology is often treated as a ‘kid brother’ subfield of cultural anthropology.  The working assumption is that if you are working on anthropological issues relating to language, you must be an ethnographer first and foremost.   Part of the reason why I have started this blog is that I just don’t buy into this view.  Anthropology in North America has been conceptualized as a four-field subject – biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology – and I’m a four-field guy through and through, so I don’t see linguistic anthropology as naturally or inherently linked to any of the other three fields.  If it were, we wouldn’t have four fields, and linguistic anthropology would be just another cultural subject, like economic anthropology or the anthropology of religion, tied to linguistics as the others are to economics or religious studies, but ethnographic nonetheless.  I call shenanigans on that, and am more than happy to use my archaeological and evolutionary training to set out a better path for linguistic anthropology (or ‘anthropological linguistics’, but that’s a post for another day).

This year I’m teaching a course entitled ‘Language and Culture’, which I conceptualize as a cross-cultural investigation of the cognitive and social aspects of language within an unapologetically four-field anthropology.   (It helps that, as a required course for all majors, the class has plenty of archaeologists and biological anthropologists.)  To make my point, I’ve started out with a set of aggressively evolutionary readings on language origins, challenging the students to deal with the paucity of archaeological and fossil evidence without dismissing it entirely, and to acknowledge the utility of comparative primatology and child development studies to fill in some of the gaps.  I adopt an unapologetically evolutionary approach to most of my teaching, which I no doubt picked up from my mentor, the late Bruce Trigger (himself an archaeologist and ethnohistorian), and my aim is to really get the class to think about what exactly language does for us (selectively speaking) that other forms of communication do not.

I begin with a high-theory article (D’Andrade 2002), an imperfect and speculative article that nonetheless forces the reader to acknowledge the interlinked nature of language and culture while addressing the very big question, “If language is so great, why don’t all sorts of species talk?”  But D’Andrade is a cognitive anthropologist, and we really need some data to address the where, when, and how questions.   Buckley and Steele’s (2002) evolutionary-ecological (yet fundamentally social) argument connects the dots using anatomical and archaeological data, but lack the direct behavioural foundation needed to test their hypotheses.   So I turn to our evolutionary cousins, the nonhuman primates, and the old master Robbins Burling presents a complex if ultimately unconvincing argument (Burling 1993) that human language is radically distinct from primate gestures and calls, and in fact originated as a non-communicative cognitive system for thought before any ape ever spoke a word.  We wrap up with perhaps the tightest and most curious account, Greg Urban’s (2002) account that links ape calls to human language through the intermediary of ‘metasignals’, signs that make reference to other signs.

There is a lot of other material I could have presented, and perhaps in future years if I am feeling like giving the students a greater mental workout, I may do so.  Certainly there is absolutely no agreement even among anthropologists as to the likely origins of language, and I’ve hardly addressed the massive literature in linguistics and evolutionary psychology.  But for now I am quite happy with the tone and scientific emphasis I have set for the course, and although I certainly won’t ignore the more humanistic side of the subfield in the weeks to come, I’m aiming for something really innovative here and won’t blindly follow anyone’s party line.

Works cited

Buckley, Carina and James Steele. 2002. Evolutionary ecology of spoken language: co-evolutionary hypotheses are testable. World Archaeology 34: 26-46.

Burling, Robbins. 1993. Primate calls, human language, and nonverbal communication. Current Anthropology 34(1): 25-53.

D’Andrade, Roy. 2002. Cultural Darwinism and language. American Anthropologist 104(1): 223-232.

Urban, Greg. 2002. Metasignalling and language origins. American Anthropologist 104(1): 233-246.

Why numerals?

Over the past few weeks in my new job, I have had many opportunities to introduce myself or be introduced as an expert in the ‘anthropology of mathematics’, which is probably the simplest and most accurate way to describe my work (although I also have strong research interests in other areas, such as writing systems and cross-cultural theory).  The comments I receive on this are mostly of two sorts:

(a) Oh, how interesting! I had never imagined there was such a thing!

(b) Oh, how interesting! Are there many people working in that field?

Both of these are perfectly understandable responses, because there aren’t really very many of us out there; perhaps a dozen working anthropologists who publish regularly on numerals, and a couple dozen more linguists.   There are many more anthropologists and linguists who at some point have written something on the subject, but aren’t specialists in the field.   But in comparison to, say, psychologists working on mathematical cognition, or to historians of mathematics, there aren’t too many of us.  And honestly, I’m okay with that, because it means that there are plenty of great questions that are completely untouched.

The question of why one would study the anthropology of mathematics is actually more interesting, from my perspective, and usually it doesn’t take much to get me onto that subject, particularly with people who answer (a).  For me, the fantastic thing about the subject is that it is so often taken for granted that there is one thing called ‘number’, or one thing called ‘mathematics’, and that there should be limited cross-cultural difference in the domain.   But at the same time, anthropologists generally work in domains where there is a lot of variability and assume that there are few or no constraints on human behavior, but in numeral systems there are all sorts of constraints, some evolutionary, some functional, and some social.  So teasing out the differences and similarities, without assuming in advance that the phenomenon is highly regular or highly variable, is fascinating stuff.   In other words, the fact that I am a comparativist (rather than a cultural particularist) and the fact that I study mathematics are closely linked.

The other really fascinating thing about number systems, for me, is that numbers can be represented using spoken or written language, but can also be represented using graphic numerical notation systems (like the set of signs, 0123456789, which laypeople generally call Arabic numerals but I call Western numerals).  So you have one system that has its origins in auditory media and is linked to linguistic abilities, and another that gets away from directly representing language and is trans-linguistic, but is nonetheless probably linked somehow to language.  So from an anthropological perspective, you have one linguistic and one non-linguistic (graphic) representation of number, which allows you to ask all sorts of interesting questions about the intersection of language and culture.

The last thing that is really cool about number is that within the domain of numerical notation, we have a pretty good database of all the numerical notation systems that have ever been used, and can without too much difficulty reconstruct the relationships between them (i.e. which systems are ancestral to which others, or which systems replaced which others).   This allows us not only to look at each system as a structured system of signs in a synchronic fashion (omitting the time dimension) but also to engage in a diachronic analysis, examining how systems interact and change over 5000 years of written history.   This is why I describe my forthcoming book as a ‘comparative history’.  But I’m writing about numbers, not about cross-cultural theory, which will have to be an essay for another day, because right now my book manuscript isn’t going to edit itself.

Phaistos phakery redux

(Originally published at The Growlery, 2008/08/21)

Prior to writing my previous post about Jerome Eisenberg’s conclusion that the Phaistos Disk is a recent forgery perpetrated by its excavator, Luigi Pernier, I unfortunately did not have access to the original article in Minerva magazine in which Dr. Eisenberg announced his findings (Eisenberg, Jerome M., ‘The Phaistos Disk: one hundred year old hoax?’, Minerva, July/August 2008, 9-24). Happily, once he found my post, Dr. Eisenberg commented on it and later sent me an electronic copy for my consideration. I can now report that while I previously thought I knew a lot about the disk, I now have a much better knowledge of the disk and the nature of the hoax claim. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced, even though I admit that I do want to believe the hoax claim, but I think that the evidence from the sign-forms just isn’t strong enough, that it relies on unproven visual similarities to too great a degree. Let me explain what I mean.

In the previous post, I focused on Eisenberg’s evidence from a) the uniqueness of the artifact’s manufacture, which is unlike the Linear A tablets; b) it uses ‘movable type’ of which no other example has ever been found; c) the idea that Luigi Pernier’s rivalry with Arthur Evans would lead him to do this. In dealing with the first two, I pointed out that comparisons with the Linear A tablets aren’t necessarily that useful if in fact the PD was part of a highly specialized text genre – i.e. it would be like using a monumental inscription to proclaim a handwritten note to be a forgery. Of course we don’t know that it’s part of such a genre, or indeed what genre it could have represented at all – hence the mystery.

The one thing I didn’t focus on is the sign-forms or graphemes on the Disk. In fact, Eisenberg spends a good deal of his paper looking at resemblances between Phaistos signs and signs on other inscriptions from the ancient world in order to assert that the latter formed the models on which Pernier based his forgery. In particular, he aims to show that there are similarities between the Phaistos graphemes and authentic artifacts made much later, but that were known to 19th century archaeologists / epigraphers and thus could have been known to Pernier.

This is an unusual line of argument; it is in fact a sort of cousin to the standard techniques by which experts on scripts postulate cultural borrowings from one society to another. If we have a 10th century BC Phoenician inscription and a very early, 8th century BC Greek inscription that use many similar letter-forms, we make the reasonable inference (all right, it is more complex than this, but you get the idea) that the Phoenician script is ancestral to Greek. In particular this is the case because there is known cultural contact (e.g. trade) between the two societies, and more importantly, because there is not just a graphemic similarity but also a phonetic similarity – the signs don’t just look the same but they have the same / similar sound-values. What Eisenberg is doing, effectively, is turning these resemblances on their heads. If there are similarities between the PD signs and known inscriptions from elsewhere, then those inscriptions may have acted as a model for the forger. If the inscriptions are later in date than the PD, Eisenberg argues, it is far likelier that these artifacts served as a model for the disk’s forger than that the Disk script served as a model for the later artifacts. Similarly, if the PD shows influences from several different regional styles, this suggests that a forger just cobbled together signs from different inscriptions to make something really unique.

Now, the reason I’m unconvinced is that I just don’t think the similarities bear up, and that even where they do they don’t point unequivocally to a hoax. For instance, let’s have a look at Phaistos sign 03:

Now, this is seen by Eisenberg as being modelled after an 18th Dynasty Egyptian wall painting (16th century BC) in which the figure, a Cretan captive is facing the other direction, has extensive facial features, has hair (long, flowing hair), and has a torso with arms. The only major similarity is the two circles on the face. But this seems to go directly against the notion of the Disk as a hoax; the time is right, the captive is Cretan, so the most parsimonious explanation is that they are both genuine representations of some sort of facial decoration (indeed, as Eisenberg suggests, it may be a Cretan ‘double earring’). But, writing, “It was certainly derived from the wall painting”, Eisenberg proceeds to write as if it is now a given that Pernier did, in fact, use this as a model for sign 03 (Eisenberg 2008: 17).

When we get to one of the more unusual characteristics of the Disk – the presence of five hand-incised dots on each side of the disk, and ‘word-separating’ vertical lines – I’m in my element, because these, Eisenberg sees as being modelled after the Cretan five dots = the numeral 50 and vertical bar = the numeral 100. This is dangerous territory though – dots and lines are ubiquitous in scripts and numerical systems. And are we really to believe that Pernier needed a model to think of the idea of adding bars and dots to a forgery? These are stylistic elements found in virtually any script worldwide, and are not indicative of anything. One of the real problems with the study of writing systems is the assertion of cultural relationships based on passing visual similarities, and one of the things that we do not yet know how to do well is to know how similar two graphemes must be before a claim of diffusion can be sustained. This is the same sort of reasoning used to argue for a hoax in this case, and ultimately its inclusion greatly weakens Eisenberg’s argument, and made me look much more critically at the remainder of his claim.

But the heart of the issue is that Eisenberg is working at cross-purposes here. On the one hand, he wants us to believe that the Disk is so unique, so different from other inscriptions that it cannot possibly be genuine. On the other, he wants us to use evidence of similarities with known scripts as proof of ‘forger’s models’. While a hoax can, of course, be both unique and based on models, we’re left with the impression that virtually any similarity or difference can be evidence of forgery, and that just isn’t sound argumentation. So I’m not convinced. I do still think the idea is worthy of consideration, and I do think that it is worth trying a thermoluminescence test, not only because it can settle the hoax issue but also because it can resolve the question of the artifact’s age even if it turns out to be genuine. In this respect, I believe that Eisenberg and I are in full agreement.

In conclusion I want to thank Dr. Eisenberg for sending me this paper, and also for inviting me to the upcoming International Conference on the Phaistos Disk, which unfortunately I am unable to attend due to my new work commitments. It does highlight however the real value of blogging as a means of social interaction and information exchange.

But of course the real question remains unanswered: should it be disk or disc?