Category: Literacy and writing

What is archaeolinguistics?

Apparently my post ‘Paleolinguistics and archaeolinguistics’ is currently the #2 result for the keyword ‘archaeolinguistics’ (and #4 for ‘paleolinguistics’). Paleolinguistics is a fairly well-known term among linguists): it refers to the extension of historical linguistics deep into prehistory, often using methods that are not accepted by the majority of historical linguists. But while archaeolinguistics hasn’t achieved the same fame (or at least, not Wikipedia noteworthiness!), that’s the topic I want to discuss.

Archaeolinguistics lies at the interdisciplinary intersection between archaeology and linguistics – including but not limited to the interaction of linguistic and archaeological anthropology. I want to distinguish linguistic analyses of prehistory that do not use the archaeological record (paleolinguistics) from those that do. Moreover, much of archaeolinguistics has nothing to do with historical linguistics at all, but rests on different sorts of intersections between the two disciplines.

Archaeolinguistics includes several distinct topics of study:
– The study of the evolution of language and symbolic behavior through the integration of Paleolithic archaeology (lithics, art, notations, etc.) and studies in cognitive linguistics. This has virtually nothing to do with ‘paleolinguistics’ as an extended form of historical linguistics, but it requires a good foundational knowledge of both archaeology and linguistics, and also of hominin evolution.
– The study of prehistory through the comparative use of historical linguistics and archaeology, e.g., to reconstruct proto-language homelands, prehistoric migrations, subsistence patterns, the diffusion of technology, and the like. Where two independent sources of information converge on the same answer, it is more likely to be correct than when one line of evidence alone is used. This is ‘paleolinguistics plus’: the archaeological record is (dis)confirmatory and serves as a check on wild speculation.
– Archaeological decipherment: the decipherment of ancient texts recovered in archaeological contexts. This relies on quantitative analysis of texts and their signs, as well as more interpretive aspects of decipherment that rely on knowledge of social contexts that can mainly be known archaeologically. Maya script decipherment is a classic example of this ongoing process; without the archaeological record, our understanding of the hieroglyphic texts would be substantially hindered.
– The use of written texts to complement the archaeological record of literate societies to discuss topics of interest to linguistic anthropologists: literacy, cognitive categories, language contact, dialectal variation, and so on. In contrast to decipherment, here the script is well-known, and the questions that are being asked are using textual material holistically with archaeological material to talk about linguistic aspects of ancient life.
– The use of the characteristics of written texts to date archaeological material, and vice versa. Paleographic changes in scripts can be highly suggestive if not definitive of the age of texts, and of associated archaeological material. Conversely, archaeological materials that are datable radiometrically can put associated texts in their temporal context.

If this seems big and vague, maybe it is. All that these things have in common is that they require some knowledge of archaeology, and some knowledge of linguistics. But I guess what I’m trying to do here is to make the case that when there are so many areas that require knowledge of both fields, that it is valuable, from a scholarly perspective, to train students who are knowledgeable in both fields, and to publish work that reflects that intersection.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be meandering through a series of posts on some of the specific topics mentioned above, and more generally on methodological, conceptual, and evidentiary similarities between the two fields that make archaeolinguistics ‘hang together’ better than one might think. I don’t know what will become of these thoughts ultimately – maybe even a short book.

Southwest Script

A slate tablet bearing the longest inscription yet found in the enigmatic Southwest Script has been found in southern Portugal, as reported by the Associated Press today. Although it’s only 86 characters long, it represents a major expansion in the corpus of Southwest Script inscriptions, which all come from southwestern Iberia (hence the name) and date from the 7th-5th centuries BCE. Southwest Script is one of the world’s more obscure semi-deciphered scripts; one can get a sense of this by the fact that about half of the top 20 hits on Google are to today’s news article (although the label ‘Tartessian’ is somewhat more common).

The Southwest Script is typologically complex. As discussed in the article, some of the signs are alphabetic (roughly, one sign = one phoneme, either a consonant or vowel), others are syllabic (one sign = one consonant + vowel combination), and others are of unknown signification – possibly representing whole words (logograms) or something else entirely. The sound-symbol correspondences can be established because the signs are related to several other Iberian scripts and ultimately to a Phoenician ancestor – so it is possible to read some parts of some of the inscriptions phonetically. But this is far outweighed by what we don’t know (yet).

An awful lot of scripts have some such typological complexities; Egyptian and Japanese are well-known examples, but even the modern Latin alphabet has logographic components like @, &, $, and % which would make a script-decipherer’s job much harder. But with the Southwest Script, where there are so few inscriptions (and the ones we have are so short), the problem becomes nearly unsurmountable. The fact that we can’t even reliably associate the script with a language, even though Phoenician has been fully deciphered for centuries, says quite a lot about the state of the decipherment.

One of the real challenges in Southwest Script studies is that the texts found are all extremely short, making computational decipherments effectively impossible. This new find will not eliminate this methodological difficulty, but it will at least make it more plausible to find repeated sequences of signs that occur in other Southwest Script tablets, one of the key aspects of archaeological decipherment. This might allow us eventually to say more about the linguistic context of the tablets and ultimately work, over the next several decades, towards what might be reasonably called a new archaeological decipherment.

An unshort answer to an unsimple question

I have not been as diligent as I should have been in completing a post that I’ve been thinking about for well over a month now. As her prize for successfully deciphering the unusual Wayne StatE UniversitY public inscription I posted back in September, my colleague Katherine Tong earned the right to ask a question relating to the subjects of this blog. Katherine asked me a question that is seemingly simple and yet highly complex. She would like me to address the question of in what ways computers (or by extension, other technologies) may have affected the way we use language. In particular she would like to know whether the morpheme ‘un-‘ has become more common (and more productive linguistically) since the advent of information technologies that allow operations to be readily reversed. I’ll deal with the broad issue first, followed by the more specific one.

This topic is broadly part of media ecology, whose anthropological proponents include such luminaries as Edmund Carpenter and Jack Goody, but which is better known through the work of people like the Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan (Carpenter 1973, Goody 1977, McLuhan 1962). I was first introduced to these ideas through my teacher Christopher Hallpike at McMaster in the mid-90s, expanded my knowledge of them during my Ph.D. under Bruce Trigger (Trigger 1976), who was influenced by ‘Toronto School’ thinkers like Harold Innis in the 1950s, and most recently was influenced by the work of the developmental social psychologist of literacy, David Olson (Olson 1994).

The Media Ecology Association website defines the field as ‘the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs’ (http://www.media-ecology.org). In this fairly broad conception, virtually every social scientist is a media ecologist. More narrowly construed, it is the idea that differences in the way that information is represented and communicated affect our perception and cognition of that information. It ranges from studies of Paleolithic art to text messaging – very broad, nonetheless.

Now, Katherine is asking about the effects of information technology and media on language, and this is a tricky issue. Perhaps the trickiest of all is establishing any sort of causality. How do we know, for instance, that any particular linguistic change is the direct result of a change in medium? But beyond that, there is the question of what non-trivial effects media have on language. There are obvious changes, such as the introduction of new lexical items: blog, spam, blogspam, blogosphere, Internet, web, intarwebs … the list could of course be expanded virtually indefinitely, without telling us very much about how people categorize and perceive the world. But I’m a cognitive anthropologist, so establishing meaningful links between language and non-linguistic behaviour is what I’m really interested in. So what about it?

So let’s look at ‘un-‘. One of the fascinating things about this morpheme is that it was actually more heavily used in Old English (prior to the Norman Conquest) than after. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that “the number of un- words recorded in OE [Old English] is about 1250, of which barely an eighth part survived beyond the OE period.” This reduction came about as many of the artificial constructions attested in Anglo-Saxon poetry ceased to be used, words which would never have been used in everyday usage but which were coined for specific metrical purposes. This is media ecology par excellence: the medium (poetic oral presentation) influenced output, and when the medium disappears, so do the linguistic forms.

One of the odd things about ‘un-‘ words is that a number of Anglo-Saxon negations survive even where the positive versions of the word have disappeared. Michael Quinion, author of the brilliant site / e-newsletter World Wide Words, has a fascinating article on ‘unpaired words’ such as unwieldy, unruly, and disgruntled, all of which formerly had positive counterparts, but which have now disappeared. But what’s important to note here is that the loss of these terms was not predictable from any sort of social or technological change, and that despite these gaps in our lexicon, we seem to get along quite fine with synonyms, or with multi-word phrases.

Important for this discussion is the word *uncleftish, which doesn’t exist, and never existed until the publication of ‘Uncleftish Beholding‘, science fiction author Poul Anderson’s fascinating account of atomic theory using only words and morphemes of Anglo-Saxon origin. Despite the fact that chemical jargon is filled with Greek and Latin terminology, it is possible (though not simple) to construct an understandable discussion of atomic theory using words like ‘uncleftish’ for ‘atomic’ (both mean ‘indivisible’). I’ve used this essay to get students to think about how language affects thought (linguistic relativity), most recently on my devilishly fiendish Language and Culture take-home exam last term, but also in my Evolutionary Anthropology class at McGill. It’s worth noting though that while you don’t need the word atomic to express the concept of indivisibility, nor indeed any Greek or Latin roots whatsoever, Anderson does need to coin uncleftish out of three existing morphemes, un-, -cleft-, and -ish.

The most famous ‘un-‘ neologism is the Orwellian ‘ungood’, a classic example of the form of linguistic relativity known as doublethink. “If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.” (Orwell 1949: 53). Pace Orwell, ungood has a long history in English, going back to Old English and attested sporadically thereafter right up until Orwell’s writing, at which time, of course, the word took on a far more sinister meaning, and acquired a very different connotation.

But despite the obvious media-ecological implications of the quotation, there is no reason why ‘ungood’ requires a cognitive gap of ‘bad’, or that the absence of the word ‘bad’ has any cognitive implications whatsoever. I’m a humanist of generally left-ish political persuasion, and a great admirer of Orwell’s novels and short fiction, but his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language‘ (Orwell 1950) is not one of his best pieces of thinking, and falls prey to this sort of muddle-headed thinking, equating the products of thought (in this case, written language) with the thoughts themselves. This is a form of linguistic relativity to which few if any linguists or anthropologists subscribe. I criticize this view in my short little humorous article, ‘The perils of pseudo-Orwellianism’ (Chrisomalis 2007); without denying that good writing is easier to understand than poor writing, it simply isn’t sustainable that the use of jargon, or buzzwords, or neologisms, or clumsy phrasing, inexorably leads to laxity of thought, or to particular political positions. The literature in the use of metaphor in linguistics is less reductionist, and far more sophisticated, than Orwell’s pronouncements, and requires that we understand, cognitively, exactly how words are used by human beings (e.g., Lakoff 1987). Shocking, I know.

In fact, there’s pretty good evidence for non-linguistic concept formation, which means that we have access to cognitive resources other than language to allow us to sidestep or ignore the cognitive frameworks that our particular language(s) might encourage. From my own narrow research perspective, I’m fascinated by the differences between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of number, with the implication that there are structured patterns of thought which follow from the use of particular graphic numerical systems, regardless of the structure of the number words of its users’ languages. Numerical notation is a visual technology for communicating numerical information: does it matter that we write 238 instead of CCXXXVIII? And if so, how so? In a couple of weeks I’m going to be giving a talk here at Wayne where, in part, I discuss the effects of the Western (Hindu-Arabic) numerals on the grammar of English numeral words, using telephone numbers as an example domain. For instance, if your phone number is 639-4625, you most likely pronounce it ‘six-three-nine-four-six-two-five’, and certainly not ‘six hundred and thirty nine, four thousand six hundred and twenty-five’. For a user of Roman numerals, the pronunciation of digits as distinct lexemes would be nonsensical, but for users of Western numerals, this is commonplace.

But now we are back to the effects of technology on language. I do think there are effects, but specifying where and when those effects will occur is tremendously complex, domain-specific, and (unfortunately) not predictable in any obvious way. Some people do in fact say ‘LOL’ and the verb ‘to lol’ may actually be achieving some currency; this of course is an acronym derived from ‘laugh(ing) out loud’ and emerged from online communication. LOL exists as a social lubricant, mediating online text-based communication in a medium that denies its participants the ability to see each others’ expressions and other nonverbal cues. But could we have *predicted* that LOL would emerge? I don’t think so. (Incidentally, I just used asterisks to indicate emphasis on ‘predicted’ – another media-ecological effect on language. In a Facebook chat conversation with a friend last week, she inquired about this usage, which was non-standard for her, but to me, indicates stress WITHOUT QUITE RISING TO THE LEVEL OF YELLING, WHICH REQUIRES ALL CAPS). Having both these tools in my repertoire of online communication techniques – as well as the emoticon :o – gives me choices that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

You may have noted my use of the term ‘intarweb’, which emerged out of Usenet newsgroups in the early 90s as a means of gently mocking the ‘noobs’ – the new users of the Internet whose mastery of online lingo was sub-par and indeed mock-worthy. Of course, people have been blending words for as long as there have been words, probably, but this particular coinage reflected a particular moment in the history of electronic technology, in which terms like ‘internet’, ‘web’, ‘online’, ‘e-‘ ‘Information Superhighway’, and ‘Information Age’ (cue laughter from those of my readers in on a particular inside joke) were well-known in the public sphere but where knowledge of how to deploy these terms was less well-developed. But again, we can explain this phenomenon only in historical and sociocultural terms, rather than as a known effect of the new technology itself.

This is why, in my opinion, media ecology is most profitably practiced today through linguistic anthropology, which has as its central goal the comparative study of patterns of relationships between communication and culture. If we ever hope to get beyond the recitation of media-ecological anecdotes, we need a comparative framework within which to examine similarities and differences among communicative situations. Of course, I’m talking about a linguistic anthropology informed by biological and cognitive constraints on human communicative capacities, and which includes archaeological and historical as well as ethnographic data as its sources. But only if we make this endeavour will we truly be able to answer Katherine’s unassuming and unfoolish question.

Works cited
Carpenter, E. S. 1973. Oh, what a blow that phantom gave me! Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Chrisomalis, S. 2007. The perils of pseudo-Orwellianism. Antiquity 81: 204-207.
Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
McLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press.
Olson, D. R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press.
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. A novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Orwell, George. 1950. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Secker & Warburg.
Trigger, B. G. 1976. Inequality and Communication in Early Civilizations. Anthropologica 18.

A biography of the ampersand

Originally published as ‘A biography of the ampersand’, The Ampersand: Journal of the Bachelor of Arts and Science, vol. 1 (2008), pp. 1-2. This was the editorial introduction to the inaugural issue of McGill’s B.A & Sc. program journal.

—

In one of those weird coincidences that arise from time to time, I recently remarked in a B.A. & Sc. lecture on my area of specialty, the anthropology of writing and literacy, that the often-neglected ampersand is perhaps my favourite written sign in English. Good old Shift-7 – where would we be without you? I am thrilled to have been asked to write this short introductory piece, and I hope to share with you some of what I think makes this sign so very interesting.

The word ampersand itself has a very curious history. Prior to the twentieth century, particularly but not exclusively in Britain, & was regarded not as a punctuation mark or an auxiliary sign, but as a sort of letter of the alphabet, to be found after Z. In listing one’s letters in order, one would end the sequence ‘X, Y, Z, & per se and’ – that is, ‘&, by itself, standing for and’. Other letters that could stand for words on their own could also be named in this way (e.g. ‘A per se A’ or ‘I per se I’). The ampersand wasn’t quite a full letter – one wouldn’t use it when compiling an alphabetized list, for instance – but it had a definite place at the end of the alphabet, as recounted by generations of schoolchildren. Over time, ‘and per se and’ became ‘ampersand’, and in this blending of words its original sense was lost to all but etymologists.

Unlike the ordinary letters A through Z, & unambiguously represents a specific word in a language without indicating the sounds of that word – the term sometimes used for such signs is logogram. This usually makes the written form shorter (= for equals), but also allows it to be used regardless of the language of the reader. One can’t, however, except when being facetious, use it phonetically in words like m&atory or h&st&. Of course in French & is read as ‘et’, in German as ‘und’, and so on. It survives in part because and is such a common word, and thus in need of abbreviation, but of course many other words like the and of have no such common abbreviation, and never have.

The history of the sign & is as fascinating as its name. The earliest use of the ampersand was Roman; it emerged as a shorthand contraction of the Roman word et ‘and’ in the rapid scribal hand used in the early Empire. Of course, its reading would always have been ‘et’ in Latin – it was not yet a logogram – but as the two letters became one, its pronunciation became divorced from any specific language, even though the meaning remained constant throughout European languages. In German, this graphic origin survives in the name Etzeichen ‘et-sign’, and to this day proofreaders of English publications use the term ‘et’ in place of ‘and’ when reading & aloud, to avoid ambiguity.

Its name born out of the union of words, its shape born out of the union of letters, its meaning conveying the union of disparate ideas and concepts – the ampersand is no mere shorthand. Indeed, this publication bears the indelible mark of the merger of diversity, as will your B.A. & Sc. degree, and ultimately, your intellectual experiences.

John DeFrancis, 1911-2009

Sad news from the world of writing systems research. John DeFrancis, whose books on Chinese writing have done more than any other scholarship to demolish the myth that the script is ‘ideographic’ or ‘pictographic’, died on January 2 at the age of 98. To be honest I had no idea he was so elderly, because his research productivity over the past 25 years has been so tremendous. While his Sinological expertise ranged from language to literature to foreign policy, I know him through his books, Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984) and Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989), which demonstrated masterfully that the morphemic and phonemic elements in Chinese writing far outweigh the non-linguistic ones. As someone who works on a subject that also straddles this boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic representations, my work has been profoundly influenced by DeFrancis’ thinking about the nature of written communication.

Works cited
DeFrancis, J. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press.
DeFrancis, J. 1989. Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. University of Hawaii Press.