World Loanword Database

The World Loanword Database project (WOLD), edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, is now online and freely available to users. It’s a remarkable resource compiled with the purpose of analyzing language contact at the lexical level. Over fifty linguists (including my colleague Martha Ratliff here at Wayne State) have provided mini-vocabularies of languages (41 in total) including information for thousands of words on borrowing, attested age, and analyzability, creating cross-linguistic indices that measure the degree to which particular words (and types of words) tend to be borrowed, and from which languages they are borrowed. So, for instance, you can find that more languages have a borrowed word for father than for mother, or that Hawai’ian borrowed several terms for continental North American animals (prairie dog, skunk, kingfisher) from Ute (an indigenous language of Colorado). It’s a rich and highly functional database, and my only ‘complaint’ is that I’d like to see hundreds more languages covered! I need to stop playing with it right now or my day is going to be shot.

Of course, being who I am and doing what I do, the first place I turned was to the numerals, and I immediately noticed two significant things:

– Ordinal numerals seem to be less frequently borrowed than cardinals; first is borrowed less often than one; second less often than two; and third less often than three.

– Fifteen is borrowed less often than five or ten. Fifteen is far more analyzable than either ten or five (most often as ’10+5′) – so how does this make sense?) I’ll have to look at the data more closely to figure this one out … but not today, work calls!

Paleography at KCL

Over the last week there has been a groundswell of action in opposition to the decision to eliminate the paleography program at King’s College London, most significantly the position of the Chair of Paleography, Professor David Ganz, which is the only such position in the UK and perhaps in the English-speaking world. Paleography, the science of manuscripts and handwriting, lacks the direct economic and political impact of other fields but has enormous influence on work throughout the historical disciplines. My new book relied significantly on Professor Ganz’s co-edition/translation of Bischoff’s Latin Paleography. More broadly, the notion that any scholar’s research should be narrowly dictated by budgetary considerations – that evaluations of scholarly merit ought to be conducted on the grounds of immediate financial impact – is anathema to the principles of academic freedom.

A Facebook group and an online petition have already been organized to oppose this misguided bureaucratic decision. I encourage any of you who may be concerned about the impact of this decision to become involved through these or other means. A parallel effort has been organized opposing the firing of several KCL philosophers.

Medieval anthropology: a working bibliography

Back in May I discussed the curious absence of anthropological research on the Middle Ages or ‘medieval anthropology’, and made wild and obviously false promises to produce a bibliography of this hemidemisemidiscipline.

– I’ve excluded material that is strictly bioarchaeological / forensic / epidemiological in nature; biological anthropologists do all sorts of interesting work on the Middle Ages but it’s a different sort of thing than I’m talking about here.
– Similarly, medieval archaeology is an enormous field but generally the archaeology of medieval Europe falls outside of anthropology. Where there is neither a comparative nor a holistic element to the work, I’ve excluded it.
– Material written by historians with an interest in anthropology is excluded, not because I have complaints about its quality but because my aim is to discuss the particularly anthropological literature on the Middle Ages.
– By chronology alone, large parts of New World archaeology and epigraphy (Maya, Aztec, Inka) can only reasonably be defined as ‘medieval’. The exclusion of the New World civilizations from the ‘medieval’ world may be pure ethnocentrism, but including it would dwarf all the other material by at least two orders of magnitude, and would defeat my purposes.
– I’ve tried to be relatively thorough but this is, as the title suggests, a working bibliography only. Contributions are welcome!

The bibliography currently has around 40 items, of which several authors have multiple publications each, and there is very little from the past decade. Despite the prominence of several of these figures (Kroeber, Goody, Turner, Appadurai, Macfarlane), I would almost be willing to stake the claim that they could get away with talking about the Middle Ages because their prominence allowed them to flout disciplinary conventions. Others (Hodgen, Naroll, Hewes) were eminent but little-known outside their own small circles. The bibliography roughly groups into several distinct categories; a) Icelandic studies; b) studies of medieval family / marriage using anthropological work on kinship; c) matter on religion and ritual using medieval Christianity as analogue or as comparative material; d) comparative-civilizational scholarship; e) formalistic material in cross-cultural studies.

Anderson, R. T. (1971). Voluntary associations in history. American anthropologist, 73(1), 209-222.
Appadurai, A. (1988). The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge Univ Pr.
Asad, T. (1983). Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual. Economy and Society, 12(3), 287-327.
Asad, T. (1986). Medieval heresy: an anthropological view. Social History, 11(3), 345-362.
Asad, T. (1987). On ritual and discipline in medieval Christian monasticism. Economy and Society, 16(2), 159-203.
Boone III, J. L. (1986). Parental investment and elite family structure in preindustrial states: a case study of late medieval-early modern Portuguese genealogies. American anthropologist, 859-878.
Brown, D. E. (1988). Hierarchy, history, and human nature: The social origins of historical consciousness. Univ of Arizona Pr.
Bullough, D. A. (1969). Early Medieval Social Groupings: The Terminology of Kinship. Past & Present, 45(1), 3.
Carneiro, R. L. (1969). The measurement of cultural development in the ancient Near East and in Anglo-Saxon England. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 31, 1013-23.
Cohn, B. S. (1980). History and anthropology: the state of play. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(2), 198-221.
Durrenberger, E. P. (1992). The dynamics of medieval Iceland: political economy & literature. Univ of Iowa Pr.
Geary, P. J. (1994). Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Cornell Univ Pr.
Gellner, E. (1992). Plough, sword, and book: the structure of human history. University of Chicago Press.
Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. (1983). The development of the family and marriage in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Hastrup, K. (1985). Culture and history in medieval Iceland: an anthropological analysis of structure and change. Oxford University Press, USA.
Hastrup, K. (1990). Island of anthropology: studies in past and present Iceland. Coronet Books Inc.
Herzfeld, M. (1989). Anthropology through the looking-glass. Cambridge University Press.
Hewes, G. W. (1981). Prospects for More Productive Comparative Civilizational Studies. Cross-Cultural Research, 16(1-2), 167-185. doi:10.1177/106939718101600109
Hodgen, M. T. (1945). Glass and Paper: An Historical Study of Acculturation. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 1(4), 466-497.
Hodgen, M. T. (1950). Similarities and Dated Distributions. American Anthropologist, 52(4), 445-467.
Hodgen, M. T. (1952). Change and History. A Study of the Dated Distributions of Technological Innovations in England, New York: Wenner-Green Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Hodgen, M. T. (1964). Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Univ of Pennsylvania Pr.
Hodgen, M. T. (1974). Anthropology, history, and cultural change. Univ of Arizona Pr.
Hsu, E. (2007). The experience of wind in early and medieval Chinese medicine. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 117, S134.
Kroeber, A. L. (1919). On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes of fashion. American Anthropologist, 21(3), 235-263.
Kroeber, A. L. (1945). The ancient Oikoumene as an historic culture aggregate. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 9-20.
Kroeber, A. L. (1958). Gray’s epicyclical evolution. American Anthropologist, 60(1), 31-38.
Kroeber, A. L. (1951). Is Western Civilization Disintegrating or Reconstituting? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 95(2), 100-104.
Kroeber, A. L. (1966). An anthropologist looks at history. University of California Press.
Macfarlane, A. (1977). History, anthropology and the study of communities. Social History, 2(5), 631-652.
Macfarlane, A. (1978). The origins of English Individualism: some surprises. Theory and Society, 6(2), 255-277.
Macfarlane, A., & Sharpe, J. A. (1999). Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study. Routledge.
Moreland, J. (2006). Archaeology and Texts: Subservience or Enlightenment. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 135-51.
Naroll, R., Bullough, V. L., & Naroll, F. (1974). Military deterrence in history. SUNY Press.
Symonds, L. (2009). Death as a Window to Life: Anthropological Approaches to Early Medieval Mortuary Ritual. Reviews in Anthropology, 38, 48-87. doi:10.1080/00938150802672949
Turner, V. W., & Turner, E. (1995). Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture. Columbia University Press.
Van Gerven, D. P., Sheridan, S. G., & Adams, W. Y. (1995). The health and nutrition of a medieval Nubian population: the impact of political and economic change. American Anthropologist, 97(3), 468-480.

More on paleo-Basque writing

Back in November 2008 I wrote a post, ‘Debunking and de-Basque-ing‘ talking about the general state of Basque paleolinguistics and epigraphy, with specific reference to claims that a set of inscriptions from Iruña-Veleia were not the best evidence we have for the early use of a Basque ancestral language but in fact a ridiculous hoax. I didn’t think about it much since that time, but it seems that the debate rages on. Maju at Leherensuge asserts this week that many of the more extreme claims of hoaxing were grossly exaggerated (thanks to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed for pointing this out in the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth). You can also see a large number of the Iruña-Veleia inscriptions on this flickr stream. I’m still pretty dubious about the inscription on the linked post; I can see how it might be read as MISCART[…] but I don’t see it as obviously more correct than DESCART[…]. And, given that it comes after the names Socrates and Virgil, why would the name Miscart (an apparently unattested or new variant of Melkart, a Punic version of the god Mercury) be there at all? But I’m not a Basque epigrapher and wouldn’t claim any particular expertise here. The existence of one (possibly joke?) inscription wouldn’t automatically negate the validity of the rest, some of which (from the flickr site) I see no particular reason to doubt. And I don’t find it preposterous at all that there should be Paleo-Basque inscriptions in the regions where Basque is spoken today. But do remember that this region has a particularly hoax-ridden and pseudoarchaeologically-inclined inscriptional history.

Discount numerals! V for the price of IV!

The excellent people at Cambridge have provided me with a downloadable flyer for Numerical Notation: A Comparative History which can be redeemed online, by phone or by mail for a 20% discount off the list price ($76 US instead of $95). This offer is good until the end of May.