Thanksgiving link roundup

Today, most of my colleagues are toiling away in an attempt to cook and carve some sort of fowl. Me, well, I’m Canadian, and even though I work over in the Dark Nether Reaches and get to enjoy its three-day week, I live over here in Canada’s Deep South and get to … have a flu shot and catch up on posting some links of interest?

I don’t have much to add about the sad passing of Dell Hymes last week. I didn’t know him but I know many people who did, and no one who purports to be a linguistic anthropologist (or sociolinguist … or anthropological linguist … or …) can possibly be ignorant of his work. The NYT description of him as a “Linguist with a Wide Net” is utterly evocative and has me imagining it literally. He will be missed, but his legacy on the discipline will remain vital for decades.

While Turkey officially switched from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet in the 1920s, at the same time it prohibited the use of letters not used to represent Turkish – which includes the ‘ordinary’ Roman letters Q, W, and X. While sometimes portrayed as a ban on those letters specifically, it is a more general ban on non-Turkish characters, as far as I can tell, which would seem to prohibit all sorts of texts. Ostensibly designed to promote national unity and secular rule, the law has only been applied to Turks of Kurdish descent. As someone who until last year was a resident of a region where texts written in my native language are under severe legal constraints, this has been a matter of some interest and concern to me for a few years now. Mark Liberman tells us more over at Language Log.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are investigating the cultural evolution of language, arguing that language change is patterned by the biological constraints of the human brain – in other words, language changes to accomodate itself to the sorts of brains we possess. They are examining this idea experimentally using an artificial language of simple syllables used to describe alien-looking fruit … which is not as bizarre as I may have made it sound. Edinburgh is doing a lot of exciting work these days in linguistics, what with Jim Hurford, Simon Kirby, and Geoff Pullum (among others) housed there.

Relatedly, Marc Changizi claims (following up on work he has been doing for the past several years) that there are strong cognitive / evolutionary constraints on the graphemes (discrete written units) of writing systems, creating similiarites across writing systems that reflect the cultural evolution of graphemes to accomodate the needs and capacities of the human brain. I have more doubts about this one, which I may talk about in more detail – basically my concern is that the cross-cultural analysis is weak and inadequately accounts for borrowing (Galton’s problem). But it’s interesting work that deserves some attention. Hat tip to The Lousy Linguist for both this item and the previous one).

Lastly, Alun Salt has recently published a very interesting paper, ‘The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples‘ arguing for a more rigorous statistical approach to archaeoastronomy and establishing solar orientations. He’s not the first to use statistical analysis in archaeoastronomy but he does note with some dismay that there is generally insufficient concern with quantitative reasoning among archaeoastronomers to be able to apply statistical tests effectively. Salt highlights some of the complexities in making these determinations – leap second daters, take note! More important than the article itself, though, is its venue, the open-access PLoS ONE. Although ‘cheap’ by open-access standards, the fact that authors must pay ‘only’ $1350 to cover publication costs is, I think, problematic in humanities and social science disciplines where grants are small and getting proportionally smaller.

To my American friends, good luck with your birds, and thanks for reading!

Leap second dating

Archaeologists have long been used to being dependent on physicists for radiometric dating, but gravimetric dating? A new paper deposited last week to arXiv suggests so:

The physical origin of the leap second is discussed in terms of the new gravity model. The calculated time shift of the earth rotation around the sun for one year amounts to $\displaystyle{\Delta T \simeq 0.621 s/ year}$. According to the data, the leap second correction for one year corresponds to $\Delta T \simeq 0.63 \pm 0.03 s/ year $, which is in perfect agreement with the prediction. This shows that the leap second is not originated from the rotation of the earth in its own axis. Instead, it is the same physics as the Mercury perihelion shift. We propose a novel dating method (Leap Second Dating) which enables to determine the construction date of some archaeological objects such as Stonehenge.

So how do we get from leap seconds to Stonehenge? The authors are claiming that the predictions of general relativity allow us to estimate the time shift of the earth’s rotation around the sun at ~ 10.3 minutes / 1000 years. The same process that leads to us adding ‘leap seconds’ to the calendar allows us to measure the difference in sunrise / sunset over long time periods. Now, I’m not a physicist so I can’t follow all that other stuff, other than understanding that the shift in Mercury’s perihelion is one of the demonstrations of general relativity used by Einstein. So let’s grant it.

The authors claim that “some of the archaeological objects may well possess a special part of the building which can be pointed to the sun at the equinox.” And if you expect the alignment to occur at sunrise but you’re off by 10 minutes, well, it must be because it was built 1000 years ago, right? But with a shift of 10 minutes per millennium, you’ve got a new problem, namely that you’re going to get a whole bunch of false positive solar alignments. The authors’ assumption that we know in advance which objects are aligned to particular solar events is incorrect.

Moreover, the authors note correctly that “It should be noted that the new dating method has an important assumption that there should be no major earthquake in the region of the archaeological objects.” Indeed, one would need to ensure that there had been virtually no movement of the celestially-aligned features – post-glacial rebound, for instance, can cause massive shifts in elevation over the time scale we’re considering, not to mention garden-variety post-depositional processes. And bear in mind that an alignment requires at least two archaeological features that can be demonstrated to be associated with one another. The error bars would be HUGE.

Finally, the idea that new dating techniques allows physical scientists to ‘tell’ archaeologists the date of their stuff is incorrect. When radiocarbon dating was developed in the late 40s, it required evidentiary confirmation, confirmation which could only come from dating archaeological materials of known age – in this case, Egyptian materials dated non-radiometrically (e.g. papyri containing dates), which could confirm that the rate of C-14 formation was (more or less) constant (Trigger 2006: 382). We don’t have anything like that here.

I’m not saying that this idea is so ridiculous that no one should try it – though it might be. But my advice to astrophysicists is to take a deep breath and consult an archaeologist before claiming to have developed a new dating technique. In other words: look before you leap.

Fujita, Takehisa. and Naohira Kanda. 2009. Physics of leap second. arXiv:0911.2087v1.
Trigger, Bruce. 2006. History of archaeological thought, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.

(Hat tip to the weird and wacky folks at Improbable Research)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908-2009

Word today that the renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died this past weekend at the age of 100 (NYT obituary here). I posted last year in honour of his centenary. Read often but rarely well, his influence on the discipline is enormous and it is nearly impossible to conceptualize social anthropology without his work.

Pseudo-disciplines

There is a fascinating short essay ‘Ancient History and Pseudoscholarship‘ over at Livius.org. I don’t share the author’s belief that most laypeople are able to distinguish pseudoscholarship from professional work, nor that there is an absolute decline in pseudoscience over the past few decades. I do absolutely agree that the prevalence of faulty reasoning and uncritical use of evidence by scholars in the historical and social sciences is far more problematic than the more outlandish pseudoscientific beliefs such as the ancient astronaut hypothesis. And it will come as no surprise to you that I share the author’s conviction that a robust and broad training (in my work, that would include linguistics, archaeology, history, anthropology, and cognitive science) in order to allow professionals to avoid pseudoscientific errors in their own research and teaching.

News roundup

Well there certainly has been a lot of action here since my post about the Embuggerance and Feisty fiasco. Alas, no word on any action on the part of the great Googly deity. Greetings to all newcomers arrived from Language Log, Language Hat, The Volokh Conspiracy, and parts a-Twitter. In lieu of thoughtful content, here are some things that have amused me over the past week:

Various blogs have noted (with various ranges of dismay) a new pop-sci volume entitled Manthropology by Peter McAllister, which takes the well-known fact that there is a decline in both male and female skeletal robusticity associated with industrialism and turns it into such gender-essentialist nonsense as “If you’re reading this then you — or the male you have bought it for — are the worst man in history”. As far as I can tell the author has no advanced degree in anthropology and has never published any peer-reviewed work in support of his rather extreme claims.

There’s a curious blog post over at the NYT by Olivia Judson on the relationship between facial expression and the phonetic inventory of languages. She asks whether speakers of languages in which certain vowel sounds (like [i] ) are common are more prone to smile on that basis. Perhaps not, but there’s an abundant literature on the relationship of speech and facial expression, much of which is found in the notes below the post. Hat tip to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed for alerting me to it.

Lastly, for any of my students who may be reading and were paying attention last week, when we discussed George Lakoff’s NATION AS FAMILY metaphor, or for any of you from the true north strong and free, I give you this amusement from the webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner. I do want to register a complaint that my part of Canada (south-southwestern Ontario) seems to have already made its escape – or perhaps is the insane relative abandoned in the basement? You decide.