Eu-philo-logy

In my internettic peregrinations yesterday, I came across a thoughtful personal essay, A Requiem for Philology, by Prof. William Harris of Middlebury College, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year at the age of 83. (I found it through this interesting reminiscence from Steve Cotler, linked yesterday by Mark Liberman on Language Log, and then all those articles were mentioned today on Language Hat. Thus ends my internetymology.) These extended reminiscences concern Joshua Whatmough (1897-1964), a prominent classical philologist of the mid-20th century and an expert on the non-Italic languages of Italy.

Philology is the academic discipline that focuses on the meaning and history of words and the comparative analysis of texts deriving from this analysis. I’m extremely sympathetic to philology as an academic discipline. It is a set of related practices and concepts exported from classics to a whole host of regionally and linguistically specific disciplines. Today, you have Egyptian philologists in Near Eastern studies/Egyptology, Anglo-Saxon philologists in English departments, and of course the classical philologists in classics … and so on. Now it’s not always that way (Whatmough was a true comparative philologist, and indeed his department at Harvard was first classical philology, then comparative philology, and eventually linguistics), and indeed, in the past, philology had much more substance and more impact than it does today. Philology is a set of methods and concepts that hang together quite nicely regardless of regional specializations. It is also extraordinarily useful for the historical and comparative investigation of languages and cultures. So as a discipline, it makes a great deal of sense to me on those grounds. Philological research is of enormous interest and relevance to my own scholarship on pre-modern numerical systems.

It is indeed the case that there are virtually no departments identified specifically with philology in the English-speaking world (although there are plenty in Eastern Europe); the only North American one I was able to find is Columbia’s Department of French and Romance Philology. However, this itself doesn’t tell us very much. The Columbia department is not producing scholarship that is substantially different than other Romance languages / French / comparative lit departments. Conversely, any number of scholars in departments that don’t bear the name ‘philology’ are, effectively, philologists – I can think of a few at my own institution, for instance, and we have a regularly taught Romance philology graduate course. Moreover, much of what was once labelled philology now simply falls under the rubric of historical linguistics – and again, most major institutions have at least one historical linguist, often more.

Indeed, the essay is neither focused on the (true but trivial) fact that there are virtually no philology departments these days or the issue of whether some academics are philologists. It is a lament that the form of close analysis of words and language undertaken by philologists is not taught to undergraduates in the way that Prof. Whatmough and others once did. And that is all it is. No one is asserting that no one does the kind of work that Whatmough once did – this would be ridiculous and patently false. In fact, given the proliferation and expansion of institutions, I’d wager that there are in fact more academics practicing philological research than ever before (even as they constitute an increasingly tiny percentage of the academy as a whole). But Harris is asserting that there has been a decline in the teaching of a set of rigorous methods towards language whose absence is detrimental to the cognition and character of students, who would have profited from it.

And now let’s ask ourselves: why is this so? Surely it was not that every undergraduate was once required to take philology – at least not in the twentieth century! But equally I don’t think it is that we have become distracted at a macrosocietal level, as Harris suggests: “our public eye has become loose, accustomed to glancing at two second flash-shots on block-buster film and TV. We tend to get overall meanings, we think and buy on impulse and we don’t read the fine print on our personal and political contracts well.” At a pragmatic level, declining enrollments in a major over a period of time result in fewer classes being offered in that major, which in turn reduce its visibility – and thus fewer students hear about it. So there is a positive feedback effect going on here that can result in the demise of many a small department or specialty, usually through merging it with another discipline. Indeed, not only did this happen with philology, but it is ongoing with classics as a whole, as many departments merge into history or lit-languages departments and become allied programs with graduate degrees, and then potentially just a few courses.

But at a bigger level, a societal level, the university has become a very different sort of place than it was 50 years ago, at institutions big and small. In an age where postsecondary education has really reached a mass clientele, and where the role of the university has become to a large degree professionalizing and pragmatic, and where very few students come from a life of leisure, it is completely unsurprising that disciplines like philology have difficulty justifying their existence within the social, economic, and political framework of higher ed. Foreign languages and cultures – sure, that’s good for business. Archaeology’s business model works because CRM firms provide jobs to graduates without the PhD. Classics gets by (barely) by taking a ‘cultural turn’ towards the study of race, gender, and class. And linguistics has linked its fate to cognitive science, for better or for worse, and has thus hitched itself to a behavioral-science model of funding and scholarship. Attributing the decline of the discipline to students losing interest is missing the point – it is indeed necessary that the modern university shed disciplines that do not conform to the structural needs of employment markets.

This is not the university that we have chosen – not academics (philologists or otherwise), and not students – not a free choice, at any rate, but one conditioned by an insatiable demand for relevance and applicability that philology simply lacks. And if we want to sit about and lament the loss of the university that once was, that’s all very well. But if we want to make the case for ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inapplicable’ disciplines – and I would insist that we can and must – we need to be cognizant that blaming students or faculty fails to address the larger issues in the contemporary academy.

Zapotec decipherment on the horizon

Artdaily.org reports on a major new initiative to compile an epigraphic corpus and eventually (it is hoped) decipher the Zapotec hieroglyphic writing system. Unfortunately the article has been poorly translated, and I am at a loss as to the meaning of the sentence, “During that age, numeral system began, which would reach a great sophistication towards 7th century.” But that’s not the point. Most people who think of Mesoamerican writing think of the Maya hieroglyphs, or maybe, maybe the Aztec manuscript tradition. But the earliest inscriptions of the Valley of Oaxaca (the Zapotec homeland) are very early (500 BCE) – as early or earlier than any other Mesoamerican writing (with the exception of the enigmatic Cascajal Block) and (debatably) centuries earlier than any writing in the Maya languages. Monument 3 from San José Mogote is the earliest clear evidence for Mesoamerican numeration (used in the name ‘1 Earthquake’).

But we really don’t know as much as we would like about the Zapotec script (of which there are hundreds of examples dating from 500 BCE to 850 CE, although many are short or fragmentary). Our state of knowledge about the script is roughly where we were with Mayan writing forty years ago: we can read the numbers and the calendar, and we can ‘interpret’ a few other glyphs contextually, but that’s about it. There has been important recent work on Zapotec, particularly by Javier Urcid, whose excellent book, Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing (2001), represents a major step forward, but it isn’t a decipherment nor does it claim to be. If a Zapotec decipherment or even a partial decipherment were to emerge from this new initiative, it would clearly help sort out many thorny phylogenetic issues in lowland Mesoamerican linguistic history and culture. But the script may not be highly phonetic, and certainly is not an excellent candidate for a Linear-B-Michael-Ventris style decipherment. Still, one can hope.

Copper Scroll mania

Check out a remarkable piece of popular science writing and pseudoscience debunking: Pseudo-Science and Sensationalist Archaeology: An Exposé of Jimmy Barfield and the Copper Scroll Project. It is an accessible point-by-point refutation of a set of claims regarding the Copper Scroll, an aberrant (but still fully comprehensible) text among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one written on copper rather than parchment or papyrus. Those of you who have followed my posts on archaeolinguistics will find Robert Cargill’s debunking of Jim Barfield’s ‘discovery’ to be a telling example of how both archaeological and linguistic expertise are essential when dealing with ancient texts.

Tolkien as translator: the anthropology of Middle-Earth

[Author’s note: Sorry for the great delay in posting! I promise that I am not dead, and neither is this blog – I’ve been involved in an ethnographic project since, well, the day after my last post here, and while it doesn’t end for another two weeks, I thought I might check in, just in case anyone is still reading. Expect a flurry of posts to come in late August once I regain my bearings.]

Several months ago, the Tolkien Studies on the Web blog reported that the Maya epigraphist / linguist / archaeologist Marc Zender, who is a lecturer at Harvard, is currently offering (and presumably is nearly concluded?) a summer course entitled, ‘Tolkien as translator: Language, culture, and society in Middle-Earth‘. It looks like a really fascinating approach, from a scholar whose work on Maya hieroglyphic writing will doubtless provide many interesting parallels and contrasts with Middle-earth.

Tolkienophilia is often associated with medieval historians (and no, I haven’t forgotten about that list of sources on medieval anthropology), understandably given that the man was one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century, but I’ve always felt a kinship with Tolkien from an anthropological perspective, despite any number of rather unsightly issues of class, race, and gender that exist within his oeuvre. His incredible focus on language, his deep concern with genealogy and kinship, and the foundational roles of myth and history in his worldbuilding, were what first attracted me to Tolkien’s writing, and still do.

There is no question that, even though I’ve hardly read any of his actual scholarship (and wouldn’t understand it if I could), Tolkien has been one of the more important scholarly influences on my work as well. One of my good friends (an archaeologist) once described me as a philologist in the style of Tolkien, and while that’s not actually true, I see what he means. I was about two hours away from leading a seminar discussion on the Elvish tengwar script (as well as other fictional writing systems) as part of a course on the anthropology of writing and literacy. That was the day Bruce Trigger died, and I cancelled class that day, and never taught the topic since.

Digital analysis of epigraphic Greek hands

Some very interesting multidisciplinary work is coming out of the intersection of computer science and classical epigraphy. A set of techniques relating to image processing have been applied to classical Greek inscriptions in order to establish the different ‘hands’ in which Greek inscriptions were written (Panagopoulos et al 2009; Tracy and Papaodysseus 2009; see also the news article here). Given 24 high-quality images of classical inscriptions, but no other information about the artifacts whatsoever, the researchers calculated ideal forms for each letter in each inscription, and then analysed the letters from each pair of inscriptions, in order to test statistically the hypothesis that the inscriptions were made by the same writer. The results show 100% agreement with the opinion of Stephen Tracy, the epigraphist associated with the study (who selected the inscriptions but had nothing to do with the image analysis), and apparently with several other epigraphists. Four of the 24 inscriptions were in fact halves of the same inscription, and in both these cases the identification of the writer was correct.

It remains to be seen how widely this technique can be applied; the Greek classical inscriptions are highly regular and the signs are not normally ligatured to one another, while a cursive script would present significantly greater difficulties. It also doesn’t prove that these were written by six individuals – for instance, if two individuals wrote at the same place and the same time in statistically indistinguishable ways, they would be grouped together. This method has equalled expert opinion on a limited corpus, and confirmed these experts’ analysis, but it has not exceeded it. Ideally we would like to be able to apply this to texts in known hands and then to use this to identify the hand of inscriptions whose authorship is completely unknown, or controversial. If in a larger test, it took a batch of inscriptions and put inscriptions thought to be the work of one writer into two different groups, that would not be a refutation of the method – it could in fact suggest that the method is more capable than the epigraphists! While more testing is necessary, this could well prove to be a major advance, not only in Greek epigraphy but in the analysis of all sorts of ancient and modern scripts.

References
Panagopoulos, Michail, Constantin Papaodysseus, Panayiotis Rousopoulos, Dimitra Dafi, and Stephen Tracy. 2009. Automatic Writer Identification of Ancient Greek Inscriptions. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on 31, no. 8: 1404-1414.
Tracy, S. V., and C. Papaodysseus. 2009. The Study of Hands on Greek Inscriptions: The Need for a Digital Approach. American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 1: 99-102.