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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
figure out (1)
If you figure something out, you find the solution to a problem or the answer to a question.
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Word of the Day
abaxial
Definition: (adjective) Located away from or on the opposite side of the axis, as of an organ or organism
Synonyms: dorsal.
Usage: The abaxial surface of the leaf was covered in stomata, tiny pores that allow the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between the internal tissues of the plant and the outside atmosphere.
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Language Quiz: Days 7-12
Euro 2024 Football Language Quiz: Days 7-12 Do you remember some of the key moments or highlights from the frst week of Euro 24. Take the Euro 2024 Quiz II to find out. Just match the phrase with the match. Each match day of the tournament, Languagcaster has chosen a football phrase or word to […]
The post Euro 2024 Football Language Quiz: Days 7-12 appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get over
to recover from something like an illness or a shock
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Word of the Day
disdainful
Definition: (adjective) Expressing extreme contempt.
Synonyms: contemptuous, insulting, scornful.
Usage: She cast one disdainful look at Moody, without troubling herself to express her contempt in words.
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iversal States, sec. C: Universal States as Means, II: Services and Beneficiaries, d: The Serviceability of Imperial Currencies, 1, vol. 7[A], 239–55. London: Oxford University Press.
Vachek, Josef. 1939. “Zum Problem der geschriebenen Sprache.” Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8: 98–104. (Repr. in his Prague School Reader in Linguistics [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964], 441–52; rev. Eng. trans. in his Written Language Revisited [Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989], 103–16.)
Wachter, Rudolf. 1991. “Abbreviated Writing.” Kadmos 30(1): 49–80.
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are appended—phonetic rather than grammatical. All three scripts are syllabic. They are not segmental, and they are not abugidic.
Modem grammatogeny is not the only evidence that syllables are something special in the stream of speech. Developmental psycholinguists, and scholars of literacy and its acquisition, have conducted experiments on literates and nonliterates and preliterates and illiterates, and their findings all seem to converge on the basicness of the syllable (as opposed to the segment). Instrumental phonetics shows that nothing in the stream of speech corresponds to the segments written with alphabets. The syllable is clearly the most salient minimal stretch of speech. Similarly, as Lincoln also knew, the word is the most salient minimal stretch of language.
So now we put these observations together. Untutored grammatogenists, ancient or modern, create scripts that record syllables. Modern creators did so by breaking words into their smallest sounds: their syllables. For ancient creators, just as Lincoln supposed, “a distinct mark for each word, … would follow as the second thought”; but, as Lincoln could not know, in some languages, the mark for each word would also be a mark for an individual sound (a syllable), and so would not “present such a difficulty as would lead to the conclusion that the whole thing was impracticable.” That is, in some languages, the morphemes are generally monosyllabic; meaning that putting down a mark for a word is also putting down a mark for a syllable; and that same syllable might also be the sound of a different word, or very like it.
Herein lies the key to inventing a writing system. It is not unusual for nonliterate peoples to make graphic representations of meaning that are, however, not writing, because they do not represent specific language. Pictographs—Lincoln’s “clumsy picture writing of some of the nations”—are found around the world; but we do not “decipher” them, for we recognize that they do not convey individual words: they may correspond to individual words, but they stand for things or events. But in a monosyllabic language, a picture corresponding to a word, standing for a thing, also stands for the sound of that word; and it might also stand for the sound of a different word, the same or a very like sound; and this different word might be the word for something it’s not so easy to draw a picture of. A standard example, due to Gelb, is that in Sumerian a picture of an ‘arrow’, pronounced ti, could also be used to represent ‘life’, also pronounced ti. This, of course, is the rebus principle that underlies logosyllabic writing.
It is the rebus principle that makes possible true, full writing—since writing is a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that the utterance can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer. This definition means that writing must be able to convey everything in language that is not concretely picturable: the grammatical morphemes, the names (especially foreign ones) that have no secular meaning. It means that some at least of the characters in the script must be used sometimes for their sound values alone: at the earliest stages of true writing, there must be a pure syllabic component to the script. Sumerian with its monosyllabic morphemes was well suited to lend at least some of its signs to this syllabary.
If, however, a language is not monosyllabic—as in, for instance, Indo-European or Semitic or Uralic or Altaic—the chances are rather less good that the picture put for one word would have the same sound as another word or one very like it, as with the Sumerian ti example. And that is why writing could get started in Sumerian, in Chinese, in Maya, and probably in Dravidian; while the best candidate for writing where it didn’t get started—the Inca civilization—did not use a monosyllabic language, and so came up with quipus for accounting, but not with writing. Maybe there were pretty complex cultures[...]
. Gelb’s A Study of Writing. According to the Preface, much of it was written in the late 1930s, thus making it contemporary with Joseph Vachek’s pioneering work on written language. My own work on the typology and origins of writing is very much a reaction to various claims in that book; unfortunately Gelb did not live to see and comment on my suggestions. But my approach also resembles that of another contemporary project: Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. Toynbee took the whole world and all its history as his subject matter, and he believed he found trends and parallels in the development of all the civilizations he identified (twenty-one of them, in his final inventory). Invoking this grandiose achievement is not in fact so far-fetched as might be supposed, for among the dozens of topics to which individual essays are dedicated throughout the ten volumes and two supplements are phenomena of, in order, “Lingue franche,” “Archaism in Language and Literature,” and “Official Languages and Scripts.” Even in light of Toynbee’s university training as a Classicist, these essays are impressively acute, especially considering their dates of publication of 1939 for the first two and 1954 for the third. Toynbee evidences a special interest in the Achaemenid period generally, and things Iranian have recently proved to be particularly illuminating of script-related questions overall. What I have done, Toynbee-like, is to observe the nature and behavior of the full range of writing systems around the world and, Gelb-like, extract a typology and enunciate general principles.
It all started with dissatisfaction with Gelb’s claim that the Phoenician and related scripts are not alphabets, but “syllabaries with unspecified vowel”; and that Ethiopic and Indic scripts are not syllabaries, but some form of alphabet. Eventually I realized that these claims had to be made not because of some inherent properties of the scripts in question, but in order to save Gelb’s “Principle of Unidirectional Development”—which claims, without justification and, in fact, contrary to fact, that the three types of writing system, logosyllabic, syllabic, and alphabetic, must succeed each other in that order and without exception. But if Cypriote or Linear B or the Japanese kana are syllabaries, then Phoenician is not a syllabary. If Greek and all its descendants and Korean are alphabets, then Ethiopic is not an alphabet. The Principle of Unidirectional Development simply does not hold.
But if we recognize that there are two different kinds of writing systems that denote complete syllables, half the problem goes away. There are the true syllabaries, like the Linear B, the Cypriote, or the kana, with a distinct character for each possible combination of a consonant plus a vowel (maybe 50 to 80 different signs). Then there are the other kind, the Ethiopic and the Indic family, with relatively a smaller number of distinct characters, and each one has a basic form, and the basic form denotes a consonant plus the unmarked vowel (generally /a/), and each of the other vowels is denoted by the addition of some particular mark or modification to the basic form. A variety of names for this type of script has appeared in the literature—alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, pseudoalphabet—but I reject any name that incorporates either “alphabet” or “syllabary,” since they suggest subtype-ness or dependency, and I wish to stress independence. The name I use for this type is abugida, an existing Ethiopic word combining the first four consonants of the traditional Semitic order with the first four vowels of the traditional Ethiopic chart. With this distinction of two different kinds of syllable-denoting writing systems, half the problem of Gelb’s Principle goes away.
However, the Phoenician script is still neither a true syllabary nor an abugida. But it is also not a full alphabet, because of the want of signs for vowels. It constitutes another separate type of script, a consonantary, and my name for this type is abjad. Abja[...]
Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 18: Shoot-out victory
In this football language post we look at the phrase 'Shoot-out victory' after Portugal's dramatic win on penalties against Slovenia in their last-16 match from the 2024 Euros.
The post Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 18: Shoot-out victory appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Quiz – Football Language Day 1-Day 6
Euro 2024 Football Language Quiz: Days 1-6 Do you remember some of the key moments or highlights from the frst week of Euro 24. Take the Euro 2024 Quiz to find out. Just match the phrase with the match. Each match day of the tournament, Languagcaster has chosen a football phrase or word to describe […]
The post Euro 2024 Quiz – Football Language Day 1-Day 6 appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
jolly (someone) up
To make (someone) happier or more cheerful; to cheer (someone) up. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
donkey
a stupid or silly person
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Language Log
Paris Hilton's vocal registers
Hilary Hanson, "Paris Hilton's Split-Second Voice Change Leaves People Absolutely Stunned", Huffpost 6/29/2024:
Paris Hilton floored social media users this week by seamlessly shifting her vocal register midsentence as she spoke before Congress. […]
When Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) asked Hilton for her thoughts on incorporating mental health care into new legislation, Hilton responded first by complimenting the lawmaker’s outfit.
“I love your jacket. The sparkles are amazing,” Hilton said.
Tenney joked, “I had a little bling here for today,” to which Hilton replied, “Yes, I wanted to find out who made it later.”
Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.
“But I think the most important thing is, they need access to therapy counseling, mentorship and other community-based programs,” she said, with her voice dropping on the word “but.”
A video of the testimony can be found on CSPAN (or CSPAN's X account).
There's a long history of interest in Paris Hilton's vocal registers, as a quick YouTube scan demonstrates.
And in the cited congressional testimony, there's no question that her way of talking changes (somewhat) between the three phrases where she compliments Rep. Tenney's jacket, and the following phrases where she reads her message on mental health care.
But the description of the intonational aspects of the change is actually upside down. Here are the first nine phrases — three offering fashion comments (with Rep. Tenney's response after the first two), and then the first six of her phrases about mental health:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
1. Thank you, I enjoyed our Zoom call,
2. and I love your jacket, the sparkles are amazing.
Um… [I had a little bling here for today you know] Yeah,
3. I wanted to find out who made it later. Um…
4. …but I think the most important thing is
5. we need access to therapy, counseling, mentorship,
6. and other community based programs.
7. And I think it's also important to not label these kids as troubled or bad
8. I think it- it makes these children feel like they aren't believed, and
9. that's something that's important for them to not feel that way, and
10. yeah I think it's just about showing kindness and love and compassion and support
If we look at the pitch tracks for the phrases labelled (3) and (4) above, we can see that Ms. Hilton actually uses somewhat higher pitches in the phrase starting with "but". And for those who can interpret perceived intonation in terms of pitch height, listening confirms it:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ParisHiltonCongressPhrases3-4.png Another way to quantify her intonational range is to look at the quantiles of estimated F0, phrase by phrase: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ParisHiltonCongressF0Quantiles1.png Her mental-health phrases (5) to (9) are indeed a bit lower in pitch (except at their endings), compared to her fashion phrases (1)-(3). But her first mental-health phrase — "(4) …but I think the most important thing is" — is strikingly higher in overall pitch, and has an expanded pitch range as well, as quantified by the per-phrase MAD (median absolute deviation from the median):
(1) 7.8 (2) 3.7 (3) 5.4 (4) 16.1 (5) 4.2 (6) 9.4 (7) 7.9 (8) 5.7 (9) 6.2
This change, probably because of the topic shift, is exactly the opposite of the description in the Huffpost article:
Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.
“But I think the most important [...]
, so Ptah rested”).
And more interesting still, from a modern scientific understanding, it is well known that the very instant of creation started with sound — The Big Bang! In fact, it has now been shown that the very ripples in the matter density of the early universe that gave rise to galaxies was created by what is called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), “fluctuations in the density of the visible baryonic matter (normal matter) of the universe, caused by acoustic density waves in the primordial plasma of the early universe.” (Wiki).
Thus, it was from the Big Bang, which seeded the material galaxies and conscious life itself, that first ushered forth that most mythic and primal cosmic cry of creation — the Word made flesh (or, to some, “the sound and the fury”). Selected reading
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 5" (6/7/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 4" (6/5/24) — especially this extended, detailed comment by Brian Pellar
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 3" (5/24/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 2" (5/12/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England" (4/30/24)
* "Wheat and word: astronomy and the origins of the alphabet" (3/15/24) — with references to seven substantial papers on this subject by Brian Pellar
* "The Alphabet and the Zodiac" (12/6/22)
* "The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse of Uruk?" (6/23/23) — this lengthy comment
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oddess. It is also not a coincidence that the plow of Egypt reflects the shape not only of a bull’s head, but the Hyades (Taurus), which is the letter “A,”
Aleph, the sun/son/seed that rises from the gate of the Goddess (see Pellar, 2009). This is why the North Celestial Pole is seen in an image of a plow in the center of the Zodiac of Dendera. The Word/seed/sun is sown from the center/axis mundi of the cosmic sphere. To dig a bit deeper, if writing is akin to plowing/sowing, then reading is akin to harvesting, where the mind grinds (philosopher’s stone) the word as seed to produce symbolic bread, which rises, nourishes, and carries the light/consciousness/wisdom within, etc. This idea found its way into the Poetic Tradition via the scribes of Egypt, to Greece, Rome, and Europe. This grinding/cutting up of the god/goddess is seen in the eastern myths, notably India, where the demiurge is not separate from its creation, but “is” the creation, as it divides itself, cuts itself up, to form all things. Lastly, in line with the Word/seed/womb/22/Logos, etc., it is interesting that the Dogon of Africa had two different words that they call ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ words.
The dry, or primordial, word was an attribute of the primeval Spirit, Amma, before he had begun the task of creation, and was undifferentiated speech, unaware of itself. It resides within mankind, but mankind does not know it. It has the potential property of divine thought, but at our microcosmic level is the unconscious. ‘Moist’ words germinated, like the principle of life itself, within the Cosmic egg and they were the words given to mankind. They comprise audible sounds, regarded as one of the ways in which procreative of the male are expressed, on a par with his semen. The word enters the woman’s ear — her other sexual organ — and then twines down into her womb to fertilize the seed and create the embryo. The word, in this same spiral form, is the light which descends on the sun’s rays to take physical shape in the earth’s womb as red copper. Moist words, like the water, light, spirals and red copper, are simply one of the different manifestations — or meanings — of a basic symbol, the world made manifest, or of its lord, the water-god Nommo. The sum of Bambara mystical knowledge is contained in the symbolism of the numbers one to twenty-two and the Bambara regard the primordial oneness, one, as the figure of the Lord of the Word and the Word itself. Within the same symbol, notions of chieftaincy, of the rights of primogeniture, of head and consciousness are all comprehended … the notion of the fecundating word, carrying the seeds of creation and with its place in the dawn of that creation as the first manifestation of the godhead and pre-existence before any created form, is to be found in the cosmogonic concepts of many peoples. We have noted it in Africa, among the Dogon, and it recurs among the Guarani Indians of Paraguay who believed that God created speech as the foundation, before he gave physical form to water, fire, the sun, to life-giving mists and lastly to the primordial earth. Many South American Indian tribes associate the Word with the principles of life and immortality. This is especially true of the Taulipang, who believe that the individual is endowed with five souls, of which only one reaches the other world after death. This is the soul that contains the Word and which leaves the body at regular intervals during sleep. Leenhardt records the Kanaka belief in New Caledonia that the word is an act, the very first act ever done…. In Biblical tradition, ‘The Old Testament speaks of the Word of God, and of his wisdom, present with God before the world was made…; by it all things were created; it is sent to earth to reveal the hidden designs of God; it returns to him with its work done…. For John, too…, the Word existed before the world in God….’ To Greek thinkers, Logos meant not only the word, phrase, speech, but also the reason and the intellect, ideas and the depths of a being’s meaning, even d[...]
Idiom of the Day
a juggling act
A difficult and/or precarious situation in which several things are being attempted or must be maintained at the same time. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ice (2)
to kill someone
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: elicit
This word has appeared in 161 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
jug-eared
Having ears that stick out markedly from the side of the head, thus resembling the handles of a jug. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ace (1)
very skillful, very good at something
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all over the world, and maybe they routinely drew pictographic aides-memoire, but if the languages weren’t monosyllabic, it was too big a leap to make the signs for some words represent other words according to their sounds.
[to be continued]
Bibliography
[Will be repeated at the end of part 2.]
Bühler, Georg. 1898. On the Origin of the Indian Brāhma Alphabet, together with Two Appendices on the Origin of the Kharoṣṭhī Alphabet and the Origin of the So-Called Letter-Numerals of the Brāhmī. 2nd ed. Strassbourg: Trübner.
Daniels, Peter T. 1990. “Fundamentals of Grammatology.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110: 727–31.
Daniels, Peter T. 1992. “The Syllabic Origin of Writing and the Segmental Origin of the Alphabet.” In The Linguistics of Literacy, edited by Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima, and Michael Noonan, 83–110. Typological Studies in Language 21. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Daniels, Peter T. 1999. “Some Semitic Phonological Considerations on the Sibilants of the Greek Alphabet.” Written Language and Literacy 2(1): 57–61.
Franklin, Benjamin. 1987. Writings, edited by J. A. Leo Lemay. Library of America 37. New York: Literary Classics of the United States.
Gelb, I. J. 1952. A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2nd ed., 1963.)
Henning, W. B. 1958. “Mitteliranisch.” In Iranistik, 20–130. Handbuch der Orientalistik I/4.1. Leiden: Brill. (Unpub. English translation by Peter T. Daniels available.)
Kara, György. 1996. “Aramaic Scripts for Altaic Languages.” In The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, 536-58. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lincoln, Abraham. 1859. “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, Jacksonville, Illinois.” In Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 2 vols., edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher, 2, 3–11. Library of America 45–46. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. London; Stanford: Hutchinson; Stanford University Press. (Corrected pbk. reprint, London, 1987.)
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1992. Before Writing. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schmitt, Alfred. 1954. “Die Vokallosigkeit der ägyptischen und semitischen Schrift.” Indogermanische Forschungen 61: 216–27.
Schmitt, Alfred. 1980. Entstehung und Entwicklung von Schriften, edited by Claus Haeber. Cologne: Böhlau.
Skjærvø, P. Oktor. 1996. “Aramaic Scripts for Iranian Languages.” In The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, 515–35. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stuart, George E. 1992. “Quest for Decipherment: A Historical and Biographical Survey of Maya Hieroglyphic Investigation.” In New Theories on the Ancient Maya, edited by Elin C. Danien and Robert J. Sharer, 1–63. University Museum Monograph 77, University Museum Symposium Series 3. Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
Toynbee, Arnold J. 1939a. “Lingue franche.” In A Study of History, pt. V: The Disintegrations of Civilizations, sec. C: The Process of the Disintegrations of Civilizations, 1: The Criterion of Disintegration, d: Schism in the Soul, 6: The Sense of Promiscuity, γ, vol. 5, 483–527. London: Oxford University Press.
Toynbee, Arnold J. 1939b. “Archaism in Language and Literature.” In A Study of History, pt. V: The Disintegrations of Civilizations, sec. C: The Process of the Disintegrations of Civilizations, 1: The Criterion of Disintegration, d: Schism in the Soul, 8: Archaism, γ, vol. 6, 62–83. London: Oxford University Press.
Toynbee, Arnold J. 1954a. “The Administrative Geography of the Achaemenian Empire.” In A Study of History, pt. VI: Universal States, sec. C: Universal States as Means, II: Services and Beneficiaries, c: The Serviceability of Imperial Installations, 3: Provinces, Annex, vol. 7[B], 580–689. London: Oxford University Press.
Toynbee, Arnold J. 1954b. “Official Languages and Scripts.” In A Study of History, pt. VI: Un[...]
d is an existing Arabic word for the letters of the Arabic script taken in the traditional Semitic order; I use these words abugida and abjad because of their structural resemblance to the word “alphabet.” In ordinary contexts, both Ethiopic and Arabic use other standard orders of the script, but the traditional Semitic order is known in Ethiopic because letter names appear in the Bible over the sections of Psalm 119, and in Arabic because the numerical values of the letters reflect the historic order rather than the rearrangement according to their shape. Now with a set of five types of writing system (plus a sixth, the featural, that comes into play in various derived scripts) I can describe the historical development of scripts with a scheme that is less neat, but more accurate, than Gelb’s tripartite Principle of Unidirectional Development.
For the next step, I turn from a Gelb-like activity to a Toynbee-like activity. Since I’m ultimately interested in the original origins of writing, I look at as many modern inventions of writing as I can find. Descriptions of most of them are collected by Alfred Schmitt, in the posthumously published Entstehung und Entwicklung von Schriften (1980). At first it looks as though any kind of writing can get invented anywhere. Cherokee of the southeast United States is a syllabary; Cree of northern Canada is a featural abugida; Vai of west Africa is a syllabary; Tolkien’s Tengwar is a featural alphabet. But if we consider the inventors of the various scripts about whom we have some information, it turns out these are two quite different sorts of people. Some of them could already read in some language and even had at least some education in phonetics. Such people include James Evans, responsible for the Cree script; King Sejong and his advisors, who created Korean Hangul; and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, whose entire fantasy world was devised to make possible play with invented languages.
But much more interesting in investigating the original origins of writing are those inventors who knew nothing about writing, except the fact that it existed: that a piece of paper could, apparently, talk to someone without a voice. Such were Sequoyah, inventor of Cherokee script; Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ, inventor of Vai script; Uyaqoq of Alaska; Afaka of Suriname; and a number of others: each of these was, as Lincoln put it, “one man of a million, in the run of a thousand years.” Clearly these untutored writing inventors—or as I say, grammatogenists—are closer to the ancient grammatogenists, creating before the discovery of grammar. And do all their scripts—Cherokee, Vai, Alaska script, Njoka, Barnum, Caroline Islands, and the others—do they have anything in common? Yes, they do: They are all syllabaries, Consonant–Vowel syllabaries. They comprise about a hundred distinct characters, each denoting what was still in the time of Lincoln called a sound—a complete syllable. Such sounds are the basic units of speech. They are what people naturally break words into if they haven’t been taught by their alphabet to find smaller segments—what Lincoln called parts of sounds.
And, such sounds are what the first writers first wrote down. Until recently, we could only read two ancient scripts that could fairly securely be believed not to share an origin: Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese oracle bone. Ever since we’ve been able to read those two scripts, we have known they are both logographic—a sign represents a word. Or, as Gelb taught us to say, they are logosyllabic—a sign represents both a word and a syllable. Or, more precisely, they are morphosyllabic—a sign represents both a morpheme and a syllable. Until recently this could be seen as mere coincidence: the two earliest scripts were devised for languages where each morpheme is just one syllable. But then came the decipherment of Maya writing, and we knew of a third original script for which the same is true. In its “inner form,” Maya writing is very like Sumerian, with a logographic core to which affixes [...]
Language Log
Script origin and typology, part 1
[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels]
Author's Note
In 1999, Holly Pittman of the University of Pennsylvania invited me to prepare a talk to close an international symposium on early writing systems. The result is before you — essentially unchanged and unupdated (because the planned publication did not materialize), even though I would treat a couple of points differently now. John Noble Wilford covered the event for the New York Times, but in order to accommodate illustrations, his article was cut (from the bottom, as newspapers do), and since he described each contribution in the order it was given, the last several talks went unmentioned! (And weren't restored when a volume of his reporting was published a few years later.)
A fuller presentation of my understanding of the nature and history of writing may be found in my Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018), and in major articles in the 2023 volumes of the journals WORD and Written Language and Literacy.
A Study of Origins
Peter T. Daniels
New York [now Jersey City, N.J.]
closing talk at The Multiple Origins of Writing: Image, Symbol, Script
international symposium, Center for Ancient Studies,
University of Pennsylvania. University Museum, Philadelphia, March 27, 1999
On February 11, 1859, the following words were delivered by a man who was on the verge of worldwide acclaim:
Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it—great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.
. . . When we remember that words are sounds merely, we shall conclude that the idea of representing those sounds by marks, so that whoever should at any time after see the marks, would understand what sounds they meant, was a bold and ingenious conception, not likely to occur to one man of a million, in the run of a thousand years. And, when it did occur, a distinct mark for each word, giving twenty thousand different marks first to be learned, and afterwards remembered, would follow as the second thought, and would present such a difficulty as would lead to the conclusion that the whole thing was impracticable. But the necessity still would exist; and we may readily suppose that the idea was conceived, and lost, and reproduced, and dropped, and taken up again and again, until at last, the thought of dividing sounds into parts, and making a mark, not to represent a whole sound, but only a part of one, and then of combining these marks, not very many in number, upon the principles of permutation, so as to represent any and all of the whole twenty thousand words, and even any additional number was somehow conceived and pushed into practice. This was the invention of phoenetic writing, as distinguished from the clumsy picture writing of some of the nations. That it was difficult of conception and execution, is apparent, as well by the foregoing reflections, as by the fact that so many tribes of men have come down from Adam’s time to ours without ever having possessed it.
Charles Darwin, on the eve of publication of The Origin of Species? No: Abraham Lincoln, on the day before his—and Darwin’s—fiftieth birthday. In this passage from a “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” given at Illinois College in Jacksonville, and then Decatur and Springfield, the failed politician and future president anticipated what I have to say about the origins of writing.
The book universally recognized as the founding document in the scientific investigation of writing systems is I. J[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: corroboration
This word has appeared in 24 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
embark on
to begin something, usually something that will be challenging and time-consuming
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Word of the Day
ocular
Definition: (adjective) Seen by the eye.
Synonyms: visual.
Usage: The evidence that the house is haunted is of two kinds: the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have had ocular proof, and that of the house itself.
Discuss
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thing is, they need access to therapy counseling, mentorship and other community-based programs,” she said, with her voice dropping on the word “but.”
The article's claim about vocal fry is also empirically unfounded, as far as I can tell.
But let's not beat up on the Huffpost writer — people in general are very good at detecting shifts in speech style, but surprisingly bad at characterizing the acoustic correlates of their perceptions.
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Language Log
Astonishing new Google Translate, with the help of generative AI
Google Translate adds Cantonese support, thanks to AI advancement: “Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” Google said. By Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press (June 30, 2024).
The Google Translate app has been expanded to include Cantonese, thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements.
In 2022, Google began using Zero-Shot Machine Translation to expand its pool of supported languages. The machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example, Google said in a Thursday blog post. Now it is using AI to expand the number of supported languages.
It added 110 new languages this week, in its largest-ever expansion, thanks to its PaLM 2 large language model.
Users of the app may now translate between Cantonese – spoken in Chinese communities across the world, and in Hong Kong – and 243 other languages
“Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” it said.
Google aims to support the 1,000 most spoken languages around the world.
It also added Punjabi on Thursday, and African languages such as Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof.
“As technology advances, and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we’ll support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time,” Google added.
When will the PRC ever achieve such wonders? Never mind when the PRC will let its people utilize the wonders of GT. Selected readings
* "Is this authentic Cantonese?" (2/26/24)
* "Token Cantonese" (5/16/15)
* "The interplay between Cantonese and Mandarin as an index of sociopolitical tensions in Hong Kong" (4/30/23)
* "Google Translate sabotage" (6/14/19)
* "Google Translate Sabotage, part 2" (1/17/21)
* "A Japanese-French Google Translate mixup" (7/13/20)
* "More Google Translate hallucinations on YouTube" (6/3/18)
* "The elegance of Google Translate" (3/10/18)
* "The wonders of Google Translate" (9/22/17)
* "Don't blame Google Translate" (2/4/18)
* "Google Translate is even better now" (9/27/16)
* "Google Translate is even better now, part 2" (5/12/22)
* "Google is scary good" (7/31/17)
* "Google Translate Chinese inputting" (1/27/13)
* "Can't find on Google" (8/12/14)
* "Cantonese novels" ()8/20/13)
* "Spoken Hong Kong Cantonese and written Cantonese" (8/29/13)
* Snow, Don. 2004. Cantonese as Written Language, The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Appendix 1 of this remarkable book gives 14 Cantonese texts, each of which Snow carefully analyzes for the degree to which it adheres to the norms of spoken Cantonese rather than of written Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). The 14 texts, which cover a wide range of genres, date from around the 17th century to the contemporary period. It is striking that the percentages of overtly marked Cantonese (and Snow is referring here not just to special Cantonese characters) in these 14 texts range from only 3% to 36%: 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 20, 23, 23, 23, 28, 32, 36, for an average of 17%.
* Kwan-hin Cheung and Robert S. Bauer, "The Representation of Cantonese with Chinese Characters", Journal of Chinese linguistics: Monograph series (18); Project on Linguistic Analysis, University of California, 2002.
* "Colloquial Cantonese and Taiwanese as mélange languages" (3/15/21)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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ivine thought itself. The Stoics regarded the word as the rationality immanent in the universal structure. (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 1125–1126)
But more research is needed to be done on this. I have just the bare essentials (as revealed in the actual structure of the two loops of the alphazodiac meeting at Zayin, and it’s direct link to divinity, silence, breath/vowels, consonants, and, more importantly, to the birth of the sun as the son/seed/Word).
In summary, your question is quite interesting. In fact, it’s the one question that has continually taunted me over the years as I dealt with the who, what, and, particularly, the why of the alphazodiac. For after all, aren’t letters, at their most basic level, merely vessels of speech, of sound? And what is that sound? It’s nothing short of conveyed consciousness — the directed movement of intentional meaning. Or to put it in a more symbolic way, it’s the transmission or rise of light or understanding from ignorance or darkness (i.e., from a medieval perspective, I personally believe that it’s the wisdom or gold within the slow lead/Latin of the black ink. Or from a much earlier Neolithic perspective, I feel that it’s the dawning of consciousness, of wisdom — for survival and higher thought. Thus, it’s the rising of the eternal solar mind/seed/Word of the ancient goddess from the mortal lunar horizon of her womb/body).
In a sense, speech and writing are meant to be “intercepted” consciousness/energy (that interception could be immediate, as in person to person speech, or even delayed via vast distances in time and place, as in modern scholars reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs). And it’s the eventual resonance and release of that transmission or motion of consciousness that, in turn, sets matter in motion. It can create it, manipulate it, and even destroy it. As a mythological symbol, the Word rises from the Flesh/matter and then sets back into it. For instance, and to speculate a bit further, what is DNA but code (a type of text) made protein (flesh)? What is willpower but thought into nerve into action? And has not science now shown how negative thoughts, words, can lead to a weakened immune system and to disease itself? And that’s just within a single body. How much more powerful is that transmission/interception of consciousness from person to person? From parent to child, from tribal leader to tribe, from shaman or priest to Mystic Body, from president to body politic? Though the technology has changed, the basic concept of, and need for, the movement of thought has not: from soot and paint on a Paleolithic cave wall, to ink on parchment and then books, to electromagnetic radio and television waves zipping at light speed through the atmosphere, to the very sounds and images on two gold-plated records on the Voyager spacecraft, whose mission is to target some distant alien civilization in the unfathomable depths of frozen space — a homecoming of sorts, as the stars in that deep space are the cosmic birthplace of all the atoms within flesh of the very fingers that crafted those gold records.
In a sense, it’s actually fitting that it was from the frigid dark depths of space (the heavens to the ancients) that sound was not only born, but was actually instrumental in both the mythological and actual scientific evolution of creation itself. That is, from a mythological perspective, the ancient deities, such as the Egyptian creator god Ptah, formed all things from the Word. Later, the Christian Bible, which has its roots in earlier stories from Mesopotamia and Egypt, starts with the creation of the universe with God’s “breath” (the Hebrew noun “Ruach,” “spirit,” also means, “breath” or “wind”) upon the waters, which is really shorthand for the sacred vowel of God giving birth to form (the Word made flesh). The Biblical god also used His breath to give life to Adam, and after the 7th day of creation, “He rested” (so, too, did the earlier Egyptian creation god: “Ptah was satisfied after he had made everything[...]
s looked at the number seven as a “symbol of eternal life” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 859), the correlation with the adze and the seven stars of Ursa Major is not a coincidence, as the ultimate aim of the opening of the mouth ceremony was to ensure eternal life for the deceased. It should also be noted that this opening of the mouth is related to not only the Egyptian Ankh, but, more importantly, to the Primal Pattern itself, as the mouth is none other than the horizon/vulva/gate of the goddess, and the bull’s leg/adze is the phallus/spear that opens the gate of the Goddess in an iteration of the astro-theological process of the opening of the Great Bull by Anu. This idea is further reflected, unknown to me till just recently, in the words of Nicomachus of Gerasa, a Pythagorean:
And the tones of the seven spheres, each of which by nature produces a particular sound, are the sources of the nomenclature of the vowels. These are described as unpronounceable in themselves and in all their combinations by wise men since the tone in this context performs a role analogous to that of the monad in number, the point in geometry, and the letter in grammar. However, when they are combined with the materiality of the consonants just as soul is combined with body and harmony with strings — the one producing a creature, the other notes and melodies — they have potencies which are efficacious and perfective of divine things. Thus whenever the theurgists are conducting such acts of worship they make invocations symbolically with hissing, clucking, and inarticulate and discordant sounds. (Godwin, 1991: 23–24)
Once again, I felt that this symbolized the vowels being cut up by the teeth (akin to arrow/spear/knife cutting up the god), where they would then sit within the womb of the consonant, like the sun within the constellations/letters of the astro-alphabet, ready to rise from the gate of the monistic goddess in light and understanding. The Seven Sages (the Indian Saptarshi, the Seven Rishis) of India seem to mirror this music via the vowels as well, as they are also the seven stars of Ursa Major. The seven sages insured that the “measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above” (Santillana and Von Dechend, 1969: 3). Furthermore, the “Line of the Seven Rishis,” the solstitial colure (solstice), “happened to run through one after the other of these stars during several millennia (starting with eta, around 4000 BC): and to establish this colure is ‘internationally’ termed ‘to suspend the sky’ — the Babylonians called the Big Dipper ‘bond of heaven,’ ‘mother bond of heaven,’ the Greeks spelled it ‘Omphaloessa’” (Santillana and Von Dechend, 1969: 301). In terms of the latter, see Omphalos, above. As spoken by the god (Great Goddess, Mommo, Ptah, Yahweh, Taiyi, etc.) in the upper celestial vault (the pole), the Word becomes manifest in the letters of the alphabet/zodiac at the middle level of the ecliptic, and is then born to the flesh through the gate of the goddess at the horizon. Furthermore, Breath is actually the Holy Spirit of the Old Testament (an apparent mistranslation as some have suggested, as when Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, it was really the breath of God that moved, which in turn, created the waves of sound, the Word/Logos, from which he “said” — “Let there be light: and there was light”). This breath/Logos is the intent/consciousness/wisdom of the Divine Intelligence of the Primal Androgyne/monistic Goddess. In the same way that the body of the god must be cut up, so must breath in the form of the vowel be cut up by the mouth so that meaning in the form of discrete units/consonants can enter the feminine ear (to “ear” is to sow/plough, hence the “ear” within “hear”) to give birth/resurrect the author/god/father within. Thus, the root of lingam and langala (plough) is not a coincidence, as the plough, like the lingam/penis, sows the seed into the earth/g[...]
