Doorworks 4: Why paleography matters

In case any of you were wondering why the study of handwriting matters, and why the elimination of the chair in paleography at King’s College London is a grave loss: Below is an image containing four discrete pieces of late medieval English writing (compiled together as a comparative collection). Can you decipher any of them?

Mystery writing

Anyone who successfully deciphers all four may choose a topic or question on which I will write a future blog post.

No country for old tongues

Attn:
Discovery News
BBC News
et al.

We all know how obsessed you are with the oldest of anything. But please, stop. You are doing a grave disservice to languages by saying things like ‘A tribal language thought to have existed for 65,000 years has disappeared forever’ or ‘Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.’ This is utter nonsense, even if you find a scholar to tell you otherwise. All languages are always changing, and although some may change more rapidly than others, the idea that a language could persist essentially unchanged for multiple millennia is pure bunk. The idea that we can assign exact ages to languages (other than recent inventions) is even more ridiculous. The only ancient languages are the ones actually spoken in the past, and all currently spoken languages have equally long histories. It is a great tragedy that the Bo language has gone extinct, as it is when, every other week or so, another language goes extinct on this planet. It is a tragedy regardless of how long the language has been spoken, because it represents the end of a particular part of the modern world’s cultural diversity. Your attempt to sensationalize this story by exoticizing indigenous peoples as primitives lost in time is unwelcome and counterproductive. Let me help:

The Bo (Aka-Bo) language was a member of the Northern branch of the Greater Andamanese language subfamily. With its extinction, only one Greater Andamanese language, A-Pucikwar, has any remaining known speakers, and it is highly endangered. The ten Great Andamanese and three South Andamanese languages are all related to one another, although the exact relationships among them remain unclear, but there is no known relationship between the Andamanese languages and any other languages of the world. Their importance for linguistics is that they may represent descendants of the languages of the original migrants to the Andaman Islands many millennia ago, and if we were able to reconstruct the Proto-Andamanese language, potentially to better understand the population and migration history of the Indian Ocean. Their importance for their remaining speakers is inestimably greater.

Juvenile ethnopaleography

Ms. 1 (APTC 1)

Arthur Chrisomalis, The Lines
Construction paper. ff. 2. Unfoliated. 11×8.5 in. Bound at left with four staples. Dated 2010 (?) in hybrid numerical notation (see below).

This manuscript is a juvenile work probably composed on 02/06/2010. There is textual and ethnographic evidence to suggest that the scribe (age 4.5) was aided by a more competent master. Currently the MS is magnetically affixed to the archivum refrigeratum in the scribe’s home.

fol. 1r: Text in orange ink, 3 lines. (Plate 1)
1v: Vertical lines in pencil, crossed with horizontal and diagonal lines in green, pink, red, grey, black, purple, and orange ink. Apparently nonrepresentational.
2r: Vertical lines in pencil, crossed with horizontal and vertical lines in red ink. Apparently nonrepresentational.
2v: Stylized depiction of a smiling human figure in orange ink. Elongated fingers and toes, highly enlarged ears. May be a scribal self-portrait.

Text (fol. 1r)

1. THE LINES
2.    ArTHu
3. ||0|0     r

Plate 1: APTC 1, fol. 1r.

Notes

l. 1: Written in a bold majuscule hand in orange ink. Dotted pencil marks underlying the ink suggest that this line was prepared by the scribe with the aid of a master, an observation later confirmed ethnographically.
l. 2: Written in a hybrid minuscule/majuscule hand; H dips well below the line. Absence of pencil marks and unusual features of the hand suggest that it was composed unaided (confirmed ethnographically).
l. 3: The final character ‘r’ at the right margin seems to be properly attached to the end of l. 2; it is spaced significantly apart from the unusual characters at left. The reading ‘11010′ as an Arabic numeral is improbable given limitations on scribe’s counting abilities. Ethnographic interview with scribe’s assistant/instructor/mother confirms that this is a hybrid notation for the date of composition, 2010. Upon learning of the custom of dating the frontispieces of books from his mother, the author inquired how to do so, and was told, “Put 2-0-1-0″, at which point he wrote the characters ||, then paused and examined the characters. At this point his mother informed him that he could just write the number 2, to which he replied, “That is a 2, in lines.” Thereupon he continued to write the final three characters, noting, however, that the last 0 “is more of an oval.”

One is reminded of the unusual notation developed by Ocreatus in his 1130 Helcep Sarracenicum ‘Saracen Calculation’ which combines the ordinary Roman numerals I, II, III … IX with a circle for O, thus producing a mixed system of the additive Roman numerals and positional Western numerals (Burnett 2006; Chrisomalis 2010: 120). Thus, Ocreatus wrote 1089 as I.O.VIII.IX. Attested in only one MS (Cashel, G.P.A. Bolton Library, Medieval MS 1), this notation represents an effort to incorporate positionality into existing systems of notation, and is related to the debate between the abacists and algorithmists over the proper contexts of use for the newer Western numerals.

Despite the temptation to see in this line a re-invention or re-discovery of Ocreatus’ notation, the ethnographic evidence suggests that this is unlikely. Although the author is familiar with Roman numerals in the context of clocks, the description of the characters || as ‘lines’ rather than ‘numbers’ or ‘Roman numerals’ suggests instead an effort to incorporate tallying principles. It is probable that the Roman numerals derive ultimately from an as-yet unattested Italic practice of tallying used in the 6th century BCE or earlier (Keyser 1988; Chrisomalis 2010: 95-6). Yet tallying is distinct from cumulative-additive numeration like the Roman numerals in that it is produced sequentially as an open-ended count; one cannot simply add signs to the Roman XIII – the equivalent tally might be IIIIVIIIIXIII (Chrisomalis 2010: 15). It is therefore probable that this notation represents the scribe’s attempt to combine the elementary tallying principle of one-to-one correspondence with the familiar Western numerals.

The ethnographic evidence that the scribe paused (as if bemused) upon the production of || might suggest that this form is a scribal error; given, however, that he is conversant with the Western numerals and is capable of producing them unaided, the hypothesis cannot be discounted that the use of || for 2 represents an aesthetically motivated decision. While the title of the work, ‘The Lines’, may refer to the vertical and horizontal lines in fol. 1v and 2r, it may equally be a reference to the lines in the date in fol. 1r.

Works cited

Burnett, Charles. 2006. The semantics of Indian numerals in Arabic, Greek and Latin. Journal of Indian Philosophy 34:15-30.
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2010. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keyser, Paul. 1988. The origin of the Latin numerals 1 to 1000. American Journal of Archaeology 92:529-546.

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.

Citation anxiety

I am always very careful to indicate, in guidelines for essays and papers, that I don’t care what bibliographic or citation format my students use. APA, MLA, AAA, NWA … I always say that as long as they pick one format and use it consistently, they’ll be just fine. I have a soft spot for Chicago style (author-date) but I certainly don’t ask anyone to use it. Yet every term, I get at least one student who speaks to me or emails me in concern about bibliographic or citation format. Even after I insist that I have no preference, they just can’t quite be convinced that I won’t deduct grades for failure to conform with an arbitrary set of guidelines, including things like whether to capitalize every word of book titles, or whether to put parentheses around dates. They can’t quite believe me, either, when I tell them that many journals and presses use minute variations of the major styles, so that whatever I do as an author will eventually require professional attention.

Everywhere I’ve taught, I’ve seen this phenomenon, again and again. I also see, again and again, students who are apparently indifferent to serious writing or analytical problems but still get stuck on fine points of some style guide. What gives? Is it really the case that most professors are such sticklers for formatting issues that it is rational for students to be so concerned? Maybe, but I’m not convinced. Alternately, maybe citation style is something that seems more objective than other, more significant aspects of paper-writing. When you’re unsure of other issues, or know you have problems with them, hanging on to the one thing that you know you can get just right is a security blanket. Whatever else may be wrong with your paper, at least you got the citations right. I don’t know about this either, though – if it were really true, wouldn’t more students actually use a single style correctly and consistently, even after inquiring?

So, colleagues and students, what do you think? Is citation anxiety ubiquitous? If so, is it reasonable? And what can be done about it?

Numerical Notation now available!

It is with great pleasure and pride that I announce that my new book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2010) is now available. I will try not to bombard you with too much press and fanfare about it (unless I get really excited, which has been known to happen). The list price is $95 but you can already find it more cheaply, e.g. at Barnesandnoble.com currently at 20% off.

Buy early and buy often!