Linguistic relativity in the news

Guy Deutscher’s article at the New York Times, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” is attracting (rightly) a lot of attention in the anthropologico-linguistico-blogospherico…oh, you get the idea. Yes, it’s a popularization of a lot of different research, but it’s the right research, rather than the old chestnuts those of my generation were exposed to. But I’ll abstain from too much commentary for now. Deutscher’s article is an adaptation of part of his new book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, which goes on sale tomorrow. I expect to review it here in the near future.

Writing systems and literacy: a syllabus

At the end of a conference a few years ago on writing systems, we (the dozen or so participants) energetically promised to share with one another the various syllabi we use in our courses on writing systems and literacy. Apparently we failed, as I have been unable to find any correspondence indicating that we did so. I taught such a course to a small group of seniors in the fall of 2006, and this fall I am teaching a highly revised version of the course to a small group of grad students. I don’t think the syllabus itself is anything special (it’s a seminar: we read a lot, then write long papers), but below, I give the reading list along with a brief discussion of each:

1. Andrew Robinson, Writing Systems and Literacy: A Very Short Introduction.
None of my students have any particular prior expertise in the area, so I’m having them read this prior to our first class meeting. It is what it is, but will form a really good introductory set of ideas for them.

2. Maurice Bloch, How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy.
This is a great mix of theory from social and cognitive anthropology and the detailed ethnographic work in Madagascar that Bloch is known for, linking literacy to memory and cognition in some really intriguing ways.

3. John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B.
I used this in the first incarnation of the course – a fantastic autobiographical account of the world’s most famous script decipherment, and a grand tribute to Michael Ventris, whose tragic death marks the narrative indelibly.

4. John Defrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.
While the title suggests that it is more generally on language, the core of the book is on the nature and social context of the Chinese characters, ranging from basic semiotic issues to modern romanization efforts, and the gross misunderstandings most Westerners have of the script.

5. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind.
Goody isn’t as popular today as he was twenty years ago, but I find his account extremely compelling and theoretically rich. The critics get their day (see below) but fundamentally my approach to numerical notation rests on Goody, another holdover from the first incarnation of the course.

6. Stephen Houston (ed), The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process.
Finally out in paperback so I can assign it – this collection of magisterial essays is social, historical, linguistic, and archaeological, framing the origin of writing in a thoroughly anthropological framework.

7. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy.
Despite the title, this is a work of deep ethnography as well as cross-cultural psychology, investigating what effects (if any) the native Vai syllabary and other scripts have on a complex Liberian literate context.

8. Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice.
I suppose this would be the ‘anti-Goody’, placing literacy (correctly) as a social practice whose cognitive effects cannot be predicted. Street’s theoretical position forms the mainstream of the modern anthropology of literacy.

9. Peter Wogan, Magical Writing in Salasaca.
A great little ethnography injecting issues of inequality and colonialism, as well as ritual and religion, into the literate lives of the people of Salasaca in Ecuador (I’m also assigning this because we have two Ecuador specialists in our department).

10. Niko Besnier, Literacy, Emotion and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll.
A last-minute addition, a further ethnography allowing us to look at another region of the world, but also to look at the ways in which literacy relates to the construction of individual identities and personal authority.

Lost numerals revealed

Marc Zender of the Peabody Museum (I’ve written about his Tolkien anthropology course before) emailed me the other day to let me know about an article in the new American Anthropologist written by Jeff Quilter, Zender, and several additional co-authors, documenting a lost language from northern coastal Peru (you can read the press release here, with a link at the bottom to the full article for those with access). In the course of archaeological work led by Quilter, a letter was discovered, written by a Spaniard in the early 17th century, on whose obverse is a series of numerals in this otherwise unidentified language, as follows:

uno—chari
dos—marian
tres—apar
4—tau
5—himic [?]
6.—sut [?]
7—canchen
8.—mata
9—yucan
10—bencor
21. maribencor chari tayac
30 apar bencor
100 chari pachac
200 mari pachac

From this, we can see that this language apparently had a fairly regular decimal numeral system. The one intriguing feature is the word tayac at the end of the phrase for 21, which the authors sensibly interpret as meaning ‘and/plus’. The words for 4, 6, 7, and 100 are all related to Quechua (the major Inka language, imposed on large parts of the precolonial Andes in the 15th and 16th centuries), but the others are (so far as anyone has been able to tell) unrelated to any other documented language. While the borrowing of ’100′ is quite typical in cases of imperial conquest – but my suspicion is that what we have here is a record of a bilingual Quechua speaker engaged in a little bit of numerical code-switching – it wouldn’t be typical (though not impossible) for just three numerals for 4, 6, and 7 to be borrowed, leaving the rest intact. Of course, given this one text, there’s no way to tell for sure. A further minor mystery is why the writer chose to write the first three numerals in Spanish, then switched to Western numerals thereafter – possibly just to save time.

Because the pre-colonial local languages of the Andes are extremely poorly documented, this find sheds a little light on the range of linguistic variability that existed in the Americas at and just after the time of the early European conquests. No doubt the historical linguists will attempt to go further with this, comparing these numerals with other documented languages. The article is a great little piece of holistic linguistic, historical, archaeological anthropology and deserves all the attention that it will no doubt be getting in the near future.