Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 3 (Spring 2011)

The links below lead to abstracts of papers from the 2011 edition of my course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are junior scholars at Wayne State University, including both undergraduate and graduate students. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at the critical juncture over the next week, when the authors will be making final revisions to their papers.

Marius Sidau
A Linguistic Approach to the Authorship of the Book of Mormon

Brent Collins III
An investigation of contributing factors that lead to social fragmentation between Black-Americans, Africans, Caribbeans and West Indians

Jean Calkins
African American Vernacular English in the Classroom

Jacqui
The cultural and linguistic relevance of naming practices

Isra El-beshir
Women’s Language and its Legal Implications

Ashley Phifer
Eskimo or Inuit: What ethnonym do museums use in displaying art and material culture?

Lauren Schleicher
Physicians’ use of persuasive techniques as a verbal tool to increase colorectal cancer screening adherence

Jennifer Meyer
The Antonine Plague: A Linguistic Analysis

Molly Hilton
Thick: Social Censorship in an Empathetic Online Community

Daniel Harrison
From sauvage to salvage: a quantitative analysis of European-Algonkian vocabularies from contact to the mid-19th century

E.J. Stone
The Power of Rumor: Blood Libel in the Modern World

Amy C. Krull
From Grits to Corn Chips: An Invention of Tradition

Zein Kalaj
The historical, linguistic, and social stigma of leadership titles

Sofía Syntaxx
Live by the drum: exploring linguistic expressions of pan-Indian ethnic identity in contemporary indigenous music

Rachel Doyle
Gesture: An Integral Component of Language Acquisition and Learning

Krystal Athena Hubbard
Rice and Gullah: Linguistic Resistance and Economic Growth on Antebellum South Carolina Rice Plantations

Summar Saad
The Changing Linguistics of the Organic Food Market

Yasmin Habib
Code-switching among Arab-American speakers

Slightly less interesting than numerals

Fiona Jordan, an evolutionary anthropologist who does some fascinating work on numerals and numeral classifiers, has blogged about some of her research on an only slightly less interesting topic: The Contextual Vulva.

Howarth, Sommer, and Jordan (2010) compared three genres of images (medical illustrations, feminist publications, and internet pornography) to investigate differences in the visual representation of female genitalia (PDF available here). They found significant differences between the three sets of measurements (e.g. in the size of labial protuberance), and further showed that of the three, the porn showed much less overall variability than the other two. While I think it is impossible to write about this topic without a chuckle (Fiona’s report of her request to her IT people to have access to porn sites at work is highly amusing!), this is serious stuff insofar as it suggests ways in which our perception of bodies, particularly female bodies, is influenced by skewed representations of actual morphological variability, and as a contributing factor to social constructions of what constitutes ‘normal’.

Howarth, H., Sommer, V. and Jordan, F.M. 2010. Visual depictions of female genitalia differ depending on source. Medical Humanities 36: 75-79.

Link roundup

Do you speak Scots? If you’re not sure, the text and audio samples at Aye Can will help you decide if you do. This is of particular relevance this year due to the 2011 Scottish Census.

Errol Morris, whose news essays have featured elsewhere on this blog (see here), has a compelling five-part essay ‘The Ashtray’ about his relationship with the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn at the Institute for Advanced Study, and whose title derives from an object hurled at Morris by Kuhn (no, really!).

Popular Linguistics magazine is an important addition to the wealth of online resources relating to language and linguistics, with a particular focus on materials for nonspecialist readers. It promises to present material written by linguists (not just language mavens like Safire) in an accessible manner.

I had no idea that there were four distinct ways of saying ’10:15′ in German, or that they divided so neatly along well-defined isoglosses (lines marking distinctions in language). In North American English there would be similar, geographically-delimited variability but not for 10:15, but rather 10:45. Do you say ‘quarter to eleven’ or ‘quarter of eleven’?

Finally, as someone who has sent out two articles in the last ten days and desperately hopes not to get rejected, here is the Journal of Universal Rejection, the world’s most selective (and thus best) journal, with a 100% rejection rate. At least they promise to be prompt!

Numeration and Numeracy in Cognition, Language, and Culture

Last month, at the Society for Anthropological Sciences annual meeting in Charleston, SC, I organized a panel of some really interesting material on the broad topic of numeration. I want to take this opportunity (again) to thank all the presenters for their attendance and hard work. The abstracts (as also published in the conference program) were as follows:

Toward a cognitive, historical, linguistic anthropology of numerals
Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University)

For over a century, the study of numeration, number systems and allied topics has been a key part of the comparative study of thought, language, and culture. The anthropology of numbers and mathematics has traditionally been a locus for unilinear evolutionary thought linked to notions of primitivity. The papers in this panel constitute a call for a culturally-grounded cognitive science of numeration within four of the disciplines of cognitive science (anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology).

Recent research in language evolution, linguistic relativity, and cultural aspects of mathematical cognition draw attention to the need for anthropologists to re-engage with this new agenda. First, the cross-cultural study of numerals allows the investigation and evaluation of universal and particular aspects of numeration and their relationship with social organization. Because numerals have multiple modalities (e.g., verbal, graphic, gestural), examining patterns in number systems beyond linguistics allows us to evaluate to what extent number concepts can be separated from language, including universal grammar. Finally, just as the cognitive anthropology of plant and animal taxonomy contributes to ecological and environmental anthropology, the cognitive anthropology of numerals and mathematics underpins economic anthropology and the anthropology of science.

Spatial-numeric associations in literates and illiterates
Samar Zebian (Lebanese American University, Beirut Lebanon)

Several independent studies have reported a cognitive association between small numbers and the left side of space and larger numbers andthe right side of space among individuals who read and write from left-to-right (SNARC effect). These associations are reversed for individuals who read and write from right-to-left. The SNARC effect has widely been taken as evidence that numbers are conceptualized as points along a mental number line, however there is growing evidence that this systematic spatial performance bias related to writing directionality is an instance of strategic processing rather than a reflection of inherent spatial attributes of numbers. In an attempt to explain the “deeper” origins of these associations researchers are examining the linkages between number and finger counting. The current study examines whether finger counting practices reveal consistent spatial-numeric associations and whether there are any spillover effects to other tasks that involve object sorting and counting and other non-counting but quantitative tasks such as line bisection and speeded parity judgment. If, in fact, finger counting practices and not the directionality of writing set up spatial-numeric associations than we should be able to observe the same type of spatial biases in literates and illiterates. Preliminary evidence suggests that the finger counting practices of literates and illiterates are not same and furthermore that the spatial biases found in finger counting are not observed across tasks.

Zero’s beginnings: the Mayan case
John Justeson (SUNY, Albany)

This paper addresses linguistic and (Mayan) historical evidence concerning the origins of a numerical concept of zero. Comparative linguistic evidence suggests that zero is not part of basic numerical cognition; rather, it develops out of computing practices of mathematical specialists. Specifically, while zero is often assumed to be prerequisite to the invention of positional notation, it seems on the contrary to emerge as a notational device within such systems. This is clearly the case in Mesoamerica. A system of place-value notation arose in Guatemala and Mexico among Mayans and epi-Olmecs by 36 BCE, with no symbol corresponding to a zero coefficient. Although data is limited, circumstantial evidence is consistent with the following scenario for the emergence of a numerical zero: Mayan calendar specialists developed discourse practices, associated with calendrically-timed ritual events, that used the word “lacking”; the associated dates were represented in a new, non-positional system of notation, which replaced positional notation except in calculating tables; the sign for “lacking” was transferred from the new notation into these tabular positional notations; as a side effect of the algorithms that specialists used to add and subtract positional numerals, the “lacking” symbol was reinterpreted numerically.

Methodological reflections on typologies for numeral systems
Theodore R. Widom and Dirk Schlimm (McGill University)

Past and present societies worldwide have employed well over 100 distinct notational systems for representing natural numbers, some of which continue to play a crucial role in intellectual and cultural development today. The diversity of these notations has prompted the need for classificatory schemes, or typologies, to provide a systematic starting point for their discussion and appraisal. In the present paper we provide a general framework
within which the efficacy of these typologies can be assessed relative to certain desiderata. Using this framework, we discuss the two influential typologies of Zhang & Norman and Chrisomalis, and present a new typology which takes as its starting point the principles by which numeral systems represent multipliers (the principles of cumulation and cipherization), and
bases (those of integration, parsing, and positionality). We argue with many different examples that this provides a more refined classification of numeral systems than the ones put forward previously. We also note that the framework can be used to assess typologies not only of numeral systems, but of many domains.

Social relationships as a lexical source for numeral terms in Amazonia
Cynthia Hansen and Patience Epps (The University of Texas at Austin)

Due to the relatively high degree of etymological transparency found in the numeral systems of Amazonia, it is possible to see the range of lexical sources from which the numeral terminology emerges. In this paper, we present the range of strategies used to create numeral terms below 5, based on an extensive survey of the numeral systems of close to 200 Amazonian languages conducted by the authors. More specifically, we discuss a strategy that is well-attested in Amazonia but that is not attested elsewhere in the world: a ‘relational’ strategy where terms for 4 (and sometimes 3-10) are built using a social relationship term, such as ‘sibling’ or ‘companion’. We propose that this strategy mirrors a gestural counting strategy found throughout the region where fingers are grouped in pairs.

Cultural variation in numeration systems and their mapping onto the mental number line
Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller (University of Freiburg)

The ability to exactly assess large numbers hinges on cultural tools such as counting sequences and thus offers a great opportunity to study how culture interacts with cognition. To obtain a more comprehensive picture of the cultural variance in number representation, we argue for the inclusion of cross-linguistic analyses. In this talk, we will briefly depict the specific counting systems of Polynesian and Micronesian languages that were once derived from an abstract and regular system by extension in three dimensions. The linguistic origins, cognitive properties, and cultural context of these specific counting systems are analyzed, and their implications for the nature of a (putative) mental number line are discussed.

Retractions in anthropology

An editorial in the British Medical Journal earlier this week described Andrew Wakefield’s controversial 1998 Lancet article linking the MMR vaccine with autism as an “elaborate fraud”. Although the article was retracted in 2004 by ten of Wakefield’s co-authors, Wakefield himself continues to insist on its validity, despite new evidence presented by the journalist Brian Deer in the BMJ that the study was not simply flawed but that data were fabricated by Wakefield in a way that could not possibly have been accidental.

I’ve been reading the academic blog Retraction Watch for a few months now, and find it interesting for more than just the Schadenfreude that comes from seeing others go down in flames, because of the ethical meta-commentary that accompanies notices of retractions, and because it has made retractions much more prominent than any one journal could (except presumably the highest-tier ones). But that leads me to think: can anyone name cases of retraction in anthropological publications? I’m not talking about Piltdown-style refutation without retraction, or disputes such as Mead vs. Freeman or Chagnon vs. Tierney, or of anthropologists publicly changing their minds about earlier publications. Obviously in a non-experimental science we wouldn’t expect them at nearly the rate or in the same circumstances, but surely there must be cases of blatant plagiarism or ethical dishonesty that have resulted in a formal retraction … right?

Does anyone know of a list of anthropological publications that have been formally withdrawn from the academic record? Or, can anyone name some?

Two new tools

Over the past couple of days, two remarkable new tools have become available for social scientists of all stripes who are interested in visualizing data.

The New York Times Mapping America project uses data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2005-2009 to give a block-by-block visualization of the ethnic composition of census tracts and individual neighbourhoods down to the block level. As someone who works in Detroit, by most accounts the most segregated city in the country, this is a really neat tool, especially for teaching purposes, to discuss how ethnic separation emerges, and where it doesn’t.

Then Google released its Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to trace and compare the relative frequency of words or phrases in any of ten subsections of the total Google Books corpus of over five million volumes. If this had existed a couple of months ago I would have had all my students hunting through this like mad for their Lexiculture projects (along with existing corpus data like COCA and COHA, which are, for all their scholarly value, much smaller bodies of text).

Check them out, and let me know what you think.

As I was going through the Times…

Recently, there has been a “Puzzle Moment” in the science section of the New York Times, with an eclectic mix of articles combining scientific pursuits with cognitive and linguistic play of various sorts. One that caught my eye is ‘Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus’ by Pam Belluck [1], which is an account of the well-known Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. The RMP is an Egyptian mathematical text dating to around 1650 BCE, and is one of the most complete and systematic known accounts of ancient Egyptian mathematics. It’s a fascinating text, written in the Egyptian hieratic script rather than the more famous hieroglyphs, and it gives us considerable insight into the economy, social organization, and technical practices of the Second Intermediate Period.

The central conceit of the Times article is that the well-known “As I was going to St. Ives” poem-puzzle has its earliest ancestor in the RMP. This is vaguely true in that the RMP has a section involving repeated multiplication by seven, resulting in an addition problem. But Ahmes the scribe, despite his insistence that his text would reveal “obscurities and all secrets”, was not writing a mystery, but an exercise that formed part of scribal training, in an era where the literacy rate was at most 1-2%. While one can argue fairly that this is not a ‘real’ problem, and that the structure of it is meant to hold the learner’s attention through its repetitions, to call it a puzzle is only true in the broadest possible sense.

I’m a professional numbers guy, not an Egyptologist, but the article we are presented with not only tells us nothing new about the Rhind. I was very pleased, on the one hand, to see Marcel Danesi, whose work may be familiar to many readers of this blog, commenting on the widespread cross-cultural and cross-historical interest in puzzles (not only numerical puzzles, but including them). It’s not often enough that linguistic anthropologists get quoted in the Times. And like Danesi, I have broadly universalist sympathies. But I disagree with Danesi, who has made this claim about the RMP elsewhere, in his The Puzzle Instinct (Indiana, 2004, pp. 6-7) that it was “shrouded in mystery” or that “mystery, wisdom, and puzzle-solving were intrinsically entwined in the ancient world.”

The better example of numerical play in Egyptian scribal traditions mentioned in the Times article is the Horus eye, or wedjat, a combination of six symbols whose constituent parts signify the fractional series {1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64} which when summed totals 63/64, or nearly one (see below). As the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner reckoned it, the remaining 1/64 would be provided by Thoth who would heal the Eye and thus produce unity. It’s a nice story, and at least at some periods or for some writers, this narrative may have been relevant.

Source: wikimedia.org

But the Horus-eye illustrates one of the central problems in the transliteration of Egyptian texts, namely that while the vast majority of Egyptian mathematically-relevant texts are written in the cursive hieratic script, they are transcribed, and all-too-frequently theorized, as if they were hieroglyphs. This transcriptional practice leads us to think of the Rhind as a hieroglyphic text that just happens to be in hieratic in the original, but in the case of the Horus eye it couldn’t be more misleading. The Horus symbols in the Rhind don’t look like the above image, and more generally, the hieratic numerals look nothing like, and behave nothing like, the hieroglyphic numerals. We now call of these six Horus eye components by the less evocative name of ‘capacity system submultiples’ in recognition of the fact that these components were originally nonpictographic, part of a metrological system of grain measurement, and only at a much later date were they composed into the wedjat-eye. This isn’t to say that the Egyptians weren’t numerically playful, but they weren’t especially playful in the Rhind.

In short, the RMP is not an especially good example of numerical play in Egypt, and certainly not an especially relevant example from a cross-cultural perspective. It illustrates, to be sure, that mathematical texts are not purely functional or economic documents, but include semiotic and linguistic elements far beyond their pragmatic use. But this is not new knowledge about the Rhind or about mathematics. And it runs a grave risk of othering a document whose function was largely pedagogical, and is thus not so different than, for instance, the ‘ready-reckoners’ of early-capitalist sixteenth-century England.

I am thrilled to see numerical texts treated as objects of inquiry beyond the facile ‘Did they get the answer right?’ I am sympathetic to Danesi’s claim that puzzles and riddles have universal salience. Yet I worry that, at least in the case of the Rhind, the link to puzzle-like behavior is so far-fetched that it turns our best glimpse into Egyptian sociomathematical practice into an inappropriately arcane and obscurantist account. This ‘mysteries of lost Egypt’ nonsense should have been set aside decades ago.

If you wanted to pull out some cross-cultural examples of numerical play, you could easily find lots of better examples, from well-covered territory such as Hebrew gematria practices, to the richly evocative varnasankhya systems of number-word associations in premodern South Asian texts, to the complex cluster of quasi-cryptographic numerical systems used by Ottoman administrators and military officers. Or if you were really stuck on Egypt, you could investigate the cryptic numerals used on late Egyptian votive rods and Ptolemaic inscriptions, richly infused with homophony. (For a more extensive discussion of these and others, see my Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2010). There is a rich, although disciplinarily diverse, comparative body of material on numerical practices including puzzles, but the Rhind just isn’t part of it.

(Crossposted to the Society for Linguistic Anthropology blog)

Deutscher, Through the Language Glass

Deutscher, Guy. 2010. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Guy Deutscher’s new book has attracted a great deal of attention among linguistic anthropologists, not least because anthropology is virtually made invisible throughout. It has a few very serious flaws; nonetheless, it is nonetheless the best presentation of a wide range of specialist literature on linguistic relativity for laypeople and introductory students. It should be read widely and critically.

Deutscher begins with four chapters on a particular theme in linguistic relativity, colour terminology, and ends with a fifth chapter on that subject. His approach is historical – many linguists and anthropologists, even ones who know this field well, will find surprising historical tidbits in his narrative. Deutscher takes us from the classical speculations of Gladstone (yes, the same one) through the seminal work of Berlin and Kay, through modern refinements and interpretations. It is not quite an alternate history, but one that notes rightly that interest in the language-cognition interface with respect to colour is a longstanding part of the history of our disciplines, not one emergent from the cognitive sciences in the past half-century. Deutscher’s correct answer is that both perceptual and cognitive constraints are at play – biology does not determine how we categorize the colour spectrum, but neither are we completely free to divide it however we wish. This is not an especially innovative answer, but it is a well-presented one that will appeal to people who are new to this subject.

Chapter 5, ‘Plato and the Macedonian Swineherd’ is both the weakest chapter and the most out-of-place. Deutscher sets up a straw man in claiming that “For decades, linguists have elevated the hollow slogan that ‘all languages are equally complex’ to a fundamental tenet of their discipline, zealously suppressing as heresy any suggestion that the complexity of any areas of grammar could reflect aspects of society” (125). Deutscher tries to resuscitate the idea of different levels of linguistic complexity by rephrasing the question in terms of complexity within specific domains of language. But we’ve known for a very long time that different languages have different numbers of phonemes, or that there are correlations between social complexity and domains like colour terms and number words (a topic sadly neglected in the book), and Deutscher is wrong to imagine an inquisition against the subject. Worse, Deutscher links these ideas to statements such as, “If you are a member of an isolated tribe that numbers a few dozen people, you hardly ever come across any strangers, and if you do you will probably spear them or they will spear you before you get a chance to chat” (115). In so doing he will doubtless reinforce the pervasive myths of primitivity: that small-scale societies are more isolated, more xenophobic, and more violent than larger-scale ones. It is very interesting that smaller-scale societies have smaller colour lexicons than larger ones, but this doesn’t provide an answer. For this reason alone I suspect that I will not give this book to introductory students. Moreover, it is poorly linked to the general theme of the book – it neither advances any particular claim between the relation between language and cognition nor supports the other chapters’ claims. The whole chapter would have been better omitted.

In Part II, ‘The Language Lens’, Deutscher begins by lambasting Benjamin Whorf’s ‘language prison’ model of linguistic relativity in favour of the model proposed by Franz Boas and Roman Jakobson, which emphasized what languages require their speakers to say, rather than the Whorfian question of what they allow or prohibit their speakers from saying. The fact that some languages require one to specify the gender of inanimate objects, or that others require you to note evidentiality when making factual statements (how you know what you know), develops habits of thought that, over time, lead individuals to favour particular modes of cognition over others. He supports this through two newer themes of research – the effects of spatial language on the cognition of the relationships between physical objects, and the role of gender categories in affecting the semantic connotations of inanimate objects. These are well-known fields among specialists, but are presented here in an engaging fashion, allowing novices to experience radically different modes of spatial cognition through the eyes of Guugu Yimithirr speakers of Australia, for instance.

Perhaps the most striking absence for linguistic anthropologists is the complete absence of discussion of a number of central figures in the field, from the early work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl to modern scholars such as John Lucy, Eve Danziger or Anna Wierzbicka, who are neither mentioned nor cited. Through the Language Glass is not, and is apparently not intended as, a full recounting of the history of linguistic relativity concepts, which is fine except insofar as it sometimes claims to be one. Because Deutscher is not, and has no plans to be, a scholar doing original research in this field, he is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as an interloper whose contribution is to summarize the work of others without consulting them. While this is not a mortal sin, one can question his judgement in failing to work with the body of scholars whose work he intends to present to a general audience.

Despite these failings, Through the Language Glass is an engaging presentation of an important theme in linguistics and anthropology. With the exception of one chapter I found it very enjoyable to read and a good presentation of important past and present research, and in particular on the field of colour studies I learned much of the history of the field that I had not previously known. It would be highly suitable for use in undergraduate courses with the caveat that it should be discussed critically.

Student publications ahoy!

Over the next couple of weeks, you should expect to see here a number of student papers from my undergraduate Language and Culture course at Wayne State University. You’ll be able to identify these from the header, from the tag ‘Guest Post’, and the Creative Commons license attached to each. These guest posts aren’t mine, although obviously I think they are extremely strong and endorse them. These represent the very best student work that is coming out of my courses, of which I am proud and, of course, of which the authors should be very proud.

AAA bound

From tomorrow morning until Sunday afternoon I will be at the American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans. Although my own paper, “Re-stimulating the anthropology of writing systems” has the misfortune of having been placed on Sunday morning at 8:00am (wheeeee!), by which time a lot of people will already be gone, I’ll be around a lot of places, including the business meetings for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and the Society for Anthropological Sciences, and my department’s Friday 5pm reception at the (numerically-interesting) 5 Fifty 5 Cafe. If you’re going, and are reading this, and would like to meet up, feel free to comment here or track me down.