Skeptical Humanities

NON-MAINSTREAM METHODOLOGY

Hi again, everybody!

Non-mainstream writers and others who accept the veracity of highly controversial claims are often quick to condemn skeptics and the mainstream more generally for assuming (or proclaiming without adequate argumentation) that mainstream methods of investigation and assessment are superior to (more reliable than) non-mainstream. However, there are many cases in which it is instead the non-mainstream methods that blatantly invite criticism along these lines. Two examples, from opposite ends of the ‘respectability’ spectrum:

The maverick amateur Liam Jones (discussed last time) deflects critical questions by likening himself to the 20th-century English philosopher and populariser C.E.M. Joad, who used to commence his analysis of amateur proposals and queries (e.g. on radio shows) by asking for the background assumptions behind the discourse – and hence the key aspects of its meaning – to be made explicit. Jones asks professional linguists and philosophers to apply this approach to their own questions regarding his obscure statements; he declines to respond to these questions unless this is done first. But these questions are, typically, already as ‘paradigm-free’ as possible, making the minimum of assumptions. And Jones’ own material is largely unintelligible in the absence of answers to these questions. This is special pleading on a grand scale.

Even more judicious and astute authors who endorse non-mainstream claims sometimes seem to assume that positive reports on the outcomes of experiments or other studies (for example, reports made by the investigators themselves) are veridical. For instance: in his tribute to the polymath and parapsychologist Archie Roy (Seriously Strange [Association For The Scientific Study Of Anomalous Phenomena] 142 (2013), pp. 14-15), Hugh Pincott says that Trish Robertson and Roy demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the ‘messages’ from alleged deceased persons in question in their studies were more relevant to intended recipients than others. Now Pincott is fully entitled to his own assessment of what R&R demonstrated – but surely his wording should have acknowledged that skeptical commentators on R&R do not accept their own very positive interpretations of their results. Even if he believes that he could overturn the skeptical objections, or indeed that they have already been overturned, it would be reasonable to mention that they have been raised. (Of course, no-one is saying here that R&R MANIPULATED their data.) One would hope that writers of all views on such matters would acknowledge thoughtful disagreement.

For samples of skeptical comment on R&R, see:

Modern Mediumship Research: Robertson & Roy

http://www.rationalinquiry.org.uk/forum/showthread.php/3266-Patricia-Robertson
http://www.skepdic.com/news/newsletter103.html
http://www.skepticreport.com/sr/?p=574
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=102863

More ‘Hall Of Shame’ at the weekend!

Mark

For my new book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

11 SOME UNPUBLISHED/BARELY-PUBLISHED ECCENTRICS

LIAM JONES

Melbourne-based Jones sent his treatises on language to various linguists including me; I was the only one who was game enough to respond at any length! Jones’ ideas involve proposed novel, large-scale theories about the nature of language, strikingly different from generally-held mainstream ideas and developed on the basis of a very limited knowledge of the discipline. In Jones’ case this involved some acquaintance with Chomsky’s thought, which he had however seriously misunderstood. His structural and sociolinguistic terminology is very different from mainstream terminology and does not seem to relate closely to the latter; it is mostly left unexplained, as if it is supposed to be already familiar or readily grasped on first exposure (some amateur philosophers in Australia proceed in similar ways). This also applies to many of Jones’ proposed non-mainstream analyses and theoretical claims, which imply many unannounced and unexplained assumptions. He declines to explain his terminology, apparently believing that he needs to avoid mainstream terms in order to make novel points and that the onus is upon his critics to determine his meaning as best they may.

CHICO

One ‘Chico’ appeared on an atheist bulletin-board, saying: ‘Nothing fails like prayer? As a linguist with a strong faith in the delusional linguistic common, as a positive phenomenon, (which actually works as an illusion), but fails miserably as a tool for value, this statement as to the failure of prayer, disturbed me deeply. As usual when confronted with linguistic phenomenon, I began a lengthy search into formulation of my conceptualization. I am happy to report, I found this statement to be absolutely truth, and have found the truth to be a linguistic positive, due to the fact, language is a delusional, illusion. It is not real, and therefore, requires failure to eliminate most all positives, and nearly all the negatives as well. It prevents sensory overload, and prevents drowning in linguistic immersion’. A request for clarification proved fruitless; ‘Chico’ responded: ‘The concept of illusion is greeted in the same manner as music, the concept of delusion is greeted the same as language. All four are illusion! This is a constant known as the four basics’. He ignored a further enquiry.

FORRESTER

‘Forrester’, a contributor to skeptical bulletin-boards based in the USA, has adopted a peculiarly mixed stance in respect of Chomskyan linguistics. He rejects Chomskyan theories concerning Universal Grammar as not fully supported by the evidence, but he does accept certain features of UG (as he understands it) as applying to all human languages (and indeed, quite contrarily to Chomskyan views, to the communication systems of higher non-human primates also). He also argues (loosely) for a close link between the acquisition of these features and that of accurate perception and hence successful manipulation of the physical world, on the ground that UG reflects the relationships between entities in the world. This view seems to be at least overstated. One of the features of UG which Forrester accepts is the Subject-Verb-Object system of functional units in clauses. Interestingly, Chomskyans do not actually use these terms in their own versions of UG; instead of identifying some Noun Phrases as Subjects, they define the relevant NPs as the NPs involved in the basic clause construction NP+VP (= Subject-Predicate) and describe what other linguists call Objects as the NPs involved in the secondary construction V+NP within the VP. There are, of course, linguists (non-Chomskyan) who do talk in terms of Subjects and Objects (as basic functional units of clauses); but these linguists are often typologists and generally do not accept UG as genuine. Forrester himself clearly holds that ALL human languages actually have Subjects, Verbs and Objects; but this does not seem to be the case (‘ergative’ languages such as Basque resist analysis in these terms).

‘TOM HARDWYCK’

The proposed spelling reforms of ‘Tom Hardwyck’ (not his real name) have been featured in The Australian newspaper and elsewhere. His system is basically phonemic, with all the usual issues (of which he is apparently unaware; he writes as if he were the first to consider these matters). Hardwyck’s attitude to scholarship is one of determined ignorance and belligerence. One critic of Hardwyck, Nick Wade, is himself utterly naive in sociolinguistic terms and apparently wants to ‘reform and unify’ pronunciation so that spelling reform will then be ‘easy’.

More next time!

Mark

For my new book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

I am struggling to relate this intemperate comment to what I said in ‘Hall Of Shame’ 10. Unless someone can persuade me that any of my statements there are out of order in any way, I don’t see any need to modify or withdraw my comments or to refrain from further comments on these issues. As I hope is clear, I am wholly respectful and sympathetic with respect to deaf people or anyone else with any kind of disability (naturally, I have my own shortcomings and hope that others will treat me too with respect and sympathy), and I am positive about any efforts made by deaf people to improve their situation. But this does not imply that I must accept EVERY proposal along these lines as helpful.

In any case, the one point of criticism of Ladd which I included was, as stated , originally advanced by Dale Mellor (himself deaf), not by me; I merely cited and endorsed it. But I DO endorse it. Young children (deaf or not) are not well equipped to make life-changing decisions, and it is by no means obvious that the desire of some deaf parents to impose avoidable deafness upon their children should be respected, still less applauded. (If an ADULT who has a choice wishes to remain deaf, that is of course their decision; they must live with the consequences.)

The most unfortunate deaf and non-speaking person referred to by ‘Kids Rule’ represents an extreme case, and people who need or wish to interact with such a person do probably need to become proficient at signing. But the fact remains that the non-deaf public at large are unlikely to learn signing, and such a person will need interpreters (who should be made as widely available as possible) in many situations. (If a cochlear implant would not work or help in such a case, naturally there would be no point in insisting on the operation in that specific case.)

Addendum: there is of course now a very welcome option to view signing (in various languages) on many TV shows.

Mark

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

10 PADDY LADD

Some minority groups generally regarded as ‘disabled’ have of late begun asserting their right not to be ‘cured’ but rather to be accepted as they are. One such group is the deaf; the term is now often capitalized as Deaf. Many deaf people have long embraced without compunction the internal use and fostering of their various signed languages, which differ from group to group as much as other languages do and are not based on the spoken languages of the countries in which they live; they have rejected the policy of ‘oralism’, under which they were pressurised into shifting as far as possible to the wholesale adoption of speech. (In extreme cases, deaf people were discouraged from forming couples, in the hope of eventually ‘breeding out’ the condition.)

The aim of many deaf people is now to use spoken language only with the non-deaf who cannot sign. Taking this idea further, some Deaf community leaders have begun to urge that their group should be regarded as ‘differently abled’, do not need to be given full hearing even if this becomes easy and inexpensive, and must be treated analogously with minority spoken-language communities. In academic circles, this is already common: interpretation into the British and American Sign Languages, in particular, is often provided at conferences. (This is especially the case within linguistics, where signed languages have become a major focus of scholarly attention.)

One of the Deaf leaders is Paddy Ladd, who was a fellow linguistics student of mine at Reading some 30 years ago. In 2008 Ladd expounded his views in the book Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, based on his PhD thesis and reviewed online by Dale Mellor; for further summary comments, see Margaret Macmillan’s 2010 book The Uses And Abuses Of History (pp. 60-61). While Ladd is very informative and has much to say that makes excellent sense, he does seem at times to adopt an exaggerated stance on this issue. Mellor is himself effectively deaf and found himself adversely affected during his early life by the older ‘oralistic’ attitudes; but, as he says, Ladd treats the Deaf community rather as a ‘law unto itself’, going so far as to argue that parents are wrong to have their deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (rather than hearing aids) so as to facilitate their life in the wider community. There is a (presumably unintended) echo of the ‘glad to be disabled’ syndrome here. Deaf people do need to live in a largely non-deaf world; and it is unlikely that very many hearing people will learn signed languages to fluency for the purpose of interacting with others who mostly know the relevant spoken language well and can nowadays be given adequate hearing (without abandoning the asset of an additional, signed community language). And isolation from the hearing world – even if with international links to other Deaf cultures – is neither feasible nor, surely, desirable (although this notion has been explored, notably in some science-fiction).

Mellor suggests that nobody has ever tried seriously to invent written forms of signed languages. However, this is not the case; see http://www.signwriting.org/index.html, etc. These systems seem not to be as prominent as they arguably ought to be, and their further development and promotion would benefit those who prefer to function in signed languages where possible.

Ladd has also argued that autistic people, similarly, should not be seen as disabled; the validity of this view seems to depend on the degree to which their autism affects their ability to interact with the community at large.

More next time!

Mark

For my new book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal a

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues (a short one this time)!

9 SCOTT ALAN ROBERTS

Scott Alan Roberts’ work is in most respects typical of ‘pseudo-historical’ treatises dealing with the ancient world and incorporating some linguistic considerations. His book The Rise And Fall Of The Nephilim (2012) commences with a fairly typical much-overstated broadside against skeptics and unsurprisingly deals mostly with Roberts’ non-mainstream ideas concerning the ‘Nephilim’ (the mysterious ‘giants’ referred to in Genesis).

However, Roberts’ work also features an unusual linguistic quirk: he presents the relevant Hebrew data in a VERY strange manner! Hebrew is written from right to left, and usually with the ‘vowel-points’ introduced around 700 CE; when quoting from earlier sources, Roberts cites it in this form. But when citing Hebrew on his own account, he reverses the letter-order. Thus the words read from left to right, making them appear utterly bizarre to those who know Hebrew (as if the English word giants were spelled stnaig). And Roberts does not transliterate his cited Hebrew into Roman letters for the benefit of his non-Hebraicist readers (surely the vast majority); one therefore wonders why he thought that (inconsistently) adopting a left-to-right ‘ductus’ would be useful. He also omits the vowel-points, AND (by way of sheer error?) some of the letters themselves.

More next time!

Mark

For my new book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212.
Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

8 EMMA COCKER

Like many ‘fringe’ authors, some artists and commentators on the arts apparently believe that scholars – including linguists – hold (or can reasonably be read as holding) that their theories and observations as published in books and articles are definitely correct, not admitting of any challenges, alternative stances or modifications. One such writer is Emma Cocker, an ally of John Latham (discussed briefly last time), who finds this supposed viewpoint unwelcome because of her own focus on the ‘margins’ between entities and the uncertainty of analyses (a popular theme among artists).

Although those of us who are active skeptics do of course find SOME alternative ideas ill-founded, this very ‘strong’ interpretation of what we say reflects a serious (and surprising) error in respect of our intent. Most academics – while confident enough to subject their ideas to scrutiny through publication – are well aware of the provisional nature of academic ‘conclusions’ and of the large amounts of uncertainty which obtain (perhaps especially but not exclusively in the humanities and social sciences). (However, we ARE also – naturally – much more interested than are artists in the RESOLUTION of uncertainties wherever possible, by synthesis or by the identification of some analyses as preferable to others.)

Some writers of this kind also advance more specific ideas (not necessarily non-mainstream) about language – though not always very explicitly or clearly; they are accustomed to using vivid metaphors rather than precise ‘academic’ wording. Cocker herself suggests that ‘seams become audible in the spoken language of certain districts’ (which, she explains in correspondence, refers to interference between dialects/accents in contact situations), and that speech can be ‘twisted and reversed’ (this refers to usage such as Cockney ‘backslang’, as in rofe meaning ‘four’). She discusses these two phenomena in the context of her more general notions about language and the mind, chiefly with respect to her ‘margins’ (these notions are only to a limited extent empirically grounded).

However, both phenomena are already rather well understood: the former is much more widespread in language generally than Cocker seems to imagine and normally requires no special explanation, and the latter is (obviously) typically involved in the encryption of information. Novel perspectives are always of interest; however, they need to be explicitly expressed and exemplified if linguists are to assess their validity and/or significance, and they are more likely to be genuinely useful if they are informed by knowledge of existing ideas within the discipline (even if their proponents reject these ideas).

More next time!

Mark

PS: For my new book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

Copies are available through me at the author’s 50% discount, for EU 26.40 including postage to anywhere outside Germany. Please let me know if you’d like one, suggest means of payment (Paypal is possible) and provide your preferred postal address.

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

7 WYNN-MILLER, CROFT, MYRLAND & LATHAM

Some extremely strange thinkers, notably David Wynn-Miller and Mary Croft, are concerned with what they take to be the inadequate basis for most current laws in most countries (including the UK) and with what Croft in particular identifies as the religious basis for legal principles: truly valid laws allegedly arise out of the will of God. This material is taken seriously by some advocates of radical meta-legal reform. These authors present linguistic analyses and theories which allegedly (not always at all obviously!) would support their critiques of current laws. However, these analyses are themselves inaccurate, and the associated linguistic conceptualisation is seriously confused.

Wynn-Miller in particular focuses upon English grammar as it is manifested in texts such as those of laws and of justificatory preambles to laws. On his web-site, he describes English grammar as providing ‘a set of rules for the construction of the English Language so that human-beings can communicate with each other and understand that communication correctly’. (Presumably he would say the same about the grammars of other languages.) He continues: ‘If the rules of grammar were not defined, then it would be impossible to know what is meant by any words or statements. Dictionaries provide definitions for words and the rules of grammar define the construction of sentences in order to convey meaning and ideas unambiguously’.

The tone here is more ‘prescriptivist’/‘normative’ than a mainstream linguist would prefer (it suggests that grammars should lay down rules for usage, even for native speakers); but Wynn-Miller’s ideas are in other respects relatively uncontroversial up to this point. However, he then makes the bizarre claim that it is important to retain as many nouns in the language as possible, because they refer to things or places and therefore ‘are’ real, tangible items. In fact, Wynn-Miller’s ontology is badly astray here. Many nouns (not all) REFER to tangible items (sometimes called ‘photographables’, for instance by Charles Bliss as discussed last time), but they are not themselves those items (like the well-known picture of a pipe by Rene Magritte, the word pipe is not itself a pipe). On the other hand, Wynn-Miller says, verbs describe actions and motions, cannot describe real, tangible items, and are thus harmful to thought. This too is confused: many verbs (not all) describe dynamic assemblies of wholly tangible entities, collectively forming physical events: ‘filmables’. (Some nouns, such as stampede, also refer to filmables rather than photographables.)

Wynn-Miller refers to his novel version of English grammar as ‘Truth Language’ because it (supposedly) retains all nouns as nouns. He offers examples of the operation of ‘Truth Language’ involving various English sentences; one example is For the text of this web-site is with the absence of the legal-advice. (This sentence is, obviously, in very strange English, to say the least; Wynn-Miller does not identify the author.) Wynn-Miller badly misanalyses the grammar of the sentence, and then proposes a new, supposedly preferable version: For the absence of the legal-advice is with the text of this web-site. He describes this version as ‘unambiguous’. In fact, no AMBIGUITY is present in the original sentence; the term ambiguity is apparently being used idiosyncratically here. In addition, the new formulation is not palpably clearer than the original, and it itself might in fact be ‘ambiguous’ if the original were ambiguous; it is also, again, bizarrely phrased. It is indeed far from clear why this new formulation is deemed preferable to the original; this may be because it is held to express (subtly) a political ‘truth’ adhered to by Wynn-Miller (and Croft), whereas the original expresses (subtly) an uncongenial political notion. Furthermore, Wynn-Miller’s new formulation STILL includes non-nouns.

Some of Wynn-Miller’s sentences are cited by his ally David Myrland (if indeed Myrland is not in fact Wynn-Miller himself in another guise!), who openly rejects the authority of the United States government and legal system (rather after the manner of the ‘Freemen of Montana’ and other such groups), threatens to enforce his own principles by sending armed gangs to ‘arrest’ officials, and is currently serving a sentence for non-compliance with various laws. Myrland too suggests that grammatical problems in the English of legal texts render them invalid; in his lawsuits against the American authorities, he presents extensive (often inaccurate) grammatical analyses of such texts, along similar lines.

One is reminded here of thinkers such as John Trotter, whom I discussed in the first instalment in this series: Trotter argues that certain kinds of formulaic expression of philosophical interest – for instance the logician’s For all X, X is Y = ‘all Xs are Y’, as in ‘all men are mortal’ – are to be deemed ungrammatical even though they are the normal forms used by the relevant native speakers (logicians) in such cases, and goes on to claim (bizarrely) that these expressions are not only ungrammatical but are therefore also logically invalid – and that, because the issue at hand is central in discussions of logic, the whole basis of logic is thereby impugned. But Myrland’s grasp of grammar (and of language matters more generally) is far inferior to Trotter’s. Indeed, Wynn-Miller, Myrland and Croft simply do not understand the grammar of English – or linguistics – well enough to make any valid comments on language, or to draw any theoretical conclusions.

The art-theoretician John Latham, in his works promoting his ‘Time-Base Theorem’, takes such ideas even further in arguing (unconvincingly) that language as a whole (supposedly ‘object-based’) cannot adequately describe reality (which is itself ‘event-based’). See John Latham, Time-Base and the Universe (London, 2006); also online discussions and projects such as http://www.arts-humanities.net/projects/reanimating_john_latham_through_archive_event.

For Wynn-Miller, see http://www. natural-person.ca/; for Croft, see
http://spiritualeconomicsnow. net/, from which Croft’s e-book How I
Clobbered Every Bureaucratic Cash-Confiscatory Agency Known To Man
(http://www. spiritualeconomicsnow. net/solutions/How_I_08. pdf) can be downloaded;
for Myrland, see
http://spiritualpolitician.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/david-myrland-man-who-cures-fear-of.html

More next time!

Mark

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

6 CHARLES BLISS

There are a number of interesting projects offering invented systems of written symbols (as opposed to invented spoken & written ‘auxiliary’ languages of the more usual kind), intended to be more systematic, more logical and more ‘in tune with reality’ than existing languages or scripts, and thus to improve thought and communication.

One such system is Charles Bliss’s ‘Bliss Symbols’, a philosophically-grounded, supposedly cross-linguistic ideographic writing system partly inspired by the Chinese logography (wrongly perceived by Bliss as itself ideographic and thus as more useful cross-linguistically than it in fact is). Bliss invented the system in the years following the Second World War; it is now controlled by Blissymbolics Communication International, based in Toronto. Bliss based his system on a supposedly universally valid philosophical analysis of human experience, rather after the manner of the inventors of a priori artificial auxiliary languages in medieval and early modern times.

For largely philosophical (ontological) reasons, the script focuses upon observables (‘photographables’), corresponding with ‘concrete’ nouns, and ‘filmables’, corresponding with actions and processes usually expressed with verbs; it avoids reference to abstract entities as far as possible. Not all critics would regard this limited ontology as adequately defended. (I will examine other aspects of this issue next time as they arise in the context of the work of other thinkers.)

Other philosophical issues also arise in the context of Bliss’s ideas. For example: in critiquing some English usage which he deems philosophically suspect, Bliss appears correct in distinguishing between two issues: that of the ‘copular’ use of the English verb be (as in be a boy), which he sees as mainly grammatical and thus as less dangerous, and the more specific and arguably more dangerous use of be with ‘evaluative’ adjectives such as bad (which remain ‘evaluative’ whatever the construction). But he goes on to contrast ‘evaluatives’ with adjectives or nouns importing objective (physical) qualities. This is not actually erroneous, but the boundary is not as obvious or as sharp as he may think. For example, whether ‘evaluatives’ do or do not themselves represent or relate to objective (non-physical) qualities depends on one’s theory of metaethics. Bliss is entitled to his own theory, but he cannot assume its truth. If he does, his formulations may exclude those who disagree. On the other side of this opposition, reference to physical characteristics, even though these are objective at a very detailed level, is subject to cross-linguistic and other variation, most obviously in terms of the classification of individuals into types and of more specific types into more general ones. Bliss makes his own assumptions here, some culture-/language-specific and some more personal. For example, he seems (though he does not make himself very clear) to exclude from his system the equivalent of Man is an animal, because he selects one sense of animal rather than others – and also focuses here on be meaning ‘be identical with’ rather than ‘be of this kind’ (which is surely the more relevant sense here in any case).

Bliss also appears rather scientistic in his apparent assumption that more scientific knowledge will provide agreed, clear definitions for all non-‘evaluative’ notions. In discussing mental events he adopts specific psychological notions (such as Id, Ego etc.) which are naturally contentious; this again seems to exclude those who have other views. It is also strange that he extends the symbol for ‘evaluative’ be to include cases where the attribute given does seem to be itself objective (such as male). It often remains unclear why Bliss believes that his particular decisions are the best or the correct ones, or, in some cases, even likely to be valid. (This is not to deny that some kinds of nonsensical or outrageous discourse – for instance, that of some dictators – can be defused by linguistic analysis. Scholars as different as Gilbert Ryle and C.S. Lewis have exemplified this, or at least have attempted it; but Bliss’ own formulations are not especially convincing.)

Bliss clearly knew more linguistics than some aspects of his approach suggest; but some of his comments on language are nevertheless linguistically naïve and/or confused. For example, he seems to assume that Subject-Verb-Object (the preferred word order in English and a common one in Chinese) is the ‘natural’ order, ignoring not only languages with other word orders (such as Welsh or indeed Latin) and ‘ergative’ languages such as Basque (where the categories Subject and Object are not really relevant) but even the commonly-used logical formulations which correspond with Verb + (Subject + Object).

More generally, in respect of inflectional morphology and basic syntax the system obviously has to select (in some respects) from among the systems found around the world). In addition, Bliss’ systematisation of derivational morphology would clearly involve major differences vis-a-vis most relevant languages, not merely in respect of the script. On the other hand, many of Bliss’ complaints about current language-specific usage do appear reasonable or at least arguable, and (if language reform on this scale were deemed genuinely desirable and feasible) a reformist might well seek to alter such things. Adjudicating on whether Bliss’ OWN solutions are the best available would require more detailed examination; but this is an especially arbitrary area of natural languages, and well-considered reform might conceivably be beneficial. More feasibly, such reforms might be introduced into novel spoken & written ‘auxiliary’ languages which might be linked with the Bliss Symbols.

Unfortunately, Bliss relies too much in places on particular, often idiosyncratic scholars, which misleads him; for instance, he accepts Otto Jespersen’s rather strange views on early language, possibly because of Jespersen’s own prominence in language reform movements.

Bliss’s intention was to develop a full international ‘auxiliary’ language, but, as noted, in the event he himself developed a script rather than a language per se. Later, his system was applied as an approach to communicating with disabled people, but he himself objected to this. Nevertheless, various groups have continued to apply the Bliss Symbols in this way. It has also been applied in the context of communication with animals.

There are many other such symbol systems, but most of them involve fewer specifically philosophical issues than the Bliss Symbols do.

On the Bliss Symbols, see the material issued by Blissymbolics Communications International, such as Blissymbol Reference Guide (Don Mills, ON, 1991); http://www. blissymbolics. us, http://www. blissymbolics. us/dictionary/ etc.; for the system, see http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=bliss+symbols&aq=f&aqi=g3g-v7&aql=&oq=&oi=image_result_group&sa=X. On applications to communicating with animals, see http://www. wikihow. com/Teach-a-Dog-to-%22Read-and-Write%22-Bliss-Symbols.

More next time!

Mark

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues!

5 VARIOUS WILD ANTIPODEANS!

Grahame Walsh, Ian Wilson and others have argued that the Bradshaw rock-paintings of the Kimberley in Western Australia, first seen by a European (Joseph Bradshaw) in 1891, can be attributed to a pre-Aboriginal Australian culture. The dating of these paintings has been heavily debated but they may be very early; and local Aboriginal people do not regard them as their ancestors’ work (or even as human in origin, though there are suggestions that their producers may have been the mysterious ‘Mimi’ people referred to in Northern Territory Aboriginal myths). Walsh argues that they represent the work of a pre-Aboriginal group who came to the area as long ago as 75,000 BP and developed the art-form during a sequence of cultures. He goes on to speculate as to where such a group might have originated, likening the art itself to certain African forms but more seriously suggesting that a negrito group such as those found on some Indian Ocean islands might have been involved. Such a group would later have been displaced or absorbed by Aboriginal populations. The movement of Aboriginal people into Australia appears to have been part of the earliest phase of Homo sapiens diffusion from Africa, and any suggestions that they were not alone in being the first inhabitants of Australia are obviously politically provocative (though they should, naturally, not be rejected on these grounds).

The controversial historian Keith Windschuttle (best known for his revisionist ideas about nineteenth-century Australia) argued, with Tim Gillin, in support of Walsh’s theory. Williamson and Gillin invoked some linguistic arguments; Colin Groves and Sean Ulm responded forcefully to Windschuttle and Gillin’s article from a mainstream anthropological standpoint; Gillin then responded in turn, denying the validity of some of Groves’ points and citing some more material by earlier authors (not linguists), including new linguistic arguments. However, these latter are partly based on Merritt Ruhlen’s ‘maverick’ ideas and are thus less persuasive than is suggested. In addition, the linguistic differences in the ethnically mixed area in question appear within normal variation limits for Aboriginal Australia. Of course, such mixing in historic times would be too recent for Walsh’s thesis, and probably too recent for Windschuttle as well.

In a very different vein, Rupert Gerritsen (of Dutch extraction) proposes that some groups of early Dutch sailors and passengers, marooned in Western Australia, had considerable influence on some of the coastal Aboriginal cultures. A fairly high proportion of the evidence offered is linguistic. This material has been informed by extensive reading in the discipline; but Gerritsen’s treatment nevertheless displays various naïveties and misconceptions. These include the usual popular but long outdated comparative linguistic methodology, use of minority/non-mainstream/outdated theories, very loose/inaccurate treatment of phonetics, phonology and spelling, implausible proposals on specific cases, some quite large factual errors, etc. The Aboriginal languages in question do seem to have some unusual features; but in most instances the case that these involve Dutch influence is not strong. (This is not to deny that Dutch and Dutch-speakers might have had some influence in the area.)

New Zealand was settled (by Eastern Polynesians, the Moriori and then the Maori) much more recently than Australia, to all appearances only in the last thousand years. The nineteenth-century writer Edward Tregear claimed to have proved that Maori, specifically, is related to Sanskrit and that the Maori and other Polynesians are really ‘Aryans’ who migrated to New Zealand from Europe via India. But Tregear’s linguistics was dated even in his own day; some of his claims appear ludicrous, notably his derivation of Maori verbs from the names of the associated animals, not themselves found in New Zealand: kauika ‘lie in a heap’ is said to be derived from Sanskrit gaus (‘cow’; cognate with the English word); the reference is to dung!

There is a body of markedly non-mainstream work regarding an ancient civilization and language known as Naacal, carried to Mesopotamia, Egypt and India in very remote ages by Mayan adepts, and a late-pre-historic world civilization centred on a Pacific continent known as ‘Mu’ (later submerged); Augustus le Plongeon and James Churchwood are the best-known exponents of these ideas, but many others have taken them up. Joan Leaf (recently deceased) was an amateur New Zealand historian and genealogist who accepted many of Tregear’s ideas and also accepted the reality of Mu, which supposedly gave rise to pre-Polynesian cultures in New Zealand and massive early diffusion more generally. In her self-published books, Leaf endorses Churchward’s ideas (including his claim that the Greek alphabet as recited is really a poem in Mayan!), and she regards Mayan as the language of Mu and the ultimate Ursprache. She uncritically treats orally transmitted stories and genealogies as very reliable, and her comparative linguistic and cultural methodology (shared with other current New Zealand diffusionists) is, as ever, far too imprecise and unsystematic; it reflects pre-scientific ideas.

Bryan Mitchell promotes the idea that there was Scots Gaelic settlement of New Zealand well before the eighteenth-century colonization. He upholds a diffusionist account of New Zealand history which minimizes the positive influence of the Maori, and accuses contemporary Maori of inconsistency in denying that some unearthed human remains and artefacts involve their own ancestors but still claiming control over them and thus preventing analysis. Mitchell believes that this involves a conspiracy involving politicians, academics and Maori activists, aimed at hindering the study of what they regard as strong evidence for pre-Maori settlement in New Zealand. This view is clearly exaggerated, although it is arguably true that it has become ‘politically incorrect’ to dispute the mainstream view that New Zealand was uninhabited until the Maori and other Polynesians began to arrive around 1000 CE. On the other hand, this is precisely what the evidence (reasonably interpreted) appears to suggest.

In respect of evidence which favours his own view specifically, Mitchell suggests that a number of Maori personal names and place-names used in Northland (the area north of Auckland) are in fact Gaelic-derived; he exemplifies with Gaelic Taine (ascribed to a Gaelic-speaking navigator who allegedly reached New Zealand) and Maori Tane (the name of a forest divinity), Gaelic Tara (used of high-set citadels) and Tara- as in the Maori region-name Taranaki, etc. He knows some linguistics, but his philology is of the usual amateur brand, and these examples are unsystematic and wholly unpersuasive.

References for specific writers on request! More next time!

Mark

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ continues! I propose to include here some thinkers who for various reasons failed to ‘make it’ into my now-available book Strange Linguistics! There is always more ‘grist to the mill’!

4 ‘ALFERINK’

Like some authors discussed in Chapter 2 of my book, the Australian amateur author ‘Alferink’ proposes new etymologies for modern words which are held to be constructed out of basic, allegedly ancient individual sounds, syllables or other very short sequences; these have somehow retained fixed meanings (obscure to modern scholars and the general public) over long periods. I became aware of Alferink through a leaflet picked up at a ‘New Age’ street-emporium in Melbourne.

The main word of interest to Alferink is the very name Australia (for which alternative etymologies have also been proposed by authors such as Knapp; see Chapter 1 of my book). Alferink interprets Australis, the immediate source of the word Australia, as Au (‘gold’) + S (‘Sun’) + T (‘top’) + Ra (‘Sun’) + L (‘land’) + Is (‘is’). However, the form Australis clearly means ‘southern’ in Latin; and the form Australia (which first appears in English in 1625), has a clear associated meaning, ‘southern land’. Alferink does not offer any defence of his own interpretation against this very robust etymology.

Some of these very short morphemes appear to have been derived by Alferink from specific words or word-parts drawn from specific non-English languages. Thus, Ra is very close to the Egyptian name for the Sun-god, and Au is the international chemical symbol for ‘gold’, derived from Latin aurum. However, most of those consisting in orthographic form of only one letter are identified as each having the same meaning as a specific modern English word commencing with that letter. For example, S means ‘Sun’, T ‘top’, etc. It is not made clear why these specific words are selected rather than other words commencing with the same letters; but it appears that they may have been chosen in an attempt to explain the origin of the alphabetic letters used to write English, since the work is titled ‘Theory on Origin of Letters’. Alferink may have tried various different analyses of each longer word such as Australia until he came upon one in which he felt that meanings which he could ascribe to the individual letters together made up a suitable sense for the entire word.

Naturally, there are considerable problems with this theory. Firstly, Alferink offers multiple readings of some of the letters, inevitably if there are to be enough words of very short length to provide a vocabulary of adequate size (and compound words of manageable lengths). For instance, S may also be read as ‘swerve’. This obviously allows Alferink excessive freedom in proposing compound derivations for known, longer words. Secondly, it is not clear why, prior to the invention of the alphabet, the initial sound of a given word, or any other sound of the language in any context, should have suggested a particular letter-form. The forms of alphabetic letters are phonologically arbitrary; any motivation they have is semantic, by way of ‘acrophony’. (Acrophony involves the conversion of a logographic symbol to an alphabetic or abjadic letter representing the initial phoneme of the corresponding spoken word. For example, the form of the Hebrew/Phoenician abjadic letter beth (which later became Greek beta and Roman B) derives from a logographic (and pictographic) symbol resembling a house, which was used earlier to represent the Hebrew/Phoenician noun beth (‘house’), one very common word which has beth as its initial phoneme.) The idea that a letter-form can be explained in terms of the pronunciation of a word commencing with the relevant phoneme is wholly naive and confused. Overall, in fact, Alferink (like several other such writers) is naively folk-linguistic in treating letters rather than phonemes as primary.

Thirdly, the alphabet used to write English is of course much older than the English language; it developed initially out of regional versions of the Greek alphabet as a means of writing Latin, which is why it is called the ‘Roman alphabet’. Any explanations of the forms or pronunciations of the letter-names, or of the original pronunciations of the letters as used in words, must relate to Latin (or to Greek or the still earlier Phoenician), not to English, to which the letters were applied much later.

Fourthly, there are further unexplained complexities within Alferink’s system. He complicates the quasi-monophonemic morpheme-system (one letter per word-meaning) by introducing digraphs such as AB (‘original’; itself unexplained) and Au/Ra/Is (as cited above; the last of these is interpreted simply as the English word spelled in this way), and also other symbols, some established ones such as + (‘Christ’, etc.) and some novel ones such as a symbol for ‘woman’ representing a woman’s mammaries.

More next time!

Mark