Skeptical Humanities

Been away. Very busy. Grading. Job hunt. I apologize. Still really busy. But also feeling guilty.

But you know I’ve been on the prowl for the latest and greatest in conspiracy, right? Because I have some sort of masochistic compulsive disorder!

• When the Republicans depend on unemployment numbers for their election, a jobs report that shows unexpected growth spawns conspiracy theories about Obama manipulating the jobs numbers.  Worldview Weekend showed their usual discernment in running with the story. The article they reprint makes the cui bono error, that the person who benefits from X must have caused X. Lots of conspiracy theories are built on that misguided premise. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, tweeted about it, and Newt Gingrich said that it “Rings true,” though David Axelrod says it’s as goofy as birtherism, which is apt because the worthless billionaire Donald Trump thinks it’s true, even though Joseph Stiglitz things it’s “literally absurd.”  Speaking of ringing, some Republican ding-dong is thinking about launching an investigation into the jobs numbers, to which the correct reply was a tweet:

@GoAngelo Truth. RT @KuraFire: @emokidsloveme @AriMelber @GoAngelo What a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars.

• Al Jazeera finds American conspiracism baffling, though to be fair, the Muslim world has it’s unsinkable rubber ducks too.
• Vigilant Citizen finds a horror movie scary for all the wrong reasons. This time it’s an occult interpretation of A Cabin in the Woods. And for the 120th week in a row it’s the Illuminati apparently trying to tell us that they exist or something. Fancy that.
• In related news, a conspiracist documentary about The Shining is on its way.
• I think it would be great if the secret hidden in the new $100 bill was that it was worth $200.
• Never do this.
• Doddering old coot Ed Asner makes fool of self on several TV shows over 9/11.
• Are chemtrails hiding Nibiru? And with that I’m going to find something high to jump off of. Sigh.
• David Icke takes scary words out of context and is scared: “FEMA Bill HR6566: Ordering National Preparation for Mass Death.” Anything involving mass death is entirely appropriate for FEMA to prepare for.
• Is a Nigerian singer a member of the Illuminati and part of a scheme to turn Nigeria gay?
• We are being blasted with electromagnetic evil, says Zen Gardner.
• A review of Ancient Aliens Debunked, which I used in class yesterday. The last two sections are unnecessary and undo a lot of credibility in what is an otherwise very useful film.
• “Sideshow” Bob Tuskin is an HIV denier. Jesus.
• Finally, they found one of the FEMA camps. On Google Earth. Not by going and asking. Sigh.
• The Vatican has leaked that a dwarf star threatens Earth!
• The Conspiracy gets a dismal review.
• Gay? In the FBI? Sounds like they are pitching a new crime series.
• Canada is being invaded by splotchy pictures of things in the sky.
• Why, BBC, why?
• Why are heads of state around the world cancelling trips and meetings? Armageddon? Irritating tacked-on baggage handling fees? I’M LOOKING AT YOU, DELTA!
• When you see an article on Above Top Secret that begins, “Look I could be way off base here,” it’s likely that you have just read only reliable statement in the whole piece.
• No, Romney did not have a cheat sheet during the first debate.
• Was Obama the unholy spawn of a Communist poet and a porn star?
• Guy with camcorder offers amnesty to pilots spraying chemtrails, while guy with editing software issues a threat to them.
• Susan Lindauer, who was found unable to assist in her own defense at trial for spying on the US for Iraq, is still taken seriously by We Are Change. When will people stop exploiting her illness?
• There is a lot wrong with this story from London about a mural being defaced.
• GAIS! GAIS! The Chinese have invaded Texas. They can have it.
• The plan is afoot to microchip the entire population says someone who thinks he’s an expert in Bible prophesy but doesn’t realize that it’s all, you know, not real:

• Ah, a new twist on the Bilderberger conspiracy theory. They are building a floating city off of California.
• Ugh. Abe Lincoln was a Marxist war criminal? Really?
• I’d rather not swear, but supreme Truther and mustache pornographer Joseph Farah and his little monkey boy Jerome Corsi are nuttier than extra crunchy squirrel shit. This week, Obama is a secret Muslim because Corsi imagines his ring says, “There is no God but Allah.” There are many ways in which the folks at WorldNetDaily are not quite complete people.
• Was Neil Armstrong threatened to keep secrets about the UFO presence on the Moon? They cite Stephen Greer, who is known to embellish his encounters with people of actual import.
• The Tea Party and Agenda 21, two bad things that go worse together.
• Came across what looks like Judy Wood’s site about the Twin Towers. The book it’s promoting is called Where Did the Towers Go? Down, Judy. The Towers went down.

Twit of the Week:

Jonathan Kay @jonkay
WND is now combining islamophobic paranoia with something resembling Aspergers wnd.com/2012/10/were-o… Ring collage = unintentionally hilarious.

The American Muslim site does a little debunkery of this claim.

Bill Corbett, however, made me laugh:

@BillCorbett
Rabid anti-Semites are gonna have a hard time explaining the bacon shortage.

That’s all. I’m trying to keep up, folks! This week, I am going to be attending the Paradigm Conference on behalf of Skeptical Inquirer. Follow me as live tweet on #paradigm!

Hi again, everybody! More on linguistic aspects of (allegedly) channelled communications and similar cases: first, oral ‘channelling’ and written ‘channelling’ or ‘automatic writing’. (I will provide (a) reference(s) to/for any specific source on request.)

Oral channelling is regarded by ‘believers’ as generated by spirits or other paraphysical entities rather than by the physical channeller or medium, who is often in a trance-like state at the time of production. These phenomena may involve languages known to the channeller (not of especial relevance here; the main point of skeptical interest in such cases involves information to which the channeller supposedly had no other access), identifiable languages (modern or other) not known to the channeller (again, very interesting, if genuine) or unidentified languages or ‘languages’ (as in glossolalia). Channellers often claim no understanding of the material produced where it is not in a language with which they themselves are familiar. For example, I met an Australian man who channelled large amounts of material in a ‘language’ which he himself could not interpret (and which – following information supposedly obtained from a ‘spirit guide’ – he wrongly identified as Seneca). In a few cases (see later on Flournoy for an example), unknown scripts are provided to accompany the oral material (see also below on written channelling and automatic writing).

Many cases of channelling are interpreted by believers as communication with deceased persons, including long-dead individuals as well as now-dead acquaintances. Examples include the works of Arthur Guirdham (reporting the channelling of a thirteenth-century French-speaker) and Margaret and Maurine Moon (reporting the channelling of ‘Wedge’, a seventeenth-century English-speaker).

In some cases involving deceased individuals from remote time-periods, and indeed in most cases involving languages not known to the channeller (contemporary or ancient), appropriate usage is not attempted. The channeller uses a contemporary form of her own first language; this is arguably both anomalous and ‘convenient’ (for channellers unschooled in language matters), but some such channellers adduce arguably specious reasons for this, such as the spirit’s desire to assist current listeners. One such case is that of the ‘Starseed Transmissions’; the channeller Ken Carey reports that these messages were transmitted in non-verbal form as ‘waves’ linking his ‘biogravitational field’ and neurology with those of the extraterrestrial/angelic communicators. Approximately synonymous English expressions were then ‘assigned’ to these ‘waves’ (apparently by the communicators).

However, such cases are obviously more convincing if linguistic forms appropriate to the period can be used. Unfortunately, where this is attempted the usage itself is seldom at all convincing to linguists. There are frequently errors and/or anomalies, for instance the mixing of usage from different periods. This suggests that the material has been fraudulently hoaxed and that the unconvincing features are errors which have intruded because the faker lacks the specialization required if utterances containing accurate forms in pre-modern usage are to be invented. One case which appears slightly less dubious is one in which a young Londoner allegedly lost his local accent when channelling.

The skeptical linguist Sarah Thomason reviewed some such cases and specifically investigated the cases of Marjorie Turcott (American, channelling ‘Matthew’, a seventeenth-century Scot), Jack Purcel (channelling ‘Lazaris’) and Julie Winter (channelling a ‘high-energy being’ called ‘Mika’). None appear convincing, especially where the supposed language variety is actually known; for example, Matthew’s dialect is mixed and often inaccurate for the period. Mika’s voice too displays an unconvincingly inconsistent ‘foreign’ accent. (The channellers/entities also make factual errors; for example, Turcott/Matthew makes various factual errors about Scotland.) Other such studies have been carried out by anthropological linguists, with similar results. In some other such cases there is a mixture of contemporary usage and an attempt at archaic forms, usually in the same language (that of the channeller); see for instance the case of Pearl Curran, who gained notoriety in 1913 for allegedly channelling a seventeenth-century character named Patience Worth, through an Ouija board; she and the spirit supposedly developed a powerful ‘mental linkage’. Skeptics such as Karen Stollznow and Joe Nickell hold that Curran herself was behind the creations.

An unusual older case involves a medium who supposedly channelled a speaker of Ancient Egyptian despite being untutored in the language. Her performances allegedly impressed some scholars of the language, though the vowels of Egyptian are poorly known (thus the channeller’s own ‘Egyptian’ vowels cannot be reliably checked) and there were in fact sundry errors, which the authors attempted to explain away. The case remains somewhat mysterious, but because of the date of the study it is no longer possible to investigate it thoroughly.

In cases involving languages altogether unknown to mainstream scholarship, such as ‘Atlantean’, it is of course impossible to demonstrate whether or not the usage presented is accurate. However, it is more difficult than most non-linguists imagine to invent a language (as opposed to an unstructured set of vocabulary items) in such a way that a linguist will be convinced, and even unknown ‘languages’ can be assessed for plausibility (this also applies to alleged extraterrestrial languages).

Other cases involve exotic phenomena such as the claimed channelling of a deceased person now living on Mars (as a spirit being) by the medium Hélène Smith, as reported by Théodore Flournoy. The spirit communications were in an unknown ‘Martian’ language, with an accompanying exotic script. This unidentifiable ‘language’ is in fact modelled (consciously or unconsciously) on a language familiar to the channeller, French. The grammatical and phonological structures of ‘Martian’ are clearly based on those of French, and the script is alphabetic and corresponds with the Roman alphabet as used to write French. Only the vocabulary is novel, although even this is partly derived by cipher from French, Hungarian and other languages known to Smith’s polyglot father.

As intimated, some cases of channelling involve ‘Atlantean’ (or ‘Lemurian’) languages emanating from spirit realms, etc. One such case involves some 3,000 ‘Atlantean’ words supposedly channelled to a medium. An Australian group called ‘Liquid Crystals’ claims that it is in touch with survivors of Atlantis (in space/other ‘dimensions’) and has access to ‘11 [Atlantean] languages spoken and written’.

Ramtha, channelled by J.Z. Knight, is said to be a ‘Lemurian’ warrior who lived over 35,000 years ago. His name is supposedly derived from the word Ram and means ‘the God’ in his own language, but the communications are in contemporary English and in a pseudo-British accent. So too are those of Mafu, who is channelled by Penny Torres and claims to be of a similar age and to know Latin. This account was critiqued by Thomason (see above).

More next time!

Mark

Hi again, everybody! I’m moving on here to linguistic aspects of (allegedly) channelled communications and similar cases. This series of blogs deals with one sub-set of a larger set of claims and theories about the mysterious emergence or appearance of linguistic material: either otherwise ‘normal’ language, or what appear to be manifestations of unknown (sometimes very unusual) languages.

The best known phenomenon of this kind is glossolalia, that is, speaking, or occasionally writing, in what appear to be unexpected and usually unfamiliar languages, mainly but not solely in the context of fervent Pentecostal Christian worship; it is especially associated with the feast of Pentecost itself. At the first Pentecost, after the death of Christ, the Apostles reportedly found themselves speaking in identified languages which they did not personally know. In modern cases of Christian glossolalia, the ‘languages’ used are generally not identified. In some cases, however, speakers and/or some listeners within the communities in question do claim to understand the material (although they cannot usually provide any structural breakdown). And in a few cases it is alleged that, as in the New Testament account, known languages with which the speaker is unfamiliar are produced (as also in xenoglossia, to be discussed later); such cases would obviously be of very great interest if verified. There is considerable overlap between glossolalia and the channelling of speech said to emanate from spirits (more on this later).

In contrast with the situation prevailing with respect to most general topics of skeptical linguistic interest, there is a very substantial literature on glossolalia, including a critical literature, some of it unusually well informed by linguistic expertise (even though many speakers are reluctant to cooperate with researchers, perceiving their performances as sacred). Here I obviously can’t attempt to discuss all the points made in this large literature, but I’ll summarise.

Some writers on this issue are associated with the relevant churches and/or unschooled in linguistics – although some of these are qualified in other scholarly disciplines (notably, and unsurprisingly, theology) and are far from injudicious. Most of these authors argue, with varying degrees of sophistication and persuasiveness, that the phenomenon genuinely involves divine possession and linguistic performances which cannot be explained in mundane terms. Many different ‘other’ languages have been reported in this context. However, linguistic details are seldom given in this branch of the literature, and ‘hard’ evidence that genuine languages not known to the speaker are involved is seldom offered. Some cases allegedly involving a specific ‘other’ language are actively disputed; one notable case of this kind involves Italian.

Morton Kelsey in particular is concerned to treat glossolalia as of divine origin and not merely a type of xenoglossia (see below), even though the latter is of course itself controversial and, if genuine, mysterious. In contrast, the consensus of linguists who have examined the phenomenon is that most if not all glossolalia is phonetic but not linguistic. The utterances are typically analysed as consisting of haphazard sequences of sounds, syllables and other sound-sequences which occur or at least are phonologically possible in languages known to the speaker, with more repetition of syllables and of some individual sounds than is usual in genuinely linguistic material, with very little evidence of morphological structure and often with no specific meanings; at most, there is a general interpretation supporting the relevant community’s belief system. For example, Felicitas Goodman studied events in Pentecostal communities in the USA, the Caribbean and Mexico (including English-, Spanish- and Mayan-speaking groups) and in non-Christian groups from Africa, Borneo, Indonesia and Japan. Her conclusion was that there was no essential distinction between the various sets of practices. Carlyle May came to similar conclusions.

Obviously, some Christian thinkers who accept the divine origin of glossolalia might find these conclusions somewhat unsettling. On the other hand, other Christian thinkers are suspicious (to say the least) of any focus upon special phenomena such as glossolalia at the expense of ‘core’ Christian beliefs and practices.

Some neurological studies have determined that during glossolalic performances activity in the language centres of the brain decreases, while activity in the emotional centres increases.

Watson Mills and William J. Samarin provide linguistically informed discussions of glossolalia. Samarin analyzes allegedly xenoglossic cases sympathetically but comes to the view that none of them can be regarded as demonstrated. As noted, there are some overtly skeptical accounts of glossolalia. Jean-Jacques Courtine provides a useful compilation of work in French on glossolalia.

More next time, when I’ll turn to oral ‘channelling’, written ‘channelling’, ‘automatic writing’ etc. in non-glossolalic contexts.

Mark

Hi again, everybody! I’m getting my next blog in early, as I’m going to be REALLY busy next week! This present blog is the last instalment of this section.

Joscelyn Godwin is a musicology lecturer who has also written prolifically and positively (though not altogether uncritically) on various ‘fringe’ topics such as theosophy and the ‘Hollow Earth’. Godwin presents a strange mixture of amateur linguistics and occultism. He seems largely unaware of mainstream phonetics and phonology, relying mainly on earlier amateurs such as Richard Paget for background. His own contribution to phonetics predictably involves matters of pitch, tone and frequency, and – though he makes some errors – he has genuinely interesting notions to contribute in this area. However, he then moves into mysticism, and in the later sections of his book even his ‘facts’ are often mistaken. For instance, Ancient Greek did not have only seven distinct simple vowel phonemes (those of Godwin’s title). Only the imperfectly systematic alphabet suggests this, and the real figure (for most dialects) was at least ten. It must be acknowledged, however, that the ancient thinkers involved in this discussion may have focused on orthography rather than phonology so much that they too ignored the evidence of the spoken usage or judged it irrelevant. This was common before linguistics began and was especially the case where Ancient Greek was in question, for various reasons including dialectal diversity and the high status of the written word. Godwin may thus be simply following earlier thought in erring in these ways.

Some writers, usually of a conservative bent, argue that the established scripts used to write various culturally important languages are imbued with special status or significance and must not be replaced or seriously altered. This view is held by some who resist proposals for the reform of alphabetic spelling but is especially salient in respect of scripts such as the Chinese logography, which bears an unusually close relationship with the Chinese language and is particularly well-suited to it, at least in some respects: it distinguishes effectively between homophones, which are numerous, and it allows for seriously divergent pronunciations of the same morpheme in different fangyan (‘dialects’). Alphabetized spellings of Chinese, such as the modern Hanyu Pinyin system used to write Mandarin, are inevitably fangyan-specific and unable to distinguish between homophones.

Some authors, however, perceive the established script as so highly valued that it is almost ‘sacred’ in character and must not be altered even to small degrees. Tienzen Gong goes so far as to identify Chinese (with its script) as ‘Pre-Babel: the true Universal Language’, claiming to be setting up a ‘new paradigm of linguistics’. He cites F.S.C. Northrop as stating that ‘the Easterner … uses bits of linguistic symbolism, largely denotative, and often purely ideographic in character, to point toward a component in the nature of things which only immediate experience and continued contemplation can convey. This shows itself especially in the symbols of the Chinese language, where each solitary, immediately experienced local particular tends to have its own symbol, this symbol also often having a directly observed form like that of the immediately seen item of direct experience which it denotes … As a consequence, there was no alphabet. This automatically eliminates the logical whole-part relation between one symbol and another that occurs in the linguistic symbolism of the West in which all words are produced by merely putting together in different permutations the small number of symbols constituting the alphabet’ (emphasis in original). These comments about alphabetic writing are essentially uncontroversial; however, the use of the terms denotative and especially ideographic suggest a mistaken, quasi-cross-linguistic interpretation of Chinese script, which is naturally language-specific and thus logographic rather than ideographic. Gong accepts Northrop’s general analysis but obviously rejects his rather negative verdict on the philosophical consequences of the use of Chinese script.

Leonard Shlain argues that the development of literacy and in particular the adoption of alphabetic scripts in ancient times (at the expense of logographic scripts such as Chinese script) reinforced the brain’s ‘masculine’ left hemisphere at the expense of the ‘feminine’ right, upset the socio-psychological balance between the sexes and triggered massive, unwelcome changes in apparently unconnected areas of human thought and society. These chiefly involved shifts in the direction of ‘linear’, non-holistic thinking, an excessive concern with logic and science, and the growth of patriarchal systems in which women and their ideas have been suppressed and undervalued. Many of the major cultural patterns and changes of the last few thousand years are, Shlain maintains, to be explained in these terms. Naturally, he would like to see this imbalance corrected. In developing his case, he ranges widely outside his own field of expertise.

Much of Shlain’s discussion of language and writing is badly confused, and some is simply wrong. Given that linguistics is central to his thesis, the major problems which he has in this area are crucial. He does not systematically distinguish adequately between languages (in their spoken forms or considered generally) and the writing systems used to represent them (a common problem for non-linguists). One very obvious instance of this is provided by his very strange discussion of the mutual non-intelligibility of pairs of modern European languages; Shlain blames alphabetic writing for this, but such languages are, naturally, mutually unintelligible in speech and equally naturally remain so in writing (in any language-specific script). In addition, Shlain does not distinguish adequately between alphabets and writing systems more generally; some of the negative consequences which he sees as arising from the use of alphabets would, if he were correct, come about even if non-alphabetic writing systems were used. He largely ignores the important phonological but non-alphabetic category of syllabary; and he mistakenly describes Chinese characters as ideograms (they are, of course, language-specific logograms) and Chinese itself as lacking in the grammatical category ‘word’. At an even more basic level, Shlain confuses the notions of phoneme and phone (‘speech-sound’) and his definition of the very word alphabet is utterly wrong; he naïvely defines an alphabet as ‘any form of writing that contains fewer than thirty signs’.

Furthermore, Shlain’s accounts of the origin and early development of language and society are highly speculative, inadequately referenced and at times overtly partisan, relying excessively on traditional beliefs and endorsing (rather uncritically) the currently popular but ideologically-charged theories of early matriarchal paradises which were later overthrown by literate males. His claims about links between writing systems (or other aspects of language) and cultural patterns are often implausible and/or inadequately defended. For instance, he suggests that the Phoenicians’ use of their abjad – the ancestor of the Greek and the Roman alphabets – was somehow associated with the alleged barbarity and uncultured character of their civilization. Overall, Shlain cannot be taken seriously.

Some other authors also attribute major cultural developments to the development of literacy or (typically less plausibly) to the adoption of certain types of script; for instance, of alphabets where vowels are shown, which, according to Rostam Keyan, contributes vastly to clarity and thus to the development of science.

More next time (in about 11 days’ time)! I’ll be moving on to linguistic aspects of (allegedly) channelled communications.

Mark

Hi again, everybody! First, more applications of gematria!

Jerry Lucas and Del Washburn follow Kurt Fetteschoss in re-applying gematria, especially to the New Testament (‘Theomatics’). They claim that an analysis of the Bible reveals numerical patterns which are in no way explicable by chance and which a numerological analysis then converts into information about the meanings intended by God in inspiring the text of the Bible. In turn, this is used to attack atheism and other viewpoints which deny the existence of a creator entity behind the observed universe.

The linguistics invoked here is less than competent. For instance, Lucas & Washburn – misinterpreting a standard reference work– claim that there are no grammatical rules at all determining the use or non-use of the Greek definite article, the equivalent of English the. They therefore claim that God was free to include the article or not in each New Testament phrase, without thereby generating grammatical anomalies, in order to make the numbers add up. This is simply not the case; there are familiar, fairly precise principles determining whether or not the definite article is used in Greek.

In addition, Lucas & Washburn treat the various inflectional forms of Greek nouns such as theos (‘God’) – for instance, theou (genitive; ‘of God’), theon (accusative; ‘God’ as clause object, etc.) – as mere spelling variants, which they claim add to the flexibility of the language, again for the convenience of God. In fact, the decision to use theon or theou rather than theos would necessitate a complete re-structuring of the clause in question and would thus not assist at all in slightly modifying the numerological ‘score’ of the overall expression, as Lucas & Washburn suggest.

Other critiques of Lucas & Washburn include attacks on the statistical significance attributed to their ‘findings’.

Other relevant phenomena (not in general involving the Bible) include the linguistic aspects of ‘Western’ numerology as understood more generally. Numerology has a long history, and essentially involves the notion that integers or numerical digits possess inherent relationships with alphabetic letters and with linguistic or other meanings. This facilitates both a) prediction of future situations (including personalities) and events from the spellings of relevant names or other words and b) the selection of names for babies, religious converts, those adopting new languages, etc. in such a way as to maximize their future prospects. Numerology is related conceptually and/or historically to gematria and to systems such as ‘Chinese numerology’ where the words for numbers and the characters which represent them are said to have associations with specific non-numerical concepts – positive, negative, or other. However, where the direction of interpretation is from numbers to words/concepts, there are no universally agreed definitions for the numerological meanings of specific digits.

Most relevant in this context are versions of numerology where the direction of interpretation is from letters of the alphabet to numbers (single- or double-digit) and where the numbers are then combined and re-combined by way of repeated addition of digits so as to yield a single-digit number for each name or other word; these numbers are then linked with meanings. Thus, if the letters of the Roman alphabet as used to write English are paired with the integers 1-26, the name Eve obtains a ‘score’ of 5 + 22 + 5 = 32 = 3+2 = 5. It is then held that people with the name Eve will be likely to display whatever characteristics are ascribed to the number 5. This particular calculation assumes, of course, that the figures for the several letters are to be summed across the entire word before the digits are added together. Obviously, other procedures are possible; without any kind of rational argument for one procedure over another, the adoption of any one procedure appears arbitrary (although in fact most alternative procedures systematically yield the same results as the above, because of inherent properties of the integer series). Helyn Hitchcock, for instance, uses a different procedure from most other contemporary numerologists, although the reasons for this difference are not clear.

In addition, all familiar numerological systems employ Base-10. This may possibly be defended in terms of the fact that in most societies which employ alphabetic writing Base-10 is the norm; but this point threatens any attempt to claim universal status for numerology.

However, the most major issue arising here for skeptical linguists is the significance – often ignored or unconvincingly handled by numerologists – of the varied and changing membership and ordering of the alphabetic letters forming names. For example, the Greek alphabet has no letter C; its third letter (gamma) is the equivalent of G. Greek words and names were borrowed into Latin, which is written with a modified Greek alphabet, the Roman alphabet (now, of course, also used for English and many other languages). In this new alphabet, G was replaced by C (which largely replaced kappa/K) in third position and was itself reinserted in seventh position. Presumably, the numerical values associated with the various letters should differ according to whether the name or word in question was used before or after this and other such changes; thus G should have the value 3 for words used before the change and 7 for words used after the change; and the values for all letters following G should be different after the change. However, many words were used in both periods, resulting in the generation of rival scores for the same words.

A further issue arises with names which are common to various languages spelled with different versions of the alphabet with different total numbers and/or different orderings of letters. This applies especially to languages where fewer letters are used than in English, potentially affecting the numbers assigned to all letters conventionally listed after the first ‘missing’ letter. For example, native Italian words (including names) cannot feature J, K, W, X or Y. A further, similar issue arises where different alphabets are in use. Many names are shared between languages usually written in different scripts, for instance between English and Russian (Cyrillic alphabet), and are used by bilinguals. Names such as Ivan will naturally be associated with different numbers in the two languages; for instance, the Cyrillic letter B, corresponding with V, appears in third position. Some Cyrillic letters have no direct Roman equivalent and vice versa, complicating matters further: digraphs such as Roman ts are used outside numerology in transliterating these letters, and rival transliteration systems often exist.

A standard general-skeptical response to numerology as a whole is the position that, since numbers possess no genuine occult meanings and since by themselves they can have no significant influence on life, numerology is essentially superstition masquerading as science.

There are also various more specific non-standard theories of this nature. One of these is ‘acrophonology’ (variously spelled in its own literature), dealing with the alleged astrological and mystical significance of names. The name of the theory suggests that it relates especially to names as pronounced rather than written, but in fact the discussion is entirely of spelling; the title is thus misleading. As the morpheme acro-suggests, there is a strong focus here upon initial letters. For example, Laurie Baum treats people whose names begin with A as likely to be initiators and builders. Baum (an American) assumes the first-middle-last name structure for personal names as a given; and she does not discuss the issue of the changing and varying membership and ordering of alphabets, as introduced above.

Mary Scott ‘found’ a code hidden in the letters of the Roman alphabet as used to write English. Each letter allegedly has a spiritually significant meaning, and the spiritual meanings of entire words are composed of the meanings of the individual letters. These meanings apply whether a text was originally composed in English or in another language; Scott’s leading examples are Biblical texts translated from the Hebrew psalms. She pays little attention to other languages, even those written in essentially the same alphabet, and urges that the forms used in older English Bibles be preserved, since these communicate essential spiritual meanings which are lost if the spelling is altered.

More next time!

Mark