Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum have had an exchange of subject-verb agreement argumentation over at Language Log. It all seems to boil down to:
Should that second sentence be starred or merely marked questioningly? Perhaps it’s okay as is. I still do remember the electric shock I received way back in the late sixites—or was it the early seventies?—when I heard George Harrison sing in Only a Northern Song:
When you’re listening late at night
You may think the band are not quite right
But they are, they just play it like that
It doesn’t really matter what chords I play
What words I say or time of day it is
As it’s only a Northern song.
So band in British English was plural, or at least in Liverpuddlian. As with data and criteria, I just learned to live with it. Dealing with constructions like “Pink Floyd are fantastic” or some such.
Would the last person to leave the box, please shut off the servers? While doing something this morning that I have not done in a while—unmeditated surfing— I ran across the website of Ted Nelson, the grandfather, as it were, of the web. And like many grandfathers, he is a tad bit cranky about his offspring.
Hypertext, as suddenly adapted to the Internet by Berners-Lee and then Andreessen, is still the paper model! Its long rectangular sheets, aptly called “pages”, can be escaped only by one-way links. There can be no marginal notes. There can be no annotation (at least not in the deep structure). The Web is the same four-walled prison of paper as the Mac and the Windows PC, with the least possible concession to nonsequential writing (“nonsequential writing” was my original 1965 definition of hypertext) that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly have made. Whereas the Xanadu Project, our original design which was beaten out by the Web, was largely based on two-way links by which anyone could annotate anything. (And by which thoughts could branch sideways without hitting walls.)
Even stranger is the “browser” concept. Think of it—a serial view of a parallel universe! Trying to comprehend the large-scale structure of connected Web pages is like trying to look at the night sky (at least, in places that stars are still visible) through a soda straw. Yet people are used to this sequential “browser”; by now it seems natural; and now this “browser” is perhaps more standard than the structures it views and the changing protocols that show them.
I feel a certain amount of guilt over this. I believe it was in 1968 that I presented the full 2-way Xanadu design to a university group, and they dismissed it as “raving”; whereupon I dumbed it down to 1-way links and only one visible window. When they asked how the user would navigate, I suggested a backtrackable stack of recently visited addresses. I believe that this dumbdown, through the various pathways of projects imitating one another, became today’s general design, and I am truly sorry for my role in it.
[Theodor Holm Nelson, 1999, Way Out of the Box]
OK, well, at least I know who to blame now for my paper prison. Even better reading is why he does not buy in to the web: in plain text here, but containing XML entities. Now, where did I put those URLs of neo-luddite websites? [via Bob Seitz' WebSeitzWiki]
[Addendum 11/29/03: Further googling has revealed this aging Wired article, The Curse of Xanadu, on Nelson, Xanadu, and their respective histories, which Nelson considered a hatchet job and answered with his own letter to the editor. There's also a chapter on Xanadu and the web in an online history of the internet and the web. Via the C2 Wiki and Google.]
Today, I cite John Ellis’ third and final misstep in theories of language:
The last initial misstep which we must consider is the asusmption that linguistic categories group like things together. Here we face an old paradox: if we look at the books on our bookshelves, we see immediately that they are all different in content, size, coloring, length, and so on. They are then not the same, but we still say that they are like each other. How are they similar? They are similar in all being books; and yet they are all still dissimilar. Categorization is the most fundamental operation performed by a language. To describe how it works means using ideas such as “similar” and “dissimilar” very carefully indeed, so that they are assigned their correct place in the understanding of categorization. This crucial matter [...] has prevented those who have taken it from understanding how categorization works. Categorization, it will be seen, will remain a mystery as long as we see it as grouping together of like things; we grasp the essence of the process of categorization only when we see it as the grouping together of things that are not the same in order that they will count as the same.
[Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, pp.24f.]
And, so ends his second chapter. I looking forwarding to reading this thin book with its extremely strange linguistic premises. To see if Ellis can hold up his provocations.
This holiday in the States always reminds me of one of my favorite Zeneise words: scciûppâ ‘scoppiare, crepare; to burst, explode, kick the bucket’. It captures the true purpose of this holiday and it exhibits a phoneme that Genoese shares with Russian rather than other Romance languages: i.e., the sound written in Cyrillic as щ. This verb is pronounced /štšyp:a/ or in SAMPA /StSyp:a/. Hò mangiôu tanto che scciêuppo ‘I ate so much I'll burst’. There seems to be some variance between whether it is pronounced with a mid or high front rounded vowel: /ø/ ~ /y/. My family tended towards the former, but Casaccia lists his headword with the latter, even though the saying cited above uses the alternate pronunciation. Perhaps we should watch La Grande Bouffe tonight.
Continuing with John Ellis’ three initial missteps in theories of language, today it’s misstep number two:
I now turn to the second [misstep], which [...] has a form specific to language theory as well as a more general form that relates to inquiry in general. This broader form consists in a mistaken attitude that can be found in any field; it is the habit of assuming that one begins by taking simple cases and generalizes from them to derive principles that can then be used to break down the hard cases. The most important specific manifestation of this attitude in theory of language occurs in semantics; the easy starting point will be the descriptive words that appear to have clear correlations in physical reality—say, round, square, mile—while evaluative words are the hard cases, to be approached only when the basic principles of how words work have been extracted from the easy cases. The consequence of this way of beginning is that descriptive words will come to be seen as more basic to the functioning of language than evaluative words; this, as we shall see, is a mistake that has devastating consequences, for it has the hierarchy of descriptive and evaluative words the wrong way round. Another manifestation of the same underlying attitude to inquiry can be seen in the generative grammarian‘s whole approach to the understanding of language: syntactic patterns are easier to systematize than semantic ones, and thus syntactic analysis comes before semantics. Soon enough, this temporal priority has become a logical one, in which it is syntax that shows us how language works.
[Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, pp.20f.]
So, he’s dropped the awkward pieces of languages—so as to side-step the whole lack of definitions of phrases, clauses, sentences, utterances, etc. problem—and now writes of words unproblematically. More later. Earlier entries: degré zéro and language != communication.
The Discouraging Word has a grand entry [no permalinks, scroll down to 11/23/03, The dad to all that gallimaufry ] near to the essence of this blog going over the term gallimaufry. John came across a passage in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
Must your hot itch and pleurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be picked out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly sports? Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that’s stuffed
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb?
Languagehat pipes in, in a update, with the exciting news (or is it olds?) that gallimaufry is a pentasyllabic word. For good measure, he throws in a synonym: olla podrida. Both terms were originally kinds of stews that came to mean jumbled mixtures in general. Over the years, I’ve come across one or two hodgepodgian terms myself: Hoppelpoppel, a sort of scrambled egg dish, in German, and prebōggiōn (‘Mazzo d’ortaggi, composto di biete, di cavoli cappucci primaticci (gagge), prezzemolo, ed altri, camangiari, che usasi comunemente da noi cuocere col riso per minestra’) in Genoese.
And this entry’s title comes from some lines which immediately came to mind when I read the Ford quotation above, “Thar [in the womb] duellid man in a myrk dungeon ... Whar he had na oder fode Bot wlatsom glet, and loper blode, and stynk and fylthe.” [Richard Rolle of Hampole, ca.1340, The pricke of conscience (stimulus conscientiæ); a Northumbrian poem.] Not a pretty picture.
[Addendum 11/25/03: I was taken to task by Steve at Languagehat for leaving the reader without a definition for the term wlatsom glet. Gleet is defined in the OED as 1. slimy matter; sticky or greasy filth. 2. Phlegm collected in the stomach, esp. of a hawk. 3. A morbid discharge of thin linquid from a wound, ulcer, etc. b. A morbid discharge from the urethra. It's etymology is listed as fr. OFr glette ‘slime, filth, purulent matter’, Fr glette ‘litharge’, whence app. Ger glätte, Du glit, Sw glite. Wlatsom is interesting. Basically it means ‘loathsome’, but it is not cognate with that word which derives ultimately from OE láð ‘sorrow, pain’, but rather with wlætta ‘nausea, loathing, disgust’.]
There are some things that slowly slip from your mind's grasp, like dial telephones, non-automated tellers, and cranky computer columnists. It's not like you miss them, until maybe somebody points them out: all racoon-eyed and Norma Desmond like in the headlights of the future. Jerry Pournelle has remained lodged in my brain because because his column usually contained some kind of information that was pertinent to computers; John Dvorak hadn't because his blather was basically unimportant to my day to day existence. Mark Liberman, at the end of an entry, had a link [via Instapundit] in which the grand poobah of poo-pooing comes down hard, like a ton of cold pizza and a splash of stale Jolt cola on blogs and blogging.
Back before the dot-com upside and all that, I was basically a Mac user, and as such read Mac magazines pretty avidly. Dvorak had an end-column in MacWorld called the Devil's Advocate. In it he dispensed his sour-grapes dicta and sub-sub-Nietzschean aphorisms, and I always looked forward to how he'd misread some slightly less than au courant trend or factoid. Then I moved on, abandoning Macs, not because I found Wintel machines better, but because I had money to make and that usually involved non-Macs. Slowly I forgot about Dvorak. And suddenly, after reading his latest screed, it all came back home to me; it's like I'd never stopped. Sort of like missing a year or so of some soap opera. Here's John still kvetching about something popular and neat. He says that more than half of the blogs have been abandoned; doom; less than a quarter of the blogs get past the first couple of entries. And, what will remain in the near future will be co-opted, big media-run blogs without a hint of anything that made blogs popular. Well, it's good that I stumbled across this dear old nincompoop, because I've been planning on getting a new Mac laptop. I've been checking them out for the last year or so, surreptitiously, and I must say I like what I see. Interestingly enough at my current contract gig, many of the developers are using Macs and the others Linux machines (all laptops by the way), and few are using Wintel beasts.
First Bob at Unfogged indicated a hilarious entry at McSweeny's on the impossibility of the Death Star's trash compacter in the first Star Wars flick [via Girl27], and then John up in Redmond sent me a link for a funny little movie about Death Star Repairmen. And after that V. & I watched a nice double bill on DVD: Aki Kaurismäki's Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past) and Pixar's Finding Nemo. The two films have more in common that you'd think at first glance.
The other day, Mark Liberman wrote an entry in which he mentioned Stalinist linguistics with a link to an article by Uncle Joe himself. Today, his colleage, Bill Poser, brought up the Georgian linguist, N. Ja. Marr, who ran Soviet linguistics for almost 30 years. Posner cites a book on Marr for the uninitiated, but, if you don't have the Norwegian, you might want to take a look at the book that introduced yours truly to Marr and his works, Lawrence L. Thomas' 1956 dissertation The Linguistic Theories of N. Ja. Marr, which I found used at Powells years after reading the typescript in the NRLF reading room.
Japhetidology does not recognize abstractions in nature—theoretical primitive elements [primitivy] which never existed in reality—abstractly conceived and abstractly created; it searches for materially real primitive elements and finds their archaic traces in the transformed layers of the contents of mixed linguistic types, and it discovers in them deathless creative elements.
Marr, 1920, [Jafetičeskij Kavkaz i tretij ètničeskij èlement v sozidanii sredizemnomorskoj kul’tury, pp.106f.]
He posited a Noêetic superfamily of languages of which Japhetic included Georgian and pre-Aryan Armenian. On the development of grammatical gender:
Can it be that the natural sexual differece was not immediately perceived by mankind? I repeat that aboriginal humanity was not interested in sex as such during the formation of the world outlook. Grammatical gender is only the reflection of forms of the social structure. During primitive communism there was no gender. During the matriarchate—the oldest class organization—there was the hegemony of the woman-mother, and metals of that period (if not yet bronze, then at least copper) reveal (by their use of a part of the word as a class indicator) their appurtenance to a social group led by a woman. Moreover, the metal, still apprehended as a tool of production, had to share the ‘grammatical’ gender of the first tool—the hand. When the matriarchate was replaced by the patriarchate, formal class indicators of the transition period arose: the so-called neuter gender, connected with the results of production ... and hence with material. The former, general, nonclass type, on the other hand, became masculine—it became the indicator of the hegemony of a class organization headed by a man-father.
[]Marr, 1930, Rodnaja reč’—mogučij ručag kul’turnogo podema, p.419.
I was looking for information on parasite vowels in Old English when I stumbled across this lovely online introduction to the language of the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes. It's a part of the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research. Oh, and by the way:
Sometimes what is rather unattractively called a “parasite vowel” gets inserted before ġ or w, and we then end up with forms like heriġas [instead of herġas ‘armies’] and beaduwa [beadwa ‘battles’].
[Section 6.2.3]
Well, I continued plowing on through chapter two in Ellis' Language, Thought, and Logic, and it's getting funnier. In this chapter he lists the three most common initial missteps made by those who theorize about language. Here's number one: "It is the assumption that the purpose of language is communication." So, he got my attention, but what does he mean?
The most common and simple version looks at language in terms of its information content: a piece of language means whatever information it contains, and an adequate analysis formulates as completely as possible what that information is. The variant that uses such words as message and encode is essentially similar. [...] A more philosophical version of essentially the same view speaks of the truth claims made by a piece of language.
[Ellis, p.16.]
I guess the question is whether a piece of language contains anything. Is a word a container? I'd always felt that a sign doesn't contain its meaning anymore than a tool contains its function. In fact, tools and words are often used against their functions or meanings. Pieces of language are interpreted, i.e., meaning is assigned to them by some hermeneutic process on the listener's end of the phonic chain.
Nothing seems more reasonable than the assumption that the purpose of language is communication. But there is a subtle trap here: granted , a particular act of language use may result in communication between two people, but much must have happened before they could get that far.
[Ellis, p.17.]
OK, now he's lost me, but it becomes clearer later on that Ellis feels that language divies up the world of its speakers and gives them a way of making sense of it, and it just happens that we can use that to communicate. I am reminded of Searle's US GI trying to convince Italian soldiers that he is a German officer by reciting a piece of Goethe, but perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Did speech precede language? Did thought precede language? But Ellis continues:
The distinction I am making will become clearer if we go back to the vocabulary used by scholars who think of language as the transmission of information, and therefore use the vocabulary of
code, encoding, and message. This language certainly fits well with that of communication and information, the latter term substituting for message without difficultym while coding and encoding seem to describe well enough the process by which the message is conveyed from one person to another. Nevertheless, as soon as we look closely at languages and codes it becomes clear that they are very different things, so much so that the linguistic situation is completely distorted if we we speak of it in this way. Codes are only devices for disguising pieces of language so that their meaning is not immediately recognizable without removal of the disguise. [...] What is in Morse is only inforSo, imative only because it is English. The surpising fact is the very vocabulary of code and message, used so often as a model of how language works, has nothing whatever to do with language.
[...]
The essential and distinctive feature of a language is not its ability to transmit information—for this would not distinguish it from Morse code—but a logically prior attribute, the process of analysis, evaluation, and organization of experience which must have taken place before communication can occur. It is because a code lacks this stage that it is not a language. To function at all, a code has to latch on to something that has already done what languages do. Codes encode messages; language do not. Codes merely transmit information; languages make information what it is.
[Ellis, p.17f.]
So is grammar a code? More to come later.
I started reading a provocative and out of print book the other day called Language, Thought, and Logic by John Ellis. He takes linguists, philosophers of language, computer scientists, and anthropologists to task for attempting their assaults on the theory of language by always starting at zero. In chapter one he parodies this attitude:
The mood can be summed up thus: There is Saussure—but that does not really work, for it seems to suggest that categories of things are a fiction of our language, and it is unable to deal with our strong intuitive sense that there are natural kinds of things in our world; there is Wittgenstein—but that, though suggestive, is full of enigmas; there is Chomsky, but the latest model of generative grammar is constantly being recalled for redesign of structural flaws, and it still breaks down regularly after it is supposed to have been fixed; there is Whorf—but that is imaginative without being sound. Therefore, given this confusion, we may as well start at the beginning all over again. This mood weakens the sense of obligation that scholars usually have to know and build on their predecessors; first because there is so much that has been said in so many contexts that nobody could master it all, and second, because the only result of all this activity seems to have been confusion that suggest that there is something wrong with all of it. Thus we arrive at the strange condition of linguistic theory at present in which, no matter how much sophisticated thought has taken place in the past, we are still constantly asked to consider yet another attempt to begin again at the conceptual beginning with a theorist who wants us to look at his or her version of the basic language situation in which there are speakers, listeners, sounds, things, and so on, to see how he or she will build the conceptual base of linguistic theory from the ground up. Predictably, the proliferation of these new beginnings means that they will all suffer the same fate as their forerunners: they do not achieve th sought-for basic conceptual clarification but instead add to the confusion.
[pp.8f.]
More later, as I uncover it.
Blogging comment spam is about to destroy blogging as we know it. Jay Allen has started an open source, vendor-neutral anti-BCS project called Blam, and Mark Pilgrim warns him that it is all in vain. [via Padawan] Is the open commentary of the blogging community going the way of Usenet? (I remember the day that green card amnesty spam showed up on Usenet.) Blacklists don't work or are merely a stop-gap measure. Turn off comments: that'll work, but it's too impersonal and blogging folks need their feedback. Turn the blog into a gated community or an by-invitation only kind of country club: not immediate enough. How do you let a growing community interact with itself?
I've been meaning to write this entry for quite a while now, but had been procrastinating. Then a couple of entries on Desbladet and Gironale Nuovo, and a book I picked up on remainder reminded me. It all started a while back at one of my favorite used book stores. I have a standing joke with Michael, the proprietor: "Have any famous linguists died recently?" Over the years, he's bought the libraries of quite a few linguists, and I've had the luck, as one of his few walk-in customers, of looking through the books before they've been priced or entered into his catalog for sale. Anyway, one day he'd acquired the library of Carleton Hodge [1917-1998], professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Indiana, best known as an Africanist. It seems also that Professor Hodge collected a lot of pre-owned linguistics books outside his field, one of which I snapped up off the shelf that day: the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes par Ferdinand de Saussure. True, it was the second edition of 1887 and, though nicely bound, the book itself was a little worse for its wear.
Opening it, I saw its previous owner's signature ex libris: "Property of / Carleton T. Hodge / 1961", but it was the bookplate on the inside of the front cover and some other annotations that caught my eye and imagination. It was an ex-library copy that had been sold and replaced on the shelves of Johns Hopkins University library by what was described as the "Collitz 1879 copy". Well, it made sense that my book had been out-trumped by a copy of the first edition pre-owned by the equally more famous linguist, Hermann Collitz [1855-1935]. The bookplate informed me that this copy had belonged to the "Stratton Memorial Library / A Gift by his wife of the Library of / Alfred William Stratton, / 1866–1902. / Ph. D. Johns Hopkins University, 1895 / Principal of the Orient College and Registrar / of the Punjab University, at Lahore." Inside on the title page was the signature, partially obscured by restoration work, of "A. W. Stratton 1892", and the stamp of the previous owner, a M. Hériot.
A quick look around the the online catalog of the JHU library revealed two books, one his dissertation and the other his collected letters edited by his widow. I found a copy of the Letters from India, 1908, in the local university library and as soon as possible checked it out. It turned out that Mr Stratton had studied Sanskrit and Greek with Maurice Bloomfield at JHU and at the time of his death was in contact with Carl Darling Buck at Chicago about enlarging his research materials into a book of some sort. He had run a small college in what is today Pakistan, where he died early of a fever. His Letters has been republished by a Pakistani publisher. I later found a used presentation copy online.
Just a few extra bits of writing had lead me off on this wonderful adventure. This book had traveled from Paris to Baltimore to Lahore to Baltimore to Bloomington to El Cerrito and, no doubt, other places in between. There are only a few examples of Stratton's marginalia in the Système, one on p. 18, "See [Phillip] Bersu / die Gutteralen [und ihre Verbindung mit v im Lateinischen, Berlin, 1885] / p.151f." Another book, another day.
On the question of whether Languagehat counts as a linguist, I'd have to come down on the side of yes, damn it, he is, no doubt about it.
Des incursions que nous venons de faire dans les domaines limitrophes de notre science, il se dégage un enseignement tout négatif, mais d'autant plus interessant qu'il concorde avec l'idée fondamentale de ce cours : la linguistique a pour unique et véritable objet la langue envisagée en elle-même et pour elle-même.
[Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, p.317, publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye.
From the incursions we have made into the borderlands of our science, one lesson stands out. It is wholly negative, but is all the more interesting because it agrees with the fundamental idea of this course: the true and unique object of linguistics is language studied in and for itself.
[Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p.232, translated by Wade Baskin.]
'Nough said.
Geoffrey Nunberg's piece on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday was about the impossibility of communication. The phrase in question is "on the up and up" which to some means "on the increase" or "improving" while to others it means "above board" or "on the level". He then tackles "the pool is deceptively shallow". Is the pool shallow or deep?
In reference to my last entry, Languagehat asked me what the final word of the entry, alaaf, meant. Here's the entry from Prof. Dr. Adam Wrede's Neuer kölnischer Sprachschatz:
Alaaf: ein Ausruf, Lob- u. Trinkspruch wie Hoch! oder Hurra!, entstanden aus all-ab, kölsch all-af, durch starke nachdrückliche Betonung des af gedehnt; Sinn: alles (andere) weg; Köln vorab, vor allem (oder allen) anderen, oben (bovven) an, außer auf Köln auch auf Personen, Gesellschaften oder anderes ausgebracht; ursprünglich vorgestellt; später wie noch heute auch nachgesetzt; zuerst 1733 als Wahlspruch nachweisbar: Allaff Collen, aber weit älter. 1748 antiquum illud commune adagium (jener alte allgemeine Lobspruch) Allaf Cöllen. 1804 (1826) Alaaf de kölsche Kirmesen — Do geit et löstig zo. 1817 Allaf Köln = Alles lobe Köln! (so; „lobe“ jedoch irreführend); bei Anwesenheit des späteren Königs Friedrich Wilhelm IV. am 6.8.1817 als Toast ausgebracht. 1825 Alaaf et kölsche Drickesthum — Alaaf de kölsche Jungen — De't (de et, die es) we (wie) vör Ahls (vor alters) met freschem Ruhm — Han op e neu's gezwungen. 1828 Möge die Narrheit weiter florieren! denn die Weisheit, wie es scheint, will doch nicht kommen. Alaaf! (Schlußruf einer Ansprache). 1832 Alaaf et kölsche Bloot!; um 1855 Alaaf Köln! (Gedicht). Alaaf uns Anne-Marie!
The Cologne equivalent of the OED.
Yesterday was the 11th of November. In my youth it was called Armistice Day and celebrated the end of the Great War, or the war to end all wars, or WW1, or what-have-you. Nowadays, it's Veteran's Day, and since dear old Dad was a veteran of two foreign wars, I'm all for that. But to me it'll always signify the beginning of Carnival in Cologne. Such serious silliness needs a long time to ramp up. Karneval em Kölle om Rhing! How to describe it to somebody who hasn't experienced it? Can't be done.
Much of what Karneval is expressed in the local dialect Köslch, which is also the name of the local beer. There are many local bands that play popular music. Some started out writing and singing Karnevaleeder, and others wrote the occasional parody or critique of your typical carnival song. But, they all do it in Kölsh. Some of the bands I've enjoyed over the years include:
The following snippet of lyrics crams as many stereotypically Kölsch catchphrases as possible into the shortest space.
Mir Kölsche, mir Kölsche
Mir Kölsche han de schönste Stadt am Rhing,
un doröm han mir Kölsche
em Hätze immer immer widder Sonnesching.Kayjass, Köbes, Kölsch, Kamelle,
Kallendresser, Halven Hahn,
de Haupsach es, et Hätz es jot,
nur dodrop kütt et an.[Bläck Fööss Mir Kölsche]
As much as the citizens of Cologne may love their carnival and say it's different from all those other pale carnivalesque simulacra, they also hate it. Nit för Kooche, bleev ich Karneval he! Anyway, it's a long period ending in Ash Wendesday, and that final week is intense to anybody who's survived one. Alaaf!
A couple of days back, I was looking over entries at a great blog, new to me, [Thoughts Rants and Arguments], when I ran across the term perdurantism (here and here). I paused, and then off I went to the OED: perdure to endure, continue, or last. Little did I realize that perdurant and endurant had entered the rarified world of formal onotology. Brian had been set off on his entries by a critique of the conjunction of perdurantism and universalism in paper by Achille Varzi of Columbia. In his opening paragraph, Varzi writes:
Perdurantism is the view that objects are temporally extended. An object, on this view, has spatial as well as temporal parts, or stages, and to say of an object that it persists through time is to say that it has different parts that exist at different times. Typically (though not necessarily) this view goes hand in hand with the principles of classical extensional mereology. In particular, perdurantism is usually associated with universalism, i.e., with the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion—something composed of just those things. This combination of perdurantism and universalism may strike some as absurd.
Perdure and endure go back to a passel of Latin verbs (induro, induresco, obduro, obduresco, and perduro, all pretty much meaning to endure) based on the root durus 'hard' that is cognate with tree and truth in English and drus 'tree; oak' in Greek and ultimately druid. Googling around, I found these succinct definitions of perdurant and endurant online:
In a nowadays almost mythical passage of his On the Plurality of Worlds, [David] Lewis distinguishes between two ways of persisting, i.e. existing in time, namely endurance and perdurance. A perduring object persists by having a different temporal part at each time, while an enduring object is wholly present at each instant of its existence.
[Luc Schneider. 2002. Formalised Elementary Formal Ontology, p.58]
Ah, now I know better. Some of the sample sentences in these and other papers would give Chomsky and his inquiring hoard the run-around just on literary merit, e.g., the following are from Varzi's paper:
Other words are called into the fray, e.g., in a paper by Josh Parsons with the postmodern title, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a turnip:
Perdurantism is sometimes stigmatised as the view that persisting objects are not literally identical from time to time. That criticism is a mistake. According to perdurantism, Pavarotti is a perduring space-time worm, with some temporal parts in, say, 1940, and some in 2003. Pavarotti himself exists at both these times, and never fails to be identical to himself (how could he?) It is literally the very same Pavarotti who exists in 1940 as in 2003.
If this is an example of ontology coming to grips with tense, then just imagine the fun to be had when they find out about aspect or ergativity.
Clay Shirky has written an elegant denunciation of the semantic web. He asks "What is the Semantic Web good for?" And answers himself later on:
The Semantic Web's philosophical argument—the world should make more sense than it does—is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.
The gist of his argument is that the semantic web is basically about reasoning (i.e., good old fashioned syllogistic deduction) from meta-data to provide answers to users' queries, and that deduction, in general, and meta-data, too, have little in the way to offer in a real-world kind of way to solve the kinds of questions that people really ask, or want to ask computers. AI is impossible and so is information retrieval in the Popular Mechanics starry-eyed sort of way. Too bad. [via Akma]
[Addendum 11/13/03: Mamamusings has collected a bunch of links that respond to Shirky. Should make good reading.]
Back in August, Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words pointed his readership at an article by Max Tegmark that had been published in the May issue of Scientific American. A quick trip to Mad Max's website got me a slightly expanded version which I printed it out and took to read on the local light rail. Hmm, it was a good read. I discussed it with a friend who pointed out that cosmologists and theoretical physicists were, in general, quite mad. But, I liked what I'd read about the four theoretical levels of multiple universes:
I found Tegmark's prose a pleasure to read and found myself following his argument. Here's how he sums up his paper:
We have seen that a common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default, and that one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates (finite space, wavefunction collapse, ontological asymmetry, etc.) to explain away the parallel universes. Our aesthetic judgement therefore comes down to what we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get more used to the weird ways of our cosmos, and even find its strangeness to be part of its charm.
I meant to write an entry about it, but then I got busy with other topics, and finally it fell off my to-do stack entirely. Today, hard put to write about something, I turned to Google to find out about multiple universes and, as a result of a link near the top of the heap, I went and read this withering retort by Karl Stephen.
Stephen's starts with:
Tegmark's main argument is that, far from being a shadowy, speculative corner of cosmology, the parallel-universe idea has been increasingly confirmed by recent experiments, and we should get used to it because it appears that it will be around for a while.
I'm not sure I'd agree with him. I thought Tegmark did a thorough job of saying that his popular essay was concerned with a description of current cosmological speculation. But Stephen sees evidence of a greater evil in the article and the popular magazine in which it was published.
Whether or not Tegmark's work constitutes a direct assault on the principle of specified complexity is a discussion for another time. The thing we have established beyond reasonable doubt is that in an article purporting to be about empirical science, Tegmark smuggled in more than a little scientism, a variety of philosophy currently favored by the editors of Scientific American. And to parade philosophy as science is never a good idea.
I cannot really say anything about the content of either paper, other than one amused me in an enjoyable manner, while the other made me wrinkle my brow frowning. Tegmark came across as the fun sort of guy you might meet at a party who has fun describing what he does. Stephens came across as a humorless stick in the mud that you end up avoiding at the chips and drinks table. Then it dawned on me that when I get going on some linguistic rant, I probably come across more acridly than I'd like to imagine, causing people to mentally roll their eyes and wonder what those smiling people are doing over by the big sofa.
It all started on All Hallowed Eve morning when somebody on the radio pronounced somhain as rhyming with some pain. That got me to thinking about the pronunciations of flaccid and to err. (And don't even get me started about Caitlin.) Still, whenever I hear somebody say "to air is human," I think indeed. But, I've stopped saying anything about it. I know what they're trying to say. Why just yesterday morning I listened as Alistair Cooke pronounced intelligentsia not once but several times with a velar stop rather than a palatal affricate. So smug was I, until I realized that when we borrowed the word from Russian that was close to how it was pronounced back then. Language changes. I've written it often enough, here and elsewhere. When did Chaucer's parfit get transmogrified into perfect? (I'm sure Caxton had something to do with it; him and his etymologizing orthographic rules.) And when did that 'd' sneak into admiral? Why do I still flinch when somebody says between you and I? It long ago ceased being ironic or humorous, but it still causes me pain. Within every soi disant descriptivist is a prescriptivist dying to drop all the pretense and nonsense and correct somebody. Hard and with passion.
Languagehat has let loose the dogs of grammar on the following sentence:
Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and deprecating.
It seems to me that to write that somebody is deprecating, rather than self-deprecating, is to redirect the belittlement of this transitive verb from Stephenson himself (a sought-after quality) to others under- or unspecified (a grumpy habit). It's made it all the way over to Crooked Timber where Brian Weatherson replaces deprecating with charming, but that's exactly my point. Saying that somebody is charming, i.e., that he charms others, is not the same as saying that somebody is self-charming. It seems a silly, little mistake that should've been caught by the editor if in fact there was one.
[Addendum 11/04/03: Now I'm confused. It seems I misunderstood the argument. Deprecating is not a word? Others have suggested deprecative and deprecatory, but if you look up these words in the august OED you see the word deprecating in both definitions. So, I guess the question is: when is a word a word?]
Brad Sucks is a musician with a blog and a CD compilation of songs inspired by spam. That and a strange article [free registration required] in The New York Times about how the record companies have given up on generation post-boomer cause they know how to use technology whereas their boomer parents and grandparents are still willing to plunk down 18 bucks for a Barbra Streisand CD.
Yesterday, Languagehat posted a nice entry on meretricious Latin. The page he links to seems to have been cribbed mainly from Oxford classicist James N. Adams who wrote the must-have dirty Latin reference book: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. And while I'm on the subject of dirty words I might as well put a plug in for Friedrich Karl Forberg [1770-1848] and his salacious De figuris Veneris which was englished in 1844 as The Manual of Classical Erotology. (It was reprinted by Grove Press in 1966 like so many classics of Victorian pornography but is sadly out of print.)
Variant Veteres in re spurca oblique significanda. Ac pro irrumare quidem dixerunt offendere buccam, corrumpere buccas, illudere capitibus, insultare capitibus, non parcere capiti, os percidere, summa petere, altiora tangere, comprimere linguam, μίγνυσθαι τὴν ἄῤῥητον μίξιν [mignusthai ten arrheton miksin]; pro fellare autem ore morigerari, ore adlaborare, lambere medios viros, lingere, tacere.
[Forberg 1966, vol. 1, pp.214-20]
The Ancients employed many forms of circumlocution to convey the meaning of their filthy practices. For instance, instead of irrumate, they said: to offend the mouth, corrupt the mouth, to attack the head, to defy the face, insult the head, not to spare the head, to split open the mouth, gain the heights, mount to loftier regions, compress the tongue, to indulge in abominable intercourse, and instead of receiving the member into the mouth they said: to lend the mouth in kind complaisance, work with his mouth, lick men's middle parts, lick simply, or lastly to be quiet.
[Forberg 1966, vol. 1, pp.215-21]
This quotation spans five pages, even for the Latin and odd for the English because each term or phrase is footnoted copiously.