A link in the commentary over at Languagehat’s entry on Bulgarian Linear A lead me to an essay entitled “Algonquins, Egyptians, & Uto-Aztecs” by Emeritus Professor of History Cyclone Covey of Wake Forest University. The first paragraph begs the reader to lay on:
If Algoquins descend from Paleo-Indians past many-millennia gaps, Morris Swadesh 12,000-15,000 years later could not have recognized the language they brought with them as genetically related to Indo-European, which spread from the “nuclear zone”—West Zagros mountains to East Turkey meadows—with agriculture in the ritual language of the regulating Goddess-religion and could not have reached America until long after a Bering land bridge went under. We have to relinquish our taboo against ancient sea passage but by no means Paleo-Indian chase of mammoths and mastodons during the last glacier—or before. Blocking downcoast passage, the glacier guided amblers to central Canada before they could feasibly turn south. Two Sichuan exploration teams, one tracing mountains, the other rivers, took that route all the way to Central America or farther, traditionally ca.2210-2180 B.C. before and during the “legendary” Xia Dynasty that preceded the “legendary” Shang.
And the last paragraph bids adieu in like manner:
It has grown unnecessary to belabor transpacific stylistic identity. You will see this ancient Geometric anew in nearly any East Asian restaurant of recent immigrants to the U.S. Bird’s discoveries—devoid of Egyptian parallels—suggest that the Akkadian-inscribed grain-measuring bowl found on the Bolivian bank of Lake Titicaca; “Mycenaean” stirrup-vases with goateed effigy heads Ruth Verrill took for Sargon I; and 3rd millennium holdovers of Shumerian she found in Quechua diffused with Egyptian elements via Indonesian, Chinese, or Central Asian migrants in the 1st millennium A.D.
In between, it goes on like this for seven (web) pages. I found the style reminiscent of my favorite medieval writer, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Your mileage may vary; try it out for yourself.
Nobody asked him, Zak Smith, to do it, but he did it. Illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow page for page. Exempli gratia / “He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen.” [via MadInkBeard] It was only last night that an architect and I discussed Greenaway’s Belly of the Architect after I had taken down Tom Phillips’ A Humument from a friend’s bookshelves at a belated housewarming party and said something about the video of the first eight cantos of Dante’s Inferno.
Angelo of Sauvage Noble tagged me in a way. And I respond in kind. The questions of a book meme follow:
Then you’re supposed to tag five blogging friends to further the meming. Angelo tagged his entire blogroll, and I’ll leave it at that.
“Ancient tablets found in South Bulgaria are written in the oldest European script found ever, German scientists say.” Just who these German scientists are, the article doesn’t say, but Nikolaj Ovcharov, the archeologist who found the tablets, announced that “the discovery proves the theory of the Bulgarian archaeologists that the script on the foundings is one of the oldest known to humankind”. Kardzhali is the site of Perperikon in Thracia. [via Ilani Ilani] Linear A is considered to be the origin of the Linear B syllabary.
[Addendum 05/29/05: Some pictures via a comment at Languagehat.]
An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the Italian government indicting a curator at the Getty Museum. (Also an article in the Chicago Tribune.)
Marion True, 56, curator for antiquities at the museum and director of the Getty Villa, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items. It is also alleged that True in effect laundered goods that were purchased by a private collection and then sold to the Getty in paper transactions that created phony documentation.
The plunder of Italian treasures has gone on for many years. Despite efforts to stem it, valuable art—some of it stolen—has made its way into the hands of major museums and collectors like the Getty, authorities believe. The criminal indictment of a top curator was seen as an indication that Italian officials are taking more aggressive steps to curb such practices.
Marion True is also the director of the Getty Villa. Another article about the statue of Aphrodite mentioned.
Well, no time no blog entry ... Last Friday Ms Viki and I flew down to Phoenix to see some old friends and celebrate their daughter’s graduation. First, I literally ran into Sean Penn on the sidewalk outside terminal 3 at SFO. He was without entourage, which seemed strange. Second, our flight was late and without an explanation or a how-d’you-do. (We flew Ted, which is a part of United, and is like its parent corporation without the friendly service. In fact, the flight attendants were indifferent or downright rude. South-Western next time.) Sigh. But anyway, Phoenix and Scotsdale are strange sprawling proto-LAs. The last time I was there in 2002 I took to referring to the constaint construction as terraforming. Lots of oversized, over-air-conditioned American suburban homes. Give it a decade or two and it’ll be sporting all the problems these folks thought they were escaping. (It didn’t help that I was reading Gibson’s Pattern Recognition at the time, I suppose.) I didn’t touch a computer while I was there, which was rather nice. I was watching CNN on cable at the hotel when I noticed that Arianna Huffington has a site that’s doing celebrity blogging.
A friend forwarded a link to a strange article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant, and his new conlang project.
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language—“Mänti”, meaning a type of tree—reflects the relationships between different things. The word “ema”, for instance, translates as “mother”, and “ela” is what a mother creates: “life”. “Päike” is “sun”, and “päive” is what the sun creates: “day”. Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
A quick googling shows that Daniel Tammet is the meme du jour. (The Guardian article has been slashdotted.) He has even appeared on the David Letterman Show. It seems that Mänti is only one of Tammet’s two attempts at a conlang. He constructed an international auxiliary language (IAL) called Uusisuom in 2001. I look forward to the publication of his grammar of Mänti. [via Maria still working in the belly of the beast]
This morning while I was reading the RFC on URI generic syntax (RFC 3986), I received a couple of emails from Richard Friedman pointing me at a collection of photographs at the George Eastman House and a couple of blog enties (one and two) giving details on the photographer, Siegfried Lauterwasser, and the round-about path the photos took from Germany to the US. Lauterwasser’s photo studio, which he took over from his father in 1933, is still in business in Überlingen.