Tryangulation

The Babylonian backup, 1500 B.C.

In Turkey we don't use file drawers very much. Instead we use clear sheet protectors (thousands of them) in big binders like the one you see here. Sometimes I'll include a CD with a backup of the files in the binder. Very useful, and apparently just a recent version of a very old idea.

After the discovery of inscriptions in Luwian Hittite hieroglyphs and Phoenician script at Aslantaş, and tens of thousands of multilingual cuneiform clay tablets at sites like Hattusa and Kültepe, archaeologists went to work to decipher the hieroglyphs. Since they already knew both Phoenecian writing and cuneiform in other languages, they could use them to triangulate (love that word!) the meanings of the Hittite symbols  and work out those thousands of Hittite tablets.

The Hittites borrowed cuneiform writing from neighboring Babylonians, Assyrians and other peoples, and they also borrowed the uses for such a versatile writing system. Invoices, prayers, business contracts, horoscopes, trial outcomes, even textbooks and student worksheets (similar to the one in the banner of this blog), have been found by the thousands. Bureaucracy especially  thrived with this new medium for tracking the minutiae of a world power.

Several world powers later and we're still pushing paper. That is to say, much of what we put on paper the ancients put on clay. One problem: while soft clay is great for writing cuneiform and wiping mistakes clean, once a tablet is dry you have the risk of breakage, or at least a chipped codicil.

Ancient Mesopotamians worked around this by making a clay envelope that completely covered the valuable document. Along the exterior of this still soft envelope a scribe would write a copy of the interior text. If anything happened to the envelope, the inner tablet would stay intact, at least long enough to make another copy.

Next: Where are the boundaries of a paradigm?

Resources on international linguistic rights

The blog of the Law Library of Cleveland State University had a recent post on the UN's International Year of Languages. Along with some other useful links, the post highlights a list of resources available at EISIL (the Electronic Information System for International Law.

These resources include The 1992 UN Declaration on the Rights of Linguistic Minorities and The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, plus some additional compilations of legal research on linguistic rights.

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Native English speakers are minority in England's schools

A news item from The Telegraph reports that "children with English as their first language are now in the minority in more than 1,300 schools, according to official figures."  Teachers' unions argue that inadequate preparation in English undermines education standards and increases costs, requiring more government assistance and a review of language policies.

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2008 is the UN International Year of Languages

According to the Boston Globe, "while an estimated 7000 languages are spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks." As the number of languages spoken in the world rapidly decreases, the United Nations has declared 2008 to be the International Year of Languages.  Having worked directly among a people group in Central America whose language is vanishing, I'm particularly interested in this theme.

The dynamics around language extinction are complex, involving external factors like economics and discrimination, and internal factors like self perception and attitudes toward one's own group and towards others. Unlike endangered plants, whose seeds can be preserved in seed banks, and endangered animals that can be protected on nature preserves, endangered languages survive only if people speak them. This is particularly challenging when those people have already formulated reasons for no longer speaking their parents' tongue.

Dictionaries, documentary films and ethnographic studies are only snapshots of the way things were, and awareness campaigns usually target non-speakers of endangered languages (like you, dear reader). Even mother tongue education programs can be compromised if there is no corpus of reading material once children leave school.

I'll watch the events around this theme closely, but I won't expect any miracles.  Nevertheless, as part of my own participation in this international year, I have added the category Languages and linguistics to this blog, and I have already retrofitted some blog posts to reflect the change.

Follow this link to the UNESCO site with resources for commemorating the International Year of Languages.

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Did you just negate my causative?

We have a winner! In my last post I posed a linguistic puzzle, which was solved by clever reader Jane. Well done! For the rest of you, the second clause in the first sentence was made negative by inserting -me after the verb stem. And yes, native speakers also think these words were kind of long, but not outrageously so. I've observed native speakers many times stop in the middle of a word as they think about how they are going to end it.

Jane had the great idea of adding a sound clip so you non-Turkish speakers out there could hear what those megawords sound like. So I asked our IB secretary Hande to give us a reading, and this is what we got: Download mukemmel_1.mp3

Even though she reads Turkish very quickly, I thought I detected a slip. We listened together, and sure enough, she said
mükemmelleştiremediklerimizden,
which is, like, a totally different word. Well, sort of: before the notorıous -me negator suffix she had inserted an -e-, so that the word comes out meaning one of those whose houses we were not able to perfect.  So here is the recording of the sentence as it was printed:
Download mukemmel_2.mp3

Here's the morphology of the word (and just remember this is automatic for native speakers):

mükemmel  : perfect, awesome (borrowed from Arabic), can stand alone as an adjective;
-leş- : a verb aspect which denotes process, as in becoming awesome
-tir- : causative aspect
-me- : negative
-dik- : past participle
-ler-: plural
-imiz- : first person plural genitive case
-den- :ablative case, here like the partitive case
-mi- : yes/no question marker
-siniz  : second personal plural nominative case; many old school Turkish grammarians tack the 'misiniz' onto the previous word

If you're curious about less studied languages, see this blog post from a few months ago:

The sound of a vanishing language.

Language and identity: diverse ways of knowing

This is part three of a series of discussion questions related to the presentation on language and identity in our Theory of Knowledge class. See the end of this post for related links.

Indigenous languages, indigenous knowledge

Anthropologists apply indigenous knowledge from different cultures to other sciences, and have created new cross-disciplinary fields like ethnobotany, ethnozoology and ethnoastronomy. By studying the ways that indigenous people groups gather and organize their knowledge about the environment, scientists have identified "new" species of useful plants and animals, discovered useful chemical compounds in traditional medicines (including antibiotics and cancer treatments), and studied cognitive processes through linguistic analysis.

Case study 1

The ancient Maya used a base-twenty numbering system for public works, astronomy and calendar making. They invented the zero independently of ancient mathematicians in Mesopotamia, and their long-count calendar still works today without the need for regular adjustments like our Leap Year.

The image at the right (source)  is of Stela C, found at Tres Zapotes, a pre-Maya site in Mexico. The stela is one of the oldest artifacts that uses the Long Count calendar system used by many peoples in Mesoamerica. The numerals inscribed on the left column read: 7.16.6.16.18, which corresponds to the date 3 September 32 BC in the Julian calendar, around the time when Caesar Augustus defeated Mark Antony.   
The zero date for this calendar corresponds to 3114 BC in our calendar. The long count calendar will reset when it reaches the date 13.0.0.0.0.0, which will occur in December 2012.

What if Western Civilization had developed mathematics based on twenty instead of ten? How would technology be different? How would the sciences be different? Or language?

Case study 2

2. Surveyors in Brazil recently found evidence of 67 previously unidentified people groups living in the Amazon rain forest. Because of extensive mining and the harvesting of tropical hardwoods and other forest products, these people groups may become extinct soon.

What would be the best way to retrieve and protect the knowledge of these people groups? 

What if they believe that sharing their "secrets" would bring danger to them? How do you weigh the importance of protecting their culture versus learning from it?

Related links

Language and identity, part one: The sound of a vanishing language

Language and identity, part two: Geography 

For more on the problem of indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights, see these Wikipedia articles on indigenous peoples,  traditional knowledge,  biopiracy.  See also the UN's Decade of the World's Indigeous Peoples.
 

Language and identity: geography

This is part two of a series of discussion questions related to the presentation on language and identity in our Theory of Knowledge class. See the end of this post for related links.

Map comparison

This map shows the topography of Guatemala and neighboring regions, with international boundaries. The red circle indicates the  area where traditionally Mam of Tacaná has been spoken.

The next map, taken from the Atlás Lingüístico de Guatemala (Michael Richards, et al. 2003), shows the municipios of Guatemala (secondary administrative divisions, like the ilçeler of Turkey). Each municipio is color coded according to the survival risk of the local indigenous languages. Red denotes the highest risk, and blue denotes minimum risk. The areas in white have no significant indigenous population for the purpose of the study. Notice that Tacaná is coded red.  

Discussion

1. Compare the topographical map with the language risk map. (You can click on the images to enlarge them.) Do you see a pattern in the distribution of risk levels? What hypotheses can you make about the relationship between geographic location and the level of risk?

2. Why do you think geographic location would be a factor? Can you think of any intermediate factors, that is, are there any ways that geography creates a certain effect which in turn affects language (like a chain reaction)? Read The sound of a vanishing language again to see if you can find an important clue that I left there.

3. What kind of research could you design to test your ideas about the relationship between geography and language?

Related links

Language and identity, part one: The sound of a vanishing language

Language and identity, part three: Diverse ways of knowing

To see the location of specific languages of Guatemala, you can look at this map from the Ethnologue.

 

The sound of a vanishing language

This is part one of a series based on the presentation on language and identity in our Theory of Knowledge class. See the end of this post for related links.

In January I had the opportunity to give presentations and lead discussions on language and identity for our IB Theory of Knowledge classes. I shared some of the field research I did in the Guatemalan highlands several years ago, among an indigenous Mayan group whose language was in the last stages of displacement by Spanish.  In the course of that ethnolinguistic research I collected tape recordings of the language for analysis and intelligibility testing, and I played one of those tapes for my students last month.

Listening to that tape over and over after so many years has created a strange melancholy and nostalgia for the nearly three years that my wife and I lived in Tacaná. I remember the day in 1989 when I visited Fortino Ortiz and his wife Delfina (seen in the image above), along with Fortino's cousin Mariano, and recorded nearly an hour of conversation with them as we sat next to the kitchen fire and talked about their farm, their children, and the annual trek down to the Mexican coast to work in the coffee plantations. I would later use some clips from that recording as part of a survey to assess whether their language would survive another generation. Our research later showed that no one under the age of 21 could speak Tacaneco , and that was 17 years ago.   

The classroom presentation and discussion focused on some of the causes of the disappearance of Tacaneco and what lessons we can learn about language as a key to identity and as a vehicle for learning culture. Several students asked to listen to the recording again, so I have edited a brief segment of the one tape I have with me, and posted it here. This is my first attempt to use Audacity, and I'm afraid the quality was compromised a bit in the conversion from magnetic to digital, and then from one digital format to another.  As I get more proficient I'll replace this with a better clip.  I'll share some of the discussion questions as well later this week. 

Click on this link to listen:

Download tacaneco_track_3a.mp3

Related links

Language and identity, part two: Geography

Language and identity, part three: Diverse ways of knowing

To see the location of specific languages of Guatemala, you can look at this map from the Ethnologue.