Linguistic Calvinball

I've written here before about the monumental difficulty of translating written text when you (1) don't know what the character-to-sound correspondence is (including whether the script is alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic), (2) don't know what language the script represents, and (3) don't know whether it's read left-to-right, right-to-left, or alternating every other line (boustrophedonic script).  This was what Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, and Michael Ventris were up against with the Linear B script of Crete.  That they succeeded is a testimony not only to their skill as linguists and to their sheer dogged persistence, but to the fact that they had absolutely astonishing pattern-recognition ability.  Despite my MA in linguistics and decent background in a handful of languages, I can't imagine taking on such a task, much less succeeding at it.

The problem becomes even thornier when you consider that what appears to be a script might be asemic -- something that looks like a real written language but is actually meaningless.  (Just a couple of months ago, I wrote here about an asemic text called A Book From the Sky that the creator himself said was nonsense, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to translate it anyhow.)

Which brings us to the Rohonc Codex.

The first certain mention of the Rohonc Codex is in the nineteenth century, although a 1743 catalog of the Rohonc (now the city of Rechnitz, Austria) Library might refer to it -- it says, "Magyar imádságok, volumen I in 12" ("Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo"). 

As you'll see, that the text represents prayers, or is even in Hungarian, very much remains to be seen.  The size matches; duodecimo means "twelve sheets, approximately 127 millimeters by 187 millimeters in size," and given that some of the earliest guesses about the book's contents were that it was a prayerbook in archaic Hungarian, it's possible that the catalog entry refers to the Codex.  The paper it's printed on appears to be sixteenth-century Venetian in origin, but of course this doesn't mean that's when the book was written -- only that it's unlikely to be any older than that.

One page of the Rohonc Codex [Image is in the Public Domain]

The drawings are rather crude, and the lettering doesn't resemble any known script, although various linguists have compared it to Hungarian runes, Dacian, a dialect of early Romanian, and some variant of Hindi.  Others think it's simply a forgery -- asemic, in other words -- with a sizable number attributing it to the antiquarian Sámuel Nemes, who was known to have forged other documents.

There's no sure connection between Nemes and the Rohonc Codex, however.  He's not known ever to have handled the document, and certainly never mentioned it.  So this seems as tentative as all the other explanations.

Attempts to use the statistical distribution of clusters of symbols, invoking such patterns as Zipf's Law -- the tendency across languages for the word rank to be inversely proportional to word frequency -- have also failed.

Like with A Book From the Sky, this hasn't stopped hopeful scholars from claiming success.  Some of them have been eye-rollingly bad, like the solution proposed in 1996 by one Attila Nyíri of Hungary.  Nyíri combined some Sumerian symbols with chance resemblances to the Latin alphabet, and used such expedients as rearranging letters and letting the same symbol correspond to more than one sound, and still came up with gibberish like, Eljött az Istened. Száll az Úr.  Ó.  Vannak a szent angyalok.  Azok.  Ó.  ("Your God has come.  The Lord flies.  Oh.  There are the holy angels.  Them.  Oh."

I'm perhaps to be excused for being reminded of the Dick and Jane readers.  "Oh, Jane, see Spot.  See Spot run.  Oh, Spot, don't roll in that dead squirrel.  Oh."

Another attempt, this one only marginally more plausible, was made by Romanian linguist Viorica Enăchiuc, and hypothesized that the document (1) is read right-to-left and bottom-to-top, and (2) was written in a Dacian dialect of Latin.  This one came up with lines like Solrgco zicjra naprzi olto co sesvil cas  ("O Sun of the live let write what span the time"), which still isn't exactly what I'd call lucid writing.  

Then there's the Indian linguist Mahesh Kumar Singh, who said the Codex is written left-to-right and top-to-bottom in Hindi, using an obscure variant of the ancient Brahmi script.  Singh translated one passage as, He bhagwan log bahoot garib yahan bimar aur bhookhe hai / inko itni sakti aur himmat do taki ye apne karmo ko pura kar sake ("Oh, my God!  Here the people is very poor, ill and starving, therefore give them sufficient potency and power that they may satisfy their needs.")  His "translation," though, was immediately excoriated by other linguists, who said that he was playing fast-and-loose with the script interpretation, and had come up with symbol-to-sound correspondences that were convenient to how he wanted the translation to come out, not what was supported in other texts.

So the whole enterprise has turned into the linguistic version of Calvinball (from Bill Watterson's brilliant Calvin and Hobbes).  If you make up the rules as you go, and never play by the same rules twice, anything can happen.

The upshot of it all is that the Rohonc Codex is still undeciphered, if there's even anything there to decipher.  Like the more famous Voynich Manuscript, it retains its aura of attractive mystery, because most of us can't resist a puzzle, even if a lot of the best linguists think the script is nonsense.  Because how do you prove decisively that something isn't sensible language?

After all, there are still people who think that Donald Trump's speeches make sense, even when he says shit like, "I saw engines about three, four years ago.  These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with a circle, boom!  Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?  He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up.  But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote.  He couldn’t fill up the eight circles.  I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, so beautiful to look at."

So maybe "Oh.  There are the holy angels.  Them.  Oh," isn't so bad.

In any case, I'm sure there'll be further attempts to solve it.  Which falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" department.  And who knows?  Maybe there's a team made up of this century's Evans/Kober/Ventris triumvirate who will actually succeed.

All I know is that attempting it is way above my pay grade.

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Mystery disk

I'm always fascinated by a good mystery, and that's definitely the appropriate category for an artifact called the Phaistos Disk.

Found in the Minoan palace of Phaistos, on the island of Crete, in 1908, the Phaistos Disk is fifteen centimeters in diameter, made of fired ceramic clay, and (most interestingly) has an inscription on it. Here's a photograph:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons C messier, Δίσκος της Φαιστού πλευρά Α 6380, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Disk is thought to have been made in the second millennium B.C.E., making it approximately contemporaneous with the Linear B script of Crete, which was successfully deciphered in the early 1950s by Alice Kober, Michael Ventris, and John Chadwick.  This accomplishment was the first time that anyone had cracked a script where not only was the sound/letter correspondence unknown, but it wasn't even known what language the script was representing.  (As it turned out, it was an early form of Mycenaean Greek.  Earlier guesses were that it represented Etruscan, a proto-Celtic language, or even Egyptian.  The script itself was mostly syllabic, with one symbol representing a syllable rather than a single sound, and a few ideograms thrown in just to make it more difficult.)

The problem is, the Phaistos Disk is not Linear B.  Nor is it Linear A, an earlier script which remains undeciphered despite linguists' best attempts at decoding it.  The difficulty here is that the Phaistos Disk has only 242 different symbols, which is not enough to facilitate translation.  Once again, we're not sure what the language is, although it's a good guess that it's some form of Greek (other linguists have suggested it might be Hittite or Luwian, both languages spoken in ancient Anatolia (now Turkey), and which had their own alphabet that bears some superficial similarities to the symbols on the Disk).

This lack of information has led to wild speculation.  Various people have claimed it's a prayer, a calendar, a story, a board game, and a geometric theorem, although how the hell you'd know any of that when you can't even begin to read the inscription is beyond me.  But it only gets weirder from there.  Friedhelm Will and Axel Hausmann back in 2002 said that the Disk "comes from the ruins of Atlantis."  Others have suggested it's of extraterrestrial origin.  (Admit it, you knew the aliens were going to show up here somehow.)

Others, more prosaically, think it's a fake.  In 2008 archaeologist Jerome Eisenberg proclaimed the Disk a modern hoax, most likely perpetrated by Luigi Pernier, the Italian archaeologist who claimed to have discovered it.  Eisenberg cites a number of pieces of evidence -- differences in the firing and in how the edges were cut, as compared to other ceramic artifacts from the same period; the fact that it's incredibly well-preserved considering how old it supposedly is; and vague similarities to Linear A and Linear B characters, with various odd ones thrown in (Eisenberg says the symbols were chosen to be "credible but untranslatable" and selected "cleverly... to purposely confuse the scholarly world."

Of course, this didn't settle the controversy.  Archaeologist Pavol Hnila cites four different artifacts, all discovered after the Disk, that have similar characters to the ones on the Disk, and that there is not enough evidence to warrant accusing Pernier and his team of something as serious as a deliberate hoax.

So the mystery endures, as mysteries are wont to do.  I find this fascinating but more than a little frustrating -- to know that there is an answer, but to accept that we may never find out what it is.  That's the way it goes, though.  If you're a true skeptic, you have to be willing to remain in ignorance, indefinitely if need be, if there is insufficient evidence to decide one way or the other.  This leaves the Phaistos Disk in the category of "Wouldn't this be fun to figure out?" -- a designation that is as common in science as it is exasperating.

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The Scottish queen's code

Despite the fact that she's been dead for over four hundred years, Mary, Queen of Scots remains a controversial and divisive figure amongst historians.

The only surviving child of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise, the younger Mary started off her reign much the same way her father had.  James's father, King James IV, died in 1542 at the disastrous (for the Scots, at least) Battle of Flodden Field, making James V the king in 1513 at the age of only seventeen months.  This put the kingdom in the hands of regents throughout the early years of the reign, which is seldom a recipe for stability.  After much jockeying about by regents and councillors eager to wield control, James V finally was able to throw off the shackles of the regency in 1528 following the Battle of Linlithgow Bridge.

His adult reign was turbulent.  James himself has been characterized as paranoid (unsurprising, really, considering that he'd been a virtual prisoner to his regents as a child), more interested in reading and playing the lute than in administering a kingdom.  He did have a great concern for the common folk, however, and actually spent time wandering amongst them in disguise, gaining him the nickname of "the Gudeman of Ballengeich" ("gudeman" is Scots dialect for "smallholder;" Ballengeich is one of his favorite haunts, near Stirling Castle).  Interestingly, there's a sweet Scottish country dance tune called "The Geud Man of Ballengigh" which I've known for years -- knew the tune, in fact, long before I ever knew the story behind it.

James V died in 1542, at the age of only thirty, probably of cholera -- only six days after the birth of his daughter Mary.  Mary was crowned, just like her father had been, as an infant.  This once again left Scotland in the hands of regents, headed by her mother, the smart, powerful Mary of Guise, who (unlike the regents James had endured) was determined to hang onto the throne on the behalf of her daughter.  Mary was sent off to France to be raised and educated, something that was to work against her later, as culturally she was seen as far more French than she was Scottish.  This was amplified in 1558 when she was married to King Francis II of France, but that marriage was ended by Francis's death in 1560 at age sixteen (whether of an infection or because he was poisoned is uncertain).  The marriage produced no children; some believe it was never consummated.

Then Mary of Guise died in 1560, at which point the younger Mary -- now widowed and old enough to rule Scotland in her own right -- returned to her home country, which she'd barely seen in her eighteen years.  But as with her father, she found that the powerful men who had run the country in her absence weren't eager to give up control.  Mary then showed signs of the recklessness that was to characterize the rest of her life.  She first married the wildly unpopular Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was actually Mary's half first cousin (Mary's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of English King Henry VII, had married twice -- first to King James IV of Scotland, and second to Archibald Douglas, Sixth Earl of Angus; those two marriages produced Mary's father, and Darnley's mother, respectively.)  The marriage, by all accounts, was miserable.  Despite being handsome and superficially charming, Darnley turned out to be a vain, arrogant, violent drunkard.  In fact, when Darnley was murdered by a group of noblemen led by James Hepburn, Fourth Earl of Boswell in 1567 -- only a year after the birth of Mary's and Darnley's only son, James (eventually King James VI of Scotland and James I of England), Mary turned around and married Hepburn a month later.

This outrage was the final straw.  Darnley had been unpopular, but the queen marrying his murderer was just too much.  There was a massive uprising, and Mary was forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son (making for three infant successions to the throne of Scotland in a row).  She fled to England, asking for asylum from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIII, was Mary's paternal grandmother's brother).  Elizabeth reluctantly agreed, but recognizing the fact that Mary was a direct descendant of King Henry VII and thus in line for the throne, she had her put under rather genteel house arrest.

Her caution is understandable.  Elizabeth's own path to the throne had been fraught, and for a while it looked likely that she herself was going to spend her life in close confinement (if not worse).  But when her two half-siblings, King Edward VI and Queen Mary I, both died without heirs, she succeeded to the throne for what would be one of the longest and most successful reigns of any monarch of England.

Mary, though, wasn't content to relax into what was honestly a fairly comfortable situation and give up her aspirations to rule.  In fact, she was of the opinion that Elizabeth's own reign wasn't valid; the marriage between Henry VIII and Elizabeth's mother, the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, had been annulled shortly before Anne lost her head on Tower Hill, making Elizabeth effectively an illegitimate child.  So Mary, ever the schemer, started writing letters to perceived supporters, trying to garner support to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne of a combined England and Scotland.

It's those letters that are why the topic comes up; while some were written (unfortunately for Mary, as it turned out) in plain English, French, or Italian, some were written in code -- and until now, they'd been undeciphered.  But a team made up of George Lasry of Israel, Norbert Biermann of Germany, and Satoshi Tomokiyo of Japan have finally cracked Mary's cipher and allowed us to discover more about her plotting to do in her cousin -- a plot that, as I'm sure you know, ultimately failed spectacularly.

A portion of Mary's cipher

"[This marks] the most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, for a hundred years," said historian John Guy.  "The letters show definitively that Mary, during the years of her captivity in England... closely observed and actively involved herself in political affairs in Scotland, England and France, and was in regular contact, either directly, or indirectly through de Castelnau [Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England], with many of the leading political figures at Elizabeth I's court...  They prove that Mary was a shrewd and attentive analyst of international affairs."

"With our new decipherments, we provide evidence that such a secret channel was already in place as early as May 1578," the authors write.  "Also, while some details were already known, our new decipherments provide further insights into how this channel was operated, and on the people involved...  From time to time, she suggests enticing various people with financial rewards so that they would switch sides, or soften their attitude toward her.  She also asks for Castelnau's assistance in recruiting new spies and couriers, while sometimes she warns him – rightly – that some people working for her might be Walsingham's [Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster] agents."

So the new letters add to the picture of Mary as a schemer -- and someone who gives new meaning to the word "reckless."  Ultimately, of course, Elizabeth got fed up with this nonsense, and after finding serious evidence that Mary was plotting to have her assassinated, signed the death warrant.  Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle in 1586 at the age of forty-four -- and despite her moniker, had spent the vast majority of her life outside of Scotland, and had only been the queen in fact for seven years.

It's a story filled with intrigue and twists and turns, and further raises the question in my mind of why in the hell anyone in their right minds wanted to be in power back then.  It'd be interesting to see, just in the histories of England and Scotland alone, what percentage of the people who were kings, queens, heirs, counselors, and nobles came to bad ends.  My highly unscientific assessment is "must be really high."  While I wouldn't have wanted to be a peasant -- that had its own, quite different set of unpleasantness -- if I were to time travel back to the sixteenth century, I'd have been perfectly happy settling down to a nice placid life as a simple merchant-class guy.  Let the royals and nobles play their human chess games; any benefits from power and wealth would simply not be worth the risk.

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Scripts and mysteries

My fascination with languages goes back a very long way.  I was raised bilingual -- French was my mother's first language, and all of her older relatives spoke French more often than English.  They especially tended to switch over to French when they were talking about things they didn't want me to understand, which I have to admit provides a kid a hell of an incentive to learn a language.

Another thing I loved when I was young (and still do) is puzzles.  I have always resonated with what physicist Richard Feynman called "the joy of figuring things out."  That flash of insight that allows you to solve a riddle is a nice little dopamine rush.

The combo is probably why I pursued a master's degree in historical linguistics.  Piecing together the etymologies of words, and tracing how they change and move from place to place, is like a gigantic linguistic puzzle.  My own particular area was how the Scandinavian languages influenced Old English and Old Gaelic during the Viking invasions of Great Britain, but etymology is just generally fascinating to me (which is why I started doing my daily #AskLinguisticsGuy feature on TikTok -- if you're interested in word origins, you should follow me).

One area that is way outside my skill set, though, is decipherment.  I've written here before about the stupendous work of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in deciphering the Linear B Script of Crete, for which not only was the sound-to-symbol correspondence unknown, but it wasn't known what language it represented.  At first, they couldn't even be certain if it was read left-to-right or right-to-left, or if -- perhaps -- it was a boustrophedonic script, which alternates being read left-to-right and right-to-left every line.  (The odd word boustrophedonic comes from Greek; it means "the turning of an ox," because the back-and-forth writing reminded linguists of the way an ox plows a field, turning at the end of each row.  Examples of boustrophedonic scripts are Etruscan and Sabaean.)

If you're curious, Linear B turned out to be written in an early form of Mycenaean Greek, and the script was a combination of a syllabic script -- like the Japanese hiragana -- and ideographs, such as are used in written Chinese.  It's read left-to-right -- just as modern Greek is today.

The amount of skill and sheer brainpower it would take to figure all that out that absolutely boggles my mind.

If any of you are looking for a challenge, though, there are still a lot of undeciphered scripts out there.  Here are a few examples of writing systems that have defied decipherment -- thus far:

• The Banpo symbols, from the fifth millennium B.C.E. in China.  They consist of twenty-two different symbols, and are always found on shards of pottery, leading some to speculate that they aren't writing, but are either just geometrical decorations or (possibly) what potters call a "chop," a mark or series of marks identifying the maker.  The fact that they're present on multiple pieces of pottery, in different orders, suggests that they might be written language, but no one knows for sure.

• The Dispilio Tablet, a wooden artifact with what seem to be written characters.  It was found in 1993 in western Greece, and the shapes of the characters drew comparisons to both Linear B and Linear A (another Cretan script that is, thus far, undeciphered).  But the comparisons didn't allow linguists to crack the code, and as of right now, the Dispilio script, like Linear A, is still a mystery.

• The Indus Valley script.  This is one of the most puzzling undeciphered scripts known, because it has been recorded from over four thousand inscriptions comprising strings of around four hundred different symbols, and has defied all attempts at decipherment.  Part of the problem is that we don't know what language was spoken by the people of the Harappan Civilization, which produced the writing and flourished in the Indus River Valley for two millennia, between 3300 B.C.E. and 1300 B.C.E.  At the end of that long period of dominance, their cities and farming communities were suddenly abandoned, and although climate change, disease, and invasion have been suggested as explanations, historians are at a loss to explain what actually happened.

A sequence in the Indus Valley script [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Siyajkak derivative work: Gregors (talk) 08:30, 31 March 2011 (UTC), The 'Ten Indus Scripts' discovered near the northen gateway of the citadel Dholavira, CC BY-SA 3.0]

• Proto-Elamite, a script used from around 3200 to 2700 B.C.E. in what is now western Iran.  Later, the Elamites adopted cuneiform, but their earlier writing system is still undeciphered.

• Southwestern Paleohispanic, a script used in southern Spain and Portugal from the eighth to sixth centuries B.C.E.  It's been associated with the Tartessian civilization, about which I've written here before, and which -- like the Harappans -- disappeared suddenly and inexplicably.  All attempts to link Southwestern Paleohispanic to Celtic, Etruscan, Latin, and Greek have been unsuccessful.

• Zapotec, a glyphic script (like Mayan) used in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico up until about 700 C.E.  It is probably a written representation of an early ancestor of the Oto-Manguean language family, a cluster of about fifty languages from Mesoamerica whose relationship to other language families is uncertain at best.

That's just six of the best-known.  There are literally hundreds of other scripts, some fragmentary in nature or only known from one or two artifacts, that have thus far resisted all attempts at decipherment.

And if the whole business wasn't already complicated enough, there are also examples of asemic writing, which is writing without meaning -- writing either created to simulate meaningful scripts for use as decoration (such as the delightful Codex Seraphinianus) or done deliberately to fool people (which is likely to be the explanation for the Voynich Manuscript).  So linguists studying some of these undeciphered scripts have to keep in mind that the reason they've defied decryption might be because they aren't meaningful in the first place.

But, as I said, figuring that out is above my pay grade, not to mention my IQ.  I can only sit back in amazement and appreciate the work that has gone into figuring out all the thousands of ways humans have communicated, by linguists whose ability to tackle unfathomable puzzles is nothing short of astonishing.

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Voices from the jungle

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enough, but I think what really captured me was the unique way the language was written.

At that time, very little of the writing had been successfully deciphered, and much of what had been was tentative at best.  In fact, for some time the task was that most daunting of linguistic puzzles; an unknown script coding for unknown sounds in an unknown language.  The surmise that the glyphs primarily represented not just a single language, but two -- the extinct Ch'otli' language and the extant Yucatec language -- didn't help matters.  Complicating things further was the fact that it turns out that similar to Japanese hiragana and kanji, some of the glyphs represent syllables and others represent entire words.  The team effort to completely decipher Mayan glyphs took well over a hundred years, culminating in a paper in 1986 that allowed just about every classic Mayan inscription to be read.

The most daunting thing is that the patterns connecting spelling to pronunciation were convoluted.  Some words had "echo vowels" -- vowels repeated from the previous syllable when written, but not pronounced (e.g. yop, leaf, written using the syllables yo-po).  Other written-but-not-pronounced vowels were "disharmonic" -- not the same as the preceding syllable -- and the rules governing which syllabic glyph to use are abstruse to say the least.  (Of course, in reality, the Mayans have nothing on English for bizarre spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences; consider how -ough is pronounced in the words rough, through, thorough, ought, drought, and hiccough.  I even have an idea of why that mess happened historically, and I still think it's ridiculous.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And, of course, the main difficulty was the paucity of examples of the script, mostly due to the Spanish, who came in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeded to destroy as many of the heathen inscriptions they could get their hands on.  People like Diego de Landa, bishop of the Yucatán in the late sixteenth century, burned just about all the Mayan codices, and his belated efforts to preserve what was known about the script and the languages they represented were half-hearted at best.  Even so, historian and linguist William Gates -- in what has to be preserved forever in the annals of chutzpah -- said, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us... or have learned in the use and study of what he told."

Well, if you count that he destroyed ninety-nine percent of the inscriptions first, then yeah, ninety-nine percent of the remaining one percent were preserved by de Landa and his friends in the Inquisition.

It's heartening, though, that five hundred years later, we find remnants of that lost civilization.  (There are still people who speak Mayan languages today, but it's undeniable the Spanish pretty well obliterated the culture of an entire people.)  Just last week, it was announced that some explorers trying to map out caves in the Yucatán stumbled upon three pieces of pottery dating back to the Late Postclassic Period (1200-1550 C.E.).  One of them was in fragments -- crushed when it was caught in between growing tree roots -- but the other two are in remarkably good condition.  The Mayans had a positive fascination for caves, and thought (like many early civilizations) that they represented the entrance to the underworld, a place called Xibalba (literally, "place of fright").  Just as the Greeks did at the cave of the Delphic Oracle, the Mayans brought offerings and sacrifices into caves to appease the gods and spirits of the nether world, and it's thought these three vessels were probably examples of those ritual gifts.

Even by comparison to other cultures' ideas about the horrors of the afterlife, Xibalba is impressively awful.  The lords of Xibalba seemed to enjoy causing pain and humiliation, and sent human spirits after death into a series of tests in various "houses" -- Dark House (completely pitch black, as you might have guessed), Rattling House (ice cold, with pounding hailstorms), Jaguar House (guess what lived there, and were dreadfully hungry), Bat House (ditto), Razor House (filled with blades that moved around on their own), and Hot House (which was on fire).  Just the names of the gods of Xibalba would be enough to dissuade me from ever going there (not, I suppose, that you had a choice).  There were:

• Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab")
• Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood")
• Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon")
• Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon")
• Chamiabac ("Bone Staff")
• Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff")
• Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon") and Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon") (who teamed up to hide in the dust of unswept parts of your house, then jumped out and stabbed you to death, which is a pretty good incentive to keep the floor clean)

Which definitely makes me wonder who spent their time making this shit up.  I mean, if you're gonna come up with wild tales, at least leave out the sentient razor blades and pus demons.

So it's a fascinating culture, but one I'm rather glad I don't belong to.  The Judeo-Christian hell I had to contend with when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church was bad enough.

Be that as it may, it's pretty cool that Diego de Landa and his ilk didn't silence all of these distant voices from the jungle.  I've been lucky enough to visit that part of the world twice, and the pyramids and stone temples they left behind are awe-inspiring.  Perhaps there are still more relics out there in the rain forest waiting to be discovered -- and which will give us another lens into a vanished civilization.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The voices of the Aztecs

When a region is conquered, one of the first things the conquerors usually do is to suppress (or explicitly outlaw) indigenous languages.

One reason is purely practical -- to eliminate the possibility that the subjugated group can communicate with each other without being understood.  The other, however, is more insidious.  Language is a huge part of culture, and if you want to destroy the native society (or, more accurately, replace it with your own, something euphemistically called '"assimilation"), you must eliminate the most vital part of that culture -- how its members communicate with each other, how they express poetry and ethnic history and local knowledge.

Destroy the language, and you've struck at the heart of the culture itself.

An excellent (if tragic) case in point is Australia.  It is the home of over three hundred languages, 170 of which are indigenous.  (One of the reasons why indigenous Australians dislike the word "Aborigine" about as much as Native Americans do "Indian;" it implies the wildly-incorrect assessment that the entire indigenous population is a single culture.)  What is appalling, though, is that even if you exclude English -- the most widely-spoken language in Australia -- none of the top-ten-most-spoken languages in Australia are indigenous.  (In order, they are: Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian, Tagalog, Hindi, Spanish, and Korean.)  Only a quarter of a percent of Australian citizens speak an indigenous language at home.  Of the 170 indigenous languages that still survive (i.e. with at least some native speakers), all but fifteen are classified as severely endangered, with virtually no one learning them as children.  All of the speakers of those remaining 155 unique languages are elderly, and with the passing of that generation, they'll be gone forever except as a curiosity amongst linguists.

Not all indigenous languages are in quite that bad a shape.  One somewhat more hopeful case is Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs in central Mexico.  The clash of the Spanish and native cultures in the Americas is rightly depicted as the worst of the worst -- between the conquering armies and the self-righteous (and often just as violent) Christian missionaries, only a few decades after conquest there usually wasn't much left of the original language, art, music, and religion.  In the case of central Mexico, however, the conquerors took a more nuanced approach, introducing the Latin alphabet but allowing native speakers to continue using their own language.  In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the missionaries did a decent job writing Nahuatl grammars and dictionaries, and during that time there were hundreds of works written in the language, including administrative documents as well as poetry, stories, histories, and religious codices.  Most striking of all -- and, as far as I know, unique in the history of contact between conquerors and the conquered -- in 1536, only twenty years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco was founded, where bilingual classes were offered to teach Nahuatl to the missionaries and Spanish to the natives.  It wasn't until 1696 that King Charles II of Spain outlawed Nahuatl, but by that time enough of the Mexican Spanish upper-crust spoke Nahuatl themselves that it was pretty much too late to do anything about it.

As a result, there are still 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl in Mexico.  Not bad, considering the moribund nature of most of the indigenous languages in the world.

The reason this comes up is because of a discovery that was the subject of a paper in Seismological Research Letters a couple of weeks ago that was about the intersection between historical linguistics and another fascination of mine -- geology.  A recently-deciphered fifty-page codex in Nahuatl turns out to describe a series of massive earthquakes that hit central Mexico between 1460 and 1542, including one that triggered a flood resulting in the drowning of eighteen hundred warriors.

The codex itself was created by Aztec tlacuilos ("those who write with painting") and is made up of pictograms that predate the adoption of the Latin alphabet by speakers of Nahuatl.  One of the most striking is a combination of four projections like the vanes of a windmill around a central circle, followed by a rectangle filled with dots.  The windmill-like symbol is the pictogram for the word ollin, meaning "movement;" the rectangle is tlalli, meaning "earth."  Taken together, it means "earthquake."  Further, if the central circle is open, it indicates that the quake happened during the daytime, and if it's closed, it happened at night.

You can see the composite pictogram for "earthquake" in the lower right; all the way at the bottom is a depiction of the unfortunate warriors who drowned in the resulting flood.

As far as the timekeeping, the Aztecs -- like many Central American cultures -- were obsessive about the calendar, and had a 52-year calendrical cycle represented by the arrangement of four symbols -- tecpatl (knife), calli (house), tochtli (rabbit) and acatl (reed) -- arranged in thirteen different permutations.  Decoding that system allowed researchers to figure out that the earthquake that killed the warriors took place in 1507.

At night.

It's simultaneously fascinating and sad how few of the world's cultures have left significant traces for us to study, and of course that's largely humanity's own fault.  For example, the campaign of suppression by the Romans two-and-a-half millennia ago eliminated virtually every last trace of Etruscan -- there are over thirteen thousand inscriptions in Etruscan known to archaeologists, and they've been able to decipher only a fraction of them.  I can only hope that the endangered languages of our own time are treated more kindly.  What a pity it would be if in three thousand years, of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken, the only ones our descendants will be able to read are Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Knots, twists, and meaning

One of the most curious relics of the past, and one which is a persistent mystery, is the quipu (also spelled khipu) of Andean South America.

A quipu is a linked series of knotted, dyed cotton strings, and were apparently some kind of meaningful device -- but what their meaning was is uncertain, thanks to the thoroughness and determination of Spanish priests in the sixteenth century to destroy whatever they could of the "pagan" Inca culture.  The result is, there are only 751 of them left, which is a pretty small sample if you're interested in decipherment.

An Incan quipu in the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki, Inca Quipu, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A number of attempts have been made to understand what the patterns of knots meant, but none of them have really panned out.  Some of the possibilities are that they were devices for enumeration, perhaps something like an abacus; a literary device for recording history, stories, or genealogies; or census data.

In fact, the jury's still out on whether they encode linguistic information at all.  An anthropologist named Sabine Hyland has suggested that they do; the color, position of knots, and even the ply of the string combine in 95 different ways to represent a syllabic writing system, she says, and claims that they were intricate family records.  If she's right, the burning of the Incan quipus represents a horrific eradication of the entire cultural history of a people -- something the invading Europeans were pretty good at.

The reason the topic comes up is because of a paper that came out last week in Nature Communications that has a striking parallel to the quipu.  The paper, titled "Optical Framed Knots as Information Carriers," by Hugo Larocque, Alessio d'Errico, Manuel Ferrer-Garcia, and Ebrahim Karimi (of the University of Ottawa), Avishy Carmi (of Ben-Gurion University), and Eliahu Cohen (of Bar Ilan University), describes a way of creating knots in laser light that could be used to encode information.  The authors write:

Modern beam shaping techniques have enabled the generation of optical fields displaying a wealth of structural features, which include three-dimensional topologies such as Möbius, ribbon strips and knots.  However, unlike simpler types of structured light, the topological properties of these optical fields have hitherto remained more of a fundamental curiosity as opposed to a feature that can be applied in modern technologies.  Due to their robustness against external perturbations, topological invariants in physical systems are increasingly being considered as a means to encode information.  Hence, structured light with topological properties could potentially be used for such purposes.  Here, we introduce the experimental realization of structures known as framed knots within optical polarization fields.  We further develop a protocol in which the topological properties of framed knots are used in conjunction with prime factorization to encode information.

"The structural features of these objects can be used to specify quantum information processing programs," said study lead author Hugo Larocque, in an interview in Science Daily.  "In a situation where this program would want to be kept secret while disseminating it between various parties, one would need a means of encrypting this 'braid' and later deciphering it.  Our work addresses this issue by proposing to use our optical framed knot as an encryption object for these programs which can later be recovered by the braid extraction method that we also introduced.  For the first time, these complicated 3D structures have been exploited to develop new methods for the distribution of secret cryptographic keys.  Moreover, there is a wide and strong interest in exploiting topological concepts in quantum computation, communication and dissipation-free electronics.  Knots are described by specific topological properties too, which were not considered so far for cryptographic protocols."

A few of the research team's knotted beams of light

I have to admit that even given my B.S. in physics, most of the technical details in this paper went over my head so fast they didn't even ruffle my hair.  And I know that any similarity between optical framed knots and the knots on quipus is superficial at best, but even so, the parallel jumped out at me immediately.  Just as the Incas (probably) used color, knot position and shape, and ply of the string to encode information, these scientists have figured out how to encode information using intensity, phase, wavelength, polarization, and topological form to do the same thing.

Which is pretty amazing.  I know the phrase "reinventing the wheel" is supposed to be a bad thing, but here we have two groups independently (at least, as far as I know) coming up with analogous solutions for the same problem -- how to render information without recourse to ordinary symbology and typography.

Leaving me awestruck, as always, by the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind.

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Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Pieces of the puzzle

I'm curious about where the human drive to solve puzzles comes from.

It's a cool thing, don't get me wrong.  But you have to wonder why it's something so many of us share.  We are driven to know things, even things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose in our lives.   The process is what's compelling; many times, the answer itself is trivial, once you find it.  But still we're pushed onward by an almost physical craving to figure stuff out.

When I taught Critical Thinking, every few weeks I devoted a day to solving divergent thinking puzzles.  My rationale is that puzzle-solving is like mental calisthenics; if you want to grow your muscles, you exercise, and if you want to sharpen your intellect, you make it work.  I told the students at the outset that they were not graded and that I didn't care if they didn't get to all of them by the end of the period.  You'd think that this would be license for high school students to blow it off, to spend the period chatting, but I found that this activity was one of the ones for which I almost never had to work hard to keep them engaged, despite more than once hearing kids saying things like, "This is making my brain hurt."

Here's a sample -- one of the most elegant puzzles I've ever seen:

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters. 

The man says, "The product of their ages is 36." 

The census taker says, "That's not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. The sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street." 

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "That's still not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. My oldest daughter has red hair." 

The census taker says thank you and writes down the ages of the three daughters. 

How old are they?

And yes, I just re-read this, and I didn't leave anything out.  It's solvable from what I've given you.  Give it a try!  (I'll post a solution in a few days.)

This drive to figure things out, even things with no immediate application, reaches its apogee in two fields that are near and dear to me: science and linguistics.  In science, it takes the form of pure research, which, as a scientist friend of mine put it, is "trying to make sense of one cubic centimeter of the universe."  To be sure, a lot of pure research results in applications afterwards, but that's not usually why scientists pursue such knowledge.  The thrill of pursuit, and the satisfaction of knowing, are motivations in and of themselves.

In linguistics, it has to do with deepening our understanding of how humans communicate, with figuring out the connections between different modes of communication, and with deciphering the languages of our ancestors.  It's this last one that spurred me to write this post; just yesterday, I finished re-reading the phenomenal book The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, which is the story of how three people set out, one after the other, to crack the code of Linear B.

Linear B was a writing system used in Crete 4,500 years ago, and for which neither the sound values of the characters, nor the language they encoded, was known.  This is the most difficult possible problem for a linguist; in fact, most of the time, such scripts (of which there are a handful of other examples) remain closed doors permanently.  If you neither know what sounds the letters represent, nor what language was spoken by the people who wrote them, how could you ever decipher it?

One of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos by Arthur Evans [Image licensed under the Creative Commons vintagedept, Clay Tablet inscribed with Linear B script, CC BY 2.0]

I'd known about this amazing triumph of human perseverance and intelligence ever since I read John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B when I was in college.  I was blown away by the difficulty of the task these people undertook, and their doggedness in pursuing the quest to its end.  Chadwick's book is fascinating, but Fox's is a triumph; and you're left with the dual sense of admiration at minds that could pierce such a puzzle, and wonderment at why they felt so driven.

Because once the Linear B scripts were decoded, the tablets and inscriptions turned out to be...

... inventories.  Lists of how many jugs of olive oil and bottles of wine they had, how many arrows and spears, how many horses and cattle and sheep.  No wisdom of the ancients; no gripping sagas of heroes doing heroic things; no new insights into history.

But none of that mattered.  Because of the form that the inscriptions took, Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, and Michael Ventris realized pretty quickly that this was the sort of thing that the Linear B tablets were about.  The scholars who deciphered this mysterious script weren't after a solution because they thought the inscriptions said something profound or worth knowing; they devoted their lives to the puzzle because it was one cubic centimeter of the universe that no one had yet made sense of.

That they succeeded is a testimony to this peculiar drive we have to understand the world around us, even when it seems to fall under the heading of "who cares?"   We need to know, we humans.  Wherever that urge comes from, it becomes an almost physical craving.  All three of the people whose work cracked the code were united by one trait; a desperate desire to figure things out.  Only one, in fact, had a particularly good formal background in linguistics.  The other two were an architect and a wealthy amateur historian and archaeologist.  Training wasn't the issue.  What allowed them to succeed was persistence, and methodical minds that refused to admit that a solution was out of reach.

The story is fascinating, and by turns tragic and inspirational, but by the time I was done reading it I was left with my original question; why are we driven to know stuff that seems to have no practical application whatsoever?  I completely understood how Evans, Kober, and Ventris felt, and in their place I no doubt would have felt the same way, but I'm still at a loss to explain why.  It's one of those mysterious filigrees of the human mind, which perhaps is selected for because curiosity and inquisitiveness have high survival value in the big picture, even if they sometimes push us to spend our lives bringing light to some little dark cul-de-sac of human knowledge that no one outside of the field cares, or will even hear, about.

But as the brilliant geneticist Barbara McClintock, about whom I wrote last week and whose decades-long persistence in solving the mystery of transposable elements ("jumping genes") eventually resulted in a Nobel Prize, put it: "It is a tremendous joy, the whole process of finding the answer.  Just pure joy."

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Humans have always looked up to the skies.  Art from millennia ago record the positions of the stars and planets -- and one-off astronomical events like comets, eclipses, and supernovas.

And our livelihoods were once tied to those observations.  Calendars based on star positions gave the ancient Egyptians the knowledge of when to expect the Nile River to flood, allowing them to prepare to utilize every drop of that precious water in a climate where rain was rare indeed.  When to plant, when to harvest, when to start storing food -- all were directed from above.

As Carl Sagan so evocatively put it, "It is no wonder that our ancestors worshiped the stars.  For we are their children."

In her new book The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, scientist and author Jo Marchant looks at this connection through history, from the time of the Lascaux Cave Paintings to the building of Stonehenge to the medieval attempts to impose a "perfect" mathematics on the movement of heavenly objects to today's cutting edge astronomy and astrophysics.  In a journey through history and prehistory, she tells the very human story of our attempts to comprehend what is happening in the skies over our heads -- and how our mechanized lives today have disconnected us from this deep and fundamental understanding.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Cracking the code

Being a linguistics geek, I've written before on some of the greatest "mystery languages" -- including Linear B (a Cretan script finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris), the still-undeciphered Linear A, and even some recent inventions like the scripts in the Voynich Manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus (neither of which at present has been shown to represent an actual language -- they may just be strings of random symbols).

The obvious difficulty in translating a script when you do not know what language it represents starts (but doesn't come close to ending) with the problem that there are three rough categories into which written languages fall -- phonetic (where each symbol represents a sound, as in English), syllabic (where each symbol represents a syllable, as in the Japanese hiragana), and pictographic (where each symbol represents an idea, as in Chinese).  Even once you know that, deciphering the language is a daunting task.  Some languages (such as English) are usually SVO (subject-verb-object); others (such as Japanese) are SOV (subject-object-verb): a few (such as Gaelic) are VSO (verb-subject-object).  Imagine starting from zero -- knowing nothing about sound-to-character correspondence, nothing about what language is represented, nothing about the preferred word order.

Oh, and then there's the question of whether the language is inflected (words change form depending on how they're used in a sentence, such as Latin, Greek, and Finnish), agglutinative (new words are created by stringing together morphemes, such as Turkish, Tagalog, and Bantu), or isolating (words are largely invariant, and how they're used in the sentence is shown by untranslatable "markers," such as Chinese and Yoruba).

Suffice it to say the whole task is about as close to impossible as you'd like to get, making Kober and Ventris's success that much more astonishing.

A sample of the Linear B script [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Sharon Mollerus, NAMA Linear B tablet of Pylos, CC BY 2.0]

So that's why I was so fascinated by a link sent to me by my buddy Andrew Butters (fellow author and blogger at Potato Chip Math), which describes a new AI software developed at MIT which is tackling -- and solving -- some of these linguistic conundrums.

There's just one hitch; you have to know, or at least guess at, a related language, the theory being that symbols and spellings change more slowly than pronunciation and meaning (which is one reason why English has such bizarre spelling -- consider the sounds made by the "gh" letter combination in ghost, rough, lough, hiccough, and through).  So the AI wouldn't work so well on synthetic languages like the ones in Voynich and the Codex Seraphinianus.

But otherwise, it's impressive.  Developed by Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google's AI lab, the software was trained on sound-letter correspondences in known languages, and then allowed to tackle Linear B.  It looked for patterns such as the ones Kober and Ventris found by brute force -- the commonness of various symbols, their positions in words, their likelihood of occurring adjacent to other symbols -- and then compared that to ancient Greek.

The AI got the right answer 67% of the time.  Which is amazing for a first pass.

A press release from MIT describes the software's technique in more detail:

[T]he process begins by mapping out these relations for a specific language. This requires huge databases of text. A machine then searches this text to see how often each word appears next to every other word. This pattern of appearances is a unique signature that defines the word in a multidimensional parameter space. Indeed, the word can be thought of as a vector within this space. And this vector acts as a powerful constraint on how the word can appear in any translation the machine comes up with. 

These vectors obey some simple mathematical rules. For example: king – man + woman = queen. And a sentence can be thought of as a set of vectors that follow one after the other to form a kind of trajectory through this space. 

The key insight enabling machine translation is that words in different languages occupy the same points in their respective parameter spaces. That makes it possible to map an entire language onto another language with a one-to-one correspondence.

Which is pretty damn cool.  What they're planning on tackling next, I don't know.  After all, there are a great many undeciphered (or poorly understood) scripts out there, so I suspect there are a lot to choose from.  In any case, it's an exciting step toward solving some long standing linguistic mysteries -- and being able to hear the voices of people who have been silent for centuries.

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The subject of Monday's blog post gave me the idea that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation should be a classic -- Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  This book, written back in 1949, is an analysis of the history and biology of the human/canine relationship, and is a must-read for anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a doggy companion.

Given that it's seventy years old, some of the factual information in Man Meets Dog has been superseded by new research -- especially about the genetic relationships between various dog breeds, and between domestic dogs and other canid species in the wild.  But his behavioral analysis is impeccable, and is written in his typical lucid, humorous style, with plenty of anecdotes that other dog lovers will no doubt relate to.  It's a delightful read!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]