The last whisper

The last two posts have been about biological extinction; today's, to continue in the same elegiac tone, is about language extinction.

A study in Ethnologue found that of the Earth's current seven-thousand-odd languages, 3,143 -- around forty-four percent -- are in danger of going extinct.  Languages become endangered from a number of factors; when children are not taught as their first language, when there's government suppression, or when a different language has become the primary means of communication, governance, and commerce.  

Of course, all three of those frequently happen at the same time.  The indigenous languages of North and South America and Australia, for example, have proven particularly susceptible to these forces.  In all three places, English, Spanish, and Portuguese have superseded hundreds of languages, and huge swaths of cultural knowledge have been lost in the process.

In almost all cases, there's no fanfare when a language dies.  They dwindle, communication networks unravel, the average age of native speakers moves steadily upward.  Languages become functionally extinct when only a few people are fluent, and at that point even those last holdouts are already communicating in a different language with all but their immediate families.  When those final few speakers die, the language is gone -- often without ever having been studied adequately by linguists.

Sometimes, however, we can pinpoint fairly closely when a language died.  Curiously, this is the case with Ancient Egyptian.  This extinct language experienced a resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth century, due to two things -- the British and French occupations of Egypt, which resulted in bringing to Europe hundreds of priceless Egyptian artifacts (causing "Egyptomania" amongst the wealthy), and the stunning decipherment of hieroglyphics and Demotic by the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion.

For a millennium and a half prior to that, though, Ancient Egyptian was a dead language.  And as weird as it sounds, we know not only the exact date of its rebirth, but the date it took its last breath.  Champollion shouted "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've figured it out!") to his brother on 14 September 1822.  

And the last inscription was made by the last known literate native speaker of Ancient Egyptian on 24 August 394 C.E.

It's called the "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom," and was carved on the wall of a temple in Philae.  It shows the falcon-god Mandulis, who was a fairly recent invention at the time, and like the Rosetta Stone, it has an inscription in hieroglyphics and Demotic:

A drawing of the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom. The hieroglyphic inscription is in the upper right, the Demotic in the lower right. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mickey Mystique, Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, drawing, 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The text reads:

Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Esmet-Akhom, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity.  Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god.

I, Esmet-Akhom, the Scribe of the House of Writings(?) of Isis, son of Nesmeterpanakhet the Second Priest of Isis, and his mother Eseweret, I performed work on this figure of Mandulis for all time, because he is fair of face towards me.  Today, the Birthday of Osiris, his dedication feast, year 110.

[Nota bene: The "year 110" is not, of course, by the Julian calendar; in Egypt, governmental records were dated using the number of years since the accession of the Roman emperor Diocletian in 284 C.E.  The "Birthday of Osiris" is what we now call the 24th of August.]

At this point, Greek and Latin had already superseded Egyptian in written records, so Esmet-Akhom was the last of a dying breed.  Ancient Egyptian lingered on for a while as a spoken language amongst the working classes; liturgical Coptic is a direct descendant.  But any final vestiges of Egyptian as a living language were eradicated in the seventh century when the Graeco-Roman state of Egypt fell to the Arabs.

So it may well be that the priests of Esmet-Akhom's family were the last people capable of reading and writing Egyptian, at least until Champollion came along.

I know change is the way of things, and given the interconnectedness of the world today, that widely-spoken languages will inevitably gain more and more of an edge over minority languages.  (Consider that a full forty percent of the Earth's people speak one of eight languages -- Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian.)  But still, I can't help but find the loss of linguistic diversity, and the cultural information those dead languages once encoded, to be sad.

And you have to wonder how Esmet-Akhom himself felt, writing his defiantly confident inscription "for all time and eternity" at the end of the fourth century.  Did he know that Egyptian was, even at that point, moribund?  A means of communication that had existed for over four thousand years was on the road to extinction; what was left was only a whisper, and even that would soon be silenced.

Has to make you wonder what linguistic shifts will occur in the next thousand years.

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Ancient Egyptian helicopters

I find it amusing to note how often woo-woo headlines are phrased as questions, e.g. "Did Aliens Build Stonehenge?"  "Does A Plesiosaur Live In The Hudson River?"  "Is Graceland Haunted By Elvis's Ghost?"

I live in constant hope that one day, I'll open one of these articles, and the entire article will consist of one word: "NO."  It hasn't happened yet, but it's this sort of cheery thought that keeps me going.

I thought for sure that would be the case this morning, when I took a look at an article entitled "Mysteries of Abydos: Egyptian Flying Machines?"  The article that followed (1) did not say "NO" anywhere, and (2) sadly, was serious, featuring the following photograph, a close-up of a panel from the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt:

There then follows some fairly hysterical (in every sense of the word) descriptions about how the Ancient Egyptians apparently spent a great deal of time zooming about in helicopters, because there is clearly one depicted here.  There is, according to the author, also a submarine and a Back to the Future-style hoverboard shown on the panel, as well as several other "futuristic craft."

Now, at first I was optimistically certain that this had to be an isolated phenomenon; no one, with the exception of the author of the article, could possibly take this seriously.  Sadly, I was mistaken.  I did a bit of research, and was appalled to find that this panel is one of the main pieces of "evidence" used by the von Däniken Descent Of The Gods cadre to support their conjecture that the Earth was the alien version of Grand Central Station three thousand years ago.  Amongst the ancient-aliens crowd, the Abydos helicopter is apparently hugely popular, not to mention amongst those who think that Stargate is a historical documentary.

Which may well be the same people.

The interesting thing is that the whole thing was adequately explained years ago; a French UFO aficionado named Thierry Wathelet took the time to query some Egyptologists about the panel, and put together a nice explanation.  Several of the Egyptologists, evidently fed up with all of the nonsense that has grown up around Egyptian archaeology, told Wathelet to piss off, but a few of them were kind enough to give him detailed information about how the panel had been created, and what it meant.  The simple answer: the apparent helicopter is a palimpsest -- a place where a written text was effaced or altered to make room for new writing.  The "helicopter" is a combination of (at least) two hieroglyphs, and the fact that it looks a bit like an aircraft a complete coincidence.  Wathelet quotes an email he received from Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama:

It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II.  With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence.   Well, hallelujah, and kudos to Wathelet for putting the whole thing together, and on a UFO site, no less.  Now, if a UFOologist can summon up this kind of skeptical facility, it shouldn't be that hard for the rest of us, right?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be "no," and I base this on the fact that my perusal of the first few pages of the 787,000 hits I got from Googling "Abydos helicopter" seemed to be mostly in favor of the theory that the ancient Egyptians spent a good bit of their time sightseeing from the air.  So I guess my search will have to continue for an article whose headline asks a question, and the article itself just says, "No" (or even better, "What are you, a moron?  Stop fucking around on the internet and go learn some critical thinking skills.").  Until then, at least one more ridiculous woo-woo theory has been laid to rest -- at least for the seeming minority of folks who take the time to evaluate the evidence skeptically and scientifically.

Vietnamese mystery rocks, and the fear of admitting ignorance

Yesterday I ran across a story that is mostly remarkable because of the last paragraph.

Entitled "Odd Rock Covered in Unidentified Hieroglyphics Rumored to Cast Spells," the article was written by Dana Newkirk, and appeared in an online compendium of "Forteana" called Who Forted?  (The "Fort" references, for those of you unfamiliar with this peculiar little slice of Americana, come from Charles Fort, an iconic figure in the investigation of the paranormal and "anomalous phenomena" in the early 20th century.)

Anyhow, the story starts off in an ordinary fashion, for this sort of thing.  We hear about a large rock in Vietnam, covered with carvings, that was donated to the Thuong Temple in Phu Tho in 2009.  Of course, as you might expect, it isn't the anthropological or linguistic significance of the artifact that is the point of interest here; there's got to be something weird going on with said rock, and in short order we find out that the residents of Phu Tho think the rock has "the ability to cast a strange enchantment," and are staying away from the temple because they're afraid of it.

As far as what the carvings mean -- or even how old they are -- that's unknown.  "Unfortunately not much else is known about the strange rock or the ancient symbols covering its entire surface," Newkirk writes.  "Currently the province is compiling a scientific committee with the intention of studying the strange rock with the hopes of finding some answers regarding where it came from and what the strange markings might mean."

Okay.  So far, we've got a mystery rock and some superstitious people in a remote country.  Neither one is a rare commodity, and would certainly not warrant a mention by themselves.  But here's how Newkirk wraps up her article:

So, what the heck is it? A star map? Some kind of tool? Or is it just some really bored guy [sic] a few hundred years ago? We want to know what you think! Share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page, tweet us @WhoForted, or leave a comment below!

I'm pretty sure she meant "was it really just made by some bored guy a few hundred years ago," not that the rock itself was a fossilized person, but even that's not the point.  When I read the last paragraph, my immediate response was, "Why on earth is what I think even remotely relevant?"  I know nothing whatsoever about the "odd rock" except what Newkirk just told me; I can't find any mention of it anywhere except in Who Forted?  I know zilch about Southeast Asian archaeology, history, and linguistics.  My opinion on this topic would be completely worthless.

And yet, I'm sure that Newkirk will be inundated with opinions from ignorant individuals like myself.  Because -- and I have the sense that this problem is especially bad here in the United States -- everyone thinks it's their god-given right to have an opinion about everything, and to trumpet that opinion from the rooftops, regardless of how little in the way of facts they might know about the issue at hand.

I find this whole thing intensely irritating, because I run into it almost on a daily basis.  For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend, "What do you think the federal government should do about the sequester?"  I responded, "I have no idea.  I don't know nearly enough about economics or politics to weigh in."  My friend frowned and laughed at the same time and said, "Come on.  You must have some kind of opinion."

No, actually I don't.  And if I did, it wouldn't mean anything.  I'm pretty aware of the topics about which I am ignorant, and I try my hardest not to pretend I'm well-informed about them; and I don't have any particular problem with saying, even to my students, "I don't know the answer to that."  (In my classes, I usually follow it up with, "... but I'll look into it and see if I can find an answer for you.")  But I find that a lot of people are acutely uncomfortable with admitting ignorance, and feel the need to have an opinion on topics for which they should simply withhold judgment until they actually know what they're talking about.

I wonder if perhaps this is one of the negative outcomes of living in a representative democracy.  We have a "one person, one vote" system, in which my vote and the vote of the greatest genius in the country have exactly the same weight and the same effect on the outcome.  (Which, honestly, I am all in favor of.)  But this has the untoward consequence of giving people the impression that because every person's vote is worth the same amount, everyone's opinion is worth the same amount.  Which it clearly is not.  To make it even more obvious: if I were to talk to Stephen Hawking, and I were to say, "Professor Hawking, let me tell you what my views are on quantum physics," he would not be obliged to listen to me, and in fact would be well within his rights to tell me to piss off.  Democracy is a lovely model for governance,  but makes no sense at all when it comes to ideas.

Unfortunately, this whole thing pervades our thought processes all the way to the top, and is why we have people like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Representative Paul Broun of Georgia blathering on about how evolution is "unproven" and "controversial," even though from their comments it's pretty evident that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about.  And I find this especially appalling given that both men have reasonably decent science backgrounds -- Jindal has a B.S. in biology from Brown University, and Broun a medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia, so they should both know better.  Despite that, in the stories I linked (which you should definitely check out), Jindal says that creationism should be taught in public schools because we want kids exposed to "the best facts" and "the best science."  Broun was even more blunt, calling evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell."

Can anyone tell me why either of these men's opinions is in the least relevant, when they evidently have no knowledge about the topic upon which they are expounding?

So no, I won't tell you my opinion about the sequester, or about the Vietnamese mystery rock.  It wouldn't mean anything if I did.  And I might be prone to a lot of mistakes, but bloviating on a subject about which I am ignorant is one I try my best to avoid.

This always reminds me of the wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov, which seems a fitting way to end this post: