Easy as A, B, C

There's an unfortunate but natural tendency for us to assume that because something is done a particular way in the culture we were raised in, that obviously, everyone else must do it the same way.

It's one of the (many) reasons I think travel is absolutely critical.  Not only do you find out that people elsewhere get along just fine doing things differently, it also makes you realize that in the most fundamental ways -- desire for peace, safety, food and shelter, love, and acceptance -- we all have much more in common than you'd think.  As Mark Twain put it, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

One feature of culture that is so familiar that most of the time, we don't even think about it, is how we write.  The Latin alphabet, with a one-sound-one-character correspondence, is only one way of turning spoken language into writing.  Turns out, there are lots of options:

• Pictographic scripts -- where one symbol represents an idea, not a sound.  One example is the Nsibidi script, used by the Igbo people of Nigeria.

• Logographic scripts -- where one symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful component of a word; the word unconventionally, for example, has four morphemes -- un-, convention, -al, and -ly).  Examples include early Egyptian hieroglyphics (later hieroglyphs included phonetic/alphabetic symbols as well), the Cuneiform script of Sumer, the characters used in Chinese languages, and the Japanese kanji.

• Syllabaries -- where one symbol represents a single syllable (whether or not the syllable by itself has any independent meaning).  Examples include the Japanese hiragana script, Cherokee, and Linear B -- the mysterious Bronze-Age script from Crete that was a complete mystery until finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the mid-twentieth century.

• Abjads -- where one symbol represents one sound, but vowels are left out unless they are the first sound in the word.  Examples include Arabic and Hebrew.

• Abugidas -- where each symbol represents a consonant, and the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks (so, a bit like a syllabary melded with an abjad).   Examples include Thai, Tibetan, Bengali, Burmese, Malayalam, and lots of others.

• Alphabets -- one symbol = one sound for both vowels and consonants, such as our own Latin alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, Greek, Mongolian, and many others.

To make things more complicated, scripts (like every other feature of language) evolve over time, and sometimes can shift from one category to another.  There's decent evidence that our own alphabet evolved from a pictographic script.  Here are three examples of pathways letters seem to have taken:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rozemarijn van L, Proto-sinaitic-phoenician-latin-alphabet-2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason the topic comes up is the discovery at Tell Um-el Marra, Syria of incised clay cylinders that date to 2400 B.C.E. and may be the earliest known example of an alphabetic script -- meaning one of the last four in the list, which equate one symbol with one sound or sound cluster (rather than with an idea, morpheme, or entire word).  If the discovery and its interpretation bear up under scrutiny, it would precede the previous record holder, Proto-Sinaitic, by five hundred years.

"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite," said Glenn Schwartz, of Johns Hopkins University, who led the research.  "Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.  And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now...  Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 B.C.E.  But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought."

When you think about it, alphabetic scripts are a brilliant, but odd, innovation.  Drawing a picture, or even a symbol, of an entire concept as a way of keeping track of it -- the head of a cow on a vessel containing milk, for example -- isn't really that much of a stretch.  But who came up with letting symbols represent sounds?  It's a totally different way of representing language.  Not merely the symbols themselves altering, and perhaps becoming simpler or more stylized, but completely divorcing the symbol from the meaning.

No one, for example, links the letter "m" to water any more.  It's simply a symbol-sound correspondence, and nothing more; the symbol itself has become more or less arbitrary.  The level of meaning has been lifted to clusters of symbols.

It's so familiar that we take it for granted, but honestly, it's quite a breathtaking invention.

Scholars are uncertain what the writing on the clay cylinders says; they've yet to be translated, so it may be that this assessment will have to be revisited.  Also uncertain is how it's related to other scripts that developed later in the region, which were largely thought to be derived from Egyptian writing systems.

If this discovery survives peer review, it may be that the whole history of symbolic written language will have to be re-examined.

But that's all part of linguistics itself.  Languages evolve, as does our understanding of them.  Nothing in linguistics is static.  The argument over whether it should be -- the infamous descriptivism vs. prescriptivism fight -- is to me akin to denying the reality of biological evolution.  Our word usages, definitions, and spellings have changed, whether you like it or not; so have the scripts themselves.  Meaning, somehow, still somehow survives, despite the dire consequences the prescriptivists warn about.

It's why the recent tendency for People Of A Certain Age to bemoan the loss of cursive writing instruction in American public schools is honestly (1) kind of funny, and (2) swimming upstream against a powerful current.  Writing systems have been evolving since the beginning, with complicated, difficult to learn, difficult to reproduce, ambiguous, or highly variable systems being altered or eliminated outright.  It's a tough sell, though, amongst people who have been trained all their lives to use that script; witness the fact that Japanese still uses three systems, more or less at the same time -- the logographic kanji and the syllabic hiragana and katakana.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts, now that Japan has become a highly technological society.  My guess is at some point, they'll phase out the cumbersome (although admittedly beautiful) kanji, which require understanding over two thousand symbols to be considered literate.  The Japanese have figured out how to represent kanji on computers, but the syllabic scripts are so much simpler that I suspect they'll eventually win.

I doubt it'll be any time soon, though.  The Japanese are justly proud of their long written tradition, and making a major change in it will likely be met with as much resistance as English spelling reform has been.

In any case, it's fascinating to see how many different solutions humans have found for turning spoken language into written language, and how those scripts have changed over time (and continue to change).  All features of the amazing diversity of humanity, and a further reminder that "we do it this way" isn't the be-all-end-all of culture.

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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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Lost in translation

Being a linguistics geek, I've posted here more than once about odd mysteries in language decipherment that have been tackled in the past, some successfully (the Linear B script of Crete) and some not (the Voynich Manuscript).  So I was pretty tickled to find out about one I'd never heard of before -- the strange inscription found on the beach in Plougastel-Daoulas, a village in Brittany, in northwestern France.

Unlike the two puzzlers I referenced, this one at least has the advantage of being in the Latin alphabet and not in some unfathomable set of characters, for which it's not even known if each symbol stands for a sound, a syllable, or an entire word (or some combination).  So we're starting with a leg up as compared both to Linear B and Voynich.

But that's the only advantage we have.  The language is clearly neither Breton nor French, and the inscription is of uncertain age (although the numbers 1786 and 1787 appear, which could be years -- although I'd hesitate to state that with any assurance).

The inscription is quite worn, but part of it says, "ROC AR B … DRE AR GRIO IS EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL ... RI OBBIIE: BRISBVILAR ... FROIK ... AL..."  Well, "viriones" looks vaguely Latin to me, but isn't an actual word (although "vir" does mean "man," and at a stretch could be some kind of cognate).  "Eveloh" and "baoavel" are kind of Breton-ish, but the same thing; they aren't actual Breton words.

Not exactly a promising start.

The powers-that-be in Plougastel-Daoulas are offering a 2,000 euro prize for a translation.  If you're inclined to give it a shot, you need to submit your decipherment by November 30, and a committee in the village is going to vote on the one they think is the most plausible.  Not really how linguistic analysis is ideally done -- witness all of the wild guesses made in highly authoritative fashions about Linear B, which was said to be a Celtic dialect, Scythian, Anatolian, Etruscan, and a variety of other languages -- when, in fact, it turned out to be archaic Greek.  (Funny, that, given that inscriptions were found in Greece.)

So I'm not sure how much credence I'd put in the winning entry.  Also, the text is quite short, which invalidates two of the most powerful tools for decipherment -- looking at character frequency, and which characters are likely to precede or follow others.  You need a sufficiently large sample size for that kind of statistical measurement to produce significant results -- and my guess is that the Plougastel-Daoulas inscription is simply too short.

But I encourage anyone interested to try.  After all, Michael Ventris, who with Alice Kober deciphered Linear B, was essentially an amateur linguist -- his day job was architecture.  So a passionate amateur may well have as good a chance as a professor of linguistics.

It's natural to wonder what someone would find important enough to engrave into a rock, and with luck and diligence we'll find out.  Maybe it'll be something fascinating, giving us a lens into the world of the past.  Or maybe -- to quote the Cardassian captain Gul Ocett in the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" -- "It could just turn out to be a recipe for biscuits."

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

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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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]