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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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.  Some seem to be ideographic, but as you undoubtedly know, many symbols that start out as pictographic end up representing phonetic units, so we can't rely on "it looks like a dog so it means 'dog'."  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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Language machines

If you've ever used Google Translate, you've probably noticed that it can be a little wonky.

Take, for example, the anecdote about the French guy who was wooing an American woman long-distance, and texted to her, "Prends une photo coquine pour moi."  ("Take a naughty picture for me.")  The woman wasn't certain what that meant, so she popped it into Google Translate, and was told it meant, "Take a photo for me, slut."

I think my favorite, though, is some feedback that a company called Koyu Matcha Green Tea received via their website, from a customer in Finland.  When they ran what the customer wrote through a Finnish-to-English Google Translate, it came out as the following:

If it resonated with cold to the bone?  Matcha Latté is guaranteed fireman, green tea with hot steamed milk.  Behold, thou hast already tasted.

Um... thanks?  We think?

The difficulty is that languages are complex entities, full of idioms and peculiarities and exceptions, so trying to find a mechanistic, totally rule-based way to characterize them is somewhere beyond tricky.  But because of the work of a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, we have come one step closer to doing exactly that -- at least for Sanskrit.

About 2,500 years ago, a man named Dakṣiputra Pāṇini living in what is now northwestern Pakistan wrote a work called Aṣṭādhyāyī, which created a set of rules for the morphology -- the way words, prefixes, suffixes, and so on combine -- of the Sanskrit language.  An example of linking together these fragments, called morphemes, in English is the word incomprehensibly -- made up of in- (prefix meaning "not"), comprehend (stem of the word, altered to replace /d/ with /s/), -ible (suffix meaning "capable of"), and -ly (adverbial marker), in that order.

Imagine trying to come up with a list of rules for all the ways morphemes can combine in English, such that the rules only produced well-formed words and not garbled messes like iblecomprehendlyin.

That's what Pāṇini tried to do for Sanskrit.

The problem is that Pāṇini's rules seemed sometimes to lead to self-contradictions.  Given a particular combination of morphemes, there are often two or more rules that apply, so which should you use?  Linguists analyzing the rule-set discovered that Pāṇini had written a "metarule" -- a rule determining how other rules should be applied -- which said that if two rules seem to conflict, the "later rule should take precedence."  Everyone had interpreted this to mean that the one mentioned later in the book was the more important.

But that sometimes led to ungrammatical words.  So something was off, but what?

Enter Cambridge student Rishi Rajpopat, who had been toiling over Pāṇini's rules for months.  Then he had a brainstorm; what if the problem was that the metarule itself had been mistranslated?  He altered the metarule to read that if two rules are in conflict, the one that applies to the latter part of the word (the suffix) takes precedence over the one that applies to the first part of the word (the stem).

With that one change in interpretation, Pāṇini's rule system works to combine morphemes and produces grammatically-correct words almost one hundred percent of the time.

Which, of course, is a cause for much rejoicing amongst both linguists and people who are attempting to create high-quality translation software.

I wonder, though, how any such attempt would fare for English.  English is an amalgam of a Germanic root language, with heavy borrowing from French, Latin, and Spanish, and less-frequent (but still significant) borrowing from Old Norse, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Gaelic, and several Indigenous American languages.  This has introduced spellings, pronunciations, and morphologies that defy easy characterization.

Even some of the simple rules you learned in elementary school can't be applied with anything like real consistency.  "I before e except after c" -- unless your weird foreign neighbor Keith forfeits eight beige sleighs to a feisty caffeinated weightlifter.

You see the difficulty.

So as much as I'm impressed by Rajpopat's accomplishment, I don't think it's going to go very far toward fixing Google Translate's problem.

No matter.  The delight of being told the tea is so good it's "guaranteed fireman" makes up for any potential awkwardness incurred because you accidentally called your girlfriend an unpleasant name while attempting to initiate sexytimes.  You gotta take the good with the bad.

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A door into RNA world

[N.B.: This post is a little on the technical side, if you're not a biology type.  Trust me, the work is worth it, because what these people have discovered is stupendous.]

I had the experience yesterday of stumbling on an article published in Nature this week that, from the title, seemed like something that could only interest biochemistry geeks.

Then I started reading it, and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Before I tell you about the paper, a little background.

Most laypeople know that genes are basically stretches of DNA, and that DNA is a double helix made of chains of smaller molecules called nitrogenous bases, of which there are four -- adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.  (A, T, G, and C for short.)  Because the bases always pair the same way (A to T, C to G), it allows for DNA to replicate itself.

So far, so good.  But how do you get from a gene to a trait?  It took a long time to figure this out, and there's still work being done on how genes switch on and off during development.  But a simplified explanation goes like this:

The first step is that one gene (a piece of DNA) is copied into a similar, but not identical, chemical called RNA.  (This is called transcription.)  RNA is a single helix, so only one side of the DNA gene is copied; the other side only exists so the DNA can be replicated.  Then the RNA goes to a cellular structure called a ribosome, where the base sequence is read in threes (a group of three is a codon), and each trio instructs the ribosome to bring in a specific amino acid.  The amino acids dictated by the codon sequence are linked together into a protein, and those proteins directly generate the trait.  (This is called translation.)  Every trait is basically produced this way, whether it's something simple like skin color, or the interaction between the thousands of genes and proteins that it takes to generate a functioning human heart.

Okay, gene > RNA > protein > trait.  The sequence is so ubiquitous that it's been nicknamed The Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons  , Pre-mRNA-1ysv-tubes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But here's the problem.  When life first began, how did the process get started?

The problem isn't the building blocks; given the conditions that we're virtually certain existed on the early Earth, all of the pieces -- the bases, the sugars that make up the backbone of both DNA and RNA, the amino acids -- form spontaneously and abundantly.  They will even link up to form chains on their own.  It's likely that any Earthlike, water-containing planet has plenty of all the biochemical bits and pieces.

But how do you get from a particular RNA to a particular protein?  Remember, it's the sequence of bases in RNA that determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein, but to read the RNA sequence and assemble those amino acids requires a lot of cellular machinery -- first and foremost the ribosome.

Which is itself made of RNA.

So it seems like the first life had to pull itself up by its own bootlaces.  Put succinctly, to do transcription and translation, you need to have the mechanisms of transcription and translation already in place.

Or at least, that's what I thought until I read this paper.

Enter the team led by Felix Müller of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and their paper "A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA-Peptide World."  Here's how the paper begins, with a couple of parenthetical notes added by me:

A central commonality of all cellular life is the translational process, in which ribosomal RNA catalyses peptide [i.e. protein] formation with the help of transfer RNAs, which function as amino acid carrying adapter molecules.  Comparative genomics suggests that ribosomal translation is one of the oldest evolutionary processes, which dates back to the hypothetical RNA world [the theory that the earliest self-replicating genetic molecules were RNA, not DNA, which is generally accepted in the scientific world].  The questions of how and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.

The immense complexity of ribosomal translation demands a stepwise evolutionary process.  From the perspective of the RNA world, at some point RNA must have gained the ability to instruct and catalyse the synthesis of, initially, just small peptides.  This initiated the transition from a pure RNA world into an RNA–peptide world.  In this RNA–peptide world, both molecular species could have co-evolved to gain increasing ‘translation’ and ‘replication’ efficiency...

We found that non-canonical vestige nucleosides [i.e. unusual bases which are still part of some structures made of RNA, but aren't on the list of the four standard bases], which are key components of contemporary RNAs, are able to equip RNA with the ability to self-decorate with peptides.  This creates chimeric structures, in which both chemical entities can co-evolve in a covalently connected form, generating gradually more and more sophisticated and complex RNA–peptide structures...  We... found that peptides can simultaneously grow at multiple sites on RNA on the basis of rules determined by sequence complementarity, which is the indispensable requirement for efficient peptide growth.

Which is way more dignified than what I'd have written, which is, "Holy shit, we just figured out how gene expression evolved!"

In my AP Biology classes, I ended the unit on evolution with a list of some of the questions that evolutionary theory had not yet solved, and the origins of gene expression and protein synthesis topped the list.  It looks like that one might now be checked off -- which, if my assessment is correct, should put Müller and his team in contention for this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

I find it so fascinating that there are still some of the Big Questions out there, and that scientists are actually making inroads into answering them.  Good science doesn't just say "it's a mystery" and forthwith stop thinking.  We're gradually chipping away at problems that were thought to be intractable -- in this case, giving us insight into how life began on Earth four billion years ago.

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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!]

Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warn my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's pretty solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we didn't all just watch Donald Trump wink at Vladimir Putin and then commit high treason in full view on television, or witness all of the Republicans respond by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog" from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that the US has been renamed the "Amerikan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republik," and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Biblical corn

One of the things I find amusing about people who argue over the meaning of passages in the bible is that so few of them seem to recognize that they're working from a translation.

A few -- very few, in my experience -- people are true biblical scholars, and have worked with the Aramaic and Greek originals (and I use that word with some hesitation, as even those were copies of earlier documents, copied and perhaps translated themselves with uncertain accuracy).  Most everyone else acts as if their favorite English translation is the literal word of god, as if Jesus Christ himself spoke pure, unadulterated 'Murican.

It does give rise to some funny situations.  We have the argument over whether the forbidden fruit that Eve gave Adam was an apple, a fig, or a pomegranate.  We have the claim (Micah 5:2) that the Messiah would be descended from David, and both Matthew and Luke go to great lengths to show that Joseph was a descendant of David (although they disagree on his descent, so they can't both be right) -- and Jesus wasn't Joseph's son in any case.  We have one person who has argued that the creation story was translated wrong, and that god didn't create life, he "separated" humans from everything else, presumably by giving them souls.

We even have some folks who claim -- tongue-in-cheek, of course -- that the line from Leviticus 20 about "if a man lies with another man, they should both be stoned" as biblical support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization simultaneously.

All of which strikes me as funny, because no matter how you slice it, you're still arguing over the meaning of an uncertainly-translated text that has been recopied with uncertain precision an uncertain number of times, and reflects the beliefs of a bunch of Bronze Age sheepherders in any case.  Notwithstanding, you still have people arguing like hell that their translation is the correct, god-approved one, and all of the others are wrong.

And then you have this guy, who takes things a step further, declaring that the translation of one word is correct, and that means that... pretty much everything else we know about the history of the Middle East is wrong.

That word is "corn."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The word occurs 102 times (in the King James Version, at least) -- mostly as a translation of the Semitic root dagan.  The problem, of course, is that corn is a Mesoamerican plant, and did not exist in the Middle East until it was brought over after the exploration of the New World.  It's very easily explained, though; not only did dagan mean "grain" (not, specifically, corn), the word "corn" itself just meant "grain" in early Modern English -- a usage that persists in the word "barleycorn."

But this guy doesn't think so.  He thinks that the use of the word "corn" means... corn.  As in the stuff you eat at picnics in the summer with lots of butter and salt, the stuff cornmeal and popcorn and corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup are made from.  And therefore, he thinks...

... that everything in the bible actually happened here in the Western Hemisphere.

I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

The difficult situation with CORN in the BIBLE is that most people, due to the brainwashing that has been handed down through generations, firmly believe that the Biblical events happened in the Middle East.  After much research I can PROVE that the Middle East has absolutely NOTHING to do with the history, geography, and genealogy of the Holy Scriptures.  Nothing!...  CORN is in the Bible because the PEOPLE, PLACES, and EVENTS of the Biblical narratives were in the AMERICAS!

The "true history" of the events of the bible, he says, have been "hidden for over 500 years."  He has proof, which he will tell us when his book is released, and it's gonna overturn everything you think you know about history.

Oh, yeah, and the Crusades happened over here, too.  Apparently the Crusaders didn't trek to Jerusalem, they were trying to retake Peoria or something.

'Murica!  Yeah!

I'm not making this up, and the guy who wrote it seems entirely serious.  But it does highlight what can happen when you decide that any human-created document is the infallible word of a deity, or even (as I've heard) that god guided the translators and copiers so that it still is inerrant even after the inevitable Game of Telephone that translating and copying usually entails.  Not many people go as far as the Corn Dude does -- but it does bring up the question of whether any translation of the bible is good enough that we should even entertain using it as a guide to behavior or (heaven forfend) science.

So that's our exercise in eye-rolling for today.  Me, I'm done with the topic, so I'm going to go get breakfast.

For some reason, I'm in the mood for cornbread.  Funny thing, that.