Twists and turns

A recommendation to anyone who wants to completely revolutionize the scientific world: learn some damn science first.

It's why I get so completely fed up by people like Deepak Chopra, who blather on about "quantum frequencies" when I doubt he could give an accurate definition of either word.  Look, I get that physics is hard; I majored in physics, for fuck's sake.  Okay, I wasn't very good at it, but at least I came away with (1) a great deal of respect for the people who are smart enough to truly understand it, and (2) a determination not to pretend I'm an expert when I'm not.

But this isn't the perspective that a great many people have, to judge by the success of Chopra's books, which include -- I shit you not -- Quantum Healing and Quantum Body.

But I'm not here to rail about Deepak Chopra, who in any case has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  No, today's rant comes to you courtesy of a long-time loyal reader who asked me if I'd ever heard of "torsion field theory" and if so, what I thought about it.

My first thought was that any kind of field theory was going to involve mathematics on a level that would lose me after the first paragraph, so (Cf. my statement in paragraph two above) whatever opinion I had of it wouldn't be worth much.  But I'm nothing if not dedicated to my readers, so I said I'd look into it.

And... holy Moses.

Torsion field theory was born of some research (using the term loosely) in the 1980s by two Russian scientists (using that term loosely as well), Anatoly Akimov and Gennady Shipov.  The basic idea was that a particle's spin configuration causes it to give off "emanations" that allow for the transfer of information faster than the speed of light.

If you're thinking, "Wait... but... Einstein said...?", you're not the only one.  In 1991, physicist Yevgeny Aleksandrov exposed them as frauds, and called the grants they'd received from the Russian government to support their work "embezzlement."

Anyone who's saying, "Okay, well, that was that, then," obviously doesn't understand how persistent the purveyors of pseudoscience can be.  Akimov and Shipov portrayed Aleksandrov's attacks as coming from a hidebound scientific establishment that couldn't handle being challenged -- and also wanted to keep all the grant money for itself.  (Similar to all of the alt-med proponents complaining about being suppressed by "Big Pharma.")  They fought back -- and won, receiving grants from the Russian government throughout the 1990s, and ultimately founding "The International Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics" to continue doing their thing.  (Thus showing that having a fancy-sounding name for your "institute" doesn't mean that you're doing actual science.)

Not a single thing they did -- not one -- ever generated a paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal.  Despite this, "torsion field theory" is still being talked about as a "revolution in physics" (and its proponents still claim the physics community is suppressing it), and it has been used to explain -- once again, I feel obliged to mention that I am not making this up -- such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and levitation.  It's said to be the basis of homeopathic "remedies," perpetual motion machines, stargates, and UFO propulsion systems.

Did you notice a commonality between every one of the things I just listed?

Yeah, me too.

Here's the problem.  This is not how science works.  Proposing a "theory" that flies in the face of not one, but two of the most thoroughly tested models in physics (the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics), based upon exactly zero evidence, and then using that "theory" to explain a bunch of phenomena that to the best of our current knowledge, don't exist, isn't science.  It's self-delusion at best, and outright fraud at worst.  And it doesn't improve things when you name it by swiping some actual terms from physics (torsion means a twisting force; a field is a distribution of values of a quantity in space).

A diagram of the torsion tensor. Like, you know, actual science [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Circle development with torsion, CC BY-SA 4.0]

No, science isn't perfect.  But it does have one enormously important thing going for it -- it self-corrects.  And scientists, far from being the sticks-in-the-mud the pseudoscientific community would like you to believe, are always on the lookout for the places it's not working, because identifying and correcting those places is how careers are made.  If there really was some mysterious twisty-turny field generated by quantum spin that could generate faster-than-light information transfer, the physicists would be clambering over each other to get their papers published first.

That'd be Nobel Prize material, right there.

So many thanks to the reader who suggested I research "torsion field theory."  I now have many dents in my forehead from all the faceplants I did.  If you find any other revolutionary developments in physics that for some reason no actual physicists are working on, though, I'd rather not know about them.

Maybe you should just send them directly to Deepak Chopra.

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The dying of the light

In July of 2004, my father died.  I was at his bedside in Our Lady of Lourdes General Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana when it happened.  He'd  been declining for a while -- his once razor-sharp mental faculties slipping into a vague cloudiness, his gait slowing and becoming halting and cautious, his former rapier wit completely gone.  The most heartbreaking thing was his own awareness of what he had lost and would continue to lose.  It looked like a slow slide into debility.

Then, in June, he had what the doctors described as a mini-stroke.  Afterward, he was still fairly lucid, but was having trouble walking.  It had long been his deepest fear (one I share) that he'd become completely dependent on others for his care, and it was obvious to us (and probably to him as well) that this was the direction things were going.

What happened next was described in three words by my mother: "He gave up."

Despite the fact that the doctors could find no obvious direct cause of it, his systems one by one started to shut down.  Three weeks after the mini-stroke and fall that precipitated his admission into the hospital, he died at age 83.

I had never been with someone as they died before (and haven't since).  I was out of state when my beloved grandma died in 1986; and when my mother died, eight months after my father, it was so sudden I didn't have time to get there.  But I was by my father's side as his breathing slowed and finally stopped.  The event itself wasn't at all dramatic; the transition between life and death was subtle, gentle, and peaceful.  However wrenching it was on my mother and me, for him there seemed to be hardly a boundary between "here" and "not here."

Of course, I'm judging that from the outside.  No one knows -- no one can know -- what the experience was like for him.  It's funny, really; death is one of the experiences that unites us as human, and one which we all will ultimately share, but none of us knows what it actually is.

Noël LeMire, La Mort et le Mourant (ca. 1770) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A study in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, though, may be the first clue as to what the experience is like.  An 87-year-old Canadian epilepsy patient was set up for an electroencephalogram to try and get a picture of what was causing his seizures, when he unexpectedly had a severe heart attack.  The man was under a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, so when his heart stopped beating, they let him die...

... but he was still hooked up to the EEG.

This gave his doctors our first glimpse into what is happening in the brain of someone as they die.  And they found a sudden increase in activity in the parts of the brain involved in memory, recall, and dreaming -- which lasted for thirty seconds after his heart stopped, then gradually faded.

"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," said Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon who was the study's lead author.  "As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times.  It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members.  Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives."

Which is a pleasant thought.  Many of us -- even, for some reason, the devoutly religious, who you'd think would be positively eager for the experience -- are afraid of death.  Me, I'm not looking forward to it; I rather like being alive, and as a de facto atheist I have no particular expectation that there'll be anything afterwards.  Being with my father as he died did, however, have the effect of making me less afraid of death.  The usual lead-up, with its frequent pain and debility and illness, is still deeply terrifying to me, but crossing the boundary itself seemed fairly peaceful.

And the idea that our brains give us one last go-through of our pleasant memories is kind of nice.  I know that this single patient's EEG is hardly conclusive -- and it's unlikely there'll be many other people hooked up to a brain scanner as they die -- but it does give some comfort that perhaps, this experience we will all share someday isn't as awful as we might fear.

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The family tree of folk tales

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was a fantastic collection of Japanese folk tales called The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories.  They had been collected in the 1950s by an American, I. G. Edmonds, and through the wonders of the Scholastic Book Club became available for schoolchildren like myself.

The stories center on the wise and humorous character of Ōoka Tadasuke, who was a real person -- he lived from 1677 to 1752 in Yedo (now Tokyo), and was an acclaimed and popular magistrate who got a well-deserved reputation not only for his fairness and concern for the plight of the poor, but for coming up with brilliant solutions for difficult cases.  In the first one, "The Case of the Stolen Smell," a miserly and nasty-tempered tempura shop owner claims that a poor student living above his shop is deliberately waiting until he fries his fish, so the aroma will make the student's bowl of rice (all he can afford) taste better -- and the merchant demands compensation for all the smells the student has stolen.

Judge Ōoka hears the complaint, then orders the student to get together all the coins he has, and it looks like the poor young man is in trouble, but then the judge orders the student to pour the pile of coins from one hand to the other, and declares the fine paid.  The tempura shop owner, of course, objects that he hasn't been paid anything.

"I have decided that the payment for the smell of food is the sound of money," Ōoka says, with a bland smile.  "Justice, as always, has prevailed in my court."

The whole collection is an absolute delight.  Several of them -- notably "The Case of the Terrible-Tempered Tradesman" and "The Case of the Halved Horse" -- are laugh-out-loud funny. And in fact, I still own my much-loved and rather worn copy.

A woodcut portrait of the wise Judge Ōoka Tadasuke [Image is in the Public Domain]

Humans have been telling stories for a very, very long time.  And of course, as a novelist, the topic is near and dear to my heart.  Stories can be uplifting, cathartic, funny, shocking, heartbreaking, edifying, instructive, and surprising -- allowing us to access and express our strongest emotions, creating a deep bond between the storyteller and the listener (or reader).

How long have we been telling our invented tales, though?  The tales of the wisdom of Judge Ōoka are about three hundred years old; of course, we have far older ones, from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which was first written down in the twelfth century C.E. but probably dates in oral tradition to a millennium earlier, to the Greek and Roman myths, back to what is probably the oldest written mythological story we still have a copy of -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to around the eighteenth century B.C.E.  But how much farther back in time does the storytelling tradition go?  And how could we be at all sure?

A new study by Sara Graça da Silva (of the New University of Lisbon) and Jamshid Tehrani (of Durham University) has taken a shot at figuring that out.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Tehrani's name; he was responsible for the delightful study of the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" that amounted to using cladistic bootstrap analysis to determine which were related to which.  Now, da Silva and Tehrani have gone one step further -- employing another technique swiped from evolutionary genetics to analyze folk tales and determine how old the most recent ancestor of the various versions actually is.

There's a technique used by taxonomists and evolutionary biologists called a molecular clock -- a sequence of DNA, some version of which is shared by two or more species, and which undergoes mutations at a known rate.  The number of differences in that sequence between two species then becomes an indication of how long ago they had a common ancestor; the more differences, the longer ago that common ancestor lived.

De Silva and Tehrani used the same approach, but instead of looking for commonalities in actual DNA sequences, they looked at what amounts to the DNA of a story -- the characters, themes, and motifs that make it stand out.  As with Tehrani's earlier study of "Little Red Riding Hood," they found that many folk tales have related versions in other cultures that make it possible to do this kind of comparative phylogenetics.  And some of them seem to go back a very long way -- notably "Jack and the Beanstalk," their analysis of which found common ancestry with other versions dating back to the Bronze Age.

In one way, it's astonishing that this is possible, but in another, it shouldn't be surprising.  The oral tradition of storytelling is common to just about every culture in the world.  I remember my maternal uncle telling us kids creepy stories in French about the loup-garou and feu follet and les lutins that scared the absolute hell out of us (and we loved every minute of it).  That cultural inheritance has very deep roots -- and as da Silva and Tehrani showed, those roots show through in versions of stories we still tell today.

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The ghost of Greyfriars

I've been asked a number of times why I disbelieve in such phenomena as ghosts, and my answer is always the same: I don't.  I have no strong evidence that they exist, which is not the same thing.  Presented with scientifically admissible evidence, I'd have no choice but to admit that, in fact, I do believe in spooks.

So on this count -- like with most other fringe-y beliefs -- I'm able to have my mind changed.  But -- to borrow a phrase from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson -- "I need more than 'you saw it.'"

And that's the difficulty I have with just about every ghost story I've ever heard.  Take, for example, the spot that is often called "the most haunted place in Scotland" -- Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.

Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carlos Delgado, Greyfriars Kirkyard - 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unsurprising that the place is claimed to have ghosts; it's been used as a cemetery since the time of Mary Queen of Scots.  But it didn't really get an evil reputation until the horrible "Killing Time," when beginning in 1679 and lasting nine years, the Scottish Covenanters got into a dispute with King Charles II over whether the Presbyterian Church would be the sole form of religion in Scotland.  (It's always been astonishing to me how often people were killed in Europe, and in the places the Europeans colonized, over disputes that boil down to "my Jesus is better than your Jesus.")  In the end, of course, Charles's side won, and hundreds of Covenanters were transported, imprisoned, or even executed as traitors to the crown.  And things only got worse when Charles's brother James II succeeded to the throne -- James was (to put not too fine a point on it) a narrow-minded, humorless religious fanatic, who (as a Roman Catholic) was even more against the Covenanters than his brother was.

However, the name most often associated with the Killing Time is one George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, nicknamed "Bluidy Mackenzie" by the Covenanters, who despised him because of his siding with the King and for his role in the persecutions that followed.  It's likely Mackenzie saw himself as having no choice, and that he was simply doing what the King ordered him to do -- but, from the Covenanters' perspective, that was a mighty fine excuse for the horrors that followed, which included people being crowded into unheated, stone-floored jails in midwinter with only four ounces of food a day to sustain them.  The worst spot was the official Covenanters' Prison, conveniently (considering how many of them died) located right next to Greyfriars Kirkyard.

In any case, the persecutions eventually ended with the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when James II was deposed and his daughter, Mary II, and her Dutch husband William of Orange, were put on the throne.  The Presbyterians were given their religious freedom, the surviving Covenanters (there weren't many) freed, and everything more or less went back to normal.  Mackenzie only lived three more years, dying in 1691 at the age of 55, and was buried with honors...

... in Greyfriars Kirkyard, within a stone's throw of the old Covenanters' Prison.

Which these days is called rubbing salt in a wound.

It wasn't long before the horrors that had happened gave rise to claims that Mackenzie's spirit was haunting the place.  By the nineteenth century, it was so established as a haunted spot that Robert Louis Stevenson commented upon it (and Mackenzie), "When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly, sometime or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave...  Foolhardy urchins [thought it] a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advocate’s Mausoleum and challenge him to appear. 'Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye dar!'"

This legend has persisted to today, where Greyfriars figures prominently on Edinburgh ghost tours.  But here's where the problem comes up.  It's haunted by an evil presence, they claim, which one site says "is attracted to and feeds on fear;" another says the vengeful spirit has "knocked more than fifty people [on ghost tours] unconscious" and has scratched or bruised others, including an eleven-year-old boy who was given a black eye.

And my question is: if there's such an embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence that the ghost of Greyfriars is real, how has this not been verified scientifically?

If people are being beaten up right and left by a ghost, it seems like it'd be simple to set things up so that there'd be some kind of evidence other than saying after the fact, "I'm sure I didn't have these scratches when I came in here."  Now, mind you, I'm not accusing anyone of lying.  But it certainly does seems suspicious that if so many people are having these experiences, no one has conducted a scientifically-admissible investigation of the place.

If they have, I haven't found anything about it.  Plenty of anecdotes, nothing in the way of proof of the claims.

So, to return to my original point -- I'm convincible.  But don't @ me with more "my grandma's Cousin Ethel went there and an invisible hand touched the back of her neck!"  I'm very sorry grandma's Cousin Ethel got scared, but that's hardly to the point as far as science goes.

In any case, you can bet that the next time I'm in Scotland, Greyfriars Kirkyard will be high on the list of must-sees.  And I hereby invite the ghost himself to change my mind.  I would consider a black eye from a poltergeist a badge of honor, and after all, as a skeptic it's no more than I deserve.

Bluidy Mackenzie, do your worst.

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Biggest and brightest

If you're the kind of person who likes having your mind blown by superlatives, astrophysics is the science for you.

I ran into two really good examples of that last week.  In the first, a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, from research led by astrophysicist Ruth Daly of Pennsylvania State University, found that the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- Sagittarius A* -- is spinning so fast it's actually warping the fabric of space time around it, flattening it into the shape of a football.

The "no-hair theorem" of the physics of black holes states that they are rather simple beasts.  They can be completely characterized using only three parameters: their mass, charge, and angular momentum.  The name comes from the quip by physicist John Archibald Wheeler that "black holes have no hair," by which he meant that there are no other adornments you need to describe to get a full picture of what they're doing.  However, I've always been puzzled by what exactly it means to say that a black hole has angular momentum; objects with mass and spin, such as a twirling top or the rotating Earth, have angular momentum, but since the mass in a black hole has (at least as far as we understand them) collapsed into a singularity, what exactly is spinning, and how could you tell?

Last week's paper at least answers the second half of the question.  Using data from x-ray and radio wave collimation and material outflow from Sagittarius A*, astrophysicists can determine how much spacetime is being deformed by the angular momentum of the black hole, and from that determine its rate of spin.

And it's spinning fast -- an estimated sixty percent of the maximum possible rate, which is set by the universal speed limit that matter can't travel at or faster than the speed of light.  The deformation is so great that the fabric of spacetime is compressed along the spin axis, so it appears spherical from above but flattened from the side.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The second piece of research comes from a study at the European Southern Observatory, and was published in Nature Astronomy.  It looks at the recent discovery of the brightest object known, a quasar (an active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole) that -- get ready for the superlatives -- is five hundred trillion times more luminous than the Sun, contains a black hole that has seventeen billion times the mass of the Sun, and is consuming one Sun's worth of mass a day.  This object, given the unassuming name of J0529-4351, is twelve billion light years away, making it also one of the most distant objects ever studied.

"All this light comes from a hot accretion disk that measures seven light-years in diameter -- this must be the largest accretion disk in the Universe," said study co-author Samuel Lai, of Australian National University.  If he sounds a little blown away by this -- well, so are we all.  A seven-light-year accretion disk means that if it were placed where the Sun is, not only would its accretion disk engulf the entire Solar System, it would extend outward past the five nearest stars -- the triple-star system of Alpha/Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, and Luhman 16.

I don't know about you, but something on that scale boggles my mind.

And that's not a bad thing, really.  I think we need to be reminded periodically that in the grand scheme of things, the problems we lose so much sleep over down here are pretty minuscule.  Also, it's good to have our brains overwhelmed by the grandeur of the universe we live in, to be able to look up into the night sky and think, "Wow.  How fortunate I am to be able to witness -- and in some small way, understand -- such wonders."

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Hand-in-glove

One of the more fascinating bits of biochemistry is the odd "handedness" (technically called chirality) that a lot of biological molecules have.  Chiral molecules come in a left-handed (sinistral) and a right-handed (dextral) form that are made of exactly the same parts but put together in such a way that they're mirror-images of each other, just like a left-handed and right-handed glove.

Where it gets really interesting is that although the left-handed and right-handed forms of biologically active molecules have nearly identical properties, they aren't equivalent in function within living cells.  Nearly all naturally-occurring sugars are right-handed (that's where the name dextrose comes from); amino acids, on the other hand, are all left-handed (which is why amino acid supplements often have an "l-" in front of the name -- l-glutamate, l-tryptophan, and so on).  Having evolved with this kind of specificity has the result that if you were fed a mirror-image diet -- left-handed glucose, for example, and proteins made of right-handed amino acids -- you wouldn't be able to tell anything apart by its smell or taste, but you would proceed to starve to death because your cells would not be able to metabolize molecules with the wrong chirality.

Chirality in amino acids [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Molecular chirality was used to brilliant effect by the wonderful murder mystery author Dorothy Sayers in her novel The Documents in the Case.  In the story, a man dies after eating a serving of mushrooms he'd picked.  His friends and family are stunned; he'd been a wild mushroom enthusiast for decades, and the fatal mistake he apparently made -- including a deadly ivory funnel mushroom (Clitocybe dealbata) in with a pan full of other edible kinds -- was something they believed he never would have done.

The toxic substance in ivory funnels, the alkaloid muscarine, is -- like many organic compounds -- chiral.  Naturally-occurring muscarine is all left-handed.  However, when it's synthesized artificially in the lab, you end up with a mixture of right- and left-handed molecules, in about equal numbers.  So when the contention is made that the victim hadn't mistakenly included a poisonous mushroom in with the edible ones, but had been deliberately poisoned by someone who'd added the chemical to his food, the investigators realize this is the key to solving the riddle of the man's death.

Chiral molecules have another odd property; if you shine a beam of polarized light through a crystal, right-handed ones rotate the polarization angle of the beam clockwise, and left-handed ones counterclockwise.  So when an extract from the victim's digestive tract is analyzed, and a polarized light beam shined through it splits in two -- part of the beam rotated clockwise, the other part counterclockwise -- there's no doubt he was poisoned by synthetic (mixed-chiral) muscarine, not by mistakenly eating a poisonous mushroom that would only have contained the left-handed form.

So specific chirality is ubiquitous in the natural world.  We have a particular handedness, all the way down to the molecular level.  What's a little puzzling, however, is why this tendency occurs.  Not chirality per se; that merely arises from the fact that if you bond four different atoms or groups around a central carbon atom, there are two ways you can do it, and they result in molecules that are mirror images of each other (as shown in the image above).  But why do living things all exhibit a preference for a certain handedness?  It must have evolved extremely early, because virtually all living things share the same preferences.  But what got this bias started -- especially given that left-handed and right-handed molecules are equally easy to make abiotically, and have nearly identical physical and chemical properties?

Well, a paper this week in the journal Advanced Materials may have just answered this long-standing question.  A group led by Karl-Heinz Ernst, at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, found that the selection for a particular handedness happened because of the interplay between the electromagnetic fields of metallic surfaces with the spin configuration of chiral molecules.

They created surfaces coated with patches of a thin layer of a magnetic metal, such as iron or cobalt, and analyzed the magnetic "islands" to determine the direction of orientation of the magnetic field of each.  They then took a solution of a chiral molecule called helicene, which had equal numbers of right and left-handed forms, and poured it over the surface.  The hypothesis was that the opposite patterns of spin of the electrons in the two different forms of helicene would allow them to bond only to a magnetic patch with a specific orientation. 

So after introducing the mixed helicene to the metal surfaces, they looked to see where the molecules adhered.

Sure enough -- depending on the direction of the magnetic field, one or the other form of helicene stuck to the metal surface.  The magnetic field was acting as a selecting agent on the spin, picking out the handedness that was compatible with the orientation of the patch.

This, of course, is only a preliminary study of a single chiral molecule in a very artificial setting.  However, it does for the first time provide a mechanism by which selective chirality could have originated.  "In certain surface-catalyzed chemical reactions," Ernst explained, "such as those that could have taken place in the chemical 'primordial soup' on the early Earth, a certain combination of electric and magnetic fields could have led to a steady accumulation of one form or another of the various biomolecules -- and thus ultimately to the handedness of life."

So a simple experiment (simple to explain, not to perform!) has taken the first step toward settling a question that chemistry Nobel laureate Vladimir Prelog called "one of the first questions of molecular theology" back in 1975.  It shows that science has the capacity for reaching back and explaining the earliest origins of biochemistry -- and how life as we know it came about.

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The language of Sark

The title of my master's thesis was The Linguistic and Cultural Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland.  I don't think many people read it other than me and my committee, but it did win the 1996 International Prize For Research With Absolutely No Practical Applications Whatsoever.  And it allowed me to learn valuable information such as the fact that there were two words in eleventh-century England for window -- one from Old English (eagþyrl, literally "eye-hole") and one from Old Norse (vindauga, literally "wind-eye") -- and for some reason the Old Norse one won and our word window comes from it rather than from Old English.

Which is a handy "fun fact" for me to bring out at cocktail parties, especially if I want everyone to back away slowly and then find other people to talk to for the rest of the evening.

In any case, I spent a good bit of my time in graduate school learning assorted random facts about western European linguistics, which was why I was a bit gobsmacked when I found out that there's a language in western Europe that I had never even heard of.  It's called Sarkese, and is only found on the tiny (1.5 by 3.5 kilometers) island of Sark, east of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

The Channel Islands [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aotearoa, Wyspy Normandzkie, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sark is currently home to five hundred people, of whom only three learned Sarkese (known colloquially as patois) as their first language.  It's a Romance language -- the closest relative is French, but it's not mutually intelligible.  It came originally from medieval Norman French via the isle of Jersey; the ancestors of the people of Sark came over from Jersey in 1565 and it's been relatively isolated ever since.

The samples of Sarkese in the article I linked above illustrate how far the two have diverged in the close to a thousand years since it split from mainland French.  "Thank you very much," for example -- merci beaucoup in French -- is mérsî ben dê fê in Sarkese.  French has seventeen different vowel phonemes; Sarkese has over fifty.  Add to that the complication that the island is shaped like an hourglass, with a narrow isthmus (La Coupée) that is all but impassible during storms, and the two pieces (Big Sark and Little Sark) have different dialects.

Fortunately, a Czech linguist, Martin Neudörfl, is trying to document Sarkese, and has worked with the three remaining fluent speakers -- who are all over eighty years old -- and about fifteen semi-fluent individuals to produce a huge library of recordings, and reams of documents describing the morphology and syntax of Sarkese.  "We have hundreds of hours [of recordings] and our audio archive is outstanding," Neudörfl said.  "Even if I were to disappear, someone could revive the language just using the recordings.  We've only achieved this through years of exhaustive research.  It's all thanks to [the speakers] for sharing their knowledge."

It's always sad when a language goes extinct, and so many have done so without anyone ever recording them or writing them down.  In large part it's due to competition with more widely spoken languages; it's eye-opening to know that half of the world's individuals are native speakers of only fifteen different languages.  The other half speak one of the other seven-thousand-odd languages that currently exist in the world.  Sarkese is one of many languages that have fallen prey to the prevalence, convenience, and ubiquity of English.

On the one hand, I get why it happens.  If you want to be understood, you have to speak a language that the people around you can understand, and if you only spoke Sarkese you could communicate with eighteen other people on the island (and one Czech linguist).  But still, each language represents a trove of knowledge about the culture and history of a people, and it's a tragedy when that is lost.

So kudos to Martin Neudörfl, and the Sarkese speakers who are working with him to record this language before it's too late.  Makes me wish I'd tackled a project like this for my master's research.  I could be wrong, but I don't think Old Norse is coming back any time soon.

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