The NYT Magazine has a very interesting article today about current research on depression. But of course it has to include some linguistic observations:
We "grow sorrowful," but we rarely describe ourselves as "growing joyful." Imprinted in our language is an instinct that suggests that happiness is a state, while grief is a process.
Sigh. I called up Mr. Verb (despite the staggering cost of the long-distance call), and his response was, well, "utter bullshit!"
So, USA Today has picked up the Proto-Human word order story and locked in on a part I was really hoping might go unnoticed in the press:
In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[Gell-Mann and Ruhlen] dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.
Sigh. This creates the impression that there's actual scholarly debate surrounding reconstructing Proto-Human word order. It's true Bickerton made arguments 30 years ago for SVO as the starting point of human language, but it's hardly the core point of the (very controversial) proposal he makes in The Roots of Language. I don't recall offhand that this particular point provoked much discussion at the time.
PS: The people who pursue the study of language are called linguists and the field linguistics. Us pseudonymous bloggers make typos but we don't have USA Today's staff to comb for typos.
PPS: My personal copy of the book has faded in almost exactly the way shown in the pic here ... the purplish stayed on the jacket where it was protected by books next to it and the spine turned that same weird color with exposure to light. Since when do online photos of books (this one on Amazon) reflect current state of the jacket?
The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design In Language From The Language Of Eden To Our Babble After Babel
It's the most recent book on Edenics. It's been out for a while (and was dealt with in some detail in the blogosphere, including on the Log, like here), but a reader reminded one of our contributors about this project.
It turns out Edenics is now on twitter and on there's an introduction on YouTube (= extended advertisement for the book), among various other videos:
I was surprised to hear (around 1:33) that "today's linguists finally accept the fact that the whole planet spoke one language; they call it Proto-Earth." Really?
Going back to the website, in the FAQ, we can read that "The Origin of Speeches is an anti-Evolutionary answer to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species." But check out the introduction to Edenics (a downloadable pdf at edenics.org, I've left out the eight or so different font colors and font changes and such):
EDENIC (Proto-Semitic, best documented in Biblical Hebrew) was HARD-WIRED in the brains of Modern Men (since Eden). Its software design matches the hardware ANATOMY of Lips, Throat, Tooth Ridge, Nose, Tongue, and Whistling Air (to pronounce the letters/sounds). Then, in Shinar (Sumer, referenced as the later Babel) a neuro-linguistic disturbance was the Big Bang of language dispersion.
Wow. And then this:
Hebrew, with its right brain/left brain neurological keyboard demonstrates that Greek and Latin are merely grandparents, while Hebrew is the common ancestor, the original computing language of our biological random access memory, which was scrambled during the output stage by the Master Programmer (Tower of Babel story in Genesis).
Double wow. And I never knew this:
The Continental Congress nearly made Hebrew the language of the new republic, as much to break away from England as to reaffirm America's status as the new Promised Land.
I'm all wowed out. The game of identifying the 'original language' of humankind is remarkably old. Campbell & Poser write in their book Language Classification (pp. 13-14) note that after Johannes Reuchlin's 1506 grammar of Hebrew, it was a major strand of historical work, with Hebrew often the original language:
Historical linguistic interests of the time had as their background the Greek tradition … and the biblically based interpretation of Hebrew as the original language (Lingua Adamica, Lingua Paradisiaca) before the confounding of tongues at Babel. It was common to attempt to fit the European languages into the biblical tradition.
That is, these guys are carrying on a long tradition here, all dressed up in current terminology. It's not merely that languages got changed, but our hardwiring — the 'neuro-linguistic disturbance'. The site hasn't been updated much lately, but even so, this year is a big anniversary of the Origin of Species, of course, so it's worth a quick note.
The material at edenics.org speaks for itself, and loudly, but it's worth one quick point. As Mark Liberman wrote about Isaac Mozeson, the man behind Edenics, in the above-cited post on the Log:
His theory seems to be that God was a sort of weak cryptographer, who didn't actually create any new languages after Babel, but simply mixed up the old ones ("letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and out") in ways that Mozeson has figured out how to decrypt.
I guess if the purpose was to disrupt communication, the cryptography was good enough. I've been talking to comparative and historical linguists some lately, including about the issue of systematic sound correspondences — the way we can best tell that English and Spanish are genetically related is that sounds differ systematically but consistently. A challenge for long range comparison and especially Proto-World is how to get such matches at this vast time depth. Edenics may be an ingenious attempt to sidestep that: the Intelligent Designer (their term) deliberately shuffled sounds around:
Genesis 11 does not reveal the mechanics of the TOWER OF BABEL’s “confounding,” but global Edenicists are making great strides.
Any labial is interchangeable with any other and likewise any fricative with any other. Plus the Designer metathesized alot. Here are examples of how these three processes give English forms from the Hebrew (from the pdf):
BILABIAL SHIFT aBBa to PAPA אבא FRICATIVE SHIFT SHaQeL to SCALE שקל BEAUTY M213 from TZiBHeeY (beautiful) צבי
This purposeful irregularization vitiates any appeal to systematic sound correspondence. All you need is some word in any language that shares some sound with some kind of phonetic similarity to some Hebrew word, place or manner of articulation of a consonant, for instance.
No more wowing for today.
Image from here – one of the claimed samples of earliest human writing.
Today's NYT has this piece on Gary Taubes' new book Good Calories, Bad Calories. He's the guy who wrote the big NYT Magazine piece two years ago that started (so it seemed to me, anyhow) a huge wave of media on the Atkins Diet. That piece struck many as giving credence to the view that carbs are dangerous, and that fat isn't all that bad for you.
The book pursues what sounds like it might be a shaky view thesis on biology and diet, but Tierney's piece today is about the sociology of the anti-fat consensus … about how little good, rigorous evidence there was for the anti-fat thesis from early on. Tierney (an editorial writer, if you don't know him) lays out familiar points about 'informational cascades' (hey, if all those guys believe this is right ....) and then a 'reputational cascade' (hey, if I disagree with the dominant position, I'll be crushed). Popular opinion has certainly reversed course here — I don't eat out that much, but 'low-carb' options seem to abound suddenly — and the science sounds pretty unsettled to me. At best, it sounds like we just don't know for sure how bad fat or what the really healthiest diet is. Considering the resources we've poured into diet, obesity, cardiac health, diabetes over recent decades, this may surprise you, but only if you expect the world to be pretty simple. It's not.
Now, if that's where we're at on one of the biggest health questions, where do we stand in linguistic theorizing? A couple of aggressive and smart career-builders could potentially sell the field on about any old snake oil, I figure.
Image indirectly from despair.com, one of the coolest outfits around.
"omg, how did I only just learn about Mr. Verb?" — Lauren, Dec. 9, '08
"Mr. Verb and his minions, few though there seem to be, dislike reading, or dislike reading carefully." — Robert Hartwell Fiske, editor and publisher, The Vocabula Review
Ooops, I meant …
Today's NYT has this piece on Gary Taubes' new book Good Calories, Bad Calories. He's the guy who wrote the big NYT Magazine piece two years ago that started (so it seemed to me, anyhow) a huge wave of media on the Atkins Diet. That piece struck many as giving credence to the view that carbs are dangerous, and that fat isn't all that bad for you.
