Anglo-Saxon heritage

The latest political dust-up is over the claim (since denied) that an adviser to Mitt Romney said to the Daily Telegraph:

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and [Romney] feels that the special relationship is special,” the unnamed adviser told the paper. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

People are hitting Romney now on 'racial insensitivity' and other grounds.

But honestly, don't you get a little nervous about embracing the 'Anglo-Saxons'? And surely Romney does.

Look, governor, I knew the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons were friends of mine. And you are no Anglo-Saxon. I think I fully appreciate the history here, and this isn't a glamorous heritage.

Leave aside the stereotypes like in the image at the top (from here), and consider the picture at the right. It is the image from wikipedia of the "Reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon royal palace at Cheddar around 1000 AD". Royal palace, we're talking, a mere thousand years ago. No car elevators in there.

Not your goals or lifestyle, I'd say, governor.

More academic misconduct, ancient edition

Wow. Here we are, still reeling from the Marc Hauser scandal, and thinking about the implications for other scholarship that built on his work. And now comes something bigger, way bigger in the academic world. According to the best print news outlet in these United States, a group of historians have admitted that they "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece.

Sure, they were trying to "advance their careers", but:

"One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago," Haddlebury said. "One thing led to another, and before you know it, we're coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad."

"That was a bitch to write, by the way," he continued, referring to the epic poem believed to have laid the foundation for the Western literary tradition. "But it seemed to catch on."

I'm shattered. And bracing for the proverbial other shoe:

"It would be a shame to see humanity abandon achievements such as heliocentrism and the plays of Aeschylus just because of their origin," the statement read in part. "Moreover, we have some rather disappointing things to tell you about the pyramids, the works of Leonardo da Vinci, penicillin, the Internet, the scientific method, movies, and dogs."

The durability of the relationship between language and space

Early this year, a really cool report came out from the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA*) in Bonn, Germany. It was done by Oliver Falck, Stephan Heblich, Alfred Lameli & Jens Südekum, and it's called:

Dialects, Cultural Identity, and Economic Exchange

The full report is available here, just scroll down to number 4743. A while back it got some international press, notably this piece in The Economist, including this:

When people migrate within Germany, they tend to go to places where dialects resemble those spoken in their home region 120 years ago.

Here's how the report's conclusion lays this out:

dialects were shaped by past interactions, prior mass migration waves, religious and political divisions, ancient routes and transportation networks, and so forth. Dialects act as a sort of regional memory that comprehensively stores such information. Consequently, language variation is probably the best measurable indicator of cultural differences that one can come up with.

Our findings imply that there are intangible cultural borders within a country that impede economic exchange across its regions. These intangible borders are enormously persistent over time; they have been developed over centuries, and so they are likely to be there also tomorrow.

One key example of dialect patterns is the case of Goslar, illustrated in the map here. (Click to enlarge.) The dialect was shaped by heavy immigration from the southeast (shown by the orange, showing greater similarities between those dialects with Goslar). This pattern was created by 16th c. immigration from Saxony to Goslar by miners.

German dialect maps are often used as examples of beautifully clear regional differences, with big, clean isoglosses stretching across a pretty vast territory. But even within the traditional dialects of German-speaking Europe, enclaves like this are remarkably common. It really underscores what we've come to call "Purnell's Law" here in Madison: Language is local.

The report has good historical depth in terms of earlier political boundaries, migrations and trade routes, etc. and their conclusions about the persistence of old patterns of contact and old boundaries are pretty exciting. In the U.S. the history of English is still relatively shallow. Some work here is considering history in these ways, but there are big opportunities.

*The German name is Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, 'research institute on the future of labor', in case you're wondering how they got 'IZA'.)

Forensic linguistics meets historical linguistics

The last few days have seen a lot of press about an effort to use linguistic evidence to gain new insight into a pivotal moment in Irish history, the Rebellion of 1641. I can't vouch for the info in the link ... it's hotly contested territory and well beyond my knowledge of Irish history, but any version of the story I know has thousands of people being killed.


Some links to the current project are here, here and here. The effort is being led by Barbara Fennell, a well known specialist in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. (In fact, there's a thriving subfield called 'socio-historical linguistics', which she's part of.) They've digitized, it looks like, upwards of 20,000 pages of contemporary reports on the massacre and it sounds like a big part of the project will be doing corpus work on the material and working to get the clearest possible sense of how accurate particular reports are likely to have been. Difficult work, but could contribute to understanding events that have shaped a chunk of European history.

Image from here.

The difficulty of Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving holiday is not unproblematic, with all the happy pilgrim crap that floats by (see image). And that's really salient if you're around American Indians. It's hardly like Columbus Day, but the holiday is so ridden with stupid stereotypes and bogus history that it's not entirely comfortable. I was reminded of that this morning when a Native person wished me a happy Thanksgiving. This is the norm around here, I think, but if you don't know people well, you certainly can't assume what they think about the holiday.

I guess my personal take is that it's fundamentally a good holiday — harvest festivals are good, and it's a rare chance to get together with family and friends that isn't totally drenched in religious or nationalist trappings. And it's about food, which always gets me on board. So, I'm for saving the holiday by debunking the myths and getting the history right. And yeah, being thankful is a worthwhile thing.

Today's local paper ran a nice piece that runs through the range of reactions to the holiday. Seems like they get it right. Anyhow, I'm pretty grateful to have a day of rest tomorrow, and a chance to be with family and friends.

Image from here.