Who do I think I am?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, pronouns, popular culture

Toddlers are addressed by everyone as "you" so frequently that they think their name is "You," and upon hearing others using "I" for themselves, the little ones think that "I" and "Me" refer exclusively to those others. Pronouns take a while to get used to. This kind of confusion underlies a bit of wordplay in a Looney Tunes cartoon in which Elmer Fudd is pursuing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. As John McWhorter tells us in the Introduction to his new book, his title is found in this exchange:

BUGS (to Elmer): Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?

DAFFY: Shoot him now, shoot him now.

BUGS: You keep out of this; he doesn't have to shoot you now.

DAFFY: Ha! Hold it right there! Pronoun trouble! It's not, "He doesn't have to shoot 'you' now," it's "He doesn't have to shoot 'me' now." Well, I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!

(BLAM!) [This being a cartoon, Daffy is now covered in soot]

The title of the book is Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

While the author points out the confusion of Daffy in mixing up "me" and "you", the reply of Bugs to Daffy in the third line shows that Bugs isn't so clear himself. The wordplay is reminiscent of the "Who's on First?" routines of the 1930's made famous by Abbott and Costello in the 1940's and later.

As the thread of the book winds along, we find that pronouns have been alternately steadfast and malleable. Each chapter traces the usage of a pronoun or a set of subject-object pronouns (such as "I" and "me" or "he" and "him"). A particularly long section traces the history of "me" as it switched between object-only, subject-only, and a little bit of both. For example, while I was taught that the "correct" way to refer to myself plus a friend doing something is, "Jerry and I went to a movie," for a century or so this has stood alongside "Me and Jerry went…" and almost as frequently, "Jerry and me went…"

Here are the rules I was taught, to which I habitually adhere, going on 70 years:

• When listing a group that includes you, out of modesty refer to yourself last.
• If the group is the subject of the sentence, refer to yourself as "I", as in "I went": "Jerry and I went."
• If the group is the object, refer to yourself as "me", as in "It made me happy": "It made Jerry and me happy."

Period. Those who used alternative constructions were considered ignorant or uneducated and, in a school setting, were firmly corrected. Again and again if necessary.

I admit to a bit of discomfort with accepting Dr. McWhorter's contention that "Me and Jerry went" is permissible due to historical English usage, and even the more, numerous languages that either have dual-use pronouns or don't have object-subject distinctions anyway. I don't really care what is acceptable in Tagalog or !Kung. I want to be clearly understood by Anglophones.

By the end of that first chapter I had a side thought, "I wonder if his goal is to support the singularizing of 'they'?" A quick look at the Table of Contents confirmed my suspicion: the last chapter's title is "They Was Plural." However, I didn't let that slow me down. I enjoyed the book, the linguistic histories and odd collections of pronouns that surround and underlie the ones with which we English speakers fill our prose. I didn't know before that in Old English, the male, female, and neuter third-person singular pronouns were "he", "heo", and "hit". "He" has stuck with us, while over time "hit" was de-aspirated to "it", but the path from "heo" to "she" (with a side jaunt to spit out "her") was more circuitous.

By the way, this puts paid to the contention that pronouns are so pervasive that making changes is arduous-to-impossible. All to support the tiny smattering of folks who don't like being either "he" or "she", and of course it is barbarous to call them "it", so of course "they" is called in to fill the gap. Behind all that is the delusion that "nonbinary" is a valid gender. In actuality, there is tremendous political force behind the delusion, for totalitarian reasons I'll defer for the nonce, such that a change has already been made, and is being forced on an unwilling public. For my part, if someone points to a individual person and says something like, "They are with me," I'm likely to respond, "Is there a mouse in his (or her) pocket?"—depending on the visible appearance of the person. And to close the loop, I have yet to hear someone say, "They is with me." I wonder if the "they" standing by even notices the gaffe.

Furthermore, there are numerous instances of "they" as a nonspecific singular pronoun, such as, "When a newcomer arrives, they need to be greeted by an usher." However, these have arisen over the past 50-60 years primarily by folks who bend over backwards to cater to old-line feminism and its crusade to change "chairman" and "chairwoman" to "chair" or "chairperson", etc. Until I was in my twenties, the acceptable usage was, "When a newcomer arrives, he needs to be greeted by an usher," unless the newcomer is expected to be female, such as at a League of Women Voters event; then, "…she needs…" is preferred.

I would say it is a little early to take up the cudgels for settling on "they" where "it" will work. To the contention that "it" refers to inanimate things, just ask anyone with a pet, where "it" is frequently used to refer to one's furbaby, except by those who over-humanize their pets. So if a man or woman doesn't want to be referred to either by "he" or "she", I'd prefer to say "it". Of course, speaking to such a person, I'll use "you." Just like I would to any other human. Or even a pet.

Not to leave too sour a taste in your mouth, dear reader, I must say that Dr. McWhorter writes very well, the book is quite valuable, and if it proves to be a trend-setter, perhaps I'll have to bend to what then becomes truly common usage. I come from a long-lived family, so I say, time will tell. Who knows what another decade or two will bring.

It ain't the King's English any more

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, united states, dialects

When I was about twelve my family attended a Congregational church in Salt Lake City, Utah. We frequently arrived early, so I would help the ushers fold programs. One day one of the ushers, an elderly man who must have originally come from New York, said to me, "Youse is a good kid." "Youse" is pronounced "use", the noun not the verb, as in "Put that elbow grease to good use." It's the only time in my life that I've heard that, even though I've been to NYC a few times in the ensuing 65 years.

Some 48 years ago we spent part of a year in Houston, Texas, and visited people we knew in Louisiana a couple of times. We got acquainted with a couple of variations on "you". You may have heard the parting greeting, "Y'all come back now, hear?" They do say that in Louisiana, where "y'all is the typical plural form of "you". But in Texas "y'all" is singular, and the plural is "all-a-y'all" or even "all of you-all". I once kidded some of our friends in Texas, "There's a popular convenience store out West, that would have to change it's name if they open any here: Y'all Totem!" (the store was U-Totem, out of business since 1984).

Based on our experiences, living and vacationing all over the continental US, I've compiled this generalized map of various ways people supply the missing plural "you" in "standard" English:

This is strictly from my own impressions and memories. I'd expect a professional linguist to have a more accurate take on this pattern, and perhaps a few expressions I've missed. One such is Rosemarie Ostler, in her book The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. As a matter of fact, the descriptions of "you" usage in the book are practically identical to these, although with more detail about where certain variations are common.

Much of the discussion in the book concerns vowel shifts that have occurred over the centuries since English immigrants began coming to North America in large numbers. The sounds of a language change over time as the way that the commonest words are pronounced is made easier by shifting the vowels to be easier to say. To a linguist, changing the sound of a vowel is accomplished by changing the position of the tongue and the shape of the mouth and upper throat. For example, the "ee" sound most of us use in "feet" has the tongue high and forward, while the "ih" sound in "will" has the tongue halfway up and still forward. In some regions, however, "will" is pronounced more like "weel", which means the "ee" sound had to "go" somewhere else. Either the mouth now opens more, turning "feet" into "fate", or the tongue moves further back, which yields "feht", where "eh" represents the schwa (shown as "ə" in the phonetic alphabet IPA). That may cause a speaker to move the schwa in words like "about" to a more open "a" sound (think of "about" sounding like "abbot"). And so it goes.

It's amazing that such shifts occur unconsciously. People don't get up one day and say, 'I'm going to harden the "i" in "will" from today forwards.' And however it was that the singular pronouns for second person (formerly "thou" and "thee") were dropped, it didn't take long for people to devise substitutes. Although the area seemingly dominated by "you/you" in the map above is vast, few people live in the middle of the continent; it's "flyover country" for a reason. The number of folks using a regional pluralism is a pretty high percentage.

Again and again I read that words from other languages and cultures were assimilated into English, as English-speaking people spread across the globe during the Colonial Era in North America and the period of the British Empire, and people from all over the Earth immigrated to the United States. Thus "tycoon" and "tsunami" are of Japanese origin, "kowtow" is from Chinese ("t'au kau" is Mandarin for "pray" or "worship"); the verb "smelt" is very old, having entered Anglo-Saxon via Danish, while the noun "smelt", a type of fish, is either Dutch or Danish, and refers to the fishes' odor. A host of food words have both Germanic (Anglo Saxon) and French (Norman) synonyms: meat vs beef, chicken vs pullet, deer vs venison, dove vs pigeon. And many Spanish or Mexican Native words have been mainstreamed ("taco", "amigo", etc.)

Where other languages may take in a word or name and bend it into a more "native" form, English speakers tend to take words in wholesale. Sometimes, a nickname becomes "the name"; for example the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, who signed his paintings with his full name in Greek, had the nickname "the Greek" throughout Europe, but the Spanish version of his nickname is the one used here: El Greco.

Such promiscuous borrowing has led to English being the largest language. The initial Oxford English Dictionary had about 291,000 entries, but about 10% have been removed in more recent editions. A comprehensive dictionary of that sort for American English would likely have between half a million and a million words! However, those in common use number about 100,000. A typical U.S. fifth grader knows about 50,000 words. But, as this book shows, going around the country, which 50,000 words a youngster knows will differ. This is why thesauruses exist for English but hardly at all for other languages. English has lots and lots of synonyms. If one were to boil down the "meanings" in a well-constructed, comprehensive thesaurus, the number would likely be in the 20,000-40,000 range.

It took me longer than I like to read the book. It is well written, but the subject does not lend itself to page-turning prose. It can get tedious. The author does well to gather facts in as interesting a way as possible, but there are limits… There are just too many facts, and it is clear she was being very selective, because if the book consisted simply of word-pair lists and other groupings, without any "glue" or other text, it would be quite a bit larger than 230+ pages. The appendix has a useful summary of where phonetic sounds are made in the vocal cavity, and explanations of how the various vowel shifts produced the most common "American English".

To make fake languages you need to know real ones

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, linguistics, language creation

Languages, mainly written, and linguistics, have been a hobby and sometime obsession for my brother and me since we were children. He made a career out of it, becoming a calligrapher, including spending time in Japan to learn Japanese calligraphy (with a brush) and also the carving of netsuke. He eventually became a professor of art history and a Mayan archaeologist, one of a few people who can read and paint the Maya script. Not having a good artistic hand, I became more an observer than a doer.

Having gone into coding from an early age (about 50 years ago, now), I occasionally studied formal languages, as I call them; not only computer coding languages (FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, C) and scripts (Perl, JavaScript), but also the broader scope of symbolic languages such as the standard sets of drafting details used in piping, architecture, and electronics design, for example. More recently, I had some interest in the icons used to launch programs (apps) on small-screen devices, but there is no grammar; they are all nouns (or, perhaps, imperative predicate phrases of the form "Do X!"). Also, there is an effectively infinite variety of them: 32×32 pixels ×256 colors, as the exponent of 2, comes to about 10⁷⁸⁹¹³ possible color patterns, and even if only a trillionth of a trillionth of them would "look like something", what remains is a truly incredible number (10⁷⁸⁸⁸⁹). Then there are the Emoji, which  seem to be settling down to some kind of standard, complete with a review board.

In my mid-twenties I got a little interested in the scope for creation of new languages in fiction by reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read somewhere that he invented five languages for Middle Earth, complete with scripts in at least two cases (I am sure many folks out there know better than I). So I was primed, with a slow-burning fuse, to thoroughly enjoy The Art of Language Invention, by David J. Peterson, when I came across it recently; it has been in print about four years.

The focus of the book is the creation of new languages to be used in fictional settings. The author was hired to create two languages used in Game of Thrones, for example. One might think, "Why create languages out of whole cloth? Aren't there languages enough already, something like 6,000? Couldn't one of these, which the right sort of 'soundscape', be used?" Perhaps. One significant problem arises, though: in the current legal atmosphere, intellectual property laws would require the permission of a language's speakers, and they might not like having their mother tongue used on the "lips" (or whatever) of tentacled villains from Aldebaran. Also, while we might use a human language for fictional humans, in the distant future perhaps, other languages are intended to be "native" to various kinds of aliens. Modern filmmakers are doing their best to put the era of aliens-as-humans-in-weird-suits behind them. If we ever encounter genuine space aliens, will it even be possible for them to make the sounds used in human languages…and vice versa? Most of all, though, for those so inclined, creation of a new language is great fun! The fun comes through in the author's writing, again and again.

The book turns out to include a powerful introduction to linguistics. Thinking about it, I realized it has to! Natural languages give a language designer the parameters of what languages can do, and ideas for how to stretch the limits as needed. The four sections of the book are Sounds (a lot more involved than just a discussion of "phonemes"; he also gets into sign languages and possible alien sound systems), Words (choices like inflected or not, cases and the presence or lack of case agreement, etc.), Evolution (history of a language and its sibling and offspring languages), and Writing (scripts and how they support the spoken word…or don't).

I'll just touch on a couple of items of interest to me. One is alien sounds. We have "alien" creatures aplenty around us, that make sounds we typically can't make: birds and dolphins—and whales in general—are best known. But also: Just how much symbolism is in the waggle dance of honeybees? How articulate is the postural language of a wolf or a bobcat? Is the Brown Thrasher, with its repertoire of 2,000 songs, each including many sounds, saying anything more than, "This land is my land"? More to the point on the bird: are the murmurings and cooings between a mated pair or Thrashers, Doves, Robins or whatever, more meaningful than the "comfort sounds" they are usually thought to be?

Another is the written scripts. In an appendix we find a phrase book for eight constructed languages (conlangs), six of which have scripts. I picked out a potentially useful phrase from each:

Dothraki and High Valerian are from Game of Thrones. The producers apparently didn't set the show up to require scripts for them. The others are from other projects. Some would be rather hard for any of us to write or draw. Indojisnen, in particular, is predicated on an alien species that went for genetic modification in a big way, including the development of hand skills that exceed those of any other species by a large margin. So the written language they invented, once they could write it, is intricate and hyper-regular.

I rather like Kamakawi. In both script and sounds, it is like a cross between Japanese and Korean. Some of the others may seem too loopy or whatever, but if you look in the front of an old Gideon's Bible, with John 3:16 translated into dozens of human scripts, you'll see just how loopy many human languages can be. The ones shown here are not at all out of line (except Indojisnen!).

I thought I knew a lot about variations of grammar. The Words section showed me how little I knew about it. I was fortunate to learn Latin at a young age, and French later. A friend who speaks these, plus Romanian and Russian, says, "French grammar is endless". It's true. Even though English has less than usual in the way of conjugation (of nouns) and declension (of verbs), some friends and I once figured out 48 verb tenses that are possible in English, if one takes account of moods and everything (of course, few of us use more than five or six). Then we tackled French, and we sort of ran out of steam when we'd racked up 256 verb tenses. There might be more; we couldn't be sure. Funny thing, even though there are inflections (word endings) to distinguish most of them in written French, most of them just sound like a cross between "-ei" and "-ee" in spoken French. That goes for the "-it" in conduit ("conduct", the verb, when "I" is the subject), as well as "-aient" in effectuaient ("were conducting", when "we" is the subject).

I can't figure how the author crammed so much linguistic knowledge into a book hardly exceeding 260 pages (in paperback, at least). If you want to try your hand at inventing a language, this book is a very good starting place for learning what you'll need to succeed. So much to learn, and presented very enjoyably.

Your English isn't your grandfather's English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, words, linguistics, historical linguistics

I find John McWhorter fascinating: he digs out so many lovely examples of language usage, and writes about them so engagingly… In a prior book I reviewed in 2009 (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue) he brought to our gaze the numerous chunks of other languages that were dragged together almost wholesale to produce what we today call "English". Now in Words on the Move; Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally), he provides an antidote to the amount of energy some of us "seasoned citizens" give to decrying the trends of change in language usage (Like, you know, gag me with a spoon if I have to keep hearing that!).

That last string of phrases caused much angst in my generation when "Valley Girl" (Val Gal) talk sprawled across the nation like a lanky teen on a love seat. In particular, "like" has gone from a word meaning (as a verb) "to desire or feel affinity to" or (adjective, adverb, etc.) "similarity", into a "piece of grammar", no longer really a word, but a functional sound that has morphed from the "similarity" end of things to at least three or four uses, most particularly a kind of bullet point, such as an example on page 215:

"So we're standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles…"

"Like" has become more a signal than a word, and this isn't new, it started almost a century ago, some 30 years before the Beatniks began to say, "Like, wow, man!". The new "like" has gathered new uses to the extent that McWhorter touches on it in three different chapters and spends a dozen pages on it in his last chapter, "This is your brain on writing." This word is an example of several he discusses, that are grammatical markers and have become very hard to explain as words. They are "grammaticalized." Consider what "well" or "so" might mean when used to begin a sentence. Could you explain them to an inquisitive five-year-old? Thought not!

Gliding back to the first chapter, "The FACEs of English", we find a long discussion of the acronym FACE, used to describe the uses of grammaticalized words such as "well" or "so", which a linguist would call "Modal Pragmatic Markers" or MPM's. Here "pragmatic" most closely means "personal". Our author states that a multitude of such words are needed so that we don't just speak English, we can talk.

This brings us to a major theme of the book, the difference between written and spoken (or "talked") English. Firstly, of course, we use fewer grammaticalizations when writing. I tend to write at full speed as though I were having a conversation with you, so I almost began this paragraph with, "Now, …". Were you and I really talking together, that's how I would have said it. But even writing full speed at 50wpm or so, I edit as I go and make the written form a little more compact, and, I hope, readable. (Those who find me long-winded are saying, "Oh, really!")

He dwells much more on spelling. For example, written English has a pronunciation rule of "silent, terminal e", that it makes the vowel before the prior consonant into a long vowel. Thus we have "mad", meaning crazy or angry, in which the "a" is pronounced as flatly as possible and is often called "short A"; and we have "made", meaning constructed or produced, in which the "a" is pronounced almost like "eh-ee" and is called "long A". The author tells us that nobody would design such a system from scratch, and that it had to arise from some process. Indeed it did. He discusses the "Great Vowel Shift" on pages 152-159, using a map of the placement of vowels in our mouth to show how the "short A" of 5 to 9 centuries ago morphed into a longer "E" sound then to the "long A", and that a final "eh" sound at the end of many words was gradually dropped. Thus, "made" was once pronounced "mah-deh", as the spelling suggests, shifted through "meh-də' ", which a much shorter final syllable, shown by the schwa (ə), which is more of a tiny grunt than a vowel, and then into the one-syllable word of today. The Great Vowel shift moved all the vowels about, leading certain words that once rhymed to have different sounds now than then, and they no longer rhyme. "Water" and "after", in "Jack and Jill", used to rhyme perfectly. No longer.

Dictionaries began to be written for English very early in the Great Vowel Shift. While this didn't exactly entomb all the spellings in stone, they did tend to hold things back, and today, dictionaries of "modern English" have to trot to keep up, having been rendered out of date by our movable language just in the time needed to research, typeset, and publish them. By the way, usage of the words "typeset" and "typesetting" is dropping, having peaked in the 1980's; they are being overtaken by "key in" and "keying in". As computers get better at speech recognition, those will drop off also.

Here is side point that I enjoyed. Do you ever hear the expression "willy-nilly"? I figured out long ago that it came from "will I, or nill I", but I wasn't sure just what "nill" meant. Dr. McWhorter has the answer. A millennium or so ago, negating words was done by adding the prefix "ne-", so to "not will", or not desire, something was to "ne-will" it. To say you don't have something, you would say, "I ne-have it", but by Chaucer's time it would have been "I nave it", with "nave" pronounced "nah-veh" or even "nah-və". And Chaucer spelled it næbbe. It seems the consonants have shifted as well, but the author has left that for a future book, I reckon.

I'll forbear further nerdifying. It is a delightful book, and an incredibly informative one. I am thinking of giving a copy to a friend who is a linguist, but primarily of Chinese, not English, to see what similar trends might have occurred in Mandarin, which the Chinese acknowledge is not a written language at all: the "written Chinese" language is one that nobody speaks, but they all know how to interpret it into whatever dialect they grew up speaking.

Solving a 3-generation mystery

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, linguistics, decipherment

Consider preparing for a monumental task, a life's work, for which no training program exists, no college courses address. When Alice Kober (1906-1950) rose to such a challenge she began by learning a host of ancient languages and scripts (languages are spoken, scripts are written). She was already a professor of ancient Greek and Latin, to which she added Etruscan, Syriac and perhaps a dozen others. She also studied, on her own, archaeology, physics, statistics, linguistics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. A true autodidact has little time to attend "courses", and learns much quicker from books and a mentor or two.

What kind of task required such a decade of preparation? It was the decipherment of a script that had not been used for more than 3,000 years, and determining the language it encoded. As we read in The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, Alice Kober, with her exceptional brilliance and unparalleled persistence, became the central figure without whose work the script would have taken a great deal more time to solve.

Expecting to spend the rest of her life at the task, she undertook her decade of study beginning in 1935, and then began working to decipher Linear B, the Minoan script used from about 1450 BCE to about 1200 BCE. During just five years, 1945 through 1949, she solved several problems that had dogged earlier decipherers, beginning with Arthur Evans (1951-1941), who had discovered the first cache of tablets at Knossos on Crete in 1900. She began to ail in 1949 and died of cancer in 1950, on the verge of completely deciphering the script.

It fell to young Michael Ventris (1922-1956)—whom Kober thought little of but shared her findings with—to add his own efforts to her work and to Evans's, and to publish a decipherment in 1952. His final breakthrough was probably delayed by a year because he had early on formed the conviction that the language of Linear B was Etruscan. Only when he had proved that was impossible was he open to think of other languages of the region. He finally determined that Linear B was the first script used to write early Greek, 650 years before the time of Homer and the alphabetic script that became "Greek".

The book is a partial biography of Dr. Kober, whom Ms Fox terms "the Detective", and of Evans and Ventris, whom she terms "the Digger" and "The Architect", respectively. But even more, it is a great primer in the art of decipherment. Drawing on the notes of, particularly Kober and Ventris, the author helps a reader understand the myriad problems one has to solve when confronted with a doubly unknown script. Linear B was harder to crack than Egyptian hieroglyphs, there being no Rosetta stone to help out.

This shows an example of Linear B, a tablet from Pylos on the Greek mainland. The image is the principal illustration from the Wikipedia article. In all, Arthur Evans unearthed about 2,000 tablets. A few hundred more were found on the Greek mainland by others.

Ironically, the tablets were preserved because in about 1200 BCE Knossos was burned, as were Pylos and other locations, in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. All the tablets preserved had been written during the last year before the fall of the city, because the scribes had a practice not of baking their clay tablets, but of re-dissolving them and making a fresh set every year. They recorded ephemeral things such as inventories and transactions. There was no Minoan literature, at least not on clay tablets.

When confronted by an unknown script, it is helpful if there are related scripts with which to compare. In this case, the only related script is Linear A, as shown here. The collection of tablets with Linear A is much smaller, and it has not been deciphered. Only a few comparative things are known. The number of signs used by each script is different, but roughly similar. Some signs are the same or similar, but others are unique to the script. The statistics of sign frequencies are different, and while Linear B encoded an inflected language, Linear A probably did not.

Ah, Inflection, the bane of English language-learners. English does it only a little, mostly in the formation of plurals (dog, dogs; man, men; child, children) and with a few irregular verbs (I am, you are, it is and so forth). Languages such as Latin are strongly inflected. Word endings that confer case, number and tense can really shorten an expression: qui morituri te salutatum means "We who are about to die salute you". This phrase was the standard greeting by the gladiators before every duel. The stem mor- conveys the concept of dying. The rest of the word conveys "plural", "future tense" and an invocative mood.

Now, why is the script called Linear? Because the glyphs are drawn as a series of lines (glyphs in philology are the physical shapes of the signs, and can differ in various ways from the ideal, conceptual sign). The Latin script used for English and all European languages is a linear script. Cuneiform, as shown here, is produced by pressing a wedge-tipped stylus into clay. A quick scribe could made a letter or word glyph by tapping rapidly. A glyph in a linear script is drawn. The third method of writing, used only on hard surfaces or paper, is brushing, as traditional Chinese or Mayan (Mayan carvings are intended to resemble glyphs brushed on paper).

Initially, everything depended on counting signs. This is not always easy. Are two similar glyphs really different, or are they orthographic variations? The Greek σ (sigma), at the end of a word, looks like ς. Both versions of the sigma are considered one sign. Many older printed books in English use run-together letters such as æ or various combinations of f with l or i. These give OCR software fits! Early on, however, it was clear that Linear B had about 80-90 signs used with great frequency, and another 100 or so used like we use special signs or abbreviations; think of a smiley face or the & for "and". These last were probably logograms that stood for whole words.

Alphabetic scripts seldom have more than 40 signs, and include the Latin script used for English (26), the Hebrew script (22) and Cyrillic for Russian (36). Totally logographic scripts such as Chinese require thousands of signs. In between are syllabaries. They typically have between about 60 and a few hundred signs. The Ethiopian language uses the Amharic script with its 283 signs, and the phonetic kana that can be used to write all Japanese has 72 signs. We'll say more about Japanese in a moment.

Linear B was considered "probably" a syllabary by Evans, and this was proved by Kober. Some languages are well suited to syllabaries. English is not. We use such a forest of run-together consonant sounds ("strengths" or "inkstand", for example) that a syllabary might wind up using more signs than we use letters to write a sentence, or become too clumsy; Amharic, for example, is on the verge of fatal clumsiness. This is because in all syllabaries nearly every sign includes both a consonant and a vowel, and rarely a c-v-c combination. All include 4 or more vowel-only signs, but not more than a very few consonant-only signs. Thus a language which has lots of words ending in consonant sounds is also ill suited to using a syllabary.

Let us consider Japanese. The only ending consonant used in the language is the -n, so their kana syllabaries (there are two, just to complicate matters) include a "n" sign. Young Japanese children first learn only the hiragana, the kana syllabary used only for Japanese words. Later they learn the katakana, used for foreign words. Soon they begin learning the logograms borrowed from Chinese, called kanji. About 7,000 kanji are in common use, though by government decree only about 2,400 can be used for newspaper publication and official documents. Traditional Chinese used more than 70,000 logograms.

The Japanese had no written language (that we know of) prior to adopting Chinese logograms a few hundred years ago. The kana were developed by simplifying kanji that had appropriate sound values. They are particularly important for adding the inflections, because spoken Japanese is inflected, while Chinese is not. Chinese doesn't even have an irregular "to be" verb, as nearly every other language does. The Chinese "conjugation" of "to be" would be translated "I be, you be, he be, we be, they be", and tense is indicated by adding a time noun if needed. So to say you are going somewhere, you say, "I go", but for future or past, you say, "I go tomorrow" or "I go yesterday", or whatever day or time is appropriate. The Japanese for "understand" is wakaru, "I understand" is wakarimasu, and "I understood" is wakarimashita. They write these using the logogram for wakaru followed by kana as needed to add the inflection.

Thus, Japanese have a difficult script because the Chinese script is so ill-suited to the way their language works. When Alice Kober and later Michael Ventris began learning how to assign sound values to signs in Linear B, it became clear that a similar case existed. Finally, Ventris realized that the strongly inflected Greek language was being written at Knossos, Pylos and elsewhere with a syllabary, based on Linear A, that had been originally derived to suit a noninflected, or lightly inflected, language. If perchance Linear A is ever deciphered, we will learn what that language sounded like.

In a way, then, Linear B had a history with some relation to the way written Japanese developed, except the Greeks never used the logograms in sentences, but only as symbols of commodities being enumerated or transacted. Also, while Japanese scholars went to the Chinese to learn writing, the Greeks were conquerors of Crete, and decided to spiff up their act by adopting the writing system in use there.

Riddle is a highly readable, incredibly informative portrayal of the amazing labors that went into unlocking Linear B, and in addition, a delightful window into the lives of the three very, very different people who did so.

Listening too closely

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, psychology

There is a proverb, that good liars give lots of details, but the best liars don't. But there is no proverb that tells us liars very seldom use the words I, me or my. Yet it is true. Lying is hard work. It doesn't pay to be introspective when your every effort must be directed to confabulation.

More interestingly, in America's "classless" society, we still estimate social ranking. It takes some work, but listen to two people talking together. One will use "I" words (I, me or my) much more than the other, who will instead use many more "us" words (we, us or our). Guess which one is dominant (stay tuned)?

Psychology Professor James W. Pennebaker, who likes to be called "Jamie", will be the first to tell you that catching such cues from active conversation is very difficult. He calls such words "stealth words" and "function words". In his book The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, he notes that we are attuned to listen for content words, words that reveal the subject or object of what we are hearing. Pronouns, articles (a, an and the), and prepositions, for example, just slip right by us. When we read, they slip by just as readily. Have you noticed, for example, that prior to this sentence I have not written any "I" words except as examples? That was hard: I usually write this blog in a self-reflective mood.

To make more accurate measures of the use of stealth words, and to avoid wear and tear on his graduate students, Jamie and his colleagues have developed a number of computer methods for analyzing text by counting the percent use of as many as 80 families of words. The most revealing of these are pronouns and other small words, the little words that glue our sentences together.

We often joke that people who have been married a long time start to resemble one another. In Dr. Pennebaker's research, he and his colleagues have found that they are even more likely to sound alike. In fact, we all tend to pick up the speaking style of those we spend time with, and the more we like someone, the more we will speak like them. We are also likely to pick up the speech patterns and accent of anyone we consider dominant (except for that I-we thing). Until recently, my supervisor was an Englishman, and people could always tell when I'd spent my monthly one-on-one review with him. It would take me half the day to shed the British accent. This was true of everyone except one fellow from India, whose accent was anglified already.

The web site SecretLifeOfPronouns.com contains several interesting exercises. One of them compares two pieces of text for similar patterns in the use of stealth words, and no fair using two pieces of your own material. I entered two 100-word extracts from an e-mail exchange with one of my colleagues, a young woman who has a grade-school boy. The comparison revealed a correspondence of 87%, which is just above the average of 84% for people who are "friendly acquaintances".

Another exercise has you spend five minutes typing about a picture of a water bottle. The subject is so boring, I found it hard to keep going after about two minutes! But I persevered, producing 178 words (I can't resist calculating that this comes to 35.6 wpm). The analysis was as follows:

• Visual Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . You . Average
• Words on Label-Verbal Thinking . . . . 1.12 . . 1.74
• Colors and Text-Visual Sensitivity . . 1.12 . . 3.74
• Bottle Contents-Functional Thinking. . 0.00 . . 1.67
• The Bottle itself-Tactile Sensitivity. 0.56 . . 2.91
• Light and Shadow-Contextual Thinking . 0.00 . . 0.79

That does not please me much. The results make it seem I wasn't thinking much at all! Since these are percents, I suppose had I used the word "water" somewhere (I didn't), I'd have had a 0.56 score for Functional Thinking. Of the 178 words that I typed, the filtering program was only "interested" in five of them. Perhaps this is a computer's revenge. I have often called my profession of Information Science "the art of lying to a computer and making it believe me."

If you work for a corporation, do you think of it as your family? When you speak of the company (if you ever do), do you call your workgroup "us" or "them"? Try writing an essay about your work. Then count the instances of "us" words and "them" words. If the latter predominates, perhaps you need to update your résumé. And by the way, when you talk to your boss, you are most likely to use lots of "I" words. The political uses of "we" are found in the speech of dominant people.

I find it a bit unsettling that there are so many things that a computer can winkle out of my patterns of speech. Perhaps this is the next direction that Toastmasters type clubs can go: diction training, teaching us how to write a better college entrance essay (use more big words and lots of articles, and reduce "I" word use), how to get along with your spouse better (or at least sound like you do!), and even how to craft more convincing "little white lies" (leave the bigger ones to the experts like Bill Clinton). Who would have guessed that such a fun book of ten chapters could be written about the way we use the smallest words?

Portia-san, is that you?

kw: translations, linguistics

On a wild hare, I typed a phrase from Shakespeare (with three words modernized) into Google Translate, and picked Japanese as the target language. Here is the result:

慈悲の品質が緊張されていない、それは下の場所に応じて、天からの優しい雨のようにドロップします。

I don't read Japanese well enough to know how good the translation might be, but the word order, as the "hover" function reveals, is:

"Mercy's quality strained is not, it the place beneath upon, heaven's gentle rain (it) drops."

This is grammatically correct, at least. Now, to hit the Reverse function:

"Not the quality of mercy is strained, it is depending on where the bottom will drop like a gentle rain from heaven."

So the word "bottom" had to be supplied at some point. Quite good, though. The original text is the opening phrase of Portia's speech in Merchant of Venice:

"The quality of mercy is not strain'd, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heav'n upon the place beneath." Except I put strained, drops and heaven in place of the archaisms and contractions.

I'll have to consult my Japanese wife to determine another point; in translations of works such as Shakespeare's, do they translate into modern Japanese, or into late pre-Edo period Japanese? I've been told that Japanese is less volatile than English, and that anyone who can read Japanese can quite comfortably read 500-year-old texts. In English, that is not quite so. I am pretty well educated, but I cannot read Shakespeare quickly, and as for Chaucer (late 1300's), I'm pretty lost.