On Swedish Music

When you think of Swedish music, something else that people rarely do, you probably think of ABBA. We saw little to make us think anything has changed since then. In a park in Orëbro we came across a group of young people rehearsing for a performance they were about to give. They were clearly trying to sing some form of jazz, but it was jazz as imagined by someone who has had jazz explained to him at some point but has never actually heard any. They were also tone deaf. Another group in the same park (it was a large and lively park), were entertaining children with the theme from Pippi Långstrump and similar works. They had a big crowd and the children were enjoying it, so I assume there was something I was missing.

There is a relaxed feel to the music you hear around you. The feel of it suggests they are unused to strong melodies and dynamic, characterful rhythms. Even the Hare Krishna we saw in Stockholm were not chanting as they do in other places, but were producing a slow, mellifluent, almost tuneless sound like a group of hippies expressing the sound of water flowing over stones on a summer’s day. You could almost see long, light, printed dresses moving in the breeze.

Niche Narratives

Rereading some short stories by O Henry, I was struck, as I often am, by the desire to have written some of them myself. If I could excise him from history, hide the tales from the world for long enough for them to be forgotten, then produce them as my own, I think I would do it. Or possibly not. His style is not mine, his life was not mine, his characters can never be mine, but many of the ideas behind the stories are universal, at least, they are once they’ve been thought of.

Last night I read ‘The Last Leaf’. I am certain I remember the story from another setting, involving a couple of Frenchmen. I don’t know which is the original, or perhaps it comes from some folk tale, or a source older than writing itself, and O Henry and others have taken it and given it a new world and new flesh to live in. His story may be overdramatised, and I would have given it a different title, but the composition is perfectly balanced, and the whole thing is gathered together by its own coherence.

It made me think about other unusual idea which have been repeated (or copied) in writing and in song. I have a little list (now that line rings a bell, too, for some reason) of particularly striking cases:

I’ve always thought that Thomas Hardy pinched the entire plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge from Les Miserables. The story of a man reacting against his own weakness and stupidity, trying to make up for them, rising to achieve great things, and finally losing the daughter who was his main inspiration is common enough, but there are too many similar details for it to be purely chance. I would have to read them both again to explain it more fully, but I am sure there is some influence.

Lope de Vega once wrote a sonnet which is a description of the process of writing itself. (It’s called Soneto de Repente, if anyone wants to look it up). And Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Hallelujah, a rather splendid song if you like that sort of thing, the first verse of which describes its own musical theme (It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift) very cleverly.

Another O Henry story is ‘The Tainted Tenner’, narrated by a ten-dollar bill. The Guy Clarke song, ‘Indian-Head Penny’, is not narrated by the coin, but it tells a similar story of its birth and adventures, and all the places it ends up and the jobs it has to do.

Country music has many niche narratives. Although every second country song ever written is about some guy getting drunk over some girl, among the songs which find other aspects of life there are some unusual themes. Girl who turns to prostitution out of despair is common enough (Townes van Zandt’s ‘Tecumseh Valley’ is one of the best). But there are a couple of songs which refine it further, as ‘mama was a whore because she had to be but she was always good to me.’ ‘Hickory Hollow Tramp’ and ‘Lily of the Alley’ aren’t great songs, but they take a very specific and unusual theme and do something with it.

There is even room for a, very small, ‘Jesus Christ on the highway’ genre. I forget the name of the song in which a truck driver meets Jesus out jogging on the road. He explains that Heaven isn’t a good place for running so He comes down to Earth to do His jogging. And there is the brilliant, and very funny, Terry Allen song ‘Gimme a Ride to Heaven,’ which is worth 5 minutes of anyone’s time.

This has been a series of random thoughts. Indulge me. In a couple of days I must return to the city, where I shall have to think, get up in the morning, organize my mind and my life, and pretend that what I do has a serious purpose. The riffing on odd things seen in the mountains will have to end. But today I can still think random thoughts.

*The photos are of the salt works I wrote about last week. I couldn't upload them then.

Stonehenge as Acoustic Experiment

There is a general assumption in anthropology that the larger and more pointless the structure, the more terrified were the people of their gods.
Stonehenge is a case in point. However it was built, and whoever built it, it took a tremendous amount of work. You need a very good reason to do it, and the best reasons of all are to keep the gods happy. They are, after all, the ones who will keep your crops growing, your enemies cowed, and your body healthy. If the idea was just to know when to plant the crops, or when to expect an eclipse of the moon, a simpler, smaller and, above all, lighter, solution would have served. Stonehenge is what it is because, for some reason, it had to be like that.
So was it built in order to reproduce the interference patterns of sound? It’s very tempting to say, err, probably not, but Stephen Waller has worked hard to make his research sound reasonably sensible.
He says, and he’s probably right as far as it goes, that moving around in the space between two pipers piping we experience louder areas where the sounds reinforce one another and quieter areas where they almost cancel out, as though a large stone block were in the way. Ancient Britons were fascinated by this phenomenon, attributed ritual or mystic significance to it, and built Stonehenge in order to reproduce it permanently on a massive scale.
When addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a certain panache and self-confidence are required, especially if the work is a touch speculative. Steven Waller seems to possess these qualities. At least he was heard. I shall leave it to the experts to decide whether there is any merit to his theory, but it’s certainly imaginative.

"I Feel Fine Today"

So, you will be pleased to hear, does Kevin Welch. And so, if you click the link, will you.

Hickory QSL

On my bedside table there is a Roberts R-861 shortwave radio. It was once just about the best portable receiver on the market, and I see it's still being sold. It had Phase Lock Loop, digital tuning, a synthesized receiver, Radio Data System which brought the name of the station up on the screen, hundreds of  memories and continuous scanning across the spectrum, none of that jumping only between authorised frequencies within authorised bands. A joy to use. I bought it in the mid-nineties, back before the internet, as the best way to hear authentic voices from around the world. Most people, then and perhaps even now, got their impressions of the rest of the world from the narrative fantasies of Hollywood films and from foreign correspondents of the Guardian and the BBC saying 'funny foreign bloke who talks funny foreign language does funny foreign thing for some funny foreign reason which it would be beneath me, as an Englishman, to try to understand.' Shortwave radio gave you the chance to hear what those people were really doing, what was happening to them, what they were interested in and what they thought about it all, unmediated by someone with a story to sell and his own prejudices to satisfy.

The R-861 wasn't the first such radio I owned, but it was the best, and it's the one I was still using when the web made it all unnecessary, so it's been relegated to playing a bit of background music while I have a siesta. Needless to say, it performs this task perfectly.

I call it a shortwave radio, but in fact it covered FM and AM medium and long wave too, which was important because, although FM doesn't travel more than a very few miles,  AM can travel hundreds of miles along the surface of the Earth in the right conditions, and some frequencies will propagate thousands of miles, allowing Radio 4 to be heard in parts of Africa, and vice versa (SW bounces around the ionosphere randomly with only a low power transmitter which is why it was used so widely and is why it can be so frustrating to listen to).

I was never a very serious DX-er, not like the chap I knew who took his holidays in Hawaii because it's the best place in the world for picking up AM stations from just about anywhere. His suitcase contained a toothbrush (sometimes), a tabletop receiver that cost more than his car and several hundred yards of wire, which always caused comment at customs. He didn't actually listen to the stations, he just collected information about the signals. And since you ask, no, he wasn't married.

I wasn't like that; my interest was in the places I could reach and the people I could listen to, but I did buy, every year, the World Radio and TV Handbook, a sort of Radio Times for trainspotters, with details of all the world's radio stations, times of broadcast and the frequencies they used. Conditions vary depending on the position of the sun (I think it causes the effect of the solar wind on the ionosphere to vary, or something similar), and so a single station will change frequencies regularly throughout the day, and often stations will share frequencies if they have different target areas or broadcast times. (Rather dull, I know, but it's why it isn't enough just to jot down the name of the station and its frequency or put in the memory.)

I caught Radio Pyongyang the day Kim Il-Sung died. If you've ever heard Radio Caracol when Colombia have just lost a vital World Cup qualifier to Bolivia you will have just the faintest inkling of an idea of the kind of hysterical grief that was pouring out of the ether. I listened to Radio Slovakia regularly and learned more than anyone needs to know about the economic and social problems of the wine growers in the East. I listened to Radio Australia, always fascinating, and never missed Lucky Oceans, and American country/folk/blues/southern rock DJ who rarely played a song you knew but never played one that wasn't worth hearing.

At times I caught football from South America, interviews with people shopping at markets in obscure parts of Africa, the Jordanian view of events in Japan, thoughts from a Thai lawyer on incipient democracy in Chile, a Bangladeshi historian explaining the history of a small temple in a village almost swallowed by the jungle, Beef Stew, Notho Myrmecia, God's will that I pop a tenner in an envelope and send it to a man in Alabama, dead people who no one else cared about, caught by accidents, wild animals, floods, earthquakes, political violence or crime too small  for anyone outside their own country to even notice, and literally thousands of other moments, some regular, most chanced upon by a happy spinning of the dial at just the right time. I heard ten thousand people who didn't know I was listening tell me things I had never realized I wanted to know, and the best were always those who spoke unselfconsciously of the world they lived in, a world completely different from mine and which I could not have known anything about but for the radio.

An important part of DX-ing, for the really serious, was the reception report. When you picked up a new, rare, very distant or otherwise unusual station you would write down the name, time, frequency, signal strength and quality, and a brief summary of the content to prove you really were listening, and send it off, by post, to the station. They would send you back a QSL card, confirming receipt, which you would proudly add to your collection. These were traditionally idiosyncratic, collectible, and some were highly prized. There is a story I heard told by an American presenter (of a programme about DX-ing; a surprising number of programmes on shortwave radio stations are about listening to shortwave radio) where he claims to have stumbled upon a clandestine station in Cuba just when it was raided by the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, not a body known for its sense of humour. But he sent a reception report to the CDR headquarters in Havana, and he says they sent him back a QSL card, which he treasures.

There is a point to all this reminiscing (not that there needs to be, but there is), so it is pobably time to be drifting towards it. I have decided to reinvent the QSL card for the internet age. I propose, therefore, to design a Hickory Wind QSL card and, when I'm happy with it, I shall send it to any commenter who leaves a contact link to a blog, website, email address or some such. Given that this is a quiet little blog, frequented only by a few, highly discerning denizens of the higher reaches of the blogosphere (Claridges at Tuesday teatime rather than the Nag's Head on a Friday night) it shouldn't take up too much time.

That, then, is my proposal for this weekend- to produce a QSL card worthy of my commenters, and perhaps to start a trend, who knows. I should really be working, but some things are more important...

On The Reliability of Oral Tradition*

For a couple of weeks I’ve been trying to put together some thoughts on the role of oral tradition in human society, with no success. This failure has been caused by the need to do a great deal of research before pretending I know what I’m talking about, and then to sift through the data, theories and speculations of others to try to make sense of it all.

It occurs to me that I don’t have the time to do this, nor, given the amount of rubbish written on the subject, do I have the interest to work my way through it all, so I offer a kind of stream of consciousness piece, a random, swirling collection of thoughts that come into my mind when I think about the question, and which are just as likely to be nonsense as much of what I have read.

A friend of mine, who does know a lot about narrative tradition, and has done the research, happens to be preparing a lecture/paper on this very subject, including cognitive and neurological aspects, but I shan’t pinch his ideas, so you’ll have to make do with mine.

We like to hear stories, to be told stories and to a lesser extent to create stories. Stories entertain us, they help to pass the time. Stories help us to escape from life, to believe that somewhere, better, more fun lives are being led, and to imagine that one day we might be part of them. Those who create stories can have a great deal of power. Those who control the creators of stories can have a great deal more. But stories were not invented to be used as a tool by those who sought power; that would, I think, be too great a conceptual leap for human intelligence to make, dangerous as it is to rule out such possibilities. No, the desire for stories, for ornamental falsehood, is instinctive to the human mind, and I want to consider why this is so, and how this instinct serves us, and serves to control us.

As I have said many times before here and in other places (the pub mostly, and also in my unpublished collected works) we need to believe things to be true, but we are not very good at seeking it out, and we are often afraid of what it might turn out to be. So we invent things we would like to be true, and we call them truths. Often we do not invent them ourselves, but rather we take them from others, who may not be telling us their real beliefs, but giving us stories that it is useful to them to have us accept as true. Most people cannot distinguish truth from belief, or understand that there are categories of truth, each applicable to a different type of understanding.

Anyhow, oral tradition. One of the original uses of story-telling, as shown by primitive tribes even today, is to provide a sense of identity, to describe the origins of a people and establish a foundation for its behaviour and customs, including its concept of right and wrong. In the absence of recorded history- a very recent phenomenon and still limited in geographical range- the imagination of some of the tribe provides a past, a sense of superiority and justification, of possession, both of the tribe with respect to other tribes, and of each individual within the tribe. The hierarchies quickly learn that these stories are a way of creating truth and reinforcing their authority, of instilling courage in the warriors and fear in the underclass, and they are used as such.

The enemies change, the sense of self changes, what the present requires of the past changes, the leaders change, the fashion for entertainment changes- even around the tribal camp-fire- new traditions need new stories. New story-tellers give new stories or new twists to the old stories, either because they want to make them their own or because they are genuinely interested in the creative process. In this light, when you look to the politics of modern industrialized nations, the uneasy conspiracy between journalists and politicians to create an apparently coherent narrative that they can call the truth is not at all surprising. It's not even much more sophisticated. Sadly, we don't require them to try very hard to fool us.

Stories that are not written down will change very quickly, from generation to generation or more quickly still as events require, and no reliance whatsoever can be placed on the factual accuracy of stories that are told even about the supposedly very recent past. Although they purport to represent truth, they exist for quite different reasons than the transmission of any objective truth, and mean nothing whatever from the perspective of academic history.

Once they’re written down, or put into verse, with metre and broader structure, they are more likely to be preserved in something closer to the form they had when first written or versified, but they can still change, and of course, we can know nothing of their pre-literate history.

The essential elements of an oral narrative are, of course, the characters, not as names but as symbols, of qualities or institutions, mainly, and the events, which are also symbolic. Once it is in writing or in verse, the structure becomes as important as, or more important than, the symbolism of the story, and much harder to change. If the original context is lost, which will always happen eventually when they are put into writing or verse, and can happen even with oral transmission in some circumstances (for example, when the story is held to be beautiful in itself, and is deliberately preserved without change for long enough for the reason for its having that form to be forgotten) it is then no longer its transparent narrative symbols which are open to manipulation through direct change, but the interpretation of events and symbols whose originally meaning is no longer clear.

This, broadly speaking, is why oral tradition matters, how it is used and abused, and why it is not history.

*The title of this post has been changed on the advice of someone with taste.

The Decay of Language Part 2

There are two main threads to the ‘language is decaying’ argument. One laments the fact that some people do not use the terms, meanings, pronunciations or structures that we learnt when we were young. The other suggests that the effectiveness of the language for communication will be impaired if a certain change or changes is ‘allowed’ to happen. Neither is a serious problem. Language use changes more or less randomly over time, and is widely different across regions, ages, classes and professions. This doesn't stop people understanding each other when they wish to. Differences in education, knowledge, cultural reference and interests are more likely to cause difficulties than differences in the way words and structures they have in common are used.

Meaning is constantly being negotiated, even during the course of a single conversation, and much more so across wider linguistic communities. But the young and the old, the British and the Nigerians, the Metropolitan professional and the rural worker, those with backgrounds in the sciences and those from the humanities, even left-wingers and right-wingers, may not belong to one linguistic community in any meaningful way, despite sharing a mother tongue and perhaps even a hometown. When they speak to each other, neither uses the language they would naturally use when speaking to those they instinctively feel are 'like them.' Each seeks a form of accommodation, a way of making the communication work, with greater or lesser effort depending on how much interest they have in it. Most of us are capable of speaking with a range of styles, registers, semantic fields and even accents, according to the communicative context, and we think nothing of it.

While there are enough people in constant communication with each other in sufficiently varying groups a language will not decay; it will only change. Those changes will leave some people mildly confused while others assimilate them completely without even realizing it. But language will decay if it ceases to be used for literary or academic purposes, or if it ceases to be written at all, or if those who use it do so for a very limited range of purposes, or or if it becomes solely a literary or academic language, no longer used for real communication at all, or if the groups who use it are too small or too isolated. Then it can lose plasticity, expressive power, or comprehensibilty between groups.

The problem with trying to impose standards in language is that nobody really listens to you. For most of human history it hasn't mattered and, except in certain specific forms of communication, they don't matter very much now. Communication in everyday life is as much about seeking ways of understanding each other as it is about exchanging information. We create standards as we go,for the times when we need them.

Recursive Music

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift…

I imagine everybody knows Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, since, apart from being played regularly on music radio in any one of a hundred versions, it seems to be the mood music of choice for the closing credits of every detective series Hollywood churns out, and it churns out a lot. So you’ll have noticed that the first verse mostly describes what the tune is doing. Quirky, but not exactly recursion, more self-reference than chicken and egg.

Not unique either. Lope de Vega wrote a sonnet that describes the process of writing a sonnet about a sonnet. As a bit of a joke, presumably.

But for real recursion look at songs like ‘The Kentucky Waltz’, ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, ‘The Last Cheater’s Waltz’ (yes, there is a theme developing here), or ‘The Lambeth Walk’ for that matter. The song (B) that the song (A) is about only exists because the song (A) exists, but it (B) didn’t exist to be written about until (A) was written. It couldn’t even exist in the mind of the composer until it had already been written.

Odd, really. But then music, the performance of music, is recursive when it’s done properly. A good musician is constantly responding to the sound that he knows he is about to make.

The Decay of Language Part 1

"Language does not decay unless it ceases to be used for communication. It changes, sometimes other people's usage (or mistakes) grate upon those who say it differently, but the language itself is not in any danger.

Language has existed for thousands of years, performing its function adequately, without any care or attention at all, and most have never been subject to it at any time in their history."

That was the comment I left on this article over here, and which the author then responded to here. It occurs to me to expand on these thought, because there are many misconceptions about how language changes and what happens when it does.

All aspects of language are changing all the time- the phonology of our grandparents’ speech is not ours, teenage slang is regenerated every few years, words become temporarily fashionable and lose popularity again, meanings expand and shift, new concepts come to be talked about and receive new names or old names, old concepts cease to be discussed and their names die out or start to mean other things, structures

None of this has any effect on the usefulness of the language for communication. Language is immensely flexible and will always contain ways to express anything a speaker wishes to say. But it is up to the speak to use his intelligence and perseverance to find it, it is not the business of language to preserve every conceivable idea that someone might want to express in fossil form through eternity in case it is needed. The success of language lies precisely in the fact that we only have to manipulate a small number of symbols to achieve our communicative goal, and these symbols are themselves arbitrary- it doesn’t matter what they are, only that they exist. That’s why they can change without any loss of communicative potential in the language.

Many of these variations occur within social groups, professions, classes, activities, towns, neighbourhoods etc, and they occur precisely because they are useful, or at least because they do not interfere with the process of communication. If they transcend these limits to other kinds of communicative context, there may be a need to identify the meaning by an alteration of the mental paradigms and common understandings that allow the exchange of meaning. But we do this all the time anyway; in almost all conversations we have to interpret and reinterpret meaning in accordance with the various details of the context, not only of the words that are used, and determine what meaning that is contained in them. We find ways to understand and be understood, not always perfectly.

Communication does not take place on a universal scale, there is no global conversation, there are only people speaking together in small or large groups, or reading privately the writings of people they may or may not know, and there are dozens of different reasons for seeking communication. Contrary to common belief, most conversations have a primarily social purpose, and the exchange of information is a minor or non-existent component. Most of what we say is quite simple.

*The painting is by Mrs Hickory.

Unusual Phonology

Many interjections, especially expressions used to express emotions with no further syntactic support, sometimes contain phonological features not present in the normal language (I say this apropos of nothing in particular, but I've been collecting examples and the subject strikes me as interesting):

Tsk- used to indicate disapproval, often ironically, contains no vowel and has a voiceless affricate not found in normal English, /ts^/, although it is common in some languages, for example Czech. The only affricates regularly found in English are the sounds of 'church' and 'judge', although some pronunciations of /tr/ and /dr/ are identified as affricates;

Uh-oh- to indicate that a problem has been spotted, exhibits tonality, since there must be a marked drop in pitch from the first to the second syllable in order to express the intended emotion; in fact the meaning may be said to be more in the tone than in the phonemes. Tonality is very common in the world's languages, and exists in the great majority of the languages of Asia and Africa. It is much less common in the Indo-European languages, especially in Europe, though Swedish exhibits some tonality;

Whew- to indicate relief, usually begins with a bilabial fricative not present in normal English;

Uhhr- to indicate horror, is often pronounced with an ingressive airstream, a method of phonation not found in normal English, and very rare indeed in any of the world’s languages. Nearly all sounds in nearly all languages are pulmonic egressive, which means that the air is pushed out of the mouth by the lungs, but several other ways of making sounds can be found here and there ;

Chkchk- to encourage a horse or express fondness for an animal, is a post-alveolar or palatal click, found only in the Khoisan and a few surrounding Bantu languages, and in Damin in Australia. Damin is a constructed ceremonial language spoken by initiated elders of the Lerdil tribe, who live on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is notable, remarkably so, for being the only language outside southern Africa to have click consonants;

Tut-tut- to indicate disapproval, is often pronounced as a dental or alveolar click.

As I say, hardly the pressing issue of the day, but there we are. All links are to Wikipedia, because it describes the phonemes pretty well.

From Within the Minds of Moths

One of those minor things which I happen to find rather interesting is found poetry. Perhaps a proper post on the subject at some point. But for now, I came across this on the Language Log and added it to my collection as 'Odor plume flux is accentuated deep within the moth brain.' Then I read the comments and saw that others were well ahead of me.

Towards a Reconstruction of Proto-Mammal 2

In case anyone is confused, or hasn’t read part 1, I’m not actually going to rebuild Thrinaxodon liorhinus or the sabre-toothed tiger, and I’m not sitting here surrounded by the results of failed Frankensteinian experiments, watching them variously writhe, rot, crumble into dust or, occasionally, eat each other. It is an interesting idea, and I’m sure that someone, somewhere is doing just that, but not me. I’m not a biologist, and my interest is in the mammalian ur-sprach.

It is only possible here to offer a few tentative conclusions, but I state them with a degree of confidence, and ask for an open mind. It is first necessary to explain what it means.

Clearly, other mammals do not speak in the way that we do, but they do communicate, and they almost invariably use sound to some extent (exceptions being the mute swan and the Haitian long-eared false wombat, which, despite possessing a fully-developed hyoid and tuneable muscles in the glottal opening, has evolved an inability to emit sound which appears to be psychological in origin. Work is continuing on the subject, which does not, in any case, affect the general argument.

Both the cognitive and physiological origins of speech go back far beyond the evolution of the primates to the origins of the mammalian order, and the following general conclusions can be stated as examples of where the work is leading:

- The single simplest sound is that made by opening the mouth with the soft palate relaxed and simultaneously voicing with the throat. Mammalian soft palates vary in tenseness, therefore this sound is sometimes closer to /b/ than an /m/, which is unimportant here. It is a bilabial. And the nature of voicing, whether by direct vibration of vocal cords, or a less controlled trembling of the pharynx, does not matter either. This basic sound was originally the same. And, being the simplest of all sounds to make, it is the first that mammalian young tend to produce, usually associated with a colourless, lax, open vowel, the tongue lying flat and floppy in or partly out of the mouth, something like /ae/. For this reason the sounds /ma:/ and /pa:/ are assigned meanings descriptive of the relations between cubs and there parents, stll detectable in the communication of many mammals today, and clearly reconstructable using the comparative method.

- Since mammary glands do not fossilize, the distinguishing characteristic of mammals in the fossil record is a small bone in the inner ear, which in other orders is, where it exists, part of the jaw. The absence of this bone in the mammalian mandible leads to a distribution of velar sounds to indicate fear, threat or warning, and of alveolar-palatal sounds to create and maintain social relations. From this, all mammalian sounds, including the words of all human languages, have their origin.

You will note that this does not presuppose or prove the existence of a proto-sapiens; the proto-language from which all human languages descend, the last common ancestor, as it were, may have existed before anatomically modern man came to be, before the hominid-chimp split, or even before the existence of primates as such.

I have a marvellous proof of this theory, but the post is not large enough to contain it. I hope to publish the full paper around the beginning of April.

Note: There is no tradition of historical linguistics at the University here; nevertherless I have been very fortunate in enjoying the help and encouragement of Dr. Milongo Patrañez in the work I am doing. Many thanks.

Towards a Reconstruction of Proto-Mammal

The origin of human language is one of the many fascinating areas of study concerned with the origin of man, and life in general. The detailed, and often rather pointless work of the great historical linguists is a testament to the majesty attainable by the human mind, and also to the lengths some people will go to to avoid paying attention to any of the things which are generally held to constitute the experience of living. Those who do not know linguistics tend to imagine that it is largely concerned with ‘learning foreign’ or with telling youths how to speak correctly. There is a general assumption that it is not a discipline calling for true scholarship, in the way that, say, sociology, is.

This is quite untrue, and as a first step the uninitiated should read the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, specifically his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, in which he deduces the existence of a series of sounds in a language that passed from this world five thousand years ago and was probably never written down. Nor was this idle speculation. Despite reservations on the part of colleagues, he was shown to be right when Hittite was discovered and interpreted some twenty years later. Such dogged insistence on seeking out identifiable truth is a rare quality; of course, having only warm chocolate and cuckoo clocks for intellectual stimulus he naturally sought ways to stimulate himself. He didn’t even have cheese, being from the region where they manufacture the holes that go in the cheese the other provinces make. (My researches indicate that the Swiss do not even have sex, but I should acknowledge that the sample was too small to draw any definite conclusions.) But I digress.

Indo-European is but one of the language families that exist in the world, Proto-IE being the assumed, and partly reconstructed, language that was the mother of English, Greek, Italian, Tocharian, Irish, Lithuanian, Bengali and quite a few other languages living and dead. This much is more or less certain. The linking of those major languages to each other, and the proto-languages into one single language from which all the world’s living languages ultimately derive, is the next step, but one which may be impossible for a number of reasons.

The underlying hypothesis may not be true, of course. It seems reasonable to postulate a proto-world language, but the physical development of language, as opposed to the cognitive faculty that allows it to exist, may have taken place after one or more of the major transcontinental migrations had occurred. (Biceps and triceps arose once in some distant ancestor of all humans, whereas archery has been invented independently by many different populations.)

It may not be possible to demonstrate the existence of such a language, even if it ever existed, and much less reconstruct it, because of the total destruction of all evidence. Words do not fossilize, as palaeo-linguists observe when they need an excuse to stop digging and put their feet up.

Those who attempt to show that there was once a single language spoken by all humans have met with varying degrees of acceptance, from furrow-browed distrust, to cautious ridicule, to headshaking exasperation and outright rejection. Nicholas Marr attempted to underpin his highly speculative theories with Marxist theory, which was good politics at the time but made for rather poor science. And having debased himself in this way he was posthumously denounced by Stalin for introducing non-Marxist formulae into his theories. This article on Stalinist linguistics provides a fascinating insight into the man. As well as being an evil, blood-stained tyrant he also had an ego the size of Ursa minor β. And he was a bright chap, though it pains me to say it.

Sergei Starostin undoubtedly suffered from the lasting effects of all this when developing his own Dene-Caucasian, also considered speculative by most historical linguists. (In science, ‘speculative’ means ‘without foundation and almost certainly a load of codswallop intended to get the attention of the newspapers’; ‘highly speculative’ means ‘completely without foundation, utter bollocks, and the author probably thinks he’s Napoleon.’)

So much for the terminology. The work of Joseph Greenberg was merely speculative. Much of it was not without interest, but the methodology was deeply flawed. In essence, in order to obtain any result at all the hypotheses that underpinned the method had to be so broad as to virtually preclude all possibility of the result being true. His determination to produce something rather blinded him to the uselessness of what he was producing. Imagine a committee of French poets trying to design a cuckoo clock. The result would be extremely messy, and might even tick, but the cuckoo would quote Lecan on the interpretation of post-modernity in a society which is both post-colonial and neo-colonial, and the numbers will have been removed as a symbol of Bourgeois capitalist oppression of someone or other. It would not tell you you were late for lunch. Once more, I digress.

Merritt Ruhlen has continued the work of Greenberg, has proved nothing and been laughed at a lot, but they have both contributed much that is useful on the way to their speculative conclusions. But this does not mean that what they say is not true, it does not even mean that it cannot be shown to be true, only that they have not shown it to be so. One day, what can in fact be concluded from their work may be satisfactorily separated from the bits that owe more to sweaty palms, and they will yet contribute to the furthering of knowledge about the history of language. The fairly recent history, relatively speaking.

And that is the point. This post is an introduction to a topic which I shall outline on the 28th (for reasons which are important but not necessarily obvious). Despite what has been said about the difficulties of establishing relationships between languages, and reconstructing proto-languages beyond a certain point in the past, and the dangers of over-interpreting results, it is still possible, with great caution, to progress in this field. And that is what I want to do in the work I shall present; to go back, not only to a hypothetical proto-sapiens (which my theory does not require in the sense that it is understood by Ruhlen and Greenberg), but beyond the hominid lineage, beyond the primate, to an early stage of verbal communication common to the ancestor of modern mammals. I wish, in short, to reconstruct proto-mammalian.