I think you probably do what I do, in two different ways. On the one hand, when I read words by people I’ve never heard speak, I hear their voices in an accent close to mine most of the time. Ironically, such people might never be able to do the accent I hear their voices in convincingly. In that sense, I think you probably speak like me when I read your words. I also think you probably do this too, when you read my words if you’ve never heard me. If you’re in the States, for example, you might hear my words in an accent I couldn’t convincingly imitate. Maybe not. Perhaps you realise I’m from Southeast England and therefore have a certain kind of accent which might be reflected in the words and spellings I use, although actually that’s not always so. For instance, at least in my childhood I said “couch” for sofa and “lounge” for living room. My mother actually used to say “mad” for angry. I’m aware that the first two are some kind of aspirational thing in that the cognoscenti say the latter and hoi polloi the former, but I’m not sure they come from there. For all I know they may not be American as such but be regional in Britain somewhere, probably the Thames Valley or the Medway towns.
When I was a child, my accent may or may not have been afflicted by speech impediments, in that my pronunciation of certain sounds differed from RP in a way which I suspect others’ didn’t. Specifically, I used a velar semivowel rather than a voiced palatal one for the sound expressed by consonantal Y and a labiodental semivowel for the sound expressed by R. My short E was also more open than it is now and in particular my pronunciation of long I was “oi”. I want to use IPA here but I worry that I’ll leave people baffled. The vowel differences are probably to do with accent at the time, and the drift short E has undergone is probably a general thing. Something I never did but children around me did do was pronounce the voiceless palatal semivowel as “fy”, which I think is quite common, and in fact someone close to me had that addressed by a speech therapist. I recently discovered that the Guarani language uses both velar and labiodental semivowels, so maybe I’d have a good Guarani accent.
Present in my father’s accent right up to the end of his life was TH-fronting: saying “th” as F and V. This is widely associated with the Cockney accent. He also did something which is widely associated with a working class Southeastern English accent: he used an intervocalic glottal stop for T. This particular sound fascinates me. In particular, it’s remarkable that a sound pronounced just behind the teeth should somehow slip all the way to the throat, although almost the reverse happened when the sound written as “GH” turned into an F. Something similar also seems to have happened in Gaidhlig, and it seems in Scottish English and Scots around here, where the TH, far from being fronted, has become an aitch sound.
I’m sorry, I can’t do this because it feels so sloppy. Here’s a chart of the IPA:
Okay, so that’s messy but this is what I’m talking about and I’m not going to fool around with spelling pronunciation vaguenesses any more. The situation is this. I used to say /ɰ/ when other people said /j/ and /ʋ/ when other people had /ɹ/. The latter’s quite common in Southeast England and I’ve also heard it from a Cornish person, but as far as I can tell, the former was just me. The Cockney accent is known for changing /θ/ to /f/ and /ð/ to /v/, and also famous for using /ʔ/ for /VtV/. With me?
Right, so the presence of the intervocalic glottal stop tends to get written as an apostrophe even when transcribing other languages. In English it occurs in Southeast England northward to the former Bedfordshire and also in Scottish English, and while I’m at it, isn’t it weird how both Scottish English and Southeastern English English use /ʌ/? I recently realised that the Gaidhlig GH and DH between back vowels, i.e. the broad allophone, is also a glottal stop in some accents. In other words, the eastern isles of this archipelago are sporadically spotted therewith.
Common use of the glottal stop in that position in English is stereotypically associated with poverty, a low degree of formal institutional education, social deprivation and possibly being White. It’s also associated with Southern England but apparently it’s also used elsewhere nowadays due to the influence of ‘Eastenders’. It comes quite naturally to me to use glottal stops but I’m thoroughly middle class though also exceedingly White. Its history is that my father did it, although I probably didn’t learn to speak much from him, then I did it to fit in at school, so in fact I’m diglossic. However, my paternal grandfather was from the Gorbals, which makes me wonder if his probable glottal stops, and for that matter unrounded short U’s, are actually in an unbroken line from his accent to mine. This probably doesn’t exist, but it reminds me of Hume’s view of cause and effect, that there is no sense in which a cause produces an effect and there’s nothing more than constant conjunction, temporal precedence and contiguity to cause. This is a weird way of thinking about causation to be sure, and not one I accept, but it might reflect my family phonology.
However, I’m not here to talk about myself except as an example of someone who has been known to produce intervocalic glottal stops. My concern is something else, and something on which I’ve recently come to ponder: the hard left glottal stop. A similar phenomenon occurs with aitch-dropping, but not to lose focus, there seems to be a tendency for SWP and other Trotskyist activists to use intervocalic glottal stops to a greater extent than in the general population. I’ve no idea if any research has been done into this but until the other day I’d generally thought that it was an affectation to make the speaker seem more stereotypically working class. A genuine example of a very similar phenomenon was of a member of the RCP who referred to a comrade as “‘Olly” when her name was Holly. This led me to think they were referring to someone called Oliver. I now think this accent was genuinely affected and specifically directed at me as someone they perceived as bourgeois with a near-RP accent, which was the case at the time, so it’s akin either to inverse snobbery or as a tactic to unsettle me. Little did they know that I was actually diglossic, and they were failing to fake an accent authentically. They were attempting to reproduce a West Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire accent unsuccessfully, because I may be wrong but I don’t think those accents drop aitches at all. Consequently I perceived them as referring to someone called Oliver.
I have a hunch, then, that the accent was fake and adopted for tactical purposes, but I’ve just changed my mind, or rather have acquired doubts, about the fakeness of intervocalic glottal stops in Socialist Worker activists. Owen Jones recently posted a video from the Your Party conference where he interviewed a member of the SWP whose accent as presented definitely did include glottal stops, so my kneejerk reaction was “fake”, but I no longer think this is true. I think something else is going on. Thomas Pynchon once referred to an American military accent as “Southern” and then withdrew that claim as a sign of his lack of experience. He later concluded, and I tend to agree with him, that the US Army accent sounds Southern to Northerners and Northern to Southerners. In other words, there’s a specific US Army accent which kind of averages out the accents of its soldiers. I further suspect this accent confers a sense of cohesion, like the uniform, rituals and general camaraderie of the military, such as it is. Moreover, maybe people adopt this accent in an attempt to fit in and it later becomes second nature to them, the same process, in fact, that I went through when I was at secondary school. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn this process.
It’s just possible, then, that the SWP glottal stop deserves a bit more sympathy than I’ve previously afforded it, because it just may be a kind of institutional accent, conferring membership and emerging without conscious intervention. It might actually not be fake at all much of the time, and when it is, it’s about wanting to fit in to the in-group and oriented in that direction rather than outwards.
The other anecdotal datum from all this is What Sarada Did. Sarada has a near-RP accent and lives in Scotland with me. Previously she lived in the English Midlands, but she’s from West London. A few years ago, she went to a political meeting in London and I saw a video of her in which she used glottal stops. She didn’t seem conscious of this and I think it’s simple unconscious influence from either others around her or being in Central London. If this is so, maybe it’s not fair to blame Trotskyists for talking this way either. It seems she used to use it at school and when talking to her friends. As for our children, one of them has an accent closest to Liz’s and the other’s used to be like mine but is now more Yorkshire.
Glottal stops in English, or at least English English, have historically been frowned upon, but in other languages they’re considered entirely respectable sounds in the standard language. This is true of Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew, Hawaiian and Samoan for example. In Germanic languages other than the ones spoken here or derived from them, glottal stops begin words which are written with initial vowels. I once said to my ex’s mother “Das ist ein Problem” and she thought I’d said “Das ist Dein Problem”. Danish uses something like a glottal stop which they call “stød” where Norwegian and Swedish use tone to distinguish otherwise identical words, although apparently not all Danish does this and it can be a creaky voice instead. The Austronesian languages Hawaiian and Samoan both use glottal stops and Hawaiian in particular is very focussed on having a letter for it, which they call ʻokina – “ʻ”. I have to admit that I don’t really understand their insistence on it in this manner. It’s considered the final letter in the alphabet and affects alphabetisation, but at the start of a word the following vowel is capitalised. The Samoan apostrophe was temporarily dropped in the 1960s CE, then adopted again in 2012, and likewise is considered the last letter in the alphabet. My perception of the Cockney or Scottish English glottal stop is that it’s a written letter which has identical capital and lower case forms and I suppose I’d alphabetise it as if it were a T. Hebrew and Arabic both kind of have the glottal stop, represented as aleph in Hebrew and in a more complicated manner in Arabic, where it’s called “hamza”, as the first letter of the alphabet. Our own letter A is descended from the glottal stop letter. Maltese uses a Q. All of these are fully-fledged letters.
Scots politicises the apostrophe. Words written with apostrophes as if they have missing letters compared to English words only had those introduced in the eighteenth century, and are often non-etymological and they’re therefore deprecated. But not all of them, because some do actually represent missing letters. It’s been referred to as the “apologetic apostrophe”. The glottal stop in Scots is simply represented as a T.
I could say a lot more, and often do, but that’s all I’ve got for you for now, except to say that there can be more than one way to politicise both the glottal stop and the apostrophe. Maybe Cockneys should start proudly using the ʻokina, and maybe Scots could distinguish between the relatively few legitimate apostrophes and their allophone of /t/ by doing the same.
As you may know, I was involved in a high-control parachurch organisation in the mid-1980s CE when I went to university for the first time. Over the first few months, I didn’t resist them much, at least externally, because I wanted to give them a chance and see whether their claim that God and evangelical Protestantism really did have all the answers. I then went back to Canterbury for Xmas and bought my dad a book about mathematics, something he was very keen on and had a good grasp of at the time, which I also ended up reading myself. In this book, which I think may have been Martin Gardener’s ‘Mathematical Circus’, there was an interesting chapter on different degrees of infinity. In maths, there are countable and uncountable infinities. Countable infinities do take forever to count but given an infinite period of time it can be done. Uncountable infinities are just not countable at all. So for example, there are infinity whole numbers and infinity points in space, but those two infinities are different. It can be proven that this is so as follows: Suppose you have an infinite number of cards with a one on one side and a zero on the other, and you make an infinite number of infinitely long rows of these cards in order, starting with zero and ending with infinity. Have you then produced all possible infinite sequences of ones and zeros? No. You can start in the top left hand corner of this array and turn a card over, then go on diagonally, one row and one column down forever, turning the cards over until you reach the bottom right hand corner infinitely far away. The number you have then generated, running diagonally down the arrangement, is not in that sequence because bit n of sequence n will always be different from the number in that position on the grid. Hence there must be a larger infinity. This leads to peculiar consequences. For instance, it means you can in theory take a sphere of a given size, remove an infinite number of points from it and construct another equally-sized sphere from them without reducing the size or integrity of the first one. Georg Cantor, who first thought of this way of understanding infinity, spent the later part of his life going in and out of mental hospitals, partly due to the hostility of other mathematicians to this concept and its implications and possibly also because the concept he came up with was a cognitohazard. To some extent, thinking of this may have broken his brain.
With steely determination, I returned to university and immediately confronted a member of the cult, not on this issue but other, more practical ones such as intolerance of other spiritual paths and homophobia. However, because we were discussing an infinite being, namely God, I mentioned in passing this concept, and his interesting response has often given me pause for thought since. He regarded this view of infinity, and by extension much of pure mathematics, as a symptom of the flawed nature of the limited and fallen human mind. I can’t remember exactly how he put it but that’s what it entailed. At a later point he tried to explain what I’d said to someone else as “infinity times infinity”, which is not what this is, and advised them not to think about it, which in a way is fair enough. He was a medical student, and it may not be worthwhile to waste your brain cells on it in such a situation, except that it might be useful for psychiatric purposes, because, well, what are cognitohazards? Are they actually significant threats to mental health and are there enough of them encountered in daily life or even occasionally for them to be proper objects of study?
Something which definitely would be a cognitohazard is Graham’s Number. Until fairly recently, Graham’s Number, hereinafter referred to as G, was the largest actively named number. Obviously you could talk about G+1 and so on, but that’s not entirely sensible. G is the upper bound of a solution to a particular problem involving bichromatic hypercubes. Take a hypercube of a certain number of dimensions and join all the vertices together to form a complete graph on 2^n vertices. Colour each edge either one colour or another. What’s the smallest number of dimensions such a hypercube must have to guarantee that every such colouring contains at least one single-coloured subgraph on a plane bounded by four vertices? This number might actually be quite small, namely thirteen. However, it might be, well, extremely large doesn’t really cut it to describe how big it is, so let me just say it might not be that small at all. It might be G.
G can actually be expressed precisely, but in order to do so a special form called Knuth’s up-arrow notation has to be used. There’s an operation called exponentiation which is expressed very easily on computers and other such devices as “^”. Hence 2^2 is two squared, 2^3 two cubed and so on. Although it would probably be fine to use the caret to express this, in the past “↑” has been used for both this operation and in particular in Knuth’s notation. In his scheme, 2↑4 is 2 x 2 x 2 x 2, which is of course sixteen. However, more arrows can be added, so 2↑↑4 is “tetration”, 2↑(2↑(2↑2)), which is 65536 (or ten less than three dozen and two zagiers in duodecimal). Then there’s “pentation”, 2↑↑↑2, which is expanded further as 2↑↑(2↑↑(2↑↑2)), and has something like 19729 digits. This can be continued as long as necessary of course, and G is expressed in this notation as 3↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑3, which should be sixty-four arrows but I haven’t checked. That is, perhaps surprisingly, the exact value of the number. If every Planck volume in the observable Universe were to represent a digit, there still wouldn’t be enough space to write it out longhand. It is literally true that if a human were to visualise G, it would cause their head to implode and turn into a black hole. This is not a joke: that’s what would actually happen. So Graham’s Number is also a cognitohazard.
Nowadays, larger finite numbers have been used. TREE(3), which I’ve mentioned before, also involves graphs, as does Simple Subcubic Graph Number 3, which renders TREE(3) insignificant. There’s an even larger finite integer which resulted from a large number duel in 2007 which I could represent here but I’d probably be talking to myself. Actually, I will:
This is too hard to type out without fiddling about with LaTeX, so here’s the first bit written out longhand, unfortunately with a bic. The next bit is based on this definition, and reads “The smallest number bigger than every finite number
with the following property: there is a formula
in the language of first-order set-theory (as presented in the definition of
) with less than a googol symbols and
as its only free variable such that: (a) there is a variable assignment
assigning
to
such that
, and (b) for any variable assignment
, if
, then
assigns
to
.”
Phi is a Goedelisation and s a variable assignment.
It wouldn’t be difficult to understand this but I haven’t entirely bothered to pursue it. I showed you the actual notation to introduce a new point: mathematical formalism. Also, the fact that this might look like gibberish illustrates an important feature of mathematics on which they capitalise: maybe it’s just a game based on symbols.
When I first read ‘Beginning Logic’, at about the same time as I was resisting the cult, I was rather surprised when the author defined the logical symbols in terms of their physical appearance as marks on paper rather than in more mathematical-type terms, and the fact that I’ve written that out might tempt one to think that ultimately that’s all they are and this form is nothing more than a kind of game which we give meaning to. This appears to be formalism, an approach found in various disciplines which emphasise form over content. The possible connection to the Bauhaus slogan “form follows function” is not lost on me, but rather than pursue that right now I should probably talk about formalism itself. Formalism as applied to literature, for example, yields Russian formalism, an early twentieth century substantially Soviet movement linked to New Criticism which held that literary criticism could be objective by letting the text stand by itself and ignoring influences and authorship, focussing on autonomy (what I just said), unity, which is that every part of a work should contribute towards the whole, and defamiliarisation, that is, making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Martian poetry springs to mind here.
Translating this to maths, formalism is the view that maths consists of statements about the manipulation of sequences of symbols using established rules. Like formalism in literary criticism, it ignores everything outside that realm, so it kind of makes everything into pure mathematics among other things. This is what I was confronted with when I first learnt formal logic, hence that photo. It’s a series of symbols on a piece of paper which there are rules about manipulating, which expresses a very large number given the comment which refers to it underneath.
Now the reason this interests me in the context of my acquaintance (friend? I don’t know) is that there is another philosophical position about maths called Platonism, which is the belief that maths is discovered and already exists. This is similar to believing in the existence of God, so my friend (why not) held an unusual position in that he thought at least one area of maths, and I think by implication much of the rest of it, wasn’t “out there” but was invented by human beings, yet he also believed in God, i.e. something which is “out there” in that sense just as mathematical Platonism sees maths. There doesn’t seem to be anything essentially wrong with this position but it is a bit odd and feels inconsistent. He also probably thought that the “plain reading” of Biblical values referred to objective principles such as not stealing, honouring the Sabbath and so on, which are in that situation like how many people, theistic or otherwise, view maths. But he didn’t view maths like that. I don’t know if he was aware of the apparent contradiction.
On the other hand, I can totally get on board with the idea that whatever we might think about how reality works is completely wrong because the Universe is beyond our comprehension. If we consider certain animals, we perceive their understanding as being limited in various ways. For instance, they might be blind cave fish or they might be sessile filter-feeders living in burrows below the high tide mark, and we suppose that they don’t understand the world as much as we do. Although I think this is accurate, and I should mention that we’re also limited in various ways, particularly in lacking a sense of smell as good as most other mammals, there’s no reason to suppose that the way we think is any more adequate or discerning about reality. All we might have is a system that works most of the time regardless of all the stuff we don’t know about. That said, it still feels like various things must exist, such as current experience and a physical world. In view of that possibility, I do have some sympathy with my friend’s take on this although it felt somewhat unconsidered in his case.
In fact I’d take it further into his world and say that as humans we do in fact have limited understanding, and I would compare ourselves with God. We’re fallible and certain things are beyond us. Moreover, there’s the question of the Fall, and I have to be careful here. Our understanding is also strongly constrained by the kinds of cultures and societies we live in, which to some extent is what the Fall really is. So like him, I do in fact link it to my spirituality and feel that a little bit of humility is in order. In that way, both constructivism and Platonism could be true. There could be mathematical truths known only to God, or for an atheist mathematical truths which could in theory be discovered by a sufficiently powerful mind, and other mathematical activities and forms which are merely games played by our own finite minds.
I’ve done a bit of bait-and-switch here, by swapping formalism for constructivism, and they’re not the same thing. Constructivism is also known as intuitionism, and sees mathematics as built by mathematicians. Hence it does have a meaning beyond the mere manipulation of symbols through rules but the meaning is given by the mathematicians. In other words, maths is invented, but it is real.
To illustrate the difference between formalism and constructivism, I’d like to go back to the diagonal proof of aleph one, ℵ₁, as mentioned above. According to formalism, ℵ₁ is a validly defined symbol and the system is internally consistent, so there’s no problem. Constructivism, though, would reject the proof and even its premises. The set of all numbers, according to this view, is only ever potentially infinite as it can never be completed. Even real numbers, i.e. the set of numbers including all decimal fractions between the integers, are only valid insofar as they can be constructed in a finite way. That infinitely long sequence of zeros and one, and all the ones under it, only exist up to the point where that process has in some way actually been done at some point in the history of the Universe, so in other words infinity of either kind is only a potential and really not even that since the Universe won’t exist forever in a form hospitable to minds capable of performing maths. I would say that this has to be a non-theistic view, since given theism there is an eternal and infinite mind which can and maybe does do all that, which makes Platonism true, although of course God might have better things to do or never get round to it.
An extreme form of constructivism is ultrafinitism. I think of this metaphorically as some mathematical objects being in focus and others being to a greater or lesser extent blurred. So for example, the lower positive integers are in perfect focus, sharp and truly instantiated by virtue of the extensive construction they’ve undergone through continual use. Less well-focussed are the non-integral rational numbers, zero and the negative numbers, and as one ascends higher, further away from zero, away from numbers which can be reduced to fractions and into imaginary, complex and hypercomplex numbers, the less sharply focussed they become, until something like Graham’s number or an octonion is just a meaningless blur and the infinities are grey blobs. This is just an image of course, so here goes.
To an ultrafinitist there is no infinite set of natural numbers because it can by definition never be completed. It goes beyond that though. For instance, a relatively mildly high number, Skewes’s Number, is about 10^10^10^34. It represents the point at which one formula used to estimate the number of prime numbers below a certain value switches from an overestimate to an underestimate. There are also higher Skewes’s Numbers for when the value switches to an overestimate again. It can be proven that this happens but the lowest exact value is unknown, and it may be impossible to calculate it, putting it in a different position from G, which can be precisely known. Peculiarly, this could mean that Skewes’s Number doesn’t exist in these terms but Graham’s does.
This gives rise to a vague set known as the “feasible numbers”, which are numbers which can be realistically worked upon using computers and the like. The question arises of how to account for such things as π, because it seems like it goes on forever, but ultrafinitists apparently view it as a procedure in calculation rather than an actual number. Incidentally, it’s difficult to refer to numbers in this setting because words like “real” and “imaginary” have long since been nabbed by mathematicians for specific meanings which don’t refer to the obvious interpretation of those terms. I suppose I could say “existing” or “instantiated”.
Some mathematicians also view maths as essentially granular. That is, the idea that there are two ways to do maths, one involving continuous functions as with infinitesimal calculus, the other exemplified by the group of integers with addition involving discrete entities, is flawed, and therefore there are no such things as irrational numbers.
Although he didn’t get as far as ultrafinitism itself, Wittgensteins thought does provide a useful basis for it. He views infinity as a procedural convenience and only potential rather than actual, and maths as an activity involving construction of novel concepts which didn’t pre-exist to be discovered. In general, he’s a very concrete philosopher. I’m actually not that keen on a lot of his thought, although some of it’s good such as the family resemblance definition, which could be applied here. Logical positivism also wouldn’t allow for such concepts, but I don’t consider that a respectable school of philosophy so much as an interesting footnote in the history of ideas.
Ultrafinitism has major consequences for physics. Singularities arise in various places in physics and cosmology. A rather prosaic example is that the degree of stress before a material cracks is infinite. This can be resolved by removing the idealised notion that such a material is a continuous substance rather than made up of atoms or other particles. Some other areas where singularities arise are more exciting, but this could operate as an illustration of how the problem might be addressed. Specifically, there was a singularity at the Big Bang, there’s one in the centre of a black hole and also one in the mass, time and length alterations at the speed of light. This has a remarkable consequence, at least as I see it: for an ultrafinitist, the speed of light can be exceeded. Ultrafinitism strongly suggests that faster than light travel is possible and that in some sense the Big Bang never happened. The first in turn also implies that time travel backwards is also possible. At this point, ultrafinitism begins to feel too good to be true, but then a light bulb would probably have seemed like that to a mediaeval European, so that would be argument from incredulity.
There’s also a problem for the theist with ultrafinitism and finitism, in that it implies that any deity would not be eternal or infinite. However, it’s important not to allow a “God of the gaps” in at any point. God should never be used as an explanation for a physical phenomenon. However, the concept of God may be moribund for them because of the need to posit octonions as variables in Bell’s Theorem.
What all of this seems to mean is that quantum physics makes more sense than relativity for the ultrafinitist because it makes reality granular. The difficulties it poses for relativity and cosmology could be a sign that there’s something about relativity which is only an approximation of the real world, but we don’t know what. However, we don’t generally accept the idea that stress before a crack is infinite because it doesn’t accord with our view of the world that something so outlandish would exist in everyday life every time we drop a piece of porcelain onto a stone floor, so maybe we should also reject the idea of lightspeed being a limit or the Big Bang being a beginning. The fact remains that relativity is very well tested and used in daily life, for instance with satnav. It isn’t just an abstract theory about a realm of reality few people venture into and it does seem odd to say that despite all the evidence in its favour, it just will fail at a certain point. Moreover, although I’m at peace with the concept of time travel, many people would object to that implication.
To conclude, I’m aware that I’ve wandered all over the place with this, and my response to this impression is as follows: yesterday I heard someone on the radio comment that as one’s age advances it’s as if different parts of one’s brain want to break up the band and follow solo careers, so maybe this blog post is evidence of my melting brain.
I’ve a tendency to back losers. For instance, Prefab Sprout and The The were my favourite bands when I was in my late teens and both were markedly unsuccessful. In keeping with this trend, I used to have a Jupiter Ace computer and I’ve alluded to this a few times on this blog. Jupiter Cantab, the company which designed and made it, had a total of I think five employees, seemed to work out of a garage and a suburban house in Cambridgeshire and had a turnover of around five thousand pounds. They went bust maybe a year or two after releasing the Ace in October 1982 CE and had to sell off all their old stock, a happy thing for me as it meant I could acquire a new computer. Its hardware was very basic even for late ’82, but its firmware decidedly was not. Unlike practically every other home computer of the time, the Ace used not BASIC but FORTH as its native programming language. Perversely, I considered writing a BASIC interpreter for it for a while but it seemed a bit silly so I didn’t.
FORTH, unlike BASIC as it was at the time, was considered a “proper” programming language. It has two distinctive features. One is that it uses a data structure known as the stack, which is a list of numbers in consecutive locations in memory presented to the user as having a top and a bottom. Words in the FORTH language usually take data off the top of the stack, operate on them and may leave one or more results on it. This makes the syntax like Latin, Turkish or Sanskrit rather than English, since instead of writing “2+2”, you write “2 2 +”, which leaves 4 on the stack. The other feature is that rather than writing single programs the user defines words, so for example to print out the character set one writes: : CHARSET ( This is the defined word and can be whatever the user wants except for control characters ) 255 32 DO I EMIT LOOP ; If one then types in CHARSET and presses return (or ENTER) in the Ace’s case), it will print out every character the Ace can display except for the graphics characters whose codes are below 32.
What you see above is the output from the Ace when you type in VLIST, i.e. list every word in its vocabulary. I think there are a total of about 140 words. All of them fit in 8K and show that FORTH is a marvellously compact language compared to BASIC or in fact most other programming languages. For instance, the ZX81’s BASIC has around forty-one words. FORTH on the Ace, and in general, was so fast that the cheapest computer faster than it, the IBM PC, cost more than a hundred times as much. For instance, in order to produce sound it was possible, as well as using the word BEEP, to define a word that counted from 0 to 32767 between vibrations and still produce a respectable note by moving the speaker in and out. By contrast, the ZX81 would take nearly ten minutes to count that high and had no proper sound anyway. This is a somewhat unfair comparison but illustrates the gulf between the speed of this high level language and the other.
Whittling Down The Vocab
As I’ve said, FORTH consists of words defined in terms of other words and therefore some people object to calling code written in it “programs”, preferring “words”. The fact that this definitional process was core to the language immediately made me wonder what would constitute a minimal FORTH system. There are quite a few words easy to dispense with in the vocabulary listed above. For instance, the word SPACES prints whatever number of spaces is indicated by the number on top of the stack, so 32 SPACES prints 32 spaces. However, this word could’ve been defined by the user, thus: : SPACES 0 DO SPACE LOOP ;
The DO-LOOP control structure counts between the two numbers on top of the stack and executes the code between DO and LOOP the number of times it takes to do that. It can be taken a lot further than that though. SPACE and CR are two words with a similar structure: they print out a character. SPACE unsurprisingly prints out a space. CR does a carriage return. Both are part of the standard ASCII character set and the word for printing the ASCII character indicated by the number on top of the stack is EMIT, so they can be defined thus: : SPACE 32 EMIT ;
: CR 13 EMIT ;
Hence three words are already shown to be unnecessary to the most minimal FORTH system, and the question arises of what, then, would constitute such a system. What’s the smallest set of words needed to do this?
The Ace had already added quite a lot of words which are not part of standard FORTH-79 and omitted others which are easily defined, examples being all the floating point words, PLOT, BEEP, CLS, VIS and INVIS. Others are trivial to define, such as 2+, 1- and 1+. Others are a bit less obvious: PICK can be used to replace DUP, SWAP and OVER, ROT is a special case of ROLL and so can be defined in those terms. . , that full stop, which prints a number, can be replaced by the number formatting words <#, # and #> . You can continue to whittle it down until you have a very small number of words along with the software which accepts input and definitions, and you’re done. In fact, if you know the hardware well enough you can make it even smaller because, with the Jupiter Ace for example, you know where the display is stored in RAM, how the stacks work (there are actually two because practically all computers implicitly use a stack for subroutines) and when it comes down to it it’s even possible to define words which accept machine code, the numbers computers actually use which represent simple instructions like adding two numbers together or storing one somewhere.
This is about how far I got until recently I managed to join two ideas together that I hadn’t previously managed.
Logic To Numbers
As you probably know, my degrees are in philosophy and my first degree is in the analytical tradition, which is the dominant one in the English-speaking world. It’s very common for philosophy degrees to be rubbished by the general public and even within philosophy, continental and analytical philosophers are often hostile to each other. What may not be appreciated is that much of philosophy actually closely resembles mathematics and by extension, computer science. When the department at my first university was closed down, some of it merged with computing. It also turns out, a little surprisingly, that one of my tutors, Nicholas Measor, was a significant influence on the theory of computing, having helped develop modal mu calculus, which is concerned with completeness of systems and temporal logic. He wrote a paper called “Duality and the Completeness of the Modal mu-Calculus” in the ’90s. This has kind of caused things to fall into place for me.
The Dedekind-Peano axioms for the set of natural numbers are central to the theoretical basis of arithmetic. They go as follows:
0 is a natural number.
For every natural number x, x=x.
For every natural number x equal to y, y is equal to x.
For all natural numbers x, y, z, if x=y and y=z then x=z.
For all a and b, if a is b natural number and a=b then a is a natural number.
Let S(n) be “the successor of n”. Then for every natural number n, S(n) is a natural number.
For every natural number S(m) and S(n), if S(m) = S(n) then m=n.
For every natural number n, S(n)=0 is false.
If K is a set such that 0 is in K, andfor every natural number n, n being in K implies that S(n) is in K,then K contains every natural number.
You can then go on to define addition, subtraction, multiplication and inequalities. Division is harder to define because this is about integers, and dividing one integer by another may lead to fractions, decimals and so forth. I’ve known about all this since I was an undergraduate but hadn’t given it much thought. It is, incidentally, possible to take this further and define negative, real and presumably imaginary, complex and hypercomplex numbers this way, but the principle of knowing that that’s possible is enough really.
Dyscalculic Programming
If you have a language which can express all of these axioms, you have a system which can do most arithmetic. And this is where I had my epiphany, just last week: you could have a programming language which didn’t initially use numbers at all, because numbers could be defined in terms of these axioms instead. It would be difficult to apply this to FORTH because it uses sixteen bit signed binary integers as its only data type but I don’t think it’s impossible and that would mean there could be a whole earlier and more primitive programming language which doesn’t initially even use numbers. This is still difficult and peculiar because all binary digital computers so far as I know use sequences of zeros and ones, making this rather theoretical. It’s particularly hard to see how to marry this with FORTH.
Proof Assistants
Well, it turns out that such programming languages do exist and that they occupy a kind of nebulous territory between what are apparently called “proof assistants” and programming languages. Some can be used as both, others just as the former. A proof assistant is a language somewhat similar to a programming language but helps the user and computer together arrive at proofs. I have actually used one of these without realising that that was what I was doing, back in the ’80s, where the aforementioned Nicholas Measor wrote an application for the VAX called “Citrus” after the philosopher E. J. Lemmon, who incidentally died 366 days before I was born, whose purpose was to assist the user to prove sequents in symbolic logic. My approach to this was to prove them myself, then just go along to the VAX in the computer basement and type in what I’d proven, although it was admittedly helpful on more than one occasion. While using this, I mused that it was somewhat like a programming language except that it wasn’t imperative but declarative and wondered how one might go about writing something like that. I also considered the concept of expressive adequacy, also known as functional completeness, in this setting in connection once again with FORTH, realising that if the Schaeffer stroke were to be included as a word in FORTH a whole host of definitions could easily provide any bitwise function. It was also borne in upon me that all the logics I’d come across so far were entirely extensional and that it might even be a distinctive feature of logic and mathematics per se that it was completely extensional in form. However, I understand that there are such things as intensional logics, and I suppose modality might be seen in that way although I always conceive of it in terms of possible world semantics and multivalent truth values.
It goes further than that though. I remember noticing that ALGOL 60 lacks input/output facilities in its standard, which made me wonder how the heck it was supposed to be used. However, it turns out that if you are sufficiently strict with yourself you can absolutely minimise I/O and do everything inside the compiler except for some teensy little bit of interaction with the user, and this instinct, if you follow it, is akin to functional programming, a much later idea which enables you to separate the gubbins from how it looks to the user. And there are purely functional languages out there, and at this point I should probably try to express what I mean.
From Metaphysics To Haskell
Functional programming does something rather familiar. Considering the possibility that programming can dispense with numbers as basic features, the emphasis shifts to operators and functions and they become “first-class citizens”. This, weirdly but then again not so weirdly, is exactly what happens in category theory. Haskell is the absolutely paradigmatic functional language, and it’s been said that when you think you’re programming in it, it feels like you’re actually just doing maths. This approach lacks what you’d think would be a crucial feature of operating a computer just as ALGOL 60 can’t actually print or read input, and such things are known as “side-effects” in functional programming. If a function does anything other than take the values, performing an operation on them and returning the result, that’s a side-effect. This makes it easier to formally verify a program, so it’s linked to the mu calculus.
I’ve now mentioned Haskell, which brings me a bit closer to the title of this post and now I’m going to have to talk about monads. Monads are actually something like three different things and it’s now occurred to me that if you put an I at the start rather than an M you get “ionad”, which gives me pause, but this is all quite arcane enough. Firstly, Leibniz’s metaphysics prominently features the concept of monads. In 1714, he brought out a ninety-paragraph book called ‘The Monadology’ setting out his beliefs. It wasn’t originally his idea but he developed it more than others. Leibniz’s monads are indivisible units within reality which has no smaller parts and is entirely self-contained, though not physical like an atom. Anything that changes within it has to arise within itself – “it has to really want to change”. Since monads don’t interact there’s an arrangement called “pre-ordained harmony” where things in each monad are destined to coincide appropriately. I mean, I think this is all very silly and it arises from Descartes and the problem of the interaction of soul and body, but it’s still a useful concept and got adopted into maths, specifically into category theory. In that, it’s notoriously and slightly humorously defined thus: “in concise terms, a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors of some fixed category”, and this at least brings us to the functor. A functor is a mapping between categories. Hence two different fields of maths might turn out to have identical relationships between their elements. It’s a little like intersectionality in sociopolitical terms, in that for example racism and sexism are different in detail but are both forms of marginalisation, the difference being that intersectionality is, well, intersectional, meaning that different kinds of oppression do interact, so it isn’t quite the same as either a monad or a functor. Finally, in Haskell a monad is – er. Okay, well at this point I don’t really know what a monad is in Haskell but the general idea behind Haskell was originally that it was safe and also useless because you could never get anything into or out of a program written in it. This isn’t entirely true because it does do work in a thermodynamic sense, so if you take a computer switched on but doing nothing and you run a Haskell program on it which does something, it does get at least slightly warmer. That is, it does stuff to the data already inside it which you can never find out about, but it’s entirely self-contained and does its own thing. So that’s all very nice for it, but rather frustrating, and just now I don’t know how to proceed with this exactly, except that I can recognise that the kind of discipline one places oneself under by not knowing how one is going to get anything on the screen, out of the speakers or off the keyboard, trackball, mouse or joystick has the potential of making one’s programming extremely pure, if that’s the word: operating in an extremely abstract manner.
Home Computing In The 1960s
I do, however, know how to proceed with what I was thinking about earlier. There is some tiny vocabulary of FORTH, perhaps involving a manner of using a language which defines numbers in the terms outlined above, which would be simple enough to run on a simple computer, and this is where things get theoretical, because according to Alan Turing any computer, no matter how simple, can do anything any other computer can do given enough time and resources. This is the principle of the Turing machine. Moreover, the Turing machine can be realised in terms of a language referred to as the Lambda Calculus.
Underneath the user interface of the Jupiter Ace operates the Z80A microprocessor. This has 694 instructions, which is of course quite a bit more than the 140 words of the Jupiter Ace’s primitive vocabulary. Other processors have fewer instructions, but all are “Turing-complete”, meaning that given enough time and memory they can solve any computing problem. In theory a ZX81 could run ChatGPT, just very, very, very slowly and with a very big RAM pack. So the question arises of how far down you can strip a processor before it stops working, and this is the nub of where I’m going, because actually you can do it with a single instruction, and there are even choices as to which instruction’s best.
The easiest one to conceive of is “subtract and branch if negative”. This is a machine which has two operands in memory. One of them is a number, which it subtracts from the number it already has in mind. If the result of this number turns out to be negative, it looks at the other operand and jumps to the number indicated in the memory. Otherwise it just goes to the next memory address and repeats the operation. It would also save space on a chip if the values are stored in memory rather than the chip itself, so I propose that the program counter and accumulator, i.e. where the data are stored, are in the main memory.
Moreover, I’ve been talking about a single instruction but in fact that actual instruction can be implied. It doesn’t need to exist explicitly in the object code of the memory. Instead it can be assumed and the processor will do what that instruction demands anyway, so in a way this is a zero instruction set CPU.
What this very simple computer does is run a program that emulates a somewhat more complex machine which runs the stripped down FORTH natively. This is where it gets interesting, because the very earliest microprocessors, the 4004 and 4040, needed more transistors than this machine would, and it would’ve been entirely feasible to put this on a single silicon wafer in 1970. This is a microcomputer like those found in the early ’80s for which the technology and concepts existed before the Beatles split up.
This is of course a bit of a mind game, though not an entirely useless one. What I’ve basically discovered is that I already have a lot of what I need to know to do this task, but it’s on a level which is hard to apply to the problem in hand. But it is there. This is the way in.
I’m fully aware that I’m too wordy, don’t stick to the point and talk about arcane topics a lot, not just on here but in face to face conversations. This is partly just what I do, in the sense that I’m unable to do otherwise or employ it as a bad habit. In a world full of shortening attention spans and loss of focus though, I feel that however ineptly, this is still worth doing.
In the process of doing this, I continued this blog post in a fairly lightweight word processor called AbiWord which we stopped using because it had a tendency to crash without warning and without there being any salvageable document when this happened, and it proceeded to do exactly that, so this is in a way a second draft. One of the many features AbiWord lacks, and this is not a criticism because the whole philosophy is to avoid software bloat, is a way of assessing reading age. Word, and possibly LibreOffice and OpenOffice, does have such a facility, which I think uses Flesch-Kincaid. A blank was drawn when I said this to Sarada so it’s likely this is not widely known and in any case I looked into it and want to share.
There are a number of ways of assessing reading age, and as I’ve said many times it’s alleged that every equation halves the readership. When I was using AbiWord just now, I decided to write these in a “pseudocode” manner, but now I’m on the desktop PC with Gimp and stuff, I no longer have that problem although of course MathML exists. Does it exist on WordPress though? No idea. Anyway, the list is:
Flesch-Kincaid – grade and score versions.
Gunning Fog
SMOG
Coleman-Liau
ARI – Automated Readability Index
Dale-Chall Readability Formula
Flesch-Kincaid comes in two varieties, one designed to rank readability on a scale of zero to one hundred. It works like this:
206.835−1.015(average sentence length)−84.6(average syllables per word)
It interests me that there are constants in this and I wonder where they come from. It also seems that subordinate clauses don’t matter here and there’s no distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, which seems weird.
The grade version is:
0.39(average sentence length)+11.8(average syllables per word)−15.59
This has a cultural bias because of school grades in the US. I don’t know how this maps onto other systems, because children start school at different ages in different places and learn to read officially at different stages depending on the country. Some, but not all of the others do the same.
Gunning Fog sounds like something you do to increase clarity and I wonder if that’s one reason it’s called that or whether there are two people out there called Gunning and Fog. It goes like this:
0.4((words/sentences)+100(complex words/words))
“Complex words” are those with more than two syllables. This is said to yield a number corresponding to the years of formal education, which makes me wonder about unschooling to be honest, but it’s less culturally bound than Flesch-Kincaid’s grade version.
SMOG rather entertainingly stands for “Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook”! Rather surprisingly for something described as simple, it includes a square root:
This is used in health communication, so it was presumably the measure that led to diabetes leaflets being re-written for a nine-year old’s level of literacy. I don’t know what you do if your passage is fewer than thirty sentences long unless you just start repeating it. Again, it gives a grade level.
Coleman-Liau really is nice and simple:
0.0588L−0.296S−15.8
L is the mean number of letters per one hundred words and S is the average number of sentences in that. This again yields grade level, although it looks like it can be altered quite easily by changing the final term. It seems to have a similar problem to SMOG with short passages, although I suppose in both cases it might objectively just not be clear how easily read brief passages are.
The ARI uses word and sentence length and gives rise to grade level again:
4.71(characters per word)+0.5(words per sentence)−21.43
Presumably it says “characters” because of things like hyphens, which would make hyphenation contribute to difficulty in reading. I’m not sure this is so.
The final measure is the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, which again produces a grade level. It uses a list of three thousand words fourth-grade American students generally understood in a survey, any word not on that list being considered “difficult”:
There are different ways to apply each of these and they’re designed for different purposes. I don’t know if there are European versions of these or how they vary for language. The final one, for example, takes familiarity into account as well as length.
When I’ve applied these to the usual content of my blog, reading age usually comes out at university degree graduate level, which might seem high but it leads me to wonder about rather a lot of stuff. For instance, something like sixty percent of young Britons today go to university, so producing text at that level, if accurate, could be expected to reach more than half the adult population. However, the average reading age in Britain is supposed to be between nine and eleven, some say nine, and that explains why health leaflets need to be pitched at that level. All that said, I do also wonder how nuanced this take is. I think, for example, that Scotland and England (don’t know about Wales I’m afraid, sorry) have different attitudes towards learning and education, and that in England education is often frowned upon as making someone an outsider to a much greater extent than here, and this would of course drag down the average reading age. That’s not, however, reflected in the statistics and Scottish reading age is said to be the same as the British one. I want to emphasise very strongly here that I am not in any way trying to claim that literacy goes hand in hand with intelligence. I have issues with the very concept of intelligence to be honest but besides that, no, there is not a hereditary upper class of more intelligent people by any means. Send a working class child to Eaton and Oxbridge and they will come out in the same way. I don’t know how to reconcile my perception.
But I do also wonder about the nature of tertiary education in this respect. Different degree subjects involve different skills, varying time spent reading and different reading matter, and I’d be surprised if this leads to an homogenous increase in reading age. There’s a joke: “Yesterday I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer’. Today I are one”. Maybe a Swede? Seriously though, although that’s most unfair, it still seems to me that someone with an English degree can probably read more fluently than someone with a maths one, and the opposite is also true with, well, being good at maths! This seems to make sense. The 1979 book ‘Scientists Must Write’, by Robert Barrass tries to address the issue of impenetrability in scientific texts, and Albert Einstein once said, well, he is supposed to have said a lot of things he actually didn’t so maybe he didn’t say this either, but the sentiment has been expressed that if you can’t explain something to a small child you don’t understand it yourself.
I should point out that I haven’t always been like this. I used to edit a newsletter for brevity, for example, and up until I started my Masters I used to express myself very clearly. I also once did an experiment, and I can’t remember how this opportunity arose, where I submitted an essay in plain English and then carefully re-wrote it using near-synonyms and longer sentences and ended up getting a better grade for the “enhanced” version, and it wasn’t an English essay where I might’ve gotten marks for vocabulary. On another occasion I was doing a chemistry exam (I may have mentioned this elsewhere) and there was a question on what an ion exchange column did, and I had no idea at the time, so I reworded the question in the answer as something like “an ion exchange column swaps charged atoms using a vertical cylindrical arrangement of material”, i.e. “an ion exchange column is an ion exchange column”, and got full marks for it without understanding anything at all. This later led me to consider the question of how much learning is really just about using language in a particular way.
So there is the question of whether a particular style of writing puts people off unnecessarily and is a flaw in the writer, which might be addressed. This is all true. Even so, I don’t think it would always be possible to express things that simply and also it’s a bit sad to be forced to do so rather than delighting in the expressiveness of our language. Are all those words just going to sit around in the OED never to be used again? But it can be taken too far. Jacques Lacan, for example, tried to make a virtue of writing in an obscurantist style in order to mimic the experience of a psychoanalyst not grasping what a patient is saying by creating reading without understanding, and in particular was concerned to avoid over-simplifying its concepts. Now I’ve just mentioned Lacan, and I don’t know who reading this will know about him. Nor do I know how I would find that out.
I’m not trying to do what he does. Primarily, I am trying to avoid talking down to people and to buck the trend I perceive of shrinking attention and growing tendencies to dumb things down, just not to think clearly and hard. Maybe that isn’t happening. Perhaps it’s my time of life. Nonetheless, this is what I’m trying to do, for two reasons. One is that talking down to people is disrespectful. I’m not going to use short and simple words and sentence structures because that to me bears a subtext that my readers are “stupid”. The other is that people generally don’t benefit from avoiding thinking deeply about things and being poorly-informed. It’s in order here to talk about the issue of “stupidity”. I actually have considerable doubt that the majority of people differ in how easily they can learn across the board for various reasons. One is that in intellectual terms, as opposed to practical, the kind of resistance found in the physical world doesn’t exist at all. This may of course reflect my dyspraxia, which also reflects what things are considered valuable. Another is that the idea of variation in general intelligence is just a little too convenient for sorting people into different jobs which are considered more or less valuable or having higher or lower status, and as I’ve doubtless said before, the ability to cope with boredom is a strength. I also think that the idea of a single scale of intelligence, which I know is a straw man but bear with me, has overtones of the great chain of being, i.e. the idea that there are superior and inferior species with the inferior ones being of less value.
There are, though, two completely different takes on intelligence.
Structure here: wilful stupidity and the false hierarchy of professors.
As I’ve said before, I try not to call people stupid, for two reasons. One is that if it’s used as an insult, it portrays learning disability as a character flaw, which it truly is not. It is equally erroneous to deify the learning disabled as well. It’s simply a fact about some people which should be taken into consideration. Other things could be said about it but they may not be relevant to the matter in hand. The other is that the idea of stupidity is that it’s an unchangeable quality of the person in question, and this is usually inaccurate. An allegedly stupid person usually has as much control over their depth and sophistication of thinking as anyone else has. Therefore, I call them “intellectually lazy”. For so many people, it’s actually a choice to be stupid. As noted earlier, there are whole sections of society where deep thought is frowned upon and marks one out as an outsider, and it’s difficult for most people to go against the grain. This is not, incidentally, a classist thing. It exists right from top to bottom in society. Peer pressure is a powerful stupifier.
There is another take on stupidity which sees it as a moral failing, i.e. as a choice having negative consequences for others and the “stupid” person themselves. This view was promoted prominently by the dissident priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930s after Hitlers rise to power and in connection with that. The idea was later developed by others. This form of stupidity might need another name, and in fact when I say “intellectual laziness”, this may be what I mean. It could also go hand in hand with anti-intellectualism.
Malice, i.e. evil, is seen as less harmful than intellectual laziness as evil carries some sense of unease with it. In fact it makes me think of Friedrich Schillers play ,,Die Jungfrau von Orleans” with its line ,,Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens” – “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”, part of a longer quote here:
Unsinn, du siegst und ich muß untergehn!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Erhabene Vernunft, lichthelle Tochter
Des göttlichen Hauptes, weise Gründerin
Des Weltgebäudes, Führerin der Sterne,
Wer bist du denn, wenn du dem tollen Roß
Des Aberwitzes an den Schweif gebunden,
Ohnmächtig rufend, mit dem Trunkenen
Dich sehend in den Abgrund stürzen mußt!
Verflucht sei, wer sein Leben an das Große
Und Würdge wendet und bedachte Plane
Mit weisem Geist entwirft! Dem Narrenkönig
Gehört die Welt–
Translated, this could read:
Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.
Now I could simply have quoted the line in English of course, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe in talking down to people and it’s a form of disrespect, to my mind, to do that, so you get the full version. This is spoken by the general Talbot who is dismayed that his carefully laid battle plans are ruined by the behaviour of his men, who are gullible, panicking and superstitious, in spite of his experience and wisdom, which they ignore. I think probably the kind of “stupidity” Schiller had in mind was different, perhaps less voluntary, but this very much reflects the mood of these times.
Getting back to Bonhoeffer, he notes that intellectual laziness pushes aside or simply doesn’t listen to anything which contradicts one’s views, facts becoming inconsequential. It’s been said elsewhere that you can’t reason a person out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place. People who are generally quite willing to think diligently and carefully in other areas often refuse to do so in specific ones. People can of course be encouraged to be lazy in certain, or even all, areas, because it doesn’t benefit the powers that be that they think things through, and this can occur through schooling and propaganda, and nowadays through the almighty algorithms of social media, or they may choose to take it on themselves. Evil can be fought, but not stupidity. Incidentally, I’m being a little lazy right now by writing “stupidity” and not “intellectual laziness”. The power of certain political or religious movements depends on the stupidity of those who go along with it. This is also where thought-terminating clichés come in because Bonhoeffer says that conversation with a person who has chosen to be stupid often doesn’t feel like talking to a person but merely eliciting slogans and stereotypical habits of thought from somewhere else. It isn’t coming from them even if they think it is, in a way. Hence the use of the word “sheeple” and telling people to “do your own research”, which in fact often means “watch the same YouTube videos as I have” is particularly ironic because it’s the people telling you to do that who are thinking less independently or originally than the people being told. Thinking of Flat Earthers in particular right now, which I’m going to use as an example because it’s almost universally considered absurd and is less contentious than a more obviously political example, there are a small number of grifters who are just trying to make money out of the easily manipulated, a few sincere leaders and a host of “true believers” who are either gullible or motivated by other factors such as wanting to be part of something bigger or having special beliefs hidden from τους πολλους. I’m hesitant to venture into overtly political areas here because of their divisive nature, but hoping that using the example of Flat Earthers can be agreed to be incorrect and almost deliberately and ostentatiously so.
He goes on to say that rather than reasoning changing people’s minds here, their liberation is the only option to defeat this. This external liberation can then lead to an internal liberation from that stupidity. These people are being used and their opinions have become convenient instruments to those imagined to be in power.
This is roughly what Bonhoeffers letter said and it can be found here if you want to read it without some other person trying to persuade you of what he said. In fact you should read it, because that’s what refusing to be stupid is about. Also, he writes much better than I. That document continues with a more recent development called ‘The Five Laws Of Stupidity’, written in 1970 by the social psychology Carlo Cippola. The word “stupidity” in his opinion refers not to learning disability but social irresponsibility. I’ve recently been grudgingly impressed by the selfless cruelty of certain voters who have voted to disadvantage others with no benefit to themselves. A few years ago, when the Brexit campaign was happening, I was of course myself in favour of leaving the EU and expected it to do a lot of damage to the economy, which was one reason I wanted it to happen, but I would’ve preferred a third option where the “U”K both left the EU and opened all borders, abolishing all immigration restrictions. This is an example of how my own position was somewhat similar to that of the others who voted for Brexit, but in many people’s case they were sufficiently worried about immigration and its imagined consequences to vote for a situation which they were fully aware would result in their financial loss. In a way this is admirable, and it illustrates the weird selflessness and altruism of their position, although obviously not for immigrants. Cippola’s target was this kind of stupidity: disadvantage to both self and others due to focus on the latter. This quality operates independently of anything else, including education, wealth, gender, ethnicity or nationality. People tend to underestimate how common it is, according to Cippola. This attitude is dangerous because it’s hard to empathise with, which is incidentally why I mentioned my urge to vote for Brexit. I voted to remain in the end, needless to say. Maliciousness can be understood and the reasoning conjectured, often quite accurately, but with intellectual laziness (I feel very uncomfortable calling it “stupidity”) the process of reasoning has been opted out of, or possibly been replaced by someone else’s spurious argument. This makes them unpredictable and means they themselves don’t have any plan to their benefit in attacking someone. There may of course be people who do seek an advantage but those are not the main people. Those are the manipulators: the grifters.
I take an attitude sometimes that a person with a certain hostility is more a force of nature than a person. This is of course not true, but it’s more that one can’t have a dialogue with them, do anything to break through their image of you and so on, so all you can do is appreciate they’re a threat and do what you can to de-escalate or preferably avoid them. This is a great pity because it means no discussion is likely to take place between you, and they’re not going to be persuaded otherwise. They may not even be aware of the threatening nature of their behaviour or views.
Cippola thought that associating with stupid people at all was dangerous, but of course this feeds into the reality tunnel problem nowadays. This is what I’ve known it as, although nowadays it tends to be thought of in terms of echo chambers and bubbles. We surround ourselves, aided by algorithms, with people who agree with us, and this fragments society. Cippola seems to be recommending that, and with over half a century of hindsight we seem to have demonstrated to ourselves that that impulse shouldn’t be followed.
Casting my mind back, a similar motive may have been part of what led to my involvement in a high-control religious organisation. I have A-level RE. This in my case involved studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the approach generally was quite progressive and liberal, including dialogue between faiths, higher criticism and the like. On reaching university, I found that the self-identifying Christians with whom I came into contact were far more fundamentalist and conservative, but because I regarded this as demotic, the faith of the common people as it were, I committed myself to that kind of faith. This is not stupidity in a general sense, as most of the people there could be considered conventionally intelligent, some of them pursuing doctorates for instance. However, they did restrict their critical faculties when it came to matters of faith, and in that respect I was, I think, emotionally harmed by these people, though I don’t blame them for it. This is the kind of selective and deliberate “stupidity” which is best avoided.
I’m aware that I’ve described this all rather unsympathetically and perhaps with a patronising tone. This is not my intention at all and it may be more to do with the approach taken by the writers and thinkers I’ve used here. I’ve also failed to mention James Joyce and Jacques Lacan at all here, which may be a bit of an omission. What I’m attempting to show is respect, and what I’m requesting from the reader is focus (and I have an ADHD diagnosis remember), long attention spans and complexity and nuanced thought. I’m not asking for agreement, but I would like those who disagree with me to have thought their positions through originally, self-critically and with respect for their opponents. I write the way I do because I know people are generally not stupid and can choose not to be.
A couple of days ago I was yet again surprised by something turning out not to be common knowledge which I’d long thought was widely known. I referred to BBC BASIC being a dialect of BASIC to Sarada and she was taken aback by the idea that programming languages could have dialects like spoken human ones. This is nevertheless so. In fact, in the late 1970s CE and early ’80s, there was a whole plethora of them, although Microsoft BASIC dominated. BBC BASIC was, however, also used fairly widely. Sinclair BASIC was another one, used by the Sinclair computers and apparently not written by Sinclair’s company at all but some company called Nine Tiles, then adapted for use on the Commodore 64 and PCs, plus the Sam Coupé and ultimately the Sprinter computer, discontinued as late as 2003. Nor is it confined to BASIC. For instance, FORTH used to be divided into FIG-FORTH and FORTH-79, i.e. the 1979 standard, later updated to FORTH-83. There are also, unsurprisingly, stages in the development of programming languages, such as FORTRANs II, IV, 66, 77 and later standards, and ALGOLs 60 and 68. The reason dialects of programming languages exist is that different computers have different hardware that needs to be supported or wasn’t in the original standard.
As a child, programming languages seemed like magic to me. It amazed me that a machine could be made to understand words in a human language, even if only typed. Another comparison which stuck in my mind at the time, though, was that it wasn’t any more impressive than training a dog to follow commands like “sit” and “heel”, although that in itself seems quite disparaging to dogs, whose ability to relate to humans itself seems quite miraculous in a way although obviously it’s to do with breeding building on wolves’ innate abilities. I don’t know how common this is, but my early interest in languages, which in a way probably dates back to before I was born because I’m human, also fuelled my interest in programming languages. They held the same fascination for me as the likes of Greek and Arabic. There’s something very special about symbolic communication of that kind to me and although I was aware of the distinction, the impetus to learn them was similar in both cases.
Later on, something which surprised and to some extent disappointed me was that the vast majority of programming is done using English words. Thisses apotheosis is probably COBOL, which attempted to make coding more accessible by using words like “IDENTIFICATION DIVISION” and “ADD 1 TO X GIVING Y” (I think, anyway – I don’t actually know COBOL). COBOL stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, but I’ve never understood what makes it particularly business-oriented. COBOL is famous for being the glue that keeps the world running, in the sense that there is ancient software running stuff like payrolls for multinationals and governmental organisations, including banks, cashpoints, insurance companies, pension systems and airline booking programs. This has been going on since the early 1960s, when COBOL was originally invented, and is still happening now because of the risk of taking the software offline and migrating it to a new system. It simply isn’t safe to “turn the computers off”. This problem was one of the things which led to the Y2K bug, which despite some people’s belief that it was an unrealistic panic, actually only went as smoothly as it did because of the work of countless programmers behind the scene. But Y2K is a separate thing.
Initially, it wasn’t clear to me whether programming languages simply had the words translated into the language of the programmer. I’d noticed that the keyboards of Japanese computers sometimes had katakana on their keys alongside Latin, which gave me hope that maybe they did. However, this is actually very rare. There has been a Welsh version of BASIC, used appropriately enough on the Welsh computer the Dragon 32 if I correctly recall. I also seem to remember there were French programming languages. However, English cultural dominance is writ large in the IT world. One major exception, now sadly an irrelevant curiosity but important to me, is APL, formerly known as Iverson Notation and actually not originally intended for programming. APL is basically a system of symbols for expressing mathematics and largely acting upon what are referred to as “vectors” of numbers, which are basically just sequences of numbers. It’s remarkably terse. For example, this sequence of characters calculates and outputs the standard deviation for the vector X:
((+/((X – (+/X)÷⍴X)*2))÷⍴X)*0.5
APL has been criticised as a “write-only” language, as it’s a lot easier to write programs in it than to read the source code (such as the above) afterward. However, one advantage it has over most other programming languages is that you don’t need to know any English to write and understand it. I learnt it in 1985 at around the same time as I was learning statistics for my unfinished psychology degree, and whereas there is a spreadsheet-like program called SPSS which specialises in statistics for the social sciences, hence the name, I would on the whole prefer to use APL for both statistics and in fact numerical data on spreadsheets. Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that this is the language used to generate the data for the movements of the original Channel 4 station ident.
APL is at the opposite pole from COBOL in its relationship to natural language. The problem with COBOL is that it attempts to solve the wrong problem. Source code is not hard to follow because of terseness on the whole, although APL probably does have that exact issue. It’s hard to follow because algorithms are hard to follow, at least sometimes. Comments and meaningful labels help somewhat, but not entirely.
After I learnt BASIC, FORTRAN, ALGOL-60, Z80 assembler, Macro-11, Lisp, LOGO and FORTH, in 1981 to ’83, I used to mess around with the idea of translating the reserved words into other languages, and came across something very obvious in hindsight but that I hadn’t realised before: popular programming languages of this era were generally about telling the computer what to do, so their commands and statements were generally verbs in the imperative mood. This was quite a revelation to me, and I wasn’t really aware of any other approach. These languages, though, use what’s known as the “imperative paradigm”. FORTH departs from this somewhat in that it defines words which tell the computer what to do, and there are parts of other imperative programming languages which are not strictly speaking imperative such as comments, DATA statements in BASIC and the labels used for structured programming. And yes, there was also structured programming, which was a big thing at the time, the idea being that programs should be set out in such a way that made them more legible. You can’t examine this paradigm very closely without other things leaking in.
FORTH occupied a brief place in the Sun in the ’80s because it was faster than BASIC and very compact. Like APL, it’s described as a write-only language, but that again depends on how you name the words. One of its distinctive features is that it prominently uses the concept of the stack. The almost universally employed stack is found everywhere in computing, though rarely as explicitly as in FORTH. It’s an area of memory which stores numbers at a location specified by a pointer, which then moves up or down depending on how it’s implemented. With FORTH, typing a number puts it on the stack, then typing another number puts another one “on top” and so on, meaning that rather than typing “2+2”, one types “2 2 +”, spaces being important. After typing “+”, 4 will be left on the stack. This is called Reverse Polish Notation or RPN, and also used to be used with Hewlett-Packard calculators. It’s also called “postfix notation”, and reflects the syntax of certain human languages including Latin, Japanese and Hindi. FORTH also has stack manipulation words such as DUP, which would duplicate the top number, so “2 2 +” means the same as “2 DUP +”, and SWAP, which reverses the top two stack elements, so “2 3 -” puts -1 on the stack but “2 3 SWAP -” puts 1 on it as it’s the same as “3 2 -“. Once I’d learnt FORTH, I used it as the basis for a constructed language for expressing natural language-like concepts as that syntax is particularly flexible, so there was a link between it and spoken languages. FORTH also works primarily not through programs in the conventional sense but by defining new words in terms of words it already knows.
One of the perhaps unusual things I used FORTH for was to generate nonsense text in apparent Finnish. The Finnish language lends itself very much to computer programming and in fact early speech synthesisers were designed using Finnish because of its perfect phonetic structure. For instance, certain vowels can only occur in the same word together and others can occur in any word, and words can only end in R, L, N, S, T or a vowel. It’s very simple to write a series of FORTH words which will produce screeds of Finnish-looking text. It’s even easier to do that with romanised Japanese, which I’ve also done. Hence even at that point I was making links between programming and spoken languages.
After getting very worried that I was becoming obsessed with computers, I went cold turkey on them in 1985, although looking at notes from that time I didn’t entirely succeed as for a couple of years afterwards there are pages and pages of Z80 assembler. Just before I did that, I came across something called functional programming. This is not imperative. I can’t say I fully understand it even now but part of it seems to be that it uses prefix notation a lot, that is, rather than saying “2+2”, you’d write something like “SUM(2,2)”, although I don’t think that’s the central idea of the model. If prefix notation is important to it, that would make it similar to Semitic and Celtic languages, which put the verb first in the phrase. Anyway, functions in imperative languages return values, so for example in BASIC, FORTRAN, ALGOL and others, SIN(1) returns the value 0.841470985, which incidentally is because usually in computing trig functions are based on radians rather than degrees, minutes and seconds although they can be forced to use those. Imperative language often also have procedures, which are like functions except that they don’t return values and are “main programming bits”. I may have got this wrong due to my forswearance of computing in the mid-’80s, but I’m guessing that functional programming treats procedures as functions, so it has no commands at all, even inside procedures, but just functions. Apparently Lisp is a functional language, and that I do understand, along with the related LOGO.
This is where the wheels fall off my brain and I have a feeling this is connected to that big obstacle in my and many others’ ability to adjust to the new computing world: Object-Oriented Programming or OOP. It’s been said that having learnt imperative programming makes it harder to learn OOP than if you started with no knowledge of programming at all. I once looked at a Java program for noughts and crosses and found that it was apparently just telling the computer what there was, such as a 3 x 3 board on which noughts and crosses could be placed, what counted as winning, how to win, but somehow DIDN’T ACTUALLY TELL THE COMPUTER WHAT TO DO!! And at that point I just throw up my hands in horror and incomprehension and give up all hope of understanding. It doesn’t help either that every time I’ve tried to understand OOP, it’s only been explained metaphorically. Examples are given like this: there’s a class of object called a vehicle, and more specifically it might fly, have wheels, run on roads or rails, be a lorry, bus or car, and so on, and somehow this is connected to object-oriented programming. But how?! How do you get past the metaphor into what it actually involves? I just despair.
But I do see, on the other hand, that verbs have different moods and these might correspond to different paradigms. The imperative is easy and exists in computing and human language, so that’s fine. There seems to be an interrogative paradigm too, although I don’t know if it’s called that, where instead of telling the computer what to do, you ask it questions, which I think is what SQL is, although it’s not a general purpose language so much as to do with databases. OOP seems to be declarative, i.e. what I think of as indicative. It simply describes what the computer does. Apart from anything else, I can’t work out how this would work at hardware level. Apparently a OOP microprocessor was once designed as an experiment but the chips used in ‘phones, tablets, computers, TVs or whatever don’t work that way and are very much still just obeying orders. So presumably there is some layer between the hardware and what the user experiences which is a kind of model of a world where things are just described and they do stuff. That makes me feel uneasy because I’m a control freak. Someone else has written that layer and I can’t be sure what their motivations were. I don’t know if I can trust them.
This came back to bite me, though in a fairly trivial and irrelevant way, in the late ’80s. After graduation, my university seemed to get a bit worried about how it would look to release loads of humanities graduates onto the job market without them either getting into postgrad or well-paid jobs, so they came up with an MSc in computer programming which they tried to plug people into, which moreover was paid. They interviewed two of us at a time and I didn’t get in because I already had extensive experience in computing, which would’ve made it harder for me to learn OOP as they were teaching Modula-2, an early object-oriented language and the transition would’ve been too hard. It’s fine: I went on to do other things and in any case I feel my interest in computers is unhealthy and having a job where I used it would’ve been catastrophic. As I understand it, practically everyone else who applied did get in. However, although I didn’t learn a programming language at that point, I very soon did end up learning and achieving fluency in a human spoken language, namely German, to the extent that the postgrad I did actually do in the end involved reading it along with French and I eventually actually got paid a small amount of money for translating German into English.
A question occurs to me at this point though. I am, as you probably know, currently putting a lot of effort into learning Gaidhlig, which as a VSO language uses prefix notation I suppose. To do this efficiently, I’m trying to avoid using other languages apart from English and reducing my exposure to them, which is difficult because you generally come across them continually, or at least I do and I can’t see that I’m unusual in that respect. I am also interested in realising a couple of video game ideas. I have written video games before but it was a really, really long time ago and the languages I used were FORTH-79, Z80 assembler and BASIC, so it seems now that in order to do that I’m going to have to learn a more up-to-date language, and I’ve decided on Python because it seems popular and has a lot of resources to help me. Now the problem is, does one use the same parts of one’s brain to learn programming languages as one does to learn human spoken languages? Is it going to be slower or in some way confusing?
It turns out that research has been done into this, using fMRI scans. Apparently, learning coding is different from learning written human language, but it starts off more similarly. If someone is unfamiliar with programming generally, the parts of their brain activated by reading computer code are the same as those for reading prose in a new language, but as they gain experience, which I of course have, long long ago, programming makes demands on the Multiple Demand Network, which includes the anterior insula, lateral prefrontal cortex and some other bits – I mean, none of this is likely to mean much to someone who doesn’t know much about the structure of the brain. But the MDN is used to deal with logic on the whole. I suppose that translates into becoming more aware of the differences between human and machine languages as time goes by. However, when a programmer notices a syntax error, it does get processed the same way as sum1 notissing a gramatikal or punkchuashun mistake.
This actually makes me wonder if programming is like writing certain types of poetry such as haiku or sonnets. Haiku, as well as using morae (can’t spell) instead of syllables and having to cover particular topics, seems to be quite restricted in a similar way to a program. I know less about sonnets, but certainly it seems to me that the rhyming scheme would have a similar influence. Sestinas would be the same perhaps.
There at least used to be a movement called “Literate Programming”. This involved writing self-documenting code in a very structured manner, so that the file containing the code could be both compiled into an executable program and, using the comments made on that code in the same file, into a manual for using that program by a separate piece of software. I don’t know if this still happens, but it seems like a healthy way to anchor someone into the issues of problem-solving in an accessible manner. It also puzzles me a little though, because if I were to make some comment about why I’m using a particular sorting algorithm rather than a different one, I don’t know what the point of putting that in a manual would be.
The brain has a specialised language network apart from this. I’m personally not convinced that that’s so. I think we probably get extremely entrenched in using particular brain functions for this purpose, because people can work around language loss from strokes for example and that lends support to the idea that it’s not inevitable that certain networks have to be used, although it could also be that it’s a matter of degree and there are bundles of nerve fibres with different degrees of damage so to speak, or something which admits to degrees of harm. This also raises the issue of protecting against cognitive decline, meaning that it really is a good idea for me to learn Python, or at least a new programming language if not that. However, since the idea is to write video games, there at least used to be something called the Simple Direct Layer (and there it is again, layer, but do they mean the same thing as I do by it?) which enabled people to write games. However, Python went through a bit of a difficult period when Python 2 was updated to Python 3 and various things were changed such as making “print” into a function as I understand it, which meant that for some time the usual libraries that had been built up over years became less available until they were rewritten.
But I mean Python might be a good choice because it’s multiple paradigm and very flexible, so although it’d probably be rather sad, I could possibly stick to the imperative approach even though functional and OO ones are usual or the norm.
I don’t know where this is going, but if it stimulates different brain functions than language learning in the conventional sense, that’s another reason to attempt it, and I’d also be building on what I’ve got to some extent. Apart from anything else, I may be able to apply the skills I acquire through learning Python to other problems in my life, although my arrogance as a philosopher tells me I already know it all and it couldn’t help. But maybe it could. After all, there are the nineteen precepts of “The Zen Of Python” for example. When I’ve talked about language here, it comes to mind that the dichotomy of “natural” and “unnatural” may be invalid and therefore I can’t call “natural” language that, and also that programming languages are also human languages. They weren’t written by God or aliens after all, and they probably bear our fingerprints. This is also to some extent a nostalgic exercise, and it’s made me wonder whether I was too hasty lopping off that bit of myself back in the ’80s. We shall see.
I have a yen for fantasy geography. Some might say I just generally live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I’ve always been keen on maps. I wrote a post on here imagining that Great Britain had been divided in the same way as North and South Korea and the way things would be for us if it had, which may have helped make the situation over there more vivid. Well, right now we’re in a very divided kingdom, as evinced by the divisive “Unite The Kingdom” march last weekend in London, and of course in a sense I’d prefer us to be even more divided in the sense that I believe strongly in Scottish independence. I’ve taken to writing “U”K recently too, and the divisions are of course not simply geographical. This is an artifact of social media, bots and AI, among other things, orchestrated of course by those who profit from division, and I mean that literally, I mean, you know all this. We all do.
I’m very, very White, and I’m from East Kent. My sister, I’m pretty sure, votes Reform. As a White person, I’m racist, sometimes consciously and deliberately so and at other times unconsciously so. Last weekend I made the observation to another White person that all White people are racist, which I firmly accept, and he appeared to take exception to this. I’m not sure whether I should explain this or not, or whether if I do, it will reach the right ears. It’s absolutely not about being a self-hating White person, any more than opposition to Zionism makes someone a self-hating Jew, but about recognising one’s privilege and working against one’s own racism. The point at which a White person decides they’re not racist is also the point at which they will stop becoming less racist.
A few months ago I was at a vigil for the victims in Palestine when a White guy involved in an anti-immigration protest stood up at the front and said “I’m not racist”. This is factually untrue, not because of his motivations for being on the demo but because he’s White and therefore racist. He’s in the position of being able to be oblivious to his racism, as do I much of the time, because of our White privilege. The problem with being able to perceive himself as racist is similar to my problem of being able to perceive myself as breathing or having a heartbeat, and also due to the fact that racism tends to be conceptualised as something one does, perhaps consciously, rather than being a product of living in a White supermacist society such as this one. Ironically, this is one reason why I’m only a very reluctant Remainer. To me, the EU is a club of rich nations which have looted and stolen money and resources from the rest of the world, consisting largely of racialised people, and are continuing to do so through megacorps and banks. One interesting fact about the European Union which a lot of people seem to gloss over is that an early adopter and possibly the inventor of that term was none other than British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, who wanted a White homeland for Europeans as he saw them. Another irony is that the reason we’re getting so many asylum seekers is that we’ve left the EU and therefore the Dublin III Regulation, which prevented people from making more than one application in a signatory state, which the “U”K no longer is. So Brexit is responsible for this.
If you’re White, at least if you live in a White majority country, the chances are you will have grown up without the enforced education of what it means to be a member of a racialised minority, and that obliviousness involves unconscious bias. I’ve used this example before, but the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police on a Black birdwatcher out of fear was unaware of the danger she was putting him in by doing so because she was able to conceive of the police as primarily an institution which upheld the law without being much of a threat to racialised people when the reality is very different. Fear is also important here. If you can get someone to be afraid, you can get them to be less fair and more irrational, and to make decisions which endanger others, which they may no longer perceive as individuals but as dominated by a particular immutable characteristic. I was kidnapped by a White man in 1989 CE, and became disproportionately afraid of White men in general for maybe a year or so afterwards. In fact I found my fear of them expanding and including more White men in a manner I found quite worrying and discussed in therapy. Suppose instead of that I’d been kidnapped by a Black person. I probably would’ve experienced the same effect the other way round, and would’ve become more racist than I already am. If I didn’t get the chance to process that and come to terms with it in some way, it might’ve become a fixed feature of my personality. Transferring this to homophobia, I used to know a man who was homophobic because he was sexually abused a lot in his independent school by other males. I don’t know whether he still is because it was a long time ago now and I’ve long since lost touch with him. You don’t necessarily have much control over your prejudice, and whereas it’s undesirable it isn’t an accusation to call someone racist. It might be inaccurate, but it’s an observation.
Another aspect of racism which I’ve mentioned before here is its potential link to veganism, which I personally make and promote to a certain extent. I may be unusual for a vegan because I’m not interested in making anyone else vegan on the grounds that there’s already so much suffering and death in the world inherent in the food chain that any decisions we make to avoid animal products have little consequence for that. Veganism, though, is about everyone, i.e. all animals, and I do mean animals. I’m not going to reduce that circle merely to animals with brains or otherwise cephalised. But this post is not about veganism specifically. It’s easy to introduce racism into one’s veganism, for instance by ignoring the internalised oppression of soul food or the difficulty of eating a healthy plant-based diet in a food desert, but even without this there’s a racist element in it, one which I actually fully embrace despite being generally anti-racist. The issue is that indigenous peoples are never plant-based, and expecting them to be so will destroy their way of life. Although this is a long way down the road from where we are now, with the majority of even White people being carnist, ultimately the species indigenous people exploit don’t belong to them any more than slaves belong to slave “owners”, and in spite of the reverence they hold their prey in and no matter how efficiently they use the remains, they don’t have the right to kill them. And this is a serious problem, because for instance the Inuit will sometimes end their own lives because they can’t pursue the slaughter of seals. It’s a central part of the lives of thousands of non-White people and I do want to take that away, and some of them will probably kill themselves as a result. Therefore, I am absolutely and emphatically, actively and consciously racist. So yes, all White people are racist and I in particular am deliberately so, although the issue is unlikely to arise because of the focus on factory farming and vivisection, which is far more important. Marginalisation is nested. Partly for this reason also, I disagree with vegans who say veganism is a feminist issue because of the rape and forced birth involved. The deaths of half the chicks to enable the other half to lay eggs arises from their maleness, and in the wild it’s very likely that there are species whose females are always raped and wouldn’t exist if they weren’t, meaning that you can’t apply feminism to most other species, and again veganism trumps feminism there. At the same time, the issue of my racism against indigenous peoples, most of the time, is not a real problem because by the time veganism becomes a significant issue for them, they will probably have become assimilated into a scarcity-based economic system. However, there are also intermediate cases, such as the Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. On this issue, though, the slaughter is of wild animals rather than farmed ones and is on a smaller scale than the slaughter of farm animals in nearby countries, including Scotland. There is a sense in which whaling is actually the most humane form of slaughter because a one hundred ton animal can feed a lot more people than a thousand ewes whose total weight is the same, but I’d much rather there was none at all. So yeah, I’m racist, I know I am and I’m not planning to change in that respect, although I am in others.
Nonetheless, in other areas I am vigorously willing to discover and challenge my racism and White privilege. This doesn’t mean I have a guilt complex or think less of myself simply because I’m White, but I did grow up with the privilege of being able to be oblivious of racialisation because I was myself not racialised.
Given all that, I identify ethnically as a White person from northwest Europe, by which I mean an area including the islands of the North Atlantic, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and the German-speaking parts of Europe. That’s an area of seven million square kilometres, including fifteen sovereign states and covering 1.3% of the total surface of this planet. Most of the states involved are either part of the EU or have a special relationship with it. However, I’m not impressed with the EU unless it becomes a democratic federal state and it’s a case of it being the least worst option rather than something one can enthuse about. It’s just a mass of rich White people taking money and resources from the rest of the world and their own poor and making a massive pile of dosh. Nothing to celebrate.
However – well, indulge me, and this is where I get to the Tees-Exe Line and the Hexagon. Back in geography lessons, I’m not sure when, like probably every British schoolchild, I was taught about the line that can be drawn between the mouths of the Tees and the Exe rivers, northwest of which lie the highland areas of this island and southeast of which lie the “Lowlands”. Remember that name. This line divides the archipelago culturally too, with the northwest being more “Celtic”, although apparently the concept of Celtic identity is pretty nebulous and I tend to think the British parts of that area forget the Nordic influence. As I’ve mentioned before, in Scotland in particular edges are central, and one way in which this applies is with the water. Lochs, isles and firths are important to Scottish physical geography, influencing transport, language, economics, climate and doubtless a load of other things. Moving southwest of this line, though, brings one to an area with fewer islands, a less twiddly coastline and of course lower, flatter land. What it doesn’t do, however, is eliminate the sea. There’s the “German Ocean”/North Sea and the Manche/English Channel, and all the history and commerce which has taken place along its coasts. In Mediaeval times it sometimes consisted of territory straddling the two coasts and the English language is both Ingvaeonic and heavily influenced by French. The English crown made claims to France until surprisingly recently, in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens due to France having become a republic. The White Ship and the subsequent arrival of the Anarchy was linked to the ferrying back and forth of royalty between France and England, and very significantly to me, Calais was only officially lost in January 1558.
Going further southeast, we have the Hexagon. France has this thing about being hexagonal, which to my mind excludes Britanny, Flanders, the Basque Country and French Catalonia (for want of a better term). Britanny still has somewhere to go due to its linguistic links to Cornwall, so that also belongs, so to speak, to the west of an extended Tees-Exe Line. On going into France, and in fact a long way into it towards Paris from the North Downs in Kent, one gets a strong impression of continuity. It basically feels and looks like Kent with different marks of human activity on it. Then there’s Benelux, a trio of countries which are closely associated with each other.
An apparent tangent:
On Mars, there are perhaps three words for extensive areas with distinctive features: vastitas, planum and planitia. Plana are plateaux, vastitas means “desert” and is just the large lowland area around the north polar ice cap where most of the ocean used to be, and there are also planitiae, the best known of which it Utopia Planitia, which is where they build the starships in ‘Star Trek’. A planitia is a low-lying area. It translates as “plain” in English, and one of the more interesting planitiae is Hellas, which includes the lowest-lying areas of the planet and was once thought to be instrumental in causing Tharsis to form near the antipodes of the planet. Planitia, then, is a low-lying area.
I think the area of the Low Countries, that near the coast and someway inland from Hauts De France and the area of this island southeast of the Tees-Exe Line could be considered a single geographical unit, and in fact should be considered a single political unit. Or rather, I don’t, but it would be sufficiently annoying that it constitutes a proposal. In the former France, this should include Picardie, Hauts de France, Grand-Est and Normandy. The capital should be Lille, or the capital should be polycentric. Why do I want this? Well, when I lived in East Kent and after I left, I felt it was weird how, far from celebrating our connections with places over the Channel, we all seemed to dig our heels in and become “extra extra English”. Lille was the closest big city to me and I’ve never been there, and to me that seems absurd. Dover is much closer to Calais than it is to London. The name Kent itself means “edge”, but it’s only on an edge if you ignore everywhere outside Britain. My home village has a vineyard which produces excellent wines. And yet the people living there basically ignore their position entirely and either act like France and the Low Countries are on the other side of the world or are affronted at the audacity of their neighbours visiting. And then of course there are the famous people in boats. Various problems there, one of which is that Calais and Dover are in different countries separated by thirty kilometres of often rough and very busy seas. This wouldn’t be a problem if we’d kept Calais in 1558.
So, why not forget about England entirely and just decide there’s a new country called Planitia comprising these areas. Put the capital in Lille, build some bridges and tunnels to link it together across the Channel similarly to the bridge linking Denmark and Sweden and celebrate the common history and culture. No more problems with boats because once the people reach Planitia, they’re in a unified political entity. It looks very roughly like this:
I have no idea why this came out so small. WordPress is not behaving itself today. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a republic. It has a number of official languages, including French, Dutch, Letzebuergesch, West Frisian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Polish and so on. It unifies a diverse number of ethnicities with a lot in common. It has a large city in the middle of it on the island which does a lot of commercial stuff but needs its wealth redistributing more equally through the area.
In the meantime, out of the area is a kind of Celtic alliance, though not really Celtic, to the north and west, and a diminished hexagon of France to the south, extending to the Pyrenees and the Alps. As for Planitia, its cuisine, sadly, is far from vegan. It consists of pancakes, cheese on toast, loads of fish, bivalves, gastropods, various cheeses, wines (very nice, but are they vegan?), beer, cider, and more positively curries and general South Asian-influenced cuisines with plenty of chilli. People are not so keen on tea as some of them used to be. There’s Britpop with French lyrics, theatre in French, Dutch and English all in the same play, everyone learns each others’ languages in school including the South Asian ones and there’s existentialist Gothic literature. The former England has terrazzas and people hanging out having lunch for hours. Everyone drinks coffee. There is respect for learning for its own sake. Foreigners are so welcome they hardly count as foreigners at all beyond respect for their cultures. People are proud of their composite identity and how they’ve managed to bridge the gaps between the six nations composing their territory and people, often literally. The Channel has several bridges along its length which open in the middle like Tower Bridge to let the supertankers through. There are artificial islands offshore along both coasts. Many people cycle to work, Cannibis is legal for personal use and accordions and brass instruments play together. There’s probably a lot more rabies, unfortunately.
OK, all that’s a bit stereotypical, but what I’m saying is, can we for goodness’s sake forget that we’re living on an island and stop pretending we’re some special people apart rather than accept our unity with the rest of Europe? In this scenario there’s either no EU or Planitia is a province of a democratic European republic. The people in boats is a self-inflicted problem caused by leaving the EU, and also they’re people running from situations so appalling most people in Britain can’t even imagine them. They’re often people whose education has been paid for by another country and we get their talents, skills and experience for free, but instead of that we house them in crappy hotels and pay them a pittance when they could be contributing massively to the economy.
We can keep the St George’s cross though. A Turk who’s the patron saint of Palestine is fine by me. A red cross on an orange field with a couple of fleurs des lyses in the corners would seem appropriate.
Going back quite a long way now when I was about thirteen I think, I was once in Dunkerque, just over the water from when I was born and just over the border from the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium, being given a lift in the back of someone’s car, and being polite, we were speaking French. The front passenger turned around and politely but firmly said “Can you speak English please?”, so we did. I don’t know why she did this, but my presumption, given the circumstances and other stuff that was going on at the time, is that the first language of the other people in the car was Flemish rather than French. Since at the time I felt quite hostile towards the Gallic tongue, I happily switched.
My attitude since then changed, very recently in fact, as I’m now aware that far from being a rich people’s language, most Francophones live south of the Med and I think the largest French-speaking city is actually Kinshasa at seventeen million compared to the twelve million of L’Isle de France. The third is Abidjan, at four million, followed by Montreal, and in fact the next-largest French speaking city in France is only the twenty-first largest French-speaking city. I guess that’s Marseilles. This has led to me softening my attitude towards it. As a child, I hated French so much that I tried to eliminate all words originating from Anglo-Norman and even Latin from my English, but it’s okay. I’ve made my piece with the tongue now. If, however, I was in an indigenous linguistic minority in the country, I’d probably still detest it, because France the country has a thing about the Hexagon, and anyone who disturbs these neat, straight lines, such as the Flemings of Hauts de France, the Basques in the southwest or the Catalan speakers of the Midi, is not respected by the Constitution. France has one official language, as defined by article 2 of the Constitution: «La langue de la République est le français». As there are also external territories which are officially part of France as well, which in one way is a good thing because unlike some other countries it gives their citizens equal status with European French citizens, it means the other languages spoken in, for example, French Polynesia or French Guyana, lack much support. As far as the Hexagon itself is concerned, this means Alsatian, Occitan, Basque, Breton, Flemish, Catalan, Corsican, Letzeburgesch and the various spill-over languages like Italian and Spanish. Just after the Second World War, a million and a half people spoke Breton. Now it’s down to two hundred thousand due to their coercion and neglect.
Where I grew up near and in Canterbury, I heard various languages spoken on the streets other than English, including French, German, Dutch or Flemish and to a limited extent Romani-flavoured English. Kent had and has more Roma people than most of the rest of Britain, although there are pockets of them elsewhere, such as in Northampton apparently, according to Wikipedia. My actual experience of their language was quite limited, consisting of a few words borrowed into the local English dialect.
The Roma and the Jewish people share the outrage of being murdered in their millions by the Nazis during the Third Reich, and people in such ethnicities can be fairly given a lot of slack. A similar situation could apply to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who suffered similarly, although it’s usually maintained that Witnesses do have a choice. The Roma are probably the ethnicity in Britain against which racism is both worst and most widely accepted, to the extent that one comedian has said of their extermination in concentration camp meant that the Nazis weren’t all bad, to no apparent outrage. Just to be clear, up to one and a half million Roma were murdered in a process referred to as the Porrajmos, and unlike the Holocaust, this is hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media and they have received no reparations for the crimes committed against them. West Germany only acknowledged that it had happened in 1982 CE. The history of the Roma is largely unknown because the centuries-long persecution they’ve suffered has made it difficult for them to record anything about their lives and story, and it can only really be worked out by clues given by their culture. It can be determined that they lost contact with other Aryan speakers during the seventh century, that they borrowed from Armenian, Persian and Greek, and that they split into two at some point, the others being the Sinti, taking different routes. Most of the information available to Western academic linguists is taken from interviews undertaken in the late nineteenth century of a group of trilingual Roma in north Wales, who spoke Romani, Welsh and English. To many native English speakers, this may sound unusual but in fact it’s thought that the rule for most humans throughout our history is to be fluent in more than one spoken language. It’s simply a skill our own linguistic community happens to lack, to our disadvantage in various ways.
Just briefly, the Roma are literally an Aryan people who speak an Aryan language. The same is not true of Germans, incidentally, so the irony of the Porrajmos is that non-Aryans were committing mass murder against Aryans because they said they weren’t Aryan. This detail of their linguistic history made their language more interesting to me than Britain’s other spoken languages, because it was unusual. Unlike most other spoken languages I’ve encountered, Romani has the distinctive feature of morphing according to the languages spoken around it, as if it’s using those languages as a framework on which to arrange itself. It’s usually said to be closest to Punjabi although apparently there’s a minority opinion which links it to the national language of Sri Lanka, Sinhala, and therefore Dhivehi, that of the Maldives. I don’t know what that’s based on. However, the purpose of this post is not internal linguistics.
I’m not sure what defines an indigenous language. I suppose I’d say it’s a language spoken by a community over many generations in a particular territory. This would apply to Romani because it’s been spoken here since at the latest 1542, probably earlier, which is longer than English has been spoken in North America or Australasia. Romani, therefore, counts to my mind as an indigenous British language. It’s worth getting back to the question of what constitutes an indigenous language later.
The usual indigenous languages of these isles are said to be English, Welsh, Scots, Gaidhlig, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Romany and the Romance languages of the Channel Islands. There have of course been others historically, and two of these, Manx and Cornish, are currently being propped up by quite a lot of effort. This could get really complicated, so I’m going to simplify things and ignore things like the dialects of Old English, Yola, the Pictish language and the various Norn dialects, sticking to what’s current, although I’m going to ignore Sarkese and the others due to the fact that I know so little about them that I don’t even know if they’re still living languages. For similar reasons I’m also going to ignore Shelta, and now I’m wondering about Polari, which incidentally was spoken in a Doctor Who episode in the early ’70s as well as in much better-known settings. But no: I shall stick to the eight I’ve mentioned for now, and in fact make it simpler by ignoring Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. Oh yes, just one other thing: Flemish used to be the native language of Pembrokeshire, to which again I’m going to pay no attention. So we’re talking English, Welsh, Cornish and some related other forms of speech.
Celtic-speaking people seem to have arrived in these islands around 600 BCE, about two centuries after the start of the British Iron Age. It’s controversial to assert that there is such a thing as Celtic identity at all. The idea that there was a single, somewhat unified group of Celtic tribes is sometimes seen as a romantic, nineteenth century invention. ‘The Dream Of Ossian’ as seen at the start of this post was painted in 1813. This was part of an eighteenth and nineteenth century “revival” also referred to as the Celtic twilight, which attempted to contrast modern tendencies with a lost dream of the primitive and the idea of the “noble savage”. The associations made with “Celtic” culture, such as Celtic knotwork and spirals, are actually widespread through Europe and sometimes beyond, being found in modern Denmark and eastern Europe well beyond Hallstatt and La Tène. The idea that the Biblical Galatians were Celts is also contentious, and may have arisen from the general idea of “foreigners” or “barbarians” as expressed by the Greeks. Later on, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the other countries along with their predecessors never considered themselves to be Celtic until the idea of them being so emerged two and a bit centuries ago. There is, though, a “Celtic From The West” hypothesis that the Celtic languages emerged in Atlantic Europe and spread east, although they very clearly do have Indo-European origin. My current thought on the Goidelic languages is that they’re descended from languages spoken in what became the Burgos area of Spain, whereas the Brythonic languages are connected to Gaulish.
Just to set down a current thought of mine, it occurs to me that different Italic languages share different features with the Celtic ones and that the P and Q division of Celtic is reflected in a similar division between P and Q Italic, with Latin and its descendants all being Q, and this to me suggests, perhaps unscientifically, that there was just this big “smush” of “Celtic” and “Italic” languages which were actually just one group which couldn’t even be separated into Celtic and Italic, meaning that Celtic identity doesn’t even exist in a linguistic sense. Nonetheless, there are clearly two groups of surviving languages with a lot in common with each other spoken in these isles and in Brittany, and whatever else is going on, the P-Celtic group includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
I can offer you a half-century old account of Welsh and Cornish in Great Britain, which brings me back to 600 BCE. There was a second influx of P-Celtic speakers about three hundred years later, then around two centuries after that came the Belgae, who were escaping from the Roman invasion of Gaul. The language reached the area between the Clyde and the Forth shortly before the Romans invaded Great Britain and also spread along the east coast up to the Moray Firth. Also, the previously mysterious Pictish turned out to be P-Celtic but quite distinct from Welsh. I realise this seems to contradict the “Celtic From The West” theory, and I don’t know what to do with that. Also, I have to mention the glaring issue that there are very obvious and unaccountable similarities between Celtic languages here and Hebrew and Arabic, and nobody knows why because they’re completely unrelated, and it’s been suggested that Semitic languages used to be spoken here before the Iron Age. This is extremely odd.
After the Romans arrived, Latin replaced Celtic in a similar pattern to how English would do so, although not as extensively as the latter. In the late Imperial period, a new language began to develop out of Latin on the lowland side of this island, but was completely wiped out leaving no real records before it could become a language of similar status to French, Romanian, Italian and the like. This also happened in the southern Med. Then the Germanic tribes invaded, traditionally Hengist and Horsa invited in by Vortigern and this Germanic language in which I’m currently writing, in very different form, began to spread north and west from Kent. At the same time the Celts (if that’s a fair name) crossed the water to Armoracia to escape the English, hence the origin of Breton.
The English called the people who were already here “Wælisc”, which very unfairly used to mean “foreigner”. So we have a situation where the future English invade a country and call the indigenous people “foreigners”, and now there’s a country effectively called “Foreign”. The native people were pushed out to the North and West and a similar situation to before arose, with the invaders occupying the South and East and the people who had actually been here since before the Roman invasion, found themselves in the same situation and places as before. This period is sometimes called “Sub-Roman Britain”, and there would’ve been a few people in the cities speaking the now extinct British Romance language, as can be seen in traces in English, such as the placename “Chester” and its variants, which meant “large town” or “city”, but it disappeared very quickly otherwise. English has also, for some reason, borrowed little from Welsh. We have “downs”, “bin” and “dad”, but most of the Welsh words in standard English refer to distinctively Welsh cultural features such as “eisteddfod”.
Wales used to be a little larger in area than today, including parts of what’s now Cheshire and Shropshire, and this can be seen, as is often so, in the place names. I remember noticing a village beginning with LL in Salop on a road atlas, possibly Llanmynech. These places actually have solely Welsh names. Welsh has names for many English places very far from Wales, such as Caergaint for Canterbury, because the whole of what’s now England used to be effectively Welsh speaking, although also under the Romans. The Act Of Union took effect in 1536 and after that various incidents eroded the status of the language in Wales itself. Industrialisation led to the influx of English workers to Swansea, Cardiff and the various mines, and the 1870 Education Act can be seen partly as aiming to eliminate Welsh in Wales itself as well as other things. I’ve just asked Sarada whether people are generally aware of the Welsh Not, and she wasn’t, and as she’s English I’m going to conclude that this is a fairly typical level of knowledge, so forgive me if I’m telling you something you already know but the Welsh Not was a piece of wood given to a pupil when they spoke Welsh in school, who would then hand it on to the next child who spoke Welsh and the one who still had it at the end of the day would be beaten. There had been interesting riots and civil unrest in the early nineteenth century, the “Helyntion Beca” or “Rebecca Riots”, where men in dresses, i.e. the daughters of Rebecca, attacked the toll gates which had been erected to raise revenue from impoverished farmers, and a government enquiry into this followed from the widespread English belief that the unrest had been due to lack of education in Wales. This led to the “Brad y Llyfrau Gleision” or Treachery Of The Blue Books, which scathingly castigated Non-Conformity and the Welsh language as the cause of the unrest, as well as the general character of the Welsh people. Although no specific action was taken directly on this report, it’s seen as instrumental in the adoption of bilingualism as the rule in the country.
The decline of Welsh can be seen in this table (which may be wrong in detail but is based on the census):
Year
Percentage of Welsh speakers
1879
54
1891
50
1901
49.9
1911
43.5
1921
37.4
1931
36.8
1951
29
1961
26
After the First World War, the only monoglot Welsh speakers were small children who hadn’t learnt English yet, which is the usual situation in language decline but actually doesn’t apply to Cornish, which I’ll come to. Farming was also modernised, leading to redundancy and Welsh speakers leaving the country, outside which they couldn’t use their language with English people, and the mass media being in English also had a big impact. By 1975, the only sizeable settlement still mainly speaking Welsh was Caernarfon.
However, the Welsh Language Act of 1967 did begin to push back against this decline by giving the two languages equal legal status in the courts and government. There’s now a drive to increase the number of Welsh speakers to a million by 2050. Also, there seems to be a policy, and I haven’t done the research here, this being word of mouth, for governmental bodies to speak and communicate in Welsh first before using other languages, usually English.
Although Welsh is the most widely spoken Celtic language, it’s also more vulnerable than the others because the areas where it’s spoken are more accessible. The old farmhouses have often been converted to retirement homes for English people, because none of it is that far from England. Gàidhlig, which I’m mainly missing out in this post, doesn’t suffer from the same problem because the areas where it’s spoken are harder to reach from outside.
I need to mention a few random things here which don’t fit in anywhere else. Despite being the part of Wales furthest from England, Pembrokeshire is English speaking because after the Norman Conquest it was settled by Flemish speakers, and Flemish is obviously close to English, more so back then because the languages had evolved away less than they now have. The Welsh accent for English is startlingly non-rhotic – R’s are silent in the same places as they are in London English. This is a sign that widespread English speaking only arose in the nineteenth century and was imposed by Westminster rather than being part of the usual course of events. Finally, Welsh, or a similar language sometimes called Cumbric, was spoken in the Old North – Hen Ogledd – in the kingdom of Rheged which includes Cumbria and present-day Scotland to Ayrshire, and there are Welsh place names here including Glasgow itself, and it also extended to Devon and Cornwall, which brings me to my next language: Cornish.
Cornish was, like Welsh, part of the indigenous P-Celtic speech of the southern part of Great Britain although in the Dark Ages Ogham inscriptions are found in Cornwall, indicating some Irish element which vanished. The English reached Devon in the seventh century and by 936 the Tamar formed the border between the Germanic people and the Celts in the Southwest. Cornish can be divided into three stages like many other languages: Old, Middle and Modern. Old Cornish is not well-recorded but does exist in the submissions of Cornish slaves for freedom in the eleventh century. Middle Cornish is the language’s heyday, forming the language of religious plays and homilies. Modern Cornish was less successful as the language was dying out by then but there is the text of a religious play dating from 1611. It had never been an officially written language and only started to be written down formally in the early eighteenth century when academic interest began to lead to it being recorded systematically.
The decline proceeded as follows. The Domesday Book records that all the lords of the manor in the area had English names already, so even by 1087 it was mainly the language of the poor. It was reported that there were many monoglot Cornish speakers in 1542. Religious services were conducted in Cornish until 1678, after which nobody seems to have spoken only Cornish. Children were no longer using it in 1700, and by 1776 only five elderly people in Mousehole spoke it. A Cornish speaker, Nicholas Boson of Newlyn, wrote that his mother tried to stop him speaking Cornish and also forbade the servants and neighbours from doing so. This is a big contrast with the Welsh situation and in fact most situations where language is in decline, because in this case the parents are preventing their own children from learning it. I’m sure this happens, but it’s striking that it’s the other way around.
Dolly Pentreath, born 1692, is often called the last fluent speaker of Cornish but in fact there were younger speakers than her. She had a son who survived her by one year and is said to have been monoglot Cornish until she was twenty. Obviously it’s difficult to maintain a language if nobody else understands you, and there was at that point only one other person she could have a conversation with, although they both spoke English as well, which however she usually refused to speak. She died on Boxing Day 1777. Some people were still able to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in Cornish after that point. It also seems that tin miners spoke it among themselves in the 1790s and weren’t understood by others. A vicar born in 1828 said that he, like many others in Newlyn, was taught to count and say the Lord’s Prayer.
There have been various different ways of spelling Cornish, and one of them is the only spelling I know in any language which omits the letter I. Apparently this version didn’t catch on. So far as I can tell, Cornish is being revived and I know several Cornish people who have learnt some. It’s apparently, and I’m doing this just from my own memory, mainly a revival of Middle Cornish with some attempts to adopt features from Breton and Welsh where the vocabulary, for example, is unavailable. The Federation of Old Cornish Societies, which aims to maintain old cultural traditions in Cornwall, was established in 1924, so there seems to be a gap of less than a normal lifespan between its complete disappearance and its revival. Modern Cornish would’ve been harder to revive because there wasn’t enough of it recorded, but the difference between it and Middle Cornish is only about the same as that between formal written and colloquial Welsh. I always think of the states of Cornish and Manx as quite similar, but the last native speaker of the latter, the fisherman Ned Madrell, only died in 1974 and a dictionary was apparently established from interviews with him, so actually Manx is better off in that respect. A recent figure for Cornish speakers is 563 compared to about two thousand for Manx, and there’s a Manx medium school. Cornish only currently has a nursery school so far as I can tell, but I imagine they’re working on it. In 1994, I remember a vicar in Truro telling us that he also did Cornish language services, so they were certainly revived quite some time ago.
The number of Welsh speakers in Wales and England combined is around 800 000. Around 470 000 speak Romani. Cornish is a very distant fourth among indigenous languages. So far as I know, nobody at all of purely British heritage still speaks Flemish. Just in England and Wales, there are about 9000 native Irish speakers in England and Wales. I have no idea how many Gaidhlig speakers there are in England and Wales.
So far I’ve ignored a very significant portion of non-English speakers in England and Wales, namely the descendants of immigrants from the Empire and also those who come from other European countries. These languages are actually quite well-represented in England and Wales, and also in Scotland. These are, in order, Polish, Romanian, Punjabi, Urdu, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Italian, French and Chinese (several dialects combined). Of these, the first four are each spoken by more than a quarter of a million people. The Poles in particular have a long association with Britain generally, since the Middle Ages, and are notable for having fought for the British military in several wars. They were particularly active in the Battle Of Britain and the Polish Government in exile was based in London during the Second World War and continued there until it was dissolved in 1991. After the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, many Poles had no option but to stay in Britain. After the 2004 enlargement of the EU, many more Poles came to join their compatriots in the UK. There is therefore an argument for saying that the Poles are not actually foreign, or at least they weren’t during the War and the post-War period. They have, however, been fairly invisible much of the time because they don’t stand out as non-White.
The Romanians have probably shown the largest growth, fivefold in a decade. Bengali, Gujarati, French and Chinese have all fallen in absolute terms in the decade 2011-2021. It is however notable that all of these languages are more widely spoken than Gaidhlig is in Scotland even though it’s indigenous.
There is no de jure official language in the UK, but obviously English has a higher status in England. It isn’t unusual for a country not to have an official language, another prominent example being the US. However, in order to become a British citizen one must demonstrate some degree of competence in English. This was not always so. The British Nationality Act 1981 stated that one had to be competent in English, Welsh or “Scottish Gaelic”. This changed in 2007 but the test can be taken in one of the other languages if one is in Wales or Scotland. I’m not sure where this leaves anyone as it still seems that competence in English must be demonstrated and it’s notable that it can’t be done in Irish or Romani. This sounds like a technicality and it is partly a demonstration, if true, that English is still given higher status. It’s also interesting that it changed in 2007, under a Labour government. However, it also means that certain groups of people who might otherwise find it easier to become British citizens don’t have that option, some of whom may have very strong links to Britain, such as members of the South Asian community with family members here. There are, however, exemptions, for instance for adult dependent relatives. The biggest practical problem for someone who speaks a British language would probably be for a member of the Welsh-speaking settlements in Argentina, as in the other cases the people concerned are living in an area where English is also widely spoken.
Moving away from the citizenship argument, there is a very obvious argument of historical precedence here regarding the status of Welsh in particular, which is why I’ve confined my scope to England and Wales. Welsh and its predecessors along with Cornish and Cumbric have been present in Great Britain for something like twenty-six centuries compared to the fifteen centuries of English. If we’re going to consider this kind of argument, it makes at least as much sense to respect the Welsh language as it does English. Also in the case of Welsh, there has always been a substantial population of Welsh speakers here, uninterrupted. It isn’t like Wales or Great Britain is a distant homeland with a relic or merely historical population of speakers. As such, it’s worthy of respect and preservation and in that sense it has a greater claim on this island than any other language currently spoken. Cornish has a gap, but is unique in being an indigenous language found only in present-day England. The reason I haven’t included Scotland or other parts of these isles is that Gaidhlig is a more recent arrival which also in some places displaced Welsh. Welsh is special. I may not be learning it right now and I may never learn it, being in Scotland, but the fact remains that it’s an ancient language. Also, if the “Celtic from the West” hypothesis turns out to be correct, it makes it even more special.
Bilingualism is the norm today and was also in the past. Sixty to seventy-five percent of the human population is fluent in at least two languages, and this confers advantages. It accelerates recovery from strokes and wards off dementia, and it makes your own thought more flexible and creative as well as exposing you to a more diverse culture and experiences. It’s like travelling to other parts of the world without leaving your country in its psychological effects. Hunter-gatherers are almost always multilingual and may have tabus about marrying within their own tribe, and if this has long been so it suggests that our brains expect us to be bilingual or multilingual and without that we may find it harder to flourish.
There are understandable and potentially sympathetic reasons why some families and communities might not have been keen on promoting the survival of their own languages. They can be seen as quaint and out of touch with today’s world, and as preventing someone from achieving more as an adult. English also has the major advantage of being a global language. But Welsh is both venerable and historically persecuted, so to me it’s also understandable why there might be hostility towards non-Welsh speakers, particularly in somewhere like Caernarfon, which is a bastion of the language.
I wanted to examine a particular word here, present in various living indigenous languages but best-known in Gaidhlig: Sassenach. This comes across as an insult and is doubtless sometimes intended as such, and it has its rough equivalents in Welsh, Cornish and Romani: Saesneg, Sawsnek and Gajo. These can be neutral and simply refer to the ethnicity of White English person (or non-Roma). If there is a pejorative element, this may have arisen from the history of persecution, but there is also the in-group/out-group dynamic which could sometimes be more compassionate. Rather than judging it, it might be best to acknowledge the hostility, wonder how to build bridges and remember that it’s not always meant in that way.
The shifting patterns of language on this island are a bit like a slower version of its weather, with the warm front of Latin moving in, followed by scattered showers of English and Norman French later in the millennium. There’s always something going on and like much diversity it makes life here richer, more interesting and stimulating. Also, I stand by my insight that maybe some languages are meant to be sung more than spoken, and that fact has made these lands a powerful source of musical energy for the whole planet. We should treasure our resources and keep them alive and ever-changing.
We had a conversation in a café in Dail Bheithe (Dalbeattie) yesterday which rather surprised us. We got into a conversation with someone at the next table who was learning Welsh. She was clearly thoroughly Scottish, so this was an interesting choice, although one also made by another acquaintance living here. It then turned out that a family at another table were actually Welsh and fluent in the language, and all of us ended up discussing various things about the surviving Celtic languages, particularly Gàidhlig and Welsh. One of the things they said about Welsh is that it’s “the hardest language”. This reminded me of how Japanese speakers are fond of saying that their language is hard and that the learner’s polite response to this is said to be to acknowledge it and say one is working hard on learning it. People seem to be proud of the idea that their native language, or one they associate with their heritage, is in some way difficult or special.
My knowledge of Welsh is very limited, more so than my knowledge of Gàidhlig, substantially because it isn’t really part of my heritage. There’s an argument that Welsh is the heritage of most White people with English ancestry because in a sense Welsh used to be the main language spoken in what would become England and being from Kent, there are plenty of “Welsh” placenames in the area such as Dover and Wye. However, one reason for me not even trying very much with Welsh is that when I read the chapter on it in ‘Language Made Plain’, Anthony Burgess pointed out that the initial consonants often changed according to their setting and grammatical context, and I found that so off-putting that I didn’t pursue it any further. In fact it’s quite common for languages to do this, particularly the surviving Celtic languages, which as far as I know all do it. From a practical perspective it makes it difficult to look words up in the dictionary when one hears them spoken.
Regarding Welsh in particular, English speakers in England and parts of Wales are often quite hostile to it, making the following comments:
It hasn’t got any vowels. This is obviously nonsense and refers to the spelling using letters used for consonants in English, W and Y, being used for vowels in Welsh.
It involves a lot of phlegm and spitting. I’m guessing this is about the voiceless consonants which are unusual in modern English, namely CH, LL and RH.
It’s spelt impenetrably. This is deeply unfair. Welsh spelling is actually quite close to Old English spelling and is very close to being phonetic compared to English nowadays. One would be hard-pressed to find another Western European language with better spelling. Spanish, Basque and German are about on the same level. English, French, Faroese and the continental Scandinavian languages are decidedly not.
Earlier that day, we’d been wandering about what might be called the machair, although I’m not sure it counts as true machair as we live in the southwest, and it reminded me of the concept of the ionad as it was one of several examples of a border between two things being considered as a place in itself. Whether or not it was actually machair, it was definitely that, and I’ll come back to that. There were also what initially appeared to be large, smooth pebbles stranded along the shoreline among the plants, and we quickly realised they were jellyfish, Aurelia in fact, which gave me to wonder if they were osmotic conformers who couldn’t cope with the low salinity of the water. Coincidentally, the Welsh people in the café brought up the Welsh way of referring to jellyfish, which opened up a can of tentacles, because one nickname used appears to be “pysgod wibli-wobli”, which incidentally illustrates how very phonetic their spelling is. I’m not entirely convinced this is true because of the “popty ping” thing, which they also mentioned, but apparently that too is a nickname and not just a joke to be played upon the Sassenach (I’m vaguely aware of a Welsh word “Saesneg” but I’ve probably got it wrong so you’re stuck with the Gàidhlig there). The term for microwave oven is probably not problematic in Welsh, but it turns out one term for jellyfish definitely does need a euphemism because it’s “cont y môr”, which translates literally as “C-word of the sea”. Makes me think of vagina dentata, which in turn I usually associate with sea urchins myself.
Becoming curious about the Gàidhlig for jellyfish, I find the word “sgoldrach” and a further term “muir-tèachd” – “sea gel” – and “sgeith-ròin”, which seems to mean “puke hair”, and that does make sense to some degree, and even edges into offensive territory, which I’m guessing “cont y môr” is supposed to be as well. The Welsh term seems to have a double connotation in that it refers to the animal’s shape and probably also to its threatening character to humans, although that presumes that words for genitals are considered pejorative in Welsh, since apparently they aren’t in Gàidhlig, so I’m told.
All of that, then, has led to highly fruitful cogitation over the use of these words in Celtic languages, and their unfamiliarity to a Sassenach is very stimulating in this respect. However, I’m not quite finished with Welsh yet. One of the remarkable things about Welsh is that the oldest written records in the language are not from Wales but apparently from around here, what became southwest Scotland. They comprise poems attributed to Taliesin and Aneirin. Wikipedia provides the following picture of a page from the ninth century CE book, Llyfr Aneirin:
Impressed upon me as a non-speaker of Welsh, this looks very Welsh indeed to me, which I find rather surprising. I’d assumed that the Brittonic language spoken along much of the western part of Great Britain varied more than that, but to my eye this just looks like Welsh, even in its spelling, which I mention because I’ve seen archaic spellings of Welsh using the likes of LH instead of LL. However, maybe it isn’t Welsh. Cornish and Breton aren’t Welsh and my understanding was that Cumbric was the Brittonic language spoken here immediately before Gàidhlig arrived from Ireland and Man. Whatever the language was, it survives in the well-known counting rhymes used by shepherds, which resemble Welsh quite closely.
Before I leave the topic of Welsh for now, I want to point out that neither of the two people I know living locally who are learning it were aware that it used to be spoken here. They just decided to learn it anyway, and I wonder if that means there’s more to it than it seems. Is there something about this region which hints that it used to be Welsh-speaking? It’s hard not to be doubtful about that idea as it sounds supernatural. It is genuinely the case, though, that the placenames around here are sometimes Welsh, a notable example being Cummertrees, whose first two syllables may in fact have originally been something like “Cymru”. There also used to be a Welsh-speaking kingdom here called Rheged, which as far as I understand it stretched from Ayrshire to Ynys Môn (I’m probably wrong about that). Awareness of its existence made me feel slightly better when we went to Carlisle recently, which incidentally is Caerliwelydd in Welsh. Nonetheless, this is all ancient, well mediaeval, history.
Turning to Goidelic, i.e. Q-Celtic for the purposes of modern times, languages and their possible exceptionalism, there’s a second issue. Apparently some Goidelic speakers regard their speech as part of a continuum of the same language which Sassenachs perceive as separate. I’ve seen, and unfortunately forgotten, evidence that the Gàidhlig spoken in Galloway was close to Manx, which wouldn’t be surprising, but as few traces remain the version we’re learning is that of the Gaidhealtacht (sp?), insofar as that’s unified. I’ve also heard that Enya’s Irish is closer to Gàidhlig than more southerly Irish speakers’ because she’s from Donegal in Ulster. It actually seems like a pity to me that we’re not learning a reconstructed Galwegian Gàidhlig, as that would to some extent restore the continuum, but presumably resources and the reasons people learn it preclude this. So when I ask whether it’s exceptional, what do I mean by that? Am I talking about the extinct Galwegian Gàidhlig, the almost extinct but very similar Manx, Gàidhlig as spoken in the Gàidhealtachd (which I can’t spell, apparently) or the entire gamut of living and recently extinct Goidelic languages?
I suppose I mean three things, as applied to the style of speech I’m learning: vocabulary, phonetics and grammar. One of the issues with living Celtic languages appears to be an historical academic bias towards classical European languages, mainly Latin and Ancient Greek, and later to what’s been called “Standard Average European”, or SAE. This was apparently originally Benjamin Whorf’s idea, and it involves the hypothesis that European languages have tended to become more like each other due to being in constant close physical proximity, leading to common features in syntax, grammar, vocabulary and usage. Two examples of how this can perhaps surprisingly manifest itself are found in many terms in Tok Pisin, an English-based creole in New Guinea, which uses “gras bilong hed” to refer to “hair”, when this way of thinking of hair would never occur to most Europeans – “head grass”, and in dvandva compounds, where two words are combined with equal force and type of reference such as “mother-father” meaning “parents” rather than something like “maternal grandfather” as occurs in Swedish. We don’t even know we’re doing it. This leads us to become less aware of other possibilities or features in languages which are unlike these, which is basically a form of ethnocentrism. Another aspect of this, from Swedish, is /ɧ/, a sound almost unique to that language and with its own phonetic symbol, but at the same time the click sounds of Khoisan languages were for a long time analysed into separate letters when they were actually single sounds rightly represented by single, but different, letters.
And the situation with Celtic languages as spoken today is that they’re on the fringe of Europe, not in a pejorative way but in terms of being less influenced by other European languages and less likely to be pulled towards them. To a limited extent this is also seen with Icelandic, which along with Faroese is an outlier with respect to other Nordic languages in spite of being the one which has changed least in the last millennium or more. In both cases, social forces have failed to pull these languages into the general homogeneity. It’s also alleged that the standard system for representing speech sounds, the IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet, is actually not very adequate for transcribing Goidelic languages. Other stuff is going on with their pronunciation which is hard to set down on paper because the notation is missing. This is clearly manifested in the apparently perverse spelling, but there is a reason why it’s like this. My personal opinion is that it should be written using Cyrillic script, the alphabet used for Russian and various other languages, but this is obviously never going to happen. It is, though, notable that the Slavic languages too, particularly Russian, are on the margins of Europe and therefore less driven towards SAE.
Thus in this case it does actually seem to make sense that Gàidhlig, or whatever it is I’m learning, is an exceptional language and that the thoughts and experiences of the Gaels are less forced into a SAE filter. Goidelic languages are from “outside the empire” and the fact that they were the languages of barbarians is a potential point in their favour. There is also a paradoxical sense in which these ultimately Western European languages, Irish, Gàidhlig, Manx, Faroese and Icelandic, are among the least Standard Average European languages in Europe! The well-known Balkan Sprachbund in southeastern Europe also tends to differ radically from more centrally located languages, perhaps for similar reasons.
I can’t say I have sufficient grasp of the grammar to make sweeping and accurate statements about it, but one thing which is notable is that the older terminology used to describe it is often inappropriate. The words “infinitive”, “dative”, “subjunctive” and “aspiration” are all used to describe features of the grammar and in the last case also phonetics which really don’t apply to the language at all. They may for all I know represent some kind of historical feature in a much earlier stage of the Celtic languages, but they really don’t make sense any more and it’s probably better not to use them. As I’ve said though, my understanding of the grammar is quite poor.
Vocabulary is slightly better. I’ve already written about “ionad”, the word for place or centre (in the sense, for instance, of “leisure centre”), and due to that word being used in maths, in itself it’s enough to revolutionise my perception of reality. It also very much anchors the word in my mind: I’m always going to notice when someone says “ionad” from now on. It’s a very inefficient way to learn a language of course, but the words get properly learnt this way. This also means you have to be careful to get it at least roughly right, in order not to have to make a greater effort to unlearn them otherwise. But many words can be treated as meditations from which one attempts to distil the water of life. That doesn’t make Gàidhlig exceptional, except in the usual sense that every language is exceptional, but adopting that attitude towards it may help one get the most out of it.
Somewhere else on the internet, some guy running a Gàidhlig group in Baltimore Maryland has singled out a number of words for the learner’s consideration. I can’t help thinking that this is rather precious in a distinctly American way which attempts to romanticise the language inappropriately, but it’s still interesting. His post can be found here on WordPress. Nine words are involved: cèilidh, slàn, dùthchas, cliù, aiteal, smùirnean, crith, lannair and deò.
“Cèilidh” was familiar to me from the late 1970s CE, when my English teacher and year head was in a band called the Oyster Cèilidh Band, now just known as the Oysterband and closely connected to Fiddler’s Dram and their one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. I had no idea it was Gàidhlig at the time, and it has of course been extensively used in English since. It actually came to me after my first attempt to learn the language was over. The word is linked to “visit”, although I think this has now been replaced by another word. The precise image it brings up in my mind is the very English but also universal experience of a social gathering in a village square in Chilham, Kent, with gaily attired folk dancing round a maypole, getting drunk, playing instruments and singing songs. It’s actually quite “hey nonny-nonny” for me, and although Morris dancing is also a Scottish tradition – Dannsa na clag as it’s known – the strong association I make with that is there too for me. I’m a Sassenach, what do you expect? Nonetheless, I think it makes perfect sense to transport the spirit of such an occasion to Scotland and make the appropriate associations. Cèile also means “partner” or “spouse”, so although that may be coincidence, the idea of “partnering”, perhaps in a dance or accompanying each other in music is suggested to me here. It also implies belonging.
“Slàn” is the root of slàinte or “health”, and this actually feels like a fairly prosaic and boring word. It isn’t that it doesn’t have interesting associations, this time with wholeness, unbrokenness and the wholesome, but that kind of association exists between words linked to health and completeness in all sorts of languages, so it’s interesting and it helps one remember it, but it doesn’t seem special to me.
“Dùthchas” provides more food for thought in this respect. It has various reasons such as “place of origin”, “homeland”, “heritage”, “heredity” and also refers to a legal form of inherited land tenure. Hence the connotation of “place” exists with this word in a similar way to the connection between that concept and “ionad”. I find this a little worrying because I can see it lending itself to fascistic and negatively nationalistic urges, but I also hope that’s not so big a problem here and there are positive ways of being patriotic, such as admiring tolerance and care for the vulnerable if those are strong traditions in a place. My own dùthchas is of course partly Scottish, as is that of the whole diaspora. I wouldn’t presume to be as Scottish as an actual Scot but this place is keen on adopting others as their own and I’m hoping to be able to aspire fairly to that. In legal terms, links have been made between the right of indigenous peoples to their land in countries with colonial history such as Australia and the US and rights to clan lands here. It’s also been described as expressing the idea that people belong to places rather than places to people.
“Cliù” means “reputation” and “renown”, also “praise”, and therefore also “character”. It expresses the idea that one is proud of being useful to a community. It’s apparently summed up in Iain Crichton’s essay on being a Gael, ‘Real People In A Real Place’. It seems to be about being perceived as more than a “character”, and escaping from the, I don’t know, mysticisation and mistification of Na h-Eileanan an Iar as a kind of misty and mysterious place at the end of the Earth, and the romanticisation of the Gael. It’s a little like the essay ‘For All Those Who Were Indian In A Former Life‘ in that it makes the outsider question how they approach the cultures of others. I fervently want to be an asset to this community, not in a proud way but just to have a good idea, and the motivation, to know how I can be the most value to the people who live here. I suppose that’s cliù.
Next comes a bit of a departure from the communal and social in the form of “aiteal”, which I can’t help noting is a lot easier to type than most of the other words here. This reveals the absence of a proper Gàidhlig keyboard layout for computers in general. On this Chromebook I have a dozen keyboard layout options, none of which are suitable for the language. Leaving all that aside though, “aiteal” can be translated as “glimpse”, “sprinkle”, “slight breeze”, “ray of sunshine” and “smidgeon”. Maybe a “breath”. It’s a hint of things to come or the hidden, a bit like the idea of an iceberg being mainly hidden below the surface.
“Smùirnean” also refers to a small thing, like an atom or a mote of dust, and it’s at this point that I feel the guy in Baltimore has kind of gone off on one. I think it’s okay to engage in this kind of thing to fix the concepts in one’s mind, but this is also an everyday, working language spoken by real people who share in the universals which are also part of us. Anyway, “smùirnean” has a more figurative meaning of an initial inkling about something, the start of a realisation. But then he goes on about “the interconnected nature of life” and I start to be reminded of ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’, but maybe it’s I who am failing to appreciate the authenticity of this take.
He does the same thing again with “crith”: tremble, be in a tremor, the ague, shaking, quaking, shivering. This to him conveys the transient nature of an apparently solid and reliable order of things, the way an earth tremor reveals that this apparently sturdy, steady and monumental land we all live on is ultimately anything but, and that we’re almost here on suffrance, or rather that the world is indifferent to us. It can also refer to the shimmering of a mirage, something I perhaps ignorantly assumed is not a common experience in the Gaidhealtachd, although there are certainly mirages here. Maybe the “Fata Morgana” is a frequent experience here. This is the appearance of a distorted, distant object beyond the horizon, often seen above ice, and it does in fact refer to Morgan Le Fay of the tales of King Arthur, although we’re not in the Brittonic realm here, or at least not any more. It could refer to a deceptive thin layer of moss floating on a bog which makes the ground appear more solid than it really is, or possibly the misleading nature of a heath with hidden crevices into which one’s foot might slip and be trapped, as is apparently the case in Clan McIntyre country, and I’m sure many other places. The world is in fact less stable and substantial than we tend to think of it, although it can be hard to live confidently without assuming that. This is true both in terms of the illusion of security many people have and more literally so in the fact that matter is almost entirely empty space, as is the Universe beyond this planet.
Next there’s “lannair”: “radiance”, “gleam”, the glitter of fish scales or swords. Again I feel the author, whose name is Richard Gwynallen incidentally, is somewhat romanticising things in referring to the glint of swords. It can refer to the inner gleam of light that appears in someone’s eyes which presages something to come, once again. There’s a definite theme in many of these words and it’s hard to tell whether this says more about our Richard or more about the language.
His last word is “deò”: breath, vital spark, ghost, spark of fire or ray of light, once again. He speaks of it as the moment where the water of a river slips into the sea and we humans become part of a greater whole.
I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s a personal view and it seems rather fanciful and poetic. Then again, maybe the language is primarily poetic. I’ve felt for a while that it’s almost meant to be sung rather than spoken, so maybe he has a point with all this. Comparing German, because of reading Heidegger and other philosophers in German, pretty much prosaic, ordinary things expressed in that language come across to me as somewhat philosophical in nature and in fact Heidegger was himself quite attached to the idea that the common folk’s use of terms made them more significant, therefore preferring terms like “Geworfenheit” and “zuhanden” to rather more classically-based language. It’s not advisable to go too far with this because he was a Nazi, something I’d like to come to terms with. Even so, the poetry and song composed in Gàidhlig could be a demonstration of how the language also tends to go in ordinary conversation, so maybe Richard Gwynallen is right.
In the end, then, maybe Gàidhlig and her sisters really are exceptional, substantially because they’ve not been squashed down into the homogeneity of SAE. Maybe Gàidhlig is the “Anti-Esperanto”, not only due to its small number of native speakers but also because there’s no rule to force it to follow. It seems quirky to the outsider, to the Sassenach and no doubt even to many Scots, but it has a freedom and spontaneity, the foam, froth and white water of a mountain burn or waves breaking on the white sand of a Hebridean beach, rather than the flatness and standardisation of the speech of central Europe. Maybe this is what we can get from it. And we need to let it flow over us and our ears, trying to swim in its relentless flood, and one day we will succeed.
I’ve blogged about Gàidhlig on here before, but I’m guessing also that there are entire blogs on the language, so I think it’s okay for me to talk about it again. Though I don’t recall exactly what I said in that post, it amounts to the highly idiosyncratic nature of the surviving Celtic languages, which is unfair because back in the day they were very similar to Latin, even uncannily so. But something happened to the languages the Celts spoke once they reached these isles, and oddly it happened to both lots. The Celtic languages spoken in what Gàidhlig calls Na Eileanan Bhreatainn didn’t stem from a single language or even two closely related languages, but from two languages which had already been evolving apart from each other for many centuries, so the peculiarities of the six surviving or revived languages are quite mysterious. But I’ll come back to that in a bit.
I think I first started to try to learn the language in 1978 CE. I know it was quite some time before studying O-levels was an imminent prospect, so it can’t have been after 1981. I remember this because the library book I was using had school exam past papers at the back and I found this quite intimidating and expected never to get any qualifications at the time. The actual book I didn’t find at all daunting though. This contrasts with my almost simultaneous attempt to learn Russian where for some reason I got stuck on a single world, «идёт», which was enough to make me give up (apparently it means “is coming” according to Google Translate). However, since the book was due back after a few weeks and I didn’t renew it, I only got a few lessons in.
Welsh television was somewhat widely available in the ’70s, so if I’d tried to learn that it would’ve been easier to expose myself to the spoken world, and to a limited extent I did in fact do this, but as far as I know there was absolutely no Gàidhlig television or radio in England. In Kent, it was easier to pick up Dutch television than Scottish, so it was a bit of a struggle to learn it. There was a TV series called ‘Can Seo’ whose books were available, but I don’t think it was available on the telly in Kent. Over that time, it didn’t seem difficult, although it was unusual. I tried a few more times in the ’80s and was really put off when I read Anthony Burgess’s description of the Welsh language and realised that the initial letters of words changed rather than just the endings. This is actually not unusual outside Indo-European languages – Bantu languages such as Swahili do it for example – but at the time it considerably freaked me out and discouraged me because it meant that if I didn’t know a word, I couldn’t necessarily just look it up in the dictionary because it often wouldn’t be there. The answer, of course, is to learn the changes, but you have to do that even before you get to look it up, so it immediately becomes a slog.
The Q-Celtic languages – okay, I’ll explain that in a bit but I mean Irish, Gàidhlig and Manx, also known as the Goidelic – have the added issue of spelling. Welsh is, despite what English people say, very phonetic and actually somewhat similar to Old English in its orthography. Irish and Gàidhlig are decidedly not, for various reasons, and Manx has a different problem because it’s been squozen into English spelling without actually having English-like pronunciation, with the result that although it looks to an English reader like a breath of fresh air, what you see on the page doesn’t actually correspond that closely to what you hear. I always say that they should be written in Cyrillic, because that script also has to deal with languages whose letters are doubled as broad and slender a lot of the time and does so by using extra vowel letters and the soft and hard signs, sometimes, as with Serbian, introducing extra letters. I actually suspect the intimidating-looking spelling is a factor in it not spreading more widely. That said, according to our teacher yesterday the number of speakers in Dumfries & Galloway, or should I say Dùn Phrìs is Gall-Ghaidhealaibh, has doubled in the last decade, and there are moves to use the Gàidhlig version of “Welcome to Dumfries & Galloway” on the signs into the region.
It isn’t just that either. It’s been said that of all the Indo-European languages, the Celtic branch has deviated furthest from its roots. Were it not for the fact that most of the vocabulary has been inherited relatively cleanly from its ancestors, nobody would guess that they were even in the same family. I was rather surprised to hear from an actual Scot a few months ago that she’d heard that it was close to Sanskrit! The existence of a phenomenon known as sandhi does link them, to be sure, but this is not unique to the two by any means. It’s also been said that the unit of the Gàidhlig language is not the word but the sentence, and I basically agree with that. I’ll illustrate the issue with a phrase we learnt yesterday: Tha mi air m’obair a leigeil dhiom. This means “I’m retired”. However, literally it means “Am I my work a-laying aside from me”, and switching the syntax from the VSO of Celtic, “I am laying aside my work from me”. There is another way of saying it – tha mi retireadh – “I am retired” – but where’s the fun in that? This does, however, illustrate one of the weirdnesses of the language: it’s entirely possible to use it as if it were a more conventional European language and literally say “I am retired”, but on the whole, it just isn’t done! It’s all circumlocutory. I used to find this exasperating, but no longer.
So, more personally and experientially, the class is good. Despite the fact that I started to learn forty-six years ago, most of the other students are ahead of me even though some of them have only been doing it a few weeks. The teacher is great, although she sounds like a Geordie. I don’t know if this is because she’s from the Borders and they sound like that over there. There are other Sassanaich in the class than Sarada and I, thankfully, although unsurprisingly most are Scots. Lessons are an hour long, and as Sarada noted, this is quite long enough. Some of what one hears in Scottish and even more so in Hibernian English reflects Celtic idioms, so for example I’d expect to hear “the hair on her” rather than “her hair” around here and likewise in Gàidhlig “a’ ghruag oirre” – “the hair on her”. This is one of the things that spares the Scots language itself from just being another Germanic language like Frisian or Danish – it has both Celtic borrowings and idiomatic influences. It doesn’t have the breeziness, and therefore the boredom, of learning most other European languages because it is so very different. More different in many ways, in fact, even than Finnish, which isn’t even Indo-European but at least has the decency to behave as if it is. The highly idiosyncratic nature of expression does in fact tend to infect the way I express myself in English and it actually seems to mess with your head to some extent, making fluency in English harder.
Although the teacher suggested to me that I go up to the next level, me having told her that I’d been studying it since 1978 and knew fifteen languages (not that well though, in either case) and her having heard me speak, I am seriously not ready to do so. As I put it to her, the principles are clear in my head but the practice is another matter entirely. Maybe at some point it’ll happen.
To come back to the points I mentioned earlier, there’s an hypothesis out there called “Italo-Celtic” which is about the idea that Celtic and Italic, nowadays Romance as the others became extinct during the Roman period although they did influence some dialects of Italian, stem more recently from the same language than the rest of Indo-European, or alternatively that they were spoken in close proximity to and influenced each other. I personally honestly suspect the former. The Italic and Celtic languages really were spoken in adjacent areas, the former on the Italian peninsula and the latter somewhat further North in today’s Austria, and this gives Gàidhlig the redeeming feature of having numerous cognates with Latin which really helps. For instance, “feasgar” means “afternoon/evening” and clearly corresponds to the Latin vesper, and “fear” – man – similarly reflects “vir”, and in fact also the English “were” as in “werewolf” – “man-wolf”. “Obair” is very clearly linked to opus, but calls to mind the later plural become singular opera, and I imagine this is because in some positions S becomes R but I’m just guessing. Therefore it does help and I’m not completely at sea.
Just to compare the numbers from one to ten in Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic:
Italic
Celtic
oinos
oinos
duos
dwau
tres
tris
kwettuor
kwettwares
kwenkwe
kwenkwe
seks
swekhs
septem
sekhtam
okto
okhtu
nowem
nawan
dekem
dekam
If this pattern is repeated across the two proto-languages, it seems to me that they were basically two dialects of the same language, and the same definitely does not apply to the other big groups of European languages such as Germanic and Balto-Slavic compared to Italo-Celtic.
There’s also the division between Q- and P-Celtic, which also occurs in Italic but only Q-Italic languages have survived. Romanian does use P sometimes but this is a later development. Celtic is distinctive in having lost its original /p/ sound, so any such sounds which occur in it today are later developments. Basically, the Q-Celtic languages, also known as Goidelic and now including Manx, Gàidhlig and Irish, retained the “kw” sound into historical times, so for example the Primitive Irish word for “son”, “mac” in Gàidhlig, was actually “MAQ”, i.e. “makw”, but in the P-Celtic languages, alias Brittonic languages and now including Welsh, Cornish and Breton this became a new /p/ or /b/ sound, so the Welsh word for “son” is “mab“. This is just my opinion, but I find it interesting that the same division existed in Italic, with Latin and Faliscan Q-Italic languages and Oscan and Umbrian P-Italic, and I think this really means that the Italic and Celtic languages were originally not just close but were actually in the same branch to the extent that this variation divides the entire set of languages into two halves, with the Q-Celtic languages closer to Latin and the P-Celtic closer to Oscan.
There seem to have been two incursions of Celtic speakers into these isles, one Q-Celtic and from Galicia in what became Spain, and the other P-Celtic and from transalpine Gaul, i.e. most of today’s France. The division already existed before they came over, and then the mysterious thing happened to change the languages into what they are today. I’ve talked about this before because up until recently I thought it was just me, but the odd thing is that they share features with the completely unrelated Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. In fact I even tried to use the Arabic relative Maltese as a way of helping me with Gàidhlig, but that language has gone in exactly the opposite direction and been strongly influenced by Italian, making it pointless. It was therefore quite interesting that our teacher pointed out that the phrase for “I am disabled” is “tha ciorrarm orm” – “there is a disability on me” – observing that it sounded quite Biblical. Similarly, the Gàidhlig for “humanity” or “humankind” is “an mac an duine” or “the son of man” as it were. The King James Version of the Bible is notable in being nearer to a literal translation of the Hebrew than many other or newer versions are and I’d be almost prepared to bet that many of the idioms in English inherited from the KJV are also found in Gàidhlig, not because of the influence of the Bible but due to the language’s baffling similarities with Hebrew. In fact, recently I’ve found that Arabic, which I don’t understand, is notably easier to disentangle than it used to be, possibly for this reason. As I say, I’ve covered this before but there are three schools of thought regarding this: it’s coincidence; it’s due to implicational universals (the languages may share just a couple of features which force the rest of them to be similar because otherwise they wouldn’t work or the human mind wouldn’t be able to use the languages); it’s due to an Afro-Asiatic substrate in these isles before the Celts got here which influenced the languages.
So I’ve tried to be brief, I’ve labelled various objects around the room: uinneag, doras, balla, sòfa, bòrd, sporan, telebhisean, leabhar, baidhsagal, cuisean, briosgaidhean, staidhrichean, pink for feminine, blue for masculine and alternating pink and blue letters for nouns which are either, and I’m about to watch some telebhisean Gàidhlig (that’s probably wrong), so progress will be made!
I don’t know where to start with this one! The reason for this picture will eventually become clearer.
You probably know I’m panpsychist, which is linked to my veganism. I suppose the best place to begin is to account for this connection and the reasons for this belief, and also to describe what that belief actually is first of all, so here goes.
Panpsychism is the belief that matter is inherently conscious. In fact I’m not so sure about this definition because it might also be that space itself is conscious. I should point out further that my own version of panpsychism might differ from the usual version, and that it isn’t the same as hylozoism or pantheism. I usually employ an analogy with ferromagnetism, thus. Many elementary particles carry an electrical charge, including in particular quarks and some leptons. All such particles have magnetic fields, and a north and south pole which means they can be lined up by applying a magnetic field to them. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not magnets. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are lumps of iron whose magnetic domains are aligned. In this situation, the essential magnetic character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also magnets, such as the rare earth pickups used in electric guitars.
Consciousness is, in my view, similar. At least many and possibly all elementary particles are conscious, and in fact possibly all of space because of virtual particles. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not minds. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are wakeful humans with their particular bodily form and functions. In this situation, the essential conscious character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also minds.
There may also be a need to contrast this with pantheism and hylozoism. Hylozoism is the belief that everything is alive. This is not the same thing as most people would probably say that not all living things are conscious, such as bacteria and plants. It’s more like the belief that the Cosmos is an immense living organism, which to some extent I can get on board with because it’s a bit like the very liberal definition of acid which interprets almost all chemical reactions as reactions involving the action of an acid. It’s fine, but it’s not panpsychism. The other thing panpsychism isn’t, although I have some sympathy with it, is pantheism, which is the idea that God is everything. One issue with that belief is that it can be a kind of squeamish version of atheism which is afraid to call a spade a spade. I am personally not pantheist because God is unlike and not dependent upon any created (or sustained) thing. That doesn’t mean the Universe isn’t worthy of respect or that God is more like a human than the Universe. I don’t want to dwell on these distinctions, but it’s important they be made because many people think this is the claim I’m making.
Okay, so why do I believe this? Because there’s no other way of accounting for consciousness. All the other models – behaviourism, physicalism, psychophysical dualism, functionalism, idealism and anomalous monism – have massive flaws. I don’t want to go into them in depth right now because although I’m staking out a vague claim here, this isn’t the main point of this post. The claim that panpsychism isn’t a solution to the mind-body problem either is also fair, because it attempts to solve the problem by assuming what it’s trying to account for. Why would matter be like that?
This belief of mine has certain consequences. For instance, it makes me vegan but in a way my veganism is more extreme and sadder than most people’s because I accept that plants are also conscious and suffer. Hence veganism is just a kind of utilitarianism where suffering is minimised rather than a particularly positive way of life where no avoidable suffering and death is wrought upon the world. I constantly destroy bacteria too. We cannot be entirely non-violent but we should still strive to be as non-violent as possible, and partly for that reason it’s not my place to judge others. The world is a practically endless cycle of carnage in which we are all complicit. I’m vegan because eating animals or dairy products would involve an unnecessary extra step which would involve the death of more plants than just eating plants.
All this doesn’t generally occupy my mind much. However, a couple of things have come to light in the past week. One was that I met up with my ex and was presented with a first draft of an essay I wrote for my Masters:
I’ve already talked about my time at Warwick. The above essay is a reaction to a comment made by Christine Battersby near the beginning of that year. The reason I did my MA was to further pursue radical philosophy and help to provide a theoretical basis for progressive politics, and as I must surely have said elsewhere, it turned out that Warwick University’s primary activity seemed to be manufacturing excuses for why the political state of affairs was inevitable – capitalist realism in other words. I hoped that the Women’s Studies contingent would be better but although I very much liked their transphobia, they were also speciesist. Battersby claimed that consciousness depends on language use, so in other words if you don’t have a voice it doesn’t matter what happens to you. She was utterly focussed on humans and didn’t care about anything else. I’m not going to rubbish everything she says, because for example ‘Gender And Genius’ is a very interesting book, but there were a number of problems with her belief system, not least its incompatibility with more than a very limited anthropocentric version of veganism. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, you need to check your privilege. Yes, I know that’s a cliché.
So that’s one. The other one is more widely interesting but no less personal. It starts, as so many things do, with Olaf Stapledon, “W.O.S”, whose name is associated with the works ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Star Maker’. The second is more relevant here. Neither of these books is really a novel, and in fact this statement is made at the beginning of the first. They are, however, both science fiction. The first describes the two thousand million year-long future history of the human race from 1930 onward. The second covers the entire history of the Multiverse, focussing mainly on our own Universe. Yeah yeah, big canvas, vast scope, origin of the adjective Stapledonian, but that isn’t what I want to concentrate on right now. The relevant bit at the moment is the way stars are portrayed. And I quote:
It isn’t clear whether W.O.S. actually believed this, but then again it isn’t even clear whether W.O.S. considered himself the author of these words for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here, but there are two ways of looking at this taken at face value. One is hylozoism – stars are living organisms. In fact, in ‘Star Maker’, various things are living and sentient organisms which might not be considered so by most earthlings. The other is something close to panpsychism, at least if the star itself is considered a world. The outer layers of the star are conscious. The chapter goes on to claim that the voluntary movements of stars are identified by astrophysics as their normal movements as predicted by scientific laws and theories.
This sounds fanciful and outlandish, not to say unscientific and perhaps even superstitious. We don’t generally look at the stars at night and think of them moving around deliberately. In fact, apart from the fact of Earth’s rotation, most of the time non-astronomers don’t think about the stars’ proper motion at all. Eppur si muoveno – pardon my Italian. The formation and rotation of galactic arms is confounding in various ways. The most obvious of these is the one dark matter is evoked to explain. The velocity of objects in the outer margins of galaxies does not compare to those further in according to the mass of the visible portion of those galaxies, so it’s claimed that there must be invisible matter causing them to rotate faster than they should. Moreover, the spiral arms of galaxies are more like the bunches of vehicles in traffic jams, separated by sparsely-populated stretches of road, through which individual motorists move, than a kind of “formation dance” arrangement. Finally, and this is a more significant fact than may at first appear, stars of different spectral classes move at different velocities around the galaxy. At this point I should probably fish out the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram:
It can be seen that stars are not randomly distributed by these criteria. There are, for instance, no small hot stars other than white dwarfs and there’s a general correlation between brightness and heat, the hottest stars being on the left of the diagram – O-type stars like Rigel. Hence their size and mass can be taken into consideration if need be. The cooler stars are on the right, and these are the interesting ones from the viewpoint of the very peculiar statement that has been quite recently been made about them by a respectable astrophysicist.
So here’s the thing: cooler stars move faster around the Galaxy than hotter ones at the same distance from the centre. This is called Parenago’s Discontinuity. More specifically, stars of spectral type F8 and hotter “orbit” faster. A few explanations have been offered for this apart from the rather obvious one I’m going to mention in a bit. One is that stars might be shining more brightly on one side than the other, and although light has no mass, it does have momentum and therefore can be used as a method of propulsion:
Another “sensible” explanation is that the stars emit jets of plasma which have the same effect, and there seems to be a third one that it’s to do with stars being slowed down as they move through nebulæ.
Okay, so another explanation has been offered by one Gregory Matloff. Matloff is a pretty respectable guy. He has a doctorate in meteorology and oceanography, a Masters in astronautics and aeronautics and a BA in physics. He’s authored various books, such as one on solar sails with Eugene Mallove – this is the very real technology of using reflective mylar sheets as a form of space propulsion by sunlight pushing on the “sail” thus formed, because as I said above, starlight has momentum which can be used as a power source. He’s currently a professor of physics. So this guy is not exactly like a Sasquatch chaser or UFOlogist – he has been involved in SETI but in a very dry, scientific kind of way – but has some respectable credentials. It should also be said that just because someone is an expert in their own field, it doesn’t mean their opinions are worthy of respect in other fields about which they know less. Immanuel Velikovsky seems to have been a competent psychiatrist but his claims about the recent origin of Venus as a comet are completely ridiculous and seem also to be motivated reasoning. Matloff is not like that so far as I can tell.
So why am I going on about this bloke then? Because he’s a panpsychist. Not only that, but he reckons panpsychism is a testable explanation for why cooler stars circle around the Galaxy more quickly than hotter ones. He believes that such stars are conscious and move around of their own volition. They don’t obey the laws of physics as we know them as precisely as they’d be expected to, but the extent to which they don’t is only like someone running for a hundred years and changing their velocity over that time by a couple of centimetres a second. This minimal degree of involvement reminds me of the Steady State Theory, which saw matter as continuously springing into existence at the rate of about two hydrogen atoms a year in a volume the size of the Empire State Building. Although, so far as I can tell, Matloff is open to the idea that the stars in question are adjusting their speed and direction using jets or changing their luminosity, he’s also open to the much more controversial idea that not only are they doing it deliberately but that they’re doing it by psychokinesis.
There comes a point in certain conversations where the “argument by incredulous stare” is deployed. This happens in a couple of philosophical areas, one of which is panpsychism and another of which is modal realism (the idea that the Multiverse is real). However, mere outlandishness doesn’t make something false and doesn’t constitute an argument against it. This is the fallacy of the argument from incredulity, much beloved of flat Earthers and Apollo mission deniers. It is, though, true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A relatively good piece of evidence that this is in fact going on is found in the fact that only cooler stars do this. There are a number of ways to account for consciousness, one of which is the behaviour of the rings making up some of the molecules in nerve cell microtubules. These are part of the cytoskeleton, and it’s been suggested that quantum events associated with the p orbitals in aromatic moieties within tubulin, the protein they’re made of, is what consciousness is. If this is so, only similar phenomena would be able to manifest consciousness, although this could be functionally equivalent and not be made of the same stuff. If it actually does require that stuff though, stars couldn’t be conscious. Maybe they aren’t. Actually this needs restating: even if panpsychism is true, it doesn’t mean that consciousness would be manifest in stars, though stars could still be impotently conscious.
Matloff prefers to evoke the Casimir Effect. An example of this is the tendency of two metal plates very close to each other to pull towards each other. It’s an example of zero-point energy, which is the “free energy” supposèdly present in empty space. Whereas this energy undoubtedly exists, it doesn’t follow that it can be extracted and used, or that if it can that that would be a good idea – my naïve mind suspects that this would cause collapse of the false vacuum and the end of the Universe, but that’s just me and I might be catastrophising. If that’s true, though, depending on the size of the Universe and how common technological cultures are within it, it seems guaranteed that that can’t happen because we’re still here. Matloff claims that the Casimir Effect’s contribution to molecular bonds makes cooler stars conscious.
This next bit is going to sound like W.O.S. again. Stars are often too hot for chemistry. Atoms as such have trouble existing in many of them because they’re too hot for electrons to stay in orbitals around them, so the idea of microtubule p orbitals being associated with consciousness is a non-starter here. However, the upper layers of stars are cooler than their interiors and molecules can form in the cooler stars, i.e. those of spectral class F8 or below. Hence the proposition that consciousness becomes operable at the energy level below which molecular bonds exist because they are involved with certain molecular bonds implies that volitional behaviour in entities below that temperature would not be found in similar entities hotter than it. In a very crude sense, all living humans have body temperatures below 6300 Kelvin, or 6000°C. This is actually true. A human running a temperature above 6000°C would not be conscious but be superheated gas. Or would she? I don’t know. It’s counterintuitive that she’d be in good mental health.
Okay, so the idea is that stars cool enough to have molecules are conscious and have volition. They act deliberately. Evidence for this is that cooler stars travel through the Galaxy faster than they should. Incidentally, this also means the Sun is conscious, because it’s a G2V star, well below the threshold where consciousness is extinguished at this stage.
Now, unfortunately I have completely forgotten how I came to this conclusion but three dozen years ago or so, I realised that if panpsychism is true, psychokinesis must also be possible. I have racked my brains about this and cannot for the life of me recall my train of thought regarding this. It isn’t to do with anything like psychophysical dualism, although that would also strongly suggest psychokinesis in the most straightforward version of that model (bodies and souls). So I apologise for this irritating omission. This also means that my reasoning can’t be examined for this belief. I might just have been wrong. Also, it makes panpsychism testable: if it could be shown that psychokinesis is impossible, it would also refute panpsychism.
Stars being conscious isn’t the same thing as panpsychism being true or psychokinesis being possible. It could be that one of the other methods of transportation they could use is under their voluntary control, and that an alternative arrangement of matter found in cooler stars also confers consciousness, but merely in functional terms like a human being is often conscious.
The problem I have with all this is that I can’t decide if Matloff is serious, or if he is, whether he’s sensible. It’s true that I am panpsychist and nowadays I take it on faith that this implies that psychokinesis is possible even though I can’t remember why. However, there is a problem with this set of claims. There’s a thing called “God Of The Gaps”, which is the idea that God is simply used to explain anything we don’t understand. Thus before the theory of evolution was popular, people believed God created all species more or less as they are in historical times. This is not a good way to believe in God. Likewise, panpsychism could be evoked to explain a lot of things we don’t have good scientific theories for. For instance, dark matter is the usual explanation for why galaxies rotate faster than the visible mass in them suggests they should. Another one is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND). I don’t like the first explanation because it seems to me that dark matter is a conveniently inactive substance which has just been made up to plug the gaps in the model, although I am open to the idea that it might just be ordinary matter which can’t be seen such as rogue planets, dust, neutrinos and so on. However, it would be equally possible to say that stars simply move around galaxies faster than the ordinary laws of physics suggest because they’re using psychokinesis. In fact, maybe I’ll just decide that’s what I believe.
I can’t imagine these views being taken seriously in the astrophysics community. However, it is interesting that they are the same views as W.O.S. expressed in ‘Star Maker’ in 1937. ’Star Maker’ is a work of fiction. It gets certain things about astronomy and astrophysics completely wrong. At the time, it used to be thought that planets were formed when stars came close to each other and pulled elongated cylinders of gas out of their photospheres, which then condensed into gaseous or solid bodies, and that red giants were young stars in the process of forming. There’s clearly no omniscient authority telling W.O.S. what to write, or if there is it’s an unreliable narrator. W.O.S. does, however, portray himself as the true author of neither ‘Last And First Men’ nor ‘Star Maker’. He also narrates his own experiences in the third person in some stories, and the continuity between ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Odd John’ suggests that he is not who he says he is. Is it possible, then, that certain ideas arrive in fiction from another source? Did W.O.S. somehow intuit that stars were conscious and did their own thing? I do have a very good reason for suspecting that this is true because of a certain paragraph in his ‘Odd John’, but because it suggests an ontological paradox and would cease to be useful as a message if I said what it was, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.
Leaving all that aside, I find it very hopeful to think of stars as living organisms, or as conscious beings. If that’s true, it means that whatever happens to this planet’s life because of what humans are doing to it, mind will continue to exist in the Universe, and in fact life, at least until the end of the Stelliferous Era, roughly one hundred million million years from now. After that, W.O.S. suggests other ways in which life and consciousness might survive and there are other suggestions about what might be possible in the very long term, but for now, if I can persuade myself that stars are conscious, I find the future to be very bright indeed.
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A Box Of Chocolates 