Herstoricity

“Afrika”, “herstory”, “Latinx”, “womon”, “womxn”, “womyn”: all of these words have been celebrated and irritated. Two of them have ethnic significance and all but one are clearly linked to feminism. Even “Afrika” could be linked to feminism, but that’s a longer conversation, which may nonetheless take place here. Hence this post partly belongs in the Other Place, but I’m putting it here due to its ambiguity.

I’ll go through them one by one.

“Afrika” originates from Haki R. Madhubuti, a poet of the Afrikan diaspora born in Arkansas, apparently first used in 1973. He explains the spelling thus:

I have talked about AfriKa before on here but can’t find the post. Apart from the odd spelling of “germain” in this passage, the first thing which strikes me about it is its apparent historical inaccuracy, and this is possibly one of the more important points I’d like to address here.

There are a number of theories regarding the origin of the word “Africa”. One of these is that it’s linked to “April” and “apricity”, as in “the sunny place”. It’s probably worth noting that being a whole continent, not all of Afrika is in fact sunny. Lesotho, for example, decidedly isn’t. It may also be Ancient Egyptian in origin, from “Afru-Ika”, meaning “motherland”. If this last is true, it is at least arguably accurate since until recently the consensus scientific view was that we originated on that continent and the actual species Homo sapiens is from there although the other species with which we interbred weren’t always Afrikan. It also has the merit of being a word from an Afrikan language. However, it’s also clear that if “Afru-Ika” is indeed Egyptian, it wouldn’t’ve been written with a K because the language never used Latin script, although Coptic does use an adapted Greek alphabet with some demotic Egyptian letters so if it ever did get written in Coptic, it would’ve used a Kappa. Although I thought Afrika was referred to in the Book of Acts, I can’t find any such reference, but in that same book and elsewhere, Ethiopians are mentioned, which has been one way Afrika was mentioned in Europe in the past. In Ge`ez, “the Ethiopian eunuch” is called ” ኢትዮጵያዊው ጃንደረባ”, and there’s definitely no K in that, which gives rise to one of my puzzles about this issue: Afrikan languages use all sorts of non-Latin scripts which have nothing which looks like the letter K in them. To give a very incomplete list, there are the multiple West Afrikan scripts such as Vai, the Berber script Tamazight, the Arabic abjad, the Ethiopian abugida and the various Ancient Egyptian scripts. The Coptic alphabet does include a K. It is true that the letter C is often a bit of an oddity in languages written with the Latin script because its pronunciation varies more, but it’s also the case that the idea that “Afrika” is spelt with a K edges into “not even wrong” territory because many of the scripts used for Afrikan languages aren’t even alphabets and don’t have letters in the Latin sense, so they don’t have an equivalent for K as an isolated sound.

However, maybe this is not the point, and I could of course launch into a further tirade on the history of the word’s spelling, noting that in particular “Afrika” is the German and Afrikaans spelling, and I’m guessing also the Flemish one, which opens a horrifying chapter in Afrikan colonial history. It’s factually incorrect that no European language other than Dutch and German has the hard C sound, so this inaccuracy bothers me. I’m also far from convinced that most Afrikan languages spell it with a K, and if they do whether those are widely spoken or otherwise used languages, although majority languages do have issues of their own. These are, though, not the only points Madhubuti raises. The K can symbolise Afrikans “coming back together again” without there needing to be an historical (very aware of that word too right now) justification. After all, the uses of the X in “Latinx” and “womxn” are not historical and that may not matter.

The third reason given feels like something I’m not qualified to comment on since I’m neither Afrikan nor part of the Afrikan diaspora. It comes from a Pan-Africanist approach, significantly a global movement which stresses common ground and mutual support by all people of Afrikan heritage within and outwith the Afrikan continent, focussing on the latter via the slave trade. The four words used have different sources, being respectively from (ki?)Swahili, Akan (actually Nkrumah), Swahili again and West Afrika. Now I recognise that because all of these cultures are Black, they may be unified by the effect of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, but I’m also not sure as the world’s Whitest person whether unifying those concepts under the same heading is positive or negative. Madhubati then builds on that by saying that using the K is a sign of an Afrikan lingua franka, an interesting subversion of Latin which introduces a K into a language which rarely uses it. I feel also that I should point out that a basically nullifying version of the idea of the Afrikan diaspora would include me in two senses as part of it. One of these is the trivial and probably annoying observation that all living humans have Afrikan heritage because our species is from Afrika. The other is the slightly less trivial but still quite appropriative fact that I actually do have recent Afrikan ancestry, but this has little to no bearing on my Whiteness because nowadays I am practically universally perceived as White, which does in fact make me White, and in fact very White indeed.

On the subject of Latin, the word “Africa” itself was initially used by the Romans to refer to a province of the Empire on the southern Mediterranean coast. This was in a sense another form of colonialism, so the use of the C there is equally colonialist except that it was imposing on the Phoenician script used there at the time. There is a bit of a side-issue about whether Roman imperialism was similar to the later European version, and the issue of slavery in the Roman Empire is also different to that of the Atlantic slave trade, but I’ve already gone on about this a fair bit so I’ll stop at this point and move on to another.

The main issue here may be that it isn’t the history that matters. When we use words in everyday life, we usually don’t pay much attention to their etymology or shift in meaning. The word “nice”, as I’ve said, is one of several words which change their meaning regularly, along with “silly” and “gay”. These all have overlapping meanings from time to time, and a fourth associate member of this group is “blessed”. We do tend to focus on these more than most others because they’re unusually fluid, but on the whole we don’t. Likewise, the word “necklace”, with many others, has an obvious form which can be broken down to reveal an older meaning, but we seldom consider this. This is because, on the whole, words interact with each other and are used in a contemporary way and their etymology is not the central issue. “Afrika” with a K may or may not have historicity.

Or herstoricity? What would that even mean? To state a very obvious and widely known fact, “history” is etymologically from the Latin word “historia”, itself from the Greek ἱστορία, and is linked to the word “story”. The Latin third person feminine and masculine possessive adjective (their analogue to our “her” and “his”) is “sua”, which varies according to the possessed thing and not the gender of the possessor. Hence there is very clearly no etymological link between the word “history” and “his”. However, this is almost irrelevant because to someone who knows English, it sounds like “his story” and an informative play on words can emphasise that history is written by the winners, i.e. men. That said, the Romance languages assign their word for “history” to the feminine, as “historia” is a feminine noun ending in A in the singular nominative.

“Herstory” first seems to have been used in 1970 by Robin Morgan. It’s been criticised by Richard Dawkins along the lines of its etymology, which as I’ve said is irrelevant because language is rarely used that way. Others regard it as a falsification of history because it allegedly emphasises certain things unrealistically and distorts the story. There have also been women historians before the twentieth century, whose expressed views tend to be those of men historians. It could also be criticised as insufficiently intersectional: is it perhaps the herstory of White women, for example? How much herstory is seen from a Latinx perspective?

“Latinx” is mainly a New World-centred concept. The X is there because some Romance languages tend to gender the adjective and adjectival noun “Latina”/”Latino” for women and girls on the one hand and men and boys on the other. In general, over most extensive texts or speeches, a person referring to themselves in such a language will reveal their gender because this is how they work grammatically. There seems also to be a weaker tendency than in some other languages with grammatical gender to ascribe genders inconsistently, as used to happen in English with “woman” being masculine and “wife” neuter. Hence the X. However, there’s a separate issue here which might also come into play with the issue of pan-Africanism. It seems to this White person typing this, whose ethnicity might mean that pan-Africanism glosses over important cultural and other differences among Afrikans which might be important, and “Latinx” seems to do the same.

“Latinx” is a term coined in the early 21st century CE. The idea is partly to avoid the forced self-gendering of using the equivalent words ending in A and O, and I think to an extent to be gender-neutral when referring to someone. It is, however, rather controversial for a couple of reasons. One is that it could be culturally imperialist because it seems to have been coined by Anglophones and doesn’t work in the actual languages themselves. Another is that it refers to a whole swathe of people who may not see themselves as similar at all and seems to exclude other people whom one might think are included such as Spaniards, Portuguese, the French, Swiss and Walloons, people from Angola and Mozambique, Cajuns and Quebecois. Within the “Hispanic” community there are also native Americans, Sephardic Jews and people of mainly European descent. This is parallel in some ways to the “Afrika with a K” situation, since Afrika is the second largest continent with a host of ethnicities and nations and the idea seems to have started outside it. The majority of “Latinx” people in the US dislike the term and possibly consider it racist. I’m not sure what womyn think about it.

I’m going to consider the three “wom*n” terms together. “Womon” and “womyn” are older and linked. The idea behind these is to remove the morphemes “man” and “men” from the word for women, for want of a better word. The first is singular, the other plural. “Wimmin” is also used for the plural, and “womban” is found sometimes. Etymologically this is naïve because the etymology of “woman” is “wifman”, i.e. “person who is a woman” and there are cis women born without wombs, cis women with more than one womb and cis women who have had hysterectomies, so “wombman” could be seen as reducing “women” to their reproductive systems and is quite tactless as well. However, the latter is more important than the former, as it’s clear that etymology is not particularly important most of the time. There are also a couple of extinct words for men which are formed in a similar way, namely “ƿerman” (“person who is a man”) and “ƿæpman” (“person whose role is to bear a weapon”). These died out because of the sexist assumption that “man” is the default. I have to admit that recently I’ve watched quite a few programmes with werewolves in them and noticed that whereas I definitely think of the word “werewolf” as masculine, most people seem not to notice the incongruity of using it for women, when a better word might be “wifewolf” or the apparently gender-neutral “lycanthrope”. This etymological thicket is, though, more interesting than influential.

The word “wimmin” is older and not deliberately coined. It’s been used as part of spelling reform, as “women” is an accurate depiction of neither the morphemes nor the etymology of the word, and is also used in a mocking way to indicate that the speaker or writer is uneducated. For instance, it gets used in Popeye comic strips. As such it’s unlike the others, which originated in 1976 in connection with the now-controversial Michigan Womyn’s Festival. It tends to be associated with lesbian separatism, a movement which has now become unpopular because it’s seen as faking lesbianism, and because of this is now rather an obscure pair of words. I don’t know if this has ever been done, but a back-formation would be possible using the words “mon” and “myn” for men. “Mon” already existed in Anglo-Saxon times and is of course also found, with no direct historical connection, in Afro-Caribbean English. There’s potential for “mon” and “myn” to mean something like “person with a penis”, unlike “womxn”.

“Womxn”, the final of many, though perhaps less prominent, examples of this mentioned here, has an intention which might be seen as athwart “womon”, although when it was invented in the 1970s the two were similar. However, it didn’t become at all popular until the late ‘teens, by which time it was in opposition to “womon” in attempting to include both cis and trans women. Since I try to avoid discussing gender identity issues on here, that’s all I’m going to say about it.

To conclude, I’ll try to extract some common themes, using bullet points:

• Etymology is largely irrelevant to these neologisms.
• There is often resistance to them.
• It can be a futile exercise to change language, but it can also succeed. The word “quiz” is a possible example of a word introduced deliberately, but I don’t think it was already given a meaning.
• These linguistic elements can have a slacktivist tendency, serving as substitutes for something which takes deeper thought, effort and dialogue.
• Sometimes these coinages are imposed from without and have an appropriative flavour.

To be honest, I don’t know what I think, and that’s probably because of my privilege. If I were on the other side of some of these moves, I might be able to judge them more fairly. As it is, in most ways my identity is that of the oppressor. Also, viewing a group from a distance and without fully authentic and lived experience can lead to an apparent homogenisation, as seems to be reflected in “Afrika” and “Latinx”, and perhaps others.

Fake Accents?

Like many others, I experienced a major shift in my life when I started at secondary school. This has been analysed by sociologists in some depth, but if you’ve been to secondary school or are at one now, you probably know the kind of thing I mean. I don’t want to dwell on that, but for me there were two new shifts, perhaps self-imposed, which actually it would help to give some context to. Let’s start a bit earlier then.

First of all, in the mid-1970s CE, my educational psychologist Dr Gray suggested I learn French. Although I expressed agreement with her, I found the specific choice of that language disappointing because it didn’t seem exotic enough to be interesting and I had already picked up Classical Greek and Latin to some extent owing to my interest in science. French was boring. It was just what all the tourists spoke and what most people on the immediate other side of the English Channel used, and also that language everyone learned at secondary school. It used the same alphabet as English (superficially, but that’s another story) and it was just kind of humdrum. I paid it no heed.

At the same time I was learning cursive handwriting in the Marion Richardson style, which so far as I can tell is the bog standard way of writing in England. I can still do it although I rarely use it, so I can illustrate it easily instead of bothering to find some royalty-free image of it:

Apologies for the low quality, but you get the idea.

I wasn’t able to write this legibly and my teacher told me to go back to printing, so I did. A couple of years later, I was at another primary school and proceeded to learn italic cursive:

This was done with a ballpoint so it doesn’t look exactly like I wrote it. I used to write with extreme pressure, so I would often split fountain pen nibs and sometimes snap pencils in half with the force I applied to the paper. Later on in that school, a rumour went around that that style of cursive was frowned upon at my prospective secondary school and over the summer of 1978, on one day in fact, I scrapped my italic style of handwriting and invented a more rounded version, which is rather similar, as it turns out, to how Round Hand was invented. This has stayed more or less the same ever since, although it’s been through phases and in particular I now use a lot less pressure when I write. When I got to the school in question, it turned out that the teachers were particularly impressed by the clarity and neatness of the style of cursive we’d been taught at that school, and moreover, many of the signs in the school were written in the rather similar Foundation Hand! Hence that was just one of those ridiculous rumours which spread among schoolchildren and there was no real reason for me to change my writing in the first place. This is quite annoying.

I’m talking about writing because in a way your handwriting style is like your voice. There’s the conscious side of what you say and how you say it, and the side which becomes second nature after a while. Analogous processes took place with oral French and English in the transition between primary and secondary school. Before the age of eleven, I spoke with a near-RP accent all the time, but due to anxiety about “fitting in”, I soon adopted the rather Cockney-sounding register my peers at school spoke with. My mother noted at one point that I’d started saying “twenny” instead of “twenty”, which was completely unconscious. A somewhat similar phenomenon happened later with French, where at first, and again it was my mother who picked up on this, my accent was impeccable and close to Parisian but after a while, partly because I felt French had been imposed upon me without any consultation and partly because the “cool” thing to do was not to use the right accent, I just spoke it with what my French teacher once referred to as a “Maidstone accent”, although that was actually a different pupil called, of all things for someone who wouldn’t speak French properly, Marcel Durier. And in fact I wonder now if his first language wasn’t French, or whether he was at least bilingual, and just deliberately pronounced it badly to fit in.

Those are, then, three examples of language use in a child being influenced socially. In each case it was primarily conscious and intentional on the whole. I was unaware of saying, for example, “twenny”, so it wasn’t completely so, but there was a tendency. Each time it was about pressure to conform, though mistakenly so in one case. Things were very different later in my life. By the time I left home and moved to the English East Midlands, I was very conscious of my accent and of the contrast with those of others at university, who were from all over Britain and beyond, and also with the Leicester and Leicestershire accents, which are not the same. I found myself consciously adopting Midland patterns of intonation and altering some of my long vowels and diphthongs, and for some reason making my accent rhotic, to the extent that when I first spoke to Christine Battersby she thought I was American. But I was doing all this deliberately. In fact I’m so intensely conscious of my speech at all times that almost nothing has changed in my basic English since I was eighteen, and I’ve reverted to near-RP. The one exception is that because I was unaware of the division between the way contractions are used between the North and South of England, I now use Northern constructions like “I’ve not” rather than Southern ones such as “I haven’t”. That one got away from me. I do remember at some point a couple of years after I moved to Leicester noticing my use of a rounded short U (as in “bus”) instead of the usual Home Counties “ah” sound (which incidentally I pronounce differently than most Southerners) on the single occasion it occurred, and I “corrected” it. It’s still habitual for me to use glottal stops for intervocalic T’s although I rarely do so.

Most of the time, even though it’s unlike that of those around me, I still speak with a near-RP accent and feel no pressure to do otherwise, although I tend to mumble. This changes, however, when I go to Scotland. I continue to use my usual accent but feel acutely conscious of its drawly and lax quality, and it feels uncomfortable to talk like that. This is probably due to having recent Scottish ancestry. This, also, introduces a complication.

Scots is a separate Ingvaeonic language than English. The other Ingvaeonic languages are sometimes clearly separate, such as Frisian, and sometimes not, as with Bislama and Tok Pisin. Yola I don’t know about so much because it’s extinct, but it seems to have been written rather like English but spoken very differently. Scots is more complicated because it exists on a continuum from Scottish English to Scots the language itself. If I were to speak French nowadays, I would attempt to do so in a somewhat Parisian accent although I also pronounce the final usually silent E’s because I don’t like the dominance of Parisian French and feel it links it more to other Romance languages and Anglo-Norman if I do that. Nonetheless, it feels incumbent upon me to make an effort out of respect for the speakers of another language at least to try to pronounce it well, although it probably isn’t very good. It also just feels lazy not to do so. Interestingly, I’ve been perceived as speaking French with a German accent and German with a French accent, so presumably I should speak Alsatian.

It’s more complicated when it comes to the indigenous Scottish languages. Two or three of them are long dead, namely the Orkney and Shetland Norns and the disappointingly P-Celtic Pictish, which was previously thought to be non-Indo-European and possibly related to Basque. The other three are yet quick: English, Scots and Gàidhlig. I include English here because there is a Scottish variety of English as well as Scots. The two are distinct. Scots, for example, is not spoken in the Highlands, the Western Isles or the Orkneys or Shetlands, but it is spoken in the Northeast and in the Central Belt and various other places. People often seem to find it hard to accept Scots as a valid language, but are fine with Gàidhlig except that this too forms a continuum with other forms of the language, this time geographically. The Scottish government also seems to promote Gàidhlig much more actively than Scots. I have talked about Scots elsewhere (or possibly here as I seem to have had two goes at it). It’s far more widely spoken than Gàidhlig and is therefore not endangered, but the Scots themselves tend to treat it as a bit of a joke.

I would never say /lɒk/ for “loch”, but I don’t say /ɫɔχ/ either. I do, however, say /lɒχ/, and just as using “er” for the French «eu» would be insulting to the French, saying /lɒk/ sounds insulting and ignorant, rather like the American “nucular” or “kie-odo” (for Kyoto). It shows no respect for the ethnicity or culture involved. But as a Sassenach, there’s a problem, as there is with my use of the word “Sassenach” itself: it also comes across as culturally appropriative, like a White person putting on a Caribbean or African American English accent, or what I imagine that might be. I would never do that of course, as it’s like blackface and deeply insulting, but there are also plenty of White Caribbeans with the former accent. A few words here and there do come naturally to me, such as “amn’t”, which is just logical, “aye” and also, as I recently become aware, I wasn’t originally in the habit of calling a small watercourse a “stream” or “beck”, because by a strange happenstance the Kentish dialect words are “nailbourne” and “bourne”, or at least they were when I was growing up. Hence I could easily authentically uncover my habitual tendency to call a burn a “bourne”. Calling it a “nailbourne” would presumably raise eyebrows. It’s also presumably the case that the glottal stops I picked up from my father’s speech also occurred in his own father’s speech, since he was Glaswegian, though whether they were directly transmitted that way is another question.

Considered more generally, using Scots or a Scottish accent a lot of the time would appear to be an affectation for me more than something which is likely to evolve organically without my attention, since I closely scrutinise my speech much of the time. I’m also likely to sound fake even if I tried to do it, and it could also come across as mockery. On the other hand, it seems extremely grating and condescending to refuse to speak Scots, as opposed to Scottish English, without trying to use the phonetics of that language. In general, I do try to pronounce place names as they’re pronounced by the people who live there, so for example there’s a Beaconsfield Road in Leicester which I say with a short E but everyone else says with a long one. Beaconsfield is in Buckinghamshire, where my father’s side of my family lived. It would be weird to call it “Beeconsfield Road”. Why would I do that? On the other hand, it’s been a while since I’ve said “nailbourne” because people in the English Midlands are completely unfamiliar with that word.

For an unknown reason, the vocabulary I’m used to shows divergence from standard British English. I don’t use it at the moment because it sounds American. I don’t know either if it’s inherited from a Scottish origin or something else. I used to refer to meals, in order, as “breakfast”, “dinner” and “tea”, but I think that’s more a class thing than a nationality one. I also called a sofa a “couch” and a living room a “lounge”, and said “mad” when I meant angry. I don’t particularly associate any of these with Scottish English and have never checked. They’re probably all class things actually. Other things have a different history. “Amn’t” happens because “Aren’t I” sounds really ungrammatical and peculiar to me for reasons of consistency. “I’ve not” and the like for “I haven’t” is a rare example of genuine unmonitored drift. I neither know which (whether?) way round that happens in Scotland nor elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

In Scotland, there’s also a difference between the usage of “shall” and “will” and “should” and “ought to”. Among the vowels is the rather perplexing use of an “ah”-type vowel for the short U in the same places as near-RP as opposed to the rounded vowels used in northern England. I find this very strange, but it does mean that certain aspects of my accent are coincidentally more like Scottish accents than the Leicestershire ones. In braid Scots, that vowel has become “I”, as in “mither” as opposed to “mother”. Some of the variations are simply due to the existence of a distinct legal system and government, so for example I am currently in a quandary about whether to call Dumfries a “burgh”. I presume that’s a merely historical detail which has been wiped out by historical changes and everyone calls it something beginning with a T and ending in an N. Getting back to accent, although my impression is that this is almost absent everywhere nowadays, I once distinguished between “w” and “wh” in speech and somewhere deeply buried it’s still natural for me to do this. Recently this led to me calling it “Whitby” rather than “Witby”, which probably a lot of people thought was strange and an affectation, but I can assure you it’s genuinely part of my original accent. They seem to be lost, but for a short period from 26th July 1980 to around April 1982, I kept a spoken diary on cassette which preserves something like my original accent. The big difference is that it’s very clearly enunciated.

It seems that there are two different approaches to accents used by actors. One is the straightforward phonetic technique of simply transposing one’s own phonemes into those used by speakers with that accent, but apparently this is only rarely used, unnecessarily laborious and prone to slippage. The other is to hold the speech organs in a particular set of positions whence the accent emerges as a matter of course. Liverpudlian can be taken as an illustration. If an actor is from London, they can reproduce such an accent by relaxing the soft palate and bringing the back of the tongue closer to it. Likewise, the vowel shift present in New Zealand and Australian accents is generally in the same direction for each vowel, suggesting that holding the tongue in a consistent position compared to a near-RP accent would enable someone with such an accent to sound more Ozzie or Kiwi, and conversely for someone from Australasia to sound like they’re from London. This approach doesn’t work perfectly of course. For instance, the voicing of intervocalic T in Australian English is not likely to result from this.

This brings me to the remarkable phenomenon of Foreign Accent Syndrome. This is a neuropsychological condition where someone ends up sounding like their accent has changed. What isn’t clear to me here is whether the accent also sounds that way to someone with the purported accent or it just sounds like that to people without it. This can occur as a result of a stroke, a migraine, epilepsy medication or on one occasion a tonsillectomy. I’m going to describe it first naïvely with an imaginary case history. A woman speaks with a Cockney accent, has a stroke and recovers fine, but is then perceived as speaking with a Scottish accent. My naïve understanding of this situation is that the stroke affected the part of her motor cortex, changing how she uses her speech organs in a way which makes her sound Scottish to her Londoner friends. For instance, the way she holds her tongue may be tenser than before and it may not move as much when she attempts to pronounce diphthongs. It’s similar to how a stroke might affect someone’s gait, and presumably handwriting, except that different muscles are involved.

However, this may not be what’s happening. I’ve now carefully listened to two Australians who appear to have acquired an Irish accent, and in both cases the long O began with /o:/ and didn’t seem to be a monophthong, but their accent also became rhotic, which is very hard to explain in this way. Rhotic accents do sometimes have hypercorrection where, for example, an R might be inserted after the A in “china”, but in general this is taken to be a sign of a fake accent and these Australians’ accent went from being non-rhotic to properly rhotic without hypercorrection. For instance, they would pronounce the R in “first” and “mother” but not an R at the end of “dahlia” at the end of a sentence. This is highly perplexing.

People with foreign accent syndrome face many challenges. One is that accent can be an important part of self-identity. Another is that they can be seen as mocking someone with that accent, as might occur if a White English person whose accent has acquired a Caribbean sound to other people of their ethnicity converses with a Black person of Caribbean heritage whose accent has always been like that. Thirdly, it can be seen as fake and an affectation, or as attention-seeking. These particular objections remind me of the prejudice which used to exist against left-handedness, which tended to be given psychoanalytical explanations such as the person in question being anti-conformist or defiant in some way. Finally, it might expose them to prejudice and active racism. The fact that, presumably, any person able to speak fluently could come down with foreign accent syndrome might give actively racist people pause for thought.

Brain scans do in fact show that there are differences in brain activity for people with this issue, and I’m now going to dive into a less naïve approach. The syndrome is rarely diagnosed, averaging cases in single figures per decade, and appears to be connected to the function of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for, among many other things, coördination, timing and smoothness of movement, so it seems clear that this is a factor, although it still seems odd that someone’s accent could become rhotic as a result of this, so I don’t feel this is the whole answer. Two-thirds of diagnoses of foreign accent syndrome are made for females. Less surprisingly, they are made in adults. There is often recovery and musical approaches can be successful. The speaker themselves does perceive the accent as foreign.

This phenomenon sounds to me as if it involves the same kind of foreign accent production as an actor placing their speech organs in a particular state such as tension or relaxation. Hence maybe when an accent rubs off on someone, it occurs in a similar manner, perhaps in the way someone’s posture might come to mirror someone else’s.

This raises a second issue. Effectively, both writing and speech, and also signing, involve the use of a very specific set of finely controlled muscles. Other muscles are involved in other social and other aspects of life, such as dancing, Yoga asanas, sporting activities and generally how people hold themselves. Again there are contrasting approaches to this, one involving conscious training that becomes unconscious, the other involving a kind of suggestion, namely the Alexander Technique. The approach to adopting an accent that involves training on individual phonemes seems less like Alexander Technique than the “acting” approach, where a general Gestalt is adopted. If one small set of movements changes, it can affect the way practically every movement is made. Perhaps the same applies to language and handwriting, on smaller and larger scales. Maybe if my handwriting changes, it reflects other, deeper changes in myself, and likewise if I change the way I speak, I also move differently in other ways. This could also work the other way: grosser changes in movement lead to changes in voice and writing. This is where it impinges on the vexed question of graphology, widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Surely it would be odd for someone’s handwriting not to reflect their personality? Does this also mean that people speaking different languages might also move differently?

Moreover, we do not generally criticise people for attempting to improve their posture or perhaps surrendering themselves to suggestion in this area, so why would we criticise someone as such for attempting to change their accent. Granted, there are issues such as why someone would adopt “Mockney” or pretend to be posher than they are, and there’s the question of appropriation, but what’s the issue about faking it until you make it in that particular area? Maybe there is one, and I mean that. It could really be that I’m missing something here, and I’d be very interested in hearing your views on this.

The Other Pronouns

There’s been a lot of focus, including in my last post, on the question of pronouns recently, leading to peculiar responses such as where people say they “don’t have pronouns” or “don’t want to use pronouns”. This is weirdly ignorant but possibly reflects too strong a focus on a particular aspect of pronouns. Because of the way English works, most of this focus is on the third person and singular number versus the plural number, because English pronouns only explicitly express what we think of as gender in the third person. It could be said that there is some gendering of other pronouns, for instance I wouldn’t be surprised if married women are more likely to say “we” when referring to themselves than married men are, but the fact remains that we don’t perceive this variation much.

Today, though, I want to focus on the other pronouns, both personal and otherwise, because they tend to be lost in the heat of battle but are nonetheless interesting. These other pronouns, though not gendered in English, often are in other languages, but their gender is not the main thing I want to mention, because, to quote myself, “it’s the least interesting thing about them”. Well, usually. I will actually start with that though, and with the personal pronouns.

The basic system many languages have of personal pronouns is that they have singular and plural each of the first, second and third person: I, we, thou, you, it and they. English is unusual in this respect in that it lacks “thou”, more or less. Many languages have distinct polite and informal versions of “you” and distinct singular and plural versions of “you”, which can overlap such that plural “you” is often also polite “you”.

Urgh. I said I wasn’t going to discuss gender but I will because it’s worth getting it out of the way. In English we’re used to the third person singular pronouns being kind of gendered but actually not really. I’ll demonstrate. If for some reason we wanted to use “she”, “it” and “he” with an adjective, it wouldn’t vary according to that pronoun. Attributive adjectives are ungrammatical in English, but predicatives are very common, although in many Western European languages those don’t vary for gender. So, we say “she is tall” and “he is short”, but in French we’d add an “-e” for the feminine adjective. This happens, so far as I can tell, only with hair colour in English: a woman is blonde or brunette but a man is blond or brunet, and to be honest if I ever see the word “brunet” written down I shall be very surprised indeed. It doesn’t even extend to other hair colours such as “white”, “red”, “auburn” or whatever. It’s also annoying because it defines women by hair colour. This is basically the only time we can be even remotely said to use grammatical gender. Oh, actually I’m wrong: it crops up in the fossilised phrase “lady chapel” because that actually means the chapel belonging to The Lady, and is not “lady’s chapel”, so that’s a gender distinction. That’s it though, and in fact most people would probably perceive “brunette” and “brunet” as different words rather than the same word with a different ending.

One distinction we lack in English is gender in the second and first pronouns. This occurs in Spanish but in that it almost feels like an afterthought, and doesn’t occur in all cases. In other languages they generally seem to be fully-fledged pronouns as simple and short as each other, as opposed to having adjectives appended to them as in Spanish. As I’ve said, I won’t dwell on this.

In Old English, and even into early Middle English, there were dual personal pronouns, to refer to two people, as “wit”/”unc” and “git” (pronounced “yit”)/”inc”, the possessives being “uncer” and “incer”. Dual pronouns reappear in Tok Pisin, the Pidgin English of Papua, in a different form, and in Bislama, spoken in Vanu Atu, there’s also a trial form, but there’s a further complication with these so I won’t mention them yet. Gothic dual personal pronouns were “wit” and “jut”. In modern Icelandic, although the form of the dual pronouns survive, their sense doesn’t. They’re plural, and I think the original plural forms are now the polite forms of the pronouns but I might have misremembered. I personally think dual personal pronouns are very useful and I still use them in my diary as it often seems weird to use a plural for when there are only two of something. Dual third person pronouns have not been found in any recorded Germanic language, or in Latin. In Gothic, the verbs also have a dual conjugation for the first and second person, but this has never been found in English.

Something I meant to say last time but didn’t is that the operation of plural nouns sometimes looks quite like gender in English. “Scissors”, “glasses” and “trousers” for example refer to singular objects but use the plural. It seems slightly odd that “bra” is singular, since it could be “brum”, with “bra” as a plural if the etymology is ignored. These uses of the plural for singular objects involves “they” and only seems to happen when there is a duality to the item in question, so it’s like a trace of the dual although in fact it isn’t because there are genuine traces of the dual in English and even in modern pronouns, which again I’ll come to.

English has separate personal and demonstrative third person pronouns. Some other languages combine the two. The demonstratives are “this”, “that”, “these” and “those” and correspond in English also to the older words for “the” in the non-instrumental sense. Latin, Spanish and many other languages have three demonstratives, corresponding to the three persons, as in “hoc” (this by me), “iste” (that by you) and “id” (that over there). English gets by with just two, “this” and “that”. Remarkably, I think anyway although I’ve never come across anyone else mentioning it, Gothic has only one demonstrative in spite of generally making the finest distinctions of all Germanic languages: “þata”, which means both “this” and “that”. It’s the only language I’m aware of which only has one. Spanish does the same as Latin, with “eso”, “esto” and “aquel”, but as with some other Romance languages the referents have changed somewhat. There’s a language in Papua whose demonstrative pronouns refer to things like “towards the mountain”, “towards the lake” and so forth and there are very many of them. I thought this was Alamblak but apparently that just does the same as Spanish and Latin although its counting is peculiar, being based on 1, 2, 5 and 20 multiplied and added in various ways.

The real ‘Flowers For Algernon‘ personal pronouns for me are the inclusive and exclusive first person plurals. I found out about this distinction when I was about eleven and ever since it’s felt like a niggling but major problem for the English language. Remarkably, the vast majority of Indo-European languages get along without the distinction. It’s very simple, although I should warn you, you can’t unsee it once you know: many languages distinguish between “we but not you” and “you and I”. Austronesian languages such as Indonesian make this distinction, as do Dravidian languages. In the former case they also have an extra, dual number, meaning that there are five first person pronouns as opposed to the English two. I honestly can’t understand why we haven’t got these. It has been noted, though, that Indo-European words for “we” fall into two categories: ones of the “we” form and ones of the “nous” form. This suggests that clusivity did once exist in Proto-Indo-European but it didn’t even survive until the earliest form of the separate branches. Under the influence of Dravidian, some Indian languages do have this distinction although it isn’t related to these forms. I would say Papuan languages have this, but the thing about them is that there are hundreds and they vary a lot, so it’s possible to find many features in them which are present sporadically throughout the world.

This next bit is a bit mind-boggling in a peculiar way. It is technically possible for “you” to be inclusive or exclusive! This is interestingly difficult to think about. When one talks to someone, one says “thou” or “you”, but the “you”, being dual or plural, could refer to both or all the people one is addressing or it could refer to the people present and also to people not present. For instance, one could talk to a person and their partner, or one could talk to a person as part of the couple when the other person isn’t present. This apparently never happens though, even though it’s possible, and it’s thought by some linguists that this category of personal pronoun is impossible for the human mind to conceive of sufficiently clearly to exist. This raises further questions as to the nature of language. One linguist claims that this distinction is present in a critically-endangered language spoken in Vanu Atu called Southeast Ambryn, spoken by about three thousand people. I don’t think it’s that one can’t conceive of it. To me it seems simpler than split ergativity to get my head round. It’s more that someone who knows such a language would have to keep doing it, and as such it might inform issues around pronouns and gender identity, particularly xenopronouns.

Another confounding fact is that there are sometimes exclusive and inclusive words for “I”, kind of. Where there’s a regular way in which duals and plurals can be related to singular pronouns, it’s possible for the two versions of “wit” and “we” to be extrapolated back to “I” and continue to give two forms. That probably isn’t very clear, so I’ll illustrate with fake English pronouns. Suppose we had exclusive and inclusive versions of “we”, such as “wee” and “nee”, and then “yee” for “you”, and the vowel changes in all of them to “oo” in the singular, so “yoo” could be the singular word for “you”. There could then be “woo” and “noo” for the inclusive and exclusive words for “I”. Samoan does this. Its plural inclusive “we” is “mātou” and exclusive “tātou”, the duals are “mā‘ua,” and “tā‘ua” and the singulars “a‘u” and “tā”, although some of these pronouns have variants. Interestingly, you might think that if a number were to collapse into another one to simplify a language, the dual and the plural would merge, but in Samoan the dual and the singular merge instead. “Tā” can mean “I” or “we two”. The exclusive “I” is the usual word, and the inclusive “I” indicates emotional involvement, so for example in “am I going to get one then?”, we use the word “then” to signal emotional involvement, and translating that into Samoan would use the word “tā” and omit “then”. In the closely related Tongan, it’s more connected with modesty and is similar to how posh people use the word “one” in English for “I”.

There’s also a fourth person in some languages, known as the obviative. This is actually not only obviative but obvious, and I used to wonder why it doesn’t happen in English in particular. The obviative contrasts with the proximate, which is the only option in most European languages. It crosses over with the idea of topic prominence, and involves a distinction between more and less important items, so for example, “did you put the food on the table?” where the food is the focus, is “did you put it (PROX) on it (OBV)?” but if it was a table as opposed to a kitchen counter and that was the emphasis, “table” would be the proximate and the food obviative. Presumably this is less important in languages with gender, but as a language without gender it’s seemed odd that we don’t have it. This feeling, unlike the clusivity issue, actually pre-dates any knowledge I had of languages other than English, rather like my daughter’s abortive used of numerical classifiers when she was a toddler, and it makes me wonder how often young children stumble upon features of language absent from their native ones and then reject them as their ability in their first language improves.

English has the distinct and separate reflexive pronouns ending in “-self” and “-selves”. These vary in the third person with dialect, such that “hisself” and “theirselves” is sometimes used in non-standard English consistent with the other pronouns being possessive rather than objective. In many other languages these either don’t exist or the objective forms are used, and in some there is a specific dedicated pronoun for this purpose. In Scandinavian languages this pronoun has become part of the verb and provides them with a mediopassive voice, replacing an older mediopassive found in Gothic. The fact that our own reflexive pronouns are so long means we’re unlikely to develop this way of expressing anything from verbs this way, although the potential used to exist.

The other pronouns also exist. In particular, the English distinction between “who” and “what” is peculiar for our language in that it’s similar to a common vs neuter distinction rather than there being three gender-like forms here. We tend to get confused about “whom” and there seems to be incipient reluctance to say “whose” instead of “of which” or something similar when the referent is inanimate. I said I was going to return to the dual number. In fact this does have some traces in English, and one of these is found in the word “whether”. Nowadays this is used as a conjunction, but it clearly looks a bit like “either” and a bit like “which”, “either” and “neither” being other traces of the dual. “Whether” was previously the dual version of “which”, which has taken over its meaning. There are other remnants too, such as “both” instead of “all”, the slightly vague “couple” and less vague “pair”, and the more contentious “alternative” which can only correctly refer to one of two rather than one of many. Trial pronouns exist in Bislama and Tok Pisin, and also in some Austronesian languages. Lihir also has a paucal number for small numbers of items above three. Paucal seems more obvious than trial and just plain having a plural to me but it’s rare in reality. Sursurunga was thought to have a quadral number but in fact it simply starts to use a different kind of paucal at four and has a “lesser” paucal for two or three, so in fact there seem to be no languages at all, at least right now, with a quadral number.

Vietnamese, I recently discovered through a relative, has a large number of personal pronouns which relate to status and familial relationship, making distinctions which English doesn’t even make with kinship terms. These are all in the second person. Like Japanese and Indonesian/Malay, Vietnamese has formal and informal versions of the first person singular pronoun. The Malay/Indonesian polite word for “I” originally meant “slave”.

There are no languages which don’t have at least two numbers for one or more pronouns. That’s a linguistic universal. However, there are many which manage without what most languages seem to consider vital, including English with its single word for “you”. German shows that it’s possible to get away with a single word for “you”, “she” and “they”, although it doesn’t actually do this most of the time, with “Sie” and “sie”. It probably manages because the verb is inflected differently. Spanish and Portuguese have both adopted noun phrases for polite second person pronouns, namely “Vuestra Merced” and “a senhora”/”o senhor” respectively, and American Spanish rarely uses “tu” and “vosotros”/”vosotras”. Mandarin Chinese substitutes the word for “humble” for the first person singular and “honour” for the second person in polite speech. This is paralleled in the considerably more elaborate Japanese system. In fact it’s been argued that Japanese doesn’t actually have pronouns as such. It’s a topic-prominent language which tends to drop pronouns and nouns often start being used as pronouns which weren’t before. Several other East Asian languages are like this. Indonesian uses the word “tidak” (“thing”) for “it” when “it” refers to something as opposed to in a phrase like “it’s raining”. There’s also the very common phenomenon of pro-drop, which occurs in many European languages whose verbs are sufficiently inflected for the person to be indicated by them. Outside Europe, for instance in Swahili, verbs can be inflected for object, and even indirect object, as well as subject, meaning that a word such as “nitaiosha” means “I will wash it” (in Japanese, incidentally, this same word means “similar company”. There’s a group of unrelated languages whose words can sometimes be identical, Finnish being another.). Pronoun dropping is foreign to all Germanic languages as far as I know except possibly Gothic, although we do have pronoun avoidance. For instance, we sometimes consider “she” and “it” to be rude when referring to human adults.

This brings up the issue of how to avoid pronouns for political reasons, i.e. anti-sexism. English has difficulty with this in regular speech and writing although note form does it. For instance, I might write “Went to the shop” in my diary, although only if the day was particularly boring or I wanted to indicate I was breaking the Sabbath or something. There’s also “Would Madam like some wine?” or “Your Majesty”, “Your Grace”, “Your Worship” and so forth, although these last three include possessive adjectives similar in form to pronouns. The situation in Vietnamese, previously mentioned, seems to be that kinship terms are used instead of the second person.

What’s the minimum number of personal pronouns a language could get away with? Although the answer is obviously “zero”, because it could just use nouns, or each pronoun could have a use as a noun, which happens for example with “Ich” in German, I think the sensible answer is probably two, similarly to “this” and “that”. There’s “this person”/”these people” and “that person or thing”, meaning “you” or “she”/”he”/”it”/”they”. The fact that Gothic doesn’t distinguish between “this” and “that” might indicate that only one is needed, but that language had plenty of other pronouns which might indicate how it coped with that odd deficit. At the other end of the scale, there could be singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural numbers, inclusive and exclusive “we” and “you”, a three-person based system for the third and fourth persons and polite forms for all of them in five genders per person, those being feminine, indefinite gender, neuter, common, masculine and virile (a gender for male persons used in Polish). This technically yields five hundred pronouns, although some of them might make no sense. It can in fact be taken a lot further than that, but five hundred might be enough.

So Good They Said It Twice

Certain words have a tendency to change their meaning on a regular basis. These include the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. Interestingly these three words also tend to overlap in meaning. “Nice” in its earliest form meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “blessed” at an early stage and “gay” has recently shifted to mean “lame” in the pejorative sense. Even the word “blessed” has shifted to mean “silly” in the contemporary sense. Another set of words like this, but rather distant from that triad in sense, is “Goth”, “Gothic” and the like.

Starting with proto-Indo-European, the stem “jhew-” meant “pour” and gave rise to the Greek “chyme”, which describes the fluid food becomes while it’s being digested. A D was added to this, making “jhewd-“, also meaning “pour” although presumably it was inflected or altered to a slightly different meaning. This became “hundo” in proto-Italic, meaning “I pour”, which became “fundo” in Latin, possibly due to another form. In Proto-Germanic, this word became “geutanã” (I can’t find the “a” with a hook underneath it), meaning “(to) pour” (there are two infinitives in English but not in many other Germanic languages), ultimately leading to the English “gut” and “ingot”, and related to the Proto-Germanic “Gautaz”, a mythical figure whose name means “he who pours out libations” and is connected to the word “God”. Some Germanic tribes have mythical founding figures. If you trace the Anglo-Saxon monarchs far enough back, you get to Woden, who is alleged to be Hengest’s great-great grandfather, meaning that the current King seems to be able to trace his ancestry back to a pagan god.

The Goths seem to be named after such a mythical figure, and the word Goth tended to float around the Germanic people, giving its name to Gothenburg, the Gutnish dialect or language, the Geats mentioned in ‘Beowulf’ and the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and were later massacred. The Goths themselves were a Germanic people like the Vandals, Norse, Angles, Saxons, Alans, Burgundians and Franks, but unlike them they fell upon such hard times that they were eventually completely lost. They called themselves (that phrase will become important) the “Gutþiuda”, which was also their land’s name. They crossed the Baltic and settled along the Vistula. Wulfila, whose name means “wolf cub” or “wolflet”, evangelised them in the fourth Christian century and converted them to Arian (not Aryan) Christianity, which includes the heretical belief that Christ was created and hadn’t existed ab aeterno. This led to the printing, and yes it was printed though with separate stamps, of the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic gloss of the Bible, which is the main source for the Gothic language today. All that said, their chief claim to fame was when the first king of the Visigoths Alaric I and his army reached the gates of Rome, at which point it’s famously been said that the people inside the city spoke a language with fewer inflections than the people outside it. This is probably true. It’s also tempting to believe that the fall of Rome was caused by the decay of the Latin language, with the existence of a more fusional language as spoken by the Visigoths somehow leading to a military advantage. Perhaps they were able to think more quickly than the Romans, or their conversations about strategy were faster because of it? I don’t take this idea seriously at all but I kind of wish it were true. It makes the idea of prescriptive grammar, that is, the notion that correct usage ought to be a certain way such as having no double negatives, saying “should have” rather than “should of”, or not overusing the word “like”, seem more valid. There is an argument, which I think doesn’t work at all in most cases, that that kind of grammar promotes clear and rational thought. All of this is rubbish, probably.

The actual reason Rome fell, according to Edward Gibbon, was that the Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to people focussing on the hereafter rather than trying to keep it going. If that’s true, it suggests that the Goths, being Arian Christians, were not so affected by it. In that case, is there some implication of the idea that Christ was “begotten and made” as opposed to “begotten, not made”, which would’ve led to them behaving differently. Another hypothesis is that the horseshoe was invented and made their exploitation of horses more efficient, and that actually might make sense even with the explanation employing the faith, because maybe they’d invented the horseshoe before they became Christian. As far as I can tell, the front runners of hypotheses regarding the fall of the Roman Empire are to do with ecological unsustainability, such as the Empire needing to maintain Rome through pillaging other lands as it conquered them, but I’m no historian. It is notable, though, that Wulfila is said to have refrained from translating the books of Kings in the Bible because he thought it would encourage them to wage war, so maybe they were just more successfully violent and aggressive than the Romans at that point.

This incident is the cause of the first semantic shift in the word “Gothic”, where it refers to the likes of architecture. This is because historians at a later date perceived Roman territory as being taken over by the Goths, and this was indeed somewhat true, with for instance the Visigothic kingdom in the future Spain and the Goths taking control of the Italian peninsula. Hence the distinctive architecture and calligraphy of a particular time during the Middle Ages came to be called “Gothic”. Apparently some early clockwork timepieces are also described in this way. It went on from there to be used to describe a genre of tales set in Gothic buildings, and their aesthetic led in the twentieth century to the youth culture.

The Goths were a large section of Germanic-speaking people who have now completely disappeared along with their language. Although they spread, in two halves, from Portugal to the Crimea, they were ultimately conquered, although there are traces of their language in Italian and Catalan, the word “Catalunya” possibly being a corruption of a word like “Gothland”. Surprisingly, their language seem to have survived in the Crimea into the late seventeenth century CE. They had fallen upon hard times in the later fourth century, being treated harshly by corrupt Roman officials and having to sell their children into slavery in exchange for rotten dog meat. This led to a war, and later a massacre of the Goths by the Romans, so although my knowledge of their history is limited I can certainly see that they may have become very resentful of the way the Romans behaved towards them. I don’t know if this was actually worse than the way they’d behaved towards other nations though.

As I’ve said, the Codex Argenteus is the main large text surviving today. There is also the Skeireins, which seems to be a Gothic translation of a Greek commentary on the Fourth Gospel. Although this is better than a lot of other languages at the time, for instance early Germanic runic inscriptions in the Elder Futhark or Irish Oghams (which are also in Wales incidentally), it isn’t like there’s a huge extensive body of literature as with Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks and the Romans. Consequently there are big gaps in what’s known about Gothic, and to my mind the actual use of the language itself as opposed to what seem to be glosses (word-for-word “translations” from another language), which might therefore obscure many features of its grammar, is lost. However, it hasn’t vanished completely. It’s written mainly in Greek-derived script, like Coptic and Old Church Slavonic, with a few runes used to fill in the missing sounds. Oddly, it actually uses Ψ for Þ even though later Greek employed Θ for the same sound, presumably indicating that in the early fourth century that sound was still an aspirated T in Greek, but this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t adopt the rune, as English and Old Norse did.

Being the earliest Germanic language which is extensively recorded, Gothic is a fair guide to what the ancestor of English, Icelandic and German was actually like. It did have a few idiosyncratic features of its own, such as the initial sound “FL-” as in “flea” becoming “ÞL-“, and it’s the only language I’m aware of which has no separate words for “this” and “that”, but on the whole it preserves an earlier stage of Germanic than is otherwise available. This leads me to an oddity among Germanic which has been largely lost but brings to mind something quite distinctive and odd about European languages generally. Unlike many other languages, European ones, including non-Indo-European ones such as Finnish, are strangely reluctant to repeat words and syllables as a way of conveying meaning.

To illustrate what I mean, I once had a Punjabi student who, instead of saying “is very different”, used to say “differ-differ”. I presume this is a feature of Punjabi, which is an Indo-European language and I believe most closely related to Romani, the language complex of the Roma people, which however like other languages spoken in Europe doesn’t have duplication. In other languages, such as Malay, repeating a noun is used to make it plural, which is like many features of Malay and Indonesian bafflingly logical and makes speakers of other languages wonder why we bother with the kind of grammar we have. It does happen in English, as with “blah-blah”, “boogie-woogie” and “tutu”, but it tends to be quite informal and seems to have no fixed function. Yiddish does it to express contempt of course, and that’s been borrowed into American English. English varies the vowel sometimes, such as with the word “flip-flop”. Afrikaans, which is very close to Dutch indeed, uses it, which is interesting because it isn’t a European language. Outside Europe it’s both very common and has specific grammatical functions.

The ancestral Indo-European language did appear to use reduplication, in particular to express certain inflections of verbs. In Sanskrit, the Class III athematic verbs express the aorist, preterite and the intensive. Where these verbs can be traced to a cognate in Germanic, it’s possible that such a verb would also be reduplicative in our own ancestral language.

Well, Gothic does this! Germanic languages historically have two main types of lexical verb plus some other unusual ones such as the preterite-present classes, though one type has been lost from Afrikaans, Bislama and Tok Pisin. These are the weak and strong verbs. In English, weak verbs generally either add “-ed” or “-t” to form the preterite and the past participle unless there’s a T already at the end, so we have “generated”, “burnt” and “cut”. There are also a few contracted verbs in this class like “have” – “had”. English strong verbs are gradually disappearing, but inflect nowadays by changing the vowel in the stem in the past and often add “-en” with another vowel change in the past participle: “drive” – “drove” – “driven”. Over the history of written English, many verbs have passed from strong to weak, an example from my own lifetime being “thrive”, but a few have gone the other way, such as “dig”. English strong verbs as they are now are, as usual, not as distinctly conjugated as they used to be since the plural preterite used to be like the past participle, and before that was distinct from both it and the singular preterite.

Anglo-Saxon as she was written had seven strong verb classes. There were also dual pronouns, “wit” and “git”, for when there were two of someone, but no third person dual personal pronoun, but the verbs associated with them just used the plural. Gothic was, unsurprisingly, more highly inflected and did conjugate for the dual, something which is incidentally completely absent from Latin. I’ve seen it claimed that in the oldest Germanic, strong verbs were actually the main form of verb with weak verbs a minor feature of the languages, and extrapolating backwards this does seem to make sense but it’s a little hard to believe. The seventh class included the reduplicative verbs, of which there were two types. One changed the stem vowel, the other didn’t. The reduplication happened in the preterite. The verbs included: “haitan” – “hight” and “hey” (this is an interesting one); “laikan” – leap (the cognate is “lake”, meaning “play”); “slepan” – “sleep”; “letan” – leave, let go (cognate “let”); “tekan” – “touch”; “saian” – “sow”; “bnauan” – “rub”; “hahan” – “hang” (transitive only); “bautan” – “beat” (found as a loanword in Portuguese but possibly not in the bits of the Bible which survived); “trauan” – “trust”, believe; “gangan” – “go”, walk.

Leaving Gothic, at least for now, Old Norse also retained a few reduplicative verbs, including “róa” – “row”; “sá” – “sow”. The former was still reduplicative in Old Norse, the preterite being “rera” in the preterite active first person singular (“I rowed”), but the latter had undergone the common change of S or Z to R which occurred in Scandinavian and West Germanic, making the same part of the verb “sera”. This made the “-ra”-type ending and the similar endings for other parts of the preterite more like an ending for a small class of non-reduplicative verbs rather than reduplicative in themselves. That is, although the form of “row” was still reduplicative in form, it wouldn’t’ve seemed like it to the speakers of the language due to “sow” changing.

I’ve gone into these verbs in what is possibly quite tedious detail in order to test an hypothesis I had about them. I thought that reduplicative Germanic verbs tended to refer to repetitive actions, and to an extent I stand by this. Sowing seed, rowing and beating, for example, are clearly that kind of action. Sleeping could also fall into this category if it formerly meant something like snoring, and walking involves stepping forward repeatedly. It doesn’t seem to work for all of them. It is interesting that trusting, i.e. having faith, is in this class because some Christians see commitment to Christ as a one-time thing and others say that the perseverance of the saints is like someone holding onto a rope being saved from drowning, and it could be said that faith waxes and wanes in a cycle and is therefore a repeated rather than continuous action. Hence trusting in the Lord is something one has to do more than once. One of the many peculiar things I do is to say the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, and if it gives me other insights like this, it’s definitely worthwhile. The others are not so obvious, but there is another distinctive feature which still shows traces in English. One of these is the verb “hang”, which we use in both strong and weak forms: hanged for execution and hung for the more benign action. Hence there is a distinction of some kind here which is unique in English so far as I can remember. The other is the remarkable verb “hight”, which is one of the two last traces of reduplicative verbs in English, and also the only synthetic passive in our language. English passives are almost always in the form “be called”, “be taken” and so forth, but “hight” is a passive in itself, and also looks suspiciously like it would’ve been “hey” in the active present. Hence when we say “hey”, coincidentally or not, we seem to be using the active voice of “hight”. It should actually be “hote”, which was a real English word. Moreover, the “GH” in “hight” descends from the Anglo-Saxon H in “heht”, which is a remnant of the reduplication which produces the likes of “haihait” in Gothic, although the passive is not reduplicative in Gothic and in fact it’s a preterite in English.

The other apparent remnant of such verbs in English is the past tense of “do” – “did”. This, however, is rather obscured by the development of all the weak verbs which use the “-ed” ending in the past, which in fact has been thought by some to be a descendant of an appended “did”, or rather its ancestor, although that idea may have gone out of fashion. If so, it’s a bit like the Old Norse “row” and “sow” extended to the whole weak verb system. Also in that class in Old English are fon – seize, preserved in its past tense as “fang”, which is no longer a verb, and also in the phrase “new-fangled”, and “feallan” – “fall”. These are not repetitive actions. “Hang” actually used to be the past participle “hangen”, the present being “hon”.

In English then, all this is, like the traces of the instrumental case, a tiny island of the way things used to be in the ancestor of our current language, except that this time it doesn’t survive in present day English at all unless you count “did”. “Hight” is no longer used, although Shakespeare did employ it.

All of this, that is the instrumental and the traces of a synthetic passive and reduplication in English, makes me feel like there could be a familiar-sounding version of modern English which nevertheless (remember?) drinks of the ancient font of our tongue in such a way that it’s more reminiscent of the ancient phase of the millennia-long string of parents and children, each of whom could understand each other, stretching back into prehistory, than of how we speak today. After all, we all know what led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, don’t we?

The English Instrumental Case

This is the kind of image which comes to mind when I hear the term “instrumental case”. In fact this is an instrument case. For some reason it’s always a violin too. Don’t ask me why.

English is one of the most inflectionally simplified and phonologically divergent Indo-European languages. Whereas in Latin one might expect to learn something like six tenses, two voices and two moods, each with singular and plural versions and three persons, and Sanskrit verbs are still more sophisticated, Germanic languages generally tend to have a much simplified verbal system, lacking a conjugation for the future tense entirely and only having synthetic voices in Gothic and Nordic. The Romance languages, though having shed the passive, are still more complex in their verbature, but their nouns and adjectives tend to be very simple. Only Romanian really has declined cases. Germanic, however, sometimes retains noun cases in a declined form. English shed all of these except, arguably, the genitive, for nouns, and like many other languages uses prepositions and syntax to express the relevant relationships. Our pronouns still decline absolute, objective and genitive cases on the whole, although even there it’s fading.

This is the end of a long-term process which in general in English was further along than in related languages even in the Dark Ages. For a look at how the original Proto-Germanic language worked, it’s worth looking at Gothic which, for example, still had not only pronouns for when there were two of something but also different verb endings for that situation, and is also unique in retaining an inflected vocative case for some nouns. The vocative is the form used when addressing the referent of the noun, and since it’s now unusual to address an inanimate object it’s easy to see how it might fade out. However, Gothic only had four other cases, the classic Germanic nominative, accusative, genitive and dative.

German also has these. I remember a German evening class when the cases were introduced. There were many complaints and most of the students left after that lesson. English speakers seem to find it hard to relate to declension and I don’t really know why, unless it’s poor explanation, because we have a limited degree of declension in our own language. The so-called “Saxon genitive”, more often called possessive, is what remains of our case system in nouns. This is the “-‘s” and “-s'” at the ends of nouns. However, it has decayed to the extent that it really amounts to a suffix appended to nouns. Strictly speaking, and I have no idea whether people observe this, it’s only supposed to be used with animate nouns, so for example you can say “Pilgrims Way” (which lacks an apostrophe) but you can’t officially say “the stones’ colour”. You have to say “the colour of the stones” instead. Our possessive also differs from a proper genitive as used in German or Icelandic in that it isn’t used after pure prepositions. You can say “for God’s sake” or “in its stead”, but not “for the sake God’s” or “instead its” – that’s “instead of it” and “for the sake of God” (which sounds odd). English very much likes to get rid of endings and replace them with separate words or use a certain word order to express these things.

The pronouns are a bit more primitive. On the whole, an English pronoun will have at least three declined cases, sometimes including two versions of the possessive. For example, one might say “he stroked me”, but not usually “he stroked I”, except in Iyaric, where it’s part of an attempt to liberate the imposed English language from colonialism. The accusative still exists here, merged with the dative, in forms such as “them”, “’em” and “whom”. The only trace of declension in adjectives is with the demonstratives “this” and “that”, which become “these” and “those” in the plural. Weirdly, Gothic is the only language I know which has only one demonstrative adjective and pronoun in terms of the “this” versus “that” or “eso/esto/aquello” or the more arcane finer distinctions found in some other languages, and this is despite its being generally finer in its grammatical distinctions than most Romance or Germanic languages spoken today.

Comparing Dark Age texts of similar vintage, one often finds that English is the least inflected. For instance, Old High German makes gender distinctions as well as case declensions for plural demonstratives but English doesn’t. It’s often the plurals which lose distinctions first. Therefore, it’s particularly surprising that among all the major Germanic languages, English alone used to decline the instrumental case.

The instrumental is alive and well and living in Eastern Europe in Slavic and Baltic languages, which have up to ten cases depending on how they’re counted. I would say there are eight. Strictly speaking, all languages have many cases but express them differently than with changing the form of the words. The chief use of the instrumental is to express “by means of” and in English with (that’s an example) the prepositions “with”, “by” and “through”. There are also subsidiary uses such as expressing time when, and there’s a peculiar use in Polish at least where an existential sentence such as “the doctor is a woman” translates as “Lekarz jest kobietą”, with the word “kobieta” in the instrumental. In most other languages this would be in the nominative, except possibly in cases of split-ergativity (don’t ask, and I’m not saying it happens differently there so much as that I don’t understand it very well), which makes me wonder if that’s one reason it happens.

Even in Old English, nouns didn’t decline for the instrumental case. It was confined to pronouns and adjectives, and in the latter case only in the strong singular form. Strong adjectives are those which operate without articles or demonstratives. Old English didn’t use indefinite articles like “an” so the forms in German used with “ein” don’t apply. English happens to have adopted the Latin alphabet early enough to capture the instrumental still being used. It was being assimilated to the dative at the time, a case which expresses the recipient of an action. As with the vocative, the dative form tends to be pushed out by the fact that inanimate objects are not customarily the recipients of things in the same way as animates, although clearly something like a bucket filling with water can be said to be a recipient of that substance. You can in a sense give a bucket water or a fresh coat of paint. Thus nowadays we have no distinctive dative form, although the actual forms used for the objective were originally dative. “Him”, “’em”, “them” and “whom” all end in “-m”, which was the original dative form, and there used to be words such as “hine”, “hi”, “þa” and “whone” for the accusative forms of these words.

The instrumental in English comprised the adjectival endings “-e” for neuter and masculine and “-re” for the feminine, whose last was the same as the dative but for neuter and masculine this ended in “-um”. The distal (the far away one) demonstrative (“the” or “that”, which were not yet distinct) was “þy” in neuter form and “þy” or “þon” as a masculine. The interrogative pronouns “who” and “what” are historically distinct for gender, hence the “-t” ending for the latter, which like “it” is neuter, and had the distinctive instrumental “hƿy”, with the letter “ƿ” used for W, so “hwy”, and later “why”.

As well as being used to express “by means of”, the Old English instrumental was used to express measure with comparatives, as with “micle læssa” – “much less”. The word “micel” here is in the instrumental, and therefore ends in E. It was also used, as in the Slavic languages, to express “time when”, as with “Þy feorþan dagore” – “on the fourth day”. There is another case known as the locative, never present in any Germanic language as a separate declined case but used as part of the ablative in Latin, which is expressed as the instrumental in Old English. It expresses location, for instance “in the house” or “at the beach”. This occurs, for instance, in the phrase “reste ƿunedon” – “stayed in bed”, but it would only be noticeable if an adjective were involved or it was, as in this case, being used as a noun. Here the word “rest” is used to mean “bed”.

A more straightforward use of the instrumental is found in phrases such as “oðre naman” – “by another name”, and evidences of its decay can be seen in a sentence like “Hƿæl me meahte mid ane slege besencan oþþe ofslean” – “A whale could sink or kill me with one blow”, where the ancient preposition “mid”, now replaced by “with” which at the time meant “against” as in “fight with” is doing part of the work, thereby making the instrumental seem more like a peculiar form of the dative. In fact I suspect that much of the modern German dative, which in masculine and neuter singular nouns often ends in “-e”, is in fact the instrumental rather than the dative form historically, although I don’t know for sure.

One really good explanation of cases I read once in a Lettish primer was that they answer questions asked with particular interrogatives. Hence in English we have “where”, “whom”, “who” and “whose”, answered by the locative, objective, nominative and genitive respectively. We also have the various “where-” constructions such as “wherein”, “whereafter” and “whereat”, but also the more “declined” forms such as “whither”, “when”, “whence”. This conjures me up a wistful thought that maybe there sould somehow be a version of English with declined forms for spatial “to”, “during” and “from”, but it was not to be and in fact these don’t correspond to anything of the sort in earlier versions of our language. “Whence”, for example, is originally a genitive, though not a genitive form of “what”. It’s worth observing that there are three series of similar words here too in the pattern “where” – “here” – “there”, although the word “hen”, which by rights should mean “now”, is missing and never seems to have existed. Two other interrogative (and relative pronouns as it happens, which is a newer development) words not yet mentioned are “how” and “why”. “How” is clearly the odd one out, although phonetically “who”, “whom” and “whose” conform to it too. It’s a doublet of “who” if you go back far enough, but not since written records began in English. This set of words also contains one of the few fragments of the instrumental in modern English: “why”.

“Why?” nowadays is “for what?”. It’s something of a surprise that it even still exists in English in that form because the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German have all replaced it with a “where-“-type form as with the German “warum” and “weshalb” and the Dutch “waarom”. English has “wherefore” and used to use it commonly, so it might be expected to have replaced “why”, and of course “therefore” is one of the many conjunctions used to express entailment, but there is no “thy” in that sense in Modern English despite the tendency to replace “wh-” with “th-” in rhyming words like these, presumably because of “thy” as in “thine”. In spite of all this, thy, the word “why” has actually survived in English even though it is instrumental in form, just as the instrumental survived in Old English way past any time it could’ve been expected to. The sense has dramatically changed and it’s not present in Scottish English as far as I know, but all other English dialects seem to have it.

The other trace is seriously eroded and it isn’t obvious what’s going on until you examine it carefully. That’s a specialised use of the word “the” which is not a conventional use of the definite article. This is again the word “þy” in degenerate form, whose vowel has now levelled to schwa or /i/ (“ee”). This is the neuter instrumental, expressed in German by the rather odd word “desto”, as in “the more the merrier”, which can be used in isolation in sentences like “I’m none the wiser” and “it’s less feasible the more I consider it”. This use also turns up in fossilised form in the words “nonetheless” and “nevertheless”, although this is more like the I in “handiwork” which used to be “-ge-” and was an important and productive prefix, still used for past participles in German but no longer recognised in English. The “the” in those two just sits there, still clearly recognisable but otherwise defunct except for the other construction.

It’s a mental exercise to analyse what these literally mean. “The” here should be replaceable by such a phrase as “by means of the” or “by way of the”. Does this work? “The more by means of the merrier” certainly means something but the phrase “the more the merrier” doesn’t seem to mean that any more. It’s more like “Having more will make one merrier”. It too is like a fossilised piece of English obeying ancient grammatical rules which no longer apply to the language. “I’m none the wiser” is something like “I am no wiser than I was before”. The “the” in these cases seems to have the value of pithiness. “Nevertheless” and “nonetheless” seem to be synonymous with each other, and also close to “even so/still” and “however”. They’re “also” with a different flavour.

To finish then, it saddens me that we now only have traces of declined cases in English, and the succinctness they would’ve given the language can be seen in the above examples, but at the same time it gladdens me that of all languages in Western Europe with the possible exception of Basque, the apparently most eroded and decayed example, and my own first language, has for some reason doggedly persisted with traces of one of the most obscure grammatical cases in the whole gamut of Indo-European languages. Even Latin and Greek had lost it well over two thousand years ago, and yet, in a way, here it still is. But why?

Is Cyberspace Haunted?

Loab – An explanation may be forthcoming

I may have mentioned this before on here, but there used to be a popular “spooky” non-fiction book called ‘The Ghost Of 29 Megacycles’. This was about the practice of listening to static on analogue radio and apparently hearing the voices of the dead. A similar technique is known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which is a more general version of the same where people listen out for voices on audio tape or other recording media. It’s notable that this is a highly analogue process. It’s no longer a trivial task to tune out a television or radio and get it to display visual or produce audio static so that one can do this. Audiovisual media nowadays are generally very clean and don’t lend themselves to this. One saddening thing to me is that we now have a TV set which will display pretend static to communicate to us that we haven’t set it up properly. It isn’t honest. There is no real static and in fact it’s just some video file stored on the hardware somewhere which tries to tell the user there’s an unplugged connection or something. You can tell this because it loops: the same pixels are the same colours in the same place every few frames. I find this unsettling because it implies that the world we live in is kind of a lie and because we haven’t really got control over the nuts and bolts of much technology any more. There’s that revealing temporally asymmetric expression committing oneself that the belief that in that respect the past and future are qualitatively different. It is important to acknowledge this sometimes, but can also bring it about via the force of that potentially negative belief. However, the demise of the analogue has not led to the demise of such connections, although it long seemed to have done so.

Most people would probably say that we are simply hearing, or in some cases seeing, things which aren’t really there in these cases. Others might say, of course, that this is a way to access the Beyond, so to speak, and interpret the voices or other experiences in those terms. If that’s so, the question arises as to whether it’s the medium which contains this information or whether the human mind contacts it directly via a random-seeming visual or sonic mess, having been given the opportunity to do so. Other stimuli grab the attention to specific, organised and definite details too much for this to happen easily. There’s no scope for imagination, or rather for free association.

Well, recently this has turned out no longer to be so. Recently, artificial intelligence has been advancing scarily fast. That’s not hyperbole. It is actually quite frightening how rapidly software has been gaining ground on human cognition. Notable improvements occur within weeks rather than years or decades, and one particular area where this is happening is in image generation. This has consequences for the “ghost of 29 megacycles” kind of approach to, well, I may as well say séances, but this is going to take a bit of explaining first.

Amid considerable concern for human artists and their intellectual property, it’s now possible to go to various websites, type in what you want to see and have a prodigiously furiously cogitating set of servers give you something like that in a couple of minutes. For example, sight unseen I shall now type in “blue plastic box in a bookcase” and show you a result from Stable Diffusion:

That didn’t give me exactly what I wanted but it did show a blue plastic box in a bookcase. Because I didn’t find a way to specify that I only wanted one blue plastic box, it also gave me two others. I’ll give it another try: “A tree on a grassy hill with a deer under it”:

The same system can also respond to images plus text as input. In my case, this has let to an oddity. As you know, I am the world’s whitest woman. However, when I give Stable Diffusion’s sister Diffuse The Rest, which takes photos plus descriptions, such as “someone in a floral skater dress with curly hair, glasses and hoop earrings”, it will show me that all right, but “I” will be a Black woman more often than not. This is not so with many other inputs without a photo of me. I get this when I type it into Stable Diffusion itself:

This is obviously a White woman. So are all the other examples I’ve tried on this occasion, although there is a fair distribution of ethnicity. There are worrying biasses, as usual, in the software. For instance, if you ask for a woman in an office, you generally get something like this:

If you ask for a woman on a running track, this is the kind of output that results:

This is, of course, due to the fact that the archive of pictures on which the software was trained carries societal biasses therewith. However, for some reason it’s much more likely to make me Black than White if I provide it with a picture of myself and describe it in neutral terms. This, for example, is supposed to be me:

The question of how it might be addressed arises though. Here is an example of what it does with a photo of me:

You may note that this person has three arms. I have fewer than three, like many other people. There’s also a tendency for the software to give people too many legs and digits. I haven’t tried and I’m not a coder, but it surprises me that there seems to be no way to filter out images with obvious flaws of this kind. Probably the reason for this is that these AI models are “black boxes”: they’re trained on images and arrive at their own rules for how to represent them, and in the case of humans the number of limbs and digits is not part of that. It is in fact sometimes possible to suggest they give a body extra limbs by saying something like “hands on hips” or “arms spread out”, in which case they will on occasion continue to produce images of someone with arms in a more neutral position as well as arms in the explicitly requested ones.

In order to address this issue, it would presumably be necessary to train the neural network on images with the wrong and right number of appendages. The problem is, incidentally, the same as the supernumerary blue boxes in the bookcase image, but in most situations we’d be less perturbed by seeing an extra box than an extra leg.

I have yet to go into why the process is reminiscent of pareidolia based on static or visual snow and therefore potentially a similar process to a séance. The algorithm used is known as a Latent Diffusion Model. This seems to have replaced the slightly older method of Generative Adversarial Networks, which employed two competing neural networks to produce better and better pictures by judging each other’s outputs. Latent Diffusion still uses neural networks, which are models of simple brains based on how brains are thought to learn. Humans have no access to what happens internally in these networks, so the way they are actually organised is quite mysterious. Many years ago, a very simple neural network was trained to do simple arithmetic and it was explored. It was found to contain a circuit which had no connections to any nodes outside that circuit on the network and was therefore thought to be redundant, but on being removed, the entire network ceased to function. This network was many orders of magnitude less complex than today’s. In these cases, the network was trained on a database of pictures ranked by humans for beauty and associated with descriptions called the LAION-5B Dataset. The initial picture, which may be blank, has “snow” added to it in the form of pseudorandom noise (true randomness may be impossible for conventional digital devices to achieve alone). The algorithm then uses an array of GPUs (graphical processing units as used in self-driving cars, cryptocurrency minint and video games) to continue to apply noise until it begins to be more like the target as described textually and/or submitted as an image. It does this in several stages. Also, just as a JPEG is a compressed version of a bitmap image, relying in that case on small squares described via overlapping trig functions, so are the noisy images compressed in order to fit in the available storage space and so that they get processed faster. The way I think of it, and I may be wrong here, is that it’s like getting the neural network to “squint” at the image through half-closed eyes and try to imagine and draw what’s really there. This compressed image form is described as a “latent space”, as the actual space of the image, or possibly the multidimensional space used to describe it as found in Generative Adversarial Networks, is a decompressed version of what’s actually used directly by the GPUs.

If you don’t understand that, it isn’t you. It was one said that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it, and that suggests I don’t. That said, one thing I do understand, I think, is that this is a computer making an image fuzzy like a poorly-tuned television set and then trying to guess what’s behind the fuzz according to suggestions such as an image or a text input. This process is remarkably similar, I think, to a human using audio or visual noise to “see” things which don’t appear to be there, and therefore is itself like a séance.

This seems far-fetched of course, but it’s possible to divorce the algorithm from the nature of the results. The fact is that if a group of people is sitting there with a ouija board, they are ideally sliding the planchette around without their own conscious intervention. There might be a surreptitious living human guide or a spirit might hypothetically be involved, but the technique is the same. The contents of the latent space is genuinely unknown and the details of events within the neural network are likewise mysterious. We, as humans, also tend to project meaning and patterns onto things where none exist.

This brings me to Loab, the person at the top of this post, or rather the figure. The software used to discover this image has not been revealed, but seems to have been Midjourney. The process whereby she (?) was arrived at is rather strange. The initial input was Marlon Brando, the film star. This was followed by an attempt to make the opposite of Marlon Brando. This is a technique where, I think, the location in the latent space furthest from the initial item is found, like the antipodes but in a multidimensional space rather than on the surface of a spheroid. This produced the following image:

The phenomenon of apparently nonsense text in these images is interesting and more significant than you might think. I’ll return to it later.

The user, whose username is Supercomposite on Twitter, then tried to find the opposite of this image, expecting to arrive back at Marlon Brando. They didn’t. Instead they got the image shown at the top of this post, in other words this:

(Probably a larger image in fact but this is what’s available).

It was further found that this image tended to “infect” others and make them more horrific to many people’s eyes. There are ways of producing hybrid images via this model, and innocuous images from other sources generally become macabre when combined with this one. Also, there’s a tendency for Loab, as she was named, to “haunt” images in the sense that you can make an image from an image and remove all the references to Loab in the description, and she will unexpectedly recur many generations down the line like a kind of jump scare. Her presence also sometimes makes images so horrendous that they are not safe to post online. For instance, some of them are of screaming children being torn to pieces.

As humans, we are of course genetically programmed to see horror where there is none because if we instead saw no horror where there was some we’d probably have been eaten, burnt to death, poisonned or drowned, and in that context “we” refers to more than just humans. Therefore a fairly straightforward explanation of these images is that we are reading horror into them when they’re just patterns of pixels. We create another class of potentially imaginary entities by unconsciously projecting meaning and agency onto stimuli. Even so, the human mind has been used as a model for this algorithm. The images were selected by humans and humans have described them, and perhaps most significantly, rated them for beauty. Hence if Marlon Brando is widely regarded as handsome, his opposite’s opposite, rather than being himself, could be ugliness and horror. It would seem to make more sense for that to be simply his opposite, or it might not be closely related to him at all. A third possibility is that it’s a consequence of the structure of a complex mind-like entity to have horror and ugliness in it as well as beauty. There are two other intriguing and tempting conclusions to be drawn from this. One is that this is a real being inhabiting the neural network. The other is that the network is in some way a portal to another world in which this horror exists.

Loab is not alone. There’s also Crungus:

These are someone else’s, from Craiyon, which is a fork of Dall-E Mini. Using that, I got these:

Using Stable Diffusion I seem to get two types of image. One is this kind of thing:

The other looks vaguely like breakfast cereal:

Crungus is another “monster”, who however looks quite cartoonish. I can also understand why crungus might be a breakfast cereal, because of the word sounding like “crunch”. In fact I can easily imagine going down the shop, buying a box of crungus, pouring it out and finding a plastic toy of a Crungus in it. There’s probably a tie-in between the cereal and a TV animation. Crungus, however, has an origin. Apparently there was a video game in 2002 which had a Crungus as an easter egg, which was a monster based on the original DOOM monster the Cacodemon, who was based on artwork which looked like this:

Hence there is an original out there which the AI probably found, although I have to say it seems very apporopriately named and if someone were to be asked to draw a “Crungus”, they’d probably produce a picture a bit like one of these.

It isn’t difficult to find these monsters. Another one which I happen to have found is “Eadrax”:

Eadrax is the name of a planet in ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ but reliably produces fantastic monsters in Stable Diffusion. This seems to be because Google will correct the name to “Andrax”, an ethical hacking platform which uses a dragon-like monster as its mascot or logo. An “eadrax” seems to be a three-dimensional version of that flat logo. But maybe there’s something else going on as well.

There’s a famous experiment in psychology where people whose spoken languages were Tamil and English were asked which one of these shapes was “bouba” and which “kiki”:

I don’t even need to tell you how that worked out, do I? What happens if you do this with Stable Diffusion? Well, “kiki” gets you this, among many other things:

“Bouba” can generate this:

I don’t know about you, but to me the second one looks a lot more like a “bouba” than the first looks like a “kiki” instance. What about both? Well, it either gets you two Black people standing together or a dog and a cat. I’m quite surprised by this because it means the program doesn’t know about the experiment. It doesn’t, however, appear to do what the human mind does with these sounds. “Kiki and Bouba” does this:

Kiki is of course a girl’s name. Maybe Bouba is a popular name for a companion animal?

This brings up the issue of the private vocabulary latent space diffusion models use. You can sometimes provoke such a program into producing text. For instance, you might ask for a scene between two farmers talking about vegetables with subtitles or a cartoon conversation between whales about food. When you do this, and when you get actual text, something very peculiar happens. If you have typeable dialogue between the whales and use this as a text prompt, it can produce images of sea food. If you do the same with the farmers, you get things like insects attacking crops. This is even though the text seems to be gibberish. In other words, the dialogue the AI is asked to imagine actually seems to make sense to it.

Although this seems freaky at first, what seems to be happening is that the software is taking certain distinctive text fragments out of captions and turning them into words. For instance, the “word” for birds actually consists of a concatenation of the first part, i.e. the more distinctive one, of scientific names for bird families. Some people have also suggested that humans are reading things into the responses by simply selecting the ones which seem more relevant, and another idea is that the concepts associated with the images are just stored nearby. That last suggestion raises other questions for me, because it seems that that might actually be a description of how human language actually works mentally.

Examples of “secret” vocabulary include the words vicootes, poploe vesrreaitas, contarra ccetnxniams luryea tanniouons and placoactin knunfdg. Here are examples of what these words do:

Vicootes

Poploe vesrreaitas

contarra ccetnxniams luryea tanniouons

placoactin knunfdg

The results of these in order tend to be: birds, rural scenes including both plants and buildings, young people in small groups and cute furry animals, including furry birds. It isn’t, as I’ve said, necessarily that mysterious because the words are often similar to parts of other words. For instance, the last one produces fish in many cases, though apparently not on Stable Diffusion, but here seems to have produced a dog because the second word ends with “dg”. It produces fish because placoderms and actinopterygii are prominent orders of fish.

It is often clear where the vocabulary comes from, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t constitute a kind of language because our own languages evolve from others and take words and change them. It can easily be mixed with English:

A flock of vicootes in a poploe vesrreaitas being observed by some contarra ccetnxiams luryea tanniouons who are taking their placoactin knunfg for a walk.

This has managed to preserve the birds and the rural scene with vegetation, but after that it seems to lose the plot. It often concentrates on the earlier part of a text more than the rest. In other words, it has a short attention span. The second part of this text gets me this:

Contarra ccetnxiams luryea tanniouons taking their placoactin knunfg for a walk.

I altered this slightly but the result is unsurprising.

Two questions arise here. One is whether this is genuine intelligence. The other is whether it’s sentience. As to whether it’s intelligent, I think the answer is yes, but perhaps only to the extent that a roundworm is intelligent. This is possibly misleading and raises further questions. Roundworms are adapted to what they do very well but are not going to act intelligently outside of that environment. The AIs here are adapted to do things which people do to some extent, but not particularly generally, meaning that they can look a lot more intelligent than they actually are. We’re used to seeing this happen with human agency more directly involved, so what we experience here is a thin layer of humanoid behaviour particularly focussed on the kind of stuff we do. This also suggests that a lot of what we think of as intelligent human behaviour is actually just a thin, specialised veneer on a vast vapid void. But maybe we already knew that.

The other question is about sentience rather than consciousness. Sentience is the ability to feel. Consciousness is not. In order to feel, at least in the sense of having the ability to respond to external stimuli, there must be sensors. These AIs do have sense organs because we interact with them from outside. I have a strong tendency to affirm consciousness because a false negative is likely to cause suffering. Therefore I believe that matter is conscious and therefore that that which responds to external stimuli is sentient. This is of course a very low bar and it means that I even consider pocket calculators sentient. However, suppose that instead consciousness and sentience are emergent properties of systems which are complex in the right kind of way. If digital machines and their software are advancing, perhaps in a slow and haphazard manner, towards sentience, they may acquire it before being taken seriously by many, and we also have no idea how it would happen, not just because sentience as such is a mystery but largely because we have no experience of that emergence taking place before. Therefore we can look at Loab and the odd language and perhaps consider that these things are just silly and it’s superstitious to regard them as signs of awareness, but is that justified? The words remind me rather of a baby babbling before she acquires true language, and maybe the odd and unreliable associations they make also occur in our own minds before we can fully understand speech or sign.

Who, then, is Loab? Is she just a collaborative construction of the AI and countless human minds, or is she actually conscious? Is she really as creepy as she’s perceived, or is that just our projection onto her, our prejudice perhaps? Is she a herald of other things which might be lurking in latent space or might appear if we make more sophisticated AIs of this kind? I can’t answer any of these questions, except perhaps to say that yes, she is conscious because all matter is. What she’s actually doing is another question. A clockwork device might not be conscious in the way it “wants” to be. For instance, it’s possible to imagine a giant mechanical robot consisting of teams of people keeping it going, but is the consciousness of the individual members of that project separate from any consciousness that automaton might have. It’s conceivable that although what makes up Laion is conscious, she herself is not oriented correctly to express that consciousness.

A more supernaturalistic explanation is that Midjourney (I assume) is a portal and that latent space represents a real Universe or “dimension” of some kind. It would be hard to reconcile this idea with a deterministic system if the neural net is seen as a kind of aerial for picking up signals from such a world. Nonetheless such beliefs do exist, as a ouija board is actually a very simple and easily described physical system which nevertheless is taken as picking up signals from the beyond. If this is so, the board and planchette might be analogous to the neural net and the movement of the hands on the planchette, which is presumably very sensitive to the neuromuscular processes going on in the arms and nervous systems of the human participants, to the human artists, the prompt, the computer programmers and the like, and it’s these which are haunted, in a very roundabout way. I’m not in any way committing myself to this explanation. It’s more an attempt to describe how the situation might be compared to a method of divination.

I’ve mentioned the fact there are artists involved a few times, and this brings up another probably unrelated concern. Artists and photographers, and where similar AIs have been applied to other creative genres the likes of poets, authors and musicians, have had their work used to train it, and therefore it could be argued that they’re owed something for this use. At the other end, bearing in mind that most of the images in this post have been produced rapidly on a free version of this kind of software and that progress is also extremely fast, there are also images coming out the other end which could replace what artists are currently doing. This is an example of automation destroying jobs in the creative industries, although at the same time the invention of photography was probably thought of in a similar way and reports of the death of the artist were rather exaggerated. Instead it led to fine art moving in a different direction, such as towards cubism, surrealism, impressionism and expressionism. Where could human art go stimulated by this kind of adversity? Or, would art become a mere hobby for humans?

Two Flowerings And A Cousin

Here at chez zerothly, the mornings are currently filled with the bongs and bings of Duolingo as Sarada and I vainly and not so vainly, not respectively, attempt to learn two distantly-related languages. Sarada is having a lot more luck than I am, or rather, she’s making progress much more rapidly. I am plodding, and as I advance through the lessons the number of mistakes I make grows steadily. I feel in no way on top of my learning, and that’s unusual for language learning for me, although not in any way a surprise in this case. Sarada in the meantime has a degree in French and is learning a closely-related language which she’s already made progress in through evening classes. As far as I can tell, the sum total of her efforts with respect to learning this language right now consist of Duolingo. My efforts consist of listening to radio stations in my language and watching the TV news in it. There probably isn’t much difference in our degree of motivation, but whereas she’s not putting as much time into it as I am, she’s getting a lot further a lot faster.

By antmoose – [1], CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=562371

Both languages are Western European Indo-European KENTUM languages. I’ve been into the classification of IE languages before on this blog, but to cut a long story short, here’s a quick summary. The Indo-European language family is the largest and best-researched language family and consists of languages originating in Eurasia from Ireland and Portugal through to Bangladesh, extending into the Arctic Circle and across Russia. Particularly in Europe, there are only a handful of indigenous tongues which are not members. The family consists of three divisions, one much smaller than the other two and completely extinct, namely the Anatolian languages which include Hittite and were so ancient they were often written in cuneiform. Of the other two, one is probably a more genuine division than the other: KENTUM and SATEM, based on their words for “hundred”, which reflect sound changes in the two main branches. Although KENTUM languages tend to be more western in origin than the SATEM ones, the easternmost subfamily of all, completely extinct now for over a millennium, is Tocharian and is KENTUM. The SATEM group is probably not closely bound and likely reflects the languages which simply didn’t descend from the one which underwent the KENTUM changes rather than having a common ancestor beyond Proto-IE itself

I’ve covered all of this before. Among the KENTUM languages, as I count them, and this is not actually the official way they’re counted nowadays but I do this based strictly on the word for “hundred” which may have been altered by other influences, the branches are Illyrian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic and Italic. The sole surviving Illyrian language is Albanian, but there are likely to have been many others spoken in the Balkans which were never written down and just died out. I don’t include Greek because its word for “hundred” isn’t like ours, and I seem to remember that linguists often group it and Armenian together. However, the Armenian word for “hundred” is “հարյուր”, and I think you’ll agree that doesn’t look much like ours, beautifully written though it be. I am, incidentally, aware of the peculiar history of Armenian but I don’t want to get too sidetracked.

I’ve taken old written examples of each branch of the KENTUM languages and compared the vocabulary. I found, perhaps surprisingly, that the two closest seemed to be Latin and Gothic. This is a little misleading as history is, literally in this case, written by the winners, and the Albanians, Tocharians and Celts definitely didn’t turn out to be the victors in the long run. The Tocharians were so long gone and utterly eradicated that nobody even remembered they’d existed and they were only unearthed because they lived in a desert area of Chinese Turkestan where their documents were preserved by the conditions. The Albanians are the sole survivors who seem to have clung on because of living in an isolated mountain kingdom which nobody wanted and was in any case pretty inaccessible. As for the Celts, well . . .

On the SATEM side of things, Baltic and Slavic are evidently rather close to each other, and also influenced Germanic because the people speaking these languages didn’t have much respect for what philologists were going to do in fifteen centuries’ time, and therefore didn’t realise they weren’t supposed to speak to their KENTUM neighbours. In the KENTUM case, two subgroups are particularly close to each other, or rather, they’re closer than the others are, and also closer to each other than they are to the others. These are Italic and Celtic. In a late nineteenth century edition of Cassell’s Etymological Dictionary, a book I studied very closely as a child before I got a copy of Skeat as an Xmas present, Italo-Celtic was considered a single branch on the family tree rather than two.

Both the languages Sarada and I are currently learning, or in my case trying to learn rather unsuccessfully, are Italo-Celtic. Sarada is picking up Italian quickly and I am slogging away unfruitfully at that nasty grandparent language known as Gàidhlig. Sarada has on a number of occasions asked me why I’m bothering, considering it’s such a huge effort and such a minor language, to which my answer is that it’s an endangered language and part of my heritage. I’ve been into this before on this blog. I’m not going to pretend it’s easy, wonderful, beautiful or anything else, but the fact is that it’s on its last legs and deserves to be preserved. To compare, there are more than three dozen native American languages with more speakers than Gàidhlig and I’d never suggest that they should be allowed to die out, so here I am learning this language whose term for spider translates for some reason as “wild stag”, and in other circumstances I’d find that picturesque and charming but to be honest my immediate reaction is “Just why on Earth‽”. But this unlovely tongue is the one in which my surnames are, and what kind of rootless fool would I be if I couldn’t even pronounce my own name? So I’m stuck with it, and as you’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog, I consider myself obliged to learn the sodding thing. This is in no way a slight on the Gaels, which would be weird and self-hating to some extent anyway, though I consider myself a White Northwestern Eurasian above everything else (or a NW European if you want to be parochial about it). To be fair, I’m not a huge fan of English either due to things like its weird vowels and diphthongs, overuse of the word “do” and only having one word for “you”, but I honestly can’t say I actually prefer Gàidhlig as a language.

There’s considerable doubt about the validity of Celtic as an identity, but whatever is true, there are a maximum a few thousand speakers of each surviving spoken Celtic language, which are divided into two halves, P-Celtic and Q-Celtic according to how they treated proto-IE “KW”. P-Celtic survivors comprise Welsh, Cornish and Breton, plus a few words adopted into a now-extinct Siouan language called Mandan. The Q-Celtic languages are Gàidhlig, Irish and Manx, which form a linguistic continuum interrupted by the ingress of Scots and English into the southwestern part of what became Scotland, although a P-Celtic language was also spoken there. It must also be mentioned that all surviving Celtic languages have mysterious similarities to Afro-Asiatic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew which have never been explained, and again I’ve been into this before.

All that said, this isn’t what I’m going to focus on today. Rather, the activity of learning Gàidhlig just as Sarada is learning Italian has highlighted the possibility of Italo-Celtic as a division of the KENTUM branch of IE, and in fact if you go back far enough they’re remarkably similar, particularly if you take out the bizarre Semitic tendency in Celtic.

The Italic languages are peculiar in that they’ve flourished twice. They’re the only example I know of a language group which developed into a whole range of spoken languages, all but one of which died out, only for that sole survivor to become another whole range. That was of course Latin, and its descendants the Romance languages, including Italian itself and also Catalan, Provençal, Romanian, French, Castilian and various others. Traces of the older Italic languages still exist in Italian dialects but the only one to emerge and spread from the Italian peninsula was Latin itself. The others were Oscan, Umbrian, South Picene, Faliscan, and possibly Ligurian, Sicel, Nuragic, Raetic and Venetic. There were also other less-closely related languages spoken before the founding of Rome on the peninsula and associate islands, including the unclassified Etruscan, which was definitely not IE but whose actual allegiance can’t be traced definitively, and also Illyrian languages and Greek, as well as Punic, an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in North Afrika. The actual Italic speakers had migrated southward from the trans Alpine region, and this is where the Celtic connection becomes apparent.

The area north of the Alps was Celtic at the time, insofar as the Celts ever really existed in their own right, so either the speakers of the Proto-Italic language were in contact with the speakers of Proto-Celtic or they actually were the speakers of Proto-Celtic, id est they were actually the same language. I’m going to use Latin spelling here as I write the numbers from one to ten in Proto-Italic:

oinos, duo, tres, quettuor, quenque, sex, septem, octo, novem, decem.

Here’s the same in Celtic using the same spelling:

oinos, duau, tris, quetuares, quenque, suexs, sextam, oxtu, navam, decam.

I’d say these are close enough to be in the same language spoken in different accents. Proto-Celtic has a more archaic flavour to me, and the presence of the A’s in “navam” and “decam” give them a kind of Sanskrit flavour –  नव (nava) and दश (daśa) being the same words in that language. That doesn’t mean the rest of the two languages were as similar. For instance, even now some Q-Celtic uses a dual number – a form like the plural but for when there are two of something – but Italic has never had that, although it has traces such as “ambas/-os” in Castilian for “both”, and of course similar traces exist in English. That said, the languages are unusually similar.

You might be wondering how this can be reconstructed since this was all going on rather a long time ago. The answer is that Italic languages did in fact often have a written form, having alphabets derived from Greek, usually via Etruscan which was the high civilisation on the peninsula at the time. Each actually had a different script. Consequently it can be seen that there are a number of similar languages which have certain things in common and one-way processes can be identified. Italic is not puzzling in this respect. Celtic is somewhat more confusing, because the only surviving Celtic languages are the ones spoken in the British Isles and Breton, which is descended from a British Celtic language, and those only date from the first millennium CE in written form. There are older examples but these tend to be rather limited, consisting of short inscriptions. On the Iberian peninsula, five scripts existed which seem to have been derived directly from Phœnician. They tended to be syllabaries rather than alphabets, i.e. one character per syllable. Elsewhere, Celtic languages actually used Italic scripts, which considering they were in the same area is unsurprising but it illustrates the close contact between the two groups.

Turning to more general vocabulary, similarities are sometimes obscured by semantic drift, id est, changes in the meanings of words, as for example happened with our “silly”, “nice” and “gay”. For instance, the Proto-Celtic word for “snake” is “natrixs” but the Latin “natrix” means “water snake”, the Proto-Italic word being “anγwis”, which became the Latin “anguis”, which now means “slow worm”, and later the word for eel, “anguilla”. The vocabulary is in both cases also, unsurprisingly, both less “Latin” and less “Celtic” in character because it retains words from PIE which later disappeared and may also have picked up words from the Germanic tribes living nearby. Hence Latin “filia” for daughter is a replacement for a word closer to “daughter” which in Oscan, for example, is “futir”. Even so, various words are quite close or identical:

Proto-Italic	Proto-Celtic	English
tu	tu	thou
is	es	he
ques	quis	who
quid	quis	what
ne	ne	not
alios	alios	other
anγustos	angus	narrow
tenuis	tanauios	thin
viros	viros	man
mater	matir	mother
pater	φatir	father
piscis	φescos	fish
co	cu	dog
palma (palm)	φlama	hand
auzis	ausos	ear
cord	cridiom	heart
cano	caneti	sing

There are many more examples, and this is not cherry-picked, although the words are from a core vocabulary which tends to change less than average. What I have done is ignore vowel length and adjusted both sets of spelling to a kind of classical Latin standard, which brings out how similar Proto-Celtic and Latin really are.

However, it’s uncontroversial that Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic are related. This is already established. A proper study would compare it with the successful Germanic branch of the KENTUM group. Fortunately this can be done. Here are the numbers from one to ten in Proto-Germanic:

ainaz, twai, þriz, fedwor, fimf, sehs, sebum, ahtou, newun, tehun.

These are, as could be expected, somewhat similar to Italic and Celtic but don’t have the uncanny affinity shown between those two. As for the list above, the Proto-Germanic version looks like this:

þu, iz, hwaz, hwat, ne, allaz, anguz, þunnuz. weraz, moder, fader, fiskaz, hundaz, handaz, auso, herto, singwaną.

In this case, though, the words selected are synonyms whose alternate forms are not found, and as Germanic language users ourselves we can spot some of these, such as “allaz” and “anguz” for “other” and “narrow”, both of which already existed in Proto-Germanic in recognisable forms as “anþeraz” and “narwaz”. This doesn’t happen so much with Proto-Italic and Celtic. Germanic is distinctive in having a large number of words not closely connected to other IE words. Apparent examples here are “hand” and “sing”. But it could still be that Germanic is simply the outlier and Celtic and Italic developed along more typical lines. Except that this isn’t so.

As well as the similarities between words, the two languages also share other features not found in Germanic or any other IE languages. For instance, the superlative, expressed in English by “-est”, and similarly in, for example, Greek, is expressed in Italic and Celtic using an ending based on “-isṃmo-“, as in Italian “fortissimo” and Old Irish “sinem” – “oldest”. The subjunctive mood of the verb is descended from the proto-IE optative (“would that it. . .”) in both cases, which is highly unusual. The genitive uses an I in its ending in both cases too, and there are several other grammatical similarities. Again, these could be primitive features which survived in Italic, Celtic and nowhere else rather than direct connections between the two, but something like the adaptation of the optative to the subunctive isn’t an archaism or that mood would have been like that in Sanskrit, for example, and it isn’t.

The hypothesis became popular from the 1860s and was attacked successfully by the Harvard linguist Calvert Watkins in 1966, so it could be that my attachment to the idea is anachronistic. The problem is supposed to be that the features held in common each connect only one Italic and one Celtic language, and not the same pairs at any point. This is interesting for another reason. Celtic languages are fairly well-known for falling into two subgroups: P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. Hence the Welsh for “five” is “pump” but the Irish equivalent is “cúig”, and the Old Irish for “son” is MAQ, later “mac”, but the Welsh word is “mab”. For a while it was thought that this division merely occurred in the British Isles, but it turns out that continental Celtic languages were also divided in this way. Something similar happens in today’s Italic languages with, for example, the Romanian “patru” for Italian “quattro”, although this development occurred after Latin split up. It also, though, took place in the older Italic languages. Oscan and Umbrian use P where Latin and Faliscan use QU. Hence a weird division can be made among Italo-Celtic where Q languages include Italian, French, Manx and Irish, among others, whereas P languages include Breton, Welsh, Oscan and Umbrian, reflecting a tendency in the entire group for this to happen, as it has in Romanian for example. However, all these similarities don’t mean that Romanian and Welsh have a common ancestor in Oscan, and likewise some of the other tendencies might follow from a pre-existent state which trends in that direction. It’s similar to the phenomenon where both English and German started off with a long I pronounced “ee” and a long U pronounced “oo”, which however became “ai” and “au” independently: min – mine/mein; hus – house/Haus.

Nonetheless, I’m not writing this with the courage of my convictions and that long list of identical and very similar words is hard to discount. This part of western Eurasia can be simplified into a series of peninsulas. There’s Scandinavia in the north, the main part of Western to Central Europe further south and the separate peninsulas of Iberia, Italy and Greece stretching into the Med. The Greeks and Illyrians occupied the last and are not so relevant to the situation. The Germanic peoples originate in Scandinavia, a peninsula which provides an obvious stronger separation from the others, and the characteristics of our languages clearly show the influence of the Uralic languages, for instance in the absence of a separate inflected future tense. It makes sense that Germanic languages would be the outliers in this respect. Then, further south lie the Tumulus and then Urnfield Cultures of the Bronze Age, itself followed by the clearly Celtic Hallstatt Culture. The peoples of the first two of these came to radiate south into Iberia and Italy, but there was a period during which the Etruscans dominated in Italy and only later came to cohabit with the Italic-speaking peoples. These clearly came from the north, trans Alpine region, and the Alps clearly constitute a barrier between the Italics and the Celts. What seems to have happened, or might have anyway, is that the Italo-Celtic speaking people north of the Alps and also spreading into Iberia got separated from the Italic speakers of Italy, and the languages started to diverge, but it clearly makes complete sense that the Urnfield Culture, lasting from 1300 – 750 BCE, or put another way, the five and a half centuries before Romulus and Remus, spoke a group of dialects which were ancestral to both Irish and Portuguese, as it were, along with everything therebetwixt.

These two branches fared very differently. Italic languages kind of triumphed, although most of the first season became subsumed into Latin dialects, and in the form of Latin came to dominate first much of Europe and then the wider globe, such as South and Central America, the Philippines, the former French colonies, and indirectly in the form of English with its extensive French borrowings. Celtic had a very successful period during which it was spoken in the British Isles, Gaul, Iberia, Central Europe and Anatolia, but was then eclipsed by first Latin and then Germanic, leaving it spoken only in Brittany, Ireland and the west of Great Britain and nearby islands, although it did also reach Nova Scotia and Patagonia in the end, in small communities. The grammar of the two halves today shows almost nothing recognisable in common except for things like the occasional letter I in unexpected places in Q-Celtic, but the vocabulary is still faintly connected. This, however, is unclear because of the influence of the Church, leading to loanwords from Ecclesiastical Latin. The Celts are also outside the Empire. The languages were spoken and finally throve best where Latin was not spoken. Their distribution was complementary, and this complementarity followed class and ethnic divisions as well as geographic ones.

The Tumulus Culture is named after the practice of interring bodies in mounds of earth. This practice seems to have spread from the Kurgans of the area north of the Black Sea, named after similar structures, who are widely believed to be the original Proto-IE speakers, so it makes sense that these people would’ve been speaking the common ancestor of Celtic and Italic languages. Their successors, the Urnfield Culture, are named after their tradition of cremating their dead and burying them in urns in fields. If these people were indeed Celts, there may a direct line between this practice at the Cremation Act 1902, which legalised crematoria in Wales, England and Scotland. This act was passed after a famous test case where in 1884 an eccentric Welsh medical doctor, Dr William Price, cremated the body of his five-month old son on a funeral pyre and was tried for it. He was re-enacting a Druidic practice in doing so and was cremated himself a few years later in 1893. Hence our current practice of widespread cremation in Britain may be directly descended from the Urnfield Culture.

At this point, I should make it clear that I know practically nothing about archæology, so I’m venturing well beyond my comfort zone here and you should take what I’m saying with a larger than usual pinch of salt. I should also point out that I don’t in fact know why Celts are not considered an ethnicity beyond a very sketchy idea that they are generally just what the Romans and Greeks thought of as the “not-we’s”,which can’t be quite true or it wouldn’t explain Germans.

The idea that the Urnfield Culture is the original Celtic culture, or Italo-Celtic, is only one of several competing theories about the origin of the Celts. There are also “central” and “western” theories. The western theory is that Celtic languages began along the Atlantic coast and were used as an auxiliary language between traders. This then spread eastward. This is interesting because it seems to imply that the areas where Celtic languages are currently spoken were close to their original territory. The idea of Atlantic Europe is anthropological and in current terms includes Portugal, the British Isles, Northwestern France, the Low Countries, the hinterland of the German coast, Jutland and Norway. Interestingly from a British perspective, it has a Southwest-Northeast orientation like divisions on our own island. It used to be claimed that there was considerable genetic unity among the humans of this area, but in the case of the British Isles any sign of this is obscured by the presence of the R1b haplogroup, of which I have a subclade. This originated from the Yamnaya in the Copper Age, who were what used to be called the Aryans. That is, they were the original PIE speakers. They’re the fair-skinned lactose-tolerant people who tend to occupy Europe.

The “central” theory is that Proto-Celtic arose in Gaul and radiated thence, which makes it easier to account for the similarities in ancient Celtic languages over a large area. It also means that the Celts began close to Italy, which means the Italo-Celtic hypothesis can be maintained more easily.

One thing I haven’t done here is mention the ancient Celtic languages much. The oldest known written Celtic is Lepontic, found in Cisalpine Gaul from about two centuries after the foundation of Rome. There are also Celtiberian, Gaulish, British, Galatian (spoken in what became Turkey – it’s been disputed whether this is a truly Celtic language), Noric and Gallaic. Celtiberian in particular is of interest here as it’s a Q-Celtic language which seems to be ancestral to Irish and therefore also Manx and Gàidhlig, confirming the origin story of the Irish that they came from Spain. There’s actually a fair amount of continuous text available in Celtiberian because of the Botorrita Plaques, which are bilingual Latin and Celtiberian law codes dating from the fifth century Anno Urbis Conditæ. This is a fairly raw transliteration of one of the plaques (the language did not use the Latin alphabet):

trikantam : bergunetakam : togoitos-kue : sarnikio (:) kue : sua : kombalkez : nelitomnekue [: to-ver-daunei : litom : nekue : daunei : litom : nekue : masnai : dizaunei : litom : soz : auguaresta[lo] : damai : uta : oskues : stena : verzoniti : silabur : sleitom : konsklitom : gabizetikantom [:] sanklistara : otanaum : togoitei : eni : uta : oskuez : boustom-ve : korvinom-vemakasiam-ve : ailam-ve : ambidiseti : kamanom : usabituz : ozas : sues : sailo : kusta : bizetuz : iomasekati : [a]mbidingounei : stena : es : vertai : entara : tiris : matus : dinbituz : neito : trikantameni : oisatuz : iomui : listas : titas : zizonti : somui : iom : arznas : bionti : iom : kustaikosarznas : kuati : ias : ozias : vertatosue : temeiue : robiseti : saum : dekametinas : datuz : someieni touzei : iste : ankios : iste : esankios : uze : areitena : sarnikiei : akainakubosnebintor : togoitei : ios : vramtiom-ve : auzeti : aratim-ve : dekametam : datuz : iom : togoitos-kuesarnikio-kue : aiuizas : kombalkores : aleites : iste : ires : ruzimuz : Ablu : ubokum

Gallaic was spoken in Gallicia north of what is now Portugal. Only the occasional word has been recorded, but there are traces in placenames in Galicia and Portugal. This is somewhat complicated by the Celtic Britons who settled there after the fall of Rome, although their influence was minor. Galician and Portuguese both have some Celtic vocabulary, which is presumably from Gallaic.

Gaulish is well-attested. There are more than five gross Gaulish inscriptions and French has more Celtic loanwords than any other non-Celtic language has. It had essentially the same vowels as Classical Latin and the main difference in the consonants were the presence of velar fricatives “kh” and “gh”, and the affricate “ts”. It had seven cases, including the instrumental which had been lost in Italic but does exist in Germanic. Unlike the living Celtic languages or Latin, word order was subject-verb-object, like English. Gaulish is also quite close to British itself. The general impression given by Gaulish is that it’s basically Latin with different words and endings, it not having any of the peculiarities one tends to associate with the surviving Celtic languages such as the confounding periphrastic approach, unusual syntax and consonant mutation. All of that appeared later. Latin and Greek are only distantly related to each other but their general approach to grammar is very similar. The same approach is found in Gaulish.

There are said to be more living speakers of Celtic languages today than there were in Roman or pre-Roman times, so in a way this is their heyday, if that’s true. I think it probably helps to know that there’s a host of lurking cognates to Romance words in Gàidhlig even though the spelling is, though to some extent justified, really annoying. I’ve decided, sight unseen, to reproduce the above list of cognates in Gàidhlig once again, in the form of a table with Italian and English equivalents:

Italian	Gàidhlig	English
tu	thu	thou
lui, esso	e	he
chi	cò	who
che	dè	what
non	chan eil	(is) not
altro	eile	other
stretto	caol	narrow
sottile	caol	thin
uomo	fear	man
madre	màthair	mother
padre	athair	father
pesce	iasg	fish
cane	cù	dog
mano	làmh	hand
orecchio	cluais	ear
cuore	cridhe	heart
cantare	seinn	sing

This isn’t very promising, I have to say. I don’t know how Welsh fares here, although I get the impression it’s less peculiar than Gàidhlig. At least the spelling is clearer.

To conclude then, I wonder if the Romance languages had been as marginalised as the Celtic whether they would have changed in equally peculiar ways. I now realise how little I know about Celtic and the Celts, which may in fact not really have much in common, and I also don’t know why it’s often denied that there is even such a thing as Celtic identity, and what political significance that idea has. And finally, after looking at all this evidence and making a cursory attempt to test it rather than seeking confirmation bias, I definitely accept that Italo-Celtic is a valid grouping of IE languages, more closely bound than either is to Germanic or Illyrian, and that in the late Bronze Age they were a single language with dialects, in close proximity to other languages which were related but not mutually intelligible with it. And I don’t know why anyone would claim the contrary, but then I’m not a linguist.

Theory

Let me get one thing out of the way before anything else. I would be the first to claim that human thought has biasses which prevent us from being neutral or objective, and that the specifics of how natural science is practiced create other biasses within it. Robert A Heinlein once said “man (sic) is not a rational animal but a rationalizing animal,” and I agree passionately with and have tried to live my life in accordance with that. I would also say that there’s a difference between scientific and non-scientific usages of the word “theory”, and the second tends to be unfairly deprecated, but confusion between these two often leads to misconceptions. This doesn’t mean that the scientific, more rigorous, use of the word is more valid, but the distinction is there and it should be known.

Looking at some other uses of the word, there are:

• The colloquial, conversational use.
• The scientific use.
• Music theory.
• Colour theory.
• Political theory.
• Driving theory.
• Cultural theory.
• Gender theory.
• Literary theory.
• Mathematical and logical theory.

I actually make some effort not to use the word “theory” when that isn’t what I mean, and to replace it with “hypothesis”. A hypothesis is a conjecture which has not been tested, and doesn’t become a theory until it gets through a test which could prove it wrong, and perhaps have got through that test several times carried out by several people. In order for it to reach even that stage, it needs to be definite enough for one to be able to articulate clearly beforehand what it would take to refute it. It’s particularly bad to modify an hypothesis to explain away apparent refutations, although that does allow one to come up with better hypotheses if one gets lucky. It has to be specific, and it has independent and dependent variables. The independent variable is the part of an experiment which can be changed and tested, so for example you might have a hypothesis that water boils at a lower temperature under lower pressure and use a vacuum pump to pump some of the air out of a sealed chamber, then use a barometer and a thermometer to measure the heated vessel of water and its surroundings. The dependent variable is the boiling point of water under lower pressure, and the independent variable is the pressure inside the chamber. This is what it takes to qualify something as an hypothesis.

A theory, in scientific terms, is what, if anything, comes out of the other end of this process, which must be practiced more than once by different people in different places while attempting to duplicate the conditions as closely as possible. For this to happen, experiments need to be written up carefully and in detail. Ideally, they should also be carried out by people who are dissimilar to the people who originally did the experiments and are still competent. Without taking up a position on the efficacy or otherwise of homœopathy, for example, many studies lack ecological validity because they don’t involve the kind of consultation homœopaths undertake before they prescribe remedies, if that’s what they are, and consequently the .fact that there is absolutely no trace of the substance left in the preparation must continue to be taken as irrelevant until there can be proper dialogue between homœopaths and skeptics. For the record, I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that homœopathy can work, but I cannot definitively say that it doesn’t unless a well-designed scientific procedure has been reproduced which is also ecologically valid which refutes it, and it is not a scientific position to assert that it doesn’t or does work until that’s been done, and as far as I know it never has. Hence my suspicion that it doesn’t work, like that of other people, including medical scientists, is not scientific and not based on a specific theory. However, in case you’re interested, that’s why I’m not a homœopath, among other reasons (e.g. that it isn’t vegan), so I just avoid it and withhold judgement.

A scientific theory is an explanation for a phenomenon which has been tested repeatedly in the manner described above and has not been refuted. There has been some controversy in the history of science regarding exactly what the process is, partly resulting from the problem that inductive inference is not strictly logical. Just because something has always happened doesn’t mean it always will, and actual logic is structured such that it’s impossible to draw false conclusions from true premises, which means that there is no logical link between cause and effect, which appears to destroy the scientific endeavour entirely. Of course, few people actually follow this through in their everyday lives because of the high degree of uncertainty it would bring. One of the breakthroughs Karl Popper made was to come up with an account of the scientific method which didn’t use inductive inference.

According to Popper, theories are simply held until they’re refuted. I’ve possibly gone a bit too far in accepting a kind of caricature of his beliefs in this area because I hold that all scientific theories are wrong. He did once make an off-the-cuff remark about the probability of arriving at a correct scientific theory being zero, but I think this was probably meant to be a joke. The basic idea is that scientific theories are simply used as practical ways of engaging with the world, such as building TV sets and internal combustion engines to mention two technological applications of theories, until something else comes along and proves them false. That doesn’t actually mean anything will ever do that, but then the question arises of whether the reason it doesn’t is because it’s literally impossible or is just because nobody happens to have come across a way of refuting it. To me, Popper is a somewhat questionable person because he threw his lot in with the likes of Hayek, although he didn’t seem to be as right wing, and although I don’t mean to be ad hominem about it, if his thought forms a consistent whole, this would for me cast doubt upon his views on the scientific method. His actually articulated political philosophy is akin to that of many right wing thinkers, that the existence of ideology is inherently oppressive, and I think this leads to being in denial about implicit ideologies and is a factor in the persistence of mature capitalism. Relating this back to the idea of theory, it seems mainly to amount to the idea that there can be rigorous scientific theories but no social or political theories of the same kind, and therefore that attempting to apply a political “theory” will always lead to oppression because it will be seriously wrong and not even a practical means of running a society. This is of course mainly aimed at Marxism.

Speaking of Marxism, another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, has always struck me as a closet Marxist. Incidentally, I’m apparently two degrees of separation from him – we have (I presume he’s dead) a mutual acquaintance. This might mean that I’ve been subject to some kind of groupthink with respect to his beliefs. I vaguely recollect that I’ve already talked about him on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail again, but his basic view is that science normally proceeds with entrenched theories held by people with experience and reputation which are only replaced when they are. When this replacement happens, it’s called a scientific revolution and science does then operate according to Popper’s view, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Hence belief in the luminiferous æther persisted with more and more absurd properties being assigned to it until its existence was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment. This reminds me of when I used to use a twin tub to do the washing and various things went wrong with it until I was having to unscrew the central column of the washing machine bit, wheel it out to the back yard, upend it to drain out the water and put the column back in. It used to take me four hours of constant attention. Eventually a housemate pointed out that it would be easier to take it to the laundrette, so that’s what I did, but the point is that the difficulties had steadily accumulated without me really thinking of what the alternative might be until I reached a stage of considerable silliness. This happens in science as well. My personal view is that non-baryonic dark matter is an example of this.

On a somewhat related matter, science can sometimes get itself into a position where it becomes difficult to test its propositions using current technology. This happens with particle physics and accelerators, for example, in that it seems to have become impossible to build a sufficiently powerful particle accelerator to test certain hypotheses about the nature of matter. Another example is string theory, which seems to be untestable. However, in such circumstances ways are sometimes eventually found to test these theories, either through ingenuity or better devices for doing so. I’ve mentioned this before as well.

The colloquial looseness of the word “theory” is particularly prone to being misunderstood in the area of biology, where evolutionary theory is often described as “just a theory” and sometimes accused of being untestable. I want to address this by using the idea of “cell theory”. Cell theory is a genuine theory which is much less questioned by anyone than the theory of evolution, and is really just the idea that all living things are composed of cells, which are the basic units of life. As stated, this is actually wrong, and there are other ways in which it could be questioned, but it is basically true. Specifically, viruses, if they’re considered to be alive, are not made up of cells, there are syncytia, which are continuous bodies of cytoplasm with multiple nuclei and other organelles through them, fungi being an example, and what we think of as single-celled organisms could alternatively be thought of as organisms whose bodies are not divided up into cells and it’s a kind of useful fiction to consider an amœba and a white blood cell to be the same kind of thing because the former is a whole organism whereas the latter is a small part of a much larger one. It’s also not known if any shadow biosphere which might exist on or in Earth is made up of cells, and then of course there’s the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe, if it exists, being very differently constituted. However, all of these things are details and they don’t really contradict the general truth of the theory. They don’t mean that if you come across a tree, say, or a jellyfish they won’t turn out to be made of cells. What happens is that theories become refined with scientific change. Cell theory is a theory which is also an approximate fact. The fact that most large plants and animals are made up of cells has been established and remains the case.

Applying this to evolution, yes evolution is a theory, but it’s a theory which is also a fact. There are refinements and controversies within it. For instance, Richard Dawkins and others are very keen on individual gene selection, where they see genes as the basic unit competing for survival, and tend to reject group selection, where the survival of individual genes is influenced by the evolution of groups of organisms. Another example is punctuated equilibrium, which is similar in a way to Kuhn’s idea, that a species stays stable and similar to its ancestors for a while, then suddenly undergoes rapid evolution in response to changing circumstances. There are also the details of how genes are represented, in the form of nucleic acids, and how they’re switched on or off, epigenetics, none of which was known in the early decades of evolutionary theory, and there are clearly exceptions to evolution in the form of planned breeding, genetic modification and the horizontal transmission of genes via viruses between unrelated organisms, but again, none of that contradicts the general theory of evolution by natural selection.

The refinement of theories can also be seen in the progress from Kepler through Newton to Einstein. Kepler was able to work out that the planets in this Solar System obeyed certain physical laws in that they moved in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus, faster when they were closer to the Sun and slower when they were further away, and that the time taken to orbit the Sun is proportionate to the square root of the cube of the mean distance from it. From this, Newton was able to generalise the laws of motion and gravity, which are considerably counterintuitive because we’re so used to air resistance and friction and don’t realise that the way things move on a planet with a substantial atmosphere is a special case. For instance, it may not be obvious that a moving object will travel in a straight line without changing its velocity unless other forces are acting upon it because they nearly always are in our experience. The preceding view is Aristotelian, and effectively applies to driving theory because of braking distances, for example. However, Newtonian physics also applies to driving theory because of the difficulty of using non-anti-lock brakes on ice or a wet road, at which point Aristotelian physics ceases to be applicable. A motorist trying to brake on ice has entered a Newtonian paradigm, and road traffic collisions and other mishaps illustrate very clearly that Newton’s theory is also a fact.

Moving beyond Newton to Einstein, it became clear that in some circumstances the laws of motion didn’t work. In particular, Mercury’s orbit precesses in such a way that it appears to imply that there’s another planet further in whose gravity pulls it about, and the Michelson-Morley Experiment shows that light travels at the same speed when it’s moving with the orbital motion of Earth, against that motion or at right angles to it. Hence further refinement was needed, and it came in the form of the general and special theories of relativity. There are various ways to demonstrate that relativity is true, some more arcane than others. For instance, subatomic particles are often unstable and have a half-life in the same way as radioisotopes. In a particle accelerator, these lives are longer according to how fast they’re moving. One of the starkest examples of why relativity is true is found in satellite navigation systems, which again apply to driving in the form of GPS and satnav, although interestingly they’ve been used by the military since the early 1960s CE. GPS satellites orbit at 14 000 kph and are in orbits where Earth’s gravity is weaker than on the surface. Both of these influence how fast the atomic clocks on board work, to the extent that they run around 38 microseconds faster per day than a clock stationary relative to Earth’s surface at sea level. Light travels more than eleven kilometres in that time. Therefore, the clocks in the satellites have to be adjusted to take this into consideration, or the error in locating a GPS receiver would accumulate by several miles every day. This also helps planes land safely in bad weather as it enables them to locate the runway in fog. Hence again it’s theory which is also factual. Some of us live in hope that a loophole will one day be found in the details of special relativity which will enable spaceships to reach the stars within a reasonable amount of time. If that happens, the fact will remain that most of the time relativity works fine. An exception needs to be found, and this may be present, for instance, in the space between two cosmic strings, which is however fine for moving between cosmic strings but not much else. If relativity was wrong, light would move more slowly if an observer was moving, and a moving torch would add its speed to the speed of its light, but this doesn’t happen. Also, Mercury’s orbit would either be different or there would be another planet orbiting closer to the Sun.

There are, however, wider usages of the word “theory” than just in science, as listed above. In this broader sense, a theory is a rationally-held abstract model of a phenomenon. It’s probably this usage which leads to confusion. In mathematics and logic, theory has to have a different meaning than in the other sciences because it can’t really depend on observation and testing in the same way. There are conjectures in mathematics, for example, that every even number is the sum of two primes, which has turned out to be the case for every example known but may at some point turn out not to be, and Fermat’s Last Theorem, mentioned here, that aⁿ+bⁿ=cⁿ is false for integer n>2. Entertaining 2109 as a real thing momentarily, and who knows, it may be, revealing the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to the psychical researchers in Cheshire would’ve disrupted our timeline, where Andrew Wiles proved it in 1994. The difference between mathematical theories and those of empirical science is that the former can be completely proved whereas the latter can only continue to be corroborated until proof of the contrary. Having said that, geometry in particular has turned out to be empirical rather than mathematical because of the claim in Euclidean geometry that parallel lines stay the same distance apart. They don’t. If they did, one consequence would be that GPS systems wouldn’t be prone to the same kind of error. Hence geometry does depend on observation and testing even though it went on for thousands of years before anyone realised it. This could also be true of logic. For instance, logic has the Law Of Excluded Middle and Non-Contradiction, which assert respectively that either-or always applies, such as something either being true or false, and that something cannot simultaneously both be and not be so. Quantum physics and some eastern philosophies suggest otherwise, and there are other kinds of logic which allow more than two truth-values, which may be in different orders incidentally, suggesting that there is more like a figurative hyperspace for truth, falsehood and others than a simple line along which truth and falsehood vary. Again, this has partly been refuted by observation. Hence mathematics and logic may not be as safe from refutation as they seem.

“Gender theory” is a polemical term rather than one actually applied by those who are said to practice it. Although there are such things as queer theory and feminist theory, this term actually refers to a purported conspiracy, sometimes seen as part of cultural Marxism when that is used as a label for a conspiracy theory. Phrases translatable as “gender theory” arose outside the Anglosphere and purports to refer to the idea that gender can be chosen at will and is being forced on children and society in general, and also aims to erode the idea of gender. This is a use of the word “theory” in a colloquial sense, because of course political and religious conservatives would assert that the reality is the biologically-based gender binary, so gender “theory” is not intended to refer to a set of beliefs which have been arrived at scientifically, unless the person involved distrusts science more generally. In fact any theories associated with gender with scientific support contradict the straw man created by this conspiracy theory.

And that’s another thing. In order to be scientific, and maybe they needn’t be, conspiracy theories would have to be able to make predictions and be open to falisification. There would need to be a test which would, if failed, demonstrate them to be false. Since there are so many of them, it’s hard to know where to start and also unfair to generalise. Moreover, this is a colloquial use of the word and it may be unfair to hold them to scientific standards. Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. For instance, there really was a consortium of filament light bulb manufacturers which deliberately made them less durable than they were originally, and some of the longest lasting bulbs date from before this time, such as the Centennial Light, which has been on continuously since the first year of the twentieth Christian century. Although investigation has revealed that this really did happen, there is a bit of a problem relying on the existence of really old working light bulbs to attempt to confirm this, as there’s a built-in bias towards older light bulbs from the fact that if they’d lasted a long time they’d be more likely to be older. For all we know there are filament bulbs manufactured in 2011, the last year they were produced, sitting in new old stock and likely to last another century. Except that we basically do know there aren’t because the conspiracy was real.

Something like colour or music theory is different again. They seem to refer to a structure of concepts placed on top of something we are unable to perceive in particular ways, so they’re anchored in an unchangeable realm and represent various networks of ideas on top of them. For instance, complementary colours and the colour wheel make sense to us because of the nature of our sense of vision. Most humans have three types of cone cells and one type of rod cell, each with peak sensitivity to a different hue. Although they’re thought of as red, green, blue and monochrome, the peak sensitivity of the first is actually in the yellow range. Red cone cells are less common than the others among mammals. To most mammals, red berries such as tomatoes and holly are black, so their complementary “colour” would be white, but not for us. Likewise, if an animal can see ultraviolet as an additive primary colour, i.e. they have an ultraviolet cone cell but no red, the complementary colour to ultraviolet would be aqua, which would be equivalent to white. It isn’t clear to me how a colour wheel would work in these circumstances because for us, violet and purple are similar but in fact violet is almost a primary colour but purple is secondary. I suspect that this is because violet wavelengths are half that of red, so our red cone cells are triggered by alternate wavefronts of violet light, raising the question of whether ultraviolet would look yellowish or greenish to us, and on top of that whether we could see yellow-blue, which to us is impossible but is possibly what ultraviolet “ought” to look like. Hence colour theory depends on our physicality and can be thought of scientifically but something else has been built on top of our nature which is not, strictly speaking, universal.

Concepts are also theory-laden, as the phrase has it, and this erodes the distinction between what we perceive as factual and what we theorise about. We bring assumptions with us because it’s impossible to function otherwise. In a professional capacity, a psychiatrist of the old school might have been trained in Freudian analysis and look at a client’s interactions in terms of, say, cigarette-smoking being a phallic symbol rather than a physical addiction, so the behaviour they see in front of them might be interpreted completely differently. It affects all of us though. There are two kinds of theory-ladenness: semantic and perceptual. For the former, the words we use are based on pre-existing assumptions, hypotheses and theories. For instance, Brownian motion is the tendency of small particles in fluids to be battered asymmetrically by molecules and atoms, making them jiggle. This was first observed in pollen grains and thought to be something to do with them being alive, so there could be a confirmation bias there that everything which shows this kind of motion is living. The way I’ve explained Brownian motion, however, depends on atomic theory in a similar way. A related problem is that the theory to be tested can be assumed beforehand. Semantically, there is another kind of issue. For instance, temperature and heat are sometimes seen as interchangeable, and in an experimental write-up, temperature might be misreported or even misread as a result. In fact, temperature is a measure of the mean kinetic energy in the molecules or atoms of a substance whereas heat is a measure of the total kinetic energy. This comes into play with the upper atmosphere, which reaches a temperature of 2 500°C but a thermometer of the kind we’re used to employing will measure that as well below freezing because of the sparseness of the ions in that region. In some senses it’s actually meaningless that the atmosphere has that high a temperature but in others it is important.

There’s a well-known psychological experiment where some psychologists had themselves admitted to a psychiatric hospital by faking symptoms which did not correspond to any particular diagnosis. Once there, it took a long time for the staff to recognise that they were not mentally ill, even though they ceased to exhibit these symptoms immediately after admission, and there was also a hierarchical order to the people who realised they weren’t “ill”, starting with the lowest-paid and least professional workers and ending with the consultants. I would call that a good example of theory-ladenness, and it’s also interesting that education in a particular speciality actually conceals the apparent reality from those who ought to be experts. However, there is another possible interpretation of this experiment that it actually means that some psychiatric patients are not as they seem. This doesn’t mean they don’t correspond to the definition of mental illness, but it’s possible that society forces them to act in a certain way consciously because they lack a coherent rôle in it. This tallies with the social model of disability, that society disables people rather than disability being an inherent organic property of the individual.

There’s a tendency to think of theory as in opposition to practice. This is indeed sometimes the case. However, it’s equally true that we can’t avoid forming pre-conceptions, which are theories in a looser, non-scientific, sense, before we do things. Another problem, though, is that although there are perfectly valid non-scientific uses of the word “theory”, these can lead to misunderstandings as with the idea that evolutionary theory is “just a theory”, when it’s actually a fact as well-established as cell theory. At the same time, I wish the other senses of the word were more respected, because they are not in some sloppy realm where things are not thought through much of the time but constitute a firm basis. If I want to create a harmonious arrangement of clothing by dressing in complementary colours, the fact that that depends on most of us having only three types of cone cell doesn’t help anyone. I could insist, for example, that I’m wearing ultraviolet tights which look black to humans and pair them with a “complementary” teal skirt, but that’s not the same as wearing purple tights and a green skirt. In a way, it’d be good if we had more than one word for theory, but on the whole it’s futile for a sole individual to attempt to change language. Therefore we should really just be careful to think through how we are using that word and take steps to signal the distinction in other ways.

Modern Latin

Latin is in a sense a dead language, and in at least two other senses a living one. It’s a dead language in the sense that any children today growing up speaking Latin as their only first language are likely either to be subject to questionable parenting or have parents who have ended up speaking Latin to each other due to not being fluent in each others’ languages. There are a few people who speak Sanskrit, and a few more who speak Esperanto, as a first language, so it’s conceivable that there’s a teensy number who speak Latin that way too. I’m not one to judge such parenting decisions, but even so I’d hope that people who do opt to bring up their children speaking Latin at least make the additional decision to make them bilingual. Judging by my own experience in bringing children up speaking languages other than the dominant ones in their community, English is the language, French and Spanish (not so much Castilian) are also spoken by people around them, but German was just this funny noise I made at them which didn’t really catch on, except that it’s alleged that our daughter does speak German in her sleep.

But how is Latin alive? In at least two ways, as I said. Firstly, looking at the map above, most of the western half of the continental Eurasian portion of it still more or less speaks Latin. Every generation would have understood what the previous one was saying all the way back to the point where they would’ve been speaking Latin, or a dialect of it, at the time represented by this map, which is CCXVII ANNO DOMINI, or DCCCLXX ANNO URBIS CONDITÆ. The kind of prescriptive “correction” of pronunciation and grammar rife in probably most human communities would’ve been going on back then. In Italia and Dacia, parents would’ve been having a go at their kids for pronouncing C as “ch” before E and I or missing the S or M off certain words, and in Hispania perhaps complaining about this new trend of saying “you will be” instead of “you are”. Then eventually they would’ve given up and died, and only the church people and nobles would have noticed anything unusual about the language they were using, until eventually they were calling their languages Italiano, Português, Castellano, Français, Català, limba română and so on (not sure about capitalisation here), and couldn’t understand Latin very well at all.

Latin, though, was and is still alive. It’s still spoken fluently, for example, in the Roman Catholic Church and much Latin terminology is used in technical discourse. I always write prescriptions in Latin and British herbalists communicate with each other in the likes of Italy and Czechia in Latin. I’ve done so myself, although my attempt at talking to a herbalist in Rome using Latin didn’t work at all. I can look into the back garden and see Euphorbia helioscopia and Fragaria vesca aplenty, and don’t even bother to think what they might be called in English most of the time. The first of these, of course, is Latinised Greek and therefore possibly a poor choice but the point is I do this, as do many others, and this is the legacy of the Roman Empire.

However, the question I want to ask here is this: what would Latin be like today if it had continued to be a vernacular language? Ecclesiastical Latin survived of course, but that has some peculiar features such as the palatisation of C and G before E and I (to “ch” and “j” sounds) which even now one Romance language at least, Sardinian, doesn’t always have. This form of Latin probably doesn’t represent how it would be today as a widely spoken language as it is formally taught and frozen in some ways, although it adopts modern vocabulary such as helicopterus. It also ignores the difference between long and short vowels. Classical Latin had five long and five short vowels and some of the diphthongs, including Æ, AV and Œ, had already become single vowels by the Augustan period from which today’s academic pronunciation is derived. This was from 710 to 771 AUC, the period during which Jesus was born and ending maybe a decade before he was killed. The vowels of Latin, however, didn’t undergo this particular type of merging because the formerly long and short vowels, although they became levelled in length, also changed pronunciation while they were doing so and therefore remained distinct.

The question arises, though, of how these circumstances might arrive. It really amounts to the Empire not falling, and in order to imagine how it might persist one has to have some idea of why it fell in the first place. I personally think it was a combination of the adoption of Christianity and some kind of issue related to physical resources such as the need to continue to conquer land to retrieve food over increasing distances until it was no longer possible to transport them economically, but I’m no historian. The question also arises of what kind of world we’d be living in now if this had happened. For instance, would slavery still exist and would the Empire have continued to expand? For the sake of simplicity, I want to assume the following state of affairs:

• The Empire didn’t split in half after the death of Theodosius I in 395 CE (1148 AUC). This could mean the eastern Empire was less dominated by Greek, and the Byzantine Empire survived until 1453 CE.
• Christianity was not adopted. Perhaps it just didn’t exist.
• Slavery was abolished in any event fairly early. This is because without that, technological progress would be much slower since there would be no direct connection between the experience of people working in particular industries and “thinkers” who could pass on what they learnt from their work, and there would be more motivation to invent labour-saving devices. This would give the Empire technological and therefore military superiority over their neighbours and strengthen its prowess in the long term.
• The Empire eventually became global and there is a single state, the world ruled from Rome.

I am aware that all of this might not result in a particularly marvellous world order but I also think this world, with no European Dark or Middle Ages and the continuing innovation of the Greek part of the Imperium, would be many centuries ahead of our own technologically. I’m going to conjecture that slavery was abolished in about the year 500 CE, followed by an industrial revolution in about 600, leading to a twentieth century level of technology by 800, meaning that there would be weapons of mass destruction and the conquest of the entire planet around then. By today, Rome would have dominated the world for twelve centuries. Note that this may very well not be a utopia, although it’s worth asking whether it’s even possible for a society like this to exist without being a utopia because I am confident that anything other than a utopia-like civilisation could exist for long and still be industrialised, so I imagine that of necessity such a world would perhaps have begun as an oppressive régime, but ceased to be so after a fairly short period of time, perhaps because the level of education required is incompatible with maintaining that level of technology. All of this is interesting and worth exploring in itself, but for now I simply present you with the global official language of the 28th century AUC.

Today’s Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin. For example, the Castilian words calle, casa and caballo now mean “street”, “house” and “horse”, but originally meant “dirt track”, “hut” and “nag”, or rather they descend from such words. If the Empire had survived, it seems likely that some of the prestige register would have continued and the words via, domus and equus would have been the source of the modern words. In some cases these have survived anyway in some form. Italian still calls roads “via” and the Castilian word for “mare” is yegua. Domus, on the other hand, seems to have died out. Similarly, the French for “head”, tête, originally meant “pot”, but caput survives in the Castilian cabeza, and also in the French chef, where however it doesn’t mean “head” in the literal sense. Hence one major feature of 28th century Latin to my mind would probably be that the vocabulary was taken from classical rather than vulgar sources, although there would probably have been some infiltration from the lower classes, particularly if the society it was spoken in had become more egalitarian. On that matter, would there now be a communist society in which it had become routine for people to refer to each other by a word translatable as “comrade”, such as “amica”?

The purest Latin in the real Empire was said to be spoken in what is now the south of France. This may be surprising, but it was probably due to the fact that the other Italic languages, related to Latin but not descended from it, had been spoken in the rest of the Italian peninsula and influenced the way it was spoken there. Centuries later, it was agreed that the most accurate Latin was spoken in Britain, and this was because the first language spoken by the peasants here was not closely related to it and therefore didn’t influence it. In general, the further one went from Rome, the more divergent the Latin was, with the proviso that in Italy itself the language was somewhat different from the standard upper class register. One of the features of the Roman dialect of Latin was that it seems to have changed L to I in some places, as for example with “fiore” in modern Italian rather than “flos”, becoming “*flore”. And this underlines the fact that Italian is not modern Latin. The chief differences from a kind of “central” standard include its distinctive double consonants and the fact that most words end in a vowel.

Now would be an appropriate point to highlight many of the differences of today’s Romance languages from classical Latin in the sense of being actual divergences from a standard which are not present in all cases:

Italian shows the influence of other Italic languages, such as “I” replacing “L”, which I seem to recall is from Faliscan. There’s also the so-called “Tuscan throat”, which is the tendency to change /k/ to a guttural fricative, said to be inherited from Etruscan, this being however a dialectal feature. Apart from that is the doubling of consonants and the use of vowels at the ends of most words. The general rhythm of the language is similar to that of Modern Greek and may also not be original.

Spanish, by which I mean all of Castilian, the other dialects of the Spanish part of the Iberian peninsula except for Catalan/Valencian and Gallego, and the language of first-language Spanish speakers of the Americas and other former parts of the Spanish Empire, is divergent in two major ways. Firstly, it has adopted a fair bit of Arabic vocabulary due to the Moors dominating the region for much of what would be considered the Dark and Middle Ages in much of the rest of Europe. Secondly, during the second Christian millennium it became phonetically quite divergent, particularly in Castille, where J came to be pronounced “kh”, C before front vowels and Z “th”, F became H and was eventually completely dropped and so forth. In non-Castilian dialects, C in those circumstances stayed as “s” but “LL” became “y” (I’m using English spelling conventions here rather than IPA). Spanish also uses the verbs “ser” and “estar” to express what appear to be mainly necessary and contingent states, and has personal “a” for the accusative, which as far as I know is unique, and uses “haber” to express the perfect but never an existential verb.

As far as Portuguese is concerned, and here I’m including non-European varieties again, there’s again considerable divergence in pronunciation, but the spelling is conservative, making the written language look closer to Italian and Latin than Spanish does. The most distinctive features of that pronunciation are the nasalisation of vowels, the contrast in pronunciation according to whether the syllable is stressed or not, which incidentally is also present in English, and the tendency to palatise, which gives it a superficially Slavic sound. Brazilian Portuguese, which is generally more conservative than European, also has a uvular R like the French one. N’s also get turned into M’s sometimes. As far as grammar is concerned, it uses “ter”, from the Latin “tenere”, meaning “to hold”, as an auxiliary verb for past tenses and has the unique feature of the personal infinitive, where personal endings are added to the infinitive in hypothetical situations. Portuguese and Spanish are the closest national languages to each other in the group, but Portuguese also shares features with Catalan which Spanish lacks. It and Romanian are the two least similar languages of the lot. I’m not sure about this, but I get the impression that Portuguese vocabulary is almost as pure as Italian’s.

This brings me to boring old French, and I know I’m being unfair here but its ubiquity in secondary schooling for an Englander of my generation lends it a patina of tedium. French is quite divergent because it descends from Latin spoken far from its native territory, which also suggests that the extinct British Romance language which vanished without trace after the Germanic invasions would have been “even more French”, since it was spoken on an island, but since it quickly died out it probably didn’t have much chance to change that much. French is probably the language whose pronunciation is both furthest from its spelling and classical Latin pronunciation, and the grammar is extremely simplified. It seems to have been influenced in two major ways. One is that it was spoken in a formerly Celtic-speaking area and although I’m not sure I think that its tendency to run words into each other and have them influence its pronunciation may date from that stage. The other is that the Franks, who spoke a Dutch-like language, also had a major hand in its form. For instance, the French vowels “eu”, “u” and “œ” are found in no other national Romance language but are common in Germanic ones. The other notable feature of French pronunciation apart from elision and liaison is nasalisation, which is accompanied with a vowel shift. Although nasalisation wasn’t as important an element in Latin, it did exist in words which ended in M, and therefore is in a sense a conservative feature.

Romanian is generally the most divergent language of the group but is also the most conservative grammatically. It’s the outlier for two reasons. Firstly, it borrowed a lot of vocabulary from eastern European sources, and secondly it’s part of the Balkan Sprachbund, entailing that it has unusual features such as a tendency to avoid the infinitive and having suffixed definite articles. Compared to its relatives, it’s closest to French and shares with French what appears to be an original tendency to have a slower rhythm than Italian and Spanish. It still has the grammatically neuter gender and case endings, and its verb conjugation also tends to be quite conservative, but is extremely irregular.

Romanian and French, although not close to each other, share a few features. Romanian seems to have borrowed a lot of French vocabulary, and French case endings fell into the same two cases as now exist in Romanian. There’s also the tendency to use schwa (the murmured final vowel in “Sparta”) and the general prosody of the languages. Some of these features are clearly radical but the rhythm and case endings clearly are not. Romanian also preserves the way the vowels changed from Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sardinia, which is different from the rest of the group.

French, Spanish and Portuguese also form a kind of block with similar features, although of the three French is closer to Italian in certain characteristics, though not the ones found in Portuguese. These include the universal noun plurals in “-s”, and incidentally in “-x” in French, which is a spelling convention.

Catalan has the distinction of being the “most central” Romance tongue. It has more in common with the other languages than any of the others have with each other. There are two fairly striking features. One is that words have a tendency to be quite short, and the other is that there is an unusually large number of personal pronouns. Incidentally, it’s the most widely spoken language in Europe which is not the official tongue of any recognised state and has more speakers than a number of other languages which are official elsewhere. Being the “central” one, it may have the best claim to being today’s version of Latin.

There are a number of other languages in the group and also some extinct ones, some of which have vanished without trace. The most conservative of these is Sardinian, which however is also influenced by Catalan. It forms the definite article in a distinctive way, from “ipso”, the reflexive pronoun “itself”, unlike all the others which got it from “ille”, meaning approximately “that”. It also still pronounces C as “k” in all positions. It’s generally considered closest to Latin of all the Romance languages but does have influences from extinct sources which have altered it somewhat. It also does things no other language in the group does, such as changing initial V to F.

I’ll just mention Ladino in passing as I already went into it in some depth here. It has more conservative pronunciation than Spanish, which is because it split off before Spanish took its foray into weirdness. Ladino is kind of more “normal” than Spanish in that respect because it’s conservative.

There are several isolated Romance languages spoken in the Alps, mainly in Switzerland, including Ladin, Rumansh and Friulian. At a cursory listen to these, about which I don’t know much, they sound rather like Spanish to me.

Dalmatian is a bit like a missing link. It was spoken in the region between Italy and Romania until rather dramatically its last speaker died in a road-building explosion. I’ll cover the rest here. Provençal is the most successful historically, and has a number of peculiar features. It used case endings for longer than any other Western Romance language, it has oddly swapped gender endings – O for feminine and A for masculine – and has no nominative personal pronouns at all. Finally there are four extinct languages of which there is little or no written record: British Romance, African Romance, Moselle Romance and Pannonian. These can be detected through placenames, words borrowed into other languages and errors made in documents.

I would like to claim that Modern Latin would, unlike other surviving Italic languages, be descended from classical rather than Vulgar Latin, and would combine features currently found in all surviving Romance languages otherwise, but that it would be more conservative. It would also have borrowed terms directly from other languages which Latin as a living language never encountered such as Australian Aboriginal or North American First Nation languages.

This, then, is what I think it would be like and why:

• A tendency to use vocabulary derived from classical Latin where surviving Romance languages have used vulgar, such as “caput” for “head”, “equus” for “horse”, “via” for “street” and “domus” for “house”.
• No definite or indefinite articles. Latin itself had no word for “the” and whereas other Italic languages now use them, they are not entirely consistent in their etymology or placement. Sardinian uses “ipso” and Romanian suffixes them.
• A future tense based on suffixing “habere” to the infinitive in most cases with the exception of “esse”. Romanian seems to be the only one which hasn’t done this and this is probably due to being in the Balkans.
• Three genders. Romanian retains the neuter gender and others have a kind of neuter pronoun. However, since the form of the masculine and neuter nouns is often similar, the distribution of those genders would seem arbitrary to someone ignorant of the history of the language. Feminine would be more definitely separate.
• Two cases for the nouns. This crops up in Old French, Provençal and modern Romanian. They’re likely to be absolute and oblique.
• C and G would be palatised before E and I, and V would be pronounced “v”, unlike in Latin.
• A nasal vowel would occur at the end of certain words but there would be no other nasalisation.
• R would be trilled.
• There would be a distinct future tense for “esse” but for no other verbs. “Stare” would not be used as an existential verb.
• The general rhythm of the language would be slower than Italian and more like French.
• The personal pronouns would include dative forms.
• Vowels would have collapsed in the Western Romance manner rather than the Eastern.
• Word order would be SVO except for pronouns.
• Past tenses would be realised using “habere” as an auxiliary verb before the past participle.

There would be a number of other deducible features, but probably the best way to approach this is to produce a passage in the actual language. Although this is a world without Christianity, the Pater Noster, or “Our Father” prayer, more commonly known in English as the Lord’s Prayer, is a reliable source of the form of most written languages, and it’s therefore worth trying to reconstruct it here. I think it would look something like this:

Padre nostro, qui es in cielo, sanctificato sia nome tuo.

Venga tuo regno, sia facta tua voluntatem, come in cielo e come in terra.

Da nobis odie nostram panem quotidianom, e pardone nos de nostras debitas, come nos pardonemos nostros debitores

E non duca nos in tentationem, ma libera nos de mal. Amen.

I’m not sure how closely I followed the recommendations here. However, I have attempted to include a number of grammatical points. The absolute case is distinct from the oblique, the subjunctive third person singular of “estre” is “sia”, possessive adjectives can occur either side of the noun. “Nobis” is the dative of “nos”. The neuter and masculine singular oblique ends in a M, but this serves to nasalise the vowel and is not pronounced as a consonant. Likewise, “GN” is a palatised N like in French and Italian. H’s are silent, if they ever occur – in fact there may simply be no letter H, except in foreign loanwords. “And” is “e”, and consequently there’s no ampersand. The penultimate line uses the same form as the English version which has “debts” and “debtors” rather than “sins” or “trespasses” and the awkward “those who trespass against us”. Finally, I’ve missed off the doxology, but it would be something like “car regno, potentia e gloria son tue, a seculas de secula.”, but I’ve just thrown that together at the last moment.

A short note on loanwords. They would have tomatlas, patatas, minuas (kangaroos), dovaques (boomerangs) and so forth. These would mainly be neuter, as the languages they were borrowed from would usually lack grammatical gender entirely.

In conclusion, I think this is an entirely feasible if somewhat arbitrary conjecture as to what Latin would look like today if it had been in continuous use since Roman times as a vernacular. The written numerals would be different as they would probably have been adopted from a different source, possibly India, but Roman numerals would doubtless have been abandoned early, and there would be no Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Baha’i or Sikh religions. Other than that, I don’t know what the world would look like today, except that it seems likely that the human race would be found on other planets and in space habitats by now. But whatever, this is how they’d be talking, or somewhere near.

Esperantotago – Esperanto Day

Today is Esperanto Day, the anniversary of Zamenhof’s 1887 CE publication of ‘La Unua Libro’, the “first book”, setting out the principles of the Esperanto language. Now I’ve mentioned Esperanto rather a lot on here so I won’t be going into it in the same way as I have before, except to note that it has external history, and to a limited extent internal history too, in common with other international Jewish languages. And I use that phrase “Jewish languages” positively, as the invention of Esperanto represents the internationalism, altruism and desire for peace which is such a central part of Jewish faith and culture.

It’s been said many times that Esperanto has a Western Indo-European bias, that it’s sexist and that it’s poorly designed. One of the problems with it is that it ignores sandhi. Sandhi is the way pronunciation changes due to sounds next to each other, either inside a word (internal sandhi) or between them (external sandhi). Sandhi is originally a concept made up by Sanskrit-using linguists in South Asia, and the well-known ‘Teach Yourself Sanskrit’ book I bought back when I was twelve or so out of fascination with the apparent exoticism and complexity of the language has a fold-out table listing all of the combinations which change the sound. Esperanto is at the opposite end of the spectrum regarding grammatical complexity in many ways, making it easier to learn, but it has led to ignorance of sandhi, which makes it either difficult to pronounce or easy to pronounce but harder to understand the spoken language. For instance, the word “kvankam” – “although” – would probably be pronounced “kfangkam” by people whose first language has those sandhi rules, such as devoicing a fricative after a voiceless stop and making a nasal velar before a velar consonant, /kfaŋkam/, but the rules in other languages may be different and it could be pronounced “gvantam” for example, or a vowel could be inserted between K and V if someone isn’t used to pronouncing consonants together. Zamenhof doesn’t seem to have been aware of this issue. However, the probable consequence of this would be that people speak it with slightly different accents.

Another significant issue with Esperanto for many is that it uses no fewer than six participles. Compare this with English, which uses two – present active and past passive. I suspect that this is the result of Zamenhof being fluent in the highly inflected Polish, which divides them into adverbial and adjectival, perfective and imperfective and active and passive, which to my naïve non-Slavic speaking brain seems to multiply up to eight, that is, two by two by two categories. This is not the kind of thing you generally see in KENTUM languages such as German, Italian or Welsh. However, Zamenhof did not incorporate the perfective/imperfective aspects common to Slavic, where the imperfective sets the scene and the perfective is more like a past continuous tense, though neither are actually tenses, presumably because he knew how confusing they would be to many Western Europeans.

Zamenhof’s focus was substantially on Europe at the time. Current affairs in the region would certainly seem to concentrate the mind on the potential for achieving peace among what might be looked at as our various warring tribes whose languages differ and that this incomprehension and struggle to communicate probably would make things worse. Douglas Adams, of course, had a go at this with the Babel Fish, whose use causes terrible wars because people actually understand what aliens are saying about them. This is along the lines of Monty in ‘Withnail & I’ listening to Withnail and Marwood:

 “Perhaps it is just that the eavesdropper should leave as his trade dictates, in secrecy and in the dead of night. I do sincerely hope that you will find the happiness that has sadly always been denied me. Yours faithfully, Montague H. Withnail.”

If people are speaking secure in the belief that they will not be overheard and understood by others they don’t wish to include, there’s an argument that if they are understood, it won’t make those who understand them happy. Speaking Esperanto, ironically, is a good way of ensuring that nobody will understand what you’re saying because you can pretty much guarantee that no-one else will have learnt it, so perhaps it does actually work quite well as a way of avoiding conflict.

Rather surprisingly, the Western bias of Esperanto doesn’t seem to be perceived as a problem by native speakers of non-Indo-European languages. For instance, it’s relatively popular in the Far East. This brings up the question of evaluation of different cultural practices by outsiders. A few years ago, there was controversy online about a White American woman who wore a Chinese-style dress to a prom, as some Chinese people saw this as cultural appropriation, but others saw it as complimentary, as she had adopted part of their own culture which she admired. On my YT video about Carvaka, I’m accused of cultural appropriation for mentioning Carvaka and Samkhya, both distinctively South Asian ontologies, but I don’t see how intellectual discourse can operate if such things can’t be discussed openly. That said, it does seem inappropriate to me for a White person to have dreadlocks induced in a hair salon even though dreadlocks are part of White Western European culture and arguably sanctioned by the Tanakh. Likewise, I sometimes wonder if the idea of cultural appropriation is itself Western, and cultural imperialism conversely could be as well to some extent. I feel uncomfortable saying this, and in fact the truth is probably more nuanced, but it’s at least interesting that Westerners often seem more concerned about the idea of Esperanto’s Western bias than other groups of people are. This is not entirely true, however. Baha’i prophets in the Middle East have praised the idea of Esperanto while saying that it would still be better for a constructed international auxiliary language to have less of a KENTUM, and in fact there is a fruitful source in Arabic for such a language, since it has had such a strong influence on languages such as Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Swahili, Farsi and Turkish. Attempts have in fact been made to construct such a language, known as Dunia, from the Arabic word for “world”. Ironically, such a language would probably be more comprehensible to first-language Hebrew speakers than the Jewish invention of Esperanto. I actually had a go at a constructed language based on Arabic which I called Dunijaluga, without being aware that it was tried, possibly later on, by someone else, and I mention it in ‘Replicas’.

I used to think of Esperanto as a Romance language. Certainly the majority of its roots are from Romance, and it has a kind of Italian sound to it although without the double consonants and with only five vowels rather than seven. However, a quarter of its root vocabulary is Greek, which actually works quite well due to the tendency for international terms in technical vocabulary to be taken from that language along with Latin. The quality of Esperanto in design terms is kind of intermediate. Some aspects are well thought through, others are linguistically naïve and there are biasses which can be perceived more easily from today than when it was first invented, and it’s been suggested that this intermediate nature is an important element in its failure to be adopted more widely. J R R Tolkien also famously invented a culture to go around his constructed languages, and Klingon also has this advantage. Esperanto, however, isn’t entirely lacking in this respect although most of that culture is firmly in the inter-war years and was subject to persecution by the Nazis. It had a hard task being adopted in such an extremely nationalistic Europe.

The language is said to be learnt on average four times faster than other languages, although this is of course somewhat spurious because the languages already known by the learner would strongly influence that. A first-language Greek or Italian speaker would probably pick it up very quickly, but if your mother tongue was Malay or Mandarin Chinese, I would expect you to take far longer.

There are a number of associations with Esperanto which developed from its invention into the 1930s. These included two global currencies, the speso and the stelo, the Baha’i faith, pacifism, vegetarianism and the philosophy of Homaranismo. None of these are inevitable, and it’s possible that these associations reduced its appeal by making it seem less neutral, although many of these things are in a way manifestations of neutrality.

The Speso is a thousandth of a spesmilo, a currency invented in 1907 by René de Saussure which was actually accepted by some banks before the First World War. The spesmilo is the practical unit. It used the gold standard and its value is fixed at 733 milligrammes of pure gold, which at the time was around two shillings sterling, or four dozen US cents. The speso itself was deliberately made very small to avoid the use of fractional denominations like the ha’penny and farthing. It has its own symbol: ₷, which can be seen on the right of the shield on the above coin. Today the face value of a spesmilo is just under £31 or €36.14. The adoption of the speso in any form was prevented by the onset of the First World War.

In 1946, a second attempt was made with the stelo, whose price was fixed at one standard loaf of bread. This is quite difficult to comprehend today due to the diversity of consumer products nowadays, but this seems to be roughly a pound if by “standard” one means unsliced white loaf bought from a supermarket. The motivation for the issuing of the stelo was similar to that of Esperanto: to demonstrate that separate currencies caused international conflict and economic pressure. As can be seen in the flag above, the pentagram is a symbol of Esperanto. The International Esperanto League also used coupons valued in steloj for its internal activity until the 1980s. The one stelo coin on the left here was bronze, the five stelo on the right was brass and there was also a cupronickel 10 stelo coin. In 1965 a twenty-five stelo silver coin was introduced. In 1974, the connection with the price of bread was ended and it was instead pegged to the Dutch guilder at a value of two steloj to one guilder. This changed again in 1977 to a percentage of the average monthly purchases of a family, in order to avoid inflation, which was a major issue at the time. Incidentally it’s always struck me as very strange that this is not how exchange rates are defined, and I assumed for a long time that it was.

Another major connection exists between Esperanto and Baha’i. Baha’i is a religion founded in the nineteenth Christian century now based in Israel which teaches the unity of all people and the equal value of all faiths. It comes across today as being kind of nineteenth century liberal, a little like Jehovah’s Witnesses but more open. For instance, Baha’i teaches that women and men are like the two wings of a bird, without which she couldn’t fly, but this is not the same as sexual egalitarianism as most might understand it today. More problematic is its firm commitment to homophobia. The Universal House of Justice, which is their governing body, does not allow female members even though it says gender equality is fundamental to the unity of the human race. Abdu’l-Baha also bans women from military service as he saw the killing of other human beings as incompatible with the station of motherhood. For me, the surprising aspect of this is that Baha’i is not universally pacifist. Regarding homosexuality, Baha’i officially sees it as an aspect of the innate human inclination towards evil, believes sexual orientation can and should be changed and excludes practicing homosexuals from full membership of the faith on the grounds that they are not living in accordance with its principles, in a similar way to how they would exclude people who drink alcohol. Another issue is that it doesn’t impose vegetarianism on principle, although of course this isn’t unusual. What this probably illustrates is the kind of approach which the Old Left had from the century following 1850 CE or so, where it continued to be just as sexist and homophobic, and in some cases even racist, as we now expect the Hard Right to be.

Lidia Zamenhof, Ludwik’s youngest child, was born in 1904, and died in Treblinka Concentration Camp in 1942. She took over the rôle her father and mother had before of spreading Esperanto, and the secularisation of the family led her to become increasingly isolated from both the Jewish community and of course Gentiles. She lost her belief in God in 1925. Soon after, however, she became Baha’i and mixed the two. She didn’t feel like she’d given up her Jewishness either as she saw that as ethnicity and heritage. She met Shoghi Effendi, the then leader of the faith, and said in one of her talks:

“The international language is part of the Divine Plan which is given effect in the era of Bahá’u’lláh. And the creation and spread of Esperanto are proofs of the creative power of Bahá’u’lláh’s words.”

In November 1939, Lidia was arrested by the Nazis on the grounds of travelling to the United States to spread anti-Nazi propaganda and she was sent to live in the Ghetto on Ogrodowa Street. Shoghi Effendi and others attempted to get her out of Poland but failed, and in June 1942 she was sent to Treblinka and murdered.

It’s important to bear in mind that although Baha’i has major conservative and intolerant elements, Baha’is are also persecuted, and have been persecuted since the start. Lidia’s optimism about the divine plan seemed to have been refuted by the Holocaust, and even today they are oppressed in Iran, where they are the largest religious minority. There have been government land-grabs, they are seen as a political group, and the stated aim of the government is “To gain control over the misguided movement of the perverse Baha’i sect”, according to a leaked document. The homes of Baha’is have been destroyed and many of them have had to flee the country. Baha’i cemetaries are steamrollered as well. To take another example, like many other non-Christian religions, Baha’is haven’t been permitted to have religious assemblies in Romania since 2007.

The oldest continuously active vegetarian organisation in the world is the Tutmonda Esperantista Vegetarana Asocio, founded in 1908 and articles about vegetarianism were being published in Esperanto before the language was a decade old. Lev Tolstoj was honorary president of the TEVA. Their website is here.

I’ve tried to be brief here, but I would like to finish by outlining what seemed to be a common Esperantist vision of the world. Everyone would speak Esperanto as a second language, there would be no more nation states but a single world government, world peace would prevail, most people would be vegetarian and there would be a universal currency proof against inflation. All faiths would be recognised as one. Modern Esperantists are likely to add more to this, but it should also be recognised that Esperanto peaked at a time when women were seen as slaves to biology and therefore restricted in ways men weren’t, and homosexuality was at best understood to be a mental illness. However, the thing about all of these movements taken together is that they are all in a sense moderate. Esperanto is an international language, but not an ideal one and still quite Westernised. Baha’i is somewhat more liberal than most conservative religion but maintains sexism and homophobia. Vegetarianism is not veganism. The international currencies were actual currencies rather than LETS or post-scarcity working for the common good having superceded money. Nonetheless, taken together, even the inter-war consensus of these movements combined is better than what we have had at any point since the War in the world on the whole. Maybe we shouldn’t let the best be the enemy of the good.