Better living through chemistry

2.43 – 2.31 billion years ago

There are some interesting parallels between chemistry on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. Remarkably, a recent article makes a strong case that there is an actual historical connection between the science of linguistics and the science of chemistry. Specifically, Mendeleev’s construction of the Periodic Table of Elements was probably influenced by Pāṇini’s classic generative grammar of Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. This was written somewhere around 500-350 BCE. It has been said to be as central to India’s intellectual tradition as Euclid’s Elements is to the West’s. It probably reached the attention of Mendeleev thanks to the work of his friend and colleague, the Indologist and philologist Otto von Böhtlingk, who translated it.

[F]oundational to the Aṣṭādhyāyī was a two-dimensional, periodic alphabet, which may have intrigued Mendeleev as he struggled to create his own periodic array.

The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” (Here is a cute recent example where repeated rebounding collisions produce successively close approximations of pi.) Perhaps Mendeleev’s debt to Pāṇini via von Böhtlingk is an example of the unreasonable effectiveness of linguistics.

Here’s more on the parallels:

Chemistry plays a big role once Earth forms. Different mineral species appear, with different chemical compositions. Magnesium-heavy olivine sinks to the lower mantle of the Earth. Aluminum-rich feldspars float to the top.

Chemistry is an example of what William Abler calls “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems,” what you get when a collection of discrete units (atoms) can combine according to definite rules to create larger units (molecules) whose properties aren’t just intermediate between the constituents. Paint is not an example. Red paint plus white paint is just pink paint. Mix in a little more red or white to make it redder or whiter. But atoms and molecules are: two moles of hydrogen gas plus one mole of oxygen gas, compounded, make something very different, one mole of liquid water. Add in a little more hydrogen or oxygen and you just get leftover hydrogen or oxygen.

A lot of important chemical principles are summed up in the periodic table.

On the far right are atoms that have their electron shells filled, and don’t feel like combining with anyone. Most, but not all the way, to the right are atoms with almost all their shells filled, just looking for an extra electron or two. (Think oxygen, O, with slots for two extra electrons). On the left are atoms with a few extra electrons they can share. (Think hydrogen, H, each atom with an extra electron it’s willing to share with, say, oxygen.) In the middle are atoms that could go either way: polymorphously perverse carbon, C, star of organic chemistry, with four slots to fill and four electrons to share, and metals, that like to pool their electrons in a big cloud, and conduct electricity and heat easily. (Think of Earth’s core of molten iron, Fe, a big electric dynamo.)

Another example of “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems” is human language. Consider speech sounds, for example. You’ve got small discrete units (phonemes, the sounds we write b, p, s, k, ch, sh, and so on) that can combine according to rules to give syllables. Some syllables are possible, according to the rules of English, others not. Star and spiky, thole and plast, are possible English words, tsar and psyche are not (at least if you pronounce all the consonants, the way Russians or Greeks do), nor tlaps nor bratz (if you actually try to pronounce the z). Thirty years ago app, blog, and twerk were not words in the English language, but they were possible words, according to English sound laws.

You can make a periodic table of consonants.

Across the top are the different places in the vocal tract where you block the flow of air. Along the left side are different ways of blocking the flow (stopping it completely –t-, letting it leak out –s-, etc.) The table can explain why, for example, we use in for intangible and indelicate, but switch to im for impossible and imbalance. (The table contains sounds we don’t use in English, and uses a special set of signs, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which assigns one letter per phoneme.) This is why a book title like The Atoms of Language makes sense (a good book by the way).

So sometimes the universe gets more complex because already existing stuff organizes itself into complex new patterns  – clumps and swirls and stripes. But sometimes the universe gets more complex because brand new kinds of stuff appear, because a new particulate system comes online: elementary particles combine to make atoms, atoms combine to make molecules, or one set of systems (nucleotides to make genes, amino acids to make proteins) combines to make life, or another set of systems (phonemes to make words, words to make phrases and sentences) combines to make language.

Talk like a post-human

A followup to Talk Like a Neanderthal Day

Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science fiction. I’m not thinking so much of constructed languages like Quenya, Klingon, or Dothraki. There are whole communities of people out there – conlangers – busy inventing and learning such languages; some fun introductions are here and here. But mostly these languages are meant to fall within the range of variation of existing human languages. I’m thinking instead of some science fiction stories that imagine more radical alterations of language.

For example,

The Persistence of Vision. John Varley (1979)

A few decades into the future, the United States is falling apart. A drifter stumbles into a community of deaf-and-blind “Kellerites” who are doing pretty well for themselves in the New Mexico desert. They communicate partly by spelling out things in handtalk. “By handtalk I mean the International Manual Alphabet. Anyone can learn it in a few hours or days.” But Varley recognizes that handtalk is not a real language. For a real language the community uses shorthand. “Shorthand was not code for English or any other language; it did not share construction or vocabulary with any other language. … Each word was something I had to learn and memorize separately from the handtalk spelling.”

The Kellerites are fictional, but sign language is not. In Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (who also writes obituaries for the New York Times) writes about a Bedouin community in Israel with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Deaf kids there have spontaneously come up with their own sign language. This is a real language, not derived from Arabic or Hebrew, with soundless “phonemes” that are combined to make signs that are more-or-less arbitrarily paired with meanings to yield words that can be combined into phrases and sentences according to rules of grammar. A nice detail: deaf babies exposed to sign language will start off “babbling” with their hands, just as hearing babies babble by making sounds. The human Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky’s phrase), an “instinct to acquire an art” (Darwin’s phrase), will work with whatever material it can get ahold of.

So Varley gets a lot right; I expect he did some research on sign language for this story. If the deaf-and-blind ever did form their own community, and come up with their own language, it would be a full-blown language a lot like his shorthand.

On the other hand, this bit, with the Kellerites merging verbal intercourse with the other kind of intercourse, is a little over the top:

But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation.

Or, as Eliza Doolittle said, “How kind of you to let me come.”

Gulf. Robert Heinlein (1949)

A tightly written spy tale, set a century or two in the future, where the United States went through World War III, went communist, and then got over it. It reads like a James Bond story as written by Francis Galton. The protagonist learns that there is a secret community of super-geniuses, who call themselves New Man (an allusion to real-life super-genius John von Neumann? By the way, “Neander” also means “new man”). They work behind the scenes to keep humanity safe from itself. This sometimes involves some antifa vigilantism: “ ‘Two weeks from now there will be a giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and caboodle. … Sad.’ ”

And New Men have their own super-language, Speedtalk. Speedtalk more-or-less violates one of the key design features of real languages, the duality of patterning. Real languages have one level of meaningless phonemes combined according to rules to make syllables (so spy fits the sound pattern of English, but psi – if you try to pronounce the p – does not). One or more syllables are then arbitrarily paired with meanings to make words, and then there is a second level where another set of rules determines what combinations of words make grammatical phrases. Even sign languages work this way.

But Speedtalk instead has just one level, approximately, pairing up individual phonemes with meanings. This is quite a stretch. In real languages, the inventory of words is orders of magnitudes greater than the inventory of phonemes. But Heinlein tells us that adding variations in length, stress, and pitch is enough “to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English [800+ words] so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a ‘normal’ language, one Speedtalk word to an entire sentence.”

There’s more to Speedtalk than this. Heinlein was very taken with an intellectual fad of his time, General Semantics. General Semantics hovers somewhere between a serious intellectual endeavor and complete crackpottery. Firmly on the crackpot side of the line was Count Alfred Korzybski, who gets a chapter in a debunking book by Martin Gardner. Korzybski’s magnum opus Science and Sanity is all about how reforming language is the key to creating the first truly rational civilization. This means the verb “to be” has got to go. As Heinlein puts it. “One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad is it as a mental tool. For example, the verb ‘to be’ in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every one of which is false-to-fact.”

Entertaining, but silly. The score today is: “to be” 1, General Semantics 0. If you want some real semantics, Pinker beats Korzybski.

The Citadel of the Autarch. Gene Wolfe (1982)

This is Book Four of a tetralogy. A million or so years in the future, civilization on Earth has sunk to a medieval level, albeit littered with bits and pieces of advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Wolfe really, really likes to have you figure things out, instead of telling you, but you can work out that the action takes place in South America. An endless war is going on against the Ascians, a totalitarian state to the north ruled by the Group of Seventeen. An Ascian prisoner of war tells a story, constructed entirely of canned slogans, while another character, Folia, interprets.

It starts off like this

The Ascian began to speak: “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”

Folia interpreted: “Once upon a time …”

“Let no one be idle. If one is idle let him band together with others who are idle too, and let them look for idle land. Let everyone they meet direct them.  It is better to walk a thousand leagues than to sit in the House of Starvation.”

“There was a remote farm worked in partnership by people who were not related.”

“One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.”

“On this farm there lived a good man.”

“Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let the rats starve.”

“The others cheated him of his share.”

And so on.

Of course the story and its interpretation are fanciful. A functioning language has to be more than a collection of stock phrases. But the story illustrates something about the way real languages work. People don’t just communicate by encoding and decoding literal meanings, but by inferring one another’s communicative intentions, always thinking “I wonder what he meant by that.” There’s a whole branch of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, that studies how this works. And pragmatic inference in language is just one instance of a special, powerful human aptitude for creating shared intentions. This aptitude means that there are always ways to subvert official speech, in any language, even Ascian or Newspeak. Or Korean: the news several years ago was that North Korea had banned sarcasm.

Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as “This is all America’s fault” would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime.

The late Gene Wolfe was a combat veteran of the Korean War.

Hits, slides and rings

423 – 400 thousand years ago

Part of the challenge of language is coming up with some way to distinguish thousands or tens of thousands of words from one another. It would be hard to come up with that many unique sounds. What human languages do instead is to come up with phonemes and rules for stringing phonemes together into syllables, and then create words by arbitrarily pairing up one syllable, or a few, with a meaning. Phonemes are the individual sounds of a language, roughly comparable to individual letters. There are about forty plus phonemes in most dialects of English. (English spelling does a pretty sloppy job of matching up phonemes and letters. Finnish comes close to one phoneme per letter.)

Often in evolution organisms don’t solve new problems from scratch, but instead harness preexisting adaptations. I argued earlier that the abstract “space” of possession (“The Crampden estate went to Reginald.”) may have developed by harnessing preexisting concepts of physical space. And our abilities to recognize speech sounds may harness our preexisting capacities for recognizing the sounds of solid objects interacting. At least that’s the argument of a recent book by Mark Changizi, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.

Changizi notes that even though we’re mostly not aware of it, we’re very good at using our hearing to keep track of what’s going on in our physical surroundings. For example, people easily recognize the difference between someone going upstairs and someone going downstairs, and we’re pretty good at recognizing individuals by their treads. The sounds that solid objects make can be broadly categorized as hits, slides, and rings. Hits: one object collides with another and sends out a sharp burst of sound. Slides: an object scrapes against another and sends out a more extended sound. Rings: an object reverberates after a collision. Changizi argues that these correspond to the major categories of phonemes.

• Hits = plosives, like p b t g k
• Slides = fricatives, like s sh th f v z
• Rings = sonorants, including sonorant consonants, like l r y w m n, and vowels

These are not the only sounds we can make with our mouths. We can do barks and pops and farts and so on. But our auditory systems are especially cued into solid object physics, so when we try to come up with easy-to-distinguish phonemes, that’s what we focus on. And a lot of rules about how phonemes hook up also follow from this principle – for example hits followed by rings are more common than the reverse. (Linguists find that CV syllables – one consonant followed by one vowel, like bee, two, or go – are found in pretty much every language, while other combinations – VC, ape, or CCV, spa, or CVCCC, sixths – have a more restricted distribution.)

So even if imitating nature is not the whole story of phonemes, it may at least be where they got started.

Later on when we talk about writing systems, we’ll see there’s a similar argument about how these are tuned to tickle our primate visual systems.

Speech sounds

Below are some reflections on language. There will be plenty more in days to come. For a science-fictional take on language, try Octavia Butler’s account of a world where language has disappeared, Speech Sounds. It’s one of her best. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award for best short story in 1984.

We’re now just past six months through the year 2018 at Logarithmic History. We raced through time at the rate of 754 million years a day on January 1. December 31 we’ll cover just one year (the year 2020) per day. Today, July 4, covers 24,535 years, from 449,284 to 424,749 years ago.

By today’s date, the universe is a lot more complicated than when we started. As we mentioned before, one of the major sources of complexity is the origin of new discrete combinatorial systems, made of small units that can be combined into larger units that have different properties than their constituents. Elementary particles are the first discrete combinatorial system to appear, already present in the early moments of the Big Bang. The different chemical elements are another major discrete combinatorial system. It took billions of years for enough heavy atoms, beyond hydrogen and helium, to accumulate from stellar explosions, allowing the complex chemistry and geology that we know on Earth. It may be that the paucity of heavy elements in the early Universe is what prevented earlier planetary systems from developing complex life.

With the origin of life comes another discrete combinatorial systems, or rather two connected systems: nucleotides strung together to make genes, which code for amino acids strung together to make proteins.

For the second half of the Logarithmic History year, we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the consequences of another discrete combinatorial system: language. Or maybe, as with genes-and-proteins there are really two systems here: words strung into phrases and sentences, and concepts strung together into complex propositions in a Language of Thought.

The origin of modern human is one of the major transitions in evolution, comparable to the origin of eukaryotic cells, or of social insects. Language is crucial here: slime molds and ants organize high levels of cooperation, turning themselves into “superorganisms,” by secreting pheromones. Humans organize by secreting cosmologies.

Better living through chemistry

2.42 – 2.30 billion years ago

There are some interesting parallels between chemistry on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. Remarkably, a recent article makes a strong case that there is an actual historical connection between the science of linguistics and the science of chemistry. Specifically, Mendeleev’s construction of the Periodic Table of Elements was probably influenced by Pāṇini’s classic generative grammar of Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. This was written somewhere around 500-350 BCE. It has been said to be as central to India’s intellectual tradition as Euclid’s Elements is to the West’s. It probably reached the attention of Mendeleev thanks to the work of his friend and colleague, the Indologist and philologist Otto von Böhtlingk, who translated it.

[F]oundational to the Aṣṭādhyāyī was a two-dimensional, periodic alphabet, which may have intrigued Mendeleev as he struggled to create his own periodic array.

The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” (Here is a cute recent example where repeated rebounding collisions produce successively close approximations of pi.) Perhaps Mendeleev’s debt to Pāṇini via von Böhtlingk is an example of the unreasonable effectiveness of linguistics.

Here’s more on the parallels:

Chemistry plays a big role once Earth forms. Different mineral species appear, with different chemical compositions. Magnesium-heavy olivine sinks to the lower mantle of the Earth. Aluminum-rich feldspars float to the top.

Chemistry is an example of what William Abler calls “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems,” what you get when a collection of discrete units (atoms) can combine according to definite rules to create larger units (molecules) whose properties aren’t just intermediate between the constituents. Paint is not an example. Red paint plus white paint is just pink paint. But atoms and molecules are: two moles of hydrogen gas plus one mole of oxygen gas, compounded, make something very different, one mole of liquid water.

A lot of important chemical principles are summed up in the periodic table.

On the far right are atoms that have their electron shells filled, and don’t feel like combining with anyone. Most, but not all the way, to the right are atoms with almost all their shells filled, just looking for an extra electron or two. (Think oxygen, O, with slots for two extra electrons). On the left are atoms with a few extra electrons they can share. (Think hydrogen, H, each atom with an extra electron it’s willing to share with, say, oxygen.) In the middle are atoms that could go either way: polymorphously perverse carbon, C, with four slots to fill and four electrons to share, and metals, that like to pool their electrons in a big cloud, and conduct electricity and heat easily. (Think of Earth’s core of molten iron, Fe, a big electric dynamo.)

Another example of “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems” is human language. Consider speech sounds, for example. You’ve got small discrete units (phonemes, the sounds we write b, p, s, k, ch, sh, and so on) that can combine according to rules to give syllables. Some syllables are possible, according to the rules of English, others not. Star and spiky, thole and plast, are possible English words, tsar and psyche are not (at least if you pronounce all the consonants, the way Russians or Greeks do), nor tlaps nor bratz (if you actually try to pronounce the z). Thirty years ago app, blog, and twerk were not words in the English language, but they were possible words, according to English sound laws.

You can make a periodic table of consonants.

Across the top are the different places in the vocal tract where you block the flow of air. Along the left side are different ways of blocking the flow (stopping it completely –t-, letting it leak out –s-, etc.) The table can explain why, for example, we use in for intangible and indelicate, but switch to im for impossible and imbalance. (The table contains sounds we don’t use in English, and uses a special set of signs, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which assigns one letter per phoneme.) This is why a book title like The Atoms of Language makes sense (a good book by the way).

So sometimes the universe gets more complex because already existing stuff organizes itself into complex new patterns  – clumps and swirls and stripes. But sometimes the universe gets more complex because brand new kinds of stuff appear, because a new particulate system comes online: elementary particles combine to make atoms, atoms combine to make molecules, or one set of systems (nucleotides to make genes, amino acids to make proteins) combines to make life, or another set of systems (phonemes to make words, words to make phrases and sentences) combines to make language.

Talk like a post-human

A followup to Talk Like a Neanderthal Day

Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science fiction. I’m not thinking so much of constructed languages like Quenya, Klingon, or Dothraki. There are whole communities of people out there – conlangers – busy inventing and learning such languages; some fun introductions are here and here. But mostly these languages are meant to fall within the range of variation of existing human languages. I’m thinking instead of some science fiction stories that imagine more radical alterations of language.

For example,

The Persistence of Vision. John Varley (1979)

A few decades into the future, the United States is falling apart. A drifter stumbles into a community of deaf-and-blind “Kellerites” who are doing pretty well for themselves in the New Mexico desert. They communicate partly by spelling out things in handtalk. “By handtalk I mean the International Manual Alphabet. Anyone can learn it in a few hours or days.” But Varley recognizes that handtalk is not a real language. For a real language the community uses shorthand. “Shorthand was not code for English or any other language; it did not share construction or vocabulary with any other language. … Each word was something I had to learn and memorize separately from the handtalk spelling.”

The Kellerites are fictional, but sign language is not. In Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (who also writes obituaries for the New York Times) writes about a Bedouin community in Israel with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Deaf kids there have spontaneously come up with their own sign language. This is a real language, not derived from Arabic or Hebrew, with soundless “phonemes” that are combined to make signs that are more-or-less arbitrarily paired with meanings to yield words that can be combined into phrases and sentences according to rules of grammar. A nice detail: deaf babies exposed to sign language will start off “babbling” with their hands, just as hearing babies babble by making sounds. The human Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky’s phrase), an “instinct to acquire an art” (Darwin’s phrase), will work with whatever material it can get ahold of.

So Varley gets a lot right; I expect he did some research on sign language for this story. If the deaf-and-blind ever did form their own community, and come up with their own language, it would be a full-blown language a lot like his shorthand.

On the other hand, this bit, with the Kellerites merging verbal intercourse with the other kind of intercourse, is a little over the top:

But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation.

Or, as Eliza Doolittle said, “How kind of you to let me come.”

Gulf. Robert Heinlein (1949)

A tightly written spy tale, set a century or two in the future, where the United States went through World War III, went communist, and then got over it. It reads like a James Bond story as written by Francis Galton. The protagonist learns that there is a secret community of super-geniuses, who call themselves New Man (an allusion to real-life super-genius John von Neumann? By the way, “Neander” also means “new man”). They work behind the scenes to keep humanity safe from itself. This sometimes involves some antifa vigilantism: “ ‘Two weeks from now there will be a giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and caboodle. … Sad.’ ”

And New Men have their own super-language, Speedtalk. Speedtalk more-or-less violates one of the key design features of real languages, the duality of patterning. Real languages have one level of meaningless phonemes combined according to rules to make syllables (so spy fits the sound pattern of English, but psi – if you try to pronounce the p – does not). One or more syllables are then arbitrarily paired with meanings to make words, and then there is a second level where another set of rules determines what combinations of words make grammatical phrases. Even sign languages work this way.

But Speedtalk instead has just one level, approximately, pairing up individual phonemes with meanings. This is quite a stretch. In real languages, the inventory of words is orders of magnitudes greater than the inventory of phonemes. But Heinlein tells us that adding variations in length, stress, and pitch is enough “to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English [800+ words] so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a ‘normal’ language, one Speedtalk word to an entire sentence.”

There’s more to Speedtalk than this. Heinlein was very taken with an intellectual fad of his time, General Semantics. General Semantics hovers somewhere between a serious intellectual endeavor and complete crackpottery. Firmly on the crackpot side of the line was Count Alfred Korzybski, who gets a chapter in a debunking book by Martin Gardner. Korzybski’s magnum opus Science and Sanity is all about how reforming language is the key to creating the first truly rational civilization. This means the verb “to be” has got to go. As Heinlein puts it. “One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad is it as a mental tool. For example, the verb ‘to be’ in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every one of which is false-to-fact.”

Entertaining, but silly. The score today is: “to be” 1, General Semantics 0. If you want some real semantics, Pinker beats Korzybski.

The Citadel of the Autarch. Gene Wolfe (1982)

This is Book Four of a tetralogy. A million or so years in the future, civilization on Earth has sunk to a medieval level, albeit littered with bits and pieces of advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Wolfe really, really likes to have you figure things out, instead of telling you, but you can work out that the action takes place in South America. An endless war is going on against the Ascians, a totalitarian state to the north ruled by the Group of Seventeen. An Ascian prisoner of war tells a story, constructed entirely of canned slogans, while another character, Folia, interprets.

It starts off like this

The Ascian began to speak: “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”

Folia interpreted: “Once upon a time …”

“Let no one be idle. If one is idle let him band together with others who are idle too, and let them look for idle land. Let everyone they meet direct them.  It is better to walk a thousand leagues than to sit in the House of Starvation.”

“There was a remote farm worked in partnership by people who were not related.”

“One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.”

“On this farm there lived a good man.”

“Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let the rats starve.”

“The others cheated him of his share.”

And so on.

Of course the story and its interpretation are fanciful. A functioning language has to be more than a collection of stock phrases. But the story illustrates something about the way real languages work. People don’t just communicate by encoding and decoding literal meanings, but by inferring one another’s communicative intentions, always thinking “I wonder what he meant by that.” There’s a whole branch of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, that studies how this works. And pragmatic inference in language is just one instance of a special, powerful human aptitude for creating shared intentions. This aptitude means that there are always ways to subvert official speech, in any language, even Ascian or Newspeak. Or Korean: the news several years ago was that North Korea had banned sarcasm.

Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as “This is all America’s fault” would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime.

The late Gene Wolfe was a combat veteran of the Korean War.

Hits, slides, and rings

423 – 400 thousand years ago

Part of the challenge of language is coming up with some way to distinguish thousands or tens of thousands of words from one another. It would be hard to come up with that many unique sounds. What human languages do instead is to come up with phonemes and rules for stringing phonemes together into syllables, and then create words by arbitrarily pairing up one syllable, or a few, with a meaning. Phonemes are the individual sounds of a language, roughly comparable to individual letters. There are about forty phonemes in most dialects of English. (English spelling does a pretty sloppy job of matching up phonemes and letters. Finnish comes close to one phoneme per letter.)

Often in evolution organisms don’t solve new problems from scratch, but instead harness preexisting adaptations. I argued earlier that the abstract “space” of possession (“The Crampden estate went to Reginald.”) may have developed by harnessing preexisting concepts of physical space. And our abilities to recognize speech sounds may harness our preexisting capacities for recognizing the sounds of solid objects interacting. At least that’s the argument of a recent book by Mark Changizi, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.

Changizi notes that even though we’re mostly not aware of it, we’re very good at using our hearing to keep track of what’s going on in our physical surroundings. For example, people easily recognize the difference between someone going upstairs and someone going downstairs, and we’re pretty good at recognizing individuals by their treads. The sounds that solid objects make can be broadly categorized as hits, slides, and rings. Hits: one object collides with another and sends out a sharp burst of sound. Slides: an object scrapes against another and sends out a more extended sound. Rings: an object reverberates after a collision. Changizi argues that these correspond to the major categories of phonemes.

• Hits = plosives, like p b t g k
• Slides = fricatives, like s sh th f v z
• Rings = sonorants, including sonorant consonants, like l r y w m n, and vowels

These are not the only sounds we can make with our mouths. We can do barks and pops and farts and so on. But our auditory systems are especially cued into solid object physics, so when we try to come up with easy-to-distinguish phonemes, that’s what we focus on. And a lot of rules about how phonemes hook up also follow from this principle – for example hits followed by rings are more common than the reverse. (Linguists find that CV syllables – one consonant followed by one vowel, like bee, two, or go – are found in pretty much every language, while other combinations – VC, ape, or CCV, spa, or CVCCC, sixths – have a more restricted distribution.)

So even if imitating nature is not the whole story of phonemes, it may at least be where they got started.

Later on when we talk about writing systems, we’ll see there’s a similar argument about how these are tuned to tickle our primate visual systems.

Speech sounds

Below are some reflections on language. There will be plenty more in days to come. For a science-fictional take on language, try Octavia Butler’s account of a world where language has disappeared, Speech Sounds. It’s one of her best. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award for best short story in 1984.

We’re now just past six months through the year 2018 at Logarithmic History. We raced through time at the rate of 754 million years a day on January 1. December 31 we’ll cover just one year (the year 2020) per day. Today, July 4, covers 24,535 years, from 449,284 to 424,749 years ago.

By today’s date, the universe is a lot more complicated than when we started. As we mentioned before, one of the major sources of complexity is the origin of new discrete combinatorial systems, made of small units that can be combined into larger units that have different properties than their constituents. Elementary particles are the first discrete combinatorial system to appear, already present in the early moments of the Big Bang. The different chemical elements are another major discrete combinatorial system. It took billions of years for enough heavy atoms, beyond hydrogen and helium, to accumulate from stellar explosions, allowing the complex chemistry and geology that we know on Earth. It may be that the paucity of heavy elements in the early Universe is what prevented earlier planetary systems from developing complex life.

With the origin of life comes another discrete combinatorial systems, or rather two connected systems: nucleotides strung together to make genes, which code for amino acids strung together to make proteins.

For the second half of the Logarithmic History year, we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the consequences of another discrete combinatorial system: language. Or maybe, as with genes-and-proteins there are really two systems here: words strung into phrases and sentences, and concepts strung together into complex propositions in a Language of Thought.

The origin of modern human is one of the major transitions in evolution, comparable to the origin of eukaryotic cells, or of social insects. Language is crucial here: slime molds and ants organize high levels of cooperation, turning themselves into “superorganisms,” by secreting pheromones. Humans organize by secreting cosmologies.

Better living through chemistry

2.56 – 2.43 billion years ago

There are some interesting parallels between chemistry on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. Remarkably, a recent article makes a strong case that there is an actual historical connection between the science of linguistics and the science of chemistry. Specifically, Mendeleev’s construction of the Periodic Table of Elements was probably influenced by Pāṇini’s classic generative grammar of Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. This was written somewhere around 500-350 BCE. It has been said to be as central to India’s intellectual tradition as Euclid’s Elementsis to the West’s. It probably reached the attention of Mendeleev thanks to the work of his friend and colleague, the Indologist and philologist Otto von Böhtlingk, who translated it.

[F]oundational to the Aṣṭādhyāyī was a two-dimensional, periodic alphabet, which may have intrigued Mendeleev as he struggled to create his own periodic array.

The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” (Here is a cute recent example where repeated rebounding collisions produce successively close approximations of pi.) Perhaps Mendeleev’s debt to Pāṇini via von Böhtlingk is an example of the unreasonable effectiveness of linguistics.

Here’s more on the parallels:

Chemistry plays a big role once Earth forms. Different mineral species appear, with different chemical compositions. Magnesium-heavy olivine sinks to the lower mantle of the Earth. Aluminum-rich feldspars float to the top.

Chemistry is an example of what William Abler calls “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems,” what you get when a collection of discrete units (atoms) can combine according to definite rules to create larger units (molecules) whose properties aren’t just intermediate between the constituents. Paint is not an example. Red paint plus white paint is just pink paint. But atoms and molecules are: two moles of hydrogen gas plus one mole of oxygen gas, compounded, make something very different, one mole of liquid water.

A lot of important chemical principles are summed up in the periodic table.

On the far right are atoms that have their electron shells filled, and don’t feel like combining with anyone. Most, but not all the way, to the right are atoms with almost all their shells filled, just looking for an extra electron or two. (Think oxygen, O, with slots for two extra electrons). On the left are atoms with a few extra electrons they can share. (Think hydrogen, H, each atom with an extra electron it’s willing to share with, say, oxygen.) In the middle are atoms that could go either way: polymorphously perverse carbon, C, with four slots to fill and four electrons to share, and metals, that like to pool their electrons in a big cloud, and conduct electricity and heat easily. (Think of Earth’s core of molten iron, Fe, a big electric dynamo.)

Another example of “the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems” is human language. Consider speech sounds, for example. You’ve got small discrete units (phonemes, the sounds we write b, p, s, k, ch, sh, and so on) that can combine according to rules to give syllables. Some syllables are possible, according to the rules of English, others not. Star and spiky, thole and plast, are possible English words, tsar and psyche are not (at least if you pronounce all the consonants, the way Russians or Greeks do), nor tlaps nor bratz (if you actually try to pronounce the z). Thirty years ago app, blog, and twerk were not words in the English language, but they were possible words, according to English sound laws.

You can make a periodic table of consonants.

Across the top are the different places in the vocal tract where you block the flow of air. Along the left side are different ways of blocking the flow (stopping it completely –t-, letting it leak out –s-, etc.) The table can explain why, for example, we use in for intangible and indelicate, but switch to im for impossible and imbalance. (The table contains sounds we don’t use in English, and uses a special set of signs, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which assigns one letter per phoneme.) This is why a book title like The Atoms of Language makes sense (a good book by the way).

So sometimes the universe gets more complex because already existing stuff organizes itself into complex new patterns  – clumps and swirls and stripes. But sometimes the universe gets more complex because brand new kinds of stuff appear, because a new particulate system comes online: elementary particles combine to make atoms, atoms combine to make molecules, or one set of systems (nucleotides to make genes, amino acids to make proteins) combines to make life, or another set of systems (phonemes to make words, words to make phrases and sentences) combines to make language.

Philology

1409 – 1443

“Just don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf.“

Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) to Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in “Annie Hall”

It seems difficult for people nowadays to get a handle on the intellectual side of the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery, sure. The Scientific Revolution, sure. But the Renaissance was in full swing in Italy before Columbus and da Gama, well before Copernicus and Galileo. Even before Gutenberg. So what was the big deal? Or was it such a big deal (apart from the amazing art, of course)?

A lot of the problem is that we’ve lost touch with one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 600 years, the discipline of philology. Below is a Google Ngram showing the fortunes of two academic words, philology and ecology (i.e. their frequencies in English language books).

Most  everyone today has some idea what ecology is, while even educated people are likely to draw a blank on philology. But, as the figure suggests, it wasn’t always that way. In his excellent recent book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities, James Turner writes (p. x)

It used to be chic, dashing … Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities. … It meant far more than the study of old texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians – and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself.

Philology’s golden age was the nineteenth century. This blog has covered just a few of its achievements – the reconstuction of Proto-Indo-European language and culture, and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Philology flourished especially Germany, and its decline had partly to do with the special path of Germany in the twentieth century. But philology was also at the center of the Italian Renaissance, allowing a much clearer view of the Classical past. Famously, in the 1440s, Lorenzo Valla used a close study of language to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine, in which the East Roman Emperor supposedly granted the pope authority over the West Roman empire, was a medieval fake.

And philology puts in a good showing in two of the twentieth century’s literary masterworks. In Episode 14, “The Oxen of the Sun,” in Joyce’s Ulysses, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as the course of a pregnancy is narrated in a historical succession of English prose styles. And The Lord of the Rings might be considered a work of philological science fiction; rather than turn to physics or biology to build his imagined world, ala Poul Anderson or Hal Clement, Tolkien turned to the science of philology. In The Road to Middle Earth, Tom Shippey does justice to this side of Tolkien’s romance. (Tolkien however lost the battle to keep philology at the center of the Oxford English curriculum.)