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We’ve discussed the notorious Pahlavi script before (e.g., last December), but I’m not sure people realized quite how bad a script it is. Now Ben Joeng has a Twitter thread/rant explaining why:

I often describe Pahlavi as the worst writing system ever invented.

Let’s take a perfectly-serviceable writing system for a completely different language (Aramaic) and adapt it for our language (Middle Persian). We’ll call this new script “Pahlavi”.

Aramaic doesn’t really write all the vowels, only consonants, but that’s OK for Aramaic, because through a quirk of Semitic grammar, consonants carry most of the semantics. But our language, Middle Persian, is Indo-European and *does* carry a lot of semantic weight in vowels.

This is why when Greek (IE) borrowed writing from Phoenician (Sem.), it repurposed a bunch of the consonants that Greek didn’t have to use as vowels.

Pahlavi didn’t do that, though, it just carried on not writing vowels.

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No, not Robert the Bruce, King of Scots; this is a much more recent guy, who (as “R. Bruce”) wrote a book I happen to own, [Teach Yourself] Cantonese. In investigating the mysteriously initialed author, I turned up his 1999 obit in the Independent, which made it clear he was of considerable Hattic interest:

A career of high achievement in the service of one’s country would be enough for most people but in Robert Bruce’s case there was a great deal more. What he attained in diplomacy and scholarship, particularly in relation to the languages and peoples of China, would have set him apart in any case, but the fact that he did so under the burden of virtual blindness throughout much of his life makes his story all the more remarkable.

Bruce was born in 1911 in Fraserburgh on the north-east corner of Aberdeenshire, the second son of Henry George Bruce, who owned the family herring-curing business and to whom Robert declared at the age of 11 that he was an atheist. Such iconoclastic utterances were to be entirely characteristic of him over the following decades but the atheism did not survive the course; he died on his 88th birthday as an Episcopalian.

Having gained a first class honours degree in History and Economics at Aberdeen University, in 1933 he applied to the Colonial Service. His interview consisted merely of being asked to which colony he would like to go. Choosing Malaya, he was sent for training to Wadham College, in Oxford, a city he described as embodying “the tradition of Platonic superiority. It held the guardian class of parliament and India; the aristocratic class.”

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Fara Dabhoiwala reviews for the NYRB (June 22, 2023 issue) Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age; here are some juicy tidbits:

Nowadays we take for granted that any kind of learned book should be indexed, however tedious the labor. So valuable is this tool, so central to our ways of thinking about and using information, that in the case of multivolume scholarly editions of texts, it’s not uncommon for the index itself to constitute an entire book. Yet in the classical world the concept of such a search aid was unknown. To Cicero, an “index” meant a label affixed to a scroll that indicated its contents, rather like the printed spine or dust jacket of a modern volume on a bookshelf. As Dennis Duncan notes in his clever, sprightly Index, A History of the, the rise of the index in its current form is a story of many interrelated developments, each with its own contingencies and chronology: the replacement of scrolls by the codex, the triumph of alphabetical order, the rise of new pedagogies and genres of learning, the invention of print, the adoption of the page number, and the constantly changing character of reading itself.*

Take alphabetical order. Even though the consonantal alphabet had been around since the early second millenium BCE, the earliest known examples of its application as an organizing principle date only from about the third century BCE. The now lost 120-scroll catalog of the Library of Alexandria listed authors partly in alphabetical order. That the ancient Greeks were fond of using it is evident in everything from their fishmongers’ price lists to records of taxpayers and monuments to playwrights (the background panel of one surviving marble statuette of Euripides lists the titles of his plays from alpha to omega).

Yet after them the Romans largely disdained the alphabetical principle as arbitrary and illogical, and so did Europeans throughout the Middle Ages. Books about words—like lexicons, grammars, and glosses—employed it, but it was not a widely understood rule. […]

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Peter Backhaus in the Japan Times reports on a truly bizarre phenomenon:

If there’s something like a Murphy’s Law for syntax, the name of this restaurant near my school is a pretty good example of it. Reading “Steak The First,” it always makes me wonder how these three words came to be aligned in just that order. “The first steak,” “first the steak,” “the steak first” — all of these seem safe for consumption. But “steak the first”?

In order to understand what’s going on here, we need to appreciate the very specific way the little word “the” is used in Japanese, where it is normally pronounced ザ (za). Note that the reading may change to ジ (ji) when the following word starts with a vowel, as in the name of the invincible Japanese rock band The Alfee, which officially reads ジ・アルフィー (ji arufī).

But since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles, it’s a bit challenging to understand what use it can make of ザ in the first place. Even more puzzling is that, more often than not, ザ shows up in places where English syntax wouldn’t want you to put an article at all. […]

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I’m still slowly making my way through Martin’s Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 (see this post), and I’ve come to a very interesting passage on names that I’ll quote below (the “Volkov” he refers to is Dmitrii Volkov, a “skilled, peripatetic goldsmith” with some education who kept a record of his employment in a notebook during the 1820s):

Names, and how they were recorded, were markers of identity. They show how cultural patterns shifted over time and spread from one estate to another.

The significance of a name for one’s identity is apparent from Volkov’s copybook. He wrote out his name repeatedly and in different forms: Dmitrii Stepanych Volkov; Dmitrei Stepanov Volkov; Dmitrei Stepanov; Dmitrei Volkov. According to Ivan Belousov, who grew up in a Moscow tailor’s family in the 1860s and 1870s, apprentices were called only by a nickname, which was derived from their looks, place of origin, or some other characteristic. At the end of their apprenticeship, in an important rite of passage, they bought drinks for everyone in the shop and were henceforth addressed by their name and patronymic. When Volkov wrote his name in its full, formal form, he was affirming his social position as an adult craftsman.

Volkov’s experimentation with the form of his patronymic likewise suggests an interest in the linkage between name and status. In everyday interactions, Russians expressed respect by addressing people with their first name and full patronymic (Stepanovich or Stepanych). However, in official documents, this usage was reserved for holders of the top five government ranks, whereas persons of lower status had to be content with the “half patronymic”: Stepanov or Stepanov syn (Stepan’s son). In his notes in the copybook, Volkov’s friend Arstov played with these nuances by addressing him reverentially as “Mr Dmitrii Stepanovich, master of the gold trade,” while humbly calling himself “Ivan Stepanov syn Arstov.” Using the European form of one’s name was especially refined. Arstov made ironic allusion to this, too, when he signed his name in Latin, the international language of scholars, as “Johannes natus, Arstoff vocatus.”

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The topic of the ancient polity known as Caucasian Albania has come up a number of times here at LH (first, I think, in 2004), and I’ve always found it intriguing; now De Gruyter Mouton has published Caucasian Albania: An International Handbook and made it Open Access, so we can all enjoy it. The section of most direct LH relevance is The Heritage of Caucasian Albanian, including the following chapters:

Jost Gippert, The Textual Heritage of Caucasian Albanian 95
Jost Gippert and Wolfgang Schulze, The Language of the Caucasian Albanians 167
Wolfgang Schulze and Jost Gippert, Caucasian Albanian and Modern Udi 231
Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, The Udis’ Petition to Tsar Peter 261

The other sections are Caucasian Albania in Foreign Sources, The Caucasian Albanian Church, and Architecture and Archaeology. The conclusion of “Caucasian Albanian and Modern Udi”:

As we have seen, many divergences between Caucasian Albanian and the modern Udi language can easily be explained as diachronic changes that were induced either by system-internal factors or by the influence of neighbouring languages, and Albanian may thus well be regarded as an ancestor of Udi. This implies that for the question of their affiliation with other East Caucasian languages, Albanian must be taken as the starting point. However, with the abandonment of class agreement, the introduction of a system of person markers, the abundant use of clause subordination including relative clauses, and many other features, Albanian had already moved away considerably from what can be assumed to have been the common linguistic basis of the Lezgic subgroup of East Caucasian before the translations of biblical texts that we find in the palimpsests were accomplished.

Hooray for Open Access!

Monica Westin writes at Aeon about the prehistory of internet searching, something entirely unknown to me:

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed.

The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. […] Participants had trouble signing on to the system and experienced unpredictable failures, ‘irrelevant output’ and, most of all, not knowing ‘what words to use in a search’. Yet they also found the system intriguing and exciting (‘fun’, ‘thorough’, ‘I dig computers’), and 94 per cent said they would use SUPARS (the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service) again if it were available. Several offered to keep the experiment running past its deadline by asking their departments to contribute funding to the project.

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Trick question — it’s both! A couple of links sent in by generous Hatters provide illustrations:

1) AI has brought back 15 languages people haven’t heard for centuries, by Tod Perry for Upworthy:

The folks at Equator AI are giving people a realistic idea of what people in ancient civilizations sounded like by recreating the languages of 15 languages that haven’t been heard in centuries. In the video, the languages are spoken by computer-generated recreations of people who lived in that era.

The languages are Old Norse, Mayan, Latin, Middle Chinese, Old English, Old Japanese, Old Church Slavonic, Proto-Celtic, Middle Egyptian, Ryukyuan, Ancient Greek, Phoenician, Hittite, Quechua, and Akkadian. Yes, some of them aren’t extinct and others are so insecurely reconstructed that you have to wonder how they came up with texts to read — not to mention that it would be nice to see the texts — but still, it’s fun. Thanks, Martin!

2) ChatGPT Is Cutting Non-English Languages Out of the AI Revolution, by Paresh Dave for WIRED:

[…] the dominance of English in global commerce is real. [Pascale] Fung, director of the Center for AI Research at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who herself speaks seven languages, sees this bias in her own field. “If you don’t publish papers in English, you’re not relevant,” she says. “Non-English speakers tend to be punished professionally.”

Fung would like to see AI change that, not further reinforce the primacy of English. She’s part of a global community of AI researchers testing the language skills of ChatGPT and its rival chatbots and sounding the alarm about evidence that they are significantly less capable in languages other than English.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I got this from Avva, and I confess that while I was reading it (in Russian), I assumed it was a rant from relatively recent times — say, my grandfather’s day. Imagine my surprise when I got to the end and discovered it was from the 14th century! Thus I made the acquaintance of Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, online here in an English translation by Ernest Chester Thomas (and here in Latin); here’s the passage (from ch. XVII) quoted by Avva:

You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies, and when the winter’s frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the ugly moisture. Would that he had before him no book, but a cobbler’s apron! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with which he marks any passage that pleases him. He distributes a multitude of straws, which he inserts to stick out in different places, so that the halm may remind him of what his memory cannot retain. These straws, because the book has no stomach to digest them, and no one takes them out, first distend the book from its wonted closing, and at length, being carelessly abandoned to oblivion, go to decay. He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continually chattering, he is never weary of disputing with his companions, and while he alleges a crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying half open in his lap with sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he leans forward on the book, and by a brief spell of study invites a prolonged nap; and then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no small injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a neglecter rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to close it.

But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the most beautiful books.

Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving only the text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the protection of the book, for various uses and abuses—a kind of sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema.

I join him in his anathema!

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude:

His interest in his own language, which had begun during his philological studies in his boyhood, was perhaps the only passion of his youth that never failed him.

… Il cor di tutte
Cose alfin sente sazietà, del sonno,
Della danza, del canto e dell’ amore,
Piacer più cari che il parlar di lingua;
Ma sazietà di lingua il cor non sente.*

Certainly the pages of the Zibaldone bear eloquent witness to the fact that, for Leopardi himself this statement was true! Some men have an addiction to drink, some to drugs, some to one particular human being: Leopardi had an addiction to words.¹²

* ‘The heart at last tires of all things: of sleep, dance, song, and even love—pleasures sweeter than the gift of words—but of words themselves, the heart is never tired.’ From Leopardi’s notes to the Canzoni, Poesie e Prose, vol. I, p. 152.

12. ‘The measure of a nation’s genius’, he affirmed, ‘is the richness of its language, and when a language is insufficient to render in translation the subtleties of another, it is a sure sign that it belongs to a less cultivated people.’ Zibaldone, I, pp. 730–1, 25 May 1821.

Works for me. (See the link for a comparison between the Leopardi quotation and a passage in Iliad 13.)