Noah Shachtman has a riveting Wired account of the decipherment of a centuries-old cipher and what it revealed about a forgotten secret society. It starts with a description of an eighteenth-century initiation, jumps to 1998 and a going-away present of a mysterious manuscript, then to 2011 and an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics that inspired the successful decipherment. If you like codes, you’ll love this story, and it’s hard to argue with the Oculists:
die neugierigkeit ist dem meNschlicheN geschlecht an geerbt wir wolleN offt eine sache wisseN blos des wegeN weil sie geheim gehalteN
Curiosity is the inheritance of mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.
(Via MetaFilter.)
A great story! and there are still some mysteries left in the manuscript and the circumstances of its writing.
Impressive that they bothered to embed the symbols in the text.
Annoying, though, that they never return to Hock and his involvement. Suddenly the original manuscript appears in place of the photocopies without explanation.
The English translation “Curiosity is … because it needs to be kept secret” is not quite correct. … blos des wegeN weil sie geheim gehalteN is an example of a kind of occasional ellipsis that one encounters in older texts (19C and earlier), but also in modern ones aiming at a certain elevation of style. Namely, the final ist has been suppressed in weil sie geheim gehalteN ist.
So the English should be “… because it is kept secret”. Commenter “sleepless” at the Wired link also points this out.
“… because it needs to be kept secret” would have been weil sie geheim zu halteN [ist].
an example of a kind of occasional ellipsis that one encounters in older texts (19C and earlier), but also in modern ones aiming at a certain elevation of style.
The most famous such example being Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen.”
Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt.
Good call. And investigating, I find that Schiller originally (1786) had it as “Was der Mode Schwert geteilt” (and “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” was “Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder”!).
Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt.
I was pretty sure that hat is sometimes elided, as well as ist, but couldn’t come up with an example. Thinking more about this, I believe it is accurate to say that only the auxiliaries in perfective forms of subordinate clauses are elided, i.e. [conjunction]+[…]+[participle + sein/haben] -> [conjunction]+[…]+[participle].
Stu’s spot on with his grumbling.
I also have issues with the translation of the first sentence. ‘Inheritance of mankind’ sounds rather ominous, while the German original is a comparatively plain statement.
If I wanted to be literal, I’d render ‘[X] ist [Y] an geerbt’ as ‘[X] is innate to [Y]’.
‘Man is curious by nature’, ‘it is the nature of man to be curious’, etc. would also be adequate by my standards.
spherical: angeerbt … innate
“Innate” is a good one. anerben is not a word familiar to me. It reminds me of der Anerbe, the farmer who is the sole inheritor of a farm – the Hoferbe in fact.
So angeerbt here might mean something like “passed on from generation to generation, staying in the family”. What do you think ?
We had a comment thread here not too long ago, in connection (I think) with the translation of a Russian story, where there was much puzzling over how to render the concept of Hoferbe in English.
whatimeantersay: “stays in the family” = “innate”.
Heh. Grimm sez: ANERBEN, hereditate competere, häufig aber auch innatum esse, propagari
@Stu:
I’m far from being an expert in 18th-century language, so please take the following with a cartload of NaCl.
In the given context, I’d read ‘angeerbt sein’ without the literal inheritance thingy, even though etymologically it is clearly there. To me, the sentence simply states that curiosity is part of the package when it comes to the human condition.
‘Anerbe’ appears to be different. According to Wikipedia, ‘Anerbenrecht’ is a legal practice that allows a farm to be treated separately from the rest of the deceased’s estate and passed on to a single heir without compensation to the other siblings.
I do not feel that ‘an geerbt’ in the text has anything to do with the legal concept of ‘Anerbe’; the ‘an’ looks like a preposition to me.
However, I’m so far out on my speculative limb at this point that you can literally hear the wood creaking. I’d like to refer this question to somebody more knowledgeable than me.
In the given context, I’d read ‘angeerbt sein’ without the literal inheritance thingy, even though etymologically it is clearly there.
Right, that’s what I initially did as well. It was only later, in connection with your suggestion of “innate” as a translation, that I embarked on speculation. I pre-salted it with the non-committal “…reminds me…”, for customer convenience.
That Schiller construction, was die Mode streng geteilt, that puzzled me for a long time until I read about finite verb elision in subclauses. FWIW, Swedish uses the same construction, as in allt (vad) jag funnit ~ ‘all (that) I had found’; with a strong verb you use the “supine” and not the adjectival participle (funnen/funnet), so it’s pretty clear what’s going on.
Danish has no truck with such sloppiness: alt (som) jeg har fundet, but I have a faint memory of having seen it in very old texts. I bet the copycat Swedes got it off the Hansa, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t too.
In school we read a whole little book from 1819 that consistently omits all auxiliary verbs in the otherwise compound past and the pluperfect (so they’re distinguishable only by context). The effect on end-20th-century readers was maddening.
the Secrets of the Oculists
Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you …
In school we read a whole little book from 1819 that consistently omits all auxiliary verbs in the otherwise compound past and the pluperfect (so they’re distinguishable only by context).
Odd that there’s no mention of that in the (quite long and substantial) Wikipedia article; you’d think it would be worth noting.
It’s not worth noting because it was normal in writing at the time. I was only struck by the complete consistency (as opposed to more isolated occurrences like “wie es eigentlich gewesen”), but I don’t know if that was unusual, and it may well not have been.
I wonder if it ever occurred in speaking. There do seem to have been dialects in the 18th century that omitted “is/are” Russian-style at least sometimes.
Oh, concerning the headline, I’ll be within walking distance of ulica Ludwika Zamenhofa tomorrow. HIDEOUS SECRET, they say.
FWIW, I think it would be fine to do “it” in spoken Swedish, as in Här är allt jag funnit, but it’s now 8 years since I used the language on a daily basis.
For me, the weird omission in Swedish is not the relativizer vad but the auxiliary har. Norw. Bm. Her er alt jeg har funnet.
My informant used to be a girl who was working at my local café, but I think she went to Uppsala to study veterinary science now, We need a real Swede!
But yeah, exaclty. You can leave out the relativizer in all the mainland Scandinavian languages, and English, maybe all of SAE, but only certain registers of Swedish allow the auxiliary to be elided. I just don’t know for sure if there are spoken registers where it’s cromulent.
I just recalled that I’m in a Telegram group with 148 mostly L1 speakers, and here’s the most relevant answer:
The man (I know him) is right that hitta is more frequent than finna, but note that he didn’t hesitate to use the finite-less construction, but hade in the main clause. (In speech, as per sagt, but you can use “to say” for things you write, so it’s not 100% conclusive). The other answers didn’t even address the lack or presence of the auxiliary, but were only about the choice of verb.
(First declension verbs like hitta/hittar/hittat don’t have a separate supine, unlike the strong verbs in -er: finna/finner/funnit/funnen), Historically, the supine is the neuter of the participle with a slight vowel change, as one does. (Funnet > funnit, but a doesn’t change. Also note verbs like köra/kör/kört that don’t have a usable common gender of the adjectival participle: Det är kört med den = ‘It’s done for’. But no vowel in the desinence that can change).
I also just realized that Swedish can omit the infinite of an auxiliary after a modal verb. I don’t know if German can/could…
Jag skulle nog inte sagt så = Jag skulle nog inte ha(va) sagt så = ‘I probably wouldn’t have said it that way’.
This is unremarkable in Norwegian, too.
Jeg burde blitt hjemme. “I should have stayed at home’
En skulle vøri fire år i romjul’n. (Prøysen) “One should have been four years old in the days after Christmas.”
Det kunne ikke gått verre. “It couldn’t have gone any worse.”
Det ville nok vært det beste for alle. “That would probably have been best for all.”
Etc., etc.
On rereading a few pages of the story, I found only occasional ellipsis of haben/sein in perfect constructions, mostly in dialogues; on the other hand, lots of normal forms with haben/sein. Exactly what I would expect of a text from the classical or romantic era. I don’t know why stundents should be struck by this — you read for the first time, the teacher explains it as a normal feature of older German, and when you come upon it the next time you know what is going on.
According to Hermann Pauls Deutsche Grammatik (1916), § 529:
– with lots of examples. Paul notes that especially Lessing and Uhland liked to do this. I grew up at a time when everybody attending a German Gymnasium had to read Lessings Nathan. I don’t remember anybody of us 14-year-olds begin bothered by this syntactic feature.
I don’t remember anybody of us 14-year-olds being bothered by this syntactic feature.
That’s a pretty weak argument for the cromulence of that feature. As I recall, 14-year-olds are concerned with one thing only – and it ain’t 18C syntax.
@Trond, thanks. As I said, Danish never does that, so I had no idea what Norwegians did.
Note that Danish uses være or have as the auxiliary depending on the verb, but I assume the elided one in Norwegian is always ha; in some cases you can use either with a Danish verb, with a slight nuance in aspect or telicity, but I can’t explain how it works,
You can leave out the relativizer in all the mainland Scandinavian languages, and English, maybe all of SAE
Certainly not in German or Russian, and I don’t think it’s possible in Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian or Polish either, but I’m not sufficiently fluent in the latter languages to exclude the possibility with certainty.
I actually crossed it twice today. *spooky music intensifies*
Now I’m wondering if Reclam made it consistent to save space. It’s specifically the consistency that struck me (and, I’m quite sure, others); the feature itself was not unknown.
#notall14yearolds
Pinchas Sapir, whom I’d brought up earlier today in the Rhenish thread, was born in Suwałki, as was Mark Zamenhof, Ludwik’s father. Coincidence???
@Hans:
Not in any dialect of Spanish in familiar with, at least. Allt jag funnit has to be todo lo que (encontré|he encontrado) even in the most casual speech.
You can leave out the relativizer in all the mainland Scandinavian languages
And in Kusaal, as you would expect from the Scandi-Congo affiliation.
So that’s a parameter that separates Scandi-Congo from SAE. And English is on our side. What do the Welsh say?
You can omit the relative particle; yet the mutation remains. The relative lurks, unseen.
I’ve had relatives like that.
Alles ich gefunden would be an unremarkable complete sentence in Sufficiently Poetic German, but it would mean “I’ve found everything”, with “everything” fronted for even more emphasis. Relativity creates relative clauses (like virtual particle-antiparticle pairs or whatever).
Oh. It’s not difficult at all to come up with an explanation of why it would be inconvenient in Russian.
Firstly, 1 no fixed word order and 2 frequently implied (rather than obligatory) arguments of verbs mean the sequence has other interpretations.
Secondly, declension. How will we mark the shared argument?
Together this is simply ‘analytical languages mark with order what others mark with morphemes’… even though here it’s not a morpheme.
But can we build a predictor for other languages from any combination of similar reasons?
all found-masc.sg, vsyo nashol
1. “never mind*, I have found it” (all (I) found, vsyo (ya) nashol)
2. “I found everything” ((I) all found, (ya) vsyo nashol)
all I found-masc.sg, vsyo ya nashol
1. “never mind, I have found it”
2. “I found everything” (an objection to someone’s belief that you have not found the ‘everything’)
* You’re looking for something and asked the listener to assist. “[That is] all” here means completion of this story.
(rather than obligatory)
[Pullum says objects aren’t really obligatory for transitive verbs in English, but that’s a different thing. A different understanding of what is ‘same verb’. In his examples the form is predictable from semantics: verbs require objects depending on the meaning, not pragmatics, style and speaker’s mood. Russian speakers simply imply objects.]
DE, I think there must be monastery where the Tablet of Divine Truth (one letter inscribed on it:)) is kept in secret, guarded by crazy kungfuist monks ready to attack every seeker.
A little girl sees it accidentally, and then the monks chase her (and Jackie Chan) all over the Earth, smiting whole empires on their way.
I’d watch that.
Pullum says objects aren’t really obligatory for transitive verbs in English
No so. Or at least, it’s not so simple.
Transitivity in English is, properly speaking, a matter of verb uses, but there are certainly verbs which always require objects. CGEL p246 gives the examples
He accosted her.
We kept the old battery.
He delineated the problem.
This entailed a considerable delay.
We forced a shutdown.
I used a knife.
English has lots of “ambitransitive” verbs, which have both transitive and intransitive uses, but using such a verb intransitively is a different thing from omitting the object of a transitive verb.
In Kusaal, objects can always be omitted, but there is still a category of obligatorily transitive verbs: the trick is, that if such a verb has no expressed object, the meaning has to be anaphoric, so
M pʋ mɔra.
I not have.NEGATIVE
has to mean “I don’t have it/them.” If you want to say that you don’t have anything, you need to say so with an explicit object: M pʋ mɔr si’ela.
In Kusaal this is not only the case for transitive relational verbs like “have” or “resemble”, but also for all causatives:
M daa diis.
I TENSE feed
“I fed him/her/it/them.”
I think this is also true for the English ambitransitive “feed” as a transitive verb. “I fed” is intransitive, and no object has been omitted here: there never was an object to omit.
Kusaal kʋ “kill” behaves like a causative: “Thou shalt not kill” has to be
Mit ka fʋ kʋ nida.
beware and you kill person.NEGATIVE
because Mit ka fʋ kʋʋ has to be interpreted as “Thou shalt not kill him/her/them.” But it’s perfectly cromulent to say
Mit ka fʋ zuu.
“Thou shalt not steal.”
because zu “steal” is an agentive ambitransitive, not an obligatorily transitive verb – just like English “steal.”
Both Kusaal and English have many such verbs: another is nu “drink”, likewise an agentive ambitransitive in English. The category is broader in English than Kusaal. But even English has verbs that can’t be used intransitively at all, and are neither active ambitransitives like “drink”, where the object can be omitted with the subject role unchanged, nor patientive ambitransitives like “melt”, where the subject in intransitive uses corresponds to the object in transitive uses.