Facundo Corradini has an impassioned LogRocket post (from 2018) about HTML and semantics:
In the dark ages of HTML, <em> was barely used at all, despite being part of the specs since really early on (HTML 2.0 standard, 1995). But at that point in time and for some years to come, (almost) no one was thinking of semantics or even separation of concerns. Italics were simply marked up with <i> tags, and we wouldn’t give it a second thought.
Then somewhere along the way, someone shouted “Semantics!” and everybody started to hate the poor little <i> tag like a bad neighbor. A really, really bad neighbor.
<em> was all the rage, with supposed benefits for accessibility and SEO, which got us all using it everywhere. By HTML 4, everybody knew <em> was for emphasis and styled as italics, <strong> was for stronger emphasis and styled as bold text. If you ever dared to use <i>, you would be instantly tagged as a bad developer. […]
But when HTML5 rolled out, they made sure to draw a clearer line on what they intended <em> to be, while redefining the <i> from a text-italicising tag into a semantic tag that pretty much wraps most other use cases for italics.
He gives examples, then:
Why it matters
Accessibility, of course. Every time we use the wrong tag to italicise a word, most of our users won’t even notice. As long as we are doing so according to our language conventions, the word will be read with the intended emphasis.
But we are making things so much more complicated for screen readers, especially when nesting. If we were doing our job right, speech synthesizers would be able to easily make the right pitch corrections. But we’re so far gone in this that all of them (as far as I know) have it disabled by default, and that’s a big part of what makes them feel so unnatural.
He ends with a series of takeaways (“Whenever you’re throwing italics at a word/phrase, think about why are you doing so and choose the right tag for the task if possible”); it all makes me feel bad for knowing so little about it and just using the “i” tag my software supplies, but obviously I’m one of a vast multitude. I expect my readers will have thoughts about all this.
I started using “em” (at least, Dreamweaver did), but I later realised that “em” and “i” were two different things, so I defiantly switched back to “i”, which is perhaps going back too far the other way. Now there is an unholy mixture of “em”s and “i”s throughout my site, depending when the page was created.
As he says, there are times when you should use “em” for emphasis (i.e., when italics are used to denote emphasis), but it’s hard to draw a firm distinction given that it is all the same in the written language.
As he points out, words will also be italicised if you use the “cite” tag (for names of books).
If I understand this correctly — and I’m not at all sure I do — the em and i and strong tags are supposed to convey meanings and distinctions in HTML-coded language that we don’t have in plain old written language on the page. Which makes me wonder (a) who made this stuff up and (b) how the heck are untutored readers supposed to grasp the differences?
In short, I’m confused.
You and me both!
I have zero experience with this, but according to Mr. Corradini it all comes down to the automatic readers. They have to know which of the italicized words to read out with higher volume and pitch or whatever else makes for emphasis in the spoken language.
Nobody does this, but one could use emphasis in a different way from italics. If the basic font class for a section of running text were italicized, the emphasis tag could be defined to switch the text to upright type.
I think it is actually possible to do the same with the italic tag too in modern HTML, but that was part of the original intended distinction; emphasis was a semantic property, italicization a typographical one. There were probably other motivations for drawing the distinction in the first place, but that is the one that always seemed most salient to me, as a font and composition person. (I had a dream last night about multiple master fonts, of all abstruse topics.)
The (excellent) blogging app MarsEdit has an I button. The mouseover label that goes with it: “Italicize text.” Click on it, and you get <em>. All of which is to say: I give up.
Oh pshaw, text-to-speech software can’t lay its robot prosody at the doorstep of our italics markup. Perfect angle-bracket-emming would help a tiny fraction of that.
Text routinely goes on for page after page that don’t have any kind of italics, and it’s TTS’s job to generate natural prosody out of that.
Just so. If you tag text according to its function, you can switch from one style to another. So <em> means emphasis, <cite> means a book title (vel sim.), <var> means a mathematical/programming variable, <dfn> means a defined term, and <i> means a foreign-language phrase, or thinking as opposed to speaking dialogue, or anything else for which itals are commonly used. By default (and that was an <em> tag) the tags all redner as italics, but you can change that. If you want to style defined terms in bold, for example, it’s easy-peasy.
I actually want to control how my texts are shown in every browser. When I put Tyrannosaurus rex in italics, that’s not some kind of emphasis; it’s the style recommended for names at the genus group and the species group of ranks in General Recommendation 6 and universally used whenever possible. I rarely want to use italics for emphasis; I prefer emphasis to be conveyed by other means.
So, whenever possible, I use <i> and <b>.
And now I learn that doesn’t give me control over the layout anymore either?!?
By default “i” should give you italics and “b” bold.
You can change how “i”, “b”, and many other elements render in the user’s browser by modifying your style sheet (css), but I think users can also set their own style sheet, which will override yours, so no, you don’t have complete control.
how the heck are untutored readers supposed to grasp the differences?
Untutored readers don’t have to grasp the differences at all. Unless they look at the underlying code or play around with their style sheet, they won’t notice any difference. It’s the web designer who has to know the difference because it will affect how pages are read out. (It’s possible that Google pays attention to the differences because Google reads the markup, but I’m rather doubtful that it is significant for Google, either.)
I very rarely use italics for emphasis — wir haben anderen Methoden — but mostly for quoting words as words, sometimes for species and genera. I assume those are part of the new semantics of <i>. I’ll remember the <cite> tag if it works here:
Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Ordbog over det danske Sprog, Gyldendals Forlag 1928-1955.
EDIT: It’s allowed but styled as ‘normal’ on this site.
According to this page from 2016, it doesn’t seem to make any difference to Google:
http://www.velizaratellalyan.com/seo/the-importance-of-bold-and-strong-tags-in-seo/
Lars, your “cite” tag doesn’t seem to work at LH. But it will definitely work on a web page.
It does work, as in it’s not removed like the <sub> and <sup> ones, and we’re viewing LH as a webpage innit. But there is a CSS override to make it ‘normal’. Blame Sven Aas who made the theme.
In practical terms, we are really talking about the ability for companies like Google to understand what the text means so they can present their results better.
So, going to the source,
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data?rd=1&visit_id=637257376257957610-1677508014
We see no lectures about the em tag.
“You use the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats to add information to your Web content. “
One can argue that the reason why Latin species names are set in italics is because, well, they are Latin, and foreign-language phrases mixed into English-language text are usually set in italics. Therefore, in this case, for the sake of semantic markup, one should not put i tags around Latin names and phrases. Rather, one should use the span tag with lang=”la”, and add a CSS rule that Latin passages (or simply all text outside the document’s main language) be set in italics.
Google Scholar parses cafeteria lunch menus as an author list
Yes, and that’s because HTML is not solely meant to be viewed on the page. Accessibility is crucial, as anyone with a visual impairment will attest.
This is not unique to <em>, of course, but a general feature of how content is supposed to be structured. You use <p> tags for paragraphs instead of forcing line breaks with <br>, for example, so that screen readers will know to make a longer pause before moving on.
I don’t think about my pitch when I speak, and I surely doesn’t think about pitch when I write. It’s not very practical to expect writers to write pronunciation guides in addition to the text. I suspect many writers simply don’t have the right skill set for that. I’m also confused over the idea that italics are supposed to be pronounced with a certain pitch. Surely the pitch (and pronunciation as a whole) is different if you use italics to mark a foreign language word or sentence, or if you use it to mark a regular English sentence? Yet none of those is the wrong way to use italics, just different correct ways.
I see from the article that some of those concerns are addressed (such as using something to mark the language for foreign languages), but I’m still confused. How did someone mix up italics and pitch in the first place?
@Moa:
You’ll need a séance to answer that, because the mix-up happened in the 16th century (cf. Lane, J. (1983/4). “The Types of Nicholas Kis”, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 18, pp. 47–75). It’s been an established custom for centuries to use italics to mark emphasis in writing (among other things), the same way pitch and volume are used to mark emphasis in speech.
People will use anything that makes part of the text stand out visually, I guess. Old Danish books and newspapers sometimes used s p a t i e r e d e letters for emphasis (spærret sats).
(I thought spatiated was an English word, and it is but it does not mean this).
When books were printed in Fraktur, Antiqua was used for contrast (and for French words in general).
@Alon: Thanks, as I’m not into seances I guess I’m going to continue being confused. 🙂
I see from your explanation that emphasis is the common theme, and it’s just happens that pitch and italics can sometimes be used for emphasis.
@Lars: I haven’t seen the spatierede letters in a long time, but I have some vague memories. I wonder if it used to be used in Swedish too?
In my hand written notes I use versals, lines, exclamation marks, draw circles and write in different colours to mark important words. Italic and bold are not very practical for hand writing.
Old Danish books and newspapers sometimes used s p a t i e r e d e letters for emphasis
Lars, is this only Danish? And how have you achieved it here?
I am only sure of Danish and German printed in Fraktur — if you follow the link you’ll see it used to set off references to (other) headwords in the running text in the ODS. (Explanatory text in italics, phonetics, older forms and citations in ‘normal’ — references in spaced italics and incidentally hyperlinked so they are blue. I think that is how the printed version looks as well, but I never acquired one). But I have a mental image of 50’s vintage SciAm using it too.
I don’t think there is a CSS font style option to achieve this, and in any case WordPress will suppress “style” attributes (and any tag you would normally put them on, such as “span”). I simply put
 between each letter and hoped the line wouldn’t break. I see I could have used  (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE)instead to prevent breaks.Fun thing about the Fraktur use: a ‘ch’ or ‘ck’ ligature would not be broken up, nor I think some other like ‘st’, but ‘sch,’ ‘fft’ and the like would, at least to 1+2 letters. I’m sure there are images on the web that will prove this wrong.
Lars, CSS does have support for spaced letters. It would be trivial to write a stylesheet by which text marked with the em tag and lang=”da” has spaced letters instead of italics.
Also, WordPress does allow blog owners to specify what HTML tags they allow in comments. For example, my own, no longer updated blog, I whitelisted the span tag because I did want comment writers to use semantic markup (if they failed to mark foreign-language text up appropriately I would just go in and add that markup myself). Hat could permit span tags on this blog, but with the volume of comments he gets, perhaps he would think it too burdensome to screen all comments for misuse.
Yeah, it’s all I can do to keep up with the moderation queue and fix typos. I don’t even know what span tags are; that’s not my department (said Wernher von Braun).
Having looked through all these comments I now understand what the original article is getting at. But it seems like a quixotic hope that even a fraction of html users will understand and appreciate and use these subtleties.
They* could introduce a ‘basic’ tag that non-experts could put around all their html writings, to indicate that the writer doesn’t really know what he is doing. This would be a warning to automated readers to switch off their detection of semantic codes and the like. Or maybe ‘basic’ should be the default and sophisticated html writers should use an ‘expert’ tag.
*You know, the anonymous overlords who create and approve html
PS I tried to write ‘basic’ and ‘expert’ between less than and greater than signs but I couldn’t even do that right. I need a ‘total amateur’ tag.
The obvious solution is only to use languages where emphasis is not indicated by stress or pitch. There are plenty of them, after all. No need to wrestle with the mysteries of html at all! It’s so simple! Sorry, simple.
But it seems like a quixotic hope that even a fraction of html users will understand and appreciate and use these subtleties.
Exactly.
The important issue here for us casual HTML users is more about what HTML is for rather than parsing specific uses of tags. Being non-visually impaired myself, I’d thought of HTML the way I think of typesetting: as a way of achieving visual effect in a visual medium. And from the perspective, the difference between ’em’ and ‘i’ tags is pretty trivial and/or needlessly obtuse. But the internet has the potential to be accessible in ways that print books aren’t, and taking advantage of that potential requires thinking in a different metaphor. I think it is an uphill battle getting non-handicapped people to think in terms of accessibility, but not impossible. That said, it seems like a bad design decision to make semantic and formal tags treated in the exact same way.
The article reminds me of the Hattery discussions about Christology: if you stick to the technical semantics, it’s a confusing mess; but if you approach it from a more sociological point of view, it becomes a lot clearer what’s going on.
I think it is an uphill battle getting non-handicapped people to think in terms of accessibility, but not impossible.
Depends what you mean. Sure, it’s not impossible to convince the occasional person to try harder, but it is in fact impossible to convince a critical mass so that the situation would materially change. This is one of the many areas where working on a person here and a person there is a waste of time and energy; the only way to achieve anything useful is an across-the-board change that would allow the average lazy, thoughtless internet user (me, for example) to Do the Right Thing without having to worry about it.
How do other languages do contrast at the morphological level, like “government OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people” or “not Good-YEAR, Good-RICH” (two tire manufacturers)? I always wondered about that.
No idea about other languages, but you can do it in English too without changing pitch/volume. Just say words separately and draw it out and it will add emphasis. Not governmentovthepeople, but government [pause] ooohf [pause] thepeople. A bit strange, but should do the trick. It’s like using l e t t e r s p a c i n g instead of ALL CAPS.
I seldom use italics for emphasis. When writing fiction, my main use for italics is direct quotes of unspoken material (usually internal dialogue), with some “foreign” words (meaning foreign to the main characters). In nonfiction, there are many more uses for italics: titles of other works, foreign worlds (like “Zitterbewegung”), and of course mathematical expressions. The mathematics is handled entirely differently from the other examples, however, since I do my technical writing in LaTeX, which has (perhaps as its most important feature) a completely separate math mode, in which all sorts of complicated expressions can be laid out in mark-up language. The changes to the typography in math mode go far beyond mere italicization: There are a whole separate set of math fonts; math mode spacing is entirely different; and there are many additional mathematical symbols and operators that are only available in that special environment.
When I do use italics for emphasis, it is because I want to represent something prosodic that I feel would otherwise not be apparent to a reader. I spend a lot of time thinking about the prosody of my fiction, and even in my technical papers, prosody is always a concern. I mostly try to convey the prosody I want without additional markings for emphasis, but sometimes that is impossible or for some reason undesirable.
For a nonfiction example, I had to skim half a dozen of my scientific papers to find one which I used italics for emphasis.
(The ellipsis corresponds to the omission of a number of mathematical expressions that I could not reproduce here, because Unicode does not support a full alphabet of subscript characters.) In this case, the emphasis is there to point to the key contrast between the related phenomena of gauge symmetry breaking and Lorentz symmetry breaking.
Example are more frequent in my fiction, but still not very common. Here is the first example I found in the manuscript I currently have open.
Here, the prosodic effect I wanted was to foreshadow that “outside” meant something outre, not the just usual outdoors.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to toot the horn of Saving the World Through Personal Responsibility, or to make a moralize at anyone. Honestly, I wonder if, as younger internet users have less attachment to paper media, adopting design behaviour that isn’t rooted in paper metaphors will be easier. That said, the general clusterfuck of HTML design isn’t doing anyone any favours in doing things “the right way.”
Lyka stepped cautiously through
How do you pronounce Lyka — laɪkə? lüka?
It’s weird to put the line between handicapped people or not, rather, the distinction is between people who care about pitch and people who don’t. Even if we make a special “pitch” marker, and it becomes wide-spread and default for all blog sites, how will we teach everybody to recognize the different pitches in English, and mark them in the right way? Sure, it’s probably a lot easier than teaching everybody to write in the international phonetic alphabet, but it’s not exactly a question of a simple 5 minute explanation and then people can start doing it. I took English classes too, thorough school, and I don’t remember any special focus on pitch or drawn out emphasis. Maybe I overslept that day, maybe our teacher just didn’t find it important, either way, it’s hardly something everybody who knows English knows well enough to put on paper.
I do remember going over emphasis in Chinese (Mandarin) class. We were told to listen to several sentences and notice the change in meaning. As it was the first semester, and we hardly could distinguish one sound from another, it seemed pointless and boring at the time. Maybe I could hear that some part of the sentence had more emphasis, but I couldn’t exactly make out what it meant. By the way, the emphasised syllables were marked with a little triangle beneath the syllable/character, not italics.
Rats. (Well, mice, actually.)
Ah, but no. Here’s the first half of General Recommendation 6:
And indeed, the names of taxa above the genus group of ranks are practically never set in italics in practice. Yet, they are more likely than genus- or even species-group names to have Latin(ized Greek) endings.
Zoological names must be in ASCII, but the legal fiction that, anytime authors coin new names that aren’t identical to attested Latin words, they thereby create new Latin words has long been officially abandoned, if it ever was official. Consider Article 11.3:
(“used as a word” appears to be some faint inkling of phonotactics.)
This is in contrast to the botanical code, BTW, which has as its Principle V that “[s]cientific names of taxonomic groups are treated as Latin regardless of their derivation.”
And finds citations for them!
I do. That’s what punctuation is (in regularized and sometimes ambiguous ways).
(Well, intonation in general – an inseparable mix of pitch, loudness and probably speed. I certainly don’t think of these components individually.)
That (gesperrt) is what it’s called in German, where it was used as the main means of written emphasis into the late 20th century – and academic works contained a lot of emphasis. (It was never used for genus & species names that I know of.)
My mother still uses it in plain text sometimes.
That depends! I’ve used them both. Fairly good italics can be achieved by just holding your hand at a different angle to the line, at least if your handwriting isn’t already tilted to begin with (mine’s vertical). For boldface, often it is possible to put a kink in the tip of a fountain pen; turn the pen around its long axis so the entire bent-over surface, instead of just the tip, touches the paper, and you’ll write in an almost calligraphic boldface.
Better yet: the refusal to break up ‘st’ survived as a spelling rule until the reform of 1998/2005. Generations of schoolchildren were taught:
Trenne nie ST,
denn es tut ihm weh!
“never separate ST, because it finds that painful”
However, while ‘fft’ was and is broken up (ff-t), ‘sch’ only is if it’s /sx/, in other words if it has a morpheme boundary through it (Häuschen, Gänschen), not if it’s /ʃ/. Both kinds of ‘sch’ were written as ‘s’ followed by the ligature ‘ch’ in Fraktur. ‘ck’ used to be broken up as ‘k-k’, but since the reform it’s not broken up at all.
That is often expressed by free-standing particles. Russian же comes to mind (though that is often combined with intonation).
Contrastive stress seems to be a purely Germanic concept. Elsewhere, it seems, you’re simply out of luck. When I lived next to Paris, the supermarket next to me occasionally interrupted the muzak to announce it was open on Sundays “de neuf [ˌ]heures à treize [ˈ]heures”, with the stress on the repeated information.
I sometimes have style/typography conflicts/disagreements with colleagues when we are both working on the same document because my view is that you shouldn’t use italics for foreign-origin words or phrases that have been borrowed into English to the extent that they have become part of the lexicon of the relevant variety of English. It is also my view that a foreign-origin word or phrase that isn’t sufficiently domesticated to be not-italicized should generally not be used, at least in my professional legal writing. I.e., don’t use a Latin word or phrase that you’re not confident will be understood by a judge who has never actually taken a single class in Latin as such, but if you’re confident that the word or phrase is so universally known by monolingual Anglophone American judges that it doesn’t flunk that test, don’t put it in italics because you’ve just demonstrated that it’s not foreign.
Left to my own devices I use italics for emphasis as well as for names-of-cases-cited, but I try not to overuse it for the first purpose. In this specific genre of writing, ambiguity as to which use of italics is intended by me in a particular instance is close to vanishingly rare.
Two minutes to google up this title page, 10 to fish out a deep link to a page image: Enough gesperrte Fraktur to illustrate. (If the link goes stale, I saved a copy that I can upload and link).
(Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, 1821. But the rest of the book is a critical edition set in Antiqua, and even though it uses gesperrt for author names it separates ligatures in so doing).
@DM, I was not talking about word breaking, but about ligatures not getting spaced in gesperrt. I didn’t find an example of ‘sch’ or ‘ff’ so far.
W a l d s ch l ö ß ch e n
Yes, also Teichmühle & Teichhäuser in the line above – ch and st were never spaced, ff was, I think ck was not.
Eine Sternstunde der Sperrkunde.
Contrastive stress seems to be a purely Germanic concept
Hebrew does it; I bet lots of languages do. Intonational focus on contrastive sentence elements is very common, and that’s easily extended to the word level.
I was sure French did it till I found out it doesn’t… it seems self-evident, but it clearly isn’t.
Modern Hebrew could always have gotten it from Yiddish. Does Arabic have it?
@languagehat: I pronounce her name laɪkə, as you suggest. It’s the same way I say the name of the first dog in space.
Thanks!
Spanish definitely doesn’t use contrastive stress: if a (Germanic-speaking) learner asks if his interlocutor said “¿el homBRE o el homBRO?”, the answer will be “el HOMbre” [man] or “el HOMbro” [shoulder] as the case may be, and so we go in gyro-gyrorondo. I agree that modern Hebrew picked it up from Yiddish. Arabic can use it, but normally uses word order instead.
My mother was born in 1919; her journal of her death (which took about two years) was handwritten mostly in English, but there are occasional German bits, and they have letterspacing for emphasis. When I typed up her MSS (not this one, I couldn’t bear it) I letterspaced on the typewriter: one monowidth space between letters, two or three between words.
I don’t really think we need a borrowing account — this feels like the kind of thing that can easily arise naturally.
Arabic can use it, but normally uses word order instead
Wait, what? I thought we were talking about word-internal stress.
this feels like the kind of thing that can easily arise naturally
It’s iconic, certainly; but it’s still conventional. It doesn’t seem to be at all common in Africa.
“Teach Yourself Swahili”, a more sophisticated work than it initially appears to be, specifically warns the English speaker against importing it into Swahili:
There are two points which should be kept in mind, especially by women, in speaking Swahili …
You cannot call attention to a word by emphasising it, or express surprise or excitement as it is done in English …
Get some African child to imitate an English person speaking Swahili, and learn from his imitation what to avoid.
I like the “especially by women.” It was published in 1951.
Hmm. That Swahili book is by a D.V. Parrott, whereas the British Swahili intro texts from that era with which I’m more familiar tend to be by E.O. Ashton. But since the E turns out to be for Ethel, perhaps the D is for Diana or Dorothy?
EDITED TO ADD: That was a shot in the dark but in fact D.V. Parrott’s full name appears to have been Daisy Valerie Parrott. Under the brutal regime of George VI, explaining Swahili was women’s work.
Might well be … [and in response to your edit, actually is]
There is some doubt about the sex of Ethel herself, inasmuch as she mysteriously metamorphoses into Eric Ormerod Ashton in some bibliographies. It was obviously all go at SOAS in the old days. Boomers, nothing. The place is in Bloomsbury, I suppose.
@David E.: In my childhood, there was a weird convention amongst American authors writing for children and/or teens (“Young Adults” in the euphemism favored by the publishing industry) that an author using only initials was likely to be a woman trying to downplay her sex to avoid being stuck in the Lady Authoress pigeonhole. S.E. Hinton and E.L. Konigsburg are good examples. I’d like to think I would have enjoyed their works just as much had they published as Susan and Elaine, respectively, but they made their choices based on their assumptions about the world, which may have been plausible. But I have the impression that going-by-initials is or at least so much more common in academic or academic-adjacent British circles, Swahili-oriented or otherwise, such that doing so was not so much of a tell. This is of course particularly ironic coming from me, but whatever led me to originally get in the habit of posting here on an initials-only basis was not (I guess you’ll have to trust me on this) the fear that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously if I posted as Jill W., which due to the fortuity of things is not actually my proper given name.
The earth trembles. Revelations that ain’t !
Letter spacing in handwriting is new to me; I’d have expected underlining. The traditional way to render taxonomic italics in handwriting, according to a university course I once had, is to put a wavy line under the words (unterwellieren, “under-wave-ize”).
It still existed, in the UK, when “J.K.” Rowling brought the first Harry Potter book out. Her K isn’t even real – she doesn’t have a middle name, it’s her grandmother’s, but her publisher wanted her to have two initials.
@David Marjanović: In English-language compositing, a wavy line under something indicated bold. I had a (sincere but terrible) professor who used that to indicate bold vectors on the blackboard; it contrasted rather poorly with another professor we had the same semester, who actually drew blackboard bold versions of every upper or lower case letter of the alphabet.
Indicating italicization was done with a straight underline. For decades, the underlining was taught to children in school as the correct way of indicating certain things. I remember being vaguely suspicious if it when I first encountered it in third grade, since such underlining did not appear in actual printed books. However, I did not make the connection that it corresponded to italics in properly printed works until I came across a full explanation in a book. As WYSIWYG word processors became available, I tried to convince my teachers that if italics were available, they should be used, not underlining; some agreed, and some did not.
but whatever led me to originally get in the habit of posting here on an initials-only basis …
Oh, I’d always assumed you were an authoress of Young Adult fiction, aiming to downplay your sex. You do realise there’s no need for your WordPress “Name *” to resemble any sort of name?
Everyone knows that perfectly well; no need to be snarky.
J. K. Rowling’s international pseudonyms
Very interesting!
Under the brutal regime of George VI, explaining Swahili was women’s work
Now that I think of it, the best of all the paedagogical Swahili grammars, Twende, is also by a woman, Joan Maw. The chilling effect of the ancien régime persists even into this second Elizabethan Age.
Indicating italicization was done with a straight underline.
Hockett’s introduction to Bloomfield’s Menomini Language says:
“For the use of italics (underline) for cited forms … I must accept the responsibility.”
The actual printed text uses underline; I presume one is supposed to read it as italics.
@ J. W. Brewer:
I have the impression that going-by-initials is or at least so much more common in academic or academic-adjacent British circles
Sure. Consider T.S., T.E., D.H., I.A., E.M., C.S., and F.R. (all men), and on the other hand Q.D. (Mrs. F.R.) and G.E.M. There are also non-academic-adjacent C.S. (the other one) and P.G., and in the United States there was S.J., who wrote, “She turned on the radio. With a savage snarl, it turned on her.”
Queenie is such an unacademicsounding name. It’s too bad she (& they) was such a dreadful scary person.
…(and you missed A.L.)
To say nothing of WH.
The book which just happens to be on top of the pile beside me, The Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula, proclaims that it is by D W Arnott. No further indication of the author’s name is given anywhere; Professor D was in fact, as it happens, a David, like all right-thinking people.
So now we know that Harry Potter exists in Sakha.
Harry Potter exists everywhere. The next previously undiscovered holdout of Neolithic folk somewhere in the jungles of Borneo or Congo will have folktales based on fucking Harry Potter.
(Er, “fucking” was meant as an intensive adjective, not a verb. Neolithic folk don’t do fanfic as far as I know.)
De Ste. Croix used Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters as the frontispiece for his book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World – how confusing of him.
Geoffrey, or “Croicks” as he mockingly referred to himself
Looking along my bookshelves, the great majority of academic textbooks from UK university presses before about 1980 just give the author’s name as initials + surname (notably, also regularly omitting academic titles and degrees.) It must have been an actual settled convention. Never thought about it before …
Folktales based on eating Harry Potter might be more interesting. I’d say that they might also be more culturally appropriate, but that would lay me open to well-founded charges of hurtful cultural stereotyping. And cannibalism is so palaeolithic. Nobody’s into that these days.
How often is the V.S. in V.S. Naipaul spelled out?
Vidiadhar Surajprasad is not that scary, especially in comparison with the following:
Президент Туркменистана Бердымухаммедов Гурбангулы Мяликкулиевич в ходе его визита в Исландию, вместе с Президентом Исландии Гвюдни Йоуханненссоном посетили вулкан в районе перевала Фиммвердюхаулс, расположенный между ледниками Мирдальсйоукюдль и Эйяфьятлайокудль,… что привело к массовым самоубийствам дикторов новостных программ.
(pity they bungled ЙоуханнеНссоном, which should be Йоуханнессоном)
Geoffrey, or “Croicks” as he mockingly referred to himself
That’s quite an obit, and quite a guy:
There are several different formats for citation used in academic works, but for most of them, you only list authors’ initials and surnames in the bibliography, regardless of how an author is listed in the actual source. Of course, you only abbreviate the given names that actually appear, so I am usually “B. Altschul,” not “B. D. Altschul,” and my colleague who goes by his middle name, listed as “V. Alan” in his publications, is reduced to just “V. A.”
This is the actual title pages of the works themselves that I’m talking about. I think it must have been a house rule for at least CUP and OUP.
@D. Eddyshaw: I understand. I just think there may have been a feedback mechanism. If only your initials are ever going to cited, there may seem little point in using your full first name all. Or, at least, the university presses may have been convinced that was a compelling argument.
Maybe so. Seems more plausible than my alternative theory that virtually all British academic works prior to about 1980 were actually written by women.
(As we were recently reminded, Virginia Woolf led the way, with her works on quantum mechanics.)
Veronica Wedgwood always published as C. V. Wedgwood. I’m pretty sure it was because she was a woman. Of course you could say the same thing about publishing as Veronica.
In Britain Naipaul was addressed as Vidia – also in the British media, after an initial introductory VS – and when he became Sir Vidia there was even less of the VS. I can’t remember ever seeing this other ‘scary’ spelling.
@David Eddyshaw: The bit about Virginia Woolf reminded me that, the most famously, loudmouthedly sexist of all American physicists was I. I. Rabi—the inventor of magnetic resonance*—who was also known universally by his initials.
* Rabi may also have founded the most illustrious scientific lineage in physics. Three of his doctoral advisees also won Nobel Prizes, and a fourth was president of Cal Tech and U. S. Secretary of Defense. A probably incomplete count shows eight more Nobel Prizes among his academic children and grandchildren.
Says Wikipedia:
As a compromise with his parents, for his Bar Mitzvah, which was held at home, he gave a speech in Yiddish about how an electric light works
One has to admire this.
O. C. Marsh, of Bone Wars fame, published under his initials because he simply didn’t like being called Othniel Charles.
More for the list of Davids who wish they were phylogeneticists.
Is that how his name works? Lots of people in India don’t have last names, so they put the initials of their father’s name and/or the name of the village they’re from in front of their own names. The exact conventions vary regionally.
No one has mentioned that other quite recent (?) convention of emphasis: Treating each word as a “sentence” [at least I think that’s what one does]: Just. Say. No.
(Sorry, I can’t think of a pithy one.)
Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
It was once fairly common in academic papers written in English to use extra-wide between-letter spacing in personal names of authors mentioned within the text. As an example, you can look at this pdf of “On the Rhythm of Muscular Response to Volitional Impulses in Man”, by Schäfer, Canney, and Tunstall, published in the Journal of Physiology in April 1886. If you look through the text, you’ll find the extra-wide spacing in every name.
@ AJP Crown and David Eddyshaw, I should also have mentioned C.E.M. to go with G.E.M., and E.E. to go with W.H. Among contemporaries, A.N.’s cargo of emotion about Jews once capsized an overloaded sentence of his in the TLS, thereby leading to my only published letter to the editor of that initialism.
e.e., surely? (the communists have fine Eyes)
Odd bod, A.N. I prefer Angus.
Rabi may also have founded the most illustrious scientific lineage in physics.
Look at J. J. Thomson’s academic family: he won a Nobel prize, of course; his students include Nobelists Rutherford, Appleton, Bragg, Bohr, Richardson; his grandstudents include Blackett, Chadwick, Cockcroft, Powell, and Walton; his great-grandstudents include Chandrasekhar, Dirac, Mott, and Klug. I probably missed some, too.
Lots of people in India
He’s from Trinidad, or grew up there.
my only published letter to the editor of that initialism.
I’m impressed. This is never going to happen to me.
I suppose all the Times’ supplements are better known by initials, but then there’s also the LRB, which I noticed is known to cognoscenti as “the London Review”.
I thought of Prof CEM too. So now I can finally guess your GE “his wife called him Bill” M (which is a slightly different system).
I’ll mention the writer A.A. who was prosecuted for racial hatred of the Welsh, but an ancient friend of mine is godmother of his children so he can’t have been all bad.
e.e., surely?
That’s a negative. As I said here: “Unfortunately, Zwicky perpetuates the persistent myth that E.E. Cummings preferred his name spelled without periods and capital letters (see here and here for refutation).”
A.A.
“loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”
Quite unjustifiable. Some of us are quite big, especially once you allow for the effects of the stunting.
That’s a negative
well i never another cherished illusion gone
A.A.
The Pooh-maker, too, of course. I don’t think he had anything in particular against the Welsh.
@ David Eddyshaw, in chapter 3 of his prison memoir The Enormous Room, uppercase E.E. transcribes in to-boot all-caps a French interrogator’s pronunciation of KEW-MANGZ. Incidentally, the typescript edition of that book (Liveright, 1978) is hattishly fun for the spacing. Its first sentence:
“We had succeeded,my friend B and I,in dispensing with almost three of our six months’ engagement as Conducteurs Volontaires,Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un,Ambulance Norton-Harjes,Croix-Rouge Américaine,and at the Moment which subsequent experience served to capitalize had just finished the unlovely job of cleaning and greasing(nettoyer is the proper word)the own private flivver of the chef de section,a gentleman by the convenient name of Mr. A.”
One experienced connoisseur of that book on its first appearance was T.E.
@ AJP Crown, the alternative G.E.M. I was thinking of was alternatively referred to as Elizabeth or Miss. She once hurt C.S.’s feelings by dismantling his logic.
The “extra-wide” spacing George Grady refers to lasted well into the 20th century, maybe even the latter part. My grandfather is credited as R. E. Brewer, not R.E. Brewer, in virtually all of his professional writing that one can google up pdf’s of. (I happen to have his 1942 publication “Plastic and Swelling Properties of Bituminous Coking Coals” open in another window on my computer at present.) He did his research as a federal employee so most of his stuff was published by the Government Printing Office (which doesn’t assert copyright, making full-text scans easy to find), but stuff published in non-government scholarly journals has the same style. E.g. his 1949 article (in a publication apparently cited as Ind. Eng. Chem.) Desulfurization of Coal during Carbonization with Added Gases: Quantitative Determination of Sulfur Compounds was co-authored with J. K. Ghosh, not J.K. Ghosh.
I have a vague sense of being taught maybe circa 1980 to do initials of individuals that way (with the space after the first period), but whoever taught me that may have been working from a stylebook already fallen (or at least falling) out of fashion.
Addendum, in regard to my heroine, Lyka:
I had that manuscript open on my computer, because I have decided, after some years away from it, to finally finish writing and editing that novel The War of the Seasons. It’s actually the sequel to another fantasy novel I mostly wrote when I was in graduate school and finished well over a decade ago when I was a post-doc. The first book is more about Lyka—and honestly I’m more happy with it than with the ongoing sequel, since I personally like her more as a character than any of the other viewpoint characters I have introduced in the second book.
If anyone is interesting in reading the first completed novel, I would be happy to share the manuscript. Just let me know.
@ J.W. Brewer:
The extra-wide spacing was more extensive than just between initials. It was between all the letters of the name. For example, in the linked pdf, there are references in the main part of the text to “H e l m h o l t z” and “V a l s a l v a” (although with something more like half-spaces than full spaces between letters). This is done with all names.
Aha, Anscombe. According to Ray Monk, Wittgenstein got around this G.E.M. being a woman (he disliked women academics and women philosophers) by calling her “old man”. Why didn’t these subtle thinkers, people who saw every linguistic nuance in a sentence, notice feminism? It’s too bad Wittgenstein didn’t live to read this bit of the Stanford Encyclopedia article on her:
One of the most significant ideas elaborated on in Intention is ‘direction of fit.’ Though the notion seems to have originated with J.L. Austin, Anscombe is credited with a clear explication of it. ‘Direction of fit’ was how John Searle referred to Anscombe’s idea that there are two things that we can do with words—sometimes we try to get the words to match, or fit with, what’s in the world, and other times we try to get the world to fit with the words. This turned out to be important in speech act theory since speech acts exemplify one direction of fit. When one utters a command, for example, one is not trying to describe the world or make an assertion that is supposed to match with what is in the world. Rather, the point is to bring about a state of affairs in the world.
Consider this famous passage from Intention:
Even so, when I get home I’m going to start correcting my shopping lists from now on.
The Pooh-maker, too, of course. I don’t think he had anything in particular against the Welsh.
I don’t think so either. He just had the enormous grudge against P.G.
A space between initials is still normal. Some journals even want that in lists of cited literature.
And while the lack of a space in e.g. and i.e. is universal in English as far as I’ve noticed, it doesn’t go further; German uses a space for some such abbreviations (z. B., d. h.) and cheats for others (usw. usf. = und so weiter und so fort = Russian итд.).
Ah, I was too clever by half, then.
Hah. Missed Anscombe. Now I’ll have to give my Wittgenstein fan club card back.
You do realise there’s no need for your WordPress “Name *” to resemble any sort of name?
That’s quite true, Nuneatoner, but you may get named anyway.
If only your initials are ever going to cited, there may seem little point in using your full first name all.
Unless you happen to be D. Stampe.
Lots of people in India don’t have last names, so they put the initials of their father’s name and/or the name of the village they’re from in front of their own names.
That is precisely Naipaul’s case, and also the case of S[rinivasa] Ramanujan, whose father was K[uppuswamy] Srinivasa. This naming convention traveled to the Caribbean as well. Naipaul’s second name “Surajprasad” is presumably after somone named Suraj Prasad; there are several famous Indians of that name, but of course it could just be a friend of his parents’.
ancient friend of mine is godmother of his children so he can’t have been all bad
Perhaps she took a stern view of the duties of godparents, and believed she would be a counterbalancing influence on those children.
if his wife gave it to him, it has the role of an order
Or not. It may be that it is his intention, but that his handwriting is so bad he can’t rely on being able to read it later, or that she is the list-keeper even though he suggests most the items on it. Both of these are my case.
The Kusaasi don’t have surnames traditionally; in contexts where one is required, a person will use his/her own real Kusaal name for a surname, and baptismal name (or the functionally rather similar Muslim formal Arabic name) as a given name (or just pick an English or French name they like.)
This seems to be quite a common strategy among groups with relatively recent exposure to the full horrors of modern Western-type bureaucracy.
It’s not an issue in the south of Ghana, where there is a whole complicated traditional system of using both your mother’s and your father’s clan names as surnames. Bad as Spanish.
(It makes sense culturally, as the Akan are matrilineal.)
It’s official in Rwanda.
Brazil officially uses tribe names as surnames.
Has anyone mentioned E. G. R. Taylor?
As an undergraduate I wrote a report on C. V. Wedgwood’s book on Richelieu without ever knowing that the author was a woman.
She once hurt C.S.’s feelings by dismantling his logic.
She almost destroyed his religion purely as a side point. He never wrote another apologetic; he turned to writing children’s books. Great career move.
C. S. Lewis? His children’s books are apologetics.
(…as far as I know from having read about them. They’re hardly known over here, and the movie didn’t become popular either.)
No, they’re captivating stories with a religious undercurrent. To treat them the same as Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain is to make the same mistake as to treat Dombrovsky’s novels as political tracts.
It never occurred to me as a child that they had any particular connection with Christianity. (I didn’t like them anyway, but that says more about me than the stories.)
I should probably have said “Christian allegories”.
By and large, The Chronicles of Narnia are just fantasy stories that happen to take place in an explicitly Christian cosmology. The nature of Aslan as Jesus is never stated explicitly,* and I am sure that many young readers missed the Christian context—although the very specific analogies are obvious if you know to look for them. (In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the son of the supreme emperor, although completely innocent, is executed to take the blame for human crimes and then rises again from the grave.)
However, the books do occasionally venture into full-fledged apologia, although it is still bizarrely couched in metaphor. Particularly near the end of The Silver Chair, Lewis presents (and then attempts to rebut) an argument against the existence of lions—which is point-by-point identical to one of the basic arguments against the existence of God. Moreover, Aslan himself tells Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter that he has brought them to Narnia so that they will better understand his nature in their own world; and Lewis acknowledged that he, as a writer, had the same goal—to help children better understand and appreciate God and Jesus, even if that improved appreciation was merely in terms of themes and values.
* In fact, when the question of who Aslan is in our world is first explicitly put forward (at the end of Prince Caspian), the answer Aslan gives is actually quite obfuscated. See this Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange question that I asked a couple years ago for views about the confusing and metaphorical way Aslan answers the question for some views on matter.
I should probably have said “Christian allegories”.
Well, as you see from DE’s comment they aren’t very transparent allegories.
Oh, I don’t know. I was probably a dim child. I think they’re not very opaque, at any rate.
Actually, I rarely pick up on even the most brazen allegories even now. Probably connected with the fact that I hardly ever see plot twists coming, either.
I was probably older than average when I read the Narnia books, but I remember feeling cheated when I found out who Aslan was. (At one point it is spelled out very transparently). People were all the time trying to get me to read edifying literature and I was having none of it, but here a work of Christian apologetics had snuck up on me unawares. Out of The Silent Planet was much the same.
Probably connected with the fact that I hardly ever see plot twists coming, either.
Same here. My wife is great at it, though.
I’ve always liked Out of the Silent Planet, and would even now maintain that it’s underrated as a science-fiction novel. The earlier scenes on Mars where Ransom is overwhelmed by sheer strangeness are very well done (I think.)
Again, when I first read it as a child, the Christian elements simply passed me by; at least in that novel they’re not so much allegorical as transposed.
Perelandra I doubt whether it’s really possible to enjoy without at least being happily able to imagine yourself into a distinctly Christian worldview for the duration. And I’m with the majority in thinking that That Hideous Strength is readable but not much more (and more or less designed to get up the nose of anyone who isn’t a Christian.)
I just found this gem. The PDF I downloaded long, long ago gives the authors as “W. Yuan”, “G. Keqin” and “X. Xing”. The journal, which is not British at all, must have abbreviated their names without asking them; they can’t possibly have written their names on the manuscript like that, because what’s abbreviated here are their last names Wáng, Gāo and Xù.
At some point that was quietly corrected, because if you follow the link now, you’ll find “Y. Wang, K. Gao & X. Xu”.
JK Rowling. She doesn’t actually have a middle name starting with K. She doesn’t have a middle name at all. She put it in there, apparently, because she didn’t want to be known as Joanne Rowling.
I was always under the impression that letter spacing was found in French. Maybe I was thinking of German. It seems exotic to me, but not outlandish.
Perhaps she took a stern view of the duties of godparents, and believed she would be a counterbalancing influence on those children.
Oh, a top role model, but absolutely no way. She was at school with AA. Counterbalancing was probably the mother’s role (she became Home Secretary).
I first heard The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe on the BBC in, I think, the late 1950s. There was nuffink about God and I loved it, especially the snow in the wardrobe. I was Edmund or one of the characters (I’ve forgotten all the names). They kept all that stuff about Aslan being Jesus quiet from children until later (1960s) and thank goodness they did, or I wouldn’t have been encouraged to listen. I was surprised by it; up until then I’d not thought of Jesus as a lion.
She almost destroyed his religion purely as a side point. He never wrote another apologetic; he turned to writing children’s books.
“Lewis actually published no fewer than thirty-four essays in Christian apologetics after the debate” [at the Oxford Socratic Club with Anscombe]. More here (I know nothing about this myself, I’m just passing it on).
We had CS but no JRR. You can’t mention them all, I suppose.
I wrote a report on C. V. Wedgwood’s book on Richelieu without ever knowing that the author was a woman.
I assume that was her plan but I’ve nothing to back it up – anyone could have probably got their first book published if it was very good and their last name was Wedgwood, even a woman.
DE’s comment
I know that one.
The story goes that her publisher wanted her to use initials instead of a full first name, and wanted her to have a middle initial to go with her first initial, so she took her grandmother’s first name, Kathleen, as mentioned above.
I wonder if the abbreviation j/k for “joke” was already established, though.
…While I’m at it: what is the spread in time and space of slash abbreviations? (The most common one is w/ for “with”, followed logically by w/o for “without”.)
@David Marjanović: The abbreviation “j/k” is “just kidding,” not “joke”—although there’s not much difference between the two, pragmatically.
I have to admit that I dislike abbreviations with the slash, since it does not appear to represent anything. In America, I think the important development started with “w/”—in which the solidus indicated that it was a contraction, like in “hamburger w/ketchup.” The development to “w/o” for “without” is fairly natural from there, and after that it seems to have spread. (I qualified that by saying I was talking about American usage, since abbreviations with slashes—or “strokes” as they would call them—seem to be more common and older in Britain.)
When I was heavily into scambaiting I had one bait where the lad* wanted by bank account number, but he kept saying “A/C number” so I gave him the serial number on my air conditioner.
* “Lad” is (or was) baiter terminology for a 419 scammer. It was abbreviated from “the lads from Lagos,” as the Nigerian 419 scammers were known.
If you don’t like w/, you’ll really hate all the abbreviations in medieval manuscripts and the early printed versions of them. Take the famous 14th-century recipe for Pygges in sawse sawge (Pigs in sage sauce): the first printed version, from 1780, tried to represent the abbreviations from the original manuscript faithfully (though they did replace yogh with z, which was the convention of the time). There’s a curlicue kinda like a superscript 9 that represents -es or sometimes -er, so Pygg⁹ = Pygges, but vyneg⁹ = vyneger; over- and under-lines that represent -er or -m or whatever letter was needed to finish the word; and more — I don’t know if even current Unicode could handle it. When Project Gutenberg transcribed it, they had to spell out all the typographical abbreviations; it must have been a lot of work, since they had to know enough of Middle English to recognize what the abbreviated words were.
I’m trying to imagine using a veffell large enough to take three pigs, however fmall they were.
At least the 9 has one or two purposes; the slash has no value and anyone using it has evidently never had to take notes quickly. I only ever use forward slashes to indicate above & below in the style of denominator & numerator. I’m glad to find that other people have been disliking a/c or w/ slashes. I thought it was just me.
There’s this in Wikipedia, on sigla, abbreviations used by scribes in various languages including Old English but in this case starting with Latin:
It must be available in Unicode, surely?
UK medics still use Latin abbreviations with a line above, like c̄ “with” or s̄ “without.”
(Or I do, at any rate. But I despair of the young. I seem to be the only person left who knows that “SOS” as a medical abbreviation doesn’t stand for “see on symptoms.” It’s lonely sometimes, being the only one who’s right …)
Si opus sit? I remember my best friend’s father telling him at thirteen he’d better become a dentist because he (like E.L. Wisty) didn’t ‘ave the Latin for the doctoring. He did so, but you wouldn’t really need all that much Latin, I’d have thought. If surgeons were required to become linguists as well, we’d have a shortage of both.
Si opus sit, indeed.
O-Level Latin was actually still a requirement for medical school when I were a lad. I’m that old. Even then, there was no good reason for it (apart from keeping the Wrong Sort of People out, I suppose.) It mostly comes up in anatomy, but I would have thought that memorising all the names of the bits is not materially helped by knowing what they mean in Latin.
It’s tricky, because if you do know what they mean in Latin it seems obvious that of course it helps and why wouldn’t you want to? Similarly, if you are an etymology nut (like myself) you feel that everyone should know where words come from, it helps in so many ways. And yet the vast majority of people get along fine without the specialized knowledge that would cost them more time and effort than it’s worth.
That goes for specialists in any field; physicists think everyone should know physics, farmers think people who don’t know how their food is produced are fools, etc. But all of us are almost completely ignorant about almost everything, and yet we manage to get through life somehow.
I learned c̄ and s̄ in US Army medic training in 1969 and still use them in my notebooks.
I should have said that Lewis, AFAIK, never attempted a systematic argument for the existence of God after the Anscombe encounter. He said in a letter that he thought that Anscombe (a practicing Catholic) was obliged to say why she did believe in God if it wasn’t on such grounds. I imagine that he put the question to her and that she replied, in effect, “Why do you think it’s called a faith?”
I don’t know about Anscombe, who was cleverer than I and incomparably more clued up on the relevant philosophy, but I’ve never been happy with systematic arguments for the existence of God, for reasons much like those. Apart from the fact that I’ve never come across one that actually seems valid on its own terms (though I have a gobsmacked admiration for St Anselm’s snake-eating-its-own-tail ontological proof), the very idea seems open to theological objection. If belief in the existence of God were a matter of being able to follow a robust argument, then all the clever people would believe in the existence of God, and the stupid people wouldn’t. Quite apart from the fact that this doesn’t actually seem to be the case, it cuts right across the Christian concept of salvation: it’s more Gnostic, really.
(There’s the point that belief in the existence of God, if perhaps necessary to salvation, is clearly insufficient [presumably Satan believes that God exists], but the issue still seems awkward to me.)
Having said that, what Lewis was engaged in was mostly apologetics rather than evangelism (hardly anybody has ever been argued into faith.) The idea is not to demonstrate that Christian doctrines are obviously correct, but to defend them against the charge of being logically or morally incoherent.
I’ve never been happy with systematic arguments for the existence of God, for reasons much like those. Apart from the fact that I’ve never come across one that actually seems valid on its own terms …, the very idea seems open to theological objection. If belief in the existence of God were a matter of being able to follow a robust argument, then all the clever people would believe in the existence of God, and the stupid people wouldn’t. Quite apart from the fact that this doesn’t actually seem to be the case, it cuts right across the Christian concept of salvation: it’s more Gnostic, really.
This has always been the Russian attitude; faith is faith, not a scientific hypothesis to be proven.
While I more or less agree with that, I don’t think it’s quite so simple; I think there are core aspects of Christian belief (traditional Christian belief, anyhow) which belong in the same conceptual world as scientific hypotheses, in the sense they are in principle capable of being definitively refuted. I think that follows from the doctrine of Incarnation (and if you jettison that, I can see only cultural reasons for being a Christian, which would evidently be enough for many, but not for me personally.)
[It’s easy to fall into confusion in discussing this because of an ambiguity in the word “belief”; I’ve been trying to keep to the sense “belief that a state of affairs is so” as opposed to “trust in a person/people”, which is what self-styled “believers” usually actually have in mind when they use the word.]
If belief in the existence of God were a matter of being able to follow a robust argument, then all the clever people would believe in the existence of God, and the stupid people wouldn’t.
As far as I understand these matters (which is not very) the Scholastics would agree with the first part of that sentence, but then they would say that the less enlightened should still believe as a matter of faith (that, and being condemned to eternal damnation if they didn’t).
Bertrand Russell dismissed Aquinas as a philosopher for this reason: that if Aquinas could find a logical argument for believing in some aspect of scriptural teaching, he would use it, but if not he would fall back on faith and the mysteriousness of His ways.
Russell, I think, misinterpreted what Aquinas was actually trying to do: easy enough, given how fundamentally unsympathetic Russell evidently felt Aquinas’ objectives to be. He wrongly supposed that Aquinas was trying to achieve Russell’s sort of objectives, and thus concluded that he was actually doing so very badly. A bit like somebody looking at a soccer match and wondering why nobody has picked up the ball.
I was gobsmacked enough by what a nominalist word game it is that I didn’t come up with Gaunilo’s island myself, despite how obvious it is in hindsight (and how pathetic the “criticism” from Anselm himself all the way to *eyeroll* Plantinga).
That’s the post-Vatican-II attitude, at least as I was taught it: a god small enough to be provable by Puny Humans wouldn’t be a god. (The dào that can…)
James 2:19: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.”
given how fundamentally unsympathetic Russell evidently felt Aquinas’ objectives to be
I wouldn’t be surprised, and having read about Aquinas only in Russell’s jaundiced analysis, I daresay I am missing something. Russell portrays his goal as being to make belief — Christian belief, specifically — philosophically ineluctable.
According to Wikipedia, Aquinas never considered himself a philosopher, and criticized philosophers, whom he saw as pagans, for always “falling short of the true and proper wisdom to be found in Christian revelation.”
But if revelation is the ultimate source of truth, then Russell’s opinion doesn’t seem that far off the mark.
Aquinas’ position is not that revelation is the sole ultimate source of truth, except in the few (but in his view, critical) areas where other sources either do not or could not in principle be adduced. For Aquinas, the truth of revelation is axiomatic; what he’s about is showing that this does not entail the position that other sources of truth are necessarily invalid or that the tradition of Western philosophy is hopelessly incompatible with Christian belief: on the contrary, it can even help in the interpretation of revelation itself, and moreover is our only recourse in the great majority of cases, where revelation is silent.
As Russell’s starting point is more or less the exact opposite, the very nearest he might have come (without greater powers of philosophical imagination) to an accommodation with Aquinas would have been a sort of grudging admission that Religion was perhaps all very well in its way, perhaps as a sort of autosuggestive wellness technique. As I myself regard that sort of religion as pointless and rebarbative, my sympathies are actually with Russell in having no truck with it. He’s still fallen into the Fundamental Attribution Error (who does not, once in a while?)
Lewis understood perfectly well that logic was insufficient to demonstrate the existence of the divine. I mentioned above the Emerald Witch’s arguments in favor of (Narnian) atheism in The Silver Chair; there is nothing logical or even scholastic about Puddleglum’s subsequent rebuttal. Here it is, delivered by Tom Baker. (Pardon the terrible 1980s BBC special effects.)
Lewis was a firm believer in the Pauline idea that all humans are constantly exposed to the divine presence of God, so that logic was unnecessary to justify belief. He felt that the natural state of humanity was acceptance of the obvious presence of the divine, and that unbelief required active and perfidious refusal to acknowledge that presence. That his own early atheism was part of a reaction against certain hated features of the British society of his youth helped him come to the conclusion that his rejection of God had been a petulant, unjustified, knee-jerk response to society. I discussed this here, in connection with the well known “problem” of Susan’s later denial of Narnia.
My difficulty with Paul’s argument is not with the idea that atheism, knowingly or not, involves active disbelief (my own experience, like Lewis’s; though the notion is – very understandably – extremely annoying to atheists, and er, not a good basis for evangelism, let’s say.)
It’s that Paul takes it as read that the evidence of creation shows that God is good. Paradoxically, this may have seemed more obviously a truism for people living in harder and more precarious times than we do. Lower expectations – I don’t know.
@DE: Thank, you that’s very illuminating. But it leaves open the question of what happens when revealed truth clashes with other forms of truth. My interest in Aquinas, such as it is, came about in trying to understand better the collision between the Church and Galileo.
Simplistically, Thomism would seem to lead to what some scientists dismiss as the “God of the Gaps” argument, according to which religious thinkers hold on to theology as the explanation for those things that are beyond the reach of science–those things steadily diminishing in number as science keeps nibbling away.
Reminds me of JP Donleavy’s:
A: Why are you growing a beard?
B: I’m not doing anything, Why are you shaving every day?
Smullyan, however, gave an ontological proof that is perfectly sound formally, given its axioms (note that property and perfection are undefined terms) must be correct:
Whitehead, of course, defined Unitarian as someone who believes in at most one God. Smullyan’s argument strikes me as a hapenny worth of bread for an intolerable deal of sack, but others may think differently. (Which reminds me of the wife’s complaint that she has to do all the marketing, because her American husband “simply refuses to say thruppence-hapenny; he says it’s silly”.)
Of course, Kant tells us that Existenz ist kein reales Prädikat, which kills Axiom 1. (I am not sure of the force of reales in Kantese.
what self-styled “believers” usually actually have in mind when they use the word.
True enough, but when applied to God the two fuse. I trust that Trump exists, but I don’t trust in Trump; I don’t see how anyone can trust in God while (as I do) remaining agnostic about the existence of God. Though perhaps “Waiting for God-o” is a refutation of this…
I think that follows from the doctrine of Incarnation
I don’t see how. What scientific tests could you have applied to Jesus to find out if he was, in fact, divine, much less partly divine or a compound of human and divine in stoichiometric ratio? (Miracles are, alas, too easy to fake, especially under 1C conditions.) Of course, the untestable is not the unprovable. As Smullyan also says, my chair may be thrown through the window five hours from now, or it may not. But no amount of testing either the chair or its environment will tell me which. (This presumes either quantum indeterminacy or free will, though I reject the explanation of the latter using the former.)
Smullyan used this example in pursuit of the notion that real is a relative term and likewise untestable, saying that objects in his dreams were real while he was dreaming, but not after he wakes up, and wondering if after his death the objects of his life would seem equally real or unreal to him then. He may know now, or he may not, but in either case he is not going to tell us.
@David L:
I think Aquinas would rather have characterised his position as “philosophy of the gaps” …
My own theological wisdom is not world-celebrated (for some reason), but FWIW:
The areas where scientific explanations of the natural world have actually displaced previous explanations based on religion (at least the sort of religion we’re talking about) are either fewer than people commonly think, and/or involve forcing literalistic interpretations onto religious texts which would have astonished their original authors (the fact that it is often modern believers who do this doesn’t make it any the less wrong.)
I don’t know of any case where such reevaluation has any bearing on an essential doctrine, though admittedly it might be said that this could be achieved by retrospectively adjusting what you mean by “essential”, and also the nature of the case is such that it’s not obvious how this could happen even in principle. For example, it is a core doctrine that God created the universe, and many simple folk have seized on the physical Big Bang as showing that yet again, this “proves” that Science (when properly understood, of course) can only support Revelation; however, even if the consensus among physicists were in fact a Steady State, given that it is also doctrine that God created time and himself stands outside it, there’s no real difficulty: it would just make the task of Sunday School teachers more challenging. (“No, Abigail, you need to think of four dimensions … here, let me show you with this paper model.”)
Having said that, I also think that the “God of the Gaps” taunt needs taking seriously. To some extent, accepting the idea in those terms is a mistake, based on retrospectively assigning whole categories of human thought anachronistically to Religion (our forebears would have been baffled by our categories); but there is (it seems to me) a particular danger of confining religion to an entirely subjective realm where horrid unbelieving physicists can never penetrate (psychologists might, but who cares about them?) As I said, I think this is particularly the case with a religion which centres on Incarnation.
In principle, (traditional) Christianity could be refuted. It makes assertions about historical events which might not be true, and they’re not peripheral to the doctrine but central to it. In practice, granted, it’s pretty hard to see how this could happen, and it would moreover actually be quite legitimate Lakatosian philosophy-of-science to refuse to give up the Theory too readily anyway at the first production of inconvenient counter-evidence. Nevertheless, I think the potential for refutation is important, because it bears on what intellectual category Christianity belongs to: in particular, it does belong by nature to the universe of God of the Gaps (though the Gaps are much larger than the non-Gaps, always were, and always will be; and much more important.)
In case I might be thought to be ceding too much ground here, I should perhaps fess up to being personally committed to a degree of Biblical literalism which is, to say the least, highly unfashionable in the intellectual and political (and to some extent, ecclesiastical) circles in which I move, and it is indeed incompatible with some large chunks of modern scientific understanding of How Things Are. On a day-to-day basis I cope with this through the tried-and-trusted ever-reliable technique of cognitive dissonance; I also have no problem with using scientific theories whose ultimate truth I disbelieve in if they work as reliable heuristics (the mirror image of the friendly humanist’s idea that religion may not be, like, true, but can be indulged a bit if it helps people.) On more reflective days I try to keep an open mind. And it’s good mental exercise having to think through why you believe the things you do. The intellectual suicide bit comes when you convince yourself that you can stop worrying about it because you’ve arrived at the Truth already. A few of my US cousins would appear to have reached this particular Nirvana …
Very interesting indeed, and I thank you for sharing all that!
On more reflective days I try to keep an open mind.
I have systematized that. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when confronted with dissent about whatever might be the issues of the day, I try to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong. On other working days I crush the opposition like a flower beneath the foot. This is a bracing exercise for all involved.
Once a week is probably enough, I feel (not the Sabbath, obviously.)
Yes, my thanks too.
the tried-and-trusted ever-reliable technique of cognitive dissonance
Quite right. Fred said it this way: ich mißtraue allen Systematikern und gehe ihnen aus dem Weg. Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel an Rechtschaffenheit.
Hey! I’ve become a Nietzschean, and I knew it not.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when confronted with dissent about whatever might be the issues of the day, I try to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong
This sounds like an Orwell translation of a Pooh poem.
We should attempt to reconstruct the Vorlage.
TR: Good catch ! That’s exactly what I wanted to convey. A bit of smarm warmed over a right-thinking fire.
the Vorlage
I think it’s one of his little “sayings”, slapped down among others with no linear argumentative intent. From Götzendämmerung mebbe.
Pooh wrote Götzendämmerung? I had no idea. Milne’s portrait of him is evidently very one-sided.
A.A. was devious himself:
Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne was first world war propagandist
Ah. Now I see.
It would never have occurred to me that Winnie the Pooh was a thinly disguised caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche, though once it’s been pointed out it’s pretty obvious, in hindsight. The clues were all there.
This calls for a wholesale reevaluation of the canon.
A chicken in every pot, and Nietzsche in every nursery.
A philosopher of very little brain.
John Tyerman Williams: Pooh and the Philosophers : In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh (1995)
I remember The Pooh Perplex from my young youth. (Reviewed here.)
Talk to a very old Princetonian (I’m the former but not the latter) and you’ll hear à clef about P. R. Honeycomb ( = R. P. Blackmur, author of The Lion and the Honeycomb) and Murphy R. Sweat ( = Carlos Baker, the biographer of Faulkner and Hemingway who refused to teach graduate courses). And since the names of F.R. and Q.D. came up the other day, notice also the contribution from Simon Lacerous.
Crews knew better than to try to imitate the F.R. prose style, though. The sentence from Dickens and the Novel that I kept pinned to my carrel’s corkboard for inspiration while I was writing my dissertation was, and this probably deserves a soundtrack:
“I can’t but observe that the critical consciousness to which this kind of confidence belongs operates at decidedly a not-profound level.”
That is an amazing sentence.
Crews’ belated sequel of four decades later (Postmodern Pooh, published 2004) did not become nearly as much of a classic. Perhaps the quality of his satire had declined, or perhaps literary academia had descended further enough into self-parody that there was little market left for “regular” parody. (I will say that Orpheus Bruno, the roman a clef stand-in for the since-deceased Harold Bloom, is reasonably well-done.)
Correction: Carlos Baker didn’t write a biography of Faulkner. He did Hemingway, and at the time of his death he was working on Emerson. I got the Faulkner attribution from the parody, and Emerson probably would have had something to say about that.
On the general topic of initialized writers, I discovered yesterday that J. D. Bernal, known to his intimates as Des(mond) or Sage (his nickname), is called by Russians Джон Бернал (John Bernal). This amused me.
(Well, he was so known in Soviet days, when he was talked about a lot because he was a committed communist all his life and president of the Soviet-dominated World Peace Council; I doubt Russians talk about him much these days.)
Father of Martin Bernal, who wrote Black Athena.
Yes, that surprises me every time I rediscover it.
if you do know what they mean in Latin it seems obvious that of course it helps and why wouldn’t you want to?
Etymologies may be more fun to learn than word meanings, but surely no easier. And while the etymologies can help you distinguish perineal, peroneal, perirenal, perianal, peritoneal from one another, it’s still hard to remember which is which on the fly.
it cuts right across the Christian concept of salvation: it’s more Gnostic, really
Quite so, which is why both gnostic and agnostic are dirty words in mainstream Christianity.
The dào that can…
Le Guin’s version from Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way:
And here’s mine, from The Unix Power Classic: A book about the Unix Way and its power:
Le Guin’s commentary, with which I agree:
Neither of us knows any Chinese to speak of; we depend heavily on the literal renderings by Carus (her) and Star (me). She also had a lot of help from the Chinese scholar J. P. Seaton, whereas I didn’t.
I should perhaps fess up to being personally committed to a degree of Biblical literalism which is, to say the least, highly unfashionable […] On a day-to-day basis I cope with this through the tried-and-trusted ever-reliable technique of cognitive dissonance; I also have no problem with using scientific theories whose ultimate truth I disbelieve in if they work as reliable heuristics
This at once made me think of Le Guin’s Hainish people, who are described in the most detail in “A Man of the People”, part of the story-suite Four Ways to Forgiveness. The Hainish are divided into the people of the pueblos, the vast majority, and the historians (Hain has three million years of history, though the first two million are pretty much uninterpretable today). Occasionally, pueblans become historians.
Historians are involved in all the sciences, many arts, and many forms of technology. About a million years ago, they discovered nearly-as-fast-as-light space travel and sent out colonists to about eighty-odd worlds, including ours, adjusting the people sent to the local life as much as possible. In recent millennia they have been exploring those worlds, the good the bad and the ugly, and with the help of the ansible, an instantaneous communication device, a dynamic stability called the Ekumen (after Kroeber’s Oikumene, of course) has arisen to keep them all talking. As Le Guin says elsewhere, the Ekumen is an experiment in the superorganic, and as such is mostly a failure, but a failure that does more good than most successes.
Here’s a historian explaining to Havzhiva, a man of what used to be her pueblo, what the difference is:
Havzhiva at historian school:
Much later, when Havzhiva enters the Ekumenical Service, he realizes that all knowledge is local.
Blake says that the artist’s job is not to believe his religion, or to disbelieve it, but to see what it means.
Excellent quote from LeGuin. (I fixed some typos.)
Thanks!
Well, what exactly is Paul’s claim?
I have always taken it to mean that evidence, perfectly scientific evidence, of the divine surrounds us and is obvious enough that any atheist would be a Discworld Atheist. (…Check out the “Other” examples.) In other words, a huge “God of the Gaps” argument. In Paul’s time and long after, up until quite recently, that was, at worst, a perfectly respectable inference, because more parsimonious explanations for large and numerous gaps had not been found. (Dawkins: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”)
Or is the claim that we perceive the divine directly, by a sensus divinitatis, rather than by interpreting evidence? Because that’s not my experience either.
I should mention at this point that there are natural-born skeptics who, when they’re little, take for granted that religion is how grown-ups play make-believe. Then, around age 8, they’re shocked to discover that adults actually believe this. They generally conclude they’re surrounded by idiots and cannot figure out, for the rest of their lives, how anyone can believe in anything so self-evidently absurd as a god. I am not one of these. By default, I believe what I’m told or what I read. It’s only when that contradicts something I learned earlier that I apply skepticism. So, I have believed, I have prayed, had no reason to go into denial, and yet felt nothing. Some people do; indeed, as I recently learned, some American denominations expect the faithful to feel interesting things when they pray, and teach them that explicitly; but evidently not everyone is like that. (…Mother Teresa once did, and then she didn’t anymore, went deep into despair and then basically decided to become a bodhisattva.)
I don’t think it was, actually – hence the concepts of divine punishment (blaming the victim), karma (blaming the victim’s previous incarnation) and original sin (blaming Adam & Eve). Theodicy didn’t begin with the holocaust.
Look at it from the other side: if there was no “historical Jesus”, you can keep all the epistles and Revelation, but the gospels go out the window, and so does half of the Nicene Creed. (And those feet didn’t do anything in ancient times.)
Prime example: American creationists like to point out that if Adam & Eve never existed, there’s no original sin, no need for a savior, Christianity vanishes in a puff of logic, and we’re all going to die for real. Not so, says the Catholic Church: because we’re descended from mere animals, we have an imperfect, sinful nature and totally need a savior.
At least it’s a model! I remember when Scientific American printed “a 3D projection of a 4D hypercube”… of course it was a 2D projection of a 3D projection of a 4D hypercube, and therefore quite incomprehensible.
That’s why it’s so important that science is not a quest for truth – it’s the quest for every single falsehood.
Thinly disguised caricatures all the way up!
Admittedly, agnostic was only coined in 1869.
J. D. Bernal, known to his intimates as Des(mond) or Sage (his nickname), is called by Russians Джон Бернал (John Bernal).
I thought that was more or less necessary in order to avoid confusion with name and patronymic initials, just as H.G. Wells is Герберт Джордж Уэллс or just Герберт Уэллс.
The Problem of Pain
There’s a Poul Anderson story called that. It’s about the exploration of a new planet by a mixed team of humans and Ythrians (flying mammaloids and obligate carnivores):
Winnie the Pooh was a thinly disguised caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche
I wonder who the Piglet was then.
@David Marjanović: I do not know what Paul personally intended by his notion that the presence of the divine was manifestly present around us—nor does anyone else, really, although there have been nearly two millennia of people ascribing particularly interpretations to what he wrote.* However, Lewis definitely believed in the presence of the Holy Spirit as humanity’s ever-attendant companion. He was not convinced of the existence of God in order to explain away the nature of lightning or earthquakes, but because he later decided that his atheism had been a petulant denial of the manifest reality of God’s intimate presence:
* Paul’s views on this are most completely set out in the Epistle to the Romans, the longest of the Pauline letters and possibly the chronologically last of the ones which is genuinely Paul’s work.
Yeah, well, that’s just alien to me. 😐
I thought that was more or less necessary in order to avoid confusion with name and patronymic initials, just as H.G. Wells is Герберт Джордж Уэллс or just Герберт Уэллс.
Huh? If it’s not necessary in English, why would it be necessary in Russian? And why “John” rather than the accurate “Desmond” if you absolutely have to have a given name? (Perhaps you are not aware that spelled-out names are not universally used in Russian — initials are absolutely standard in formal reference.)
I wonder who the Piglet was then
John Stuart Mill (who was, of course, known as “Piglet” to his intimates.)
There can be no doubt but that Eeyore is Schopenhauer.
I had no immediate intuition about Piglet, but Eeyore is definitely Schopenhauer. Perhaps Piglet was one of his poodles (they were all named Atma).
I mention this possibility because Mill thought it important to consider all sides of a question:
# It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question. #
There are Satanic Mills, and there are Silly Mills.
And why “John” rather than the accurate “Desmond” if you absolutely have to have a given name?
J.D. Bernal = John Desmond Bernal.
Yes, I know that. But he didn’t use John.
better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied — that’s one of those ‘two kinds of people’ things, isn’t it?
I’m in the camp of ‘the one who has laughed the most, wins.’
a footnote at this point, after a conversation that’s gone in such long & lovely directions, but yiddish also uses s p a c i n g for emphasis (i don’t know under what name) – at least in orthographically ‘modernized’ scholarly contexts. the convention’s obviously imported from german, but does make me wonder whether any other non-roman scripts have also adopted the form. the advantages seem clear for either the movable type era (no need for a second typeface) or the contemporary html era (flexible tags, officially “semantic” or not), but not really for any publication technology besides those two…
@John Cowan: i love those passages from “A Man of the People” – Five Ways to Forgiveness is one of my favorite of le guin’s books. but they seem to me to be fundamentally (and i’d argue deliberately) about practice-based systems rather than belief-based ones (the sort that christianity gave us the notion of “religion” to describe). the former generally don’t claim to be more than ‘local knowledges’; the latter have great difficulty limiting their claims to the ‘local’. i hasten to add: that doesn’t imply any pattern in their relationships to alternate ways of moving through the world, just that orthopraxy doesn’t have the kind of structural universalism as orthodoxy does (at least in systems of thought that insist on truth being constant across time and space).
@languagehat: all folklore is fanfic! harry potter slash is at least as authentically neolithic as commensal goats.
If Schopenhauer is Eeyore, Hegel is Rabbit.
There’s also a case for Piglet being Kant, who said something about pygmies avoiding the drunken giants of colonialism but piglets would also make sense. There’s imo an even better case for Christopher Robin – who has to go off to what we infer as school at the end of The House at Pooh Corner – than there is for Aslan, as Jesus. The only difference is that the author made no claims about it.
Tigger, the “new animal in the forest”, is pretty evidently Bertrand Russell.
Owl is a somewhat cruel portrayal of an all too recognisable Hegel. Milne was notoriously unsympathetic to German Idealism.
Hegel licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell “Phänomenologie.”
the convention’s obviously imported from german, but does make me wonder whether any other non-roman scripts have also adopted the form.
Russian does (presumably also borrowed from German); they call it разрядка [razryadka], with the associated adverb вразрядку [vrazryadku].
all folklore is fanfic! harry potter slash is at least as authentically neolithic as commensal goats.
Fair enough!
AJP (back on May 25), thanks for the link to Wikipedia on sigla — I should’ve known not to underestimate Unicode. Sure enough, that curlicue has its own codepoint at U+1DD2 COMBINING US ABOVE: Pygg᷒, no need for a workaround. And so do a bunch of other abbreviation marks: ꝑſel (persel, i.e. parsley), ſau̅ay (saueray, i.e. savory), qͥnces (quinces), powdo᷑ (powdour). (I think the blog specifies a font that includes all those; let’s see what happens. Looks OK in my browser.)
And I should’ve also expected that The Forme of Cury has been discussed at Language Hat before! The reason why the 1780 printed version was able to include all those marks is because the printer was also working on the first printed edition of Domesday Book, which they wanted to reproduce *exactly* as written because sacred document, so they created a typeface for it with all the curlicues and overlines and stroked letters.
@ktschwarz: My font set does not apparently include the curlicue, but it does know that it is supposed to appear above the other character. So I get a box directly above the “g” (and likewise a box above the “o” at the end of “powdo”). This is probably the first time I’ve seen something like that. It does, however, reproduce “qͥnces” correctly, probably because that does not involve a special glyph for the stacked character.
My font set does not apparently include the curlicue, but it does know that it is supposed to appear above the other character.
That is because (following Havzhiva’s historian friend, supra), the first is local knowledge, the knowledge of particular font(s), whereas the second is uni(code)versal knowledge. A simple table lookup tells your browser’s font renderer that the character whose universal name is U+1DD2 is a combining character of class 230, meaning it is to be rendered on top of its base character, just like an acute or grave or circumflex. But when it pokes around the local system for an actual glyph for U+1DD2, it draws a blank, and that’s what you get (with an appropriately small box around it for greater legibility).
As for what your font knows and what it doesn’t, I suspect that it’s a matter of date: the character U+0365 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER I was added to Unicode in March 2002, whereas U+1DD2 and friends didn’t arrive until six years later, and your fonts haven’t caught up. (Universal knowledge tends to grow, though with occasional corrections; local knowledge of universal knowledge is often behind.)
Note that the name in caps is another universal name, and is fixed even if (as sometimes happens) it is wrong: the name of U+1D0C5 BYZANTINE MUSICAL SYMBOL FHTORA SKLIRON CHROMA VASIS is immutable, even though the Greek language does not now and never did include any such unpronounceable and untranscribable word as FHTORA. (Insert Cthulhu joke.)
======
I asked somewhere whether any other languages can routinely do things like Ala-fucking-bama and inde-goddamn-pendent and reduplicated imma-bloody-material. Nobody answered, so I am, like the narrator in “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” shouting all the louder, and in a place where answers are more likely found.
I do know about Ennius and his phrase saxo cere-comminuit-brum ‘with a rock he shattered [someone’s] skull’, but lit. ‘with-a-rock sk-he-shattered-ull’, but surely that’s a special effect created by a poet with a huge interest in wordplay, not a general feature of Latin.
In the year since this was posted, no-one pointed out the stray right angle bracket in the cited part of the OP:
“If you ever dared to use <i>>”
It’s not in the original, so it must have arisen during local editing.
Woops! Thanks, fixed.
Father of a lot of other people too, I suspect.
He writes “of course”, so casually, like everyone has read Kroeber. Well, I only recently started checking out Ursula Kroeber Le Guin’s family, and so only recently discovered her father’s works.
The Ancient Oikoumene as an Historic Culture Aggregate [JSTOR]
He writes “of course”, so casually, like everyone has read Kroeber.
Well, I’m glad you have now, because I myself have not read a single paper by Kroeber, at least not yet. I also note that there are now 23 occurrences of of course on this page, and shortly there will be 24.
@Owlmirror: Of course,* it is common here at Language Hat for commenters to post things that imply, with varying degrees of explicitness, that the typical interested reader will have the necessary background to understand the language, history, and cultural context—even if the poster knows full well that few, if any, readers will actually have that level of grounding. However, I think it definitely contributes to the atmosphere of the site. David Eddyshaw described a particular version of the phenomenon:
I think that also sums up my feelings as a reader fairly well, and when I leave similarly obscure comments myself, that is the spirit in which I generally hope they will be taken.
This all leads me to a question, however. Is this a recognized (that is, named) form of irony? (If not, “Hattic irony” is available.) Of course,* the ironic presumption that one’s interlocutors should be thoroughly versed in whatever subject matter, when one knows full well that they actually are not, can be a biting form of irony; by acting as though certain knowledge should be commonplace, one implicitly criticizes those who lack that knowledge. However, Hattic irony has the opposite kind of emotional valance; it compliments the reader (or listener) by assuming that they are knowledgeable about whatever topic may arise.
* I started writing this comment before the previous one appeared. Thus both the above occurrences of, “Of course,” arose unpremeditated.
It’s just like talking in full sentences to one’s baby. They probably don’t understand, but they want to, and they might pick something up. No irony.
@brett
I agree with other commenters that irony is not intended or (mostly) inferred. I would say that the presumption of equal knowledge on the part of an interlocutor, who does not lack the means or time to acquire the knowledge, is to be interpreted as a gesture of respect (except when additional remarks or other context renders this interpretation implausible). I do not suppose you find it ironic when you or a colleague says in a lecture “we see that..” ????
Semantic mark-up can be very useful. My LaTeX papers have
\newcommand{\defn}{\textit} % definition
\newcommand{\jnl}{\textit} % journal name
\newcommand{\bk}{\textit} % book name
\newcommand{\spc}{\textit} % species
\newcommand{\latin}{\textit} % Latin
\newcommand{\vol}{\texbf} % volume number
in the preamble. Having so many ways of representing italics may strike you as overkill (reminiscent of all the ways modern Greek can represent the phoneme [ɪ]), but if, for example, a publisher insists that journal names must be roman it just requires one line to be changed rather than hundreds.
I find “of course” useful for marking doubtful points in my argument, though many readers may not be familiar with this usage.
“It turns out” is also good for this (as in “it turns out that Greenberg’s Niger-Congo grouping is based on shaky foundations.)
You can thereby create an impression that you are merely summarising the more recent developments in our understanding of the matter. No need to particularise about any actual new evidence.
I do use “it turns out”. Also “as it happens”. The esoteric readign of my writings is different than the naive reading.
@J. W. Brewer. “whatever led me to originally get in the habit of posting here on an initials-only basis was not (I guess you’ll have to trust me on this) the fear that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously if I posted as Jill W.”
Come to think of it, why DO few women post comments on Languagehat?
Or are most of them signing their comments with initials or with male pseudonyms?
That’s probably a fruitless line of investigation, since (as you point out) there’s no way of knowing who’s who. But quite a few women have posted here over the years, and I see no point in making an embattled minority out of them.
Another line of investigation: why do so many Davids post here?
I haven’t been posting so much lately (I recently retired and don’t spend so many hours staring at the computer screen) but I will try to do better. We Davids need to maintain our leading position.
I recently retired and don’t spend so many hours staring at the computer screen
Interesting; retirement has had the opposite effect on me. But I am not an outdoorsy person.
>But I have the impression that going-by-initials is or at least so much more common in academic or academic-adjacent British circles
Reading an academic treatment of a recent epigraphic find in Israel, I was stopped by the citation of someone who’d provided relevant information – P.L.O. Guy. It took me a moment to be sure that this was really just an early 20th century British colonial officer / archaeologist.
I’m also pondering why I had pictured you as a man, J.W. Pictured is too strong, but it was my impression.
I used to sometimes visit a transportation-oriented site where the originator of a detailed, amateur proposal for switching a commuter rail operation to rapid transit on short headways often posted under a pseudonym. I remember being surprised to learn he was black, and questioning myself for being surprised. From newspaper articles, I knew his real name, Anglo without any particular clues to background, and his neighborhood, which was racially mixed.
I don’t believe I had any unwillingness to think a black man would have generated these ideas. I tend to think that these were mostly outcomes of my experience of people using initials, and of transit geeks. But it’s useful to reflect on how using a preponderance of experience to fill in all the blanks leads aft a-gley.
It’s tough to hold such things in abeyance even in the absence of information, to avoid forming some vague mental impression of those who post here, for instance. But any method to address it seems fraught — mentally assigning characteristics at random in proportion to their presence in the population, John Emerson being black and Y being female, till I learn differently.
Does anyone else experience this? Or experience it differently? Do any of you have facial hair? That would come as a shock.
why do so many Davids post here?
I Real Life I am not called David. I’m just trying to blend in.
I’m also pondering why I had pictured you as a man, J.W.
I’m pretty sure J.W. is a man; the Jill thing was a counterfactual thought experiment.
I assume a fair proportion of the commenters have facial hair, though I don’t have any strong notions about which ones. And the number may have increased during the pandemic (I had a beard for a couple of months).
I too expect a fair number have facial hair. And yet in my mind, no particular poster does.
And the handful of avatars don’t help. They’re so small, and my eyes increasingly so presbyopic, that Keith, you could be Mr. Rogers, and Brett is definitely an ax murderer. It’s best to try to overlook the avatars.
Interesting article. Thanks for the post and the link. Now I have to read the comments.
I only use HTML in blog comments, but good to know just in case. I’ve been using the i tag, going back to before there was an em tag I think (doing a few simple websites in the web’s early days). Didn’t know about the cite tag. Nor the lang attribute.
Edit: After reading a few comments, it looks like I shouldn’t bother with the cite tag.
“I remember being surprised to learn he was black, and questioning myself for being surprised. …
…But it’s useful to reflect on how using a preponderance of experience to fill in all the blanks leads aft a-gley. ”
It still means that “black” is not the same as, say, “tall”. A part of this difference is questioning yourself. On the other hand, if you systematically dealt with short transit geeks, you would be surprised to meet a tall one.
I used to compare Russian distinction between people who studied humanities (гуманитарии) and people who studied precise sciences with gender, now I think maybe “race” has something in common with gender too: importance and social expectations.
Semantic mark-up can be very useful.
Yes, but for this there are CSS classes, if one’s concern is content management.
Many sites sysmatically use em/strong instead of i/b. I do not understand it. And I do not understand the part about screen readers.
If you need a hint for an external program, you will have to add this hint manually.
Re facial hair: You can continue to picture me without. My wife made it clear early in our relationship that a beard would be a valid cause for divorce.
Since cartoonish imagination is limitless, I’d like to imagine all of us as wearing green visors and sitting in front of typewriters in stuffy rooms with ceiling fans (cigar butts optional).
The green visor wouldn’t go with my smoking cap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_cap
That’s an entirely different cartoon. In yours, we all address each other by our last names.
I thought “Y” was your last name!
(Have I inadvertently been overfamiliar?)
I had a beard for four years — I grew it during the 1972 Olympics and shaved it off during the 1976 Olympics (the Olympics are irrelevant except that they provide a mnemonic for the year range). My youngest daughter was born in 1983, so she had never seen me with a beard. However, she had seen photographs, and wanted to see a bearded me for real, so I grew it again. I think it lasted about a year.
I got my beard shaved off in June 2006 (at age 14), shortly after it started growing for the first time, and the follow-up irritation was so strong that I resolved to never agree to it again. Since then I’ve occasionally had my beard trimmed but never shaved.
My Dear Eddyshaw, my last name is “.” I omit it in this lamentably permissive circumstance.
Now, I know about Victorians addressing each other as “Holmes” and “Lestrade”, but I don’t recall ever seeing it done with hyphenated names. Would one Victorian address another as “Cornish-Bowden”?
In Three Men in a Boat, only Harris is referred to by surname. George isn’t (because he gets no respect). “J.” is a nickname, but in any case his given name and surname are the same.
Behold the G.O.D.D.S. among men.
(Odd that Wake was missing.)
We pogonophores are so numerous here we once took over this thread. (It’s short.)
OMG, I’m lost in a forum of Civil War reenactors.
And to add to the general sense of my alienation from the Hattery, the other day, watching credits on a movie, my 7-year old, who only has the experience of the modish names of her classmates, exclaimed “Steve?!? What kind of a name is Steve?!?”
It’s become a refrain around the house. And of course, she’s finding Steves everywhere now, crawling out of the woodwork.
@.:
We addressed one another by surnames at school (this was shortly after the Victorian era), but I can’t actually recall anyone double-barrelled. I don’t think it was allowed in Glasgow in those days.
I say, Fotheringay-Phipps, shall we pop round to the Drones Club?
Surely Fotheringay-Phipps is in fact universally addressed as Pluffles? (Except by his Aunts, of course. I heard one of them call him Ethelred.)
Barmy, actually.
Ah yes. I was confusing him with his cousin, Featherstonhaugh-Phipps. Same ears.
Someone in this world would probably shudder at how we ignorantly conflate Victorians and Edwardians.
Let us refrain from ethnically stereotyping the quant natives of declining island nations.
I never knew my grandfather (born in 1870), but in view of my own experience at school in the 1950s I think the answer is probably yes.
It’s certainly what I would expect; I don’t know why the presence of a hyphen in the written form would make any difference.
OMG, I’m lost in a forum of Civil War reenactors.
The odd thing is that I think most of them are well over 35. Beardos are common among the young nowadays.
I’m reading an old murder mystery with a character called Wriggley-Bell, and people mostly seem to call him bell, apart from the woman who calls him Wriggles. I’m not claiming this as representative, however.
Is that The Armchair Angler? If so, he’s definitely addressed as “Wrigley-Bell” (one g):
“‘Did I ever tell you, Wrigley-Bell,’ he said to his companion…”
@ rozele. “yiddish also uses s p a c i n g for emphasis (i don’t know under what name) – at least in orthographically ‘modernized’ scholarly contexts. the convention’s obviously imported from german, but does make me wonder whether any other non-roman scripts have also adopted the form. the advantages seem clear for either the movable type era (no need for a second typeface) or the contemporary html era (flexible tags, officially “semantic” or not), but not really for any publication technology besides those two…”
With respect to “yiddish also uses s p a c i n g for emphasis (i don’t know under what name),” (at least Eastern) Yidish has the masculine noun שפּײַץ (shpayts) 1. ‘space [gap between written characters, lines, etc.]’. 2. ‘space [piece of wooden or metal type used to separate written characters, cast lower than other type in order not to take ink]’ (plural שפּײַצן [shpaytsn]), which is cognate at least with Italian spazio ‘idem’ and Polish spacja ‘idem’ but which cannot come from either of those words because it (the Yidish word) has protovowel 34 (called by Max Weinreich protovowel I4 ), that is */ii/ (phonetically *[i:]), which neither the Italian nor the Polish word has ever had.
However, I know of no Yidish lexeme (whether a word or a set phrase) that means ‘letter-spacing for emphasis’.
With respect to the origin or origins of spacing for emphasis in written Yidish, I have not seen it in handwritten texts (but the experience of one person is far from enough to serve as a basis for judgment) and it is found in printed Eastern Yidish texts at least since the second half of the nineteenth century (again, the experience of one person…).
In light of the absence of a systematic study of written Yidish texts that pays due attention both to time (how far back does spacing for emphasis go?) and to space (is it found in Western Yidish texts?), it is too early to discuss an origin or origins of spacing for emphasis in such texts.
With respect to “whether any other non-roman scripts have also adopted the form,” letter-spacing is called разрядка in Russian. One could search for that word to see whether letter-spacing for emphasis has ever been used in that language.
I’ll mention the writer A.A. who was prosecuted for racial hatred of the Welsh
Obit: “AA Gill, the restaurant critic who wasn’t the biggest fan of Wales, has died/ The privately educated writer thought the Welsh ‘immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly'”
One could search for that word to see whether letter-spacing for emphasis has ever been used in that language.
Yes, it has, as I said here.
A A Gill
I’d be more alarmed to be praised by an A A Gill.
Also, I am neither bigoted nor dark.
(Prosecuting him was just silly. Yet, let me flap this bug with gilded wings …)
Last year you only denied being little. Have you undertaken a course of self-improvement?
I would take a course of self-improvement, but there is so little scope left for it that it hardly seems worth the investment.
Previous discussion of kerning for emphasis in German, for those unfamiliar.
Would Yiddish have used German terminology for a typographical emphasis used by German printers?
WikiP:Emphasis (typography)
The English WikiP page links to the German WikiP page on emphasis (de.WikiP:Schriftauszeichnung), and there one can click on “gesperrt” to link to a page on the topic of letter-spacing (de.WikiP:Sperrsatz).
On that page, the source HTML for “richtig gesperrt” is:
<span style="letter-spacing:0.13em;margin-left:0.13em">. I, as a mere commentator, cannot use arbitraryspantags in a comment, but a moderator could presumably use them if so moved.@Brett: Since I’ve been reading up on typography, I am reminded that as terms of art, “letter-spacing” is not synonymous with “kerning” (just as “typeface” is not really the same thing as “font”). Kerning usually refers to moving glyphs closer together for aesthetic effect when there is a gap between them caused by their respective shapes.
All about Goudy, letter-spacing, and the sheep.
Sperren is an etymological mystery to me, because otherwise it means “lock” – well, aufsperren “open a locked door/building/establishment”, zusperren “close same”, einsperren “lock up”, aussperren “lock out”, Straße gesperrt “road closed”…
I don’t think it’s ever been used in handwriting; it would cause trouble with the very point of cursive, which is that most words can be written in a single uninterrupted stroke. Emphasis in handwriting has mostly been underlining (unterstreichen), sometimes underwaving (unterwellieren). I actually made a kink in the tip of my fountain pen so I could turn it around and write in boldface, but I’m not representative of anything…
Is a metathesis of word-final /tsj/ (i.e. spazio without the -o) to /jts/ possible? Followed, perhaps, by regular vowel correspondences created by etymological nativization?
All about Goudy, letter-spacing, and the sheep.
Thanks, that was an extremely interesting (and entertaining) read!
And I agree that an American would not say “shag sheep” in 1936.
the spacing would be achieved by inserting additional non-printing slices of metal between the types, usually about an eighth of an em wide
Likewise, an eighth of an en is used for the lightly pronounced enphasis. There’s also elphasis, the mere suggestion of stress, almost unnoticeable even to the most attentive listener.
@Owlmirror: The oldest meanings of kern (and the only ones in the OED) were specifically related to making non-rectangular type blocks for glyphs like lower case j or f. For example, the part of the block containing descender on the j could be wider than the part containing the stem and dot. That allowed for what you describe: placing two letters like “mj” closer together than would be allowed by the full width of the j glyph; the descender of the j is allowed to lie underneath the preceding letter.
Later uses of kern extended this to spacing characters out as well; in practice, this meaning has long been much more common in the typesetting business than the older sense mentioned above. The reason for this seems to be simple. Making type blocks with kerns (or setting your hot metal system to produce them) is generally a one-time thing, but changing the spacing of letters in a word by hand is done all at the time.
The later emergence of desktop publishing allowed for the meaning to be broadened even further. (See my remark here.)
I am pretty sure that I have seen spacing for emphasis in Chinese, in a contemporary Taiwan book not in simplified characters.
I suspect that the book is on a shelf 4 feet in front of me and a foot to the left, but in this plague year making the extra effort to get the book and examine it would be inadvisable.
but they seem to me to be fundamentally (and i’d argue deliberately) about practice-based systems rather than belief-based ones (the sort that christianity gave us the notion of “religion” to describe). the former generally don’t claim to be more than ‘local knowledges’; the latter have great difficulty limiting their claims to the ‘local’.
The local knowledge of Stse or Christendom or Jewry isn’t confined to those localities: it has content about the whole universe (e.g. that the stars are lesser lights attached to the firmament, perhaps) without thereby becoming universal knowledge. The term “local” describes the scope of the knowledge: this is what they believe in Stse, but its subject matter can be anything.
Current Danish has spærre øjnene op for ‘open eyes wide’ and back in the day, spærret skrift for spatiation in Fraktur. (And other blackletter fonts, but Fraktur was by far the most common). The ODS thinks its a specialization of the loan/calque from German sperren, with the first attestations being at spærre benene = ‘take a wide stance’ (when wanting to spærre someone else’s approach), but given German Sperrsatz which is supposed to derive from the name Sparre for the actual spacers in the type, I’m not sure spærret skrift is not an independent loan.
…oh. Yeah. DWDS says sperren is indeed from Sparren “oblique bar in a roof”, the cognate of English (and Dutch) spar.
I suppose the sense expanded from “create and maintain a distance” to “open, unlock” (including Augen aufsperren, an impolite request to finally look), and then “lock” (zusperren, versperren, sperren) and eventually “bar, deny access” (sperren) were backformed.