A page from (recent) history

Today’s post is a quick example of the kind of language-culture connection that can be made by using the Google ngram tool I mentioned in the last post. It features some wildly unsupported hypothesizing, but sometimes that’s the way we do things here.1

It had actually occurred to me years ago that there had been a shift in the use of the terms pager and beeper (to refer to the portable electronic paging device). This observation was based completely on subjective impression. It seemed to me that the word beeper used to be more common, an impression I formed from things like television and film, but that the word pager to refer to the same device was becoming increasingly common. I attributed this to the increasing use of the devices by the general public, not just those in special niches, such as doctors or plumbers. The word beeper calls attention to external impression of the devices -- they make beeping noises. The word pager calls attention to the function of the devices. Of course in the years since, the devices themselves have largely disappeared with the advent of the cell phone.

Now with the ngram tool (and a little background research) I can test this observation. Pagers were invented in 1950 (as you can read about in the Wikipedia entry). The devices were not initially referred to as beepers or pagers. As you can read in this early Popular Science article, the service is referred to as a radio paging service and the unit itself is referred to as a pocket ratio or portable receiver. As it turns out, the words pager and beeper both predate the device which they have come to refer to. The OED lists the first attestation of the word beeper in 1946 to refer to any machine which makes a beeping sound. According to Merriam-Webster, the first use of the word with its current more restricted use is 1970. The word pager was originally a printing term, referring to someone who makes up type into pages (dating from the 19th century). The first use of the word to refer to the radio device is not until 1968.

Now these other senses of the words beeper and pager may cause some ‘noise’ in the Google ngram search results, particularly in the earlier years before the current uses become more common, but these other uses are rather uncommon and are soon drowned out. In any case, some general trends are quite clear.

Initially beeper has the edge on pager. Then in the early 1990s, as the devices become more commonplace, the word pager surges ahead, and beeper starts to level off and eventually decline. Of course both words drop off dramatically in the early 21st century as the devices themselves become uncommon. So now, thanks to the Google ngram tool, I’ve easily been able to support this casual supposition I’ve been making all these years. It’s a fun game to play. If anyone reading this wishes to play around with the ngram tool, I’d love to hear about your results in the comments.

1 It’s my blog and I can do what I like! Obviously one could do a little more digging and consider things like regional variation, other terms beyond the two I consider here, and other influencing factors, but this is just a quick example. Do also have a look at the Culturomics website, and in particular the Cultural Observatory for more details about this kind of analysis. Also, have a listen to this podcast from Lexicon Valley about the analysis of the language used in such historically-set tv shows as Downton Abbey and Mad Men. [back]

Interdisciplinarity: Crossing the boundaries from the trivial to the interconnected

I wanted to write today about something that is in many ways central to much of what I write about here on this blog, and has been fundamental to much of my research more generally: interdisciplinarity. For those not that familiar with academia, universities are generally rigidly divided into a variety of disciplines. At the larger level, there are main groupings such as the sciences and humanities, which are further divided into departments such as physics, biology, English literature, history, and philosophy. There are certainly good organizational reasons for this kind of division, as it fosters in depth interaction within disciplines with others working on similar areas, and puts researchers and students with others of a like mind, who might best be able to appreciate their shared material. I suppose ultimately this kind of division goes back to the medieval arrangement of education into what is known as the trivium and the quadrivium. The first level, the trivium with three subjects, is what we might now think of as the arts: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (that is logic). The second level, the quadrivium with four subjects, consisted of what we might call the sciences: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (that is the theoretical study of harmonics). The word trivium means literally ‘three ways’ (referring obviously to the three parts) from Latin tri- ‘three’ and via ‘way, road’, and on a more literal level the same word was used to refer to a crossroad of three streets. From this also comes the modern English word trivial.1 Now I’m not suggesting that intense specialisation is trivial,2 but the research produced from increasingly specialised disciplines runs the risk of being appreciated by only a small few who are in the know. Now this kind of detailed work is very important at advancing and solidifying what we know about the world -- quantum physicists may discover the fundamental operations of reality or paleographers may determine the provenance of a particular manuscript. But sometimes great advances come from the unexpected intersection of different knowledge sets, and because few people can be experts in more than one field, these kinds of perspectives can be missed.

This serendipity is at the heart of much of the writing of the popular science historian James Burke, and indeed Burke makes a particularly strong case for this kind of boundary crossing in this podcast, if you care to listen. The point is, groundbreaking discoveries often come from people working outside of their normal, comfortable, well-defined area of study, exploring areas outside their comfort zone. Sometimes they connect the familiar with the unfamiliar. Or they connect an external idea with their usual subject matter. This is in part what lies behind interdisciplinarity.

My background, as I've mentioned before, is in medieval studies, which combines a variety of disciplines such as language, literature, palaeography, codicology, history, archaeology, musicology, and so forth, over a wide geographical range, with the unifying chronological parameter of the middle ages. My doctoral dissertation would not have been possible in an English literature department, combining as it did linguistics, literature, anthropology, philosophy, history, and a variety of other approaches. It may have left me as something of a jack of all trades, master of none, but it allowed me a range that I found quite interesting. Cognitive science, my latest interest, is also an example of an interdisciplinary field, even more so when applied to literature, culture, or history, as researchers like myself do.

Recently I've noticed some quite inventive interdisciplinary projects worthy of note. Culturomics, applying detailed quantitative analysis to a large database of texts with a view to making cultural connections, has garnered some broad attention, particularly with a recent paper examining the birth and death of words. This culturomics approach has led to the Google ngram tool, which is free for anyone to play around with. Searchable electronic corpora of texts are often only available to those within an academic institution, and take some specialised knowledge to use. When I work with Old English, for instance, I make extensive use of the Old English Corpus from the Dictionary of Old English Project. The ngram tool from Google allows anyone to experiment.

Closer to my own background in Old English, there is the Lexomics project, which bring statistical analysis and computer science to the study of Old English poetry. This project has taken the Old English Corpus and applied some quite sophisticated statistical analysis with a view to finding lexical connections between different texts. This could, for instance, be used for research on authorship or literary influence. And again, many of the Lexomics tools are freely available online.

And as I've written about before, M. Keith Chen has tried to explore the intersection of economics, language, and psychology, and Chen’s other work also employs similar cross-boundary approaches, as is clear from his website.

Of course, inevitably such boundary pushing research will be criticised by specialists in the fields, sometimes rightly and sometimes not. Naturally when working outside of your comfort zone you may make faulty assumptions that a specialist would not, and thus the scrutiny of specialists is important for refining this kind of work. I’ve already written about the criticisms of Chen’s linguistic relativistic effects on saving behaviour. There are, indeed, some potentially serious problems to his categorisation of languages, and perhaps with the type of statistical analysis he uses. Nevertheless, I think this research raises some interesting questions, which merit further investigation. While I don’t think Chen has definitively proven anything, I do think that he has cast a light on an intriguing correlation between language and thought, which can be further explored with both statistical and experimental work. And the Culturomics work has similarly been criticised due to problems with the corpus of texts they’re working with.3

In particular, I’m personally quite fascinated by scientific approaches to literature and the humanities in general, bridging that traditional trivium/quadrivium divide I mentioned earlier. Culturomics is one such example, conducted as it is by physicists and mathematicians. Another science/humanities crossover is the project to determine the provenance of medieval manuscripts by analysing the DNA of the parchment. My own post on the history of sailing technology in its way is a cross over between science and the humanities. And one thing the sciences do well, that is often not a factor in the humanities, is collaboration. I’d like to see more collaborative work in the humanities.

So in the end, all of this was to call attention to the basis of much of what I’m writing about on this blog. As I’ve said, my research, including my doctoral dissertation, is inherently interdisciplinary. I use language as an entry point to investigate history, culture (including literature), and thought. On this blog I may push the boundaries even further than I do in my other research in an effort to see what sticks. I do think that by taking those chances real progress can be made, but I certainly do welcome any constructive criticism.

Coming up soon, a related post on interconnectedness...

1 Presumably from the sense of 'commonplace', hence 'unimportant'. [back]

2 Nor am I suggesting that the arts are more trivial than the sciences. [back]

3 See here, and a humorous response to this kind of interdisciplinary approach can be seen here. [back]

Reboot

This blog (and my other blog) have gone fallow of late, due in part to end-of-term busy-ness and my preparation for and attendance of the medieval conference in Kalamazoo. But it’s time to get the blogs back on track, so to that end here’s a roadmap of what’s coming up.

First up, a few more background posts on some of what lies behind much of what I write about here and elsewhere, one on interdisciplinarity, one on interconnectedness, and some background on where I stand on the issue of linguistic relativity. Then I’ll embark on a series of posts about the topic I’ve been working on most intently over the past decade and more, that is time, language, and thought. These posts will hopefully go beyond the narrowly defined subject of my dissertation, futurity in Old English, to explore how people think about and talk about time more generally. There will probably also be the occasional post on other topics as the mood strikes me too. Oh, and there's a redesign of the banner image, my own take on the cognitive science hexagram (which I've mentioned before) -- the significance will be explained in an upcoming post. So, as they say, watch this space...

Kalamazoo Time

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Between end-of-term grading and preparing a conference paper, I haven't had much time. But speaking about time...

I'll be attending the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. It's the biggest specifically medieval academic conference. I don't have time to write much more about it now, but here's a summary of my paper, titled "Linguistic Relativity Revisited: Language and Thought in Old English":

Ever since Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed that there was a connection between language, thought, and culture, the concept of linguistic relativity has been a highly controversial topic. The famous (or notorious) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposed that differences in linguistic categories from one language to the next determine or at least influence the ways in which speakers of those languages think about the world. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, this notion fell out of favour and has been strongly rejected. For instance, Steven Pinker states unequivocally that the theory is “wrong, all wrong”, and instead argues for an underlying language common to all people, which he calls ‘mentalese’. However, in the past decade new evidence has come to light, pioneered in particular by cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, that reopens the debate on linguistic relativity. Boroditsky’s research, bolstered by extensive experimental data, suggests that language differences can have profound differences on the way speakers think about the world.

This paper will explore the implications of this research for the understanding of Old English language and thought. In particular, I will focus on linguistic categories involving time and tense, including the use of spatiotemporal terms for time. Old English speakers were powerfully influenced by the very different language and culture of the Latin speaking Christian missionaries. I argue that exploring the differences between these languages helps explain the development of the language, literature, and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

In the paper, I'll not only be drawing on Boroditsky's work, I'll also mention the recent controversial paper by M. Keith Chen which I've blogged about before (here and here), and looking back at an old book by Ernst Bauschatz on Germanic notions of time. So though short on time, I'll be speaking mostly about time.

Numbers Count: Thought, Culture, and Number Systems

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend an excellent talk by Dr. Geoffrey Saxe titled “Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas: Papua New Guinea Studies”, part of the Thought and Culture Seminar at Laurentian University. This lecture touched on a number of interests of mine relating to thought, culture, and language. Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Psychological studies of cognitive development are often conducted without regard for the interplay between the cognitive activities of individuals and the cultural histories of communities. In my talk, I illustrate a heuristic research framework that illuminates this interplay through studies drawn from a program of work conducted in a remote Mountain Ok community in Papua New Guinea, the Oksapmin. Traditionally, the Oksapmin like their neighboring groups use a 27-body part counting system to represent quantity. Over three periods of fieldwork that stretch 23 years, I trace the shifting organization of the system and the shifting functions it serves as it is reproduced and altered in collective practices of daily life. Though the focus of the talk is on the Oksapmin case, I point to ways that the framework is useful for understanding the dynamics of culture-cognition relations more generally.

The research page of Dr. Saxe’s website has a good brief summary of the two lines of his research, and the publications page has this more detailed account of his research into the Oksapmin 27-body part counting system.

To summarise, Saxe looked at the counting system of the Oksapmin, in which numbers correspond to 27 body parts of the arms and head, as in this illustration taken from the website:

These are cardinal numbers that are used to count, but Saxe found that traditionally they were not used for arithmetical calculation. In this brief video clip, on Saxe’s website, you can see this counting system being demonstrated.

The Oksapmin were first contacted by westerners in 1938, and gradually western culture has influenced Oksapmin society since then. Saxe has made three visits to study the Oksapmin and observe the changes in their traditional counting system, in 1978, 1980, and 2001. Two major influences on change are financial transaction, as the Oksapmin became more and more integrated with western economy, and education, as western-style schools were established in the region. For basic counting tasks, the traditional system could be used for counting out money, but more complex arithmetical calculations novel adaptations of the system began to be developed, many of them quite ingenious workarounds. Unsurprisingly, Saxe found that the more integrated a person was with western culture, the better they would be able to perform such arithmetical tasks, especially without a physical object to count, such as coins. In terms of education, initially the educational policy was to ban the use of any language other than English in the classroom. Saxe reports, therefore, that the traditional use of the body-part system was on the wane by his 2001 visit. However, educational policy had changed, and greater value was attached to traditional culture and practices, and attempts were being made to bridge traditional and western culture, rather than simply suppress the traditional. Thus the body-part system began to be used in the classroom. However, as the body-part system was no longer in much use in traditional contexts, the use in the classroom was somewhat divorced from the older tradition.

I am, of course, summarising and simplifying here, and no doubt I am missing many of the subtleties and complexities of Dr. Saxe’s research, as I only had a chance to briefly look over the article before the presentation, though I look forward to reading it more carefully now. If you’re interested in the subject, I recommend you read for yourself the article itself (as well as his other research).

Some particular questions / areas of interest I have about this research include the issue of bilingualism. Greater knowledge of western culture goes along with differences in use of the number system. Do bilingual speakers perform differently when performing the same tasks in different linguistic contexts, and does learning a different number system change the way one uses the traditional one? The evidence here seems to suggest yes. Another small question I have is do the Oksapmin use words for right and left -- the counting system outlined above seems to use an expression ('tan') meaning “on the other side” -- and does this have any bearing on things.

Ultimately Dr. Saxe’s work seeks to develop a framework for dealing with the complex cultural and cognitive interplay at work here, and how this leads to changes in knowledge systems over time. He noted the lack of inclusion of social history in the study of cognitive development, for which he thus tried to develop a working model. Obviously this could have very broad implications and utility to other situations, and is particularly relevant to my own interests in the interplay between culture, cognition, history, and language change, and so I look forward to learning more about his work.