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Language Log
Paris Hilton's vocal registers
Hilary Hanson, "Paris Hilton's Split-Second Voice Change Leaves People Absolutely Stunned", Huffpost 6/29/2024:
Paris Hilton floored social media users this week by seamlessly shifting her vocal register midsentence as she spoke before Congress. […]
When Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) asked Hilton for her thoughts on incorporating mental health care into new legislation, Hilton responded first by complimenting the lawmaker’s outfit.
“I love your jacket. The sparkles are amazing,” Hilton said.
Tenney joked, “I had a little bling here for today,” to which Hilton replied, “Yes, I wanted to find out who made it later.”
Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.
“But I think the most important thing is, they need access to therapy counseling, mentorship and other community-based programs,” she said, with her voice dropping on the word “but.”
A video of the testimony can be found on CSPAN (or CSPAN's X account).
There's a long history of interest in Paris Hilton's vocal registers, as a quick YouTube scan demonstrates.
And in the cited congressional testimony, there's no question that her way of talking changes (somewhat) between the three phrases where she compliments Rep. Tenney's jacket, and the following phrases where she reads her message on mental health care.
But the description of the intonational aspects of the change is actually upside down. Here are the first nine phrases — three offering fashion comments (with Rep. Tenney's response after the first two), and then the first six of her phrases about mental health:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
1. Thank you, I enjoyed our Zoom call,
2. and I love your jacket, the sparkles are amazing.
Um… [I had a little bling here for today you know] Yeah,
3. I wanted to find out who made it later. Um…
4. …but I think the most important thing is
5. we need access to therapy, counseling, mentorship,
6. and other community based programs.
7. And I think it's also important to not label these kids as troubled or bad
8. I think it- it makes these children feel like they aren't believed, and
9. that's something that's important for them to not feel that way, and
10. yeah I think it's just about showing kindness and love and compassion and support
If we look at the pitch tracks for the phrases labelled (3) and (4) above, we can see that Ms. Hilton actually uses somewhat higher pitches in the phrase starting with "but". And for those who can interpret perceived intonation in terms of pitch height, listening confirms it:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ParisHiltonCongressPhrases3-4.png Another way to quantify her intonational range is to look at the quantiles of estimated F0, phrase by phrase: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ParisHiltonCongressF0Quantiles1.png Her mental-health phrases (5) to (9) are indeed a bit lower in pitch (except at their endings), compared to her fashion phrases (1)-(3). But her first mental-health phrase — "(4) …but I think the most important thing is" — is strikingly higher in overall pitch, and has an expanded pitch range as well, as quantified by the per-phrase MAD (median absolute deviation from the median):
(1) 7.8 (2) 3.7 (3) 5.4 (4) 16.1 (5) 4.2 (6) 9.4 (7) 7.9 (8) 5.7 (9) 6.2
This change, probably because of the topic shift, is exactly the opposite of the description in the Huffpost article:
Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.
“But I think the most important [...]
, so Ptah rested”).
And more interesting still, from a modern scientific understanding, it is well known that the very instant of creation started with sound — The Big Bang! In fact, it has now been shown that the very ripples in the matter density of the early universe that gave rise to galaxies was created by what is called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), “fluctuations in the density of the visible baryonic matter (normal matter) of the universe, caused by acoustic density waves in the primordial plasma of the early universe.” (Wiki).
Thus, it was from the Big Bang, which seeded the material galaxies and conscious life itself, that first ushered forth that most mythic and primal cosmic cry of creation — the Word made flesh (or, to some, “the sound and the fury”). Selected reading
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 5" (6/7/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 4" (6/5/24) — especially this extended, detailed comment by Brian Pellar
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 3" (5/24/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 2" (5/12/24)
* "Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England" (4/30/24)
* "Wheat and word: astronomy and the origins of the alphabet" (3/15/24) — with references to seven substantial papers on this subject by Brian Pellar
* "The Alphabet and the Zodiac" (12/6/22)
* "The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse of Uruk?" (6/23/23) — this lengthy comment
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oddess. It is also not a coincidence that the plow of Egypt reflects the shape not only of a bull’s head, but the Hyades (Taurus), which is the letter “A,”
Aleph, the sun/son/seed that rises from the gate of the Goddess (see Pellar, 2009). This is why the North Celestial Pole is seen in an image of a plow in the center of the Zodiac of Dendera. The Word/seed/sun is sown from the center/axis mundi of the cosmic sphere. To dig a bit deeper, if writing is akin to plowing/sowing, then reading is akin to harvesting, where the mind grinds (philosopher’s stone) the word as seed to produce symbolic bread, which rises, nourishes, and carries the light/consciousness/wisdom within, etc. This idea found its way into the Poetic Tradition via the scribes of Egypt, to Greece, Rome, and Europe. This grinding/cutting up of the god/goddess is seen in the eastern myths, notably India, where the demiurge is not separate from its creation, but “is” the creation, as it divides itself, cuts itself up, to form all things. Lastly, in line with the Word/seed/womb/22/Logos, etc., it is interesting that the Dogon of Africa had two different words that they call ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ words.
The dry, or primordial, word was an attribute of the primeval Spirit, Amma, before he had begun the task of creation, and was undifferentiated speech, unaware of itself. It resides within mankind, but mankind does not know it. It has the potential property of divine thought, but at our microcosmic level is the unconscious. ‘Moist’ words germinated, like the principle of life itself, within the Cosmic egg and they were the words given to mankind. They comprise audible sounds, regarded as one of the ways in which procreative of the male are expressed, on a par with his semen. The word enters the woman’s ear — her other sexual organ — and then twines down into her womb to fertilize the seed and create the embryo. The word, in this same spiral form, is the light which descends on the sun’s rays to take physical shape in the earth’s womb as red copper. Moist words, like the water, light, spirals and red copper, are simply one of the different manifestations — or meanings — of a basic symbol, the world made manifest, or of its lord, the water-god Nommo. The sum of Bambara mystical knowledge is contained in the symbolism of the numbers one to twenty-two and the Bambara regard the primordial oneness, one, as the figure of the Lord of the Word and the Word itself. Within the same symbol, notions of chieftaincy, of the rights of primogeniture, of head and consciousness are all comprehended … the notion of the fecundating word, carrying the seeds of creation and with its place in the dawn of that creation as the first manifestation of the godhead and pre-existence before any created form, is to be found in the cosmogonic concepts of many peoples. We have noted it in Africa, among the Dogon, and it recurs among the Guarani Indians of Paraguay who believed that God created speech as the foundation, before he gave physical form to water, fire, the sun, to life-giving mists and lastly to the primordial earth. Many South American Indian tribes associate the Word with the principles of life and immortality. This is especially true of the Taulipang, who believe that the individual is endowed with five souls, of which only one reaches the other world after death. This is the soul that contains the Word and which leaves the body at regular intervals during sleep. Leenhardt records the Kanaka belief in New Caledonia that the word is an act, the very first act ever done…. In Biblical tradition, ‘The Old Testament speaks of the Word of God, and of his wisdom, present with God before the world was made…; by it all things were created; it is sent to earth to reveal the hidden designs of God; it returns to him with its work done…. For John, too…, the Word existed before the world in God….’ To Greek thinkers, Logos meant not only the word, phrase, speech, but also the reason and the intellect, ideas and the depths of a being’s meaning, even d[...]
hich in turn divides the twenty-two consonants (body/vessel of the monistic goddess) at the Gemini Gate, with the end product generating that magical/mystical number pi — 3.14 (see Pellar, 2009). The idea of the consonant as the vessel/body of the vowel/light/understanding god within, is seen in the Ugaritic alphabet, which is composed of thirty letters, symbolizing the days of the moon, which was the vessel of light, and which contained in it the twenty-two letters of the solar zodiac (see Pellar, 2009). In Hinduism, the word vāk is “the mother of knowledge, the seven vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet are still called the seven wombs, being the seven mothers of speech” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 1122). According to Demetrius (Godwin, 1991: 22) of Hellenistic Greece, the Egyptians had seven sacred vowels that they used in singing in praise to the gods. Along with the alphabet, these seven sacred vowels were carried into the Phoenician/Hebrew and then Greek alphabets. This concept of the seven vowels is further seen in the number seven being the gate of the goddess in the astro-alphabet (see Pellar, 2009), and mirrors the seven stars of Ursa Minor in the womb of the Great Goddess/Bull. Godwin also notes that Eusebius of Caesarea (260–340 AD), quoting Porphyry, remarks that Apollo, the sun god, is the “King of the seven notes, known to all” (Godwin, 1991: 21). Furthermore, Godwin, quoting Eusebius, remarked that … it was with the seven vowels that the Jews sought to express the name of God which cannot be spoken, but that they reduced these to four for the use of the multitude. He draws a parallel with a saying he remembers from one of the Wise Men of Greece (who may well be Porphyry again): “The seven vowels celebrate me, the great imperishable God, indefatigable father of all. I am the imperishable lyre, having tuned the lyric songs of the celestial vortex.” This is a formulation of the beautiful doctrine of astral paganism, according to which the Sun is the leader of the choir of planets, and Apollo’s lyre a symbol of the harmony of the spheres. It is Franz Dornseiff, however, who again cautions against too cut-and-dried an interpretation of ancient correspondences. He cites an invocation in one of the magical papyri of “α ε η ι ο υ ω that rise in the night,” heavenly bodies which evidently do not include the sun; they must be the seven stars of the Great Bear, he says, which, in a tradition that goes back to Babylonian times, are confused with the seven planets and even called by their names. This ambiguity — which is the same as that between the Hyperborean and the Delian Apollo — was recognized by the Sabaeans of Harran, that mysterious Hermetic sect which survived into Muslim times. They had seven temples dedicated to the planets, and seem to have originated the correspondences of planets to metals, but their worship also included a liturgy addressed to the Pole Star, around which the Great Bear turns. (Godwin, 1991: 21–22).
It is important to note that, though unknown to Dornseiff at the time, the seven vowels that rise in the night could indeed correspond to the seven planets, the sun, and the seven stars of Ursa Minor or Major, for the monistic goddess as the Great Bear/Bull, as previously noted, gave birth to the sun as the logos/seed/son via the action of the celestial pole. They are not mutually exclusive. The “opening of the mouth ceremony,” the most important ritual in ancient Egypt, which uses an adze in the shape of the seven stars of Ursa Major, and which also used a bull’s leg (which, again, is none other than the front leg of the Great Bull, Ursa Major, Meskhetiu, as discussed in Part One, with references to the research of Relke/Ernest) to open the mouth of one who is deceased so that he may speak, hear, breathe, see, etc., mirrors the importance of the seven sacred vowels as the seven sacred stars of the god (possibly referring to Ptah, who created all things via the word) in that they form the Word behind the words of the deceased. As the Egyptian[...]
s nested seed shape in the form of the bull, which matches the bull god Osiris as the bull wheat, is also seen in several other Celestial diagrams, such as Ramses II, Pedamenope, etc.). Those nested seeds, which are connected to, and arose from, the new head of the wheat plant (thus Aries, the vernal equinox at the time, is visually shown as a sheep in Senemut — the new “head” of wheat just prior to the more mature bull head of wheat of Taurus) are akin to the “three powers” and are thus the nested seeds of sound, of the nested “invisible mystery” within the vowel/breath that is in turn, within the Word as seed/sun/son that will be born from the Gemini Gate at the harvest of the wheat, which the sequence in Senemut clearly shows (as discussed in several of my papers, this link between the “son” and “seed” and “sound” and the zodiac is also demonstrated in the Chinese ganzhi in the start of the Earthly Branches, the Rat, which is equivalent to the start of the earlier Western zodiac, as Aries, and like the Western zodiac, it symbolizes the new head of wheat, or rice in China, that emerges in spring. For the character Zi, Rat, not only has the shape of Aries, but, like earlier Western symbolism, is linked in meaning to “child,” “seed,” and “word.” See SPP 328, p. 87).
As discussed in the recent Language Log posts on the Dodecahedron, the Gnostic texts also discuss the idea of the “Monad” and the unfolding the cosmos from the “silence” (the idea of the monad, once again, comes out of Greece, and most likely, Egypt. It’s also interesting that word “monad” is also a “Greek feminine noun” — thus, there’s a possible residual connection to the earlier Great Goddess, the creatrix, of the Neolithic and Upper Paleolithic, that is still seen in the Rigveda of India. According to the Devi Sukta (10.125), the “eternal and infinite consciousness” is feminine — “I created earth and heaven and reside as their inner controller. On the world’s summit, I bring forth sky the Father. . .” But more importantly, she is also associated with Word, and she alone speaks it from that eternal and infinite consciousness: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that Gods and mean alike shall welcome”). Furthermore, like the 12 sides of the dodecahedron being linked by Plato to the 12 constellations of the zodiac, as well as to the Gods of the Aeons (see LL post Roman Dodecahedra Between Southeast Asian and England, Part 4), the Hebreu Primitif also links the 12 zodiac signs to gods (12 gods of Greece-Rome, and the one Hebrew god Jehovah) and to numbers and sounds — the letters of the Hebrew (Phoenician) alphabet that contain the vowels/breath of divinity.
But more importantly, in the Gospel of the Egyptians, note the focus and emphasis of “silence”: “Three powers came forth from him; they are the Father, the Mother, (and) the Son, from the living silence, what came forth from the incorruptible Father. These came forth from the silence of the unknown Father.” That is, there was first “silence,” and then non-silence — sound (the vowels and then the Word), with the gods themselves, the Aeons, being composed of both “numbers and sounds.” Those Aeons also form male/female “pairs” that are called “syzygies,” which, might be correlated to the male/female couplets that compose the 22 consonants of the alphazodiac. That is, the Aeons form 15 pairs of 30 each, which might be correlated to the 30 earlier lunar houses (28 lunar mansions in China). As mentioned in several places in my published papers, the solar alphazodiac is merely a later subset of that earlier lunar one.
Some similar ideas regarding sound and the Word into flesh/matter are within my paper SPP 263:
Zodiac/Alphabet (Word into Flesh) [pp. 117-118]
a.) Figures of the constellations of the zodiac are extensions of the same astro-theological processes within the circumpolar region (Pellar, 2009). Thus, the arrow of Sagittarius is symbolic of the axis mundi, as is the arrow of the hu[...]
Language Log
Logos: The sacred phonology, mathematics, and agriculture of the alphazodiac
[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]
. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. — Hebreu Primiti
The Consonants of Command
Dear Professor Mair,
In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,
the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].
In that endnote, I did not elaborate much at all. But looking at it again, what’s particularly interesting regarding this particular passage, which is a subset of “the holy book of the Egyptians about the great invisible Spirit,” are the elements of Pi: 22/7 = 3.14 (22 repeats of 7 powers, 3 powers), which, in turn, is part of the structure of the alphazodiac (22 consonants joining at the 7th letter/Gemini Gate = 3.14), which also comes out of Egypt (i.e., its roots, as I have tried to show in my work, are in the Egyptian Celestial Diagrams of the Pharaohs. Furthermore, this Gnostic text is based on Greek ideas, which, when taken in context of Pythagorus’ Solids, appear to also have their roots in Egyptian ideas — as Pythagorus and other Greek scholars studied in Egypt). To speculate a bit, the three powers of the Gospel of the Egyptians, thus, could correlate to Osiris, Isis, and Horus, who, no doubt, praise the “hidden invisible mystery” within the Word/Sun/Seed. Thus, it is their “praise” or breath that brings forth the seven “sacred vowels” that give rise to the “Word” itself. But critically, as I mentioned in SPP 263, p.117 (and below), the Hebreu Primitif, states,
The Hebrew letters are the ciphers or signs of the zodiac, from which the words of the Hebrew language itself are formed; the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. The constellations of the Zodiac formed the twelve great gods of Graeco-Roman antiquity, corresponding to the twelve stations of the Sun, and these constellations were distinguished by the letters from Aleph to Thau; attributes or energies of the same divinity, they are so to speak the pearls which have formed the necklace of the Zodiac, and the vowels corresponding to the seven planets which surround the Sun are the voices which give sound or color to the consonants; they form the word, and the word is the Divinity itself. The priests of Abydos would recite the myst[...]
Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Language Phrase Day 12: Bore Draw
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 12): Day 12, and the football language post for Euro 24 today is bore draw which is conneted to the England versus Slovenia match. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of football cliches. If […]
The post Euro 2024 Football Language Phrase Day 12: Bore Draw appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
jolly (someone) along
To encourage someone (to do something), especially in a positive, cheerful manner. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
old man
father, husband, boyfriend
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Language Log
Acronymity
Abner Li, "Google Messages adopts double FAB to promote Gemini", 9to5google 6/26/2024:
Gemini in Google Messages exited beta at I/O 2024 last month and now features a double FAB design.
In a rather prominent push, the “Start chat” floating action button now has a smaller Gemini FAB just above it. When you’re dealing with the rectangle, the square looks misaligned. Everything is visually correct upon scrolling.
There’s some precedent for this look in Google Drive where the “New” FAB is paired with a scan shortcut. However, the camera disappears when scrolling.
I guessed after reading this passage that FAB is an acronym for "floating action button". Or rather, it can be. In a tech context it might also be (an abbreviation for) "A manufacturing plant which fabricates items, particularly silicon chips", which is how I first tried to interpret that article's headline. And it could also be at least 73 other acronyms, initialisms, or abbreviations, according to acronymfinder.com — a list that doesn't yet include "floating action button".
In fact, most 3-letter sequences have already got several interpretations Out There, as discussed in "Ambigous initialisms", 7/21/2019. Here are 10 chosen literally at random, following by the number of interpretations available at acronymfinder.com:
MVX 2
XJR 1
IMC 143
FUH 0
WAW 19
ZXW 0
RVD 24
AVB 26
JJI 4
ESQ 9
And acronym-finder is far from complete, so that its 0 counts are often actually Out There — in this case FUH and ZXW.
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Language Log
Franklin (1773) on colonial obligations
A couple of days ago, I did a web search to find out how late the King of Prussia mall was open, and landed on the Wikipedia page for the "census-designated place" King of Prussia, which (as I knew) includes lots of stuff besides the mall. Reading the article and following links, as one does, I learned something new, namely why in the world an "edge city of Philadelphia" was named after Frederick the Great.
It all started with a tavern:
The eponymous King of Prussia Inn was originally constructed as a cottage in 1719 by the Welsh Quakers William and Janet Rees, founders of Reesville. The cottage was converted to an inn in 1769 and did a steady business in colonial times as it was approximately a day's travel by horse from Philadelphia. Settlers headed west to Ohio would sleep at the inn on their first night on the road. In 1774 the Rees family hired James Berry to manage the inn, which henceforth became known as "Berry's Tavern". General George Washington first visited the tavern on Thanksgiving Day in 1777 while the Continental Army was encamped at Whitemarsh; a few weeks later Washington and the army bivouacked at nearby Valley Forge.
Exactly how and when the name changed is apparently not entirely clear. But the reason for the change is clearly connected to Benjamin Franklin's 1773 satirical essay "An Edict by the King of Prussia", prepared "For the Public Advertiser" (and perhaps published there?).
That document argues that just as America's colonial ties to Britain give the British the right to impose taxes, duties, and regulations, so the Germanic origins of settlers in Britian gives Frederick analogous rights:
WHEREAS it is well known to all the World, that the first German Settlements made in the Island of Britain, were by Colonies of People, Subjects to our renowned Ducal Ancestors, and drawn from their Dominions, under the Conduct of Hengist, Horsa, Hella, Uffa, Cerdicus, Ida, and others; and that the said Colonies have flourished under the Protection of our august House, for Ages past, have never been emancipated therefrom, and yet have hitherto yielded little Profit to the same. And whereas We Ourself have in the last War fought for and defended the said Colonies against the Power of France, and thereby enabled them to make Conquests from the said Power in America, for which we have not yet received adequate Compensation. And whereas it is just and expedient that a Revenue should be raised from the said Colonies in Britain towards our Indemnification; and that those who are Descendants of our antient Subjects, and thence still owe us due Obedience, should contribute to the replenishing of our Royal Coffers, as they must have done had their Ancestors remained in the Territories now to us appertaining: WE do therefore hereby ordain and command, That from and after the Date of these Presents, there shall be levied and paid to our Officers of the Customs, on all Goods, Wares and Merchandizes, and on all Grain and other Produce of the Earth exported from the said Island of Britain, and on all Goods of whatever Kind imported into the same, a Duty of Four and an Half per Cent. ad Valorem, for the Use of us and our Successors. — And that the said Duty may more effectually be collected, We do hereby ordain, that all Ships or Vessels bound from Great Britain to any other Part of the World, or from any other Part of the World to Great Britain, shall in their respective Voyages touch at our Port of KONINGSBERG, there to be unladen, searched, and charged with the said Duties.
[…]
We flatter Ourselves that these Our Royal Regulations and Commands will be thought just and reasonable by Our much-favoured Colonists in England, the said Regulations being copied from their own Statutes of 10 and 11 Will. III. C. 10. — 5 Geo. II. C. 22. — 23 Geo. II. C. 29. — 4 G[...]
Idiom of the Day
Johnny One-Note
Someone who repeatedly expresses or maintains a strong opinion on a single or a few particular subjects. Primarily heard in US, Canada. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
grinding
dancing in a sexually arousing way
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still taught in American schools.
At that point, the text comes to a close. It is followed by a gallery of fourteen sentence diagrams gathered from the works discussed.
Visualization is a key component of Buddhist thought and practice, e.g., here. "Visual metaphors, visionary literature, and visualization practices are pervasive in Buddhist traditions. Vision and seeing are dominant metaphors for knowledge, awakening, and insight." Perhaps Western grammarians were also inspired by becoming familiar with this aspect of Eastern thought as well.
An added treat are links to eight visually oriented "related collections", several of which I find highly attractive: Mnemonic Alphabet of Jacobus Publicius (1482) A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) Growing Things: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928) Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition) Punctuation Personified (1824) The History of Ink: Including its Etymology, Chemistry, and Bibliography (1860) Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880) Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster
Until I set about preparing this post, I had never heard of The Public Domain Review. Now I must say that it has found a soft spot in my heart. Selected readings
* "Sentence length and syntactic complexity" (3/29/22)
* "Sentence diagramming" (1/1/14)
* "Personal and intellectual history of sentence diagrams" (10/14/04)
* "Diagramming Sentences" (4/14/13)
* "Putting grammar back in grammar schools: A modest proposal" (12/25/13)
* "School grammar, Round two" (12/30/12)
* "Diagrammatic excitement" (3/27/12)
* "Defiant diagramming" (10/5/08)
* "Not just Oxford commas" (6/25/24)
* "Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Vietnamese dictionaries" (2/7/22)
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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distance from the major section. Playing a kind of grammarian god, Brown uses John 1 to demonstrate how his system can cleave sentential flesh. (In the beginning) [was the word] (and the word was) (with God) (and the word was God).
Barnard's presentation is so highly logographic and isolating that it almost makes me feel that he was influenced by common misunderstandings of the the Sinographic script, which puts him quite at odds with the formidable (pronounce it in French, please) lawyer and linguist, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau, June 3, 1760 – April 1, 1844), whose revolutionary A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese Writing System, published in Philadelphia by the American Philosophical Society in 1838 (almost the same time as Barnard's tome), focused on the sounds and words of the Chinese writing system, not on its alleged universal, ideographic nature.
Whereas Brown sought to reform an educational system plagued by “simplifiers”, “plagiarists”, and “new modellers”, Frederick A. P. Barnard’s Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (1836) reported from the classroom on syntactic techniques “advantageously used in the instruction of the deaf and dumb”. His system for diagramming sentences is mildly pictographic, based off of six principal symbols for marking substantive, attributive, assertional, influential, connective, and temporal words and phrases. Each symbol, in turn, can accommodate a host of diacritical marks to further specify its function. In the sentence “A man goes into a house”, for example, “man” is marked with a vertical line, signifying the noun’s substantive property. Two feet are added to the line since “man” is the subject of this sentence, “the supporter of what follows”. Because the word is in the nominative case, it also receives a diagonal, accent aigu–like appendage, pointing the action forward. “Goes into” necessitates a confluence of connected marks that resemble the Eye of Horus. First, we start with a horizontal line, the attributive verb. Since it contains an intransitive assertion, it receives a v-shaped hat, whose right arm curls in on itself, signifying “the attribute exists merely in the agent himself, without regard to any outward object”. Interlocked to this arm is a spiral-like symbol that accounts for the preposition “into”, “a connecting link”. “House”, in turn, looks a lot like “man” — built on a substantive vertical line — but with a grave accent instead of acute, symbolizing the objective case: receiving the action thrown forward by the nominative subject. Curiously, whereas Brown turns toward scripture for his corpus, Barnard’s examples frequently express physical violence or categorical division, mirroring the two-fold sense of “articulation” that his system embodies: both a means of expression and a form of dissection at the joints. “The victor exceedingly rejoices in his conquest”; “He is about to tear a book”; “Negroes are habitant in Africa”.
Goodness gracious! Barnard's "mildly pictographic" system even has six principal symbols for marking different types of words and phrases. This reminds me of the liùshū 六書 ("six writings", i.e., six types of character composition) of the Chinese lexicographer Xu Shen (c. 58–c. 148 AD): pictographic, indicatives, ideographs, phonetic compounds, mutual explanatory, and phonetic loans (source). Of course, Barnard's six principal symbols for types of words and phrases and Xu Shen's six types of character composition are quite different in their referents, but so uncannily similar in their application it's possible that, if Barnard had looked into what was known about the construction of the Chinese writing system at his time, he might have been vaguely inspired by some of the basic concepts of Xu Shen.
Three years later, Oliver B. Peirce’s The Grammar of the English Language (1839) came on the scene with a fervent rhetoric that reads as hyperbolic even among hot-headed grammarians. “On this imperishable foundation — this rock of[...]
Language Log
Astonishing new Google Translate, with the help of generative AI
Google Translate adds Cantonese support, thanks to AI advancement: “Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” Google said. By Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press (June 30, 2024).
The Google Translate app has been expanded to include Cantonese, thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements.
In 2022, Google began using Zero-Shot Machine Translation to expand its pool of supported languages. The machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example, Google said in a Thursday blog post. Now it is using AI to expand the number of supported languages.
It added 110 new languages this week, in its largest-ever expansion, thanks to its PaLM 2 large language model.
Users of the app may now translate between Cantonese – spoken in Chinese communities across the world, and in Hong Kong – and 243 other languages
“Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate. Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” it said.
Google aims to support the 1,000 most spoken languages around the world.
It also added Punjabi on Thursday, and African languages such as Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof.
“As technology advances, and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we’ll support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time,” Google added.
When will the PRC ever achieve such wonders? Never mind when the PRC will let its people utilize the wonders of GT. Selected readings
* "Is this authentic Cantonese?" (2/26/24)
* "Token Cantonese" (5/16/15)
* "The interplay between Cantonese and Mandarin as an index of sociopolitical tensions in Hong Kong" (4/30/23)
* "Google Translate sabotage" (6/14/19)
* "Google Translate Sabotage, part 2" (1/17/21)
* "A Japanese-French Google Translate mixup" (7/13/20)
* "More Google Translate hallucinations on YouTube" (6/3/18)
* "The elegance of Google Translate" (3/10/18)
* "The wonders of Google Translate" (9/22/17)
* "Don't blame Google Translate" (2/4/18)
* "Google Translate is even better now" (9/27/16)
* "Google Translate is even better now, part 2" (5/12/22)
* "Google is scary good" (7/31/17)
* "Google Translate Chinese inputting" (1/27/13)
* "Can't find on Google" (8/12/14)
* "Cantonese novels" ()8/20/13)
* "Spoken Hong Kong Cantonese and written Cantonese" (8/29/13)
* Snow, Don. 2004. Cantonese as Written Language, The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Appendix 1 of this remarkable book gives 14 Cantonese texts, each of which Snow carefully analyzes for the degree to which it adheres to the norms of spoken Cantonese rather than of written Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). The 14 texts, which cover a wide range of genres, date from around the 17th century to the contemporary period. It is striking that the percentages of overtly marked Cantonese (and Snow is referring here not just to special Cantonese characters) in these 14 texts range from only 3% to 36%: 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 20, 23, 23, 23, 28, 32, 36, for an average of 17%.
* Kwan-hin Cheung and Robert S. Bauer, "The Representation of Cantonese with Chinese Characters", Journal of Chinese linguistics: Monograph series (18); Project on Linguistic Analysis, University of California, 2002.
* "Colloquial Cantonese and Taiwanese as mélange languages" (3/15/21)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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ivine thought itself. The Stoics regarded the word as the rationality immanent in the universal structure. (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 1125–1126)
But more research is needed to be done on this. I have just the bare essentials (as revealed in the actual structure of the two loops of the alphazodiac meeting at Zayin, and it’s direct link to divinity, silence, breath/vowels, consonants, and, more importantly, to the birth of the sun as the son/seed/Word).
In summary, your question is quite interesting. In fact, it’s the one question that has continually taunted me over the years as I dealt with the who, what, and, particularly, the why of the alphazodiac. For after all, aren’t letters, at their most basic level, merely vessels of speech, of sound? And what is that sound? It’s nothing short of conveyed consciousness — the directed movement of intentional meaning. Or to put it in a more symbolic way, it’s the transmission or rise of light or understanding from ignorance or darkness (i.e., from a medieval perspective, I personally believe that it’s the wisdom or gold within the slow lead/Latin of the black ink. Or from a much earlier Neolithic perspective, I feel that it’s the dawning of consciousness, of wisdom — for survival and higher thought. Thus, it’s the rising of the eternal solar mind/seed/Word of the ancient goddess from the mortal lunar horizon of her womb/body).
In a sense, speech and writing are meant to be “intercepted” consciousness/energy (that interception could be immediate, as in person to person speech, or even delayed via vast distances in time and place, as in modern scholars reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs). And it’s the eventual resonance and release of that transmission or motion of consciousness that, in turn, sets matter in motion. It can create it, manipulate it, and even destroy it. As a mythological symbol, the Word rises from the Flesh/matter and then sets back into it. For instance, and to speculate a bit further, what is DNA but code (a type of text) made protein (flesh)? What is willpower but thought into nerve into action? And has not science now shown how negative thoughts, words, can lead to a weakened immune system and to disease itself? And that’s just within a single body. How much more powerful is that transmission/interception of consciousness from person to person? From parent to child, from tribal leader to tribe, from shaman or priest to Mystic Body, from president to body politic? Though the technology has changed, the basic concept of, and need for, the movement of thought has not: from soot and paint on a Paleolithic cave wall, to ink on parchment and then books, to electromagnetic radio and television waves zipping at light speed through the atmosphere, to the very sounds and images on two gold-plated records on the Voyager spacecraft, whose mission is to target some distant alien civilization in the unfathomable depths of frozen space — a homecoming of sorts, as the stars in that deep space are the cosmic birthplace of all the atoms within flesh of the very fingers that crafted those gold records.
In a sense, it’s actually fitting that it was from the frigid dark depths of space (the heavens to the ancients) that sound was not only born, but was actually instrumental in both the mythological and actual scientific evolution of creation itself. That is, from a mythological perspective, the ancient deities, such as the Egyptian creator god Ptah, formed all things from the Word. Later, the Christian Bible, which has its roots in earlier stories from Mesopotamia and Egypt, starts with the creation of the universe with God’s “breath” (the Hebrew noun “Ruach,” “spirit,” also means, “breath” or “wind”) upon the waters, which is really shorthand for the sacred vowel of God giving birth to form (the Word made flesh). The Biblical god also used His breath to give life to Adam, and after the 7th day of creation, “He rested” (so, too, did the earlier Egyptian creation god: “Ptah was satisfied after he had made everything[...]
s looked at the number seven as a “symbol of eternal life” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 859), the correlation with the adze and the seven stars of Ursa Major is not a coincidence, as the ultimate aim of the opening of the mouth ceremony was to ensure eternal life for the deceased. It should also be noted that this opening of the mouth is related to not only the Egyptian Ankh, but, more importantly, to the Primal Pattern itself, as the mouth is none other than the horizon/vulva/gate of the goddess, and the bull’s leg/adze is the phallus/spear that opens the gate of the Goddess in an iteration of the astro-theological process of the opening of the Great Bull by Anu. This idea is further reflected, unknown to me till just recently, in the words of Nicomachus of Gerasa, a Pythagorean:
And the tones of the seven spheres, each of which by nature produces a particular sound, are the sources of the nomenclature of the vowels. These are described as unpronounceable in themselves and in all their combinations by wise men since the tone in this context performs a role analogous to that of the monad in number, the point in geometry, and the letter in grammar. However, when they are combined with the materiality of the consonants just as soul is combined with body and harmony with strings — the one producing a creature, the other notes and melodies — they have potencies which are efficacious and perfective of divine things. Thus whenever the theurgists are conducting such acts of worship they make invocations symbolically with hissing, clucking, and inarticulate and discordant sounds. (Godwin, 1991: 23–24)
Once again, I felt that this symbolized the vowels being cut up by the teeth (akin to arrow/spear/knife cutting up the god), where they would then sit within the womb of the consonant, like the sun within the constellations/letters of the astro-alphabet, ready to rise from the gate of the monistic goddess in light and understanding. The Seven Sages (the Indian Saptarshi, the Seven Rishis) of India seem to mirror this music via the vowels as well, as they are also the seven stars of Ursa Major. The seven sages insured that the “measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above” (Santillana and Von Dechend, 1969: 3). Furthermore, the “Line of the Seven Rishis,” the solstitial colure (solstice), “happened to run through one after the other of these stars during several millennia (starting with eta, around 4000 BC): and to establish this colure is ‘internationally’ termed ‘to suspend the sky’ — the Babylonians called the Big Dipper ‘bond of heaven,’ ‘mother bond of heaven,’ the Greeks spelled it ‘Omphaloessa’” (Santillana and Von Dechend, 1969: 301). In terms of the latter, see Omphalos, above. As spoken by the god (Great Goddess, Mommo, Ptah, Yahweh, Taiyi, etc.) in the upper celestial vault (the pole), the Word becomes manifest in the letters of the alphabet/zodiac at the middle level of the ecliptic, and is then born to the flesh through the gate of the goddess at the horizon. Furthermore, Breath is actually the Holy Spirit of the Old Testament (an apparent mistranslation as some have suggested, as when Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, it was really the breath of God that moved, which in turn, created the waves of sound, the Word/Logos, from which he “said” — “Let there be light: and there was light”). This breath/Logos is the intent/consciousness/wisdom of the Divine Intelligence of the Primal Androgyne/monistic Goddess. In the same way that the body of the god must be cut up, so must breath in the form of the vowel be cut up by the mouth so that meaning in the form of discrete units/consonants can enter the feminine ear (to “ear” is to sow/plough, hence the “ear” within “hear”) to give birth/resurrect the author/god/father within. Thus, the root of lingam and langala (plough) is not a coincidence, as the plough, like the lingam/penis, sows the seed into the earth/g[...]
nter Orion, who lifts his hand up into the Gemini gate/horizon of the goddess within the Milky Way/celestial waters on the ecliptic (the birthplace of the sun/son/seed/Logos).
b). Figures of the constellations correlate to the letters of Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet, which in turn is an extension of the twenty-four uniconsonant hieroglyphs of Egypt. Unknown to me until just recently, Adolphe Lethierry-Barrois (died 1863), no doubt following up on the same seminal idea in the Sefer Yetzriah, wrote in the opening of his posthumous Hebreu Primitif,
The Hebrew letters are the ciphers or signs of the zodiac, from which the words of the Hebrew language itself are formed; the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. The constellations of the Zodiac formed the twelve great gods of Graeco- Roman antiquity, corresponding to the twelve stations of the Sun, and these constellations were distinguished by the letters from Aleph to Thau; attributes or energies of the same divinity, they are so to speak the pearls which have formed the necklace of the Zodiac, and the vowels corresponding to the seven planets which surround the Sun are the voices which give sound or color to the consonants; they form the word, and the word is the Divinity itself. The priests of Abydos would recite the mystic hymn of the seven vowels, or the name of Jehovah which unites them. It is through the word or Son of God that all creation was made, for the voice and the vowel give life to the consonants, just as the sun gives color to bodies, to matter; and the consonants or radical letters, animated by the vowels, form the roots that compose the primitive, monosyllabic language, just as the koua contain the system of the Chinese language. (Godwin, 1991: 63).
c). Plato in Timaeus noted that the Demiurge created the universe from two circles that he joined “in the form of the letter X” (quoted from Ulansey, 1991: 47). As noted in my paper “On the Origins of the Alphabet,” the alphabet is composed of two loops (circles) that form an “X” at their intersection, and has two letters with an “X” in them, Taw and Teth, both symbolizing the solstices (the winter/Capricorn and summer/Cancer solstices respectively), and thus the reversal of the direction of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet at those two letters (mirroring the reversal of the sun on the horizon when it hits the solstices). The “X” referred to by Plato is the “X” formed by the intersection of the circle of the celestial equator and the circle of the ecliptic (the two poles at their center: the north celestial pole and the pole of the ecliptic, the latter having a “center,” by definition, in the center of the sun).
And also from SPP 263:
Thought as Spiritual Text [pp. 153-159]
Breath/Vowel/Logos. The Word behind the word. The idea of the god or divine wisdom within the spoken word must be as old as humankind itself, and must have informed its early rituals and astro-theological constructs and images. This is seen in the written record, at least, from the ancient god Ptah in Egypt who created all things via the word, to Thoth, “Lord of the Sacred Word,” to Hermes, the messenger of the gods (the Greek counterpart of Thoth), to the Christian Gnostics, such as the Ophitic Christian sect, the Perates, who, as earlier mentioned, believed that the cosmos consisted of the Father, Matter, and the Son/Logos, or Marcus, who said that the seven vowels, uniting in harmony, rise to glorify God as the world builder, and that echoes of this hymn ascend to the Divine Logos and then “descend to earth to model and generate the souls of men” (Godwin, 1991: 25). It is not an accident that those seven vowels, which are cradled within the twenty-two consonants as vessels (like the horizon symbol Ahket cradles the sun/head), symbolize the seventh letter of the astro-alphabet, Zaiyin, w[...]
ic hymn of the seven vowels, or the name of Jehovah which unites them.”
Thus, not only does this directly link the gods and the zodiac to the Hebrew alphabet (and, thus, the earlier Phoenician), but, more importantly, it links the Hebrew letters to the earlier priests of Egypt (where the Phoenician alphabet was ultimately derived. Note that in my first paper, SPP 196, I discussed important connections between the Zefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, and the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabet/alphazodiac, and in my latest paper, SPP 341, I strengthened those connections by showing a strong relationship between the Phoenician alphabet and the zodiac by way of the Phoenician author Sanchuniathon, etc). Those Egyptian priests, like the three powers in the Gospel of the Egyptians, give praise to divinity, as they recite the “seven vowels” that compose the “name of Jehovah which unites them,” the “word” or “divinity itself. Thus, like in the Gospel of the Egyptians, from the silence of divinity, the “hidden invisible mystery,” comes “sound” — the vowels, which unfold into the “Word” of God.
But more specifically, it is the son, Horus, who is the culmination of that mystery — the sound and light/color and matter. Thus, Isis and the dead Osiris (via a pre-Christian immaculate conception) are needed to couple to produce the son, who is none other than the sun itself, as well as the new select wheat that rose from the body of the harvested father/Osiris as wheat. Horus is also the new Pharaoh of Egypt, who, as king, carries within “his bosom” those seven sacred vowels/breath from which to issue his edicts to Egypt. His breath, composed of those 7 vowels of light, will be carried within the consonants of his commands, and will thus manifest in the divine and eternal “Word” (i.e., the “hidden invisible mystery” at the center is nested within the father, who is nested within the mother who is nested within the son, which is akin to the “hidden invisible mystery” at the center being nested within the breath/vowel, which is nested within the consonants, which is nested within the Word). The impotent and mortal Seth will nourish the bodies of Egypt (“he who causes to live”) as the seed that is eaten, but Horus, the living Pharaoh, via the Word as seed/sun, will nourish the minds of Egypt as the select ruling power and eternal Word/sun/seed of Egypt.
But what’s vital in regard to this is that the myth was enacted in the sky first — as above, so (w) below. Thus, from the northern womb of Nut in the circumpolar region was born the sun/seed/Word at the southern Gemini Gate, the 7th letter out of the 22. As the exit to the Duat/Heaven/Womb, it is a symbol of the birth of the eternal sun as the Word as the seed passing through all 22 consonants (the 11 couplets that comprise the 11 houses of the zodiac) during the course of the year and the cycle of the wheat (with the animals of some of the those houses of the zodiac comprising the various stages of the wheat, as discussed in SPP 328 and SPP 341). Thus, it makes sense that each of the seven vowels of the “hidden invisible mystery” are repeated 22 times. This is due to the vowel symbolizing the sacred breath that passes through the consonants. As it all mirrors the cycle of the sun and the cycle of the wheat during the year, this means that all seven vowels/breath of divinity must pass through all the 22 couplets of the alphazodiac. Those seven vowels are then born from the Gemini Gate (Duat), the seventh Phoenician consonant Zayin, as the “Word” — the son, Horus, as the sun/seed that will then give rise to, and nourish, matter — flesh. It’s also relevant that the Egyptian Celestial Diagram of Senemut (see Figure 16B, SPP 328, p. 51) shows a seed-like shape at the heart of the hidden bovine on the south wall that I’ve shown to be the Hyades in Taurus — the Phoenician letter “Aleph.” That seed-shaped “A” (which is the head of Taurus, which itself is shaped as, and forms the origin of, the letter “A”) is composed of three “nested” seeds (thi[...]
Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 16: Whimper
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 16): Whimper The knockout phase of the competition has started and day 16’s Euro 24 football language is ‘whimper’, from the Italy v Switzerland match. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of football cliches. […]
The post Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 16: Whimper appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go off (1)
If something goes off, it stops working because of a power cut.
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Word of the Day
delirious
Definition: (adjective) Marked by uncontrolled excitement or emotion; ecstatic.
Synonyms: excited, frantic, mad, unrestrained.
Usage: A crowd of delirious baseball fans cheered the home team to a shutout victory.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Everyone Was Grinding (Bless These Braces) #shorts
"It felt like too much" says Joanna Hausmann.
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eo. I. C. 11. and from other equitable Laws made by their Parliaments, or from Instructions given by their Princes, or from Resolutions of both Houses entered into for the GOOD Government of their own Colonies in Ireland and America.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
number among
to include something or someone in a class or group of similar things or people
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Word of the Day
farcical
Definition: (adjective) Broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce.
Synonyms: ludicrous, ridiculous.
Usage: The clown, with his farcical exuberance, rainbow striped hair, and poorly timed gags, drew enthusiastic applause and laughter from the audience.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Playing With Dolls In Middle School (Bless These Braces) #shorts
"Everyone else was like, 'I'm going to try to have sex this year‚' and that was not on my radar."
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eternal endurance — I rear my superstructure, the edifice of scientific truth, the temple of Grammatical consistency.” Far less systematic than Barnard, Peirce arranged his sentences with a chain-link structure: assertives and relatives (verbs and prepositions) connect larger subject and object circles whose articles are attached to these nouns like keys on a ring. The visual conceit is apparent and didactic: appendant clauses are literally appended one onto the next; if one link grammatically falters, the whole chain of meaning becomes undone.
Such overwhelming confidence in the truth value of grammar is breathtaking!
God (the trunk of der Grammatikbaum) hath spoken.
Before “syntactic trees” became common parlance for linguists, Solomon Barrett’s Principles of Grammar (1845) used a similar metaphor and added bark. The frontispiece displays Hebrews 1 as an old-growth hardwood: “God” is the trunk, the predicates “who spake” and “hath spoken” form solid boughs, while prepositional phrases are figured as finer twigs, pruned of all foliage. Ranging beyond his peers into Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and German grammar, Barrett’s arboreal figures suit his interest in language’s branching connections, the root-like structures of etymology and inheritance.
The central role of the tree metaphor is noteworthy in many of these 19th century presentations on grammar visualization.
It is not until Stephen Watkins Clark’s 1847 work, A Practical Grammar, however, that we find a system that strongly resembles sentence diagramming in its modern-day — though quickly fading — guise. Combining the divisional schema of Brown and Barnard with the visual style of Peirce’s scalar links, Clark’s method uses word balloons that resemble, in the words of Kitty Burns Florey, “elaborate systems of propane storage tanks — or possibly invading hordes of Goodyear blimps”. There are twelve general rules and scores of definitions that resemble mathematical proofs. A sentence’s principal elements occupy the highest row. Subject, predicate, object — there is a fixed order of operations. Adjuncts are placed below the words they limit or modify, conjunctions between the terms they join, and pronouns dangle from their antecedents by umbilical cords. Clark’s enduring innovation was attributing properties to “offices” rather than individual words — offices that could be occupied by words, phrases, or even entire sentences. Grammar thus becomes a system of scalable relations rather than a paint-by-numbers tool for classifying parts of speech. “Major grounding ideas still present in modern IC [immediate constituent] analyses and PSG [phrase structure grammar] were already present in Clark’s syntactic conception”, writes Nicolas Mazziotta. Comparing grammar to “the foundation of a building”, Clark gave his students a toolbox for dismantling faulty foundations and properly assembling sentential edifices of their own.
Now we come to the "modern" diagramming with which many of us are familiar.
Like the twisted balloon animals that they resemble, Clark’s annotations floated into his contemporaries’ linguistic consciousness. In Higher Lessons in English (1877), Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog deflated his bubbles into lines but preserved many of their predecessor’s innovations. Returning to Enlightenment preoccupations, Reed and Kellog begin their treatise with a discussion of the natural language that “we never learned from a grammar or a book of any kind”: “the language of cries, laughter, and tones . . . the language of gestures by the hand, and postures by the body”. While this form of human signification is purely innate, they claim, spoken language (or “Word language”) must be governed by a grammatical “science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language”. Their system and subsequent companion volumes were so popular that, for a time, the pair’s books sold a half-million copies per year. As Richard Hudson notes, the Reed-Kellog system for diagramming sentences is[...]
Language Log
Diagramming: history of the visualization of grammar in the 19th century
Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences. Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review: "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century". This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.
The works collected are the following:
James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).
Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.
Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).
Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).
Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)
Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).
Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).
When I was in high school, we were still doing diagramming like that in Reed and Kellogg (1880), and I loved (almost) every minute of it, although sometimes it was vexatiously challenging to make everything fit in neatly and rigorously.
The text, by Hunter Dukes, is both entertaining and edifying, although the introductory quotation is rather impenetrable:
“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”
In my estimation, Stein's sentences would have benefited from the addition of a few commas.
Dukes follows thus:
While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.
The collection then proceeds, one book at a time. It is interesting to observe how the explications and illustrations become increasingly clear and sophisticated through the years and decades.
Some highlights:
The history of diagramming sentences in the United States begins with James Brown’s American Grammar (1831). “Language is an emanation from God”, he writes. “As a gift, it claims our servitude; as a science, it demands our highest attention.” … It was in American Grammar that Brown debuted construing as a method for parsing sentences using a system of square and round brackets to isolate major and minor sections. Major sections are “mechanically independent”; minor sections are “mechanically dependent”. Brown called this form of analysis close reading, but construing was only one half of the system. “As construing is a critical examination of the constructive relation between the sections of a sentence, so scanning is a critical investigation of the constructive relation between the words of a section.” Scanning involves ranking minor sections in ascending numerical order based on their relational[...]
