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Language Log
Yet again the Voynich manuscript
Perhaps as early as 1640, decipherers have tried practically everything to decode the maddeningly frustrating Voynich manuscript. So far it has resisted all efforts to identify the language in which it was presumably written. About the only way to make further progress in cracking the code is to apply some new technology. As described in the following reports, it seems that a type of digital enhancement has become available and been used to fill in some of the gaps in the manuscript.
The first is the primary document, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", which appears on Lisa Fagin Davis' blog, Manuscript Road Trip (9/8/24). She begins with an explanation of what the technology consists of.
Multispectral imaging is a way of capturing a digital image using non-visible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and infrared (click here to learn more). Where medieval manuscripts are concerned, UV imaging in particular can make faded or effaced text legible. This is because most medieval inks (including that used to write the Voynich Manuscript) have a significant iron component. This allows the ink to “bite” into the surface of the parchment rather than sliding off of it. When ink is scraped away or fades, the molecular bond remains, and the faded text may therefore fluoresce when exposed to UV bandwidths. This technology has proven invaluable in helping scholars read palimpsests and damaged manuscripts such as the Archimedes Palimpsest and the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. Could such imaging of the Voynich Manuscript help reveal its secrets?
What follows is a lengthy and highly detailed description of Fagin Davis' analysis of the new data provided by the application of multispectral imaging to the Voynich manuscript.
The second report is Jennifer Ouellette's "New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details: Handwriting suggests Prague doctor named Johannes Marcus Marci tried to decode in 1640" in Ars Technica (9/9/24), which digests and summarizes Fagin Davis' post, while adding amplifications of her own. Here are pertinent portions that highlight the significance of the latest findings.
About 10 years ago, several folios of the mysterious Voynich manuscript were scanned using multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, has analyzed those scans and just posted the results, along with a downloadable set of images, to her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. Among the chief findings: Three columns of lettering have been added to the opening folio that could be an early attempt to decode the script. And while questions have long swirled about whether the manuscript is authentic or a clever forgery, Fagin Davis concluded that it's unlikely to be a forgery and is a genuine medieval document.
As we've previously reported, the Voynich manuscript is a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax.
There are so many competing theories about what the Voynich manuscript is—most likely a compendium of herbal remedies and astrological readings, based on the bits reliably decoded thus far—and so many claims to have deciphered the text, that it's practically its own subfield of medieval studies. Both professional and amateur cryptographers (including codebreakers in both World Wars) have pored ove[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ice (2)
to kill someone
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Idiom of the Day
let (the) perfect be the enemy of (the) good
To allow the demand, desire, or insistence for perfection to decrease the chances of obtaining a good or favorable result in the end. (Usually used in the negative as an imperative.) Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dweeb
a studious but socially inept person
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Idiom of the Day
let the good times roll
To have as much fun or live life as richly as possible. (Often said as an imperative.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
duster
Definition: (noun) A loose coverall (coat or frock) reaching down to the ankles.
Synonyms: gaberdine, smock.
Usage: In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper.
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The Craziest Thing Nimay Ndolo Saw At The DNC
Nimay sits down with Funny or Die to talk about the crazy antics of the Democratic National Convention, how to debate hot button topics, and who she would kiss/marry/kill. #CreatorsForKamala #HarrisWalz2024
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Language Log
"Word salad"
According to Wikipedia, word salad
is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.
The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.
The examples focus on Trump's habit of stringing together a sequence of fragments and parentheticals, while hopping around among semi-related topics. As I wrote in "Trump's eloquence" (8/5/2015), this to some extent (mis-)represents "the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form". And in many of the examples discussed in my (too many) "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", the material is indeed "comprehensible and even eloquent" in spoken form.
Sometimes, as in the much-discussed child-care Q&A, the sequence of fragments includes some puzzling bits. But even there, the women who asked the question, Reshma Saujani, got a clear message from Trump's answer, although it was not a message that she liked.
FWIW, here's the full audio of her question, taken from this recording of the New York Economic Club session:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Here's the full audio of Trump's answer:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
For a complete transcript of that answer, and a funny but accurate comment on how the NYT describes such content, see Alexandra Petri, "The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine", WaPo 9/6/2024.
But getting to my point, here's Reshma Saujani's evaluation of Trump's answer, from a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on 9/6/2024:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Jake Tapper: With us now is uh Reshma Saujani. She asked the question yesterday. She's a member of the Economic Club of New York's board of trustees. I don't know if you watched the debate in June, but I tried three times to get him to answer that question, you tried a fourth — did you get anything out of that?
Reshma Saujani: Kinda. I- I may have done a little bit more than you did, because he did answer the question. And what he told us is that child care expens- expenses are no big deal. The fact that you're drowning in debt because of them — sorry, but not sorry. And he also told us that "no, I don't have any ideas or proposals or legislation". And it's insulting. And it's insulting to parent who are constantly having to choose between funding their day care and feeding their kids. And the thing is, is like if you don't have a plan to solve child care, you are not fit to be president.
So Trump's answer included a few confusing fragments, but it was absolutely not "word salad", in the sense of words that "may or may not be grammatically correct, but […] are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them".
By the laws of bothsiderism, the press also often uses the phrase "word salad" with reference to Kamala Harris — and the examples are even further from the original meaning of the term, focusing on her use of slogans (sometimes described as [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: scalable
This word has appeared in 31 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
lay out (2)
to explain an idea or a plan clearly and in detail
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Word of the Day
imperceptible
Definition: (adjective) Impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses.
Synonyms: unperceivable.
Usage: The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes.
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Language Log
"The Truth About English Grammar"
It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb:
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
The start of the preface:
If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.
And the start of the final section, with the header Disrecommendations:
Now for a few remarks that are just between you, me, and the gatepost. It may upset millions, but I owe it to you to speak the truth. Some of the most famous and much-loved books on how to write are grossly misinformed on grammar and usage, not to be trusted on style, and way past their use-by dates, which are spread across the 20th century.
A flagrant case is the book commonly known as The Elements of Style. It’s actually E.B. White’s revision and expansion of a 1918 book by William Strunk called Elements of Style, which White was assigned when he was in one of Strunk’s classes at Cornell in 1919. Parts of it were four decades old when White published his version with Macmillan in 1959, and they are over a century old now, after several more editions by different publishers. Much of what it says about grammar and usage is very bad advice, and some of White’s changes and additions (which Strunk never saw) are flagrant nonsense – like when White says that stranding a preposition “sounds like murder” (4th edition, page 78). Stay away from this book.
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” (1946) is an essay, not a book, but millions of students will have seen it in a book because it was reprinted at least 118 times in 325 editions of fifty-eight college readers between 1952 and 1996 (see “The essay canon” by Lynn Bloom in College English 61.4, 1999, 401–430). Its text can be found in scores of places on the web, and hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: don’t even read it, but if a[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: volatile
This word has appeared in 684 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
watch out
If you tell someone to watch out, you tell them to be careful or warn them of a danger.
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The Debate Topics That Americans REALLY Care About
Content creators, government officials, and drag queens come together to tackle the issues that American voters need the answers to. Astrology, earthing, and whole milk all trouble Americans on a daily basis. Watch how folks at the Democratic National Convention defend the indefensible.
Featuring:
@malcolmkenyattaforauditor
@MissPeppermint247
@TheKalenAllen
https://www.instagram.com/lizaminnella/
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@nimayndolo
https://www.instagram.com/msbellepepper/
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Word of the Day
stoop
Definition: (verb) Debase oneself morally, act in an undignified, unworthy, or dishonorable way.
Synonyms: condescend, lower oneself.
Usage: The neighborhood bully constantly shouts insults at the children, but they refuse to stoop to his level and instead choose to ignore his rude remarks.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: impunity
This word has appeared in 256 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go through (1)
to look through a collection of things like documents, books, clothes, etc. to find something or to sort them out
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catch-phrases), ordinary spontaneous-speech syntax, and so on.
But maybe over-use of the term "word salad" goes back to its origins in the 19th century. The OED's earliest citation is from Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (1904):
Youth normally comes into a new attitude toward speech at puberty. The vocabulary is enlarged; meanings are re-adjusted; words seem different; there is always a new speech consciousness: interest in new terms shows that in some cases we have loquacity which becomes almost verbigeration; diaries and letters, and even stories and treatises are scribbled at great length. We often observe, too, an inverse ratio between thought and speech, so that as the former becomes scanty and indefinite the stream of words flows more copiously and smoothly; and conversely, as meanings deepen the vocabulary becomes more select and the lapse of speech and pen more restrained. In other normal types the mass of new inner experiences of thought, motive, and sentiment prompt concealment and reticence, and the subject becomes dumb-bound, silent, and perhaps seems to brood, or the range of expression is very confined and narrow. Both these tendencies have asylum out-crops in Forel’s “word-salad” or Krafft-Ebing’s “word- husks” on the one hand, or in mumbling and taciturnity, even speechlessness, on the other.
That's Auguste-Henri Forel, who would have used the French phrase "salade de mots". A search for that term confirms the translation, and also gets us to a StackExchange answer, which links to an 1895 publication that draws an ironic parallel between word-invention by psychotics and Forel's creation of the "word salad" term:
The earliest attestation I can find ascribes the origin to Forel's wortsalat, as translated by Kraepelin to 'wordsalad'. This appears in The Medical Standard of 1895, recounting events from the May, 1894 meeting of the Association of German Alienists and Neurologists, where "Kraepelin of Heidelberg described a 'peculiar group of insane patients,' who, among 'other distressing symptoms,' exhibited as 'the most striking phenomenon' a tendency to the coinage of new words": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/1895WordSalad.png ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Language Log
"Welcome in!"
I'm in the little (population about two hundred) town of Wamsutter in southwest Wyoming. It's just west of the Continental Divide and bills itself as "The Gateway to the Red Desert". It is the largest settlement, and the only incorporated town in the Great Divide Basin.
The name Wamsutter is intriguing, but it doesn't sound Native American, like so many other toponyms in Wyoming. As a matter of fact, Wamsutter was originally known as Washakie (c.1804/1810 – February 20, 1900) after the formidable Shoshone chief, but was later changed to its current name due to confusion with nearby Fort Washakie. No great loss for the Shoshone leader, since so many other places and things in Wyoming are named after him, including the excellent student dining center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in front of which stands a most impressive statue of the chief on his horse. When the town decided to switch its name, at least they retained the initial "Wa" of the original designation, which reminds me of "The Good Old Song" of the University of Virginia, with its "Wah-hoo-wa" cheer, borrowed from Dartmouth.
Wamsutter is the surname of a Union Pacific bridge engineer, but that's not what I want to write about today. Instead, I will talk about a thought-provoking experience I had at one of the three big gas stations / truck stops that seem to constitute the raison d'être for the town in its present manifestation. (Earlier it would have been a stage coach stop, and in medieval Central Asia it would have been a caravanserai filled with Sogdian traders and their stinking, drooling camels.)
The three stations / stops are One9, Love's, and Conoco. I went in all three to get supplies and food. While I was in the One9, I was puzzled by the frequent shouts of the employees that punctuated the bustling atmosphere of the shoppers and drivers coming and going. "Eh Uh Ih!" "Eh Uh Ih!" (Don't forget that I have tinnitus, which causes one to lose most consonants.)
I really didn't know what they were saying, and I was dying with curiosity to know what it was. Curiosity got the better of the cat, so I went up and asked one of the workers what it was.
"Welcome in!" he said. I almost fell over, both because of my perplexity at not understanding it in the first place and because of my instant realization the it was the exact analog of the ubiquitous Japanese greeting, "irasshaimase". The latter is invariably translated as "welcome", but it literally means "(please) come (in)". Thus the One9 employees' greeting "Welcome in!" is an ingenious combination of "welcome" and "(please) come (in)", with an emphasis on the adverb. We'll have to ask Master Grammarian Geoff Pullum exactly what "in" is doing in the phrase "Welcome in".
Curosity continued to get the better of the cat, so I asked one of the One9 employees if he and his coworkers were instructed by their manager to call out "Welcome in!" to each customer who entered the store. He replied, "Yep! Meet and greet." The cat pursued, "Is this company policy at all One9 travel centers?" "Yes," he acknowledged. "It's not just a local thing."
By the way, One9 is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They know how to do business.
After I filled up my tank and was about to head down the road to Rock Springs, I looked up and noticed this large sign above the entrance to the One9 store: WELCOME. Selected readings
* "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
* "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pack heat
to carry a gun
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) off the hook
To pardon, release, or allow someone to escape from blame, responsibility, obligation, or difficulty. Watch the video
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n English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.
John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:
In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:
The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.
That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.
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Language Log
"…X, let's say Y…"
Justin Weinberg, "Analytic Philosophy's Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying", Daily Nous 9/6/2024:
“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.
I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.
Justin Weinberg added:
*UPDATE: Some are suggesting Kripke’s line was meant to be funny, in which case I suppose we should broaden the request for suggestions to include intentional self-parodies by analytic philosophers.
In the comments, Eric Winsberg responded:
I don’t think he’s joking. You have to remember this is the transcript of a talk. He’s just throwing in very standard though [sic] experiment language. Compare “a number of people, say five, are tied to a railroad track”. You’re just signaling that the number 5 is only important in that it’s more than one. But in Kripke’s case, the whole point of the example is that there’s nothing distinctive about the person at all except the ensuing baptism. So he’s going “someone is born” and he’s brain goes “we need a “say” clause, and ends up making the funniest sentence ever. Kenny Easwaran added:
I’ve always interpreted this line as a clear self-parody. When he’s trying to stay object-level, he has no trouble coming up with specifics, like naming his pet aardvark Napoleon, or any example involving, say, Nixon. In this case, I think he’s observing the need to include “say X” afterwards, and then filling it in with the one thing that actually adds nothing, rather than “someone, let’s say, the future teacher of Aristotle, is born”.
FWIW, Eric Winsberg's comment about "standard thought experiment language" seems persuasive to me.
In (the transcribed and edited text of) Naming and Necessity, "let's say" is used 18 times as a rhetorical device to introduce a specific but arbitrary assumption for the purposes of the current argument, e.g. on p. 80:
Let's see if Thesis (2) is true. It seems, in some a priori way, that it's got to be true, because if you don't think that the properties you have in mind pick out anyone uniquely — let's say they're all satisfied by two people — then how can you say which one of them you're talking about? There seem to be no grounds for saying you're talking about the one rather than about the other.
He also uses plain "say" for the same rhetorical purpose, e.g. on p. 17:
Nor, when we regard such qualitatively identical states as (A, 6; B, 5) and (A, 5 ; B, 6) as distinct, need we suppose that A and B are qualitatively distinguishable in some other respect, say, color. On the contrary, for the purposes of the probability problem, the numerical face shown is thought of as if it were the only property of each die.
And on p. 87, he uses "let's say" to introduce an assumption arguendo that's vague nearly to the point of emptiness, probably because he didn't care to come up with anything more specific:
What's going on here? Can we rescue the theory? First, one may try and vary these descriptions — not think of the famous achievements of a man but, let's say, of something else, and try and use that as our description. Maybe by enough futzing around someone might eventually get something out of this; however, most of the attempts that one tries are open to counterexamples or other objections.
It might still be true that Kripke was intentionally parodying this device when he said "Someone, let's say a baby, is born" — but Eric Winsberg's hypothesis is consistent with Kripke's overall patterns of usage.
As an aside, it's worth noting that Kripke refers to the baby with the male pronouns "his" and "him", probably because that was a common prescription for generic third-person singular pronouns in 1970 when the lectures were delivered.
.
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