lexis-nexus or a language is a dialect with an army and a flag

The wonderfully peripatetic web magazine Vox has a stellar installment with a series of approaches to plotting the languages of the world. The maps are introduced with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, which limits our experiences to those which we can find the words for. Though mostly Anglophone, the maps could be an important point of departure for understanding a bit more and pushing the envelope a little. Be sure to check out the site’s other articles and features.

encryption key or legacy software

Kottke points our attention to a fantastically thoughtful article (with a stirring multimedia accom- paniment) in the New York Times Magazine on the secret lives of the maligned password, and how those choice secret words, encoded within certain, strict parameters are not just a means to access one’s private accounts but also ways to make quiet little statements, mantras, devotions, goals and even confessions and unlock one’s heart. The author of this story encountered many sweet and tortured surprises, histories and heritages that all were opened up with the key of the asking what individual’s passwords meant to them—and the resistance that the reporter experienced when soliciting watchwords from strangers was not over security or privacy concerns (though many use the same string of characters across multiple platforms) but rather having to pull these hidden keepsakes and tributes out of the dungeon and into the real world, however anonymously. I wonder what part of ourselves we might be losing without whispering with our keyboards daily as the convention password is be replaced by other bolts and locks.

fricative or win, lose or drawl

Surely those early scribes and grammarians had a tough slog in figuring out how to adapt the Latin alphabet to English as she is spoken. After all, there were quite a number of foreign sounds to try to capture with the familiar letters at their disposal, and the committee of monks had to make some arbitrary decisions in spelling in order to apply the alphabet phonetically. Quite a few terminal j-sounds were found in Old English—like edge, bridge and judge, and the development of this sound was something separate from the shift in the romance languages that took place at the beginnings of words, like Iohan and Iupiter, so the monks did not want to represent the sound with an i (the letter j not invented unitl much later) but instead choose ʤ—being derived from the hard g-sound. 

Though the Romans had had their encounters with the Goths and other Germanic tribes, new utterances had come into being, like th-, sh- and ch-, and vowel sounds were slipping away from anything that the monks had heard before. Not that English is a direct descendant of modern German, but one wonders why we go from Brücke to bridge, Eck to edge, Schiff to ship or Freund to friend. These kinds of transformations happen among all languages and dialects, but all these shifts occur in the name of economy. I have noticed that I am sometimes quite lazy in my pronunciation of German and if I am doing it half right, my face aches a little. These changes are the mouth's attempt to align phonemes and reduce movement from the front to the back of the mouth. Not that continental Germanic languages are all harsh and breathy like Klingon, there was a tendency to cut back on the back and forth and eliminate throaty consonants paired with soft vowels. Though a lot of original forms are preserved for old time's sake—like win from won, buy from bought, feet from foot where the old, more awkward style is preserved in the less common past or plural forms—English does seem to have a particular penchant for slurring words. Although probably more due to the lack of an authoritative body to govern spelling and pronunciation among the Germanic-speakers unlike the institutions of the Roman Empire, some linguist believe this indolence and inertia is owing to the circumstances wherein the invaders took the island. Abandoned by Rome, the Anglo-Saxons found themselves in a place where there was not much to do other than plunder and drink, cultivating sloppy enunciation.

gregorian mission or lex luther

Having enjoyed a tenuous overlordship on the island to begin with and with the Romano-Britons driven across the Channel by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, there was essentially no writing in England until after the year six-hundred. The Germans chieftains did not speak Latin, having had little exposure to it previously, which already had a true alphabet. The Germanic tribes had runes, which were primarily used for inscriptions and charms and not an effective way of imparting lore or commerce—although surviving evidence of personal amulets suggest that the illiterate peoples were already enchanted by the written word: one of the more prevalent words found on these charms was garlic (spear-leek, ᚷᛚ), attesting to the Germanic custom (as was the fashion at the time) of wearing a garlic clove around one’s neck to ward off evil eventually being replaced by the non-perishable glyph for the same Kryptonite, imbued with the same mystical powers.  Irish monks to the north and west were scholars of Greek and Roman—inventing lower case Greek, among other things to make texts easier to copy, and the Goths on continental Europe had published a version of the Bible in their native language—but neither of these achievements was transmitted to England.

Instead, literacy only got traction thanks to Church administrators. A young monk from a Roman patrician family named Gregory was credentialed as apocrisiarius (papal ambassador to Constantinople) and plead with the emperor of the East to send in the legions to protect the Eternal City from barbarian raids. Though unsuccessful with this mission, Gregory did become extremely popular in aristocratic circles of the capital, especially with the wives of prominent officials and academics. This influence made his elevation, though unbidden, to Pope (discourses and chants but not the calendar Gregory) himself seem natural. While the anecdote of Gregory smitten by the sight of youths from England being sold at a slave market in Rome (Non Angli, sed angeli—But they are not Angles, rather they are angels) is said to have been what inspired the Pope to send Augustine and an army of missionaries to England, beginning with the Kingdom of Kent, to convert the pagan population, it probably also had to do with Church politics and cohesion, as those monastic communities in Ireland were not under the authority of the Holy See and had some pretty radical and potentially dangerous ideas—doctrinally and regarding decentralised governance. Augustine was welcomed by the king and queen of Kent, who were already members of the flock, but fearing what might happen after the current regime was replaced and wanting the Church of Rome to be fully cemented in England, the future archbishop of Canterbury directed throngs of monks to compose the most enduring and compelling reasons that he could summon up, aside from the Church itself: legislation and punishment. Perhaps Augustine thought that such threats were the only thing that these pagan brutes would understand, and he knew that none of them would care a jot about a bunch of rules in Latin. Therefore, scribes adapted the Latin alphabet to Old English and wrote out eighty-five laws, mainly dealing with consequences for damaging Church property or the clergy, in the native language of the population--making it not only the first document written in English but also one of the first vernacular codices in Europe since the beginning of the Republic.

blueprint or imprimatur

Kottke turns our attention to this brilliant cut-away view of the Washington DC’s Evening Star newspaper building that illustrates how different components, raw materials and the ideas of reporters and editors—come together to produce a daily edition. One can find a huge version at the link. There is a really neat anatomical/mechanical quality captured here. State-of-the-art, even if not solid-state, still has lots of moving parts but I don’t think modern infographics show this level of detail in the factory—though it can be yet found.