curds and whey or conestoga wagon

The tribes of prehistory who carried the prototypical Indo-European language to Europe are relegated to mystery and myth but to a diminishing degree: while no one bears reliable testimony, triangulating archeological evidence with what these early peoples had words for and what they did not is quite revealing. Comparative linguists, continuing the research of Jacob Grimm and others, know where and when these wandering tribes made their appearance. They had names for the weather (and not fifty words for snow and ice and the hardships it caused), cattle, rabbits, centaurs, griffins, certain trees, the fields and other qualities of the temperate climate of the European steppe, the great plains that ran from Asia Minor through the flatlands of the Mediterranean. The migratory path flowed from east to west, as there were significant obstacles to expansion to the north and south. Most significantly, aside from common terms reconstructed for wheel and drive, they had words for wool, bees, honey and horses—as the migration and spread of those animals and animal products were restricted by certain geographical hurdles as well. We find our wanderers in the Balkans as nomadic herders, trying to secure a niche between the hunter-gatherers that claimed the great forested-regions to the north and the farming cultures further south.
The question about settlement becomes somewhat of a delicate one as we are really unsure of the deportment and reception of these forefathers to the Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic peoples. Due to a paucity of game to pursue on the plains, the Indo-Europeans traveled with their livestock and developed a tolerance for dairy products. This mutation is recorded later as well in North Africa with the domestication of camels, which makes me wonder if they was not also some genetic influence from the cows, camels or the pox to encourage milking over slaughter. Consequently, this acquired taste saw the use of horses for more than food (which they were quite accommodating about fending for themselves during the winter months since their hooves could dig out grass under the cover of snow). There were still hardships and the struggle was unending but a better, steadier diet and utility animals—to carry burdens, help with herding and for mobility in skirmishes, the Indo-European population grew. There is no ethnic superiority for these Aryans to be construed, of course, but there were nonetheless groups of indigenous people already in the lands that the Indo-Europeans came to dominate. The total human population of the European steppe was quite sparse to begin with and a small advantage in numbers went very far over successive generations in allowing the language of these wanderers to overshadow aboriginal languages and assimilate minority cultures. The peoples encountered surely had an influence on these newcomers but whatever local colour that was has mostly faded over four thousand years.
Those artefacts that present the most reliable testimony, however, are the systems of writing, which demonstrate spread and reach in a systematic way. Writing is such a fundamentally clever, sufficient and viral idea to only need be invented once in history (like the wheel), and some believe it was gifted to humanity by the venerable Semitic and Egyptian civilisations. Writing and by extension the alphabet came to the previously illiterate Indo-Europeans indirectly, however. Crowding themselves out in the Balkans, the tribes disbanded and some moved towards the Greek peninsula where they encountered the ancient Minoan culture. This first contact would have occurred around the time that the events told of in the Odyssey and Iliad would have taken place. To me, it was a real revelation that spoken language has such fluidity, though one can sometimes detect the distant echoes of viscosity in arcane words, stock-phrases and spellings, and to be told that all the Romance languages emerged from regional dialects after the collapse of the Roman Empire is amazing enough—not to mention that even those foreign languages dismissed as barbarous came from the same pedigree. To speak in terms of centuries just does not seem long enough for the spoken word to transform as it has. Written language, on the other hand, has remained a relatively static thing, which is perhaps even more amazing—even knowing a bit about the form of writing that those early Greeks adopted and promulgated. The script and hieroglyphs of the Middle Eastern peoples evolved from the glyphs and cuneiform writing of the Sumerians and disseminated to every culture in the Old World, arguably, in a discoverable chain of transformations and the departures and branches in every form of writing from runes to Cyrillic to Arabic to Devanagari. The new neighbours, the Minoans, of these newly-arrived Greeks had a form of writing with the uninspiring name of Linear-A—in part because it remains undeciphered and was the short-hand, serviceable-form of the more stylised symbols of the natives. Linear-A was the Morse-code way of rendering those symbols that were reversed for the ages, the writing of bookkeepers and commerce that was quicker to spell out in a series of dots and dashes gouged into clay tables than the complex and refined cartouches and dedications that appeared on monuments. Though the way of writing we have inherited is equally suited to similar rapid gashes—hence the dual systems of hieroglyphics (sacred) and cuneiform (profane), depending on one's penmanship and preference, these early Greeks did not commit their Parnassus of literature to paper with this script.
The exact reasons for this reluctance is unknown but the Romans, centuries later, also had tutors in the Etruscan tribe, whom they subsequently strove to erase and replace with founding mythology. Like many contemporary scripts, Linear-A, and what the Greeks were toying with—called Linear-B but which can be seen as early form of the Greek tongue, was something highly articulated and functional, if not a bit unwieldy. This manner of capturing speech was not a true alphabet but rather what is called a syllabary, with separate characters representing all the possible permutations of the language. With hundreds of characters to be learnt, its mastery was beyond the common man and so a workforce of scribes had to be employed. The arrival of Phoenician traders delivered to the early Greeks the accessible medium that they were waiting for. In order to facilitate international commerce, the syllabary model was dropped in favour of a true alphabet that represented each possible utterance with letters that could be combined, phonetically, to form any of those multitude permutations. Once the Greeks had a way of writing that was practical and accessible, almost immediately, based on what’s been found extant since trading with the Phoenicians began, they transcribed those stories that had supposedly been handed down in oral traditions for as long as anyone could remember: the above-mentioned Iliad and Odyssey and a collection of fables. Although it is clearer that the Romans disowned mentorship by the Etruscans and it looks like the Greeks just eventually surpassed the Minoans in brute numbers, we don’t know for certain. As good of a story it is, Rome inserted the legend of the Æneas and Romulus and Remus so they did not have to attribute their success to a predecessor. Who knows if these sagas of Greece did not also have a touch of propaganda? After all, they’re not billed as timeless tales now inscribed in clay but rather with at the traditional authorship as the works of Homer and Æsop. I wonder if the epic poems were not some sort of founding mythology that we cannot access any more that relegated the Minoans away.

it happened on the way to the forum: epilogue oder mainzigartig

I had an opportunity to seek out and find those relics and sites of the late Roman Empire hidden in more or less plain sight in the ancient city of Mainz. Originally known Fortress Mogontiacum after a Celtic deity, the outpost founded by General Nero Claudus Drusus became the provincial capital of Germania Superior.
 Having learned of the existence of these places after being inspired by the podcast series, I was really surprised to discover how I had just breezed by them on more than one occasion. It was a real treat to have a comprehensive and circumspect view of Rome from its origin to the eventual collapse. First, I explored the archeological excavation of the Temple of Isis and Magna Mater (both being the matrons of the gods but from different traditions and both with a devoted following), beneath the subfloor of the appropriately named Römerpassage shopping centre.
The foundation is preserved and multiple artefacts are on display—as well as and video presentation. The fact that this miraculous ruin was discovered buried beneath a shopping centre makes me think about a very good novel from Portuguese writer José Saramago called The Cave—no spoilers but with a similar arrangement. Next, I cut a path to the Electoral Palace (Kurfürstliche Schloß) that brought me past a few other Roman remnants along the way. A wing of the palace houses the Roman collections of the archeological and historic institute called the Romano-Germanic Central Museum (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum).
 I had read about this venerable place but was completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the scope and reach, which is comparable to that of the Vatican’s holdings in terms of treasure and curation. Not only were riches and craftmanship on show to wonder at, there were unending galleries on different aspects of Roman culture and daily life, including tools and technology and all the trappings of government administration, time-keeping, trade and commerce, and communication.
There were geographically-orientated exhibitions on how the different peoples of the Empire practised and reinterpreted these donations and influenced the Romans in return.  I really liked this magic amulet with the head of a rooster and found it interesting to peer inside a sacrophagus and see it‘s furnished for the afterlife. There were countless other mundane and sacred objects to inspect.  The altar-pieces of the temple under the shopping centre can be seen behind the coffin  against the wall. Spanning from the early days of the Republic all the way to the aftermath when the Western portion fell and the Middle Ages began, there was simply too much to digest for one day’s visit—not that I even managed to cover all the ground with partner museums around the city, and H and I will have to return soon.

I spoke briefly with one of the caretakers who said that there was not even floor-space for half of the collection, which is often loaned out to other museums, and told me a little bit about the research and restoration functions of the institute. Though the majority of the relics were not uncovered locally, several findings did occur in Mainz—which saw nearly four-hundred years of Roman rule, and more and more items are being unearthed all the time during construction and urban expansion, like the temple under the shopping centre. Sadly, as time is money building-business, she said that she suspected that antiquity is often bulldozed over to avoid complications, with not everyone entirely sold on the prospect of hosting an archeological sensation instead of a park-deck but the institute is working for conservation and ways to mitigate such conflicts.

fleet dispatcher or taximeter

Though sometimes people just need a sounding board and some one to vent to, I am sure that there are potentially massive risks to the arm-chair therapy of hair-dressers and other confidantes or perfect strangers, so I was relieved to read, as the Swedish edition of The Local reports, the municipal government of Stockholm has elected to staff some of its area taxi cabs with licensed psychologists.
From the backseat (cab drivers are not treated as chauffeurs in Europe and riders generally sit in the front passenger seat), a professional solicits one to open up, communicating with the eyes in the rear-view mirror. Though the reputation of dreary, serious Nordic peoples is untrue and unwarrented and the population—despite the long winters and less frequent co-habitation, is probably no more or no less at risk than any other, the service can barely keep up with demand.  Riders are bringing all sorts of problems and anxieties to the mobile therapists. So it remains a case of life-imitating-art and passengers’ stories don’t come back to haunt them in a revamped reality-television series, the drivers, whom are also ready to lend a sympathetic ear or shoulder of course, sign a non-disclosure contract. “Thank you very much!,” as Latka would say.

helau! helau! helau! oder elfter-elfter

By chance I found myself just across the Rhine in the city of Mainz, and was caught up in the thronging crowds and pushed towards Schillerplatz, where hundreds of spectators, many in costume, had gathered to watch the Lord Mayor usher in the so-called Fifth Season (fünfte Jahreszeit) of Fasching. The countdown started just seconds before the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, and singing and cheers followed before a series of speeches, mostly wishes for good health in this time of abundance and abandon that lasts until Ash Wednesday and references to the friendly rivalry with Wiesbaden on the other side of the river, delivered by the prominent personalities assembled on the balcony of the Osteiner Hof above.
It was fun to watch and shout with the merry-makers, some already using this get-together as a chance to plan and coordinate what they would do for the closing parade that would take place in early Spring on what is called Rosamontag, just a couple days before the onset of Lent, and sort of felt like the time I was in Times Square to see the ball drop. I did wonder though about the timing and placement of the whole opening ceremony, with it coinciding with Armistice Day, which is not generally commemorated in Germany but what with the so-called Schicktsalstag a couple of days prior left sacrosanct, but eleven (Elf) became associated with the Rhenish carnival traditions as a lucky number as it was also an initialism of the rallying cry of the French Revolution of egalité, liberté, fraternité, where the trappings of the season and festivities came from in the first place.

half-life or aire du nucléaire

Astoundingly, just a mere thirty kilometers outside of Paris, there is an abandoned nuclear testing grounds. Environmentalists have ventured, illegally, into this mothballed military facility and found few hot-spots, happily. Considering, however, the intensity and age of these experiments, one is nonetheless given pause to wonder whether Nature has not actually cleaned up the area but just managed to dilute it well enough to register as inconsequential. Or rather, has the dust and ash settled and is circulating over suburbia and the tourist haunts beyond?

sandboxed or pen and ink

I am sure that all good zoo-keepers strive to make a stimulating environment for their inmates and charges and not just for the gawking throngs of visitors, but I think this initiative by an aquarium in Brighton-by-the-Sea, courtesy of Nag on the Lake, has to be a pretty unique example of outreach.

Appreciating the intelligence, visual-acuity and dexterity of its resident octopi, care-takers have installed a series of still-lives, an ensemble of objects to be rearranged and composed so the cephalopods can make their own artistic state- ments—even if it is in human-terms. That is a big improvement over sunken castles and shipwrecks and ambiance. What do you think? Do your pets—even your silently circling ones, have an unexpressed talent—for the lack of the right medium?

ketchup, catsup—apfel, appel or fractured fairy tales

The introduction and promotion of the idea of a shared Indo-European parent tongue, as opposed to the commonly-held belief that linguistic similarities came through borrowing and mixing, was nothing short of revolutionary to the understanding of languages—much like the ideas of plate-tectonics and even the theory of evolution that were being developing around the same time, and like the former, is kind of difficult to imagine a world where these facts did not seem obvious or at least worth the inquiry.

As keen as the idea was, however, not much was done with it in Imperial India and it was another conflict that pushed the proto-language to the next level. The rampage of Napoleon’s armies through Europe saw the dissolution and restructuring of the Holy Roman Empire—which was a virtual patchwork of petty-kingdoms, secular and ecclesiastic states that vied for turf and imperial immediacy, and there was no truly aligned national identity, unlike the case in France—which was a well-defined sovereign unit. In this Kleinstaateri, there was no Germany or German citizen, with people subjects of places like the Kingdom of Prussia, the Free City of Aachen or the County of Nassau-Orange-Usingen-Dillenburg. With the invasion and subsequent occupation, however, a sense of nationalism developed out of rebellion to French cultural incursion and the fragmented lands behind their shared heritage and language. Heir to this political environment and growing fascination for tradition and custom and with his brother Wilhelm was more focused on gathering and classifying folk-tales, Jacob Grimm began exhaustive studies of the Germanic languages and dialects in comparison to Europe’s romance languages.
The outcome of these efforts could be described as a sort of linguistic periodicity: known as Grimm’s Laws, the philologist demonstrated that apparently unrelated words, did in fact have a shared lineage—which could be revealed through shifts in the sounds of letters that transformed in fixed and predictable ways. After more refinements, Grimm not only showed that there were cognates across the different branches in the spectra of speech, but further created a series of protocols that could be reversed in order to reconstruct something of what the original parent word was. As Sir Jones noticed in Calcutta, a p-sound tended to change into an f-sound and Grimm codified more of such transformations, such as t- to th-, as from the Sanskrit त्रेता, Greek τρίτος, Celtic trydydd, and Russian третий all turning to the Old Saxon thriddio or English third, or the k-/q-sound embedded in the Latin languages changing to an w-/h-sound—which makes qué, qui and quod seem less foreign compared to what, why, and whom (was, wie und wem), or—another example—the c-/k-sound shifting towards an h-sound, like from canis to hound (Hund), cornus (as in Cornucopia, horn of plenty) to horn (Horn) and even, with multiple sound shifts occurring within the words, centum (as in century, Jahrhundert) becoming hundred. Grimm limited his research to the Germanic branches of the Indo-European family, but kindred linguists went on to discover parallel rules for other languages.
The rigour that results by applying the laws of each branch of European and Asian languages to a word allows researchers with some certainty the ability to reconstruct its ancient roots. Not only was this Ur-language resurrected by the folklorist, storyteller but by better understanding how the sounds migrated and what remained relatively familiar-sounding (our core vocabulary, those words that defy change because they are what’s most important and universal, and of course, what was named was what they knew, lending insight into where and how they lived), those ancient people who spoke it millennia ago were also resuscitated.  The French infiltration was also shown to be one in the same for the natives. 

intershop oder deutsch-deutsche grenze

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, there’s an array of tributes and retrospectives worth checking out. I am reminded of one small artefact that I found a few years ago at a flea market. This cancelled East German passport is only marked with the endorsement that allows the bearer unrestricted transit into the so-called Neue Bundesländer (it is still probably a little dig to keep the distinction of a West Berlin, which was a national peculiar). It is a little sad that someone’s grandmother never got the chance for further travel, as there are no other stamps, but maybe she threw out this one for a new passport of the united Germany.