Flowers set against a fuzzy skyscraper

McWhorter on Shakespeare: Should he be rewritten in modern English?

McWhorter has argued that Shakespeare's language is so difficult that it should be "adjusted" into modern English for modern readers and theatre-goers. I'm sympathetic. Yesterday I started watching the Zeferelli movie version of Hamlet, with Mel Gibson in the title role and Glenn Close as Gertrude, and at times the language just lost me. Here's a podcast where he discusses the subject with John Lynch.

Here's a post at The New Republic where McWhorter makes his case. I quoted passages from that post in an old post at The Valve and it generated a bit of discussion, including a comment from Kent Richmond, who has rendered five plays into modern English.

McWhorter on Wolf on Chomsky and Everett: What color are the thoughts of a 12-tone squid sleeping furiously?

Dan Everett says that John McWhorter's review of Tom Wolf's The Kingdom of Speech is the best review of the book to date. I'll take Dan's word for it. The book, as you may know, pits Everett against Chomsky in the Intellectual Cage Match of the Century.

Here's McWhorter getting started on Chomskyian linguistic theory:

For example, in English we say, What do you want? But Chomskyan theory suggests that when our brains first assemble such a sentence, it structures it as You want what? This hardly seems implausible, since what is the object of want and objects usually come after their verb in English (I kick the ball). Besides, we can even actually say, "You want what?" depending on the tone we intend.

Thus, Chomskyan syntax has it that — in English, although obviously not in all other languages — there is a special rule for a word like what, which moves it from after want to the beginning of the sentence.

So far, fine. But from one academic generation to the next, this method of parsing language has mission-crept into a strangely complicated business, increasingly unrelated to what either laypeople or intellectuals outside of linguistics would think of as human language. It is truly one of the oddest schools of thought I am familiar with in any discipline; it intrigues me from afar, like giant squid and 12-tone classical music.

Yes! I like the slippage "from one academic generation to the next," which I've observed in literary theory. And McWhorter has a word on that as well:

And as to whether the density of the jargon (which I have spared the reader) is deliberately fashioned for an air of profundity, the charge is as unnecessary as it is against the lingo of literary criticism. The jargon accreted gradually and imperceptibly over decades, and is readily comprehensible to practitioners.

This McWhorter, he's a level-headed guy. On Dan Everett:

Everett agrees that there is some kind of genetic specification for language in a general sense — there’s a reason chimpanzees do not talk and do not even use sign language on a primitive level unless painstakingly taught to by humans. But he dismisses the idea that it calls for quietly shifting subjects, verbs bouncing around, or exercising the mental muscles that perform math and create computer programs. Language is just saying what you are: "Our identities and our cultural cloaks," as Everett has put it. For those dedicated to Chomsky’s syntactical tree diagrams, this could only sound simplistic, uninformed, and even dangerous — distracting the public from science with feel-good pablum.

FWIW McWhorter thinks the syntacticians may have a point:

Wolfe describes how three die-hard Chomskyans penned an almost obsessively detailed rebuttal to Everett’s claims about Pirahã in linguistics’ flagship journal Language, making them seem like hapless, sputtering refugees from The Revenge of the Nerds. The truth is that even someone more inclined to Everett's claims than the Chomskyans' – e.g., me — who slogged through that rebuttal plus the response from Everett and a riposte from the syntacticians, ends up unexpectedly finding the syntacticians largely convincing. It seems quite plausible that Pirahã is not as quirky a human language as Everett proposed.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Helicopter from the sun

Sound Symbolism is REAL, folks

We've known about this for some time, but the idea hasn't gotten through. Will it do so this time?

From Sci-News:

A careful statistical examination of words from 6,000+ languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language they’re speaking.

The new research, led by Prof. Morten Christiansen of Cornell University, demonstrates a robust statistical relationship between certain basic concepts – from body parts to familial relationships and aspects of the natural world – and the sounds humans around the world use to describe them.

“These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,” Prof. Christiansen said.

“There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there.”

The research is published in PNAS:

Damián E. Blasia, Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler, and Morten H. Christiansen,Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages, September 12, 2016, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1605782113: PNAS September 12, 2016

Significance

The independence between sound and meaning is believed to be a crucial property of language: across languages, sequences of different sounds are used to express similar concepts (e.g., Russian “ptitsa,” Swahili “ndege,” and Japanese “tori” all mean “bird”). However, a careful statistical examination of words from nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages reveals that unrelated languages very often use (or avoid) the same sounds for specific referents. For instance, words for tongue tend to have l or u, “round” often appears with r, and “small” with i. These striking similarities call for a reexamination of the fundamental assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign.

Abstract

It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words (“small” and i, “full” and p or b) and body part terms (“tongue” and l, “nose” and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species’ unique communication system.

There's now an article in Scientific American.

Interlude: Dylan Thomas constructs a WONDERFUL chiasmus

On the one hand this is one of the more popular posts at New Savanna. Not in the very top rank, but well over a thousand hits. That's one reason to bump it to the head of the queue. The fact that I'm currently thinking about chiasmus, in the extended form known as ring-composition, is a better one.

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Some years ago, before I got a computer, I read. R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3, May 1976: 367-375). It opens:

That such a superb example of Renaissance elegance and grace as Spenser’s Epithalamion is literally informed by a complicated numerical system and a highly symmetrical structure was announced in 1960 by A. Kent Hiatt. The numbers–365 days, twenth-four hourse, the proportions of day and night at the summer solstice at a given latitude in Ireland, the long and short lines of the poems, the groups of stanzas–coincide with transitional points in the content; the structure depends upon correspondences and parallels between the two halves.

Peterson goes on to report that similar methods “have been used to reveal everywhere in literature hitherto hidden symmetries, correspondences, patterns, and systems of number symbolism.” He goes on to review quite a bit of this work while raising the inevitable question: did the authors actually intend these patterns? And that question bleeds into this one: Are they real?

The questions are real, and serious. But I’m not prepared to address them in full. I’m interested in a single case. Peterson devotes some attention to Cedric H. Whitman’s study, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958) and tells us that had also remarked that Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue” formed a “huge chiasmus” – that is, the first line rhymed with the last, the second with the next to last, the third with the next to the next to last, and so forth. I decided to check it out.

Rhyming the Circle

“Author’s Prologue” is the first poem in Thomas’ Collected Poems. It is 102 lines long. Here’s the first ten lines:

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,

There’s no rhyme scheme apparent there, but that’s not the issue. What we’re interested in is the relationship between the first ten lines and the last ten. Before we look at that, however, let’s look at the middle ten lines:

Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms
To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!

Graffiti – A couple of old-time good ones

Baby Let Me Shake Your Tree

The late Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of my favorite musicians. I’ve never seen a more dynamic performer; I describe one of his performances in “Ecstasy at the Left Bank” (the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore). He used to tell stories and rhymes between tunes, and some of those were recorded. Here’s a performance of “Baby Let Me Shake Your Tree” that was recorded on Atlantic SD1575, Rahsaan Rahsaan (1970):

I have transcribed his introduction and indicated some audience reaction [enclosed in square brackets]. I follow that with the lyrics he sings to the song. You’ll have to figure out for yourself just what White House lady he had in mind.

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We would like to play a tune by an old gypsy blues singer.

You have to be a gypsy in this country to make money...especially if you’re black.

You got to travel all over the damn land, you dig.

I’m not bitter, I’m just bittersweet.

But you have to be a gypsy to survive in this country.
Because when you stay in one place you get tagged and the guys say “Oh, that’s a local group,” you know. [laughter]
“You mean that group’s been there for five years?”

If we worked at the Vanguard 5 years straight, cats say “Oh yeah, we go down there once a year, Christmas, New Years.”
So we go out every now and then and come back.

And you all think we done been somewhere.

Been in the same old riots.

But anyway, this is a tune written by old Tongue Snatcher.
He wrote this tune back in 1859.

Tongue Snatcher, he was a mean character ‘cause anything he wanted, he would snatch it with his tongue....

Reach out and say “Aaardlugh bleyt!” [laughter]

Th’ man could touch his nose with his tongue, you know...

He could suck his hair...[laughter]

Is academic literary criticism uniquely self-critical among academic disciplines?

Is the Pope Jewish?

When I first encountered literary criticism as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s the discipline was reflecting on the nature of its own procedures. The same was true when I was a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1970s. Somewhere along the line the discipline seems to have conceived of itself as particularly self-critical among disciplines, or at any rate, in contrast to the sciences, which just keep rolling along.

But is it true? Is literary criticism more self-aware than, say, physics or biology? I doubt it. Oh, critics are aware of their own “subject position” and how it influences their work. Or are they? Is such awareness real or a formulaic rhetorical gesture? Maybe it was real at one time, maybe, but now?

I remember when critics first started acknowledging that, of course, the fact that they’re employed by a university that is supported by capitalism, or that they’re white writing about African-American texts, etc. Those always struck me as intrusive gestures with little or now epistemological value. And that’s pretty much what I think of the professions claim to self-awareness. It’s narcissism grounded in anxiety and signals rigidity and complacency.

And yet, there are signs of change.

My little red seat

The Demise of Deconstruction

Sometime back in 1969 or 1970 I was auditing a graduate seminar taught by J. Hillis Miller, who was still at Johns Hopkins. Somehow the Modern Language Association (the primary professional organization for academic literary critics in the USA) came up and Miller was less than enthusiastic about it, offering some dismissive remarks about the “meet market” aspect of the annual convention. At this time Hopkins was in the vanguard of work in critical theory – you may recall it hosted the (in)famous structuralism conference in 1966 – and Miller’s attitude was natural.

A decade-and-a-half later, 1986, Miller was giving the annual Presidential Address at the MLA convention: “The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” His theme was the eclipse of deconstruction in favor of a turn toward “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context.” I don’t recall whether or not I attended the convention that year – I would have been job hunting – but I didn’t hear the address. I did read it though when it was published in PMLA in 1987.

I was a bit surprised to hear the deconstruction was waning, not so much because it seemed a bit soon, but because it seemed to be all over the place. But if it was on the way out, that was fine by me. I wrote a letter to PMLA in which I offered a generational-succession account of deconstruction’s demise and the letter was published. I reproduce it below: On J. Hillis Miller’s MLA Presidential Address 1986. PMLA. Vol. 103, No. 1, Jan. 1988, p. 57. As for Miller, he has long since reconciled himself to the discipline’s accommodation of other interests while noting that the term “deconstruction” has become somewhat degraded in popular usage (see my various posts on Miller).

* * * * *

To the Editor:

I was fascinated by J. Hillis Miller’s “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base” (102 [1987]: 281-91). Miller suggests that “the resistance to theory” is one factor in the “almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such” (283). I want to suggest another factor, one rooted in the very nature of the process by which ideas spread from their originators to others.

Let us consider deconstruction. Much of its rhetorical force comes from its immediate intellectual tension with the Western metaphysics it criticizes. First-generation deconstructionists, such as Miller, reached intellectual maturity fully within Western metaphysics. For Miller and his peers, deconstruction is thus something they arrived at after other philosophical commitments, such as phenomenology, fell apart. For these critics deconstruction has the strength and necessity that comes from the struggle they endured to create it.

The situation is quite different for those of us who first encountered deconstruction in graduate, or undergraduate, school. For us deconstruction has been just one intellectual option among others. When we learned deconstruction we of course learned of the crisis in Western metaphysics. For them, the crisis has been and is an immediate fact of their intellectual experience. For us, our knowledge of the crisis is, in Platonic fashion, but a copy of the original crisis.

Thus deconstruction can never be as compelling to us as it is to its originators. Our intellectual world is, by virtue of their effort, significantly different from theirs. Within this difference, many of us see deconstruction primarily as a great leveler. The distinction between the world and its representations retreats behind an infinite repression of signs. All texts become vessels for containing contradictions in Western metaphysics. Just as all cats appear gray in the dark, so all texts appear the same under deconstruction.

In short, to those young enough to be removed from the immediate crisis, the boring sameness of deconstruction’s results can easily become more compelling than its logical rigor or its sense of intellectual urgency. The social process of creating and disseminating knowledge moves inevitably toward routinization. Ideas that taxed the full powers of the best thinkers of one generation become the routine intellectual property of ordinary thinkers in succeeding generations. Deconstruction is so tied to the passing moment of its intellectual necessity that its forces weakens as its accomplishments become routine. That, as much as resistence to theory, is why younger critics have turned from language-centered theory, such as deconstruction.

I am not entirely happy with this situation. I think that we really are in trouble, that we need to establish new intellectual frameworks. But I am not at all sure that deconstruction has succeeded in doing much more than turning our deep intellectual problems into a rhetorical device called “the crisis in Western metaphysics.” The move “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context” may well be theoretically naïve; it may even spring, in part, from “the resistance to theory.” But I don’t think that deconstruction’s repeated encapsulation of intellectual crisis is rich enough to overcome that resistance.

William Benzon

Troy, New York

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You can download the letter at my Academia.edu site.

Friday Fotos: Yellow Pagodas / Goldenrod

My Early Jazz Education 5: Al Hirt and (again) Maynard

It’s back to my early jazz education. For one thing I just got a new pair of speakers for my computer and I want to listen to them. Mind you, these are small desktop speakers, so we’re not talking about “like real” fidelity or a room shaking sound, but still, they’re nice. I like them.

Also, I’d realized I’d forgotten Al Hirt in my second post, which was all trumpet: Maynard, Miles, and Diz. And to fill things out, I’ll add a bit more Maynard. I realize that neither Maynard nor Hirt are as important in jazz history as Miles or Diz, or, for that matter, Thelonius Monk or Dave Brubeck. But these posts aren’t about jazz history. They’re about my personal history with jazz, and Al Hirt and Maynard Ferguson loomed large in my early years. I still listen to them with pleasure.

Here’s Al Hirt playing a tune that was written by a trumpet player, Ziggy Elman, and is associated with him. “And the Angels Sing” was a number one hit for Benny Goodman back in 1939. This is on Hirt’s album, Al Hirt – Swingin’ Dixie! (At Dan’s Pier 600 in New Orleans):

To appreciate how this hit me in my early teens you have to understand that the trumpet is a beast of an instrument. Just getting a sound out of it is difficult. And to get a sound like this, nice clean and round, that’s impressive. And the playing is so relaxed. Where’s the effort?

But what really got me, it starts at about 1:01 with the just the drums, tom-toms, and then Hirt enters otherwise unaccompanied with some really sexy snaky swirly licks. What the heck is that? thought I to myself. The album notes said something about Ziggy Elman and “frailach licks.” Whatever they are, that must be them. And, wham! at 1:41 we’re back to classic swing, but still snaky and sexy. The rest of the ensemble enters at 2:02 and we go to the out chorus.

Well, Ziggy Elman was Jewish, as you might guess from his name. And he knew klezmer quite well. That’s where those frailach licks come from. Here’s the original, with the snaky licks starting at 1:53:

And he breaks into swing at 2:25, just like Al Hirt did. Except that it’s the other way around of course. And if you listen closely to the two you realize that Hirt wasn’t just playing something like Elman did, he was quoting him note for note. So what we’ve got in Hirt’s performance then is a trip from New Orleans to the shtetls of Eastern Europe by way of New York City. Such is the way of jazz, the way of music, the way of the world.

And it doesn’t end there. Lee Morgan, who became an important influence on me in the mid-1970s, recorded a tune, “Soulita” in which he quotes/paraphrases Elman, at 2:01 to 2:20:

Finally, sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s I heard a performance by tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom. Griffin played Morgan’s “Soulita” and he quoted Morgan’s Elman quote in his solo.

I didn’t know any of that back in the early 1960s. The internet net did not exist, dear children, so I couldn’t look any of that up. And just where, in a small city in Western Pennsylvania, would I have been able to find out about a trumpet solo played by a Jewish trumpeter back in the 1930s? Oh, I’m sure there were people who knew, but I didn’t know how to find them nor what books to consult in what library. So Elman and frailach licks were just tantalizing mysteries on my path through jazz.

Mustart, Loser #GVM019, Jersey City

Could the Dali Lama Reincarnate in a Computer?

The following exchange is quoted from the book GENTLE BRIDGES: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind by Jeremy Hayward and Francisco Varela [Shambala, 1992] pp. 152-153:

DALAI LAMA: In terms of the actual substance of which computers are made, are they simply metal, plastic, circuits, and so forth?

VARELA: Yes, but this again brings up the idea of the pattern, not the substance but the pattern.

DALAI LAMA: It is very difficult to say that it's not a living being, that it doesn't have cognition, even from the Buddhist point of view. We maintain that there are certain types of births in which a preceding continuum of consciousness is the basis. The consciousness doesn't actually arise from the matter, but a continuum of consciousness might conceivably come into it.

HAYWARD: Does Your Holiness regard it as a definite criterion that there must be continuity with some prior consciousness? That whenever there is a cognition, there must have been a stream of cognition going back to beginningless time?

DALAI LAMA: There is no possibility for a new cognition, which has no relationship to a previous continuum, to arise at all. I can't totally rule out the possibility that, if all the external conditions and the karmic action were there, a stream of consciousness might actually enter into a computer.

HAYWARD: A stream of consciousness?

DALAI LAMA: Yes, that's right. [DALAI LAMA laughs.] There is a possibility that a scientist who is very much involved his whole life [with computers], then the next life . . . [he would be reborn in a computer], same process! [laughter] Then this machine which is half-human and half-machine has been reincarnated.

VARELA: You wouldn't rule it out then? You wouldn't say this is impossible?

DALAI LAMA: We can't rule it out.

ELEANOR ROSCH: So if there's a great yogi who is dying and he is standing in front of the best computer there is, could he project his subtle consciousness into the computer?

DALAI LAMA: If the physical basis of the computer acquires the potential or the ability to serve as a basis for a continuum of consciousness. I feel this question about computers will be resolved only by time. We just have to wait and see until it actually happens.