Human irrationality and the purpose of a liberal arts education

There's a very interesting post by Lane Wallace at the Atlantic, called "All Evidence to the Contrary".

In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.

So where does education come into the picture? Obvious enough:

A liberal education, [UCLA professor Mark] Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.

Very, very interesting. Read the whole thing! (Yes, I have more work than I can get done, and I'm procrastinating.)

A beautiful verse from Hafez

I love Hafez, I really do. (In the interests of scholarly scrupulousness, this is taken from Thackston's grammar.)

گر چه منزل بس خترناک‌ است و مقصد ناپدید

هیچ راهی نیست کورا نیست پایان غم مخور

"The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist", I: "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

"6 Norton Lectures by Orhan Pamuk," say the posters plastered throughout Harvard Yard. And, judging by the crowds lining up to get into Sanders Theater today, plastered throughout New England. I would have never forgiven myself had I missed this, the very first in the sequence of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures to be delivered by Pamuk this year at Harvard, and so I made sure I got there about two hours in advance. I didn't take notes at the time, not wanting to disturb the solemn silence of the attentive audience with the sound of a keyboard being tapped away, and not being able to see my notepad clearly enough in the dim light to actually write anything down. As soon as the talk ended, I rushed to the nearest café with a power outlet to get online and pour out my memories onto paper (of a sort, at least)—to capture the image painted by Pamuk's words in my own before it faded away into the dim halls of memory; to recreate, with my own words, the painting I saw with my own ears (a metaphor for the appreciation of poetry that I borrow from Prof. Steven Hopkins's work on the Haṃsa-saṃdeśa of Vedānta Deśika). If what follows is garbled, it is because of the difficulties of translation: from Pamuk's mind to Turkish words to English words to my ears to my mental image to my words online, it is a long and tenuous chain and no doubt much is lost, much more is corrupt. And yet I do hope that some of what he was trying to say comes through in this hastily written, unedited, stream-of-consciousness entry.

The title of Pamuk's lecture series is borrowed from Friedrich Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, described by Thomas Mann as one of the most beautiful essays in German, in which Schiller argues that there are two kinds of poetry that he terms (surprise surprise!) the naïve and the sentimental. This is, in a manner of speaking, the distinction between unselfconscious and self-conscious artistic creation; one other contrast that comes to mind that may not in fact be a good example is the distinction between poetry as art and poetry as craft. Pamuk reads Schiller as saying that, while naïve poets record immediately, effortlessly, and without intermediary what they perceive in nature, sentimental poets are acutely aware of their own thoughts and emotions, perhaps even feeling a sense of alienation from nature, and bring this acute self-reflection to the fore in their work. Noting the importance of this work in his own thinking and writing, Pamuk argued that although he considered the naïve to be inferior to the sentimental in his youth, he has now moved to what he believes is a honest balance between these two poles of poetic excellence.

But I digress. Using the mandate of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures to study Poetry "interpreted in the broadest sense," Pamuk is trying to apply Schiller's poetic insight to the novel in particular, and this first lecture in the series was titled "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels."

Drawing from his own obsessive reading of novels in his youth, Pamuk painted a picture of reading as studying and entering a landscape painting. (His artistic inclination towards "naïve" painting, as he put it, comes out most vividly in his use of words as a paintbrush, but also through his powerful use of such metaphors throughout both his writing and this lecture.) We may read lightly, from a distance; we may read intensely, immersing ourselves into the narrative; we may read logically, seeking a single continuous path through the landscape; we may read reflectively, always standing outside the picture—regardless, we paint for ourselves a picture as we read, and it is this act of recreating a landscape using the novelist's words that, it seems to me, constitutes reading for Pamuk.

Furthermore, Pamuk claims that just as a novelist may write naïvely or sentimentally, so too may a reader read naïvely (accepting what the novel says, believing in the authenticity of the characters, trusting in the narrative) or sentimentally (reflecting on the act of reading, consciously injecting one's own feelings and sentiments into the work); and, for Pamuk, either extreme is dangerous. The beauty of reading lies in the creation of a new landscape that exists outside our own, one that we can trust and believe in. To read too naïvely is to treat this landscape as a part of reality, to confuse the literary and the mundane; to read too reflectively is to never let this landscape truly get off the ground, to mark off the literary as so obviously fictional that the pleasure of reading is itself killed. (When I heard Pamuk bring up this distinction, I couldn't help but be reminded of my favorite passage from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler on reading. Calvino, incidentally, was also the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, but died before he could present his lectures.)

Pamuk argues for balance here between these two extremes of naïveté and sentimentality, and he offers the analogy of reading a Chinese shanshui painting, where a mountainous landscape is represented as if through a fog, often with a solitary figure in the foothills climbing up a tortuous path. The landscape is to be seen not as a faithful depiction of an actual natural scene, but as an object in the painter's mind, as seen through the eyes of the solitary figure. (I'm not entirely making sense here, I know.) The heart of reading, then, is to be able to recreate such a landscape, holding more than one contradictory thought in our minds simultaneously.

Pamuk then outlines a nine-step process of reading that, he claims, happens every single time a reader reads a book attentively. Furthermore, he argues that each of these stages occurs either naïvely or sentimentally, depending on the reader, and that some stages can occur simultaneously or even out of order. This is where I am most likely to have deviated from the actual content of the lecture, so, gentle reader, I humbly seek your forgiveness.

1) Following the narrative

When one gets into a novel, one really has to follow the plot to see what is happening. Now this is most obvious in cheap detective or spy novels, but it holds true for the best literary works too, and while it may not entirely hold for sophisticated, fancy, atmospheric novels where "nothing" really happens, even there the reader must follow the chain of descriptions to build a progressively sophisticated picture of the work.

2) Going from word to image

That metaphor takes us to the second stage, where the reader sees "beyond" the words, in a sense, and begins to (re)create, slowly, painstakingly, piece by piece the mental landscape of the novel. This includes not just the physical setting, but also the characters, their exteriors and their interiors, and their own miniature mental landscapes of (what is to them) their reality. Here the naïve reader really gets into this mental landscape, perhaps seeing themselves a participant in it (even if just a voyeur), whereas the sentimental reader constructs it while remaining aware of its fictionality.

3) "How much of this is fantasy?"

4) "How much of this is reality?"

The question of fictionality raises the question of how much of the work is fantasy. This is particular true for those landscapes that the author claims are representations of a fictionalized history (as Pamuk himself has done on multiple occasions). Similarly, the question of how much of the setting and the interiors of the characters is taken from reality also eats away at the reader. Both of these questions work together, and Pamuk posits that the very fact that the reader poses these questions says something about why we read novels: it is because we expect to find some element of reality in them, something that, although occurring within a fictional, imagined landscape, is nevertheless acutely relevant to life as we live it. (Pamuk drew a sharper distinction between the two, but my memory fades and I can no longer be sure how much of this is his and how much of it is mine.)

5) Enjoying the beauty of the novel

Notwithstanding the reader's (un?)self-conscious immersion in the mental landscape created by the novel, the fact remains that the novel is a text, made up of sentences made up of words. Part of the pleasure of reading lies in the discovery and appreciation of these textual, linguistic elements: word-play, unexpected rhymes or other aural figures of speech, powerful themes or evocative juxtapositions of images.

6) Judging the characters and the Author

As the reader gets deeper and deeper into the novel, (s)he begins not just to create interiors for the characters but also to reflect upon them as (s)he reads along, it being irrelevant to Pamuk at this point whether the reader does so consciously or not. We readers judge characters for their actions and emotions, and we judge the author too for inducing the characters to act in particular ways and for fashioning situations in which the characters cannot help but carry out certain actions. Such immersive critique, Pamuk avers, is not always helpful in appreciating the text for itself, but I think he would concede that it is extremely difficult to restrain oneself from engaging in it.

7) Complicity

One of the common "dangers" of reading is, in effect, a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The reader grows to trust the narrator, and more often than not invests part of their own self into the narrator, and gradually paints a rather more sympathetic figure of the narrator than would have been the case had the narrator's character not been the narrator. This may lead the reader to forget, whether consciously or not, important pieces of the landscape that would otherwise color the narrator more darkly. Pamuk mentions that this makes the choice of narrator a very powerful instrument in the hands of the author. And although he doesn't say it, I took this sense of complicity to imply something else about the act of creating a mental landscape: no two readers paint exactly the same landscape from reading the same novel.

8) Self-congratulation

Another emotion that we commonly experience is one of self-congratulation, particularly upon completing hard texts or portions of texts. We set ourselves the challenge of understanding something, and upon doing so, rejoice and celebrate our achievement. This emotion may be one of our inducements for reading; conversely, the fear of failing to attain this state may discourage us from reading. (Pamuk said more here that I can't remember.)

9) The "center" of the novel

And that self-congratulation occurs because we all take every novel we read to be a nut that needs cracking, whether we consciously think so or not. For Pamuk, this is at the very heart of reading: the quest for the center of the novel, that core of the text that may or may not exist in fact, but which we all seek nevertheless. We may meditate on one word, one sentence, one passage, or the novel as a whole as we seek to discover that which we think imparts all meaning to the novel. Whether or not such meaning exists, and whether it exists in the surface arrangement of the words or in the mental landscape invoked in the reader's mind by the words, or whether it exists beyond any landscape, it is the quest to find such meaning that motivates us to go on reading.

As is his wont, Pamuk self-referentially uses the Bildungsroman as a metaphor for the act of reading itself: the journey of a youth through the trials and tribulations of life, all the while facing new challenges and learning to master them, and all the while growing in inner strength and maturity. The character's quest for maturity mirrors our quest for the center of the novel, which in turn is a manifestation of our striving to understand the meaning of life.

And that's all I remember at this point. More next time!

<UPDATE>

One thing I forgot to mention earlier: why the novel in particular? Pamuk claims that it is the novel, unlike, say, epic verse or medieval romance, which truly fleshes out the interiors of characters; to return to his shanshui analogy I would say that only a novel has the power to create such a three-dimensional landscape in the reader's mind. It is this three-dimensionality, this creation of perspective [in both the literary and the visual sense] that gives the novel (the illusion of) a center.

</UPDATE>

From al-Ash`arī's "Vindication of Kalām"

This is a very interesting statement that al-Ash`arī makes when defending the practice of kalām against those who argue that it is a needless, unimportant, irrelevant, or misleading innovation (bid`a) because the Prophet said nothing about it.

"But when new and specific questions pertaining to the basic dogmas arise, every intelligent Muslim ought to refer judgment on them to the sum of principles accepted on the grounds of reason, sense experience, intuition, etc. For judgment on legal questions which belong to the category of the traditional is to be based on reference to legal principles which likewise belong to the category of the traditional. And judgment on questions involving the data of reason and the senses should be a matter of referring every such instance to (something within) its own category, without confounding the rational with the traditional, or the traditional with the rational."

(p. 131, The Theology of al-Ash`arī, translated by Richard J. McCarthy)

It seems that al-Ash`arī considers the intellectual world to be sharply divided between reason and tradition, with each having its own domain of operations. Let's see how well that intuition holds up as I continue to read. I can sense one wrinkle already: how does one come to agree on what, precisely, the "tradition" constitutes? Only the Qur'ān? The Qur'ān and the Sunna? Are all the various madhhabs of jurisprudence included in this? And so on. I'm very eager to see how this turns out.

Islamic Philosophy and Theology, VII: Life under the `Abbāsids

First, apologies for not updating this series of posts in a while. I've been busy with a few other things, but am going to try to squeeze in as many posts as I can before school starts.

Let me mention that my reading net has broadened to include Wikipedia as well. This is officially no longer a simple note-taking exercise while reading a book, but a full-fledged endeavor to understand as much as I can, using what few resources I have access to. I'm not going to be linking to Wikipedia since there are enough links as it is and a simple Google search will get you there anyway. I will, however, continue to cite my book sources as accurately as I can, out of respect for their authors' intellectual labor and in order to encourage you, gentle reader, to get your own hands on the books too!

I'd left off earlier with the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphs in 750 CE at the hands of the `Abbāsids, mentioning briefly that the latter had smartly articulated their message to appeal to disaffected Shī`ites (including Zaydites), Qadarites of different flavors, and the mawālis, who were mostly Persian converts to Islam. With this defeat, the caliphate officially passed to the hands of the `Abbāsids, and the remnants of the Umayyads fled to Spain to establish another kingdom there. 

The major social players during the `Abbāsids

Lots of important things happen during the effective reign of the `Abbāsids (that is to say, during the period within which the `Abbāsids were not merely puppet caliphs but actual overlords), foremost among which are the hardening of the divide between the Sunnis and the Shī`ites, and what Watt describes as the "first wave" of Hellenic thought to influence Islamic theology, and the development of distinct approaches within Islamic philosophy, rational theology, and jurisprudence. The connections between these changes and the rise and fall of new social / political groups are also interesting.

From the social perspective, two groups acquired great importance. First, the old Arab patron - Persian client (mawāli) power dynamic that had been so important under the Umayyads changed in some important ways. The administration of the empire remained in the hands of the ethnically Persianate bureaucrats, descendants of the sophisticated Sassanid aristocratic administration, and they continued to resent the prominent positions held by Arabs in the Muslim empire. Watts notes that these bureaucrats had mostly been Zoroastrians under the Sassanids, with some Christians in the mix. During the Umayyad and early `Abbāsid periods, most of them converted to Islam; a cynic might observe that this would probably have been due to the universal tendency of bureaucrats to gravitate towards whatever is most likely to advance their careers. Whatever the reason, the `Abbāsid era saw the rise of the Shu`ūbite (from sha`ab, meaning "nation") movement in literature, where government officials began to produce works design to denigrate and insult all things Arab. One of the most important consequences of this movement was the redemption and revival of Persian literature, especially in far eastern Khorāsān, as `Abbāsid power waned.

Second, the mainstream religious intellectuals who had opposed the Umayyads and supported the `Abbāsid uprising began to organize themselves better into a class of scholars well versed in Islamic knowledge (`ilm), the `ulamā' (sing. `ālim). Watt argues that the struggle between the bureaucrats and the `ulamā' eventually hardened into the divide between Shī`ism and Sunnism, respectively, saying

"where the Shī`ites in difficulties sought a divinely-inspired leader, an imām, their opponents held that salvation came through carefully following the divine law as expressed in the Qur'ān and in the sunna or example of the Prophet. Since the ulema were accepted as the accredited interpreters of the divine law, the Sunnite position gave them great power." (p. 34)

Now I don't find this terribly convincing. Perhaps it's just the manner in which Watt has phrased it here, but I think this statement as it stands grossly oversimplifies the considerable diversity in positions held by the `ulamā'. To argue that scholars who held diametrically opposed views on, say, God's qadar or the (un)createdness of the Qur'ān, were all Sunni simply because this position gave them more "power" seems terribly weak to me. Moreover, it glosses over the ethnic dimension of the situation—surely not all `ulamā' were of pure Arab origin? There certainly seems to be much more scope for overlap between the Shu`ūbite movement and many theological questions than Watt seems to acknowledge.

The major intellectual players

Within the Islamic intellectual movement itself, a number of terms crop up that I want to list here, for their histories are so intertwined that I found Watt's normally clear, historically driven narrative somewhat confusing. The first is falāsifa (sing., faylasūf), the students of Hellenic philosophy who translated these works into Arabic; most, but not all of the, were Muslim, and not all of them chose to reconcile the tensions between their philosophical work and their religion. (This last is a sense I got from a preliminary skim, and may be inaccurate.) The second is kalām, literally, "speech" in Arabic. Wolfson states at the very beginning of his work that

"the term kalām, which literally means "speech" or "word," is used in Arabic translations of the works of Greek philosophers as a rendering of the term logos in its various senses of "word," "reason," and "argument." The term kalām is also used in those Arabic translations from the Greek in the sense of any special branch of learning, and the plural participle, mutakallimūn (singular: mutakallim), is used as a designation of the masters or exponents of any special branch of learning." (p. 1)

However, kalām also has a more restrictive sense, when it is applied to a particular school ("method" may make even better sense) of Islamic philosophical thought that is to be contrasted with the falāsifa. In this more restrictive sense, the mutakallimūn are Islamic theologians who explicitly see themselves as Muslim, and who embark upon the ambitious task of reconciling reason and revelation. The two great schools of kalām that flourished during the `Abbāsid period were the Mu`tazilites and the Ash`arites. 

In addition to these two groups of philosophers, a number of schools (madhāhib) of jurisprudence (fiqh) grew up during the `Abbāsid period. Watt broadly refers to them as the Ahl al-Ḥadīth, since their primary motivation seemed to have been the desire to systematize the collection and study of the various ḥadīth of the Prophet along with their chains of transmission (isnāds), in order to justify and substantiate legal positions for which no direct Qur'ānic corroboration could be found. The fāqih al-Shāfi`ī first articulated the common principles of jurisprudence (usūl al-fiqh), which he arranged in the hierarchical order:

1) the Qur'ān

2) the Ḥadīth of the Prophet, systematized most prominently into the ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and of Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj

3) qiyās, or analogy (and not all schools accepted this)

4) ijmā`, or the consensus (whether of scholars or of the active, devout community of Muslims)

The four most prominent Sunni schools, all founded during the `Abbāsid era and all surviving until today, are the Ḥanafite, the Shāfi`ite, the Mālikite, and the Ḥanbalite. The most important Shī`ite school is the Ja`farite.

It's important to note that theology and jurisprudence were distinct fields, and that in general a particular theological position did not necessarily bind a mutakallim to any madhhab, or vice versa. The one exception was the Ḥanbalite madhhab, which had its own small theological school. Broadly speaking, though, the "rational" study of the mutakallimūn was rejected by the fuqahā', who held that it was only through thorough study of the usūl al-fiqh that a Muslim could lead a good life. (This is an oversimplified, overgeneralized position, to some extent.)

Watt mentions one term as rising in use only much later, but whose referent is recognizable even during `Abbāsid times. This is the ahl al-Sunna, or the Sunnis, the term given to the mainstream of Islamic practice once certain concrete beliefs are generally agreed upon. These beliefs are positive statements that also serve to distinguish other groups as not being part of the "mainstream", and this "adversarial" sense of the components of the ahl al-Sunna is captured in Watt's prose here:

"Against the Khārijites (and with the Murji'ites) it was agreed that sinners whose intellectual belief was sound were not excluded from the community because of their sin. Against the Shī`ites it was agreed that the first four caliphs were genuine caliphs, and that the chronological order was the order of excellence. Against the Qadarites and Mu`tazilites it was agreed that all events are determined by God. It was also agreed that the Qur'ān was the uncreated word or speech of God, though there were differences about the human utterance of the Qur'ān." (p. 59)

The only other thing to note at this point is that the Shī`ite position is clarified during the `Abbāsid era largely along Imāmite (the so-called "Twelver" or ithnā`ashariyya) lines. The two other flavors of Shī`ite thought, the Ismā`īlite and the Zaydite, gain prominence under other dynasties (for the former, most prominently under the Fāṭimid caliphs of North Africa).

Orderings of alphabets

(Warning: there is no point to this post! Then again, I suppose that holds for virtually all of the posts here.)

I was reading something by Prof. Paul Kiparsky the other day about Pāṇini, the brilliant Sanskrit grammarian whose Aṣṭādhyāyī is essentially a complete generative grammar for the language, which mentioned that the entire Pāṇinian edifice rests on the grammarians' penetrative analysis of the Sanskrit phoneme inventory. Now, anyone who knows any Indic script (with the qualified exception of Tamil) knows that the alphabetic arrangement of letters is highly systematic, classifying the main consonants into a 5 x 5 array based on five points and five modes of articulation. However, Pāṇini does not use this arrangement, instead using the arrangement of the akṣarasamāmnāya, also known as the Śivasūtras. These are fourteen sūtras (lit., "threads", meaning something like "aphorism"), arranged in the following peculiar fashion:

1. a i u Ṇ
2. ṛ ḷ K
3. e o Ṅ
4. ai au C
5. h y v r Ṭ
6. l Ṇ
7. ñ m ṅ ṇ n M
8. jh bh Ñ
9. gh ḍh dh Ṣ
10. j b g ḍ d Ś
11. kh ph ch ṭh th c ṭ t V
12. k p Y
13. ś ṣ s R
14. h L

The minuscule letters represent the actual sounds of Sanskrit, while the majuscule letters are what are known as anubandhas (lit. "tie, attachment, connection", meaning "indicator(y letter)" in the Pāṇinian context). This paper, also by Prof. Kiparsky, does a much better job of arranging the Śivasūtras into an array that also brings out the phonemic logic in the arrangement. Prof. Kiparsky's paper also tries to flesh out an argument that explains why the Śivasūtras have the shape they do (his main point is that this arrangement is particularly conducive to the economy of expression so prized by Sanskrit grammarians that it was said ardha-mātrā-lāghavena putrôtsavaṃ manyante vaiyākaraṇāḥ (roughly, "The grammarians celebrate the economizing of half a mora like the birth of a son") ).

<UPDATE>

This article has more information on the working of Pāṇinian grammar, and in particular draws attention to the "background material", so to speak, that Pāṇini assumes a working knowledge of: the phonology of Sanskrit (the aforementioned akṣarasamāmnāya), the verbal roots classified by their conjugation in the present system (the dhātu-pāṭha), and non-verbal nominal and pronominal bases (the gaṇa-pāṭha, a somewhat confusing name since the verbal conjugation classes are also called gaṇas). Inflectional morphology (the suP case markers and the tiṄ verbal conjugations) and derivational morphology (the primary derivational, or kṛt, and and the secondary derivational, or taddhita, affixes) then apply to the bases found in the gaṇa-pāṭha.

</UPDATE>

Anyway, while I was looking up more details about the Śivasūtras online, I came across the interesting fact that the current Japanese ordering of the kana syllabary, called gojūon ("fifty characters"), was inspired by the very sensible conventional Sanskrit order. Prior to this, a poetic pangram was used to organize the syllabary into an order. According to Wikipedia, the poem, called iroha, was:

(in modern Japanese writing, a mixture of kanji and hiragana)

色は匂へど

散りぬるを

我が世誰ぞ

常ならむ

有為の奥山

今日越えて

浅き夢見じ

酔ひもせず

(in pure hiragana)

いろはにほへと

ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ

つねならむ

うゐのおくやま

けふこえて

あさきゆめみし

ゑひもせす

(archaic pronunciation in Roman transliteration)

iro ha ni ho he to

chi ru nu ru wo

wa ka yo ta re so

tsu ne na ra mu

u wi no o ku ya ma

ke fu ko e te

a sa ki yu me mi shi

we hi mo se su

I must add that I can read neither kanji nor kana! The poem was translated thus by Prof. Ryūichi Abe at Harvard—

Although its scent still lingers on,

        the form of a flower has scattered away.

For whom will the glory

         of this world remain unchanged?

Arriving today at the yonder side

        of the deep mountains of evanescent existence

We shall never allow ourselves to drift away

        intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.

This ordering of hiragana is apparently still used in Japan to represent numbers in some formal contexts, something like the old abjad order of the Arabic alphabet. (Not that I can read Arabic either!) While the modern sequence in Arabic is almost entirely based, at least as far as I can tell, on the orthographic resemblances of the letters, the old abjad order was an extension of the order of the Phoenician alphabet (which also influenced the Greek and Roman orders). This older ordering is only typically used for enumeration, and I think Orhan Pamuk uses it in My Name is Red to number the many triplets of anecdotes narrated by the characters. I have vague memories of learning this order in Dubai, but this is just what I found online, cross-checked against Wikipedia:

أ ب ج د ه و ز ح ط ي ك ل م ن س ع ف ص ق ر ش ت ث خ ذ ض ظ غ

read:

أبْجَدْ هوَّزْ حُطِّي كَلَمَنْ سعْفَصْ قَرَشَتْ ثَخَذْ ضَظَغْ

I don't know why the alphabet is parsed in this manner, but I do recall that Hebrew still follows the abjad order. (Not that I can read Hebrew either!)

<UPDATE>

I quickly ran through the English alphabet in my head, contrasting it with the abjad order. It's fascinating to see clusters of letters that still correspond in order to clusters in the Arabic order: A-B-(C)-D, K-L-M-N, Q-R-S-T.

</UPDATE>

Of the tongues of Albion

One of the greatest subtle pleasures of traveling around the island of Britain has been the incredible natural linguistic diversity of this place. Of course, in one sense the US is far more diverse thanks to its huge immigrant population from all over the world (although the UK enjoys that too); nevertheless, Britain displays two forms of linguistic diversity that the US is not old enough to show all that clearly. 

The first is the tremendous diversity of accent and style and register and dialect within English itself, as spoken by native speakers (thus excluding the diversity of foreign accents / variants / dialects in English). Even though there are far more native speakers of English in the US spread out over a far vaster area, the actual variations are minimal compared to the incredible differences that occur in the UK. Why this is the case, I don't know, aside from a possibly doubtful factoid I read somewhere sometime that a language shows maximal diversity within the geographic region of its birth. It may be because migrants tend to retain the language of their youth and attempt to artificially preserve it in some manner; I do know for a fact that my Tamil is more akin to the Tamil of my grandparents' generation than it is to the Tamil spoken by the kids of my generation who've grown up in the fertile Kaveri delta.

The second is the palimpsestic layering of languages, where the successively fainter traces of successively older languages can be found in just about everything, most obviously in toponymy and lexis. North America too would have enjoyed this when Columbus landed on its shores, and Native American influences can certainly be seen on American toponymy, but the near-total destruction of the Native American populations and the extent to which the mainstream European settlements in the continent set themselves apart from the Native Americans meant that the linguistic continuity still visible today in Britain was, alas, irreparably ruptured in North America.

I don't mean to say that these modes of diversity are somehow exclusive to Britain or particularly denied to the US; it is merely that they are much more visible to me in Britain than they are in the US. 

Accents or dialects?

Given the extraordinary globalization of English, it's probably accurate to say that everybody, even native speakers, speaks English with an "accent". It's possible to identify people's nationalities by their accents, and with some practice to dive even deeper into their backgrounds; there is a distinctive Bostonian accent just as there is a distinctive Keralite accent, and I'm sure Sydney speaks a different variety of Strine than Perth does. But within the UK, the diversity is absolutely staggering. A native of the UK, born and bred in the country, will be able to place someone within a particular county, possibly even within a particular town in that county, based on shifts in accent or vocabulary that are entirely imperceptible to me. In the West Midlands, the "Brummie" Birmingham accent is supposedly different from the accent of the Black Country, just a few miles to the northwest—both are equally incomprehensible to me though, so I couldn't tell you what the differences are. Black Country English supposedly preserves some very archaic features of Early Modern English that have otherwise been lost in other forms; all I can say is I'm glad we don't all pronounce "horse" to rhyme with "arse"! 

Sometimes these differences are so sharp that the natives are speaking a different language, for all intents and purposes. Now naturally the native speakers of these languages are unlikely claim that they speak a language different from English, which makes it difficult for us to continue calling them "languages"; I suppose we then have to call the more extreme accents "dialects". After all, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," to cite the quotation often, but wrongly, attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich. But the fact still remains that accents and dialects and languages are artificial, frequently political, distinctions that are externally imposed on what is in purely linguistic terms a spectrum. 

This was nowhere clearer to me than in Scotland, where the English (spoken by native Scotsmen) varies from "standard" BBC English, to the presence of a trilled 'r' and hard 'ch' and and a few peculiar words like "bonnie" and "wee", to a very pronounced "Scottish" accent, to a language that doesn't really seem like English anymore. This is of course the Scots language, a surviving branch of Middle English, the language of Robert Burns, distinct in many major points of grammar and vocabulary from "standard" English. Scots is different from Scottish English (which is grammatically mostly standard English but whose pronunciation is influenced by Scots), Scottish Gaelic (the Celtic language brought to Britain from Ireland which is very close to Irish Gaelic), and from Highland English (English heavily influenced both by Scots and by Scottish Gaelic). This complex linguistic picture was presented to us by our tour guide, a kilted Scotsman with a barely noticeable trilled 'r' who nevertheless could speak "braid Scots" when needed, and who possessed some knowledge of Scottish Gaelic. This last point is important to note, for Scottish Gaelic, like Irish Gaelic and unlike Welsh, is rapidly fading away.

A Brief History of Languages

The linguistic history of the British Isles is incredibly fascinating, and I've been trying to read up a bit more about it (on Wikipedia, of course!). And the picture I've gleaned from a quick skim is incredible. Excluding the pre-Indo-European languages of Britain (about which we know regrettably little), the major language families to have existed here include the Celtic, the Norse, the Germanic, and the Romance: four huge language families on one little island!

We know almost nothing about the pre-Celtic languages spoken on the isles, except that they must have existed: the great Neolithic sites like Stonehenge predate the coming of the Celtic languages, who were probably the first Indo-European-speaking peoples to cross the English channel into the British Isles. But about the Celtic languages we know much more. We know, for instance, that there were a number of Celtic languages spoken in modern France and Spain, giving rise to the names Gaul and Gallic and Galicia, and that these languages had long been in contact with the Italic branch of the great Indo-European family (the branch that gives rise to Latin and then to the modern Romance languages). Some of these people push off from modern Galicia and Normandy and land in the British Isles, bringing with them not one, but two distinct flavors of Celtic tongues. 

This is a good place to note that the migration of languages is not necessarily connected with the migration of peoples or with violence. A very small number of people may migrate to a new land and quickly become indistinguishable by blood from the surrounding population, and yet their language may come to be adopted even by the majority surrounding them, possibly with great phonological and morphological changes, possibly almost unchanged. We don't know how many Celtic-speaking people came over, nor do we know if their coming was bloody or peaceful. We don't even know how many languages these people spoke when they first landed in Britain; all we know is that there are two distinct Celtic language families present in the isles.

In Ireland, the Goidelic family flourishes, spoken by the early Gaels, while in Britain it's the Brythonic languages. The former gives rise to modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic; the latter to modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. One small wrinkle here is with the Pictish language, possibly but not definitely a Brythonic Celtic language. Spoken north of the Firth of Forth (near modern Edinburgh), the Pictish language was spoken by (duh) the Picts, after one of whose tribes the Romans named the region Caledonia. Now neither language family stays put, of course. Some Brythonic speakers resettle in mainland Europe, surviving till today in Brittany. Some Gaels from northern Ireland invade western Caledonia to establish the kingdom of Dál Riata, thus introducing a Goidelic language into the Isle of Man and into Britain. (One fascinating tidbit: today in Scotland, the word "Gaelic" is pronounced "Gallic", but in Ireland it's "Gaylic".) The Romans called the Gaelic population of Dál Riata the Scotti, whence the name "Scotland". The Scotti and the Picts alternate between making war and making love, until the two kingdoms are united to create a single Scottish kingdom (alas, with the loss of the Pictish tongue).

The Celtic languages have already existed in contact with the Italic languages during their co-existence on mainland Europe, but when the Romans invade Britain, Latin exerts a massive influence on the languages, possibly more on the Brythonic than the Goidelic. The Romans also add an extra element of linguistic diversity: since a substantial portion of their army is composed of non-Italian auxiliaries, some of their languages (Saxon for sure) are also brought to the Isles at this early point. Of course, the Germanic languages come in much greater numbers later.

Around the time the Romans start quitting Britain, major changes are afoot on the mainland. Turkic-speaking Hunnic tribes are pouring in from Eurasia, squeezing all the other existing European tribes into ever-shrinking territories. Small wonder then, that some of the Germanic groups—the Angles, the Saxons, and the like—set sail for the shores of fair Albion. Some of these settlements were probably peaceful while others were quite violent; it's funny then that, in a sense, a skirmish between ethnic Anglo-Saxons and ethnic Brythonic-speaking Celts is a fight between the English and the British! (I claim poetic license to slightly misuse the words for humorous effect.) 

Other, more northerly Germanic tribes also begin to raid the coasts of Britain and Ireland—the wild Vikings, speakers of Norse languages (whose ancestor, Old Norse, is descended from Proto-Germanic just as these other languages are). In parts of Scotland, the two groups actually begin to co-exist as the so-called Norse-Gaels, and I wonder what sort of curious Celtic / Norse mixture they must have spoken! Curious fact: the words "Loch Ness" and "Inverness" are a mixture of Gaelic and Norse: "loch" is of course Scottish Gaelic for "lake", while "inver" is the anglicized version of Scottish Gaelic "inbhir", meaning "confluence", and "ness" is the anglicized Norse "nis", meaning "large body of water".

Old English, at this point essentially just a collection of Anglo-Saxon dialects, was thus a very Germanic language that was nevertheless heavily influenced by Latin (thanks to the educated monks), by the Old Norse-speaking invaders (a different flavor of Germanic), and by the pre-existing Celtic languages. A number of Old English words still survive today in Modern English; we tend to think of these words as somehow being shorter, crisper, and more direct. Reading some Old English poetry in the original gives us a sense of how near we are to that tongue, and yet how far.

But of course, there is yet another hugely important linguistic influence that shapes Anglo-Saxon into Modern English, and that is of course the linguistic impact of the Normans. The language spoken by the Norman invaders and later rulers of Britain was (surprise surprise) Old Norman, a dialect of Old French. As with anything else, such naming of languages shows the difficulties we face in accurately labeling and classifying a complex, fluid linguistic situation. To be more precise, the various languages spoken in the region of modern France around this time are collectively called Old French and can broadly be grouped into two families based on the word used for "yes". The more northerly group, into which both Old Norman and modern "standard" French fall, is the so-called langues d'oïl; the southerly languages, including old and modern Provençal, are the langues d'oc. (Bear with me, jay nuh parlay pah luh fronsay!)

The impact of Old Norman and its descendant Anglo-French on English was profound, to put it mildly.A gigantic amount of Latinate / Romance vocabulary was imported wholesale into English, changing the language's style and expression forever. The reason kids who study Latin do better on the SATs is because the Normans invaded and ruled Britain and transformed the language; otherwise we'd be pointing to German as a model worthy of emulation.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a really interesting work, Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson, an introduction to atomic theory written in a hypothetical form of English largely uninfluenced by the Romance languages.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

The rest of the essay is available here. It's a fascinating exercise to try to piece together what Anderson means, and to try to explain his reasons for his coinages (in most cases, from the Latin or Greek etymology of the word replaced; in some cases from the German equivalent). Wikipedia has a fully hyperlinked version of the passage, which should aid in completely deciphering it.