* A brisk walk.
* A hop.
* Providing artificial interpretations for the names of people and places: a favorite creative pastime among the more cavalier philologists.
* The asterisk here indicates that we’re in the realm of reconstruction, therefore the realm of the unknown.
* What’s the difference between an introvert engineer and an extrovert engineer? The introvert looks down at his own shoes while he’s talking to you; the extrovert looks down at yours.
* A determinative is a sign that marks a word’s semantic category, used to help avoid ambiguities in interpretation. For example, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, a determinative will let you know up front that you’re speaking of divinities, or parts of the body, or plants, or animals, etc.
* To be, or not to be.
* My thanks to Alex de Voogt, whose ethnographic studies were of great help to me in writing this section.
* I checked: the quote is officially attributed to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a politician and writer (so he knew what he was talking about), but the phrase is as old as the hills and I have no doubt that someone thought of it before him.
* On his first attempt, she refuses him because she’s waiting for a proposal from another man—the novel’s villain, naturally.
* I’ll give you a hand: “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?”
* A pictogram is not a means of linguistic expression—it represents only a primitive phase of drawing-signs, which may or may not have been used to articulate spoken language.
* In transliteration, signs with a homophonic letter are differentiated by adding a subscript number. (KU6 tells us that there are five other KUs with different graphic forms.)
* Ignace Gelb, in his important A Study of Writing (1963), holds that Mayan cannot be phonetic because, at that point, the script had yet to be deciphered, despite the fact that various Mayan dialects were still being spoken in the modern age.
* The etymology of Yucatán, true or alleged, is already enough to make us wary of the relationship between proselytizers and the locals. Yucatán comes from the Maya tectetan, “I don’t understand,” or from uyutan, uyukatan, or yukutan, meaning “hear how they talk.” Perhaps here, too, we’re dealing with the patina of myth, but so be it.
* The Mayan Long Count was a nonrepeating numbering system used for keeping track of the days, with a structure that varied according to each numeral’s position. The first (the “ones”) was base-20, the second (the “tens”) base-18, the third and fourth again base-20, the fifth base-13. The Long Count’s complete cycle was therefore 20 x 18 x 20 x 20 x 13 = 1,872,000 days (nearly 5,125 years). Year zero, the calendar’s starting point, corresponds to August 13, 3113 BCE. Now you know why the world was supposed to end in 2012.
* Even with Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have a consonantal base, and therefore seem to be an exception, we can find an interpretation: the presence of many morphemes or monoconsonantal words.
* One day, the renowned French author Diderot was given a beautiful dressing gown. When he put it on, however, he realized that it outshone all the other old and dusty objects in his possession. It was too elegant. What to do? He decided to overhaul his wardrobe and furniture, to live up to the gown’s standard. The Diderot effect = a trap.
* Morin’s How Traditions Live and Die (2016) is a marvelous book.
* This parallel with biology has been in vogue now for a generation. Terms like meme (a coinage drawn from gene) are at this point ubiquitous (an example of successful cultural diffusion!). A meme is an element or behavior passed through imitation or replication from one individual to another—by cultural, not genetic, means. Cultural evolution viewed through the lens of biological evolution.
* Both the English soup and the Italian zuppa derive from the Gothic word suppe, meaning “a slice of bread immersed in broth.” To call soup “wet bread,” then, is to call the same thing by another name.
* An alternative method to this group effort does exist: the imposition of a writing system from on high. And we’ve seen numerous such cases, often tied to political or religious factors. I’m thinking of the case of Atatürk, who, as a part of his great modernization project in Turkey, ruled in 1928 that citizens must use the Roman alphabet to record the Turkish language, replacing the previous Ottoman script, which was based on a consonantal Arabic abjad.
* Again, as long as graphic changes are not imposed from on high.
* These three lectures make up the book The Meaning of It All (Addison-Wesley, 1998).
* There are many cases where a script has been deciphered thanks to bilingual inscriptions: for example, the classical Cypriot syllabary, deciphered in 1851 thanks to a bilingual text including a Phoenician inscription; or the Ugaritic alphabet, or Anatolian hieroglyphs. There are, on the flip side, other cases where having a bilingual text made little difference—such as the inscriptions in Etruscan and Phoenician at Pyrgi, in Santa Severa, not far from Rome, which have done little to help interpret Etruscan.
* The fifth commandment of decipherment: follow your intuition, but don’t give it too much credence.
* In truth, the classical Cypriot syllabary has six signs in common with Linear B, and Ventris did use these parallels to help validate his findings.
* Thomas Young has gone somewhat unsung in the history of VIP decipherers. His contribution to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was fundamental. It’s no wonder that at the University of Cambridge, where he studied, he was known as “the Phenomenon.”
* Yet another unsung early decipherer. Georg Grotefend was a grammar school teacher with exceptional analytical skills.
* Italians say the profile of Monte Soratte, Horace’s Soracte, near Rome, resembles Mussolini’s face.
* It’s not the only thing he got wrong. Watkins thought there’d be no more cars in big cities, and no more flies or mosquitoes either (though with the rise of pedestrian-only downtowns and the way insects are now dying off, Watkins was looking even farther into the future, perhaps around 2100?).