The Purpose of AE (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

I launch into a linguistic theory that first germinated in THOBR and came to full flower in RevHist. It is as usual completely obvious and totally ignored. I would like to say 'disputed' but it hasn't reached those dizzying heights yet.
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Page Hundred and Twelve of Forgeries

form that defied all rules save those of basic comprehensibility to whomsoever one was speaking to. One wouldn't use that sentence for a start. ‘Natural languages’ are chaotic universes. English for instance was one once, not now.

Were you minded to keep a permanent record of the natural Sumerian language of c 3000 BC you would either have to invent the tape recorder or a ‘word-formulation’. I am sorry to use such a clunky expression as word-formulation but historians, archaeologists, linguists, philologists and anthropologists do not accept any of the above, so no word has ever been coined for a ‘natural language’.

For them, language is language because it is the way we do it – we write as we speak. It does not occur to them that what we speak is a word-formulation which we call a language but is in reality a limited palette of sounds mapping phonetically to an alphabet of a few dozen sound-symbols. They apply their speak-as-you-write rule rigidly which means whenever they come across writing they assume what is on the page is the spoken language of the writers.

On hearing all this your first reaction will be to suppose I am drawing a distinction that is both petty and arbitrary. Your brain always converts unsettling concepts into something familiar so, if you are an English-speaker, you will probably be thinking in terms of

[Mick Harper]

This all may seem uneasily attached to forged gospel books but remember historians rely on linguists who are relying on marginalia in gospel books which historians are assuring them are the genuine article to decide who is speaking (and writing) what, when. Many academic subjects are based on such houses of cards.
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Page Hundred and Thirteen of Forgeries

It is a wonder the lowland Scots, speaking a ‘language’ cognate with their southern English neighbours, elected (if that's the right word) to form a country with their northern neighbours, the wholly alien Gaelic-speakers. But later on they elected (nearly the right word) to join the English after all whereupon Lallan Scots died out and Standard English ruled.

By the by, Scottish historians, ever the lackeys of English historians, are perfectly content to accept the theory they acquired their language from a handful of Anglo-Saxons who occupied the south-eastern corner of their country for a few years. They differ from English historians as to how this was done. In England, apparently, the Anglo-Saxons either killed off the natives or drove them into Wales; in Scotland the Anglo-Saxons somehow ‘persuaded’ everyone to start speaking Anglo-Saxon without further ado.

As I say, the Scots always defer to the English. Or they may wish to defer to me instead and send the whole theory packing by adopting the common-sense position that Anglo-Saxon has nothing whatsoever to do with either Inglis or Scots which were the languages everybody was speaking when the Anglo-Saxons arrived. It is difficult to predict which theory would appeal more to the Scots. They may wish to hold a referendum.

I appreciate all this may be difficult to get your English-speaking head around so try this experiment: go to Rome (today's Rome, not Roman Empire Rome) and try ordering a cup of coffee in Latin. When that fails, ask the waiter (preferably in Italian) where his language comes from. He (their gender enlightenment is Roman Empire Roman) will tell you (proudly, if he is an Italian Roman) it derives from Latin. Ask him what Romans were speaking before Latin and he will ask you if you want a panini with your coffee. (Or would he say ‘panino’, I must find out.)

He won’t have a clue because linguists don't have a clue. Linguists are a clueless lot. It requires no more than a basic understanding of peoples’ attachment to their mother tongue to guess that Romans were speaking ‘Italian’ before there was a Rome though not an ‘Italian’ much resembling modern Italian. Standard Italian is a phonetic word-formulation mapping closely to the twenty-one sounds represented in the Italian alphabet, whereas Ancient Italian had the infinite sounds of a natural language.

The ancient Italian spoken around Rome would be the Latsian variety because the people of the Lazio region of central Italy would be speaking a version all but incomprehensible to their contemporaries in Umbria, Tuscany, Abruzzo and Campania. Just to confuse things further Lazio itself would be something of a linguistic melting pot. A Roman Latsian male would find it difficult to sweet talk a Sabine Latsian female. Next valley over.

This unsatisfactory situation led to some Romans of the fifth/sixth century BC embarking on a radical departure. For Latsians anyway – their northern neighbours, the Etruscans, and their southern neighbours, the Greeks, had

[Mick Harper]

The process of turning one's spoken language into a written one must have been undertaken hundreds, thousands, of times and it is an essential step in history, for history. So naturally historians, anthropologists and linguists ignore it. I was forced to come up with my own step-by-step guide. Which they have ignored. [But if anyone knows of one, let me know.]
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Page One Hundred and Fourteen of Forgeries

already done it. Rome, they decided, needed its own written language, just as the Greeks, the Etruscans and all the successful ‘civilisations’ around the Mediterranean basin had their own written language. They would need their very own ‘word-formulation’ if Latsian was to be written down.

What did they have to do to come up with Latin? We don't know from the historical record but we can approximately know by using the few sources we do have, plus common sense, to produce a step-by-step guide:

1. They first had to confront the problem all the others had confronted before them – how to reduce the infinite sounds of Latsian to a manageable number that could be represented by written symbols.

2. This was especially difficult for the Romans because they knew nothing of writing systems that allowed a large number of sounds to be represented on the page – ideograms, pictographs, logographs, syllabaries, graphemes.

3. The only method they were familiar with was the phonetic ‘alphabet’ writing-system invented, as far as we know, by the Phoenicians (the clue is in the name).

4. But which alphabet? Taking someone else's off the shelf would militate against local pride which was the whole point of the exercise.

5. But something completely novel would militate against persuading already literate Latsians, of which there were a great number, to adopt it.

6. So they did what everybody else before them had done (save possibly the Phoenicians): choose an existing alphabet and tweak it enough to make it distinctive.

7. But which alphabet? Phonologically Greek was closest – the Etruscans and the Phoenicians spoke very strange languages.

8. So Greek it was, plus tweaks.

9. How now, brown cow, does one set about fitting the infinite sounds of the natural Latsian language into the straitjacket of the twenty-plus vowels and consonants of a tweaked Greek alphabet?

10. Well, Yulius Cæsar, one can always expand any alphabet by using two-way letter pronunciations and diphthongs.

11. Since infinite still won't go into twenty-something no matter what tricks of the trade are employed, it was quite impractical to write down anything recognisable to a Latsian.

12. The Romans knew what demotic Greek-speaking Greeks had done which was to invent Classical Greek in order to write down demotic Greek.

13. So they invented Latin to write down demotic Latsian.

What were our own dear academics to make of all this thousands of years later? Since academics speak as they write, they assume the ancients spoke as they wrote. Sometimes this is actually true. Cicero spoke as he wrote. But mostly not. Even in Rome. Either way, Roman history can cope.

But what happens when literate people occupy the lands of non-literate people and all

[Mick Harper]

Doncha love it when you can start mining stuff from one book to write another?
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Page One Hundred and Fifteen of Forgeries

local written records will of necessity be in the language of the invaders, not in the language of the natives? How does historians' ‘speak as they write’ rule work when really widespread occupiers of non-literate lands like the Romans are around? It produces some very weird history

1. Whenever the Romans occupy a literate country – say, Greece or Egypt – and therefore the documentation is written in, say, Greek or Egyptian, historians assume the locals carried right on speaking whatever it was they were speaking when the Romans arrived

2. Whenever the Romans occupy a non-literate country – say, France or Spain – and therefore the documentation can only be in Latin, historians assume the locals must have ditched their language and gone over en masse to speaking Latin

3. In such cases the locals set about evolving Latin into a ‘Romance language’ e.g. French and Spanish [Romance = from Roman i.e. Latin]

4. If the locals do not speak a Romance language – say, Basque or Dutch – this cannot have been the case so an exception to the rule is applied: they were hold-outs who did not take up Latin for some unspecified reason

5. Should a specified reason subsequently become available, the rule can be re-applied e.g. Brittany is occupied by Welsh-speakers and the Bretons switch over en masse to Welsh; Britain is occupied by Anglo-Saxons and the Britons switch over en masse to English etc etc

6. Once these ‘literary occupations’ have taken place, everyone lives happily ever after language-wise. Any subsequent foreign-speaking invaders occupying areas of Europe for just as long as the Romans did – say, Goths, Arabs, Franks – will not be able to perform the old language switcheroo.

* * *

To set the record straight all that is required is to do what no historian can ever do, ignore the historical record. Since we have extensive modern records for how all this is done in the present day we can apply the known known to the known unknown. The ‘knowns’ in this case being the languages of Esperanto and Hebrew. This is what we know

1. how easy it is to create artificial languages. The Esperantists had no difficulty coming up with a complete vocabulary, grammar and syntax

2. how easy it is to write an artificial language. Esperanto was entirely phonetic and mapped to a tweaked but familiar alphabet

3. how easy it is to speak an artificial language. Anything that could be written in phonetic Esperanto could by definition be spoken in Esperanto

4. how difficult it is to persuade anyone to do (2) or (3) unless there is a pressing reason why they should

5. if there is a pressing reason why they should, e.g. polyglot immigrants arriving in the new state of Israel, they might be persuaded

6. if for political reasons it was decided the common language should not be any of the ones the immigrants already spoke and wrote, e.g. Yiddish, German, English, Polish, Russian, Arabic, but an artificial one, e.g. Hebrew, that none of them spoke or wrote (except maybe a bit from shul) then

7. it was a piece of cake.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Latin became a written language that was created/evolved from Gregorian chanting around about the 11th century.

[Mick Harper]

You will have to describe how this happened (see above) if you want anyone to go along with you. Starting with who was speaking Latin.

[Mick Harper]

I had kept my mania for numbered lists well under control in the book but in this final chapter the mask slipped. I still have no idea whether this aids or discourages the reading of complex-idea books. It being so small a market to begin with.
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Page One Hundred and Sixteen of Forgeries

We can apply these known general principles to see how the Latsian-speaking Romans were faring in the sixth century BC. First the bad news

1. Like the Esperantists, the Romans had no trouble coming up with Latin but found few Romans wanted to ditch the wonderfully expressive Latsian they had painstakingly learned at their mother's knee in order to do it all over again for the stilted rigidities of Latin

2. Unless maybe they wanted to be literate except, the Latinists were disconcerted to find, any Roman who wanted to be literate was already literate in Greek or Etruscan

3. There was nobody to write to in Latin. Why learn Latin to write to other Romans when you could pop round and speak to them in person in Latsian? If you really wanted to write to them they must already be literate in Greek or Etruscan, as presumably were you. And of course there was no point in writing Latin to non-Latsians

4. There was nothing worth reading in Latin whereas Greek (we don't know about Etruscan) was famously awash with all the great classics of literature.

Now the good news

1. Romans who were literate in Greek or Etruscan were already marked out from Romans who were illiterate; now Romans literate in Latin were marked out from merely literate Romans

2. Latinists could communicate with other Latinists irrespective of anyone’s mother tongue. Speaking Latsian was irrelevant

3. By the second generation, Latin did not need to be ‘learned’ since these marked-out Latinists tended to marry one another and brought up their children to speak Latin. You were born to the purple

4. You stayed in the purple no matter how many of the hoi polloi learned Latin because, as people speaking a second language, they betrayed that fact every time they spoke Latin. Them and us cannot be counterfeited

5. People in the purple tend to be the people in power and hence can promote policies favouring Latin-speakers – in particular mother's knee Latin-speakers – for a vast array of state purposes, especially those that tended to keep the people in power in power

6. An oligarchical state with internal cohesiveness and expansionary potential had been produced with remarkable speed and efficiency

7. How much expansionary potential would be determined by competition with Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Egyptians etc who had already adopted the same model

8. History will decide

9. Ensure all historians are brought up in a tradition which is skewed wildly towards Latin (and to be on the safe side, Greek) sources

10. History has decided that...

[Mick Harper]

This reminds me that neither orthodoxy nor ourselves have ever come to terms with either Phoenician or Etruscan.

[Mick Harper]

The net is cast wide to see who gets caught.
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Page Hundred and Seventeen of Forgeries

All this applies functionally, if not in detail, to all civilisations from Sumer onwards. We know all civilisations from Sumer onwards failed to achieve exponential lift-off, except our own. It is not unreasonable then to apply a bit of hypothetical correlation, All of Them vs Us, and since literacy in a demotic language is one difference between Them and Us, we might tentatively propose this was a critical factor. Even the critical factor.

In terms of any development the Chinese did by far the best but they could not, it seemed, get over the artificial literary language hurdle so long as they were speaking Han and writing Mandarin. The Chinese certainly had the option of mass literacy – all (Han) Chinese today speak Han and write Mandarin so it is certainly technically possible, but presumably the Mandarinate did not permit such liberties.

However, generally, the ‘the artificial literacy barrier’ does not appear to be political since each civilisation had its own variant form of literacy and its own variant form of how literacy was diffused through its population.

Nonetheless, all of them ended up functionally as citizen/helot societies, a literate minority and an illiterate majority. It would appear that literacy itself was creating the barrier to development and the only common factor in all ancient literacy models was that the language spoken by the helots was not the language spoken by the citizens.

All ancient civilisations were good at some things, not so good at others. That is not surprising. What is surprising is they were always the same things

Good: monumental building, roads, armies, state religions
Fair: metallurgy for military and artistic purposes, observational astronomy, basic geometry, public art, rhetorical literature
Woeful: technology

* Everything in the first category was pre-figured in pre-history
* Everything in the second category serves in the attainment of the first category
* The third category provides lift-off.

That is why our time-travelling Sumerian would find nothing strange about Augustan Rome. He might admire the aqueducts but that is because Rome needs to employ monumental building to get a decent water supply whereas a river civilisation like Babylon could afford to apply its monumental building talents to hanging gardens.

Neither place got much beyond the simple Archimedean screw when it came to hydrological technology.

[Mick Harper]

I never discovered whether this laborious description of the most important event in the history of the world was even read in the outside world. Apart from the usual suspect.
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Page One Hundred and Eighteen of Forgeries

They did not, for instance, need sophisticated pumping technology to, for instance, mine everything they required so they never developed, for instance, pumping technology for deeper mines using, for instance, steam engines thereby, for instance, triggering Industrial Revolutions. Steam engines do not require modern metallurgy – any ancient smith could have knocked one up – if only they had been engineers as well as smiths.

But for some reason a few basic technological principles were forever out of reach so long as ‘knowledge’ was the purview of mandarinates, priesthoods, academies, schools of rhetoric, monastery scriptoria and universities. Ancient civilisations could produce all kinds of wonders but not engineers.

* * *

The history of the engineer starts with realtor-monks of eleventh century England, or so I like to think though in truth it might have been elsewhere in Western Europe. They needed to write into their land charters the names of people and places that were presenting them with a novel problem.

Their familiar Latin was an exemplary medium for recording Marcus Apenninus of Eboracum, it could cope well enough with Gudrum Bloodaxe of York, it was not suited at all to Enid Witherall of Hoe Street, Walthamstow and unfortunately, by the eleventh century, land belonged more often to the Enids than to the Marcuses and the Gudrums.

The technique for rendering names and places had been to take the demotic name and render it into Latin by transliteration using certain rules arbitrarily applied. Words like Enid, Witherall, Hoe and Walthamstow could happily be given this treatment to produce a Latin equivalent for each word but, unlike Marcus Apenninus and Gudrum Bloodaxe, 'Enid Witherall' was not known by name to any scribe other than the transliterator so his arbitrary transliteration would not necessarily be their transliteration. Mrs Witherall's identity might easily be challenged and as her estate was quite valuable this could prove awkward.

Feudal Europe was based on individual land ownership so a solution had to be found. Necessity/ mother/ invention meant a solution was found. Instead of transliterating they could use the phonetic letters of their alphabet to write approximately the sounds of the demotic words Enid, Witherall, Hoe and Walthamstow.

It was still arbitrary because demotic English in the eleventh century consisted mainly of sounds that could not be captured exactly by the Latin alphabet but the realtors found to their surprise this did not matter! So long as you spoke eleventh century demotic English, you could guess with almost complete fidelity who the Latin letters in Enid, Witherall, Hoe and Walthamstow referred to.

It helped if a new letter, W, was added to the Latin alphabet in order to capture that particularly English aspirate at the start of Witherall and Walthamstow to distinguish it from the Latin aspirate of Hoe and

[Mick Harper]

This is rattling along at such a speed I doubt if any unprepared reader would be able to follow it, much less be swayed by it. But it has to be remembered I was an unprepared writer at the time.
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Page One Hundred and Nineteen of Forgeries

the non-aspirate of Enid. What's more, this new letter which, at the start of a word meant an aspirate, could be put unambiguously at the end of a word to get that awful meow sound at the end of Walthamstow. Now they were motoring.

But not terribly fast and not terribly far. These realtor-monks, being professional scribes, could laboriously apply these new rules for spelling out discrete words like Enid, Witherall, Hoe, and Walthamstow for other realtor-monks (or canon lawyers) to read back equally laboriously. It was no use for text because writing and reading continuous English of any length was even more laborious.

One thousand AD demotic English was a natural language and would-be literate people in it would have to make up and carry around a vast number of conventions to get it all down on paper, even approximately. And even if they managed that, folks fifty miles away, speaking a different variant of one thousand AD demotic English, would need a whole different set of conventions. To be honest, when it came to text, Latin did the job much better in every way.

Once the innovation had bedded down, it was found the monks of Old England had made no advance in human civilisation beyond some improvements in land registration practices. A seed, however, had been sown. An essential seed if the English monks’ English-speaking descendants were ever to get to the moon. The first brick in the wall of exponential development had been laid.

* * *

Anyone thinking the New History of the World is getting a wee bit Anglo-centric will be relieved to hear it was the French who took the next step. To follow the story it is essential to appreciate there was nothing special about Western Europe. Yes, it had had experience of superior civilisations – Phoenician, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Umayyad – but in the period AD 1000–1500 it was and remained behind the Chinese, the Indians, the Persians and the Ottomans in overall development.

If anything it had gone backwards. A citizen of Augustan Rome would have been disgusted by the Rome of the Borgias. Never mind hanging gardens, never mind aqueducts, they scarcely had drinking fountains. And the arts! My dear, one shudders.

But it is the military sphere – always the touchstone of contemporary technology – that best sums up the state of Western Europe at this time. Any average Greek hoplite army would have made mincemeat of the English at Agincourt

“Look out, lads, incoming! Arrows. Now there's something you don't see every week. Non-compound longbows judging by the trajectory. Nice grouping. Demonstrates adequate training. Make a note of that, adjutant. Eyes right, everyone, here comes the cavalry. What are those things? Oh, stirrups. Whatever will they think of next. I wonder if horses charge formed bodies of infantry knowing they've got stirrups on. Apparently not. Good grief, who's this lot? Men-at-arms in fully-articulated plate armour? Bet that costs a drachma or two. No wonder there's so few of them. All the same, odd thing to bring onto a battlefield. Front two ranks, push-of-pike, on my command. They'll fall over after a few backward steps. Try not to damage the armour – that's good stuff, you can see that from here. Stop smirking the rest of you, you're not in the Theban army now.”

[Mick Harper]

I was very pleased to find out those hippie favourites, the Cathars, were important after all. The question posed at the end of the last sentence should be tried out in a pub quiz.
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Page Hundred and Twenty of Forgeries

And yet shortly it would all be different and the Western Europeans would conquer the world. How did they manage this, armed only with nascent written demotics? There were formidable obstacles to overcome before the Age of Artificial Elite Literary Word-Formulations could be brought to an end. For instance

1. The old system held all the levers of power, including the power to determine who could read and write, what they could read and write, and in what language they could read and write.

2. Even if a written demotic became widely available there was no reason for the general public to learn it because there was nothing of any interest to read in it.

3. Even if there was something of interest to read, the medium of reading – manuscripts – was too expensive for anyone to bother. Name any book you would pay £500 to read.

Getting past (1) and (2) was difficult for the Europeans because the Church held both de facto and de jure powers, which meant written material consisted of the Bible, saints’ lives, ecclesiastical land charters and state papers, all in Latin except for some demotic sprinkling. To move things along would require people who, as an absolute minimum

• took no notice of the Church
• were familiar with literary languages other than Latin
• were neither monks nor bureaucrats
• had a professional need to write things down in the demotic
• had access to people who could pay for their professional services
• and powerful enough to protect them from the ire of the Church

Got it in one! The troubadours of Septimania. This is the area of southern France most of us would call either Provence or the Languedoc but people from those parts with an elevated political consciousness might call it Occitania because the local language is – increasingly was – Occitan, intermediate between French and Catalan.

This was not what made Septimania special in 1000 AD, that was Septimania’s enthusiasm for syncretic religions drawn from Muslim, Jewish, Aryan and Bogomil sources – anything so long as it wasn’t Roman Christianity.

Why this was is not clear, nothing is clear about Western Europe c 1000 AD, but it probably had something to do with Septimania being awash with literary languages other than Latin – Arabic, Hebrew and Greek to name three. So who were the troubadours and what was their part in the unleashment of Europe?

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

I reckon my uncovering of the part played by travelling players in the development of written languages is a real coup de théâtre.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-One of Forgeries

Thus far in human history, the performing arts had always been labouring under a severe handicap. Should you wish to be a respectable theatre actor you had to

• learn your lines
• learn to read in order to learn your lines
• learn a foreign language because the lines were written in a language you did not speak
• learn how to give a dramatic performance in a foreign language
• learn to give a dramatic performance in a foreign language that was horribly inexpressive because it was designed to be written by traders, bureaucrats, priests and academics
• learn how to perform to traders, bureaucrats, priests and academics if you wanted an audience who could understand a single word you were saying

Nevertheless, judging by the size and number of ancient amphitheatres, there was no shortage either of performers or audiences. Thousands came whether they understood the words or not. This is not unprecedented, millions of people today attend operas performed in languages neither they nor the singers can speak.

It did though mean the repertoire was limited to staple themes, simplistic plots, fanciful settings, formulaic productions and over-stylised performances. Classical theatre was much the same.

Over in the less favoured parts of town, there was demotic theatre. Though not necessarily in a theatre. Euripides is fine for special occasions but what we really want for a good night out is something we can relate to and most of us don't go round killing our parents.

Ancient demotic theatre though had problems of its own. Since it was by definition non-literate there could be no lines to be learned. Actors had to be verbally taught lines by rote or by freely extemporising from familiar material and, while it was certainly easier to do this in their own expressive, endlessly variable natural language to audiences who shared that language, demotic theatre had strict limitations

• it didn’t travel well – fifty miles away the language variations were too great
• the audience couldn’t pay much – the nobs either did not speak the local demotic or wouldn't be seen dead
• there could be no specialisation of labour – the performers were necessarily the playwright
• the repertoire was limited to what could be easily memorised or extemporised
• the audiences actually preferred endlessly repeated (with a bit of extemporising) versions of time-honoured themes – mainly illicit sex or, if that wasn't allowed, licit religion.