Indefinite hyperbolic numbers!

Zillion, squillion, bajillion!

Stephen Chrisomalis of Wayne State University gives a delightful talk about where these numbers come from!

"An honest to God Elizabethan psycho" and a fascinating reading list about literacy

So far this weekend two especially noteworthy posts have come to me via Google Reader.

Thanks to Dr. Beachcombing, I got to read about said Elizabethan psycho, Sir Richard Grenville, who

... was of so hard a complexion that, as he continued among the Spanish Captains, while they were at dinner or supper with him, he would carouse three or four glasses of wine; and, in a bravery, take the glasses between his teeth, and crush them in pieces, and swallow them down, so that oftentimes the blood ran out of his mouth, without any harm at all to him: and this was told me, by diverse credible persons that, many times, stood and beheld him.

To see what kind of excesses eating wineglasses can lead to, I refer you to this post.

If, however, you are in a less excitable mood, Stephen Christomalis provides the world with his reading list for a grad course on writing systems and literacy. Now if I could just pull myself away from this screen, I could indulge myself in such treats as

John Defrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.
While the title suggests that it is more generally on language, the core of the book is on the nature and social context of the Chinese characters, ranging from basic semiotic issues to modern romanization efforts, and the gross misunderstandings most Westerners have of the script.

Enough to make your mouth water, isn't it? Beats reading debates on the fragile economy.

History of language: higher education can be fun

Stephen Chrisomalis is a fun and spirited guy, as I can attest from personal contact. Read this account of in-class research on the history of the word "chairperson" and see if you don't agree that it sounds like practically the Platonic ideal of an undergraduate course-meeting:

Last week I was running a very similar lecture to the one I always, on language and gender, where we talk about whether there are innate sex differences in language usage (not really), whether there are gender differences (yes, albeit highly context-dependent), blah blah blah. We talk about the myth that women talk more than men and get into some of the issues relating to social power. But that’s it. Even though it’s a topic a lot of students are interested in, I hadn’t ever come out of that session feeling as if we had learned anything in particular, or done anything out of the ordinary.

And then we found chairperson. It had ended up on the list of topics I was preparing on the subject, and when I showed the list to my class, they honed in on it right away. We actually started by investigating ‘chairman’, ‘chairwoman’, and ‘chair’, as well – all three are attested in the OED from the 17th century. ‘Chair’ as a title held by a person was surprisingly early (not just ‘he held the chair’ but ‘he was the chair’) at 1658. This alone, based on two minutes’ search of the OED, was worthwhile as a lesson to the students, because chair, too, has been the subject of some ideologically-charged metalanguage. I had thought that I might show them how we could examine the frequency of the various terms on a decade-by-decade basis. But chairperson, sitting there with its date of 1971, was far too tempting a target.

And so off we went on our lexical excursion. I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”

“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

Read the rest here.

The future of the past of anthropology

Or was it the other way around?

Yesterday I crossed the Detroit River to see Stephen Christomalis talk about issues in anthropology raised by his recent book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. The talk was mainly before colleagues and students of his department At Wayne State University, but they did him proud with a decent catered lunch and a comfortable room to listen in. People were very interested in what Steve had to say, and no wonder. His specific research (I suppose we should say "old" research, now that it's been published) on the invention, life, and abandonment of number systems, is pretty darned cool, and some of it was incorporated in the talk. But he also talked about bigger issues, such as the fact that his numerical notation research has led him to reject usefulness of both a particularist view of anthropological reality (everything is unique), and its polar opposite, universalist approaches. Chrisomalis likes the theory that works 99% of the time. Why not all the time? There is some interesting interaction lurking behind that situation. Then there is his championship of historical anthropology. He made the point that almost all theoretical work in anthropology is based on data from merely the last 100 years. What about cultures that died out before ethnographic investigation was devised? It only stands to reason that things that are not present now or in the recent past may well have existed 10,000 years ago. And an understanding of 10,000 years ago may be vitally important to understanding "human nature."

Well, someone who used to write "Muhlberger's Early History" is not going to argue with that!

Image: Stephen talking.