[lit-ideas] Grice's Riddle
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 09:54:41 -0400 (EDT)
Following McEvoy's post and attending Popperian commentary.
"Riddle of the script: how the world's most difficult puzzle was solved"
"Linear B, the mysterious language discovered on Bronze Age tablets
unearthed in 1900, had baffled linguists for decades."
The problem, of course, is if a language has baffled its own speakers. Only
then would Grice call it 'mysterious'.
"Then along came a 21-year-old graduate named Alice Kober. Margalit Fox
tells the remarkable story."
Soon to be filmed with Gwyneth Paltrow perhaps (in the leading role).
"It was one of the most captivating mysteries of the modern age, requiring
three detectives and 52 years to solve."
Cfr. Fermat's theorem, once called a 'conjecture' (and _STILL_ called a
conjecture by Griceians: "once a conjecture, always a conjecture").
"Along the way, there was magnificent obsession, bitter disappointment,
world-shaking triumph and swift, unexplained death. At the centre of the
mystery lay a set of clay tablets from the ancient Aegean, inscribed more than
3,000 years ago and discovered at the dawn of the 20th century amid the
ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace."
The tablets inscribed what we may dub a Griceian conversation, _sans_
conversation and _sans_ Grice -- but the 'implicatures' were there.
"Written by royal scribes, the tablets teemed with writing like none ever
seen: tiny pictograms in the shapes of swords, horses’ heads, pots and pans,
plus a set of far more cryptic characters whose meaning is still debated
today."
Grice had by then NOT yet written his magisterial seminal masterpiece,
"Meaning", so scholars did not yet know much what they were looking _for_.
"The tablets were unearthed in the spring of 1900 by the great English
archaeologist Arthur Evans. Digging at Knossos, Crete, he discovered a
sprawling palace larger than Buckingham Palace," -- "but without a monarch",
he
added ironically (yet literally), "comprising grand staircases, artisans'
workshops, once-bubbling fountains and hundreds of rooms linked by a network
of
twisting passages."
"It would seem that this monarch was _odd_."
"Evans named the vast edifice the Palace of Minos, for surely, he
reasoned, it was the historic basis of the Classical Greek myth of the
labyrinth,
built for King Minos by the architect Daedalus and housing at its centre the
fearful Minotaur - half-man, half-bull."
Of course we should distinguish between:
"he reasoned surely"
and "surely he reasoned".
---
"From the ruins, Evans unearthed crumbling murals in still vivid hues,
exquisitely worked gold jewellery and a massive alabaster throne, the oldest
throne in Europe. But these treasures paled beside the tablets, which first
came to light on the excavation's eighth day."
"Oddly, one day after the creation of the world, according to the Old
Testament. This scared us."
"Set down in wet clay in about 1450BC, they were, when Evans found them,
Europe’s oldest written records."
"Of course, we must assume that primitive man still SPOKE, even if he
didn't care to write -- but so thus many spouses."
Writing is not really necessary for conversational implicature -- hence
Grice's sobriquet for the phenomenon.
"As he [Evans, not Grice] was painfully aware, there was no swift way of
telling what the strange inscriptions said or which language they recorded."
"He never cared to find out what the inscriptions IMPLICATED. Plus, he
disregarded Grice's interesting distinction between 'natural' and 'non-natural'
meaning. For surely, it was beyond doubt that the inscriptions NATURALLY
meant something -- as black clouds mean rain."
"Evans named the curious writing Linear Script Class B – Linear B for
short. (At Knossos, he would later unearth tablets bearing a somewhat older
script, still undeciphered, which he called Linear A.)"
"I decided to disregard the order of the alphabet, but then, I was pretty
revolutionary then."
"Evans had uncovered the first European bureaucracy, and the tablets, he
knew, were the palace’s account books. If they could be deciphered, they
would illuminate a thriving, wealthy and literate civilisation that had
flourished in the Aegean a full millennium before the glories of classical
Athens."
"So don't expect an Euripides tragedy inscribed there -- compleat with
stage directions."
"Oxford educated, vastly wealthy and used to getting his way, Evans vowed
to solve the riddle of the script. But though his work at Knossos - which,
restored under his direction, is today a bustling tourist attraction -
earned him a knighthood in 1911, he proved no match for Linear B."
The King reported, "He still deserves a knighthood -- perhaps we can make
him a BARON if he gets to decipher what he unartistically calls the Linear
B".
"Though Evans tried ferociously to decipher the tablets, he was unable to
do so – or even to determine what language the tablets recorded – before
he died in 1941, at 90. As a result, Linear B gained a reputation as one of
the most intractable puzzles in history, a locked-room mystery with almost
no possibility of procuring a key" (Metaphorically).
"Then along came Alice Kober. The story of Linear B has long been a
British masculine triumphal narrative, bracketed by two remarkable Englishmen:
Evans and Michael Ventris, the dashing young amateur who, against all odds,
deciphered the script in 1952."
"But at the narrative’s centre there stands an equally remarkable American
woman: Ms. Kober, an overworked, underpaid classics professor at Brooklyn
College in New York City."
Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City, which is a
collective name.
"For it was Ms. Kober, sitting night after night at her dining table, who
hunted down the hidden patterns within the script that would furnish the
long-sought key." (metaphorically).
"Though the full extent of her work remained unknown for decades (Kober’s
private writings became available only recently), scholars of the
decipherment now believe that without her painstaking analysis, Linear B would
never
have been deciphered when it was, if ever."
"The daughter immigrants from Hungary -- another country with a 'myster
ious' language, some say --, Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in Manhattan in
1906."
Manhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, a collective name.
"Kober's childhood had none of Evans's privilege or even Ventris's
middle-class certainties: Her father was an upholsterer and in later years an
apartment-building superintendent."
"But I loved the Central Park - and what more can you ask".
"As an undergraduate at Hunter College, part of the city's public
university system, Kober took a course in early Greek life" -- as opposed to
late
Greek death -- and it appears to have been there that she encountered Linear
B."
"On her graduation in 1928, the 21 year-old confidently announced that she
would one day decipher the script. No one believed her, but she very nearly
kept her word."
"Hunting the script: Alice Kober spent 20 years searching for hidden
patterns in Linear B."
"At Evans’s death, only a few facts about Linear B had been established."
"It was written from left to right and employed about about 85 basic
characters -- which may we call 'letters'".
"The number of characters revealed Linear B to be a syllabic script, in
which each character stood for a distinct syllable of the ancient language.
These were:
ma
pa
bo
do
tam
and
kam.
"Many of the tablets were inventories, counting everything in the palace
storehouses from chariot wheels (broken and unbroken) to cattle to litres of
wine."
"The Linear B numerical system was easily understood."
"A base-10 system it was notated by means of five characters (denoting 1,
10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000), which could be used in combination."
"It is surprising the amount of wine bottles the monarch kept".
"The tablets also contained pictograms, which stood for whole words and
showed the objects inventoried. Many were understandable"
-- including bottle wines --
"And yet, when it came to the non-pictographic signs that littered Linear
B, which appeared in small strings called “sign-groups”, Evans was
flummoxed. When he died, the meaning of only a single Linear B word was known."
"The word was “total”"
As in "We had a total party".
"This was revealed by the fact that it appeared regularly at the bottom of
inventories."
"We had five bottles of wine for breakfast, three for lunch and seven for
dinner. The total you should calculate. Since we need to replace the empty
bottles for full ones -- for tomorrow's breakfast."
Another context:
"The prince came with his children: three girls, one son, and a wife, and
five pets. So you should calculate the TOTAL of individuals in the rather
small hall where we welcomed him."
It was not clear if the Minoans used 'total' as a 'noun' or an 'adjective'
(or both). "Not a verb, we expect."
"For the decipherment to advance, as Kober declared in a 1948 lecture, it
would be necessary “to develop a science of graphics”. It was just such a
science that she, working uncompensated and largely unheralded, set out to
construct."
"Alice Kober never married, nor is there evidence she ever had a partner."
Of course we shouldn't be mentioning this, but this is what you call the
popular press.
"Ms. Kober's life was her work, and what a great deal of work there was.
Night after night, after her classes were taught and her papers graded, she
sat at the table in the house in Brooklyn she shared with her widowed mother
and pored over the strange Cretan inscriptions."
Her widowed mother served her tea -- with biscuits. She grew an interest
for 'mysterious languages', too, and it reminded her of Old Hungarian.
"Kober's first order of business was frequency analysis: the creation of
statistics “of the kind so successfully used in the deciphering and decoding
of secret messages,” as she wrote, for every character of the script.
Anyone who has solved a Sunday paper cryptogram has met frequency analysis
head-on."
"And Mom loved crrosswords."
"At its simplest, it entails pure counting, with the decipherer tabulating
the number of times a particular character appears in a particular text. If
the text is long enough, the frequency count for each letter should mirror
its statistical frequency in the language as a whole. Kober compiled
statistics on each character" -- especially
"total"
-- tabulating its incidence at the beginnings of words, the middles, the
ends, in combination with every other character and much else."
"When Ms. Kober began her work in the early thirties, Kober kept her
statistics in a series of notebooks. But during the Second World War and for
years afterwards, paper was scarce, and she could no longer get notebooks.
Undaunted, she scissored by hand an immense set of “index cards” from any
spare paper she could find - the backs of church circulars and greeting cards
and a great many checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the Brooklyn
College library. Her dedication almost defies belief."
Not mine, but the original writer.
"In a letter to a colleague in 1947, Ms. Kober itemised the time it took to
compile a single statistic: “You can figure out for yourself how long it
will take to compare each of 78 signs with 78 other signs, at 15 minutes
(with luck) for each comparison. Let’s see, 78 times 77 times 15 minutes –
that’s about 1,500 hours.”
Over the years, Kober cut and annotated 180,000 cards, storing them in
empty cigarette cartons, the one paper product of which, sadly, she seemed to
have no shortage. Even now, to open one of her ersatz file boxes is to be
met with the faint whiff of midcentury tobacco. From the start, Kober
approached the decipherment differently than other investigators."
"Grice was still unknown then, which didn't help".
"To her great disgust, most scholars persisted in looking at the problem
through the wrong end of the telescope, seeking first to identify the
language the Minoans spoke and only afterwards to unravel the script.
Everyone, or
so it seemed, had a theory about what language the tablets recorded.
Ventris was convinced it was the lost Etruscan tongue, and clung steadfastly
to
the idea until weeks before the decipherment."
Ventris loved what he called the "Etruscan" countryside, which others --
less cultivated ones -- call "Tuscany".
"Others held even stranger notions. “It is possible to prove, quite
logically, that the Cretans spoke any language whatever known to have existed
at
that time – provided only that one disregards the fact that half a dozen
other possibilities are equally logical and equally likely", a mathematician
said, which was hardly illuminating, but typical of mathematicians.
“One of my correspondents maintains that they were Celts, on their way to
Ireland and England, and another insists that they are related to the
Polynesians of the Pacific.”
--- "But if they were from England, surely they would speak English -- or
"Anglo-Saxon" at least, to use the politically correct term".
"Rather than speculating on the language of the script, or on how to
pronounce its symbols, Kober analysed those symbols as abstract objects of pure
form. She was willing to inhabit, as she evocatively wrote, a world of “form
without meaning” for however long it took."
This was anti-Griceian in spirit.
"A haunting riddle from my childhood gives a taste of what it's like to
dwell in that world. And, by coincidence, its solution is all too relevant to
Alice Kober's life: A crossbar, and a circle complete. An upright where two
half-circles meet. A triangle standing on its own two feet. Two
half-circles. And a circle complete."
"The riddle describes written symbols. To solve it, think of each line as
invoking one or more of those symbols as objects of pure form, with neither
sound nor meaning attached."
"The answer is this."
T - O - B - A - C - C - O
the substance which cigarettes are made of.
-- She concluded that (some of) the Minoans smoked.
"Inhabiting the world of form without meaning let Kober make vital
discoveries. Her first, in the mid-1940s, was that the language of Linear B was
inflected."
"That is, the Minoan language, like English, relied on word endings, or
suffixes, to give its sentences grammar, much as Latin, German or Spanish does
-- "not to mention English -- then why mention?"
"The discovery was born of her relentless search for patterns. Among those
she identified were three-word sets sharing similar suffixes, which
Ventris would waggishly name “Kober’s triplets”. These “triplets” let Kober
pinpoint critical relationships among the characters of Linear B -
relationships that come to the fore, as she discovered, whenever an inflected
language
is written with syllabic script."
"Kober next drew up a 5-by-2 grid of these related characters. As she knew,
if the phonetic values of even a few characters could be determined, the
interdependencies she plotted would let the whole grid fill itself in, in a
domino reaction. And it was precisely these relationships that let Ventris,
after reading her published articles in the late Forties, make a crucial
intuitive leap and then, using the web of interdependencies she had set up,
unlock the mystery of Linear B."
"It could so easily have been Kober who solved the 50-year riddle. But on
May 16 1950, Alice Kober died, aged 43. No one knows what she died from, but
it seems probable, given her heavy smoking, that she had some form of
cancer."
which is, ironically, back to
T - O - B - A - C - C - O
"In June 1952, Ventris, just shy of his 30th birthday, solved the riddle of
Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had never been to Oxford university
-- or any other university for that matter."
"But he had a prodigy’s gift for languages and an obsession with the
tablets that dated to his youth. Everyone knew that the tablets were the
municipal documents of a Bronze Age Cretan kingdom. What if, Ventris wondered,
some of the related words in Kober’s “triplets” were actually related forms of
Cretan place names – forms analogous to English words such as “
Britain/Briton/British”?"
"With this in mind, and an ignorance of Grice, he began plugging phonetic
values into the triplets."
"One word in particular reared up seductively. Ventris’s analysis suggested
that the first character stood for the syllable
“ko”,
the next for
“no”,
and the third for
“so”.
“Ko-no-so” recalled a particular place – and not just any place, but
Knossos, the chief city of Cretan antiquity.
"It would have been different if the tablets read: "Ox" followed by "ford".
"On the strength of this word, Ventris started plugging sound values into
other words on the tablets. They too yielded Cretan place names, spelled
syllabically, including “a-mi-ni-so” (Amnisos) and “tu-ri-so” (Tulissos). As
predicted, each correct sound value generated new ones in a chain
reaction. As Ventris was able to read more and more words on the tablets, the
solution massed before his eyes."
"On June 1 1952, Ventris took the microphone at BBC Radio to announce his
discovery: Linear B recorded a very early Greek dialect – spoken long before
Hellenic peoples were known to have existed, 500 years before Homer and
seven centuries before the advent of the Greek alphabet."
"His great triumph would end in tragedy. Beset by self-doubt as he was
invited to speak before the world’s greatest learned bodies, Ventris died four
years later, at 34, in a swift, strange car crash that some pessimist
observers believe was suicide" -- while others think it was just casual. (The
traffic was terrible on that 'strange' day).
"“I don’t like the idea of getting paid for scholarly writing,” Ms. Kober
had said in 1948, two years before her own untimely death. “If I wanted to
make money writing, I’d write detective stories.” That, as it turns out,
is precisely what she was writing: read today, her work is a forensic
playbook for archaeological decipherment. And it is something even more
valuable
besides: the story of an unsung heroine that can, at last, be properly
told."
Much later, Grice read the tablets.
"We may still want to investigate what they IMPLICATE -- in my favoured
jargon."
Cheers,
Speranza
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