However, there are times when you’d rather your writings not necessarily be understandable to others. Sometimes, like if you’re keeping a journal and detailing the various angsts and dramas of your life, you’d rather that the relevant parties not be able to read the entries. Similarly, if you’re keeping a grimoire (book of recipes and incantations), a book of shadows (for spells or other magical writings), or even just the list of top secret spices in your world famous marinara sauce, you’ll have a strong motivation to make sure that nobody else gets to to the information. In this sort of a situation, there’s a variety of different ways of going about hiding or obscuring your writing, even though you’re using the same language that everybody around you speaks.

Writing without being read

Now, assuming that you’re writing a physical document, the first, and most simple, is by hiding it. You could write your marinara sauce recipe out in perfectly understandable english, but if it’s locked in a safe at the bottom of the Atlantic, nobody will be able to read it. Similarly, if you keep your diary in a locked box, or even just have a lock on the cover, it’ll be safe from prying eyes.

However, hiding the document can fail. It’s really easy to go and answer the door, leaving your journal in plain sight for any offendable parties to find. Not to mention the fact that all locks are breakable, and if the only thing between your neighbor and your marinara sauce recipe is a cloth and cardboard locking journal, your recipe is practically already stolen.

So, the next step is to somehow hide the writing itself. Things like disappearing invisible ink or ink that’s only exposed with certain light sources are wonderful at this sort of thing. Similarly, you could use some sort of steganography (hiding information within other information), maybe putting a microdot on the page, or making the first letter of every word spell out your real meaning.

These methods have their downfalls too, though. Invisible ink and microdots require specialized methods or technologies, and aren’t really practical to everyday use. Besides, sooner or later, people will notice the UV lamp on your desk and start to wonder why you keep so many blank journals. If you do a “the first letter of every word” sort of thing, then you’ll end up having to write whole paragraphs of gibberish to communicate even the smallest of concepts, and even then, it’ll betray that there’s something else going on.

You could certainly go all out and start using some sort of cipher. Switch z for a, y for b, and so on, until eventually you’ve replaced the whole alphabet with an alternative one. Perhaps you could even go deeper, using some of the more innovative sorts of cryptography out there. (For a great, understandable book on cryptography, check out Simon Singh’s The Code Book). But, encrypting your writing takes forever to encode and decode, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever be able to read and write in a cipher fluidly. Besides, those, too, are crackable.

Perhaps the most complex sort of cipher would be to just use the writing system (and even some vocabulary) from another language. If you’re, for instance, writing English using the Cyrillic alphabet from Russian, it’ll be pretty incomprehensible to your neighbor. However, if you come across somebody who speaks English and reads Russian, your system falls apart.

So, what option does this leave you?

Enter Cryptorthography

‘Cryptorthography’ is a word I’ve made up to describe the creation of secret writing systems. It’s a combination of cryptos (Greek for ‘hidden’), and then the linguistics term ‘orthography’, referring to the writing system and writing rules of a language. ‘orthography’ also comes from Greek, being a combination of orthos (‘correct’) and graphein (‘to write’)

So, how does one practice cryptorthography? It’s actually fairly simple. You just take a given language (or languages), and create a new writing system for it which only you (or a few select people) can understand. This way, you could leave even your most secret writings out on the kitchen table, but nobody would be able to understand them without a fair amount of contemplation or analysis.

By creating your own system, you’ll be able to write and read it without too much trouble, but it’ll be completely opaque to everybody else, no matter which language they speak. It’ll be far faster than coding or ciphers, and doesn’t need to be hidden or obscured to be secret, and since it’s all hand-written, it’ll be far less vulnerable to computer-based assaults because of the trouble of transcribing it into a computer.

Before you start writing all your personal secrets on your front door, it’s important to remember that, just like with the above systems of hiding your meaning, there are weaknesses and places where people could easily figure out what you mean. I’d like to discuss a few of these weaknesses that I’ve come up with, and offer some advice for how to harden your writing system against analysis.

Obscuring the obscure

The most simple way to do this would be just creating new letter forms for your language. If you just use a new symbol in the place of ‘a’, a new one in place of ‘b’, and so on, you’ll quickly have a text that’s unable to be read at first glance. The system would be easy to create, but I’d recommend against it. As soon as somebody started looking, they might well start noticing patterns. If they know (or suspect) that it’s English, they’ll start looking for certain patterns. If they see a single symbol alone, they’ll know, for instance, that it’s either ‘a’ or ‘I’. Similarly, two symbol words are far less common, and give them an inroads to further analysis.

If, on the other hand, you mix it up a bit, you’ll make their lives infinitely more difficult. For instance, if you were to use only the sounds of words and disregard how they’re written, it would instantly complicate analysis. So, instead of “rough”, you’d have ‘ruf’. “You” would become a two symbol sound (‘yu’), and ‘I’ would become two symbols (‘ay’). If you’d like to play it even safer, start marking all the different English vowels. With that step, you’ll confuse anybody who thinks that English only has a, e, i, o and u, and likely stop most casual inquiries.

Another good strategy is to include a few filler characters. If you include in your writing system a symbol or two that you know has no meaning, you can use it with single sound words (‘a’) to throw off analysis. Similarly, just dropping a few of those into random words will force people to try and find a correspondence for something that, well, just doesn’t exist.

While we’re being evil to any potential analysis, one of the advantages to creating a phonetic symbol set is that you can use it to write in other languages as well. If you start including random words in other languages, or substituting say, some Hindi word for their English equivalents, it’ll throw off any attempts to figure out what is what based on the phonology (sound rules) of a language.

For instance, somebody analyzing your system might know that if there are three consonants together in English at the start of a word, the first consonant is always an /s/ sound. Always. So, if they’ve decided what constitute vowels, and then find three consonants before one, they’ll know what your /s/ symbol is. That is, unless you use the Russian word “vsyo” (all) someplace in your text. Then, they’ll have at least two three-consonant clusters, and can’t use the phonology to work their way through it.

Using similar symbols to the existing system can be a double-edged sword: it can both help and hurt you. If your symbols are too similar, your system is far too easy to crack. However, I highly recommend using one or two symbols that are at least close to an existing symbol, however, I’d recommend assigning them a different sound. For instance, one might use a ‘v’ to represent the /k/ sound.

This has the wonderful effect of creating a cognitive mismatch between the system they’re trying to analyze and the system they’re using. As any English-literate learner of Russian will tell you, at first, it’s very tough to see a ‘p’ and hear an ‘r’ sound, even though that’s what Cyrillic does. It won’t stop them, but it’ll certainly make analysis that much more of a pain.

There are other ways to make life difficult for anybody analyzing your writing. If you write from right to left, you’ll create a great many problems for them, just as if you were to write vertically. Along those lines, if you remove spaces and familiar punctuation, it’s even more difficult, both for you and for them.

Also, remember that you don’t need to create an alphabet per se. You might create a syllabary like in Japanese, where the symbols each represent a different syllable (‘ra’ might have one symbol, whereas ‘re’ would have a completely different one). Also, if you’re feeling ambitious, you could make a character set, where each word has a symbol. It’d be a great many symbols, but it’d be very difficult to crack.

Finally, as common sense dictates, throw away the key. Once you’ve created your system and learned it well, hide or destroy your handy reference guide, or else understanding your writing is as easy as looking up the symbols.

It has to make sense to somebody

However, if you spend all your time trying to make reading your system tough on other people, it’s easy to make it tough on you too. There are a few easy ways to avoid this.

Perhaps one of the toughest parts of the process is actually designing the symbols. For that, I highly recommend that you make a trip over to Omniglot, a wonderful website which discusses writing systems around the world and has lots of examples. It’s a great place to blow a few hours, and will show you all the variety of systems out there.

Once you’ve got symbols, make sure you’re combining them in a way that makes sense to you. For instance, I might use a system based on phonetics, where high vowels (like in beet and boot) are marked above the baseline, and low vowels (bat and bot) are the same symbol, but marked below the baseline. However, you can go much more personalized. If a symbol reminds you of the shape of Cape Cod, you might use it for a ‘kay’ sound. Basically, if it makes sense to you, go for it.

Finally, keep in mind the difficulty of writing the symbols you pick. Don’t use anything more complex than necessary, because it’ll only slow you down. Similarly, if you often write with a fountain pen, try to avoid symbols with right to left strokes (assuming you’re writing left-to-right). If you’re going to use this a lot, any corners you can cut now (without making it more difficult to read) will save you a massive amount of time in the future.

Your thirteen spices are safe

If you take the time to create your own writing system and take a few easy steps to harden it, you can sure that nobody will be able to casually peruse your secret recipes and writings.

However, as with all security measures, your secrets are never completely safe. All that locks, encryption, ciphers and even cryptorthography can buy you is time. If somebody has a sample of your writing system, it’s very likely that, given enough time, they’d be able to figure it out.

So, if the CIA wants to find out the secret thirteen spices, chances are, they’ll be able to. However, a little bit of cryptorthography will go a long way towards keeping your recipes mysteriously delicious.

(PS: If this sounds interesting, stay tuned. I might well be holding some sort of a contest where people create secret writing systems and then have other people try and crack them. I’ll announce more details later, but if you’re interested, leave a comment and we’ll be in touch!)

-mancy is what’s called a ‘derivational’ suffix, meaning that it is used to create new words by attaching to an existing word. Usually, these suffixes add a set meaning to a word. For instance, another derivational suffix, ‘-ness’, turns an adjective into a noun which describes a characteristic. So, we take “red” and add “-ness” to get “redness”, the quality of being red.

The function of the suffix -mancy is to indicate “using something as a means of divination (the telling of the future)”. So, we take a word like carte (an Old French word for ‘card’), and then tack on -mancy. Suddenly, we have “cartomancy”, defined as “using cards as a means of divination”, for example, reading the Tarot.

Etymology

Where does -mancy come from? One source, The Skeptic Report article “Divination: A Mancy for every Fancy” (great title), gives the etymology as:

…Many of these are described by words that end with the suffix –mancy, which comes to us from the old French word mancie, which in turn comes from the Greek mantis, meaning ‘prophet’.

However, the Oxford American Dictionary traces the word back to a different Greek word:

ORIGIN from Old French -mancie, via late Latin -mantia from Greek manteia ‘divination.’

I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that mantis and manteia are somehow related, if not different forms of the same root. Also, it’s worth noting that this Greek word mantis ‘prophet’ in the first etymology is still present in Modern English, in the form of the “Praying Mantis”, a type of insect.

Although the trail begins to blur several languages back, it’s fairly obvious that this origins of this suffix came up through Greek, then Latin, then went into Old French, when it was finally borrowed into English. It’s traveled a long way to get here.

Usage

This ‘mancy’ suffix occurs in many places to mark different divination methods. Necromancy is the occult practice of summoning the dead to gain knowledge about the future (necro is a Greek word borrowed into Latin which means ‘death’). Astromancy is an old term for Astrology, charting the stars for information about the future. You’ll recognize “astro” from “astronomy” and “astronaut”, it’s a Greek root which generally refers to stars or space.

Apparently, it can be used with nearly any Latin root to describe whatever sort of divination somebody’s bothered to perform. This site lists many other uses of the term, and discusses such obscure forms of divination as ‘nephromancy’ (the act of analyzing the kidneys of a sacrifice for divinatory purposes) and even ‘chalcomancy’, which is apparently a manner of divination performed by striking brass and copper bowls. Regardless of the specific root, though, you can be fairly sure that any time you stumble across this ‘mancy’ suffix, there’s divination afoot.

It’s also interesting to note that this suffix is still being used to create new words today (in Linguistic terms, it’s still ‘productive’). I got 32 hits on google for “blogomancy”, and more than 200 for “webomancy”. Considering the term “blog” has only arisen in the past few years, it’s safe to say that “-mancy” has stuck around as an independent suffix, and will likely be around for us to use for years to come. Perhaps -mancy’s continued popularity could even be used to predict the future of other Latinate suffixes in English. Anybody up for a little bit of Mancimancy?

Disclaimer

EVP is not a well-studied phenomenon and there is little (if any) scientific evidence in favor of its existence. This post should not be construed as an endorsement of this phenomenon or an assertion of its reality. I try to keep an open mind on such things, but I’m doing this analysis for my own interest (if nothing else, “paraphonetics” is a cool sounding field name), not for any legitimate, scholarly purpose. Take this post (and, if you’d like, the phenomenon itself) with a grain of scientific salt.

What is EVP?

In the words of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena’s FAQ page on EVP:

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is the term traditionally used to describe unexpected sounds or voices sometimes found on recording media. EVP initially involved audio tape recorders, but in later years, virtually any recording medium became a vehicle for phenomena. The term Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) came into being to describe these expanded modes of audio- and video-format communication. Other acronyms used in the literature include Electronic Disturbance Phenomena (EDP) and Trans-Dimensional Communication (TDC).

For a more two-sided (and skeptical) discussion and other resources, I encourage you to visit the Wikipedia page on EVP.

Long story short, EVP are anomalous voices that show up in recordings, often claimed to come from the dead. These voices are reported to be phrases, words, or even dialogues with a living speaker.

Praat and the Paranormal

When I first read about this, I decided to try and find some samples of this phenomenon and run them through Praat, a Phonetic Analysis program. Luckily, the AAEVP provides a number of examples on their site. The one I’ll be analyzing today comes from Vicki Talbott’s Examples, and purports to feature a discussion between her and her son who had recently died, discussing the proper pronunciation of the word “evidentiary”. I encourage you to read her explanation (the last example on her page) and listen to the file a few times before I proceed.

As you can hear, her voice is quite clear (albeit recorded), but the other voice is nearly incomprehensible if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. However, I was curious just how much of the data I’d expect to find in speech would be there, and how much is my brain filling in the blanks. Let’s look a little more closely at the acoustics of the voices.

What’s in a voice?

We hear patterns of sound based on the emphasis and damping of certain parts of the sound spectrum. The vibration of our vocal folds is fairly constant (excepting the occaisional pitch or voicing change), but we’re almost constantly moving our mouths and tongue. Just as your voice changes when you put your mouth to a flexible tube and talk while bending the tube, the sound of your vocal folds vibrating is changed by the position of your tongue, lips, and velum in your mouth and throat. Different vowel sounds are created by modifying the shape of the mouth, which in turn modifies the sound escaping your mouth to be heard by others. This is called the Source-Filter Model of Speech Production.

So, when we hear another person make a sound, say, the vowel ‘i’ (as in feet), we’re analyzing which parts of the sound from their vocal folds are being damped (supressed) and which parts resonate (are stronger). For example, in the vowel /i/, there are strong bands of resonating sound (called ‘formants’) around (roughly) 250hz, 2500hz, and 3000hz. We hear these particular parts of the spectrum being emphasized, and interpret them as somebody making an /i/.

These formants (along with the gaps between them and some other sounds) are what we’re listening for in speech. In clear speech, the formants are well defined and strong, but in distorted or mumbled speech, they’re very tough to pick out, both by computer and with our ears.

Evidentiary evidence

So, for comparison, I’ve recorded a file of myself saying “evidentiary”. Give it a listen, if you’d like.

When I open this file in Praat, it shows me a part of the spectrum (0-5000hz). On that Spectrogram, there are darker parts and lighter parts. The darker parts show the formants (the resonating parts of the spectrum), and the lighter parts show the damped portions. I’ve also had Praat draw red dots on the formants, to make them a bit more distinct. Here’s a screenshot of the spectrogram for my “evidentiary”, labeled with English on top, and IPA on the bottom:

As you can see, the heights and separation between the formants (black parts with red dotted lines) are distinctly different for the initial “e” and the “ia” in the middle. If they weren’t, the vowels would just sound the same. Similarly, there are other trademark signs of speech sounds. The ’sh’ sound (ti in English) shows up with a burst of noise around 3000-7000hz (as one would expect), and the ‘n’ makes everything a bit damped and quieter (as do all nasal sounds). All the formants are well defined, and Praat doesn’t have much trouble finding them and sticking to them.

Now, let’s look at a spectrogram of Talbott’s recording, annotated the same way, with red dot formants, and using her transcriptions from the diagram at the bottom of her site:

Of course, the spacing is different, and based on the white streaks around 200hz and 3500hz, it looks like she’s done some filtering to isolate these sounds. The interesting part about this is that there aren’t any well defined formants. Praat is great at finding formants in good files, but it’s also quite adept at finding them in bakcground noise if there’s not any good speech in a given file. As you can see, there are three pretty constant bands of red dots going across the entire spectrogram, with the same amount of variation in the silence as in the “spoken” portions. Although Praat thinks they’re formants, when compared to the relatively sharp black lines in my version, it looks like it’s just finding whatever pattern it can in the noise.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything in the way of clear formants or expected voice patterns. The noise for the ’sh’ is missing from ‘ti’, the ‘n’ doesn’t seem to affect much, and the formant patterns over the two different /i/’s don’t really match (as they did in mine). Over all, there’s not a lot here to latch on to, and, as you likely noticed when listening to it, it’s by no means obvious what’s being said. Most of the auditory cues we use to pick out meaningful speech are absent acoustically, yet, with a few repetitions, we can usually convince ourselves that we’re hearing speech here.

What does it all mean?

Based on what I see here (in this one example), it seems like many of the fundamental characteristics of human speech are missing in the second, purportedly paranormal voice. I suspect that this is what makes it nearly incomprehensible without coaching.

What does that mean for EVP? Well, nothing, really, because my study here isn’t particularly scientific. Just because a phledgling phonetician doesn’t see speech through one method of analysis doesn’t mean it’s not there. Also, I can’t be sure what sorts of filters were used that might have changed the sound quality. I’m not sure what results a different file would yield.

However, even if this were a perfect analysis, all that I’m proving here is that it’s actually similar to normal human speech. The EVP people will still defend their assertions, and the skeptics will still have their objections to their claims (and methodology, and other such things).

The difficulty with Paraphonetics

The other relevant question is whether such study really matters at all. To the people who believe in EVP, the clarity (or closeness to normal human speech) may not be particularly relevant.

Phonetics is a very exact sort of science, but anything to do with the paranormal is extremely subjective. We can scientifically measure things all day long, but in the end, these sorts of phenomena depend on the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps Vicki Talbott heard “evidentiality” in that noise because of her previous question (using context to make sense of inaudible portions of a “conversation”). Perhaps the noise just coincidentally sounds enough like “evidentiality” to trip the human brain’s speech analysis functions. However, as is the case with all paranormal claims, one can never prove the negative (we can’t prove completely that nothing paranormal occurred in this tape). You’re welcome to believe whatever you’d like on the subject.

Regardless, next time you go out ghost-hunting, you might want to grab a copy of Praat. It can never hurt, and at the very least, Praat can help you find some phantom formants in the background noise. It might not sound scary to you, but in the middle of a research project, they can be downright terrifying.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a blanket term for the idea that the grammar and lexicon of a person’s language subtly affects their thoughts and perspectives on the world. It’s a very hotly contested issue in modern Linguistics, and although the most extreme variations (the idea that language determines your thought) have been disproved through some pretty ingenious color studies, the more subtle varieties are still supported in some senses.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, a speaker of the Hopi language (which has a very different system of tenses than English) will perceive time in a fundamentally different way than an English speaker. Similarly, a Spanish speaker will have a slightly different view of the world than an English speaker, simply due to the underlying differences between the two languages. If this is, in fact, the case, then there are huge ramifications in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and the world in general.

However, up until today, nobody has constructed a method to conclusively prove or disprove the idea of the language you speak affecting your thoughts (linguistic relativity).

The LinguisticMystic Method for proving/disproving the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in three easy steps:

1. Find monolingual native speakers of Hopi and Mandarin Chinese
2. Find a skilled telepath, ideally one who can speak the same language as the researcher
3. If the telepath can read (and understand) the minds of the Hopi and Mandarin people, then complete determinism has been disproved. If he/she can read them and understand parts of it, yet notices differences, there might be some relativity going on. If the only difference between the two is the side of the room they’re sitting in, then I’d venture to say that Linguistic relativity is extremely weak or non-existent.

Actually, there’s some false advertising there. Only step one is easy, the others might just be impossible. With the right cash incentive (and a set of plane tickets), you could likely find a native speaker of pretty much any living language without too much trouble, but finding yourself a skilled telepath is far easier said than done. It’s not like you could just post a few flyers on campus (“Skilled telepaths wanted for research study! $$$$”) or check the Yellow Pages, and many people argue that no such people exist. In fact, the relative (or complete) lack of telepaths is the fatal flaw in this experiment’s design, and one of the many reasons that I myself haven’t submitted this to any reputable journals. However, it does underscore something that I’ve come to terms with throughout my study of the idea of linguistic relativity: without an impossible set of circumstances as in my experiment, it might not be possible to prove or disprove the idea, ever.

Why Sapir-Whorf may never be conclusively proved or disproved

Studying language’s effects on thought is a very troublesome area, because there are so many factors to control.

To begin, everybody views the world differently, and uses their language accordingly. For instance, my family is in the photographic printing business, so I’d likely be an extremely biased sample in a color chip study, due to my overdeveloped scrutiny of color. Similarly, there’s likely to be individual cognitive (and linguistic) quirks with every person, so really, there’s no neutral sample of a given language. You might be able to balance it out by performing the study with 150 speakers of a given language, but sadly, there’s nothing to average, much of it will be subjective.

Culture is also a complicating factor. Cultural beliefs and upbringing can have a profound effect on people’s views of the world, and in general, people sharing a given native language (or dialect) are likely to share a cultural background as well. So, you’re placed in the awkward spot of trying to decide whether a given effect is linguistic or cultural (or both). This gets into a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type of debate that can derail an experiment pretty quickly.

Finally, there’s the issue of the experiment itself. You’re trying to study how people use language, without biasing them. However, you’re going to have to use language to explain the study and conduct the experiments. So, you’ll have to face the added complication of using a translator to pass on instructions, which may bias your participant right from the get-go. Also, keep in mind that, if there is some degree of linguistic relativity, it will likely be universal, and thus, the researcher will be affected by it too. Depending on the nature of these effects, a researcher studying this effect in another person might be like an inmate studying the behavior of fellow inmates. If we’re all looking at the same shadows, who can claim to be objective on their source?

Conclusion

Now, I don’t mean to say that it’s pointless to do research in this area. There are lots of really cool studies going on even now, and every little bit we learn about these effects (or their absence) is a Good Thing™. Although I doubt anybody will ever prove (or disprove) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m less and less sure that we need to.

Humans have successfully lived with gravity throughout the history of our species, and only now are we starting to determine what it actually is. Similarly, if it exists, linguistic relativity has always been a force on us, and we’ve made do so far. There’s not really a way to escape it (that I can think of), so finding out more about it is a purely academic exercise. Knowledge is power though, and every little bit of knowledge about how humans function is a good thing.

However, if you do happen to see a Hopi speaker, a Mandarin speaker, and a telepath walk into a bar, keep them there and shoot me an email. I’ll put your name in my dissertation somewhere.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.

Many cultures and subcultures believe that knowing a person’s name gives you some degree of power over them. In Paganism and Wicca, practitioners will frequently select (or be given) a secret (or “Magikal”) name in addition to their public name. According to conventional belief, this name should never be told to anybody, and reserved only for ritual work, the idea being that this name is the one you use when communicating with the gods. This all stems from the belief that “anything we know the secret name of, we can destroy” (Source…). This idea is not unusual in the world, but still seems quite foriegn to many Westerners.

In American culture, your (only) name is public domain, expected to be used anywhere and everywhere when people need to make reference to you. We give out our name when meeting complete strangers, write it on the various cards and documents we carry at all times, wear little tags on our shirts which proudly display it, and even post it online or in a phonebook, available for anybody who might stumble across it. Our names are common knowledge.

However, I think that the attitude that knowing a name gives you power is still present, to some extent, in Western thought. We really like to know the name for everything and everybody around us, and when we can’t figure it out, we begin to feel uneasy. Imagine meeting a person at a party and introducing yourself, only for them to respond that they won’t tell your their name. If no reason were given, you’d likely feel curious at first, maybe trying to get it out of them later in the conversation. If that didn’t work, you might ask somebody else. Finally, you might be a little bit scared and distance yourself from the nameless person.

People without names are both feared and esteemed in our culture, with examples from entertainment like “V” from “V for Vendetta” or Batman, both of whom use their secrecy and namelessness as a weapon. To this day, anonymity is viewed as dangerous. Just imagine refusing to tell the police officer your name next time you get pulled over. No matter what you did, it’s doubtful that they’d let you go until they found it out, either through your surrender, or their fingerprint database.

Now, more than ever, having somebody’s name gives you power over them. Armed with just a name, you could find all sorts of information scattered over both the internet and the printed world, and with the advent of sites like Facebook and MySpace, you can even find out who matters most to them. Knowledge is power, and a name leads to knowledge about a person.

So, according to some, every nametag, business card, facebook profile, or phonebook entry you bring into existence comes with the ability to control you. However, there are still some people left who are worried about the secrecy of their name. Need proof? Just ask the next telemarketer who calls you for their first and last name. Their silence will speak volumes.

Perhaps the most likely form of abuse would come from the corporate world. Marketing and advertising are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States alone, and with a highly competitive market for many common goods, every company would like an “edge” that would bring the hearts and minds of the people over to their brand.

With enough money, any company can flood the airwaves, streets and billboards with their name and message. If Megacorp A wants you to buy from them, they can advertise as loudly, cleverly, or frequently as they like, but there’s still nothing keeping Megacorp B’s Ads from being just as loud, clever or frequent. New marketing techniques (such as Viral Marketing and new advertising media (internet ads, product placement, adware) can briefly give one company the edge, but the public will quickly move on and the technique may fade away. Right now, ads are only as effective as their exposure and presentation.

There have been efforts to gain the upper hand through other, less obvious (and more devious) means. One such effort is that of Subliminal Advertising. Designed to pass a message by our normal, everyday perception and straight into the mind, Subliminal messages are frequently used in Propaganda, but can occasionally be found in advertising. Take this example:

During the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, a television ad campaigning for Republican candidate George W. Bush showed words (and parts thereof) scaling from the foreground to the background on a television screen. When the word BUREAUCRATS flashed on the screen, one frame showed only the last part, RATS. Democrats promptly asked the FCC to look into the matter, but no penalties were ever assessed in the case. The effect this had on the overall presidential race was unclear.

(From the Wikipedia site on Subliminal Messages)

Subliminal messages are discouraged in advertising, and the FCC and National Association of Broadcasting have both banned the use of Subliminal messages in programming or advertising (More information…), even without conclusive evidence of their effectiveness. Subliminal messages are relatively easy to find and demonstrate, and they are rare enough that having one found and exposed can be a public relations disaster for advertisers.

So what does language and thought have to do with it?

If language used does in fact affect our thoughts (both consciously and unconsciously), then a whole new avenue of research is open to exploitation by those few whose greed may outweigh their ethical standards.

Already, there have been innocuous forays into subtly structuring language to slip a message, feeling or idea by the listener. There are firms who exist solely to advise marketers about potential product names based on their “sound symbolism”. According to these people, certain language sounds denote slowness, daring, or pleasant feelings. Thus, through some strange combination of aesthetics and subliminal suggestion, they claim to be able to design a product name which helps to place your product above the competition’s in the mind of the customer.

As research into the interaction of language and thought continues, more and more techniques will arise to help get Megacorp A’s message into your head more quickly, efficiently, and powerfully than Megacorp B’s. Now more than ever, linguists and psychologists are being snatched up into the corporate world with the goal of learning how to better influence people. Ph.D’s are pitted against preteens in a battle for their purchasing power, and with the advancement of research, there are more and more tantalizing techniques for them to try each day.

Just like fire, gunpowder or dynamite, psychological and linguistic research in this field can be used both for and against the good of the everyday person. I do believe that the increased understanding that can be found through this research will be of benefit to psychology, linguistics, and our understanding of the human mind. However, we must always be on the lookout for the few bad eggs who might want to use these ideas for less-than-ethical purposes.

If all words hypnotize, then it’s vital to not only recognize who your hypnotists are, but also how they do what they do.

Having not been raised in any particular religion, I was somewhat surprised to discover that in the Bible, God is usually addressed informally rather than formally (when the language so permits).

For an example, let’s use Job 10:4 (this passage is the first I found where a person speaks with God. Attribute no special significance to this choice.).

In the New International Version of the Bible, the passage is glossed:

You don’t have human eyes.
You don’t see as people see

Modern English has lost the Second Person informal (‘Thou’), so this informality doesn’t show up at all in Modern English translation.

However, in the King James Version, we start to see this informality:

Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth?

Here, the full informal is used in reference to God. Also interesting is the lack of the capitalization found in the NIV’s “You”, when referring to God.

Interestingly, this same informality showed up in other languages as well. The Reina-Valera Spanish Version of Job 10:4 uses the informal “tu” (lowercase) in place of “Usted”, and the Russian Synodal Version uses the informal “Ti” (uppercase) in place of “Vi” (Sorry, my cyrillics are having issues with this blog). This pattern also held true in French, German, and Portuguese, as best as I can tell.

Of course, there are people who might have a field-day with this information, attributing all sorts of cultural conclusions to these choices (“People must view God as their friend!”). However, rather than jumping to any conclusions, I’m going to ask what other people think.

So, my questions for my readers are twofold:

First, if you speak another language or practice another religion, with what form of address do you address your Deity or Deities? Do you use a formal Pronoun (Usted, You, Vous, Sie, etc.) or an Informal pronoun (Tu, Thou, Du, etc.)? For languages with many levels of formality, please specify.

Second (and answer this only if you’d like), does this informality (or lack thereof) hold significance for you? Do you feel like it’s more a matter of tradition than anything? Do you think that this represents or affects your perception of your God(s)?

If you’d like to post a reply, either click “Comments” below this post, or send me an email (will at this domain name dot com). All comments will be moderated for spam prevention, so yours may take some time to appear.

I hope this yields some interesting answers, and maybe some interesting discussion!

Proponents of E-Prime maintain that the English verb ‘to be’ in all of its forms has no place in discourse. Thus, words like “be, being, been, am, is, isn’t, are, aren’t, was, wasn’t, were, weren’t” are strictly forbidden. However, no ban has been placed on words like “has, become, will, would, do, shall, ought”. Two wonderful poems have been placed on the Wikipedia site, one in E-Prime, and one in Conventional English.

Conventional English
Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

E-Prime
Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

E-Prime’s creator felt that these rules “reduce the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict”. The reasoning for this seems firmly rooted in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as they argue that the use of ‘to be’ can create false security in characteristics (when we say “the coat is red”, we only know that “the coat looks red to me”). They also seem to feel that the elimination of ‘to be’ leads to a language based less on an objective view of reality. Thus, eliminating statements of reality which include no epistemic information (information about how we know what we know) forces us to concentrate on the subjective nature of our interpretations. By adopting this language change, the creators of e-prime seem to feel that our perceptions would gradually shift as well, and eventually, so might our thoughts.

My primary skepticism involves the benefits of adopting such a change. Even if the elimination of ‘to be’ in written and spoken discourse could actually affect our perceptions of the world, I wonder whether the resulting change would really reduce the possibility for conflict and misunderstanding. Sure, false objectivity and lack of epistemic information in language could disappear (at least partially), but I question whether the awkwardness caused by eliminating ‘to be’ might outweigh the benefits and create additional sources of confusion. However, the awkwardness would vary from person to person. I composed this entire post in a basic form of E-Prime (excepting examples), and I did not find it overwhelmingly difficult, but I also cannot imagine it working well in spoken discouse.

E-prime seems quite innovative to me, and although I cannot see it catching on in everyday use, the mere idea provides a great example of thinking outside of the linguistic box in language creation/expansion. It seems like a good step towards precision language, and the idea of eliminating words for higher precision fascinates me. Thus, like many created languages, E-Prime seems destined to a gradual journey down the river to obscurity. However, like all created languages, it offers a new perspective and a new way to view the world.

I’ll end with a great quote from one of the E-Prime sites:

“You don’t need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.”

I’d mentioned High Precision Language in a previous post, and I think it’s time to give it a little more consideration.

Human language is quite often ambiguous, especially outside of context. Take, for instance, the following wonderful examples of ambiguity at its best:

“Police help dog bite victim”

“Have you seen the Queen of England’s hat?”

This ambiguity is seldom a problem, especially in a conversational situation where the participants can either infer (“Oh, Jane was talking about getting bitten by a dog the other day”) or ask for a clarification. Worst comes to worst, there is a misunderstanding and some communicative catastrophy occurs.

Trouble on the Path to Precision

There are some areas where ambiguity becomes far more problematic.

One such area is that of computers. As my computational linguistics professor says, “Computers are stupid. They’ll do exactly what you tell them to.” Computers lack the ability to infer, or to ask for clarification, so if you hand a computer an ambiguous command, it will likely hand you an error in return. To conquer this, we have created a great variety of computer languages (like C, Python, Perl, etc.), all designed to prevent as much ambiguity as possible and offer the computer a command that can only be read in one way.

However, I believe that there are some human realms that are more susceptible to troubles from the ambiguity.

Whether or not language is the basis for human thought (a highly contentious idea, see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), we do a great deal of subvocalization (talking to ourselves, silently) when thinking or working through difficult problems. Language is a good means of communication with ourselves, as well as with others, and when spelling out one’s thoughts, precision is very helpful.

In the legal world, hours upon hours are spent on each document, finding and removing (or exploiting) ambiguity in laws, contracts, evidence, and other such documents. Precise language could quickly eliminate loopholes, shorten text, and ideally make “legalese” obsolete.

In the realm of religion and spirituality, there are many examples of ritualized speech, where precision can be very important. In religious texts (and their translations), ambiguity can cause massive difficulties. As any lawyer can tell you, a single changed word can change the meaning of a text immensely. So, when a person is using a book to develop his or her spirituality, ambiguity can put them in a very difficult position. To avoid this, some religions (such as Islam) have decreed an official language to avoid such troubles in translation. In Islam, the Koran (or Qu’ran) cannot be “translated” from its native Arabic, but rather it is “interpreted” into other languages. These interpretations are not considered valid for any serious religious discussion, and most scholars of Islam are able to read, recite, and explain the Koran in Arabic. (Referencing the Wikipedia Article on the Qu’ran). However, a potent, easy-to-use, and ambiguity free language would be very handy for translation, and for the creation of any texts which may become important to future generations.

However, even in one’s personal worship or rituals, ambiguity in language can be seen to raise difficulties. In Paganism, Wicca, and other spiritual systems involving spellcraft or invocations, words are frequently used in Spells or Rituals as a method of establishing or guiding intent. In these situations, it’s vital to “be careful what you wish for”, because, if the spell is successful, practitioners believe that you just might get it. So, if your language is ambiguous, there’s a chance that your intent might be as well, and that could quickly lead to great difficulties. I suspect that with a High Precision Language, crafting the language for rituals would become a meditation and ritual in-and-of itself, and might well lead to better creation of intent in the long run.

Similarly, in some cultures involving planned ceremonies, the use, delivery, and intent of each word is vital, and some cultures believe that if a single word is misplaced or mis-spoken, the entire ceremony may fail. In these cultures, precision in speech and language is necessary, and ambiguity might be seen as a way to break a perfectly good ceremony. (This example stems from knowledge gained from a class on Native American Culture, but I’m unable to remember the specific tribe or ritual to cite. Assistance or corrections are appreciated.)

So what is High Precision Language?

Well, truthfully, I’m not sure yet. Whether it be an expansion to existing language, a language all its own, or a fool’s pipe-dream, High Precision Language is language easy enough for human use, but precise enough for computers, rituals and lawyers. Although it would undoubtedly be difficult to create, find, or discover, I think that the benefits in situations like those above would be a boon to humanity in a variety of contexts.

The potential of these benefits are what keep me searching for such an obscure concept, and hoping to make progress on what some might consider a fool’s journey.