Languages in Papua New Guinea

I remember learning in high school that there are about 2000 living languages in Africa today, although that number is decreasing as lingua francas like Swahili, English, French, and Xhosa become more standardized. This is a pretty large number, though not unimaginably so: Africa is about 11.73 million square miles in area, so on average, an African language might be spoken across about 5900 square miles, an area slightly larger than Connecticut (though this number is a massive oversimplification; most languages overlap geographically with others, many Africans are multilingual, and many areas of Africa are largely uninhabited). And Africa has a population of about 1.2 billion, so the average African language might have about 600,000 speakers (though again, the prevalence of multilinguality throws a wrench in the gears of this calculation, and a few very common languages — like Swahili, which has 50-180 million speakers — skew this number up a lot). In other words, Africa has a lot of languages, but it’s also huge, and therefore doesn’t have a language density too much higher than that of Eurasia.

Recently I read that Papua New Guinea has 840 living languages, almost half as many as all of Africa. That number is almost unimaginably large to me. Here’s a map of Oceania, with Papua New Guinea highlighted:

Papua New Guinea
From Wikimedia Commons.

It’s the eastern half of an Austronesian island and has a landmass of about 179,000 square miles. That gives it a language density of roughly 210 square miles per language. Its population is ~8.4 million, meaning that languages are on average natively spoken by about 10,000 people, or possibly less.

Basically, this is hard for me to imagine because we’re talking about an area that would be a mid-sized nation were it in Africa that nonetheless houses almost half as many languages as the entire continent. Only Vanuatu, another Pacific island nation, has a higher language density, with more than 100 languages over 4700 square miles and 272,000 people.

Silent letters

The other day I came across a wonderful Wikipedia page entitled “List of places in England with counterintuitive pronunciations“. There are so many examples that the list is divided up across two different pages, A-L and M-Z. Unfortunately, the actual pronunciations are given in the International Pronunciation Alphabet, which I can’t read, so I went looking for a more accessible guide and found this one from BBC America. My favorite examples: Woolfardisworthy, which is pronounced woolsery (note that there are literally more silent letters than pronounced ones in the written name), Towcester, pronounced toaster, and Oswaldtwistle, pronounced ozzletwizzle (which is not too counterintuitive, but is a delightful word).

Woolfardisworthy
The name is also sometimes written as it is pronounced. From the Daily Express.

In the spirit of fairness, here’s the list of places in the U.S. with counterintuitive pronunciations. Early on the list is my hometown, Amherst, which is pronounced amerst, with a silent H. Not as bad as a silent “fardisworth”, but I still managed to mispronounce it for the first seven years that I lived here.

Francesco Lana de Terzi

Recently I looked up the term “airship” to make sure that I was using it correctly and came across the Wikipedia page for Francesco Lana de Terzi, a Jesuit priest who came up with an airship design based on copper spheres evacuated of air in 1670. This concept later came to be known as a vacuum airship, now known to be physically implausible on Earth, but possibly useful on planets with lower air pressure.

Flying Boat
Lana de Terzi’s vacuum airship. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lana de Terzi’s prescience was remarkable, both in his recognition of buoyancy as a mechanism for flight and his consideration of the consequences of such an invention:

…God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against his surprise, as the ships at any time could be maneuvered over its public squares and houses? Fortresses and cities could thus be destroyed, with the certainty that the aerial ship could come to no harm, as iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height.

(Source: Fairfield University faculty website)

In this quote, Lana de Terzi predicts the future of warfare with amazing clarity — while also assuming that God would prevent its occurrence. I wonder what he would think if he were brought forward in time to witness the World Wars.

Jane Austen and the War with France

I recently read Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, and while researching a quote from it, I found this page. It has a lot of interesting quotes, but what really caught my interest was this response from the author of the page to a quote criticizing the sedentary lifestyle of Austen’s characters: “It is true that none of them traveled outside of England, but then there were those inconveniences thrown up by the French Army and the Irish patriots.” Until I read this, I hadn’t seriously considered that Austen — and, accordingly, her characters — lived in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, nor could I recall a specific mention of the wars in either of the other Austen novels I’ve read.

(Some spoilers for Persuasion follow.)

Persuasion, as it turns out, is quite explicit in its references to the war with France, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the fact that it was written after the conclusion of the war. One of its primary characters, Captain Wentworth, has this to say on his service in the British Navy:

“I had the good luck, in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted… a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for [my poor old ship] Asp, in half the time; our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition. Four-and-twenty hours more, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers”

Admiral Croft has a comparatively understated view of the dangers of the war, and says this to his seafaring wife in response to Captain Wentworth’s insistence that “women and children have no right to be comfortable on board” a ship:

“Ah! my dear,” said the Admiral, “when he had got a wife, he will sing a different tune. When he is married, if we have the good luck to live to another war, we shall see him do as you and I, and a great many others, have done.”

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s funny that both of these naval officers reference the “good luck” of having to fight a continental power! Captain Wentworth does so with, to borrow a phrase used elsewhere in the novel, a “playful solemnity” that makes it hard to tell how serious he’s being; the Admiral, who is presumably sheltered from unsupported contact with the enemy, appears to be serious.

A darker cast on war appears in the final lines of the novel. Having married a naval officer, Anne Elliot, the protagonist, has to contend with the specter of war:

His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish [the tenderness of her marriage] less, the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.

The only really sincere view of war in the novel remains unspoken.

If you want, you can find out what men have said about Jane Austen here. If you’d rather find out what Jane Austen said about the Napoleonic Wars, you can read Persuasion online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.

Alfred Tennyson and Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen

Right now I’m reading Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion. The copy I own has this quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson on the back: “Miss Austen… was a great artist, equal in her small sphere to Shakespeare.” When I looked up this quote to find more context for it, I found this later quote from Tennyson on this page:

“I am reported to have said that Jane Austen was equal to Shakespeare. What I really said was that, in the narrow sphere of life which she delineated, she pictured her characters as truthfully as Shakespeare. But Austen is to Shakespeare as asteroid to sun. Miss Austen’s novels are perfect works on small scale — beautiful bits of stippling.”

Source: B.C. Southam [Editor] Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870-1940 Volume 2 [1987]

Undoubtedly, there is a vast difference in scope between the two authors. All of Austen’s protagonists are middle- or upper-class, straight, and English; all of her novels are set in England and focus on particular themes and character types; and in the world she wrote of, marriage was the sole legitimate conclusion to romance, and Christianity the sole legitimate form of spirituality.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, set his plays in nations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean (and ultimately moved west in The Tempest), focused on characters of all class backgrounds, introduced African, Asian, and Jewish characters, crossed genre lines, and used fantastical worlds, battlefields, courtrooms, palaces, and more as backdrops. Most importantly, his characters engage in ventures, relationships, and crimes that could not be acknowledged in Austen’s world.

Tennyson’s clarification of his comparison nonetheless seems unfair to Austen, for a number of reasons. Shakespeare wrote for much larger, more diverse audiences than Austen, and in the world of Elizabethan drama, setting plays in a variety of places and times was not an especially unique trait. Austen wrote in a more restrictive environment and worked from humbler sources than Shakespeare — simple, 18th century morality tales provided the basis for her novels — but still vastly expanded the scope of her genre during her career.

Additionally, Shakespeare’s period of maturity was neither as short nor as abruptly ended as Austen’s. Shakespeare’s plays were already in production by 1592, 24 years before his death. By comparison, Austen’s first published novel was released in 1811, only six years before her death. Shakespeare’s four great tragedies were published between 1599 and 1608 — that is, between seven and 16 years after the beginning of his published career. Jane Austen had just reached this period of her career, and had just started to incorporate characters from beyond the borders of England and themes of industrial modernization in her unfinished novel Sanditon, when she died at the age of 41.

Virginia Woolf, in her essay about Austen, makes a strong case for Austen entering a new, more developed phase of her career at the end of her life:

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived… There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed…

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure… But she would have known more… She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is.

In other words, her scope would have expanded, from the “narrow sphere of life which she delineated” to a world that is “larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed.” Woolf, like Tennyson, believed Shakespeare and Austen to be equals in quality, if not in scale. Unlike Tennyson, she did not imagine that Austen was confined to creating “beautiful bits of stippling”; she saw the full scale of Austen’s creative power and imagined it had it gone unhindered.

And finally, Woolf acknowledged that Austen’s genius, though it was fully displayed in her life, was prematurely dissipated by her death:

She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust — but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.

I highly recommend Woolf’s essay, especially if you’re a fan of Austen’s. I also recommend Persuasion, which can be found online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.

Bahá’u’lláh and Mani

I looked up the Bahá’í Faith after reading an irreverent Clickhole article that ranks it as the second best world religion (quote: “Couldn’t quite clinch the number-one spot, but second place is nothing to be ashamed of.”)

Reading about the Bahá’í Faith, I wondered if it was a relative of or derivative of another Iranian religion, Manichaeism — but Manichaeism was founded over a millennium earlier and was extinct by the time the Bahá’í Faith was founded.

The similarities between the two religions are striking. Both were syncretic religions that fused and expanded upon the speech and writings of other major religious leaders, and both specifically cite the Buddha and Jesus Christ as alternate incarnations of the same god. Both were persecuted by their rival (and source) religions — Manichaeism by Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Buddhist, and secular leaders, the Bahá’í Faith by Muslim leaders. And both were founded by Iranian men who were ultimately punished for their dissent from the state religion of the time.

Here’s some background on the two religions:

In Islam, God has 99 names. In the Bahá’í Faith, God has a hundredth, true name — Baha. This is the ‘Greatest Name,’ and is shown here inscribed in a Bahá’í place of worship. Image by Sean M. Scully – own work, Public Domain.

The Bahá’í Faith is a religion that was founded in 1862 AD the prophet Bahá’u’lláh, an Iranian exile to Iraq. He was a follower of the Báb Faith, an Abrahamic faith based on Islam, who borrowed from the Báb’s teachings and claimed that he was the latest in a line of manifestations of God. He cited Jesus, the Buddha, and Muhammad as his immediate predecessors in the line of divine reincarnation. The Bahá’í Faith’s intimate relationship to the major religions has allowed it to become a significant minority religion in a number of regions worldwide — including South Carolina, where followers of the faith make up the second largest religious group. In 2007, Foreign Policy Magazine listed it as the world’s second fastest growing religion after Islam. Today, it is estimated that there over 7 million followers of the faith worldwide.

A 14th century depiction of Jesus Christ as he was viewed in Chinese Manichaeism. By unknown artist of Yüen dynasty China [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Manichaeism was a religion founded by the prophet Mani, an Iranian man who lived from 216 AD to 274 AD in Babylon (in modern day Iraq) during its rule by the Sassanid Empire. Mani claimed that his teachings were a completion of the philosophies of Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus Christ, and that he was the latest in a line of reincarnation including the previous prophets. Manichaean tradition also refers to Mani as a reincarnation of the Hindu figure Krishna — in other words, implying that Mani was an avatar for the Hindu god Vishnu as well as the Abrahamic and Zoroastrian conceptions of god. Manichaeism ultimately spread across Eurasia, gaining significant followings from China to the Roman Empire. It was largely wiped out in the West by Christian opposition. In the Roman Empire, the Emperor Theodosius I sentenced all Manichaean monks to death in 382 AD and converted the Empire to Christianity in 391 AD. Mani himself is believed to have been executed by a Zoroastrian emperor. In the East, it was attacked by secular leaders who also opposed Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions, and by the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was extinct.
Links I used for these summaries:

Why did Iran produce, on two occasions over a millennium apart, religious leaders with such similar revelations? Iran has always been in a unique position in terms of religion. In its ancient imperial periods, Iran was officially Zoroastrian, but it controlled areas with high populations of polytheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and other religions. Greeks, Arabs, Israelites, Hindu Indians, and many other groups coexisted under the Achaemenid and Sassanid Empires. As such, religious tolerance and syncretism were sometimes a necessity for ancient Iranian leaders.

When the Rashidun Caliphate, the first Islamic caliphate, came to prominence and captured Iran, there was resistance from the predominantly Zoroastrian Iranian community — in 644 AD, an Iranian slave assassinated the sitting caliph of the caliphate. Over the following centuries, Iran remained under Islamic control, and it ultimately became one of the leading regions in Islamic theology and philosophy. But it retained elements of Zoroastrianism and independence from the Arabic world. Today, Iranians still celebrate Nowruz, the Zoroastrian new year celebration, and some even speak resentfully of the “Two Centuries of Silence” that followed the Islamic conquest of Iran.

Like Mani, Bahá’u’lláh lived under a theocratic government that nonetheless ruled over people of various religions. By the 19th century, Islam had had extensive cross-cultural exchanges with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, among others. Iran in particular had cultural ties with the Mughal Empire in India, which came into close contact with Buddhism and Hinduism. Bahá’u’lláh and Mani may have attempted, in a similar manner, to unite the ideology of their leaders with their personal ideologies and their respect for the religions of imperial subjects.

Iran has been on both sides of imperial acquisition, and has a rich, complex history of religion as a result. Phenomena like this can be found in many regions of the world: in China, where Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism historically coexisted with folk religions, various Buddhist sects, quasi-religious forms of Confucianism, and even Christian cults arose from the local environment. Along the Swahili Coast, traditional aspects of Bantu religions became associated with Islamic and Christian practices after, respectively, the medieval Indian Ocean trade period and 19th century colonialism. Yet the convergence of religious ideas between Mani and Bahá’u’lláh remains remarkable for the parallel between their reinterpretations of Christian and Buddhist ideology in the context of the ruling religions of their respective times.

Note: I use the phrase ‘the Buddha’ several times here, despite the fact that ‘Buddha’ is often used by Buddhists to refer to various figures who have achieved enlightenment. Both Mani and Bahá’u’lláh borrowed specifically from Gautama Buddha, but may have been influenced by other forms of Buddhism.

Annotating the Internet

The Problem: The Web is big. Really big.

In 2009, Google engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google’s most recent index had found over a trillion unique URLs throughout the World Wide Web:

Even after removing [duplicate websites], we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! 🙂

Needless to say, someone must take this burden upon themselves.

My Task: To Annotate Every Web Page

How do I plan on keeping up with the billions of new pages being added to the web daily? As I see it, there are three possible outcomes:

1. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point I choose an heir to continue my journey. This will happen around 2070, by when the world’s population will have stabilized at 10 billion and the rate of new internet content production will have plateaued. My heir will repeat the process, and within several hundred generations (give or take a few orders of magnitude) the entire world wide web will be annotated at this URL.

2. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point artificial intelligence comes to fruition and completes my task in a matter of seconds. I retire to a cabin in the woods while the rest of the human race tries to figure out why their new supercomputer’s ‘off’ button isn’t working.

3. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point a coronal mass ejection, supervolcano eruption, nuclear war, or other catastrophic event destroys the majority of the world’s internet infrastructure, making my job much easier.

There is also a fourth option…

4. I will never finish annotating the internet.

…but that seems very unlikely.