Shakespeare made shit up

Well, duh. But really, he made up an astounding number of words and phrases! He lived in a time where language was flexing to accomodate the influences of merging dialects, and the populace had no expectation of a set syntax or vocabulary. Simply, the average audience member was prepared for verbal innovation due to the incredible linguistic commingling underway in 17thC london.

But Chaucer...now Chaucer had it good. He could choose between clawed and clew, ached and oke, climbed and clomb, and he variously used hi, hem and her to denote they, them and their. The English of the time had not yet settled into even a simple set of plurals, and gender was still applied slipshod across the land according to local dialect. Chaucer, a relatively cosmopolitan man, simply chose his verbiage according to scanning expediency. Lucky sod.

But all this is leading to my minor obsession; the greater and lesser vowel shifts that swept across the english language and changed vowel pronunciation forever. For example, the Domesday book is pronounced doomsday not because of some apocolyptic association with the census, but because "Dome" (for domestic census) was actually pronounced "doom" back in the day. Why did we lower the vowel sound? Nobody knows, and it happened to all vowels across the board. I'm fascinated by this, and if I have one complaint about Bill Bryson's fantastic book, "Mother Tongue", it's just that it can't unravel this particular knot for me. i guess i'll keep reading.

Eureka, Archimedes!

Ok, so this isn't actually a book review, but it's about a book, so it still counts. I seem to be celebrating having finished with my first round of marking by watching a documentary about the history of mathematics, but if I didn't love this stuff I wouldn't do it for a living. I'm watching Nova: Infinite Secrets, which is about a lost Archimedes manuscript in which he appears to have been working with infinities. In particular, he appears to have developed techniques very similar to those of integral calculus, almost 2000 years before its credited invention by Newton and Leibniz. Integral calculus is central to applied mathematics and engineering - so it's not just fun, kids, it's science!

The documentary is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is a manuscript by Archimedes which had since been cleaned off and reused as a prayer book, with the original text only barely visible. It talks about how the palimpsest was rediscovered by historians and is being restored and redeciphered by scholars from various fields. It's an incredibly difficult process, since it involves an attempt to read a text (already very old) which has since been overwritten and has had to weather plenty of abuse.

The bonus in the documentary for me is that one of the scholars involved is a Stanford Classics prof (a historian of ancient mathematics), whose seminar in Plato's Philosophy of Math was one of the main things which kicked me into history and philosophy of mathematics in the first place. The comments he gave me on what became the second chapter of my dissertation were very, very useful. He's interviewed in the documentary about the significance of the mathematical work in the palimpsest, and gives a very articulate and accessible account.

Highly recommended, and of both historical and mathematical interest! (Who better for a classicist and a logician jointly to celebrate than Archimedes?)

"Kurt is Up in Heaven Now"

I am sad this morning, because Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday, at the age of 84. I would write a review of one of his books, or write about what kind of person he was, but so many much more talented writers than I am have already done so.

So here is the theme of Slaughterhouse Five, summarised by the New York Times Book Review:

Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.

And as for the title of this post, it's from something he said here, which also does a better job of showing what kind of person he was than whatever I might write about him. RIP.

So it goes.