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| About a week ago I was feeling rather worn out and tired of my non-fiction diet, so I thought I'd see if I could find a copy of George MacDonald's Lilith. I had read his Phantastes several months ago and enjoyed it quite a bit, and thought that another dose of fantasy might be nice. I didn't find Lilith at first, but saw C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and decided to read that instead. So I did. Then I got Perelandra, the second book in the trilogy. I just finished reading that tonight, and am eager to read the third book, That Hideous Strength. I think I probably won't read it right away, though - I'm starting to feel a little fantasy'd-out. :-} And it's a longer book, and I don't think I'll have time to finish reading it before the wedding. So I may leave it as an August project for when I'm in Boston.
Anyway, it is a very interesting trilogy. I didn't really have any expectations coming into it, but it still has been much different from what I might have expected. I don't want to tell any spoilers, but I'll say that it's amazing how seamlessly Lewis interweaves classical mythology, medieval theology, modern science, and the Bible itself into the plot. As far as writing style goes, I still think he's good but not great, but for this interweaving of things he is like Mozart - every part is necessary and nothing is redundant. I've read the summary on the back of the book for That Hideous Strength, and the short Preface at the beginning, and it turns out that the interweaving is about to become even more complex. Specifically, Arthurian legend is going to be brought into the mix, as well as - believe it or not - Tolkien's Numinor and the True West!! I get the feeling that I'll have to start reading Tolkien once I finish this trilogy.... (I know, I know, everyone has been telling me for years that I need to read Tolkien..... )
So there's my bit of fantasy reading lately. Oh, I did finally find Lilith - I might try to read it next instead of That Hideous Strength, but again, I think I might be tired of fantasy for now. I might return to my book about The Last Mughal and the events of 1857 in Delhi and around India.
In other news, I've started packing my books this week! I now have two completely empty shelves in one bookcase, two or three more empty shelves in another, and some holes in a few other shelves. Oh, but that's a little misleading because I used to have more books than bookshelf space, and as I've packed books I have put others in their place on the shelves, so really I've packed more than I realize. Still...There's a lot of books left to pack. I figure it's better to do the packing early and take my time rather than being rushed at the end of August. I've lived in Boston just over 6 years now, and it will feel a bit odd to leave, I think. Oh well - I'm moving on to something (someone!) much better. 
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| In my last entry I said that 4000 BC, the time of proto-Indo-European (PIE), was about right if you take a literal view of the chronology in Genesis, at least as far as the Tower of Babel is concerned. That isn't correct. If the chronology is literal, then the Tower of Babel must have happened close to 2500 BC. Plus, 4000 BC is the *earliest* PIE could have been spoken (according to this book).
But! This actually begins to get really intriguing now...
The author claims that the *latest* PIE could have been spoken was somewhere around 2500 BC. Hm.... His claim is (going to be - I think) that speakers of the 12 major branches of PIE (Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Albanian, Phrygian, Hellenic, Armenian, Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian) burst out of the PIE homeland in the steppes just north of the Caucasus in the centuries surrounding 2500 BC, as a direct result of the discovery/development of wheels, wagons, and chariots, and the domestication of the horse in the first half of the 3rd century BC. This breaking out of the steppes and onto the (Biblical) world scene, it is claimed, occurred suddenly, and apparently at about the same time as the Tower of Babel incident. So perhaps there's a connection between these events - a possibility which would take the Tower of Babel out of the legendary and put it firmly in history. How exactly such a rearrangement of history would need to be interpreted, Biblically, I honestly don't know, but that's not my point right now.
Also intriguing is the fact that there *are* 12 major branches of PIE. Why is this intriguing? There are also 12 families of Japheth listed in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10), several of which can be connected directly with the PIE daughter languages. For completeness, the 12 families of Japheth are: Ashkenaz, Riphath, Togarmah, Magog, Madai, Elisha, Tarshish, Kittim, Dodanim, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. (Ashkenaz through Togarmah are the sons of Gomer, and Elishah through Dodanim are the sons of Javan, so there are actually 14 names in total). Some of these can be linked to PIE daughter languages through linguistic and geographical evidence (but I must confess that I am not able to evaluate some of this evidence myself):
PIE daughters Japhetic families (families in parentheses are my own wild guesses)
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Baltic (Magog)
Slavic (Meshech)
Germanic Ashkenaz
Celtic Tarshish
Italic Tiras
Albanian (Kittim)
Phrygian (Riphath)
Hellenic Elishah
Armenian Togarmah
Anatolian (Dodanim)
Indo-Iranian Madai
Tocharian (Tubal)
I won't go into the reasons for lining up the languages with the families now, partly because (as I said) I am not really in a good position to evaluate the evidence, other than qualitatively: Elishah, Togarmah, Madai, and Tiras seem relatively solid, Ashkenaz less so, and Tarshish even a bit less. But that's 6 out of 12 which have been linked by some scholars - not too bad.
By the way, dating the Tower of Babel to around 2500 BC is based on the dating of Abraham to somewhere between 2500 and 2000 BC, which seems very solid. The chronology leading up to Abraham in Genesis 11 tells how old each member of the genealogy was when he begat the next member of the genealogy, and these are "normal" numbers by our current standards, in the range from 29 to 34. We're also told how long each member lived after begetting the next generation - numbers are still in the hundreds of years - and whether you want to take that literally or not, I'm not going to make any argument one way or the other right now. (There's also the trouble with figuring out just how old Terah was when each of his three sons was born, including Abraham. But that's only one generation, which doesn't affect the broader chronology from Babel to Abraham significantly). By this chronology, the Tower of Babel must have happened somewhere around 250 or 300 years before the birth of Abraham. So everything from Genesis to PIE seems to be well within the margins of error.
Much more is known about Indo-European languages than any other language family (and even here the picture is vastly incomplete). It will be interesting to see whether similar links between the families of Ham and Shem can be linked to various languages in some sort of ordered way. To some degree this can be done, although it seems more convoluted ("Semitic" languages end up as a subset of "Hamitic" languages, etc.).
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| It so happens that a good chunk of my free-time reading recently has had something to do with historical linguistics. LDB loaned me his copy of "The Mother Tongue" to read, so I've been working my way through that. It is about the history of the English language - historical linguistics! It kept talking about Norse, so I started getting interested in old Norse literature. I already have a few small books of Norse sagas - I read The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki soon after reading Beowulf a few years ago - so I turned to one of the books that I haven't made time to read yet - the Vinland Sagas. I opened it up and there was already a bookmark in the Introduction (I had started reading the introduction a while ago), so I picked up where I left off. This part of the Introduction has a bunch of stuff about the language, and again we have historical linguistics! A few days ago I used some of my still-unspent Christmas gift card money to buy The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. It's really about defining the Proto-Indo-European homeland and the spread of PIE peoples as far as western Europe and western China (and beyond). The first part of the book is about the PIE language and how the vocabulary and timeline of PIE and its descendant languages is sorted out - historical linguistics! Another book that I started reading a while ago and then got distracted from - but would like to go back to now - is Empires of the Word, a book not about how languages change, but about how they move around to be the major spoken languages of first this region, then that, then both, then none (extinction).
So it's a delightful mix of reading. But here's my problem... The author of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language says that most linguists believe the Anatolian branch of PIE split off from a proto-PIE because it has several rather peculiar features of grammar that aren't shared by the rest of the PIE languages. These peculiarities include 2 genders (rather than 3), 2 tenses (rather than 6), and 2 numbers - singular and plural - (rather than 3 - singular, plural, and dual). The claim apparently is that proto-PIE was like Anatolian, but PIE itself somehow evolved/developed the extra tenses, gender, and number. This strikes me as rather unlikely - how often do you hear people complain that the foreign language they are learning doesn't have enough tenses and genders??? It seems to me that the natural direction for language change is in the other direction, especially in the relatively short period of time allowed for PIE to develop from proto-PIE. Why not rather say that Anatolian is the language branch that changed by simplifying its grammar? The fact is that Anatolian-PIE speakers moved into Anatolia from outside, into a part of the world where Semitic languages were dominant. Semitic languages characteristically have only two tenses and two genders. I thought they had a dual number, but perhaps not. [NOTE: I am making claims about Semitic based on what I remember - rather vaguely - from a short typological sketch I did of Aramaic back when I was in college, and from the little bit of Hebrew I (think I) know - and therefore my conclusions should be treated rather sceptically.] It would be the most natural thing in the world for the Anatolian-PIE language to be influenced in the simplifying direction by its new neighbor languages of Semitic origin.
Anyway, that's my soapbox. I'm also a little surprised at the timeline - I thought PIE was supposed to be much older than it apparently is. So far it looks like the author is going to claim that PIE was spoken around 4000 BC - the rather intriguing thing about this is that it puts PIE right around the right time for the Tower of Babel, if we take the post-Tower of Babel chronology in the Bible to be historical (as opposed to literary). Hmmm......
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| It's been a while since I last posted anything here. There's been lots going on... Teaching is hard, but fun and educational; collaborations are good; learning about biophysics, grant-writing, the world of academia, etc. There's wedding planning, visits to St. Louis, long phone calls that are somehow never quite long enough. And of course the usual reading. I woke up at 4am this morning and decided to finish reading this biography of Tamerlane. Very good book, well written, interesting. Tamerlane (a corruption of "Temur the Lame") was a nomadic Central Asian warrior-conqueror in the tradition of Genghis Khan, from modern-day Uzbekistan. He conquered 4 of the 5 or so daughter empires of Genghis Khan's original empire, including the (Russian) Golden Horde, the (Middle Eastern) Hulagid empire, the (Indian) Moghul empire, and his own native (Central Asian) Chagatay empire. He died of old age when en route to try conquering the (Chinese) Ming dynasty, which had succeeded Kubla Khan's Yuan dynasty. All in all a very interesting figure, and a good book for whetting the appetite for more of non-Western history.
In other news, my friend JL and I (and sometimes PJ, when he is able) have been listening to a set of lectures on Genesis, and reading some of the contemporaneous creation and flood myths from Mesopotamia and thereabouts. Very interesting stuff - learning a TON. I've also been listening to lectures from Reformed Theological Seminary for free at iTunes University (check it out! <http://itunes.rts.edu/>). Mostly I've been listening to lectures on Church History. Makes me want to read more of the writings of the early church fathers. I think when I move to St. Louis I may try to recruit some folks from church for an Early Church reading club. Hehe, maybe we could make a pun out of it and meet to discuss our readings early on Sunday mornings. 
My coffee table is currently strewn with rubber bands, empty coin rolls, thumb tacks, exacto-knives, super glue, and other such stuff. I'm not usually one to make things with my hands, but the other day I went to Staples to buy these things in order to play with some ideas for building simple models of the the trachea + vocal folds. I can blow into one end of a coin roll which acts like the trachea, and a rubber band glued to the other end will be set into vibration, much like the vocal folds. I took a couple of these models down to DM's lab and we made some high-speed video and audio recordings of these vibrating "vocal folds". It's pretty neat stuff. What blew our minds was that the main vibratory cycle gets much longer as the pitch goes up - completely counter-intuitive, but the explanation seems to be that there are somehow some secondary vibrations of a very different nature which give rise to the percept of a higher pitch. Not sure how relevant this is to vocal fold vibration in real life, but it was quite interesting to see.
Psalm 19 keeps coming up in a variety of unrelated contexts, which is cool. Meredith and I are reading the Psalms backward as a countdown to the wedding. This evening we read Psalm 82 - only 82 days left before we get married!!  Reading the Psalms like this has shown me that it's been a while since I last read them!
Don Richardson (author of The Peace Child) preached at church yesterday, and was the speaker for the Perspectives course at Park Street this evening. Visitors were welcome to come to this, although these are usually reserved for registered participants for the entire course. It was very interesting, very good, and it was great to finally meet Don and Carol, whom my parents know and whose names and stories I grew up hearing about. I was telling Meredith yesterday that Don's story was so much a part of my growing up years that I am always amazed when I find people who haven't heard of it. Today's seminar in the Perspectives course began with a lot of linguistics, which I was very pleasantly surprised at.
And now I think I need to try to go back to sleep for an hour and a half "nap" before getting up for the rest of the day. Who knows, maybe I'll write another entry in the near future? :-}
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This was taken in front of Disneyland's California Adventure park. Meredith is sitting in the "A" at the end of "California". This was a day or two after we got engaged. We're a bit wet because we had just been on the Grizzly River Run a few times in a row.
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