Rorschach Philology

Six years ago, Fox News (and imitators) ran a most ill-founded story in a genre that we may term Allah-sightings.

The underbelly of a plane was streaked, thus:

Mene, mene, tekel  upharsin

Omigosh!  Arabic writing!  Terrorists on the tarmac!  How did they get access to the airplane!!  At whom shall we point the finger of blame!!!

BLUF:  Bogus.  The streaks on the airplane are not writing of any sort, let alone a terrorist message in Arabic.  (Our post on the matter, and on the underlying problem of the semiotic ambiguity of abstract images, can be viewed  here.)

Later, someone imagined that, by tilting your head a certain way, a decorative swipe on a certain brand of sneakers looked rather like … you guessed it,  “Allah”.  Only this time, it hadn’t been placed there by jihadis;  rather, by Islamophobes, since shoes are well-known to be held in low esteem in circum-Mediterranean Islamic lands.  Hullabaloo on social media.  Fortunately that story died before it could become a staple of the jihadi media, else we might have faced further killings such as those that followed the Danish-cartoons scandal.
Here you can read about that episode:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/nike-to-trash-trainers-that-offended-islam-1257776.html

Again:  Bogus. Judge for yourself:

And now we are being told, by such gullible outlets as the BBC and the New York Times, that (in the words of the headline in National Geographic),

    Viking Funeral Clothes Reveal Surprising Arabic Lettering

Namely, once again, that ubiquitous "Allah".  Along with (as a bonus) "Ali", another simple graph that is little more than an extended swoop.
The proper response to such a claim (by a Swedish “textile archaeologist”, not a linguist) is to present the evidence, and weigh it.  But that would be merely one step in the arduous progress of empirical science.  Instead, to pump up their headlines, the media assume the truth of that unproven assertion, reporting the claims in factive mood, as “Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script? “(History) and “Why did Vikings have 'Allah' embroidered into funeral clothes?” (BBC).   At the same level:  Has Eric the Red stopped beating his wife?

What is really going on this that the clothing is decorated with an abstract geometrical blocky design, part of which reminded the textile specialist of something she’d seen somewhere in Arabic script -- specifically, the early variety known as Kufic script -- or rather, a decorative blocky variant of Kufic. 

Now, it is unquestionably the case that Arabic scripts have been used for calligraphy, typically depicting brief Koranic quotations.   Great ingenuity was devoted to some of these, so that the results  in some cases  resembled those Hispanic-American “tags” which only the initiated could make any sense of, or the similarly cryptic Hippie-era posters for San Francisco rock concerts.

Poster for a SF Shiite mosque
known as the “Fillmore West”.
Notice the “Allah” hidden in the picture.

The fabric pattern in question, however, is extremely simple, and likely merely generic.  Thus:

For an example of genuine Kufic-block-script-(influenced) design, cf. this:

And sure, if you select a bit here and a bit there, there is a sort of resemblance -- as there could hardly fail to be  in sketches so schematic.  Actually, even at that, the match is not close, so that the Swedes conceded that, to read the thing as “Allah”, you had to read it in a mirror.   Which would seem to be a sort of Black-Mass version of the holy name, like Satanists chanting the Credo backwards.  Hardly evidence of Islamic influence.

(For many examples of  subjectively-similar or suggestive designs, simply google-image "fret motifs".  You will find  to your surprise  that Islamic influence extended even to the Aztecs and the ancient Greeks!)

[Note btw, that that serious-looking graphic with the mirror and all, is by no means a photo of any part of the actual tattered garments.  Rather, it is an idealization of a piece of the garment, which then in turn is given subjective interpretation.  Thus, there are actually two layers of "Rorschach" here.]

Medieval Islamic abstract decorative designs, whether linguistic-influenced or not, are quite lovely, and have been influential in many sister cultures.    As to whether these Viking funeral garments were directly or indirectly influenced by these, I can have no opinion, not being an art historian.   

Certainly it is within the bounds of historical possibility that there was contact, since the Vikings were great seafarers, and the Arabs  great wayfarers; they intersected, in particular, during the time of the Moors in Spain.  (Raid on Seville, 844 A.D.)

 
But as a student of linguistic sociology, I detect a few clues as to why, despite but a slender stalk of empirical support, this story has legs.  By the same NY Times reporter  (though in this case, she is rather more guarded, having run her rough-draft past some skeptics)  came this recent article:

    A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

[Note:  In the PC Guardian's  article,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/viking-burial-clothes-woven-with-allah-unveiled-by-swedish-university

in a picture purporting to show a "re-enactment" of Viking combat, the only warrior with face visible is ... a woman.]

And, even more telling, this spin

   White Supremacists Flustered by Viking Discovery

(Someone bring Steve Bannon his smelling-salts.)

The pattern of journalistic dots, though as sketchy as those on the Viking garments, at least suggests why so empirically underbuttressed a claim  would be embraced for a comforting narrative.

[Footnote for the Arabic-literate]  Even with that mirror-image sleight of hand, there isn’t really a match.  The Viking design shows three horizontal strokes, all of them connected; whereas in Arabic, the initial alif is non-connecting.  And the blob that struck the Swedes as resembling the final hā’  of Allāh  would be upside-down.  So, if the design had been intended to spell Allah, it was a (double) misspelling, and thus blasphemous.

Seeing Allāh in that clothing  is like spotting Orion in a skyful of stars.   And from there to such gormless headlines as “Were some Vikings Muslim?” (National Post), and even speculations as to whether they were indeed Shiites (based upon another supposed sighting of the simple design for "Ali"), is like concluding that the skies proclaim the truth of the Olympic religion.

For a wide-ranging survey of Arabic language and stylistics, check out this:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Footnote 19 October 2017]  A day or so after this post went up, another Arabist went up on Twitter to scoff at the Swedish claims, making some of the same points (e.g. about non-connecting alif), but adding a new one based on timelines.  For, whereas Kufic script is ancient, the subvariety of ‘square’ or blocky Kufic, supposedly postdates the Vikings’ floruit by centuries.

A nice idea, but there’s a hitch.  For, the design was constrained by medium in which it was worked (whether made by Vikings, or merely captured by them), a thin strip of stiff fabric:  the weave imposes its own rectilinear preferences.   Just as Babylonian clay tablets virtually dictated the geometry of cuneiform, so this hem would itself bring forth or invent `square Kufic’, pour les besoins de la cause, independent of any prior existence of the style  or imitation thereof.

[Sociopolitical footnote:  It is perhaps no accident that this fond fantasy was emitted out of Sweden.  As is well known, that nation has, in recent years, been wondering whether it has perhaps bitten off rather more than it can chew, so far as imported demographics.  However, it has long been politically impermissible in Sweden to remark publically on the elephant in the room.  So the sparring goes on  in code  and behind cover.] 

Who knew that Vikings were so controversial?  For a quite aggrieved-sounding feminist article from that same drearily reliable Guardian, try this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

That article's headline is conclusively proven by a passage in the Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy, where historians of old were caught bwa-ha-ha'ing as they inked out all such records.

~

Appendix on Steganography

A genuine case of a name hidden in designs, is that of the stellar cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who used to work-in the name of his daughter  NINA (all-caps), in drawing after drawing.  Here is one with the hidden items highlighted:

Notice that, as was the case with the Arabic spelling of Allah and `Ali, the ease with which the name Nina can be secreted away as part of a larger design, is dependent on its simple form;  if his daughter’s name had been Murgatroyd, Hirschfeld would have been out of luck.

After signing his name in a lower corner, he would usually append a small Arabic (Arabic!) numeral, showing the number of times the name was hidden in that particular drawing.  Here, for example, in a (rather cruel) portrait of Katherine Hepburn, we are challenged to find three occurrences:

 

And in this tour de force, the name “NINA” appears no fewer than thirteen thousand times.:

 

Can you spot them all?  Set aside the rest of your life, full-time, to accomplish this necessary task.

 

~

An earlier instance  of steganographic eisegesis:

Ancillary to the great Hollywood witch-hunt, a satellite inquisition in 1951  was mounted against ‘subversive modern art’ at the (old) County Museum in Exposition Park.

A group called Sanity in art  swore they detected maps of secret defense fortifications  sequestered in abstract paintings, and one painter … was accused … of incorporating propaganda in the form of a thinly disguised hammer-and-sickle within a seascape.

-- Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 63

NORAD installation, Cheyenne Mountain (artist’s impression)

For more along these lines, try
=> Rorschach Morphology

 

[Update] XXX-clusive!

Tomb find indicates prehistoric dinosaur may have been Jewish

 [Update 25 II 2018] The latest example   of seeing something that isn't there, and getting the world spun-up:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article201604224.html


 

Word/gesture of the Day: "Raute"

"Raute" (literally 'lozenge, rhombus, diamond-shape') has become the new nickname for Merkel (earlier: Erika, after her supposed DDR intel career), based upon her characteristic hand-gesture.  The term is used with much the same dismissive tone that people said Dubya for George W. Bush.

You can read about the background here.

French feminists use the symbol as well:

[Update 2 April 2017]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/31/its-time-to-drop-the-vagina-as-a-protest-symbol/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.c3181e71235a

[Update 21.II.2017]   My, my, scarcely a day goes by,  without something new under the sun.

Now it’s a portmanteau-word, ‘Nipster’:

Schwesig will User vor "Nazi-Hipstern" schützen

Sie posten ihr veganes Frühstück auf Instagram, ein Selfie mit Sonnenbrille - und mittendrin ein Bild einer Nazi-Demo: Rechtsextreme präsentieren im Internet einen jungen Lifestyle und ködern so gezielt Jugendliche. Familienministerin Schwesig warnt vor hippen Rechten, den "Nipstern".

Doch dann wird Rapper "Komplott", wie der junge Mann sich nennt, deutlich. Er warnt davor, dass "unser liebes Land" geflutet wird von Kriminellen, "die so aussehen wie Robinsons Freitag". Er nennt sie eine Bedrohung für die ethnische Kontinuität Europas. Und er ruft zum Widerstand auf: "Wir werden unsere Fahnen tragen, in den Heldenkampf marschieren." Und am Ende spricht eine martialische Stimme heroisch: "Unser Volk ist noch lange nicht am Ende."

http://www.heute.de/schwesig-will-junge-user-vor-hippen-rechtsextremen-schuetzen-46548154.html

Randbemerkung:   If you’d been quick about it, you could have viewed, at the URL, an interview with the Familienministerin, with the question, “Wollen Sie Wahrheitsministerin sein? “ (“Do you wish to become Ministress of Truth?”)  Yet, oddly, that video has already been flushed down the memory-hole (over a black blank, the words, "DIESES VIDEO EXISTIER NICHT MEHR"  Note, not merely "has been removed from this site", but.... "no longer exists"  It has become an unvideo.   Conceivably her first act as Wahrheitsministerin.)

Tut uns Leid, that video is *streng verboten*

[Update]  Here is another German finger-gesture word  for which no common expression exists in English:

Schwurfinger (plural) thumb, first finger,  and second finger,  raised in swearing an oath

-- Collins-Klett German English Dictionary

Somewhat reminiscent of the Cub Scout oath-gesture (two fingers raised) or that of the Boy Scouts (three).

.

Prolegomenon to any adequate pataphysics

Satirists have joined the breadlines, ever since actual reality became too wacky to satirize.

Unemployed satirists.

Send in your aluminum pull-tabs to help!

Surfing the Net, you can always find some silliness somewhere -- to notice it, would be shooting fish in a barrel.   But the editorial board of the NYTimes  is not quite a straw-man (though perhaps it should).   So here goes.

This morning they served up an editorial entitled, stirringly, “French Women Fight Back”.   For anyone familiar with the social relations in current-day, multi-culti Western Europe, or with the already misandric slant of legislation in those countries (see Looking at Someone Up and Down), will smile at this, or sigh.   To polemicize would be pointless.  But as part of our series on European political gestural semiotics,  we reproduce the photograph -- the only one illustrating the editorial -- which the editors saw fit to stand for this righteous uprising:

Or maybe they're doing "I'm a Little Teapot"

To all appearances, they are flashing a yoni-symbol!
(Can you imagine if a group of men had thus, publically and polemically, reduced women to their anatomy like that?)

Compare the Merkel-Raute:

American readers might here deny the senses of their eyes, or try to explain it away.  But actually, in France, the way feminists protest being noticed for their physiques, is to march naked in public:

What are *you* looking at, you dirty old man!

(They have done far more egregious things in public, than that;  which we decline to link to.  This is, after all, a family magazine.)

[Update Feb 2017]  "Raute" has become the new nickname for Merkel (earlier: Erika, after her supposed DDR intel career).  It is used with much the same dismissive tone that people said Dubya for George W. Bush.

~

AirBNB has come out with its own corporate version of the yoni-symbol, cleverly tweaked so as to accommodate Rorschach projections of lingam, mamillae, or podex as well:

~

There is a “Société du spectacle” aspect to the androphobic fanfare in Germany and France.   Cf. this extended essay, from yesterday:

   Vergewaltigung: Spiel mit den Zahlen

   http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/48/48265/1.html

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Salutes and Semiotics

We earlier offered semiotic analyses of politically-tinged postures and gestures, in Europe

     La quenelle

and in the Middle East

     The Rabi`ah

And now such a controversy has flared up in the United States, specifically at West Point.   In a highly interesting and well-illustrated article in this morning’s New York Times,

     Raised-Fist Photo by Black Women at West Point Spurs Inquiry

we are invited to consider this graduation photo:

Now, as a non-veteran civilian, I shall have nothing at all to say about this Army-internal controversy, leaving that to the warfighters themselves.   But a word about the ambiguities of the symbolism.

The raised-fist gesture has been around a long time, appearing in a wide variety of contexts, though  in general  with a common theme of militancy.   I first encountered it personally in the late 1960’s, as part of the movement against the Vietnam War.  At the time, there were actually two raised-hand antiwar gestures.  The one more familiar to outsiders was that of a raised hand with two lifted fingers, the index and the medius (“Pointer” and “Tall-man” as we called them in kindergarten -- O happy days!);  and that, to be sure, with the palm towards the onlooker; the same gesture with the onlooker facing the back of the hand, is not used in America, but is used in England, and means something quite different, and very very bad.  This gesture was often called the “Peace sign”;  it was the badge of the peacenik.  Although most of us who flashed the thing didn’t know it at the time, it was an odd choice for an antiwar symbol, since the same sign during the second World War was the “V for Victory” sign, universally known.   Well, autre temps, autre sémiotique.

The raised fist, in its beginnings, was subtley different:  it was the signature gesture, not of peaceniks, but of activists, militants, and had roots in the Communist movement (a fact probably unknown to most who came to use the gesture, simply for its jaunty sexiness).  In their purist form, the gestures meant respectively  “Bring the Boys Home” (a moderate slogan, suitable for patriots) and “Bring the War Home” (in the startling formulation of the Weathermen, of insurrectionary intent.).

Back to the posed photograph.   Its evaluation, and the actions to be taken as a consequence, hinge crucially on the fact that these soldiers are in uniform;  that is the essential context, sine qua non. I know of people who have been stripped of their security clearances and even drummed out of the service, for having done something publically in uniform  which they would be perfectly at liberty to do in civvies. As such, it is a matter for the Army in general and West Point in particular;  for the rest of us, it is none of our affair.

But as semioticians, we may consider a bit.

The pose itself is striking -- and, to this observer, strikingly handsome, considered only as a tableau.   It calls to mind  such sculptural compositions as  this (from the Arc de Triomphe):

But more pertinently, we are dealing here, not with such stray, subjective associations, but with a context within a context, the larger context (as the article illustrates) being specifically a long-standing West Point tradition, exemplified by this, from 1884:

Thus, while the raised-fist motif (of ambiguous interpretation, now that the gesture has been so watered-down as to be exploited by pop stars) might or might not seem defiant or truculent (eye of the beholder),  it occurs in a framing that is in fact ultra-Army and ultra-traditionalist.  And quite possibly,  what was in the minds of these young women at the time  was not really that of insurrection (let alone Communist), but more along the lines of another Army tradition:  esprit de corps.

[Aesthetic footnote]  The distaff composition actually seems quite a bit more "Hoo-ah!" than that of the 19th century men.  Most of them can't stand up straight; the guys  towards the bottom  seem to have melted.

[Psychological footnote]  As a complete outsider to all this, what first struck me (and somewhat shocked me) about the picture, was not the fists, any minatory interpretation of which was at least partly neutralized by the merry grin on the woman stage-left, and the cocked-head dreamy half-smile of the woman at the opposite bannister (who resembles a -- white -- woman I work with).  Rather, it was the grey old-fashioned uniforms.  Had they dressed up as Confederates?  Surely not;  the article identifies the kit as “traditional gray dress uniforms”.   To contextualize adequately  requires expert testimony;  you can’t just go by the sight of your eyes.

Language, linguistics, logophilia

Quotes out of context;  click for the real meal.

I studied Old Norse at Berkeley; accordingly, I can more or less read modern Icelandic.  Norwegian is a different kettle of kippers, however.  Even so, though I am not expert here, it does appear to my unpracticed ear that Mr Dylan (or his Norwegian lyricist) has taken certain liberties with the text.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/desolation-row-norwegian-version.html

The ISIL flag  functions internationally rather  like MacDonald’s Golden Arches -- an instantly recognizable visual brand.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/flagge-verbot.html

Your guarantee of quality

It is difficult to find any passus  in which round  is used in dispraise.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/on-what-is-round-ter.html

Familiar examples are bipartite constructions like “either … or…”  (German “entweder … oder”,  and (somewhat less structured) French “ou bien … ou bien”):  whenever you meet the word either in a sentence, you know that or cannot be far behind -- or rather, actually, in this case, it can be quite far behind;  but come it must.  Cf. and contrast French celui:   it must be followed by qui, but in this case, followed immediately.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/03/farflung-interdependencies.html

This antinomy of language-per-se versus languages, has become acute since Chomsky, who has little interest in the endless gabble of actual tongues.  If this seems an extreme position, it is nonetheless exactly parallel to that of physicists, who seek general physical laws, rather than endless descriptions of individual objects falling or rolling or spinning or colliding or what have you.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ontology-of-linguistics.html

Compare that elegant phrase, which slips so smoothly from the pen of Quine:  “substitutable salvâ veritate”.   I have here further spiffed up the expression, by giving the â its neat little ablative hat.)

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/05/categories-and-sameness.html

 

The fault by no means lies in any pointless, Basque-like complexity of the lending languages:  in Latin and in French, the stress-patterns are as easy as can be.  Yet somehow English managed to ingest these borrowings sideways, or wrong-way-round …

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/02/orthoepy-of-day-regulatory.html

Arabic does notoriously avail itself of this morphosemantic flourish;  in classical Arabic, it's called jinaas, or tajniis.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/word-of-day-paregmenon-expanded.html

ennoösis

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/update-to-goldberg-variations-variations.html

The ‘attribute’ of paternity  fits so comfortably into our language (there is even a synonymous saxonism, fatherhood), that the plain man is satisfied.  But hold on: both sired a son.  So they share something more than mere paternity (once again reifying), call it virpaternity.  Those who are happy of two sons, share duovirpaternity. Or consider the sire of Romulus and Remus, and that of Tweedledum and his twin: these share homoduovirpaternity.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/pattern-and-attribute.html

 “I’d say ‘Res ipsa loquitur’, if I thought you knew what it meant.”

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/res-ipsa-loquitur.html

Every carpet has an underside.  We may even concede (perhaps over-generously) that both sides are interderivable:  given the one, you can work out the other.  Now, you and I prefer the upper side, where green birds are depicted in an azure sky, and the prince urges his huntsmen  forward in the chase.  Equally -- and it is their right, -- the proctoscopic philosophers prefer to ogle the underside, an unintuitive tangle of knots and loose ends. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/eliminative-materialism-expanded-update.html

Fuite en avant has long been one of my favorite phrases, in large part because of its complex meaning, and its lack of an equivalent in English.  But later a new term spread generally throughout our American tongue, one which, while not an exact equivalent, still covers important shared territory:  doubling-down.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/10/phrase-of-day-sunk-cost-fallacy.html

On Fox, an airhead prattles for a bit; then the anchor, equally clueless, raises no questions and elicits no details, but simply dumps on a bit of his own emotion.   They seem to be descended, not from the line of Murrow, but from game-show hosts:  dolts, and happy to be so.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-there-linguist-in-house.html

Here  phlogiston plays ever and again the useful role of whipping-boy.  (Indeed, given the continued prominence of this ethereal etwas in philosophical debate, it must count as one of the most fruitful scientific hypotheses ever.  If it didn’t not-exist, someone would have to uninvent it.)  

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/eliminative-materialism-expanded-update.html

We have seen how the pejoration of savant came about -- a trajectory peculiar to this term.  But what of sophist, and its (commoner and) equally pejorative derivatum, sophistry?

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/04/word-of-day-sophistical.html