TOWER OF BABBEL TWO

 

I doubt you would have heard of the English monk Roger Bacon were it not for his corpulent boss  Pope Clement The Fat, AKA Clement IV.  He was famous for only three things. First, he was really fat. Secondly, he really hated Jews. And third, he ordered the “brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric” Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon to write a compendium of philosophy and science.

Bacon's “Opus Majus” laid the foundation for our world, beginning with the startling suggestion that since humans are made of the same stuff as the stars, we should be able to understand the stars.  Further, Bacon wrote, "Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them"  He was thus hinting that all languages, because they all used the same human organs and human brains,  must have the common ancestors. Eight centuries later, Bacon still appears correct about both of those ideas. 

It makes you wonder how far Bacon's mind might have taken us  had not fat Clement IV died just four yeas after becoming Pope. With Clement's early demise Roger Bacon lost his financial and moral support.  

Roger went right on thinking great thoughts, even when he had to hide them from his new regressive church superiors (above), inventing the magnifying lens among other things, but since the Cardinals would not chose Clement's successor for three years, Europe had to wait another two hundred years for The Renaissance, which  Roger had been trying to midwife into existence. The Black Death putting half of Europe in mass graves did not help, but the singular death of the anti-Semitic fat man was a real blow to the evolution of humanity.

The theory of a Universal Grammar, first postulated by Roger Bacon and most recently by Noam Chomsky, is supported by the existence of “cognates”.   

As Bacon pointed out in 1254, cognates are words which share "the same linguistic family or derivation”. Such as:  “la misma familia lingüística o derivación” (Spanish), “a mesma família lingüística ou derivação” (Portuguese), “la stessa famiglia linguistica o derivazione” (Italian), “la même famille linguistique ou dérivation” (French), “la mateixa família lingüística o derivació (Catalan), “din aceeasi familie lingvistice sau derivare” (Romanian)..or, in English, lexical cognates. They make up about  quarter of  all English words .  

The reality of Universal Grammar makes the work of code breaking possible, and drew Alice Elizabeth Kober into the Minoan labyrinth created by little Arthur Evans.  Remember him?

On the day in 1928 when 18 year old Alice Kober (above) received her Bachelor's Degree from Hunter College in Manhattan, she confidently announced she would decode Evan's mysterious Linear B language. It was not merely that Alice was arrogant. As far as I can tell she had no ego about her science. But she was very, very, very smart. And she knew it.

Alice got her Phd from Columbia in 1932, excavated in Greece, and in 1940, landed a job as an assistant to Sir John Linden Myers, professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University. Myers had worked directly under Professor Arthur Evans. And when age and illness had forced Evans into retirement, Myers took over his work on Linear B. But Myers didn't get very far.

Alice Kober agreed the mother tongue of Minoan was probably Etruscan, a culture which dominated the northern Italian peninsula after about 700 B.C. The rational as handed down from Evans to Myers and now to Alice, was that because the Linear B inscriptions were found on Etruscan amphora at several Minoan sites on Crete, it had to be based, at least in part, on Etruscan. 

During World War Two Professor Myers went to work for the Royal Naval Intelligence service. That left Alice, now a professor herself at Brooklyn College in New York City (above), as the leading expert still working on decoding Linear B. And she decided to make a fresh start.

Alice chose our old friend, frequency analysis. She knew the 90 characters generally acknowledged as Linear B, did not represent a phonetic alphabet like modern languages, but closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Evans himself had suggested it might use voice inflection to define tenses, with the nouns changing their endings to fit past, present and third person perfect. But that also made a paper translation all the more difficult. So Alice began to collect every crumb of information she could about all of the 90 most probable Linear B symbols, as well as the two hundred possible ones. And she taught herself ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Egyptian, so she could do that.

Had this been a modern research project, Alice would have input it all into a computer. But the world's first one of those had just been built to crack the German Enigma codes, and its very existence was so secret, the allies officially referred to it as the “Ultra Secret”.  So Alice had little choice but to use 3X5 inch “index cards”. When the war caused a shortage of those, she scavenged paper from old calendars, greeting cards and catalogues, even stealing library index cards. She carefully filed her homemade index cards into handmade drawers constructed from empty cigarette cartons provided by her addiction to nicotine.

Alice explained the problem in a 1948 paper published by the American Journal of Archeology. “People often say,” she wrote, “ that an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. They are putting the situation optimistically. We are dealing with three unknowns: language, script and meaning.... Forty years of attempts to decipher Minoan by guessing....have proved that such a procedure is useless. Minoan cannot be deciphered, because we do not know if "Minoan" existed....If, as seems probable, it was a highly inflected language, it should be possible to work out some of the inflection pattern.” And she ended that paper with a warning about speculation. “When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

After a full day of teaching, Alice would return to her home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which she shared with her widowed mother. There is no record she ever had a romantic life. Perhaps Alice was gay, or had little sexual drive. But for whatever reason, her life was clearly devoted to Linear B. After dinner and grading papers, she would engage her opponent. Said one writer, familiar with her work, “She suffered no fools. She demanded precision of herself and others. She spoke and wrote in no-frills, spin-free English, direct and blunt, prickly and undiplomatic”.

I wonder what old King Minos would have thought, had he caught a glimpse of Alice around a corner in the labyrinth of ages, her research scattered across the kitchen table, a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray, its smoke curling romantically to the ceiling, as Alice shuffled and rearranged the 186,000 cards she had created, and the symbols and notes they contained. Like an alchemist she was trying to conjure an ancient world out of what came to be called her “Triplets”, three-word sets she had uncovered, with similar suffixes. Deciphering an entire language out of that would be a real magic act. And she darn near pulled out a rabbit

Prophetically, Alice had delivered a lecture on Linear B in 1948, in which she did speculate about the doors which a solution to Linear B might unlock - and might not.. “We may find out if Helen of Troy really existed, if King Minos was a man or a woman...On the other hand, we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June 1400BC.” After learning of her terminal cancer diagnosis, Alice wrote to a colleague, “The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it. ” She died on 16 May, 1950, at the age of just 43, with the great mystery of her life unresolved.

The odd thing is, just after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, Alice had met the solution to the great mystery.  She had traveled to England, to visit with her mentor Professor Sir John Myers. He had arraigned a brief meeting between Alice and a man he thought was a promising young architectural student named Michael Ventris (above). The meeting did not go well. Alice was an academic, the daughter of blue collar parents, respected for her hard won achievements in science and the byzantine politics of academia. Michael was the son of a wealthy family, raised by a mother influenced by the cold and imperial psychiatrist Carl Jung. They were both socially inept to a degree and managed to say just the wrong things to each other. But being socially inept, they did not hold it against each other, and exchanged a few letters over the next five years, all strictly on the topic of Linear B. And oddly, that was where the solution would be found, in the unpleasant pauses in their conversations.

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TOWER OF BABBEL - ONE

 

I offer proof here that there is no such thing as useless information, as illustrated by the fate of the 600 elite German paratroopers who floated down or thudded in rough glider landings on a dirt air field on the island of Crete, at about eight on the Tuesday morning of 20 May, 1941. 

Six short hours later 400 of them were dead, killed by poorly armed, badly disorganized and under strength New Zealand infantry. And what largely killed those confident well trained, well armed Teutonic warriors was, in part,  information uncovered forty years earlier and sixty miles to the east, written 4,000 years before men could fly.

The second imperial palace built at Knossos (above) on bronze age Crete was so large visitors got lost in its labyrinthine corridors. It had been built for King Minos, and was occupied for over 400 years. It had hot showers, and flush toilets, and gardens. 

Its walls were adorned with colorful frescoes of sacred bulls, graceful women, and brave men. Its gold came 300 miles from Egypt, its olive oil 100 miles from Greece, its ceder throne, 400 miles from Lebanon. And then about 1375 B.C., this kingdom simply disappeared. Time eventually even wiped out its memory. For most of human history, people had no idea the acrobats of Crete were cartwheeling over the horns of bulls before Moses challenged Pharaoh. Then a British archaeologist went looking for a new meaning in his life.

Little Arthur Evans (above)  - he stood just five feet two inches tall - had always been fascinated with ancient history, but only ancient history. He almost failed his final exams at Oxford because he knew nothing which had happened after Richard the Lion Heart died in 1199 A.D. Evans spent half his life as a dilettante archaeologist, digging about the edges of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. 

When his wife Margaret (above, left) died in the spring of 1893, the heartbroken 43 year old Evans (above, right) went digging with a new purpose. He used his inheritance to buy land already identified as a palace three miles south of the port of Heraklion on Crete.

Beginning in the year 1900, Evans spent six years unearthing the great palace at Knossos. Its murals were so exuberant, its architecture so confident, its wealth so obvious, that Evans was certain it had been the center of a great empire which rose and fell while the ancient Greeks were still barbarians. 

The record of its achievements and soul were right at hand, in the thousand or so mostly broken clay tablets scattered about the palace. But they were written in what seemed to be two unknown languages, younger by a millennium than the cuneiform tablets of Sumer and Babylon, but older by a century than the oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Evans labeled the languages Linear A and B. His obvious choice was to attack Linear B (above) first, since the majority of the tablets were in that language. But the best brains in England, working at Evan's behest,  were unable to read the words. After more than a decade of study the only thing Evans was certain of, was that neither one was Greek. 

After World War One more tablets with the same mysterious pictographic languages were unearthed in the palaces at Pylos, Thebes, Corinth and Mycenae, on mainland Greece. As the number of uncovered tablet shards approached 3,000, the best brains in the world were still unable to read them. How could you decipher an unknown language, once the authors and speakers, and everyone who ever read or spoke the language, was long dead?

For 1,500 years the most insightful method to decipher coded messages and unknown languages was the one invented by the Syrian mathematician Al-Kindi - frequency analysis.  You had to trust this guy. He wrote 262 books. And his method for decoding unknown writing was to reduce it a math problem, by first figuring out what was the most common letter in the language. In English that is "E", and then filling in the blanks. 

 But none of the symbols used in Linear B appeared in any statistically significant variation. The diligent mathematicians Evan's hired simply did not have the resources to crack the puzzle of Linear B. But the effort did provide a good testing ground for new theories, just in time to deal with an ambitious electrical engineer who came up with a great way to get very rich.

His name was Arthur Scherbius, and in 1918 he marketed his new mechanical rotor device under the name “Enigma”. Pushing the letter “e” on Scherbius's keyboard turned a mechanical rotor (above) one spot forward.  There were twenty-six spots on each rotor, so when you entered any letter into the rotor,  the letter produced by that  rotor would be a  totally random letter from the one input, determined only by the original position of that rotor, before you started pushing any buttons at all,

Putting the rotors in sequence (originally three, each translating the input from the rotor before ) would make the code practically impossible to break, unless you knew the starting setting for each rotor. And those could be changed either randomly or according to a schedule.  In 1926 Scherbius sold his machine to the German Navy, and the following year to the German Army, who thought the Enigma codes would be unbreakable.

And they might have been, but in 1928 a minor bureaucrat on the Army General Staff did something stupid. Instead of sending their new Enigma machine (above) to their embassy in Warsaw, Poland in a diplomatic pouch, he sent it by regular mail. When it failed to promptly arrive, the ranking German officer in Warsaw panicked, and asked the Poles to please look for the package. Intrigued, the Polish postal workers searched for, found and opened the box, and got their first look at the new Enigma machine. Polish intelligence service spent a long weekend disassembling it and building a duplicate machine. Then they carefully repackaged the original and delivered it to the relived German embassy staff.

The Germans had little reason to worry even if they had known. With eight rotors wired in sequence, Scherbius had figured it would take 1,000 technicians using frequency analysis, 900 million years to try every possible combination of keys and rotor settings just to read a single message. And he was right. The Polish code breakers struggled with the machine for a decade, but came up with nothing. Finally in 1939, facing an impending German invasion, the Poles shared their duplicate Enigma machine with British Intelligence. And in 1941, a brilliant English mathematician named Arthur Turing, built his own electro-mechanical machine (above) which could try each of the millions of possible mechanical rotor settings on Enigma in a matter of hours. With that, it became possible to break the unbreakable German codes.

The first use of this British “Ultra Secret” was on 28 April 1941, when their commander on Crete was given details of the coming German invasion. General Freyberg was not certain he could trust this new source, and divided his troops between the sea coast and the air bases, where Ultra said the attack would come. 

But enough men were guarding Maleme airfield on 20 May 1941 to slaughter the German units as they landed. British Prime Minster Winston Churchill pointed out that “"At no moment in the war was our intelligence so truly and precisely informed.” 

In the end it did not save Crete, because the German air force prevented General Freyberg from bringing reinforcements back from the coast. Eventually German air dropped reinforcements swamped the New Zealanders and forced the British to evacuate the island.. The battle cost the British 3,990 dead and 17,000 captured. But it cost the Germans 6,698 dead, and 370 aircraft destroyed. Their decimated parachute battalions never made another large combat drop during the last four years of World War Two.

A little over two months before the fall of Crete, little Arthur Evans (above) died in England, still convinced that Linear B was an as yet unknown language. And through the multiplying effect of tenure and graduate students, he was able to reach out from beyond the grave to influence the effort to decode his tablets for another generation. 

The solution, it turned out, had been first been offered by the 13^th century Franciscan monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, from his study atop Folly Bridge (above). It was in that small room where Bacon had written,  “Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae”, or “Half the answer is asking the right question.”

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APRIL FOOL'S DAY

 

I don’t approve of practical jokes. I seen nothing humorous in having your shoes set afire while you are wearing them. And dribble glasses are not only not practical they are also not funny - especially on “April Fools Day”, when every glass is a dribble glass and every shoe is a potential combustion chamber.

And it turns out that this celebration of sociopathic behavior was invented by the French, a nation without humorous inclinations since Moliere slipped on a banana peel in 1673. But the story of April Fool’s Day began over a century before that comedic-tragic event, when in 1564 King Charles IX (above)  decided to follow Pope Gregory’s suggestion and begin the calendar on January rather than April. I know why the French originally celebrated New Years Day on April First, but I'm not going to tell you.

Now, in the 16th century, France had only one road. It came out of Paris, turned left, looped all the way around the city and re-entered on the other side of town. This tragic design error,(the world’s first Traffic Circle) made communication with the majority of the nation difficult (and introduced the phrase “Out-of-the-Loop”), and when combined with the French telephone system - which was in no better shape in the 16th century than it is today - meant that a lot of peasants never got the King’s memo concerning the calendar adjustment.

So as they had every year, thousands of these ill-informed peasants journeyed to Paris during the last week of March and on what they thought was New Year’s Eve, gathered in Bastille Square to say bonjour to 1565 and watch the guillotine drop on 1566. In unison they gleefully chanted, “Cing, quartre, trios, deux, un” and…No guillotine. No satisfying plop of a head into the basket. No Campaign corks popping. No le Anderson Cooper.

 Instead of cheers and shouts of glee, mass ennui broke out among the masses. Now anyone who has experienced the Parisian version of “good manners” can imagine what came next; the locals mocked the bewildered peasants and made them feel like complete Americans,…ah, I mean, fools. But the way they did it makes the word “odd” seem inadequate.

For reasons beyond understanding the Parisians snuck up behind their confused country cousins, surreptitiously stuck a paper fish to the bumpkin’s backs and then shouted in a loud voice, “Poisson d’Avril!”, which translates as “April Fish!”, and then collapsed in raucous laughter and shouts of “tres bien.”

Why would they shout “April Fish!”? I have no idea. But, perhaps the first Parisian to label his victim an "April Fool” immediately received a mouth full of fist, while calling the victim an "April Fish” confused him just long enough so that the prankster could escape.

I have long thought that this uncharacteristic outbreak of French “humor” was actually inspired by Charles’ Italian Queen, Catherine de Medici, who was already famous throughout Europe for her gastronomical gags,  such as her duck a la cyanide with a hemlock sauce. Only a Medici could see the humor in humiliating the people who handled your food.

But however it started, the Parisians knew a good time when they saw it and they sent peasants on “fool’s errands”, and tricked peasants with “fool’s tales”, until every April 1st, France reverberated with gales of laughter and shouts of “Poisson d’Avril!” Good times. 

But eventually the Parisian bullies grew bored with taunting the unresponsive peasants and in 1572 they shifted their attentions to the Huguenots. But by then the tradition of humiliating people for your own amusement on the first day of April had become popular. And like Disco music and Special Federal Prosecutors, once invented some institutions have proven impossible to stop.

This holiday for the humor-impaired spread around the globe with the new calendar like a fungus, infecting and evolving a little in each afflicted nation. The Germans added the “Kick Me” sign, and a second day which they call “Taily Day”, to further enjoy the frivolity of bruised buttocks. Ahh, funny  Germans.

In Portugal, today’s innocent victim is hit with flour, sometimes while it is still in the bag - the flour, not the victim. In Scotland the target is humiliatingly referred to as an “April Gawk” (?!), in England as a “Noodle” and in Canada as an “American.” I would have expected mental health professionals to call for a stop to this public insanity but evidently they are too busy setting their patients’ shoes on fire.

Not even a world war could snap the world out of this cruel insanity. In what may have been the first time a practical joke qualified as a war crime, when, on April 1, 1915.  a French pilot buzzed the German trenches and dropped a huge bomb, which bounced.  It was a rubber bomb.

Four years later the citizens of Venice awoke on April 1, to discover their sidewalks littered with cow manure, the "gag" of a visiting Englishman, Horace de Vere Cole, with too much time on his hands and too much money in his pockets. But then what can you expect from a man who would honeymoon on April Fool's day? 

Bad humor moved into the electronic age in 1957 when BBC Television News broadcast a report about the successful and bountiful Swiss harvest of spaghetti.  

On April Fool's Day in 1992, National Public Radio in the United States, broadcast the announcement that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run again for President, under the slogan, "I didn't do anything wrong and I won't do it again."

In 1975  the Australian Broadcasting Company carried a report that the nation was about to switch to "Metric Time".  The next morning would begin at midnight but each minute would be made up of 100 mili-days and each day would consist of 20 deca-days.  It is alleged that the following morning nobody in Australia showed up for work on time, but it is unclear if that was because of the April Fool's joke or merely because, being Australia, they were all still hung over, mate.

Admit it; there is no defense against April Fool tomfoolery, except a preemptive strike. So button up your top button, zip up your pants, tie your shoes and look out for that cat. Load up your water gun, inflate your fart cushion and repeat after me; “Poison d’Avril, sucker!”

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