Language: The Broken Bridge
Between the Sciences and
Humanities;
and How to
Repair It
Simon D. Levy
Washington & Lee University
Lexington, Virginia, USA
The Two Cultures
Once or twice I have been provoked and
have asked the company how many of
them could describe the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The response was
cold: it was also negative. Yet I was
asking something which is the scientific
equivalent of: Have you read a work of
Shakespeare's?
Consilience?
Every college student should be able
to answer the following question:
What is the relation between science
and the humanities, and how is it
important for human welfare? …
Only fluency across the boundaries
will provide a clear view of the world
as it really is….
Comment #1: Respect the Classics,
Man!
παντα δε δοκιμαζετε το καλον κατεχετε
Omnia autem probate quod bonum est tenete.
Examine all things; hold fast to what is good.
--Thessalonians 5:21
Poetry Is What Gets Lost in
Translation
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
ουλομενην ἥ μῡρί' Αχαιoῖς αλγε' εθηκε
πολλὰς δ' ιφθῑμους ψῡχὰς ΑϜιδι προϊαψεν
ἡρωων αυτοὺς δε Ϝελωρια τευχε κυνεσσιν
οιωνοῖσι τε πᾶσι · Διὸς δ' ετελειετο βουλή ·
εξ οὑ δη τα πρωτα διαστητην ερισαητε
Ατρεϊδης τε Ϝαναξ ανδρῶν και δῑος Αχιλλεύς.
Μηνιν
αϜειδε
anger-ACC
θεά
sing
Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
goddess-VOC Pelias’son-GEN
A
Chapman (ca. 1600)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Achilles’ banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse, …
Lattimore (1951)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
Fitzgerald (1974)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, …
Fitzgerald (1974)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, …
Fagles (1990)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Reck (1994)
Μηνιν αϜειδε θεά Πηληϊαδεω
Αχιλῆος
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ maniac rage:
I explained to [my students] what a profound
change has taken place virtually within my lifetime
and entirely within the life of my grandmother,
certainly. For centuries and centuries everyone
who'd been through university in the West knew
and shared Horace in Latin. They shared it with all
their contemporaries and with all those
generations that had come before. And all that's
gone now. One is isolated from educated people of
one's own time and, without Latin (and to a slightly
lesser extent Greek) isolated from one's educated
predecessors. I'm sure there are and will be new
compensating countergains. But the loss is very
sad to me.… I found it terribly hard to convey the
beauty and importance of Horace in translation.
But I HATE Memorization!
What Does This Have to Do with
Science?
What Does This Have to Do with
Science?
“Current Knowledge Will Soon Be
Obsolete, So We Have to Teach
More of It”
Comment #2: Computer Science
and Linguistics Share a Common
Foundation
Can We Study Poetry
Scientifically?
Excrement. That's
what I think of Mr. J.
Evans Pritchard.
We're not laying pipe,
we're talking about
poetry.
Recursion (Hauser, Chomsky, and
Fitch 2002)
Recursion in Poetry
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that
fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that
fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that
fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that
fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless
things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that
fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
“Leaky” Levels
[I]n a biologically evolved object like the human
brain … a clean separation between levels of
architecture and between software and
hardware is impossible. This is because, first of
all, these architectures we have been describing
are all "leaky" virtual machines. That is, the
underlying machine shows through when the
surface structures are stressed or under certain
situations. There are layers of representational
structures and representations from other layers
peek through at any given layer.
-- Chandrasekaran and Josephson (1993)
Language Ungrounded:
Metacircularity
Our evaluator for Lisp will be implemented as a
Lisp program. It may seem circular to think
about evaluating Lisp programs using an
evaluator that is itself implemented in Lisp.
However, evaluations is a process, so it is
appropriate to describe the evaluation process
using Lisp, which, after all, is our tool for
describing processes. An evaluator written in
the same language that it evaluates is said to
be metacircular.
- Abelson & Sussman (1996)
Metacircularity
Natural Languages vs.
Programming Languages
• Ambiguity (British left waffles on Falkland
Islands.)
• Fault-tolerance (Something is missing this
sentence)
• Irregularity
one two
three four
first second third fourth
five
six
fifth
sixth
Prescriptivism vs. Insight:
A Preposition Isn’t Something to
End a Sentence With
1. She looked up the number.
2. She looked the number up.
3. She climbed up the hill.
4. * She climbed the hill up.
(Fraser 1976)
Parting Shots
I didn’t want to turn out boys who in
later life had a deep love of
literature, or who would talk in
middle age of the lure of language
and their love of words. “Words”
said in that reverential way that is
somehow Welsh.
- Alan Bennett, The History Boys
(2006)
Potential Topics for Debate &
Discussion
1. Should everyone learn Latin & Greek?
2. Can modern linguistics give students
greater confidence & mastery in their
writing & speaking?
3. Are Latin & Greek Euro-Centric, or are
they so “other” as to be novel for
everyone?