Linguistics | Chris Aldrich

The importance of bread in society: the etymology of Lord

In listening to The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth Lerer (Lecture 8), I came across an interesting word etymology which foodies and particularly bread fans will appreciate.

Dr. Lerer was talking about the compression of syllables at the border of Old English and Middle English circa 1100 which occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, the warden (or guardian) of the loaf.

Who is the guardian of the loaf? The hlfaf weard << The hlaweard << the laweard << the lord. This is the etymology of the word 'lord'. Lord is the guardian of the bread, the mete-er out of bread in a cereal society.

An interesting linguistic change that tells us a lot about power, structure, religion, and society surrounding bread of the time. I suppose one could also look at Christian traditions of the time which looked at the transubstantiation of the symbolic bread of the Last Supper which is ritually turned into the body of Christ–Christ, our lord.

One can’t help noting the slang use of the word “bread” to mean “money”. Perhaps it’s time to go back and re-visit Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent podcast series Our Daily Bread?

Featured image: Bread flickr photo by adactio shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Listened to Lecture 8: Did the Normans Really Conquer English? from The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by

Seth Lerer from The Great Courses

Witness language change in action as English shifts from an inflected to a relatively uninflected language, and as word order takes precedence over case endings and the determiner of meaning. Also, consider how a language builds and forms its vocabulary through building new words out of old ones, or by borrowing them.

Shift from an inflected language into an uninflected one

Syncretism

Emphasis of archaeolinguistics based on the barely literate. What are they writing so as to capture the daily change of language over time. Linguists look for writing that can be dated and localized.

example: Peterborough Chronicle showing changes over time through the years

“word horde” is kenning for mind, so unlocking one’s word horde is to speak one’s mind (example from Beowulf)

Sound changes hl-, hr-, hn-, and fn- level out to l-, r-, n, and sn-

Compression of syllables occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, the guardian or warden of the loaf, which was shortened to become Lord.

“Who is the guardian of the loaf? The hlfaf weard << The hlaweard << the laword << the lord. This is the etymology of the word lord. Lord is the guardian of the lord, the mete-er out of bread in a cereal society.”

metathesis (/mɪˈtæθɪsɪs/; from Greek μετάθεσις, from μετατίθημι “I put in a different order”; Latin: trānspositiō) is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis[1] or local metathesis:[2]

ask / aks in modern English (Southern US)
brid / bird
axion / ask
thork / through
The Old English beorht “bright” underwent metathesis to bryht, which became Modern English bright.

The Owl and the Nightingale[edit]

early middle-English poem c. 1200 in 2 handwritten manuscripts from 13th c.
octosylabic rhymed couplets
Old English words held in a francophone container (French style poetic structure)

Watched Winston Perez: Concept Modeling Your Disruptive Idea to Perfect It from YouTube

How long have you been working on your idea? Or looking for that next disruptive investment? Better still, how do you perfect your skill in doing all that? How do you lock-down your idea, your technology, your business or even your approach to investments? Consider this: the key stems from a very practical understanding how the abstract world (where disruptive innovations come from in the first place) actually works. Amazingly, it is something we were never accurately taught. Hard to believe right? But change that…and we change everything. So take a step into both the past and future. Come to a talk that will change the way you understand the world forever – something that will actually make you smarter. How cool would that be?

Winston is the founder of a discipline called Concept Modeling, which is at the root of all other disciplines – but don’t let the word “discipline” scare you. This talk will be very practical and may just be the key to your success going forward. He is the author of an award (Visionary Award) winning new book, Concerning the Nature and Structure of Concept. Reviewers have called his book (thus his work) “brimming with insights,” “intellectually fun,” “a startling fresh perspective on our world.” NY Times has called him “the guru of concept modeling.”

With past and present clients that include Warner Bros., Dreamworks, NBC/U, Interscope, Relativity and many others, Winston works on films, TV Shows, technologies, businesses and management models for executives. How cool is Bug Bunny? Very. With dozens of movies, technologies under his belt, his presentations are unique, insightful, informative, and yes, fun — he even concept modeled baseball. Love that! As Winston always says: “Let’s rock this thing!”

Biography:
As featured in the New York Times, and Deadline.com, Winston is the creator and founder of Concept Modeling, and author of his coming award (Visionary Award) winning book, Concerning The Nature And Structure Of Concept. His concept modeling helps studios and companies perfect films, ideas, technologies, science or businesses. It is considered revolutionary (truly, no cliché) by more and more professionals. The NY Times called Winston the “guru of Concept Modeling.”

Based on a discovery made on Feb. 6, 1989, -- a massive eureka moment as described in his book-- Winston developed a unique practice of deconstructing ideas based on deep insights on how the abstract world actually works or doesn’t – his past and present clients include Warner Bros., Dreamworks, NBC/U, Interscope, Relativity and many others.

His work may just represent a revolutionary advancement that launches you and your successful idea or investment, right here, right now. As Winston is fond of saying: ‘Let’s rock this thing!”

I saw this talk live a few weeks back. There’s something interesting to the general concept of what he’s trying to communicate here, but it doesn’t feel as gelled or as concrete as it could be. He needs to start with some iron clad definitions of “idea” and “concept” and go from there. I looked up his book, which appears to be self-published and incredibly overpriced. I’d pick up a copy if it was reasonably priced, though I suspect that it may not shed much more clarity on his ideas, which are almost a full concept.

The real value of a lot of this is in some of his examples. There are also some interesting thoughts for applying this to linguistics and early languages with smaller vocabularies compared to more developed modern languages with much larger vocabularies.

Notes:

Concept modeling

Ideas are infinite and free. Concepts are not. How can you get to the end of an idea?

Cup conceptually is a container.

Example of pictures of an airplane on the ground versus in the air. The picture of the airplane in the air is better because it contains the concept of what an airplane is.

Sir George Cayley cousin of mathematician Arthur Cayley

Negacept is a concept that defines its nature by the negation of another concept.

Example: Superman and krpytonite
Example: brakes on an automobile

Innovation is literally “into” and “new”

The softball is not based on a baseball, but is originally based on a boxing glove.

Concept is not obvious. It is not a structure or bigger idea, it’s not a strategy. Concept is abstract essence. It is nature, structure, activity and philosophy of abstract essence.

An idea is simply a possibility.

Revenge movie versus retaliation movie. Revenge takes time. Don’t take revenge. You can’t relate to movies unless there is a concept, and that is typically hope.

Words were originally based on concepts.

Replied to a tweet by

Jon Udell (Twitter)

This might be my all-time favorite use of @hypothes_is. The examples that show up in my wordnik-friends feed always bring a smile to my face.
Wordnik is using @hypothes_is to collect citations for new words or interesting usages! It's still in early stages but you can check out our instructions (or sign up) here: https://t.co/8PMWN2ZAT5
— wordnik (@wordnik) December 8, 2019
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 8, 2019

Does this cast you as Dr. W. C. Minor in the story, albeit not in the same sort of mad man way to wordnik’s Sir James Murray? Seriously though, this is an awesome use case.

📖 14% done with The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth Lerer

Listened to Lecture 5 and the first several minutes of 6 today while cooking in the kitchen.

There’s some interesting history about the ideas of law, ligatures, and links. He also has an interesting history of the words ‘apocalypse’ and ‘revelation’ which ultimately mean the same thing. Apocalypse essentially means to ‘take away the cover’. He doesn’t go into it, but this word also has historical relation to the removal of the curtain within the holy of holies, or in the New Testament the rending of said curtain at the death of Jesus. Subsequently there has obviously been a lot of semantic shift to create our modern day meaning of apocalypse.

Liked a tweet by

Laura Gibbs (Twitter)

oh my gosh: how did I not know about this counting-out system called Yan-Tan...?!
I was looking up something about the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, which some people think is a counting out rhyme, and that led to this British sheep-counting system: https://t.co/NWfJgyicB6 pic.twitter.com/azXjrpo8ob
— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) November 15, 2019

👓 Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You | Dan Cohen | Buttondown

Read Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You by

Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)

This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been.

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

This isn’t a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in *[An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise](https://amzn.to/32JWDSn)*. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.
November 13, 2019 at 08:33AM

The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.

Circle back around and read this when it comes out.

Similarly, these other references should be an interesting read as well.
November 13, 2019 at 08:36AM

From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.

And it’s not just happening with text, but it also happens with speech as I’ve written before: Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016 In fact, in this mentioned case, looking at transcripts actually helps to reveal that the emperor had no clothes because there’s so much missing from the speech that the text doesn’t have enough space to fill in the gaps the way the live speech did.
November 13, 2019 at 08:43AM

The Owl and the Nightingale[edit]

Compounding

Determinitive compounding

repetitive compounding

Caedmon’s Hymn