There’s a certain sub-class of English nouns that has interested me for a while. They’re formed by the suffixation of /-th/ to an adjective, yielding a noun. What’s really peculiar is the alternation of vowel sounds between the two words; in the nominal form, the vowel is one thing, and in the adjectival, it’s another. Here are two common examples:

long - length
strong - strength
broad - breadth

In each case, the stem vowel changes the place where it’s pronounced in the mouth. This is called “I-mutation.” Basically, in the adjectival form — which is derived from the noun — the vowel scoots closer to the sound /i/ (”ee” as in feet) In this case, the shift is from /ɑ/→/ε/.*

The chart below visually demonstrates the process. It’s essentially a location map of where your tongue is in your mouth during the execution of vowels. For the /ɑ/ in long, strong and broad your tongue is low and retracted, and for /i/ of feet its pushed forward and up.

Figure 1: /ɑ/→/ε/

As you can see, the sound /ɑ/ is pulled upward and forward, and winds up at an intermediate between /ɑ/ and /i/, namely /ε/.

Why would the vowel undergo this transformation in the first place? Well historically, the /-th/ suffix was more like /-ith/, so it actually contained the sound /i/ (”ee”). In anticipation of the vowel in the suffix, speakers would move the stem vowel incrementally closer to /i/, and they stopped off somewhere in between. It has been said that this is a form of laziness, in which speakers try to expend as little effort as possible to pronounce the word, but I think it’s more likely a constraint on articulation: the tongue is physical object, and must actually move from one position to another. Over time, this transition becomes audible, and begins to color the vowels. Eventually, the “slide” between sounds becomes part of the accent of that language and becomes established (think of a Spanish speaker trying to say home, they have much trouble mastering the slide from “oh” to “oo” packed into that vowel). But I digress.

For the other words in this class, the process of I-Mutation has been obscured by other processes. For example, in the following words, the adjective was derived from the noun and was preserved. Later, the Great Vowel Shift changed the sound of the noun, but left the adjective intact:

fūl → filth

Figure 2: /u:/→/i/

Later, fūl (pronounced “fool”) became foul by means of the Great Vowel shift: /u:/→/au/

hāl → health /ɑ/→/ε/ (See Fig. 1)

Here, the Great Vowel Shift covered I-Mutation’s tracks by changing hāl (pronounced “hall”) to whole and a less commonly used word hale. The likely explanation for the two results is that there were two competing pronunciations of hāl, and each went a different way with the Great Vowel Shift (and it probably has to do with the influence of /l/ on the preceding vowel … don’t ask).

In other instances, it’s more complicated. The Old English word slaw had the same vowel of modern (cole)slaw, but the /w/ was actually pronounced (like the interjection “ow!” but with the /ɑ/ of father instead of the /æ/ of cat). I-Mutation pulled the /ɑ/ forward:

Figure 3: /ɑ/→/æ/

… and we were left with slæwth, which stuck around for quite a while in Old English. However, in Middle English, slaw changed roughly to the modern pronunciation slow, and speakers – conscious of the relationship between slow and slæwth – futzed the vowels. Essentially, they performed the equivalent of changing length to longth. The important thing is that the /th/ stuck around.

One final example is young - youth, although the story of where the /ng/ went is a bit convoluted.

All of the derivations we’ve examined thus far were formed in Old English and were fossilized. At some point the /-ith/ suffix ceased being a preferred way of forming nouns, and it was abandoned in favor of suffixes like /-ness/, but the nouns that had already been formed were preserved. Linguists say suffixes such as /-ith/ are no longer “productive,” because they’re recognizable in a few places, but they aren’t actively used in the generation of new words.

However, since the process of adding /-ith/ and I-mutating the stem vowel fell out of use, some words have nevertheless been formed to superficially resemble the fossilized forms through the process of analogy. For example, wealth was formed from well under analogy to health. And tellingly, there was no application of I-Mutation: well and wealth have the same vowel.

Meanwhile, other words were analogized that DO exhibit some change in the stem vowel, but not in the manner we know to be consistent with I-Mutation. Depth was formed under analogy with breadth, but I-Mutation isn’t responsible for turning deep to depth. Similarly, analogy to breadth is also the provenance of width (from wide).

Most interesting is the emergent tendency to analogize to breadth for words relating to dimensions. It’s as if speakers wanted wide and deep to behave like long and broad, so that they could all be one neat set. This “ironing out” the kinks in the language is still happening today (although there’s some out there who would fight it). The noun height is traditionally formed from the adjective high, but you can often hear people saying heighth! It’s not hard to imagine a day when heighth has become accepted, and all the words for dimensions end in /th/.

*Technically, it was probably /ɔ/→/œ/ which was subsequently unrounded to /ε/. That’s why we have “o” in spelling today, but you get the idea.

The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

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So where’s your money?

For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.

I recently received a reply to my piece ‘I am a Militant Atheist’ over at Plasma Pool. Since I neither have the time to address these trite sneers nor the patience for the commenter’s snark, I’m posting a quick run through of his post here, with my immediate thoughts.

“I am not the least surprise [sic] that he launched an attack on the Bible; it’s an old political trick – assassinate your opponent’s character in order that you can appear credible.”

Nonsense. Non-Catholic Christians justify their beliefs all the time with the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s their premise, and if you successfully challenge it — which any half-wit can do — you challenge every assumption they make thereupon.

“He has not submitted any credible evidence to prove the non-existence of God outside of his aberrant views of the Bible.”

This really pisses me off — when people declare that it’s my obligation to debunk their belief structure.

First off, a bunch of them unabashedly admit at the outset that there’s nothing I could do to change their minds, so you might as well stop the discussion there. And second, they’re the ones making the positive claim about the way the world is! The burden of proof is on them. If they can’t produce a single scrap of evidence for these grandiose claims they’re making about the metaphysical structure of existence, I’m under no obligation to take them seriously, or treat them with deference.

Really, I don’t have time to run around disproving every stupid idea everyone has ever had. If you want to believe there’s a bearded man in the sky who cares what gives you a boner, or that there’s some cosmic soul-soup that we all return to when we die, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that warrants the slightest bit of respect in public discourse when the best evidence you can drudge up is a bronze age book of fairy tales.

“The Bible and Christianity have laid down their propositions. Where is his?”

Here’s my proposition: the world really is as simple as it seems. If you can’t touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it, see it or perceive it with the extended senses given to us by science and mathematics, it just doesn’t exist.

“Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before.”

By what gauge do you make this assertion? Christian faith is — and has been — on the decline in the US.

Church attendance is on a 70 year decline (just since Gallup began tracking, so likely longer than that).

And then there’s Europe, which was formerly the most Christian place on the planet. I don’t think Jesus freaks are rallying a major comeback anytime soon over there.

“May the story of Madelene O’hare [sic] be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy [sic].”

So what? Her kid’s a preacher. Unless he turned lead into gold on national television, or predicted the exact time and location of some unexpected stellar event, or shit, did anything that couldn’t have just happened anyway it’s not a miracle.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to Sourapples (OK, about four months), and the shame of projects abandoned was putting distance between me and the blog I used to be so proud of. I thought I might never again have the courage to mount my online soapbox.

But lo and behold, last night I was given reason to return, thanks to my local news channel.

There, nestled in between the Black Friday consumer masturbation and the insufferable holiday football recap was a tiny little mention — couldn’t have been more than a couple sentences; I would have missed it if I had gone to open another beer — about the recent findings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They concluded that in 2001, we had cornered Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, but he escaped because we shifted our strategic attention to the nascent Iraq war.

There it was. The naked truth. The most important geopolitical factoid of the last decade, revealed non-chalantly in an momentary evening news aside. An ‘I-told-you-so’ bombshell a thousand times more powerful than Republicans’ ‘the surge worked,’ went off in my living room. And it barely made a sound.

Yet before my jaw could hit the floor, they moved on to the football scores.

I love xkcd, especially this comic:

As a linguist, I can tell you, people are always decrying the decline of the English language; doomsayers lament that this may be the last generation marginally capable of stringing together words into a grammatical sentence!

But that’s simply not true.

Language has survived this far, and it will continue to survive indefinitely–if in slightly different forms. Common ‘pet peeves’ are actually symptoms of language change. For example, the inability to correctly execute the traditional distinction between ‘lay’ and ‘lie,’ pronouncing ‘pillow’ to rhyme with ‘fellow,’ and contractions like ‘gonna’ are signals of things to come: the next stage of English.

However, returning to the comic, I’d like to make a quick counterpoint. While there is no danger of humanity devolving into a quivering mass of stupid–à la Idiocracy–there is a very real danger of entering a dark age if we fail to educate ourselves. For this, there is precedence, and history has a demonstrated tendency to repeat itself.

I agree that the solution is not to institute selective breeding programs, but if we are at all concerned with the perpetuity of our species, we should make it our utmost priority to make education and information widely available, and to stamp out superstition and prejudice. That might mean socializing education a little more.

Humans are evolution’s only experiment with higher intelligence, as is evidenced by our mastery of mathematics, language, engineering, space travel, medicine, and many other fields in which we have visibly demonstrated command of the world around us. Sure, dolphins and octopodes may have highly developed brains, but they don’t print books or manufacture nuclear bombs. We’re clearly the smartest things on the planet.

Many people believe that this makes us special; that we are evolution’s end product, the creator’s chosen race, or simply that we are the “highest” form of life. But I mostly reject that idea.

Intelligence is just what we do. Birds fly, sharks have sharp teeth, and humans build cities. This in no way makes us “higher” than any other organism, it just makes us the best at being smart. Nature is full of “best at”s. Cheetahs are the best at running, and if they were capable of designating a “highest” form of life, it would surely be themselves, because the metric they would use would be the one most useful to them as an organism: speed.

An obvious counterpoint is that intelligence makes us “best at” anything we want. Cheetahs can admire our high-speed trains, sharks our knives, and birds our jets. However, it’s useful to remember that despite our intelligence, we are not the most successful earth creatures by any measure. That honor goes to the most inconspicuous of our neighbors: microorganisms. To any objective observer, humans–along with most species of animal–are a fragile lot, perpetually on the verge of extinction. The best way to gauge the “highest” life-form may simply be its ability to perpetuate itself. If that’s the case, the nuclear bomb puts us far lower on the ladder.

I often reflect on my sentiments towards religion, and wonder why I hate it so much. I ask myself why I dedicate so much time to railing against an institution that has done me no more harm than a few shattered delusions and wasted Sundays. I even feel ashamed of this seemingly puerile obsession with denigrating faith, despite a lack of any ostensible wrongdoing on the part of the religious.

However, I’m reminded that there is one grave disservice that religion has done me which I cannot bring myself to forgive. It mutilated my genitals.

Yes, that may seem a hyperbole; even writing it I feel I am being deliberately provocative. But I have to stop and ask myself, am I? Is there any sense in which surgically modifying an unconsenting child’s genitals is not a reproachable human rights violation? Due to its cultural normativity, circumcision may fail to arouse our sense of disgust in the same way footbinding or female genital mutilation do. However, just because we don’t have a gutteral aversion to it does not mean it’s not an egregious act. We tend to look on other cultures’ barbaric rituals with a smug superiority, reassuring ourselves that we’re civilized, but maybe we should turn the lens inward.

Circumcision, is at its root a religious export, and it’s in religion that it takes refuge and perpetuates itself. When a mohel in New York was responsible for the death of a child, no one spoke up against practice of circumcision as a Jewish ritual. Instead, we pussyfooted around the topic, saying that it was merely a problem with the orthodox techniques, or that proper precautions were not taken. No one considered that cutting off part of a child’s penis was inherently wrong. They dare not denounce the religious practice itself, either for fear of being culturally insensitive, or because most of us live in glass houses.

And therein lies the problem. No one will stand up and call this atrocity that it is, because if we don’t respect everyone’s right to have irrational beliefs, then someone may come after our own. Well I won’t feel ashamed for being strident anymore, because we should all have the right to savagely critique one another’s irrationalities; to lay them bare and hack away at them, just like they did to my newborn privates.