Citizen Science and the Law (continued...)

Editor,

It has become increasingly difficult to get supplies and equipment for home lab use. I saw the writing on the wall, so I came up with the following solutions over 10 years ago.

First, I set my lab up as a business. Its actually interesting in that my home lab has now become my sole source of income since 2001. The first 8 years it was a part time endeavor, and my total yearly profit might have bought lunch at McDonalds. Now it supports my family.

Second, I established a relationship with the chemical suppliers. If you talk the lingo, and bring up safety concerns and shipment issues with them before placing an order, it establishes some credibility. Throwing in some university connections also helps. Chemical suppliers have pretty good databases. To some extent, I could almost call them and ask for my employment and educational history.

Third, I have a business credit card. My orders are too small to justify an account, yet the business credit card seems to imply seriousness in ones endeavors. A business credit card is also very easy to obtain. Although I have an EIN, none of the applications have asked for it.

Fourth, I have an arrangement with a local business for a commercial address. This again adds credibility. It also provides a way for freight delivery, as some substances and equipment cannot be shipped via UPS, USPS, or FedEx.

Finally, for small quantities of chemicals, or lab equipment, a friend of mine recommended Elemental Scientific. I have not ordered from them yet, but he was pleased with their service a few years ago. Here is their catalog: http://www.elementalscientific.net/downloadcat.html

Ron Amundson

More Citizen Science and the Law (continued...)

Editor,

One has to have their head in the sand to not see that legal restrictions are being placed on all kinds of things, not just on things that affect amateur science. For example, in a number of places it is illegal for a civilian to own or wear a bullet proof vest. The thinking here must be that only someone committing a crime would wear a vest to prevent the police from killing them. The idea seems to be that if you make a possible precursor to a crime illegal it will be easier to prosecute the person for a crime and potentially stop the "real" crime. Because of the widespread use of this legal tactic, it is unlikely that a few amateur scientists complaining about not being able to buy some chemical is going to have much effect.

Also, unfortunately, this general concept of less government interference in our lives is associated with some radical anti-government movements. If you pay attention to the little informal surveys that show upon the various news web pages it seems that the general public is in favor of this sort of government restriction. All this makes me feel that it is unlikely that any effort is going to slow down or reverse any restrictions.

One thing I did notice is that some of the chemicals that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has on its list of meth ingredients can be purchased. You just have to fill out a form so the DEA knows who bought what. This happens where I live if you buy more than two cans of ether (starting fluid) from the car parts store. I suspect that a lot of the chemical suppliers just don't want to bother with the forms for small amateur sales.

Jim Hannon

Einstein's Tea Leaves (followup)

Editor,

I just wanted to thank the three responders to my request for information about Einstein's tea leaves problem ("Backscatter," The Citizen Scientist, 1 July 2005). It was interesting to see the different approaches taken from the very technical to the more simplified, in which latter class I put Einstein. Thank you very much SASers.

Shifting to another subject related to climate change in that the burning of fossil fuels consumes oxygen and the degreening of the world's forests removes oxygen producers from the scene, is there any evidence that the oxygen level of our atmosphere is declining? I look forward to your replies.

Johan Benson

Readers, Johan raises an interesting question about oxygen that is being carefully studied by a few professional scientists. This is a ripe field for serious amateur scientists looking for a very significant, long-term project. Please send any comments or suggestions to "Backscatter." Editor.

Meroitic Language: Reggie Smith to Sheldon Greaves

Shawn Carlson forwarded a correspondence between Reggie Smith and Sheldon Greaves that is so interesting that we have asked permission to place it in "Backscatter." Editor.

Hi Sheldon, my name is Reggie Smith.

I'm an active member of SAS and, though most of my work deals with physics, I have an interest in history as well. Shawn told me at the last SAS conference that you are an expert in ancient languages. I have been interested in the still undeciphered language of Meroitic since I was in college, where I taught myself to transliterate the script. I have been in contact with several scholars in the field who are working on decipherment. Most are hoping to find a bilingual script (i.e., Meroitic/Egyptian Demotic or Meroitic/Latin or maybe even Meroitic/Greek).  

I have recently been attempting to use my science skills to try to understand the language through computer and statistical techniques. I was wondering if there has been any successful decipherment of a dead language when no bilingual text was available? It has recently been discovered which languages are related to Meroitic in Africa. How could this be helpful? Is there any knowledge of successful statistical linguistic techniques being applied to languages in the Near East? Do you know Meroitic too?

Reggie

Meroitic Language: Sheldon Greaves to Reggie Smith

Thank you for your very interesting note regarding the decipherment of Meroitic. Shawn's information is correct; my academic background includes training in many of the languages and literatures of Mesopotamia and the western Mediterranean basin. I confess that I have never worked with Meroitic specifically. The closest I've come geographically concerned a couple of Punic and Phoenician inscriptions from the north African coast, and, from time to time, I've dabbled a little in Arabic.  

However, there does seem to be some interesting stuff out there on Meroitic. I'm aware of the grammar by Fritz Hintze, "Beitrage zur meroitischen Grammatik" ("Studies in Meroitic Grammar") and the more recent work of C. A. Winters, who seems to agree with Hintze that Kushana is the long-sought cognate language for Meroitic.  

But let's move on to your other question regarding the decipherment of a language in the absence of a bilingual text. It is possible, although it is pretty uncommon.   One example was the decipherment of Ugaritic in the early 1920's. This is a northwest Semitic language that used a unique alphabetic cuneiform writing system. The texts were found and first published "as is" by Francis Schaeffer, and literally within weeks of publication, the language was deciphered by at least three scholars working independently.  

They each noticed that the number of letters in the Ugaritic alphabet was nearly the same as that used in ancient Hebrew, and since these texts were found not too far north of traditional Bible lands, they independently tried treating the texts as if they were simple substitution ciphers in Hebrew. (Not surprisingly, all three of these scholars had recently served their respective governments as cryptographers in World War I). While the correspondence was not exact, they were able to identify enough words that were clearly part of the NW semitic language family that working out the rest of the language proved relatively easy.

Another example is Mayan hieroglyphics, which have no known bilingual texts or cognate languages to speak of.

It is now known that this language bears some very, very distant resemblances to very, very old Asiatic languages, but that doesn't help much. Mayan got a little help from some notes made by a Spanish priest prior to the conquest, but it mostly only gave some early insights into the writing system. The rest has been long, slow, unspeakably tedious guesswork starting with the most tentative hypotheses. After a couple of centuries of this, however, it's possible to read a fair bit of it. I have also heard claims that the Phaistos Disk, a Mycenean document written in Linear A, has been cracked without the benefit of a bilingual text, but from what I can see a lot of scholars remain skeptical and rightly so. There just aren't enough Linear A texts extant to test the theory.

You asked how cognate languages are used to help dismantle the vocabulary, syntax, and grammar of an otherwise unknown language. One key to reading an unknown language is to identify its language family. For instance, if I know that an unknown language is Semitic, I can make some solid assumptions about how it's put together. I know that all the verbs will be built from a root consisting of three consonants. I know that it will have a very primitive case system or even none at all, and that the parts of speech are probably indicated by the order in which the words appear in a sentence. I can, thus, hypothesize which words in a sentence are the subject, main verb, direct object, etc. just from their location.

For a declined language (i.e., uses a case system) like Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc., I know that since the case and part of speech is encoded into the individual words ("amicus, amici", etc.), then word order is a much less reliable indicator of the words' function. So, I would look for words that are very similar to each other except for the last one or two letters, or the first one or two letters. This indicates the use of prefixes or suffixes attached to a stem, and if the language is declined, these words are probably nouns. And so it goes.

Other reasons why cognate languages are useful is because if there is some ancient connection between the two languages (such as, say, between Latin and Spanish), if you can isolate some of the older vocabulary, and then identify something that looks like it in your mystery language, you can start to piece together sentences and perhaps get enough to "fill in" the blanks. Simple computer comparisons of word lists could prove useful in identifying those word forms ("morphemes") that look similar, which you could then start comparing based on the known meaning of one and see if it works for the other.

This is also why learning languages becomes easier the more of them you study, especially if you study languages from the same language family. An old professor of mine who was known to have a considerable command of at least 28 languages told some of us slack-jawed undergraduates that, "the first two or three languages are the hardest. After that, it gets easy." My own experience has proven him correct.

As for statistical studies of ancient Near Eastern languages, I am not aware of any studies currently underway. (Obviously I'm leaving out crank stuff like the so-called "Bible Code" and similar drivel). But that's not to say it isn't happening. I have, I confess, been "out of the game" for awhile, and I am not current on what is happening on the cutting edge. However, I am genuinely intrigued to learn more about your proposed studies. I would be happy to offer what assistance I can, given my time limitations. Perhaps I can point you in some fruitful directions or warn you away from some dead ends. In any case, I am delighted to see that the spirit of Michael Ventris lives on in the amateur science community. Please feel free to contact me again with questions. 

Best wishes,

Sheldon Greaves

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