[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares a video of the expansion of supernova remnant Cas A.
• James Bow shares an alternate history Toronto transit map from his new novel The Night Girl.
• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber notes the Boris Johnson coup.
• The Crux notes a flawed study claiming that some plants had a recognizable intelligence.
• D-Brief notes the mysterious absorbers in the clouds of Venus. Are they life?
• Dangerous Minds shares, apropos of nothing, the Jah Wabbles song “A Very British Coup.”
• Cody Delistraty looks at bullfighting.
• Dead Things notes the discovery of stone tools sixteen thousand years old in Idaho which are evidence of the first humans in the Americas.
• io9 features an interview with authors Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz on worldbuilding.
• Joe. My. God. notes that a bill in Thailand to establish civil unions is nearing approval.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how using plastic in road construction can reduce pollution in oceans.
• Language Log looks to see if some police in Hong Kong are speaking Cantonese or Putonghua.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the perplexing ramblings and–generously–inaccuracy of Joe Biden.
• The LRB Blog asks why the United Kingdom is involved in the Yemen war, with Saudi Arabia.
• The Map Room Blog looks at the different efforts aiming to map the fires of Amazonia.
• Marginal Revolution reports on how some southern US communities, perhaps because they lack other sources of income, depend heavily on fines.
• The NYR Daily looks at the complex literary career of Louisa May Alcott, writing for all sorts of markets.
• Window on Eurasia reports on the apparently sincere belief of Stalin, based on new documents, that in 1934 he faced a threat from the Soviet army.
• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at fixings, or fixins, as the case may be.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait shares images of Jupiter, imaged in infrared by ALMA.
• Centauri Dreams looks at ocean upwelling on one class of super-habitable exoplanet.
• D-Brief looks at how the Komodo dragon survived the threat of extinction.
• Far Outliers reports on a mid-19th century slave raid in the Sahel.
• Gizmodo notes that the secret US Air Force spaceplane, the X-37B, has spent two years in orbit. (Doing what?)
• JSTOR Daily looks at the economic underpinnings of medieval convents.
• Dave Brockington writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the continuing meltdown of the British political system in the era of Brexit, perhaps even of British democracy.
• The LRB Blog looks at the impact of Brexit on the Common Travel Area.
• Marginal Revolution reports on how Poland has tried to deter emigration by removing income taxes on young workers.
• Carole Naggar writes at the NYR Daily about the photography of women photographers working for LIFE, sharing examples of their work.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why time has to be a dimension of the universe, alongside the three of space.
• Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps shares NASA images of the forest fires of Amazonia.
• Window on Eurasia notes that many Russophones of Ukraine are actually strongly opposed to Russia, contrary Russian stereotypes of language determining politics.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul writes</u about the pioneering women architects of the United Kingdom.
• Bad Astronomy reports on a marvelous mosaic assembled by amateur astronomers of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog notes how college debts in the United States hinder social mobility.
• The Crux considers how the antibiotic-resistant fungus C. auris can be treated.
• D-Brief looks at the archaeological studies of graves in the forest islands of Bolivia that have revealed remarkable things about the settlement of ancient Amazonia.
• Far Outliers looks at how U.S. Grant built a pontoon bridge across the James River in Virginia.
• Gizmodo notes the big crater created by Hayabusa 2 in the surface of Ryugu, suggesting that body’s loose composition.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the plan of Denmark to build a border fence to protect its pig populations against wild boars might be flawed.
• Language Hat looks at the South Arabian languages, non-Arabic Semitic languages spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the growing role of women in the American labour movement.
• James Butler at the LRB Blog writes about the new urgency of the Extinction Rebellion in this era of climate change and threatened apocalypse.
• Marginal Revolution considers a paper claiming that intergenerational social mobility in much of Canada is no higher than in most of the neighbouring United States.
• The NYR Daily examines the democracy of Indonesia.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at how a particular reading of international law was used in Bolivia to justify a violation of the national constitution.
• Peter Rukavina shares an insightful map looking at the election results from PEI. One thing brought out by the map is the strength of the Greens across the Island.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle looks at the useful Ontario shrub of leatherwood.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the discovery of carbon-60 buckyballs in the far reaches of our galaxy by Hubble.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the president and the prime minister of Ukraine are both Jews.
• Towleroad notes the new video by Willie Tay, a Singapore music star who was dropped by his label for being gay and has responded by coming out and releasing a video for his song “Open Up Babe”.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the Ingermanlanders, also known as Ingrians or Ingrian Finns, a Finnic people in the hinterland of St. Petersburg who suffered horrifically under Communism.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how computers, originally imagined to function in certain specific ways, are being reimagined and reused in ways which do not quite suit them (and us).
• Arnold Zwicky finds a stock photo used to represent art stolen by the Nazis and uses it to explore issues of recovery and loss and mistake.

[NEWS] Five First Nations links: Louis Kamookak, Mohawk, Taushiro, jewelry, Elizabeth Warren

• Inuit oral historian Louie Kamookak gathered vital information in the recent recovery of the ships of the Franklin expedition in the Arctic. The National Post reports.
• A journalism class at Corcordia University is assembling a multimedia project to try to help the Mohawk language. Global News reports.
• The older article from the New York Times tracing the sad life of the last speaker of the Taushiro language, from the Peruvian Amazon, is tragic. The article is here.
• Jezebel notes that many recent migrants to New Mexico have, in their production of jewelry incorporating indigenous themes and materials like turquoise, harmed indigenous jewelers.
• I have to agree that the continued insistence of Elizabeth Warren that, contrary to all manner of genealogical proofs, she can lay claim to a Cherokee ancestor speaks poorly of her. If she has problems with facts as applied to her family … Jerry Adler writes here.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper suggesting exoplanet transits could start a galactic communications network.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the connections between eating and identity.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas looks at the need for a critical study of the relationship between technology and democracy.
• Language Hat notes how nationalism split Hindustani into separate Hindi and Urdu languages.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on the grim outlook in Somalia after the terrible recent Mogadishu bombing.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen thinks Trump’s decertification of the Iran deal is a bad idea.
• The Map Room Blog links to an article imagining a counter-mapping of the Amazon by indigenous peoples.
• Neuroskeptic considers the possibility of Parkinson’s being a prion disease, somewhat like mad cow disease.
• The NYR Daily notes that a Brexit driven by a perceived need to take back control will not meet that need, at all.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw looks at the problem Sydney faces as it booms.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer looks at the extent to which an independent Catalonia would be ravaged economically by a non-negotiated secession.
• Peter Watts tells the sad story of an encounter between Toronto police and a homeless man he knows.
• Window on Eurasia notes a Sakhalin bridge, like a Crimea bridge, may not come off because of Russian weakness.

[LINK] “Reconstructing the Lifestyles of Three Pre-Historic Amazonian Tribes”

This brief post by Asya Perelstvaig at her Languages of the World constitutes still more evidence, this time linguistic, suggesting that current Amazonian cultures are survivors of a much larger and more complex society that collapsed, likely as a result of the post-colonial exchanges.

In my class on October 5, 2015, we talked about how ancestral languages can be reconstructed on the basis of their present-day descendants and how such linguistic reconstructions (particularly reconstructions of the vocabulary) can be used to reimagine the lives of the speakers of such ancestral languages. While most of our examples in class dealt with Indo-European languages (with a brief foray into the Polynesian world), here I would like to present another example where the same sort of socio-cultural reconstruction can be done on the basis of unwritten languages who offer us a rare glimpse into the lives of the their speakers’ linguistic ancestors. This example concerns three indigenous South American language families: Arawakan, Tukanoan, and Nadahup. These languages are spoken in the Upper Rio Negro region, on the border of Columbia and Brazil (see the map on the left adapted from muturzikin.com). The present-day Arawak languages are shown in pale-green, Tukanoan languages are shown in yellow, and Nadahup languages in brown. (The best-known language in the Nadahup family—at least in linguistic circles—is Nadëb, which exhibits the rarest Object-Subject-Verb order, found only in a handful of languages around the world, 4 in the WALS sample.) Of the three families, only the Nadahup is limited to this region, while Tukanoan languages are also spoken elsewhere through South America and Arawakan languages are found from Brazil to the Caribbean.

Epps (2015: 581) describes the present-day speakers of the languages in these three families who live in the region as follows:

“within the Upper Rio Negro region, the contemporary Arawak and Tukanoan peoples are settled river-dwellers who rely predominantly on fishing and bitter manioc cultivation for subsistence; the Nadahup are semi-nomadic forest-dwellers who prioritize hunting and gathering but also cultivate small garden plots.”

But did their ancestors live the same way? Since there is no indigenous form of writing, we must turn to contemporary languages and reconstruct the ancestral tongues. Such reconstructions were made by Payne (1991) for Proto-Arawakan, Chacon (2013) for Proto-Tukanoan, and Martins (2005) and Epps (forthcoming) for Proto-Nadahup. The relevant reconstructed words are given in the table below (adapted from Epps 2015: 582). The exact pronunciation of these reconstructed forms is not relevant for our present purposes; what matters is whether or not a given word reconstructs for a particular proto-language. A dash in a given table cell indicates that the word does not reconstruct for that family.

[. . .]

Since the only language for which the entire lexical set reconstructs is Proto-Arawakan, Epps concludes that its speakers “lived in settled villages, probably along larger rivers, and made use of ceramics, diverse domesticated plants… and animals … — consistent with archaeologists’ conception of early Arawak peoples as settled agriculturalists, much as they are today” (p. 581). In contrast, speakers of Proto-Tukanoan and Proto-Nadahup must have had very different lifestyles from those found among their descendants today. As can be seen from the table above, in Proto-Tukanoan a word for ‘canoe’ cannot be reconstructed. Similarly absent from the reconstructed Proto-Tukanoan vocabulary are “words for animals typical of larger rivers, as well as words for ‘canoe’, ‘paddle’, or ‘fish-trap’” (ibid). From this lexical gap, it has been concluded that speakers of Proto-Tukanoan were “less river-oriented than they are today” (ibid). However, the presence of a broad range of words for domesticated plants suggests that they engaged in agriculture. Likewise, the reconstruction of ceramic-related words means that speakers of Proto-Tukanoan manufactured ceramic goods.

As for speakers of Proto-Nadahup, they too must have had a different lifestyle from that of their present-day descendants. As mentioned above, today’s Nadahup peoples are “semi-nomadic forest dwellers who prioritize hunting and gathering but also cultivate small garden plots… [and] manufacture … ceramics” (ibid). Their ancestors, in contrast, appear to have neither “relied on domesticated plants, with the apparent exception of tobacco” (pp. 581-582) nor engaged in manufacturing ceramics since words for such objects are not reconstructed for the ancestral tongue.

Much more detail at the site.