Robert Louis Stevenson might have been right when he claimed that “Language is but a poor bull’s eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world,” but we have to use what we’ve got, and language itself is interesting enough to inform and amuse, as evidenced by “Fact or Fantasy?  Tales From the Linguistic Fringe.”  That Knowledgeable Magazine article by Charles Choi described some strange adventures in fantastic linguistics” experienced by University of Pittsburg professor Sally Thomason.  Her main academic pursuits are the Montana Salish Native American language and what happens when different languages meet, but she’s also interested in “the world’s oldest language” debate and xenoglossy.  As the Smithsonian Magazine article by Lucy Tu, “What’s the World’s Oldest Language?,” noted, “Language comes in different forms—including speech, gestures and writing—which don’t all leave conclusive evidence behind. And experts use different approaches to determine a language’s age …. But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world.  Accordingly, some linguists argue that the designation of the ‘oldest language’ should belong to one with a well-established written record.”  

            The Sumerians can claim the earliest established written record, but some men fishing in Bashplemi Lake in Georgia in 2021 found “a small stone tablet inscribed with dozens of mysterious symbols,” according to “Ancient Tablet Etched With Mysterious Language Found in Georgia,” a ScienceAlert.com article from last December.  “Roughly the size of an iPad, the basalt tablet features just 39 different characters in 60 inscriptions written left to right across seven lines. Each carved symbol began as a series of holes made with a cone-shaped drill, connected into flowing lines with a smooth, round tool.”  The discovery’s site is the same as where the first European hominid remains, 1.8 million years old, were found, but no one knows who made the tablet nor how old it is.  I’m far more concerned with modern tablets being used to teach reading to children.  “Has Technology Been Bad for Reading and Learning?,” a 2024 Education Week article, pointed out that “A recent report by Tim Daly showed that national test scores started dropping abruptly in 2013 after 25 years of growth with no clear cause. At the risk of oversimplifying the case again, Instagram came out in 2010, Snapchat came out in 2011, and Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012. With that in mind, the test-score tumble starting in 2013 seems less abrupt.”

In “Reading Print Is Better for Comprehension Than Screens,” an Axios article, Sareen Habeshian wrote about a meta study in which “researchers analyzed 25 studies on reading comprehension published between 2000 and 2022, with more than 450,000 participants.”  They found “that if a student spends 10 hours reading books on paper, their comprehension will probably be 6 to 8 times greater than if they read on digital devices for the same amount of time.”  We use the scanning circuitry of our brains to “read” screens but use a very different and more complex circuits to read hardprint.  Our brains are filled with connectomes, maps of our neural connections.  When we walk along an unfamiliar trail our brains subconsciously build connectomes by noticing a big tree stump, a dip in the path, and other landmarks.  That’s hard to duplicate when scrolling through a screen.  As Avery Elizabeth Hurt wrote in “Will You Learn Better From Reading on Screen or on Paper?” for Science News Explores,” “When reading a printed page or even a whole book, you tend to know where you are. Not just where you are on some particular page, but which page — potentially out of many. You might, for instance, remember that the part in the story where the dog died was near the top of the page on the left side. You don’t have that sense of place when some enormously long page just scrolls past you …. Researchers have shown that we tend to make mental maps when we learn something. Being able to ‘place’ a fact somewhere on a mental map of the page helps us remember it …. Scrolling down a page takes a lot more mental work than reading a page that’s not moving. Your eyes don’t just focus on the words. They also have to keep chasing the words as you scroll them down the page.”

James Earl Jones said, “I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language,” and many pathways exist for delivering information.  That gets us to xenoglossy, which Encyclopedia.com defines as “Speaking in a language unknown to the speaker in the normal waking state. It is different from what is commonly called glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a form of vocalized religious experience characteristic of some religious movements.”  Wikipedia adds that one form of the phenomenon is “recitative xenoglossy: the use of an unacquired language incomprehensibly …. Most cases of recitative xenoglossy have been interpreted as instances of cryptomnesia, where memories of a language acquired earlier in life re-enter the consciousness in certain exceptional circumstances.”  At age eleven Helen Keller provided a glaring example of innocent cryptomnesia.   One fall day Anne Sullivan, her teacher-companion, described to her how the leaves’ colors were changing using “finger-spelling,” in which she formed letters in Keller’s hands so she could feel them.  Soon thereafter, Keller wrote a story about fairies using casks of jewels that melted in the sun to color the leaves and sent her tale as a gift to Michael Anagnos, the head of the Perkins School for the Blind where she attended and her particular friend.  He published it in the school’s alumni magazine, and the Goodson Gazette, which focused on deaf-blind education, ran it.  One Perkins teachers noticed its similarity to “Frost Fairies,” a story by Margaret Canby about fairies changing the leaves’ color, and she notified the Gazette, which ran both stories concurrently along with its editor’s opinion that Keller’s version was a deliberate fraud.   Anagnos agreed and formed a special committee to decide if the girl and/or Sullivan, committed plagiarism.  Keller insisted she couldn’t recall ever encountering Canby’s story, and Sullivan maintained she’d never read Canby’s story to her.  According to a Perkins.org article, “[a]fter bringing Keller into the room with the school officers, Sullivan was asked to leave while they questioned her student. The questioning lasted two hours and ultimately ended up deadlocked, leaving Anagnos with the deciding vote.  Keller later wrote that she was questioned ‘with what seemed to me a determination on the part of my judges to force me to acknowledge that I remembered having had “The Frost Fairies” read to me. I felt in every question the doubt and suspicion that was in their minds, and I felt, too, that a loved friend [Anagnos] was looking at me reproachfully.”  Deeply scarred by the event, she and Sullivan left Perkins.  It eventually turned out that when Keller was seven or eight, Sullivan had been away briefly, her mentor, Sophia Hopkins, stayed with the girl and used finger spelling to read Canby’s “Frost Fairies” to her.  Keller cited the “Perkins trial” for never again writing fiction.  She also never forgave Anagnos.  In happier times he’d acknowledged how Keller frequented the Perkin’s library, but it wasn’t until 1909 – three years after Anagnos’ death – that she began donating to the Perkins library 61 Braille books from her personal collection including novels, poetry, and non-fiction.

Mark Twain read of Keller’s mock trial for plagiarism in her biography, and on St. Patrick’s Day, 1903, he wrote her an amazing letter that begins, “I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad I am to have your book and how highly I value it, both for its own sake and as a remembrance of an affectionate friendship which has subsisted between us for nine years without a break and without a single act of violence that I can call to mind. I suppose there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off.”  He later continued, “Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul–let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances in plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”  Twain ended with, “To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn’t sleep for blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and they didn’t know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop! Oh, dam–But you finish it, dear, I am running short of vocabulary today.”