Right now I’m running a book club on classical history. We’re reading volumes two and three of Will Durant’s History of Civilization. It’s a simply fantastic series, and one that I intend to review in-depth very soon. But for now, I’d like to zoom in on one overlooked figure that struck me in Durant. I was struck by his connection with Buddhism, and I’d like to look at the possibility of influence.

The Philosopher from Ionia

Ancient Greece was far bigger than we realize. The Greeks were the first colonists, and they sailed far from the Greek mainland westward to make their homes in southern Italy, which they called Magna Graecia, and Eastward into Asia Minor, the landmass today occupied by Turkey.

Asia Minor became an important part of the Greek hinterland, akin to middle America today. The western shore of Asia Minor was known as Ionia. The foremost city of Ionia was Ephesus, which was a bustling center of trade, politics, and learning. It was here that Heraclitus was born.

Heraclitus is one of the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, meaning those philosophers who appeared before Socrates. Their thought prefigured the thoughts of the famous philosopher sequence of Socrates → Plato → Aristotle. Just as Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, Socrates stood on the shoulders of Thales, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus.

The Principles of Motion and Struggle

Heraclitus was born into an aristocratic family but, as a young man, abandoned his birthright to pursue philosophy and solitary misanthropy. He remained an aristocrat at heart who shunned what he saw as incorrect popular understanding of life. That being said, he didn’t hate poor people: “Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman. [43]”

He only wrote one book, and it doesn’t survive. We only have fragments of it quoted by other authors. However, he was popular enough that we can use the fragments to piece together a coherent view of his philosophy. The fragments actually make for great reading today, and I highly recommend them. I’ll be citing the translation by Haxton and Hillman, with the number in square brackets being the fragment number originally given by Bywater.

To understand Heraclitus we must first understand his monism. He thought the universe was best conceived as a single thing. “For wisdom, listen not to me but to the Word and know that all is one”. [2] He looked down on popular Greek religion because its many gods and goddesses distracted from seeing the universe as the unity it truly is. “Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.” [35] In this he reminds me of Paul and the later monotheists criticizing pagan societies.

The unity of everything is not static but rather constantly in motion. All phenomena arise from everlasting strife. While Thales thought that the arche, the fundamental element, was water, for Heraclitus it was fire. Fire provides the most suitable metaphor for life itself:

“That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire; the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away.” [20]

Just as fire is constantly in motion, and individual tongues of flame are constantly appearing and disappearing, so are the things in life always appearing and disappearing. No actual configuration of the world is permanent, even though Heraclitus thought the world itself was permanent.

Heraclitus appreciated the violent connotation of fire. It is the heat of conflict which, in Heraclitus’ view, engenders everything: “War, as father of all things, and king, names few to serve as gods, and of the rest makes some men slaves, and some free.” [44] People’s stations in life are decided by conflict, which seems pretty acceptable to us moderns. Further, even the Gods themselves ascended their thrones by this! Heraclitus has plenty of backing in Hesiod: the Twelve Olympians earned dominion over the Earth by warring with and vanquishing the titans. Durant traces the theme of conflict in Western philosophy and science through Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Nietzsche. I would add Marx, as the originator of conflict theory, to the list.

You will read all this in any introduction to Heraclitus. A close reading of the fragments produces more tendencies that appear in popular summaries less often. Heraclitus was a relativist, believing that there is no objective good or evil: “Therefore, good and ill are one”. [57] Things become what they are only by contrast: “Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?” [60]

Heraclitus also believes in an aristocracy of the mind. He contrasts “sleepers” and “wakers,” with the implication that most of us sleepwalk through life. Nowadays we might call the sleepers NPCs. Heraclitus says “The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own”. [95]

The astute reader will find their mind turned to the Buddha, whose name means “the awakened one.”

Buddhist Parallels

There are many similarities between Heraclitus’ and the Buddha’s thought:

Of course, there are crucial differences. The first lies in what we might call soteriology. For the Buddha, the ultimate goal in life is to melt the boundary between self and not-self, achieving Nirvana. For Heraclitus, it’s living a virtuous life. Both of these ideas are taken from the background traditions of each sage. For Heraclitus, that is Greek religion; for the Buddha, Upanishadic Hinduism.

The other big disagreement is about strife. For Heraclitus, it’s an essential agent of change. For the Buddha, it’s a distraction to be avoided.

These similarities are big enough to explode the idea that these two belong to the same school. They show influence, but not substantial agreement of thought.

Channels of Interchange

Is it possible that they inspired each other? In what direction did the inspiration flow?

The relationship between Greek and Indian philosophy is well-established. We know for a fact that ideas from Greece flowed into India via the Alexandrian conquests and subsequent Seleucid Empire. However, this only happened a couple centuries after the two thinkers lived: Alexander reached India in 326 BC.

Do the timelines line up? Heraclitus was born in 530 BC and widely known by 500 BC. The Buddha was born around 560 BC, began his search for enlightenment in 530 BC. So the Buddha was older than Heraclitus by about a generation, but they were contemporaries.

While links of trade existed between India and Ionia even at this time, horses and camels aren’t fast. I find it unlikely, but not impossible, that the Buddha’s ideas would travel far and fast enough to directly influence Heraclitus. Influence in the other direction is even less likely.

It seems more likely that Heraclitus was inspired by the background of Indian philosophy that already existed. There are a huge number of parallels between Heraclitus and the Upanishads. McEvilley argues that the parallels are so great in number that Occam’s Razor cuts away a theory of independent development: “ The extraordinary parallelism is a strong and clear link… it amounts to a scholarly ‘proof’”. [McEvilley Page 60].

Don’t make conclusions too early though! In order to know what the Buddha thought we need written records. The Buddha himself didn’t do any writing, and his thought was only recorded centuries later!

The oldest surviving documents of the Buddha’s teachings are the Gandharan Buddhist texts, dating from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, hundreds of years after the death of the Buddha. They were written in the Indo-Greek kingdom of Bactria, a highly Hellenized region. These texts show many of the same sutras and themes that later show up in the Pali Canon, the first complete basis of Buddhist scripture

It’s possible that these sutras and the interpretation thereof was influenced by Greek thought. To what extent is difficult to say.

So, there was very likely a great degree of indirect influence, but direct influence is unlikely.

Conclusion

“The living, though they yearn for consummation of their fate, need rest, and in their turn leave children to fulfill their doom.” [86]

You should read Heraclitus— you can find his fragments here and read them all in twenty minutes. They remind me of the Tao Te Ching, as a poetic collection of aphorisms that hint at a philosophy rather than state it. You’ll get something out of them, although what exactly it’s hard to say… maybe the effect his philosophy has on moderns, just like his view of reality, is constantly in motion.

Bibliography

Source for Heraclitus citations:

Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, tr. by Bruce Haxton and James Hillman (Penguin, 2001)

My notes on other sources are in bold, and as usual are listed in recommended reading order.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization II: The Life of Greece, 1939

Volume II of the best universal history ever published.

Richard Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus, 2000

Great modern introduction to interpreting Heraclitus. Geldard knows his stuff and makes quite a few original points.

Thomas C. McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, 2002

Eleni Chronopoulou, Heraclitus and the Rig Veda: A Cross-Tradition Engaging Examination, 2024, link

4/5 Stars

(I do not endorse Kaczynski’s worldview or actions. I give the work 4/5 stars because it is well-written, trenchant critique of modern society, not because its ideas are true.)

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”

This was America’s first bomb-published work. Ted Kaczynski said that his terrorist campaign was done to bring attention to this manifesto. It worked: Industrial Society and Its Future was published in The Washington Post, and has been influential ever since. Kaczynski never sent another bomb, and his distinct writing style led to his capture. Hence, this work was both Kaczynski’s final triumph and his final undoing.

My first thought is that it was obviously written by a mathematician: every paragraph is numbered and the text frequently back references paragraphs by number. Terms are defined before they are used (with one notable exception that we will get to). Kaczynski’s prose is analytical, sparse, and clear as crystal. Except for a moldy rant here and there, it sparkles.

Kaczynski stampedes in with his first idea: mass technology is anti-human. The rest of the word has Kaczynski using Spinoza-like reasoning to argue, not for changing who owns the means of production, but destroying the means altogether.

The core of the work is the power process, which he says is an innate human need to exercise power and survival in a small group. Technology’s giant scale and massive coordination frustrates the power process, so most people cope with surrogate activities. This is his name for the hobbies that are the raison d’être for so many contemporary people. For Kaczynski, these are pointless foibles that just stave off boredom: people would be more fulfilled and happy with the struggle for survival. The frustration of the power process leads to mass psychological illness: depression, alienation, and even psychosis are all traced back to this cutting-off. Modern technology is the radix malorum.

Kaczynski never says explicitly how much technology we should destroy. The closest he comes is in the section Two Kinds of Technology: small-scale tech and organization-dependent tech. The latter is far more fragile since it depends on large-scale society in order to function, and it’s likely to be permanently destroyed by the revolution. Kaczynski uses this to defend his idea of destroying technology: organization-dependent technology will not necessarily come back immediately after the revolution, and as the long Pleistocene and Early Middle Ages have taught us, the same technological level can persist for a very long time.

I read in this the implicit argument that we should get rid of organization-dependent tech like electrical grids and refrigerators, but keep small-scale tech like hammers, plows, solar lights, and abaci. Anarcho-primitivism is therefore the current of the work.

Since technology perpetuates itself, the only solution is revolution, likely violent. Much of the work is an instruction manual for potential followers on how to carry out the revolution. Given Kaczynski’s clarity and explicitness, I’m surprised that it seems like no actual such group has yet to form. That being said, such a group would not want to widely advertise themselves. Maybe they do exist, but keep to the shadows.

Kaczynski’s other big idea is the psychology of leftism. He spends a surprisingly large amount of time critiquing leftism, probably for the same reason Marxists do: it doesn’t go far enough, and its reformist tendencies will delay the revolution.

For Kaczynski, modern leftists are the epitome of the alienated people technology creates. Their lack of autonomy encourages them to discard their selves and retreat into mass movements. Their inferiority complex leads them to identify with “losers” and become masochists. For Kaczynski, leftist empathy is not emotional and is instead a drive for power. In this he prefigures the concept of virtue-signaling.

Kaczynski’s own writing style and mind-flow forces him to define leftism, but interestingly, he can’t. He makes a list of causes leftists are likely to support and takes a “you know it when you see it” attitude.

In many ways this feels like an inverted form of Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which also seeks to describe the psychological maladies of political radicals. I am left dissatisfied by this type of analysis, in both directions. It is the highest form of the ad hominem fallacy. Rather than attacking people’s ideas, showing them to be logically incoherent or at least outweighed by other considerations, it aims to show that the opponent is psychologically deficient. Anyone who’s been to debate 101 will see how flawed this is.

That being said, at least Adorno’s work has good empirical backing. Kaczynski feels like an ancient Platonist in that he just makes assertions and doesn’t bother with data. This is the work’s biggest flaw, and the reason I only give it four stars. Kaczynski is self-aware enough to acknowledge that his conclusions “rely heavily on intuitive judgment.” Thus, how much you agree with Kaczynski will ultimately rely mostly on your own intuition. As an engineer, I am perennially dissatisfied that the revolutionary impulse prefers destruction to creation. The best argument Kaczynski could have given for his ideology would be to construct an anarcho-primitivist commune and show how much happier people are living there.

That would be much more moral than killing innocent people. Unfortunately, it would also be less scandalous, and so this book wouldn’t be so widely read. Fame and the devil are closely allied.

In 2017, the congress passed the largest tax code overhaul this century — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The bill advertises itself with two claims: first, that it will lower taxes, and second, that it will create jobs. Today I want to examine that second goal. When, if ever, should government policy try to create new jobs?

Traditionally, Americans have considered creating jobs an obvious good. Politicians use it to justify themselves all the time. I was surprised in undergrad when I learned that many economists take issue with this.

Bryan Caplan made the most recent major critique. He labels the voter preference for job creation as make-work bias.1 He joins a long line of economists criticizing make-work bias, including Frédéric Bastiat and Simon Newcomb.

In their view, the point of jobs is not to exist in themselves: they’re supposed to provide goods and services. Making more jobs for the same amount of goods and services is wasted labor. Optimizing for the number of jobs makes each worker less productive.

Declining efficiency between output and number of jobs has been a long trend. The most prominent historical example is decreasing daily work hours. Today, France has a 35 hour work week instead of a 40-hour work week. The effects troubled economists: the missing work was filled in by gig labor, spreading it among more people. Output stayed the same, but per-worker output decreased. It was less efficient.

Annual working hours have been decreasing for a long time.

The Good of Work

Caplan’s idea sneaks in the assumption that work is valuable only for the goods and services it produces. We know this is false. Jobs provide people with well-being in many ways. They provide structure to the day, contact with others, social status, identity, and engagement. On the flipside, unemployment has significant long-term negative effects. Since modern society is very work-centric, to be without a job in the modern West is to be left unmoored, with little social engagement and, often, little purpose.

Work gives a sense of ownership and autonomy. Working lets you think, “I’m good at something, and my skills are valuable to others.” I certainly feel better on days when I’ve worked to improve the lives of others, whether it’s with a full-time job or just volunteering or helping a friend.

It can be argued that these benefits are just a product of how work-centric our society is. Possible! But until our society changes, they will exist.

As long as society cares about the well-being of its people, we have to value jobs for their own sake.

Jobs and Technological Change

Nowadays, we usually bring up this question in light of the withering of manufacturing jobs throughout the West, or the threat to knowledge work AI poses. Economists think this kind of thing isn’t a big deal. In fact, they usually welcome it for two reasons:

1. In the long run, technology improves the efficiency of labor.

2. Historically, the jobs eliminated by technology were eventually replaced with new jobs that are often better, more productive, and more comfortable.

It’s hard to argue with #1. If it weren’t true, companies in a market economy wouldn’t adopt the technology. #2, however, is on less sure footing. The paradigmatic historical example of it is the rural-to-urban transition around the turn of the 20th century, during the 2nd Industrial Revolution. People who lost farm jobs moved to the cities, where they found employment in factories as workers, machinists, and as the first hires of the ballooning service sector. There was no mass unemployment. That technological transition worked.

However, I don’t think we should treat technological transitions going well as an axiom of history. There is no law of conservation of jobs. Jobs that technology eliminates won’t necessarily be replaced by new ones. Even if they are, they may not be as accessible. A farm boy can operate a punch press pretty easily. Can a translator manage AIs? Will they want to?

It could be that the rural-to-urban shift was unique, or at least that its apparent conservation of jobs was rooted more in its own circumstances. We know at least that full employment is not ubiquitous in wealthy economies. Spain’s unemployment rate has hovered around 10-20% for decades.

I’ll leave the question of whether the US will experience persistent long-term unemployment akin to Spain or Greece to a different post. Here I want to propose what the US government should do in that scenario.

The Solution: A Post-AI WPA

In the 1930s, FDR created a number of programs, most notably the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to fight against the sky-high unemployment caused by the Great Depression. The WPA was a giant public works program aiming to employ everyday Americans. It’s well-known that the WPA built hundreds of bridges, houses, monuments, canals, and more. What’s less known is that WPA workers also contributed to a small renaissance in American historical culture, including Native American archaeology and interviews of former slaves in the South. The program accomplished all this while relieving the unemployment rate for the worst-off Americans.

If AI makes mass, permanent unemployment a reality, I propose not UBI, but a new WPA. This would serve the function of UBI by giving people an income even when they couldn’t get one through traditional methods. It would be strictly better than UBI because Americans wouldn’t just get the income from sitting around. The new WPA would provide not just money but purpose. It could take advantage of the more educated America of today by employing millions not just in infrastructure projects, but also archiving, digitizing old documents, scientific research. Finally, as part of the federal government, this new WPA could bypass the regulation restrictions holding back private development that slow infrastructure building today. We could fund it by taxing billionaires, especially given that they’d be making billions of dollars a year from AI.

There are policymakers thinking about this right now. We could see it in my lifetime.

The reputation of this book precedes it. Firstly, Heinlein is one of the Big Three science fiction authors — along with Asimov and Clarke. Further, this is one of Heinlein’s best-known works, and it won the 1960 Hugo.

However, these generic reasons weren’t why this book grabbed me from the shelves of the local bookstore and demanded my attention.

I read this book because of its influence and controversy. Popularizing the military SF subgenre, this book invented the concepts of the space marine and the mech. Meanwhile, it portrays a society that is both utopian and highly militaristic. For this, it has been labeled a militarist, or even fascist, work.

Make no mistake: Starship Troopers is not fascist. It’s not even political. While it contains some political ideas, that is not its heart. The heart of Starship Troopers is a deeply personal exploration of what it means to be a soldier.

The military was important to Heinlein: he lied about his age to join his state trooper unit. Later, he served in the navy, though he never saw combat. It’s tempting to read this book as Heinlein’s meditation on the military career he never had. What if he had been deployed to fight in World War II?

In the universe of this book, the United States collapsed in the late twentieth century after sustained public attacks by roaming juvenile gangs. Out of the ashes of anarchy rose a new republic. Its first and highest rule was that only veterans would have a say in how the society ran.

This rebuilding attempt was so successful that, in time, it united all of Earth under its banner. The new government — the Terran Federation — never abandoned its founding principle: citizenship only for veterans.

Our protagonist is Juan Rico, young heir to a wealthy CEO. Rather than study business at Harvard as his dad wants, he’s eyeing the franchise. The army recruiter is less than enthusiastic:

“… the government doesn’t care one bucket of swill whether you join or not! … It has become stylish, with some people… to serve a term and earn a franchise… whether you’ve ever seen combat or not. But if you want to serve and I can’t talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that’s your constitutional right… but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren’t just glorified K.P.”

— Chapter 2

Juan joins up anyway. About half the book details his experience in basic training, a grueling 14-month ordeal. He endures exercises with weapons ranging from bare hands to simulated nukes. His training culminates in a week-long wilderness survival exercise in the Rocky Mountains, after which the soldiers don power armor and train for battle in earnest.

Heinlein takes the opportunity to illustrate how he thinks military training should work, and we explore the transformation of the trainee’s mind and body. In the meantime, Heinlein slowly reveals aspects of the world as they become relevant, a worldbuilding technique he pioneered that has since become standard.

During Juan’s training, war erupts between the Terran Federation and the Bugs, a hive-minded alien species. Juan will need to serve for longer than the expected two years, seeing actual combat. The second half of the book includes a few well-written battle scenes but mostly continues the focus on Juan’s development as a person and a soldier.

A major theme of the book’s latter half is Juan becoming an officer. For this he must train his brain as well as his body. In order to become a leader, his perspective must shift. It is here that Heinlein expounds the ideas that made this book controversial.

The Terran Federation ideologically opposes prisons, opting for flogging instead. In a startling and masterfully written dialog near the middle of the book, Juan’s teacher explains why:

“Let’s get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class . . . and they often started their lawless careers much younger… These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret—in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage…

Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law… flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as ‘cruel and unusual punishment’… I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.”

— Chapter 8

The book likely influenced the select minority of intellectuals today who take this view.

For crimes too serious for mere flogging, Terra imposes the death penalty. Juan attends a public hanging when a former trainee kills a little girl. The murderer gets a military execution despite having deserted training long before. This is meant to teach us that the army takes care of its own, even when it doesn’t want to.

Another big idea is that women are amazing; they are the reason men fight. For example, near the novel’s beginning, our narrator tells us the following:

“When a female pilot handles a ship there is nothing comfortable about it… Yes, yes, I know they make better pilots than men do; their reactions are faster, and they can tolerate more gee… But that still doesn’t make it fun to be slammed against your spine at ten times your proper weight.”

— Chapter 1

Based on this, along with certain aphorisms in the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, I can tell that Heinlein takes a quasi-worshipful attitude toward women. While perhaps a reaction to the sexism of his day, I can’t help but find it off-putting.

Perhaps the most interesting idea, and one that I rarely see discussed, is that morality can be mathematically described. Heinlein, through one of his many self-insert characters, describes morality as having its first source in the survival instinct, and that the rules of morality can be mathematically proven, in a way reminiscent of Spinoza’s Ethics. I wonder how seriously Heinlein believed this: if so, he evidently left the working out of his morality to the analytic philosophers, and I see no evidence that he tried to justify his own loud political pronouncements in this manner.

So, is Starship Troopers fascist literature? Let’s get one thing out of the way: while Heinlein may not have necessarily wanted to establish the Terran Federation in real life, it is clear from his other writings that he valued its ideals. The book does not critique the society it presents.

However, that society is not fascist — while democracy is limited to those who earn it, there is real democracy. In this it resembles the early United States. The state is legitimately pluralistic, and we see no evidence that it suppresses rights and freedoms in civilian life.

Contrary to the book’s supposed militarism, the Federation doesn’t value war for its own sake. Warmongering is frequently and unequivocally condemned. War is declared on the Bugs after they level Buenos Aires, much like the U.S. only entered World War II after Pearl Harbor.

The society presented in this book is, in fact, a liberal society, but it is one that assumes less than ours does. It does not assume, for example, that humans possess an innate moral sense. It seeks, in Heinlein’s own words, to inculcate the moral sense “through training, experience, and the hard sweat of the mind.” It is a democracy only for the worthy.

Perhaps, in the long run, that will describe our society as well.

I’ve been applying to graduate schools recently, and as part of this process, I chose to take the GRE, or Graduate Record Examinations.

For my whole childhood, I built up an internal image of the GRE as a Big, Scary Test: the bugbear of scholarly young adults, the eater of graduate school dreams everywhere. The reality turned out to be much different— and much more dystopian— than I had imagined.

However, before I can begin that story, I first need to introduce its central character. The ETS (Educational Testing Service) is a private US nonprofit founded in 1947. You may know them from such heavy hitters as the TOEFL for assessing English ability for non-natives, the PSAT for young high schoolers, and the CLEP for extra college credit.

In the United States, the SAT measures apparent ability for American undergraduate prospects, and the GRE is its graduate school counterpart. Also like the SAT, the GRE has a written essay section, a grammar section, a reading comprehension section, and two quantitative sections.

The GRE exists to be a single yardstick schools can measure applicants against. GPA is insufficient because it varies so much from college to college. On the one hand, the Ivy Leagues inflate their grades so much that an A has little meaning. On the other, schools like MIT and the University of Michigan are as cold as the states that host them, and in many of their classes, a C is an impressive grade.

I completely support the idea behind the GRE. I just wish the implementation wasn’t so easy.

Seriously, despite what you might have heard, the GRE is trivial. It’s no more difficult than the SAT, despite being meant for students who are four years older and on the other side of an entire undergraduate education!

The following question, which is from ETS’ official practice service, is typical:

This is a effectively an SAT question. To solve it, you just need to know how to calculate a mean. This is not something you need to go to college to know how to do!

I am frustrated by the GRE’s sheer triviality. It does not test a single college-level subject— not calculus, not anatomy, not biology or philosophy or language or vector analysis or programming or ANYTHING! This is particularly embarrassing when you compare our tests with those of any other advanced country. Take a look at the German Abitur, for example, where students get to perform calculus on vectors in three dimensions to solve problems. Or test your mettle against the Chinese Gaokao, with its own biology section asking students to decode complex diagrams. Meanwhile, the only way for an American to get tested in biology at the graduate level was to take a separate test, and even this door was closed in 2021.

The cancellation of the Biology GRE is part of a pattern whipping across American assessment. America has always had the weakest examination culture of any developed country. The atrophy of this culture accelerated after the 2020s, as the pandemic forced the test online and universities suspended testing requirements. These suspensions found a way of becoming permanent.

The result is that, while the GRE used to be a standard requirement, nowadays the proportion of schools that require it is falling precipitously. In my experience, those that still require it are often middling schools, those that are neither the worst nor the best in their state. For them, GRE scores may provide a useful differentiating factor among students who may not have uniformly excellent GPAs. However, its use among top schools is all but done, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the GRE itself ceases to exist in a few years.

Vocabulary: The Funnest Part of the GRE

While so far I have mostly been complaining about the GRE’s stultifying similarity to the SAT, there is one rather infamous point of divergence. The GRE asks for advanced knowledge of English vocabulary, and it does so in an oblique and, honestly, very creative way.

The example above is a sentence equivalence question. I like it because it asks you which two words are near-synonyms in a functional way— that is, in the context of the rest of the sentence. This represents how language truly works. Dictionaries are glories of our civilization and beauties of scholarship. But they obscure the full dimension of signification, which grows only when a word is dropped into the full context of its phrase, sentence, chapter, and speech community.

I found these questions a lot of fun, though it probably helps that I already knew the majority of GRE-tested words. For the ones I didn’t, I used Vince’s vocab list, loaded the words I didn’t know into Anki, and studied with celerity until the day of the test and after. This helped me get back into the habit of regular Anki repetitions, so thank you GRE for that, I guess. This was, for me, the GRE’s best feature.

A Dark Chill

Some criticisms of the GRE are, in my opinion, well-said. For example, the fee to take the test is a ridiculously large $220. I was shocked by this number at first— while proctoring isn’t free, $220 seems exorbitant, especially in comparison with the $68 SAT fee.

The sky-high fee hurts poorer students. Back when the GRE was required for nearly all graduate admissions at American universities, the fee led to a severe economic barrier to entry for students to even try to improve their station in life through graduate study. This no doubt has also led to psychological barriers for these students.

All this being said, there is a reason the fee is so high. I discovered it when I came to take the test.

The sinister aspect of the test gets even worse. At the same time that it’s selling the test for a high fee, the ETS also sells tons of very high-cost practice materials for it. This seems like obvious grifting: they simultaneously sell a gate to entry and the keys to unlock it, both at very high cost. Students who use official ETS study resources are at a major advantage. It all makes the GRE feel less like a disinterested evaluation of capabilities and more like an opportunity for ETS to line its pockets.

The Testing Experience

To its credit, the ETS offers very frequent test dates, and I was able to schedule a date pretty much exactly to my liking. I decided to schedule a very early date, because I needed the score by a looming deadline, and I wanted to be done before the MIT Mystery Hunt [link]. As a result, I only gave myself about two weeks to study, and only seriously studied for a few days. So irresponsible!

There are two ways to take the GRE: an online exam and an in-person exam. The receiving schools can tell which version of the test you took, so rather than have them think I might have cheated, I chose the in-person exam. This involved driving a few miles to the nearest testing center in Longmont.

I took the test in an independent private test center in a strip mall. I paid them no money: presumably they get a (large?) cut of the testing fee.

This is when I learned why the testing fee is so high. The amount of security at the center rivaled the TSA. They emptied my pockets. They waved a metal detector over me. They took off my glasses and gave them a 360-degree inspection. It turns out that it’s much easier to cheat in grad school than in applying to grad school.

Next, I plopped down into my assigned cubby and donned a pair of headphones. If I wanted to use the bathroom I had to exit and, upon reentry, be scanned once again. A water bottle was not allowed, nor was, of course, anything in my pockets. It is by far the most secure test I have ever taken.

The exam itself, as I have already said, was trivial. I was given on the writing section a prompt about whether modern technology impedes the development of morals, to which I answered no, because I believe the development of the human virtues is possible in a wide variety of conditions (perhaps all conditions). I got to cite Nicomachean Ethics in my response… my reading of it in high school in an attic in the mountains apparently paid off.

A few weeks later, I got my score back. I did very well and received no penalty for my foolish lack of study. One interesting observation is that my scores in the quantitative and in the verbal sections were similar, but the percentile in the quantitative section was much lower— just 76th as opposed to 99th for the verbal section. You can confirm this yourself if you look at the score percentiles for each section.

Why does the quantitative section have such a higher mean than the verbal? My guess is that it’s because of selection effects on the kind of student who takes the GRE. Students with a quantitative tilt might be more likely to take the GRE because engineering and STEM-oriented programs are more likely to require it than, for example, creative writing programs. As a result, GRE test-takers tend to be better at quantitative reasoning, and so the average score on the quantitative reasoning section is higher.

Does it Accurately Predict Graduate School Performance?

While the SAT has been shown to accurately predict college success, it appears prima facie that the GRE will not be as good just because it’s too darn easy. I struggle to see how an exam that only tests high school-level concepts can differentiate one college graduate from the other.

To what extent does the GRE actually predict performance in graduate school? The ETS, the most biased source possible, has published its own research indicating that the GRE does correlate strongly with graduate school success.

Other studies paint a less rosy picture. Quite a few studies and one meta-analysis have found only weak predictive power for the GRE.

That being said, I was able to find one recent study arguing that it was a strong predictor of various valued graduate student outcomes. The meta-analysis is, in my opinion, the best source, showing that the correlation between GRE and student grades has always been positive across various studies. It does, however, vary based on the department: interestingly, the correlation is highest in the humanities and the liberal arts.

Were I an admissions administrator, I would run a local study and determine correlation with GRE scores and preferred outcomes for historical grad students in my own department. However, even in the best predictive case, I would never let the score be anything more than one component of the equation. I think the GRE is best viewed as a lens through which to view more important components, like grades and recommendation letters.

All the same, I’m not an admissions administrator. Whether I like it or not, the winds of change are blowing against the GRE. I doubt my children or grandchildren will take it. Maybe that’s for the best.

I did the MIT Mystery Hunt!

Since I explained what a puzzlehunt is and my relationship with the medium in a previous post, this time I’ll focus on what Cardinality, the writing team, did to set MITMH 2026 apart, as well as LAF’s unique experience.

Before

My invitation to the hunt arrived from (what else) a Bay Area house party.

Through Betaveros, I met some friends who invited me to hunt with Literally Animal Farm (LAF), a relatively new team that nevertheless has many puzzlehunt veterans. As a long-time devotee of the MIT Mystery Hunt, I couldn’t miss such a fantastic opportunity.

And so I flew to Boston…

We woke up mid-morning on Friday to eat at Flour, a long-time puzzlehunting tradition, and meet up with some friendly folks from Galactic. Soon it was kickoff time.

The main purpose of the MITMH kickoff is to explain the rules and the “plot.” I’ll explain the scare quotes shortly.

The story initially unfolds around the prestigious CRYPTIC conference, an assembly of elite cryptid researchers from around the world. There are rumors that this year, a professor will bring a mysterious egg… the first cryptid object ever recovered.

Meanwhile, agents from the MIT, a parody of the SCP Foundation, covertly vie for the egg in an attempt to keep knowledge of cryptids away from the public. We puzzlers have been recruited by the MIT to get into the conference and steal the egg. But in order to access the conference, we need to solve the puzzles CRYPTIC uses to test the brains of potential attendees.

That’s the plot presented by the pre-hunt Mystery Hatch, an easier “fish” round designed to warm up MITMH attendees. Solving Mystery Hatch in the days leading up to the hunt definitely put me in the puzzling mindset, and the puzzles are easy enough that one person can tackle them… unlike the dragons we slayed during the hunt itself.

Of course, if you’re a veteran hunter, you’ll know everything I just said is almost irrelevant. MIT Mystery Hunts traditionally open with a deliberate feint: an apparent theme is announced and carefully established, only to be overturned at kickoff, when the real theme of the Hunt is finally revealed.

Sometimes the true theme is totally unrelated to the fake theme, as in 2018. Other times, they are almost rhymes of one another, as if the fake-out is a distorted image of the true theme. Happily, this year’s hunt belonged to the second type.

During this year’s kickoff, the MIT and the conference leader vied for the egg. A slapstick struggle ensued and the egg broke, hatching into an adorable little marketing opportunity named The Child.

The cryptids, roused by the appearance of one of their own, open a portal to another dimension. In order to close it, we’ll need to curry the cryptids’ favor and befriend them by solving puzzles. In fact, these creatures love a good puzzle so much, one could even call them Puzzle Monsters— or Puzzmon for short!

That’s right, it’s a Pokémon-themed hunt. Like any good puzzlehunt writing team, Cardinality went above and beyond in creativity by making 88 Puzzmon with creative and often funny designs. Hawk Tulpa was the favorite of many; I am personally partial to Felixoth. It’s a theme so good I’m amazed it hasn’t been done already. One LAF member actually predicted this before the hunt, but said it wasn’t likely because Silph Hunt exists. I’m happy they were wrong.

Some PuzzMon, as shown by the MonArch

During

We marched over to our assigned building. Opening our laptops, we discovered that Cardinality had done immense work on the infrastructure of this hunt. I would love to link to specific parts of the website, but unfortunately right now it’s only accessible to registered teams. Cardinality says they’re in the process of archiving the site— when they do, I definitely recommend you go through it, because it’s very nice.

A nearly-full map of the Hunt. The main island is home to the Puzzmon kingdom, which has nine sections and a meta. Around it are the six dimension rounds.

Incredibly, every region includes a 2D video game with challenges that unlock puzzles.

Monquest, a classic Pokémon game parody. One of the best parts of the hunt.

Another aspect to this hunt was the points system. Unlike a traditional hunt where puzzles are the only thing to do, Cardinality had teams perform research tasks in addition to puzzles. Tasks were wacky little actions or events like imitating Pokémon cards, arranging food items to imitate a Puzzmon’s appearance, and making paper airplanes. Doing tasks helped teams earn research points that they used to unlock new puzzles and progress to new regions. The puzzles were hinted by short descriptions, a nice touch that helped teams decide what to unlock.

Puzzles had short descriptions.

I helped with the grunt work on quite a few puzzles, but as a less-experienced member I struggled to reach the “aha”s. Quite a few times I was scooped when a friend and I were working on a puzzle together and another subgroup independently zoomed past us, quickly and quietly rendering our efforts moot. On a team of 90 people solving over 200 puzzles in only 2.5 days, this is unavoidable.

Events

The events were a great way to unlock teams’ creativity. People with skillsets as diverse as art, programming, and athletics all had something to do.

My first event was “pictograms.” Though the description asked for someone who could draw, this was revealed as a fake-out when the teams had to play a game of telephone by arranging board game pieces to suggest words, like arranging two Uno cards to suggest “dos,” and arranging chess pieces to suggest “checkers.” You can imagine how well we did with this.

The second event I did was the Puzzmon spelling bee with fellow LAF hunter seanm. We studied the Puzzmon spellings and specialized each in a particular category of Puzzmon. The event was surprisingly engrossing since many of the Puzzmon have deliberately obscure spellings: for example, we had to memorize that “Grrrrrrravelax” has precisely seven r’s.

Remember, there are only three Ls in Bbluurrbibell.

It was clever and slightly mysterious that the Puzzmon had so many puzzles and puzzle affordances linked to them: not just the strangely obscure orthography, but also attributes like Big Garff’s number of stripes and even the number of eyes on the Elder Ridge Puzzmon.

The Later Hunt

Once we had befriended over half of the Puzzmon in the Kingdom, a portal to a new dimension opened, unlocking a new round: The ▮▮▮▮ ▮▮ ▮▮ ▮▮M▮ . Sorry, I only worked on one puzzle in this round so only one letter of text is unlocked for me.

That’s how this round worked: all alphabetic text was censored, and teams “unlocked” the letters one-by-one by completing each of the twenty-six puzzles in the round.

This was the first of six “dimension” rounds, each of which was unlocked after quite a few puzzles and which collectively represent the second, more difficult part of the hunt. The plot unfortunately takes a backseat at this point, as this was clearly the time when they just wanted to squeeze in as many cool puzzle ideas as possible.

This leads us to why I said “plot” in scare quotes earlier. Unfortunately, I cannot praise the plot very much. Many characters disappear almost as soon as they are introduced, and many plot points are barely explained or are obviously only there to facilitate some aspect of the puzzlehunt. A plot that is just duct tape to hold the hunt together is hardly a plot at all. Given the great effort Cardinality spent on art and writing for this hunt, it would have been nice to see stronger storytelling.

After

Near to midnight we had the final runaround, in which we solved yet another barrage of puzzles and saved the Kingdom of the Puzzmon.

LAF performed very well, with the help of a 90-person team (roughly 40 in-person, 50 online) and many others. For the first time, we even finished the puzzlehunt during the hunt itself! This is very hard to do given the required velocity. We were the 8th out of 15 teams to finish

Metas Solved Over Time

Puzzles solved over time.

I recommend watching the full wrap-up video for more.

According to our team captain, last year we had the potential to finish but lost steam.

We earned our finish with better focus. Our practice over the year by doing the Galactic Puzzlehunt, ECPH, Teammate Hunt, and other small hunts kept us sharp. Finally, the addition of a few excellent hunters — like Syntax— to the team this year also helped push us over the edge.

The biggest advantage this year, however, was our night team. For the first time this year, we had a strong night team deployed largely in Asia. Waking up and seeing multiple metas solved and new rounds unlocked kept morale up.

Favorite Puzzles

Tortured Programmer’s Department

My favorite dimension was the Land of Mosaics, a round comprised of puzzles on a hexagonal grid. The main puzzle I worked on in this was the Tortured Programmer’s Department. This was a series of Taylor Swift-themed Hexagony puzzles which asked you to fill in programs in the hexagon-based esolang Hexagony with the provided symbols, in order to do some unspecified task that went with the Taylor Swift song the puzzle was named after.

We still haven’t finished one of them.

Having had an esolang phase when I was younger and being already familiar with Malbolge, I was very happy to see this popping up and worked on a lot of programs. It’s a good example of how Mystery Hunt teaches you new things. I know Hexagony now!

Puzzmon: The Card Game

I also enjoyed the Elder Ridge meta (to know what sort of Puzzmon reside in the Elder Ridge, just gibber the region name quickly.) For this, Cardinality made an actual Puzzmon card game, complete with cards for every Elder Ridge Puzzmonand a set of dice! I may write an analysis of the game later, but know that it had a very good puzzle.

Puzzmon at Monday lunch.

Combative Felines

Sniper immediately parsed this as hinting “Warrior Cats”. Looking at the puzzle itself should remove any doubt.

We are given a family tree with lines of ten different colors and a legend at the side to teach us what these colors mean. Matching the nodes with Warriors characters and the colors with relationship-types makes it pretty easy to solve this puzzle and index into it. I think I contributed more to this puzzle than any other— despite not having read Warriors as a kid, I was able to get plenty of mileage from trawling the wiki. Extraction is simple and elegant: you just read the puzzle like a book.

The Celeste Puzzle

I will finally speak on the first puzzle we solved in the Land of No Name. Its official name is a sequence of three emojis but I will call it “The Celeste Puzzle.”

The Celeste Puzzle presents us with a formal language made of mathematico-numeric symbols and emojis. Not having letters, the gimmick of the dimension was not an impediment to us, and therefore we were able to solve it fairly easily.

The title makes it pretty easy to surmise that the puzzle is about Celeste.

From there it’s only a small leap to figuring out that it is describing the Celeste game in a formal language. Our task was to figure out what each symbol and symbol sequence meant, and use this to answer the questions at the bottom. Quite interesting!

Once Cardinality sets up the archive site, I recommend looking at the author’s notes to this puzzle. It depicts well the process of building a video game puzzle that is still fun to solve for people unfamiliar with the source material.

Method to the Mathmess

The whole puzzle

My favorite puzzle from this hunt was Method to the Mathmess. It is remarkable in its beauty and simplicity. You are presented with a series of scrambled-looking lines of math. You don’t need Legrand-like wit to figure out this is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher… or perhaps I should say monomathematical, since the ciphertext uses math symbols.

You can see this by noticing how certain symbols are arranged in a way that implies mathematical logic if the symbols were slightly different. For example, at one point there is the integral operator, but in place of the true integral symbol there is a number seven. This tells us that the operative position of integration is being fulfilled by the number seven here. This is a really fun puzzle. In solving it, I assisted Adalbert Zollern, who dazzled me with his ability to untangle the symbols in mere minutes.

The unscrambling is the main part of the puzzle. There are a few more surprises in there, and the extraction is pretty delightful in itself, but I won’t spoil those goodies for you.

This puzzle is also great because it unlocks Felixoth, and Felixoth is great.

Kitty!

In Defense of Long Puzzlehunts

In preparing to write this post, I looked at Eric Berlin’s and Dan Katz’s posts on MITMH 2026. They both wrote that the hunt was too long. Berlin calls for a hunt short enough to allow “dozens of teams to cross the finish line”, as opposed to the 15 that actually did.

MITMH has indeed grown longer and longer with each year, as a quick glance through the archives reveals. The 2010 hunt, only sixteen years ago, had less than half as many puzzles. I can see why veterans find this frustrating. The puzzlehunt experience today is necessarily different than the one they experienced when they were new to the art form.

Change and decay are different things, however, and there are many reasons why I don’t think MITMH should be artificially shortened.

The Arms Race of Puzzlehunting Tech

The first ever Mystery Hunt looked like this:

That’s it. Each puzzle gives you a word, and these can can be combined at the end to find the coin.

Looking at the page, my first thought is how trivial these puzzles are today. Putting aside campus-specific puzzles like #6, most of these are solvable by a novice in minutes— some, like #3 and #7, are one-shotted by Google.

The puzzles aren’t bad. What their modern triviality reveals to us is that puzzles must be designed with reference to the puzzle-solving tech available to solvers. In 1981, #11 (for example) is a legitimately difficult puzzle. You’d need to find someone who can read Chinese, or a dictionary, and if using a dictionary you would need to know that it’s organized by radical, etc. Nowadays OCR solves it in seconds.

The rise of search engines and easier programming represented what was, until recently, the most important shift in puzzle-solving tech. However, since then there have been even more advancements that continue to give teams more and more firepower. Crossword solvers mean crosswords must be either trivial or hyperobscure. Nutrimatic is so good it feels like cheating. Spreadsheet tech, now customized and used by all top teams, makes it easy to organize information. The low-latency nature of the modern internet makes mass collaboration far easier, allowing teams to balloon into over 100 people solving across the globe, 24/7.

If the hunt is to end roughly 55 hours after kickoff, which has been the goal from the beginning, the puzzles necessarily need to increase in difficulty in tandem with improvement in puzzlehunting tech, leading to an arms race in difficulty.

In his review, Dan Katz does a good job illustrating what this arms race looks like to a veteran solver:

“… I think it’s fascinating to compare the scope of any recent Mystery Hunt with, say, the first Hunt I wrote for in 2000. What qualified as a puzzle back then would barely take most teams ten minutes in 2026; for example, one of my puzzles was basically a nonogram that you read in Braille, and that was it. Another involved sorting a bunch of five-letter strings as if they were poker hands and reading the resulting acrostic. Yet a Hunt with less than fifty of those “puzzles” took teams until Saturday night, and this year a Hunt with 200+ exponentially more involved only took a team about 40% longer.”

An Encomium for High Summits

I don’t think this escalation in difficulty is a bad thing.

MITMH isn’t a normal puzzle hunt— it may have been the first, but it’s no longer typical. It’s the flagship, the Everest, the highest of them all. It is not, and never has been, designed to be easy.

For every skill set, there is an arena in which performers perform at the absolute, most extreme level. For athletes, it’s the Olympic Games, for scientists, it’s prestigious journals and labs, for artists, it’s the highest medals of their respective nations. For puzzlehunting, it’s MITMH.

If MITMH wasn’t extremely difficult, it’s unlikely any other puzzlehunt could be… no other would have the history, the cachet, and the sheer volume required. I think it’s a terminal good to have certain ridiculously high challenges for people. As I said in the Bishop’s Castle essay:

“It is good to make your highest ambitions very high indeed. Just like stretching a rubber band a great distance results in greater tension in the cord, stretching your ambitions as high as possible inspires more ardent action.”

MITMH is supposed to stretch you. If you don’t finish this year, that teaches you to stretch yourself further so that you will finish— exactly as LAF did.

There’s also the logistics question. If MITMH was shorter, the first team to get the coin would do so on Saturday afternoon or even morning… meaning there would be a long “lame duck” period where the hunt is over but wrap-up has not yet begun. The fact that this year’s hunt ended on Sunday afternoon—right “on time”— is great evidence that it was the right length.

For those who were frustrated by the length, there are plenty of shorter, easier hunts for those who want them— Silph hunt and Galactic, to start with.

Finally, remember that we’re just talking about finishing during MLK Junior weekend. Even teams that don’t finish during the weekend can still clean up the last few puzzles afterward, and in fact many teams do this. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to push yourselves hard enough to finish in an arbitrary time frame.

In conclusion, MITMH 2026 was great and I had a great time. Good job Cardinality and good luck Providence. You will need it.

The chill of Boston is a little sweeter, and a little stronger, than that of my home state of Colorado.

Colorado air can be described with no better word than “cold snap,” the coldness and the dryness combining to give a bit of the feeling of breathing dry ice. It’s actually quite invigorating, like a cold shower after eight hours of sleep or a morning run.

Boston cold feels more enclosed, more musty. It’s a cold that drives you indoors, not one that drives you outside… it feels like you’re draped over with a cold blanket. I like Boston. As soon as I got here, my charm sensors were overloaded.

I’m here in Boston to fulfill an old dream: participating in the MIT Mystery Hunt. What is this? It’s slightly hard to describe…

A puzzle is a contrived problem, usually done on paper, posed by the AUTHOR to the PUZZLER. The puzzler tries to arrange the elements of the puzzle, usually in a way that requires some thought, logic, or background knowledge, in order to find the SOLUTION intended by the author.

A puzzle hunt is a competition where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles and whoever finishes the series first wins. These puzzles are a little different from normal puzzles:

• They usually don’t have instructions. Figuring out what to do is arguably the main point of a puzzle hunt puzzle.

• Often there will be some fairly obvious first step, like in MIT Mystery Hatch’s first puzle Recruited by the M.I.T. (link), where you’re supposed to fill in the blanks. But later, there will be an “extraction” step where you’re supposed to get a solution through possibly unconventional means.

• They often involve unconventional representations of conventional forms, as in DP Puzzle Hunt’s first puzzle.

• Sometimes they take even stranger formats… such as the famous duck konundrums.

I forget how I first learned about the MIT mystery hunt. I was in high school and it was through some blog, somehow. It became a weird hobby of mine to trawl through the dev/joe index and look at puzzles I liked. I generally did not get very far with this. I usually got stuck on a pretty early puzzle, so going very far into a single Mystery Hunt wasn’t super rewarding. Keep in mind that I was doing this solo in a Denver suburb, and I knew of no one else who was into puzzle hunts. At one point I tried to recruit a friend. We pondered over a particular MH puzzle, getting nowhere, and when we looked at the solution he said: “There’s no way I would have thought of that.” I was much more excited by the convolution of the solution than he was!

What I usually did instead was trawl through dev/joe looking for puzzles with keywords I liked and solve those. Board game-themed puzzles were a perennial favorite... Turnary Reasoning remains probably my favorite puzzle hunt puzzle ever.

I also looked through a lot of non-MH puzzles and generally had more success with those. I collected a lot of these, some very obscure. You can see these at the very bottom of my website’s links page.

Being the most difficult of all hunts, I didn’t have as much time to do the MITMH in college. As a result of this, I’m weirdly familiar with a lot of very old hunts but don’t know what happened last year or the year before! This should cause no problems whatsoever.

So sorry for the delay… I’ve been busy studying for the GRE (more on that later) and have been sick. Hopefully the wait has been worth it!

Previous Posts:

Part I - Intro, Proto-Germanic

Part II - East Germanic

Welcome back to our series on the Germanic Languages!

Last time, we discussed the mysterious dead branch of the Germanic language family — -the East Germanic languages. But I’m tired of dead things. From now on, the series will cover living branches. Here’s a reminder of what the family tree looks like:

In this series, we aren’t meandering aimlessly like the town drunk. There is a direction of motion from least to most familiar. The plan looks like this:

• Part I: Origins <- Done!

• Part II: East Germanic + Gothic <- Done!

• Part III: North Germanic <- The current post!

• Part IV: West Germanic EXCEPT English

• Part V: English

• Part VI: [A secret bonus language that’s not on this tree] + Conclusion

We have already finished the dead EG languages. Now we’ll move to the living ones, starting with those most alien to English speakers: the North Germanic languages.

1. North Germanic

North Germanic, or Nordic is the collective term for the languages above the green line on this map:

West Germanic languages are in the yellow region, North East Germanic languages in the blue region, North West Germanic languages in the purple region.

We know little about when exactly the Nordic languages diverged from the others, and the little we do know can only be attested from runic inscriptions. These writings lag behind the spoken form of the language at the time they were inscribed. All the same, they can still help us perceive the flow and direction of change.

North Germanic (NG) originated in Scandinavia. It was still relatively uniform as late as 1050, and was often known as the dansk tunga “Danish tongue” well into the Midle Ages. Towards the end of the Viking Age, NG divided into two branches: East Scandinavian, comprising the kingdoms of Denmark and the southern two-thirds of Sweden and Norway, and West Scandinavian, covering most of Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. This engendered the East Nordic / West Nordic split, which is indicated by the red line on the map.

The East Nordic languages tend to be quite close together and are mutually-intelligible. Icelandic and Faroese are the odd ones out. You can see this when running 2D MDS (the same technique I covered here) on the Germanics:

There area few important differences between Nordic and West Germanic (WG). TO start with, North Germanic languages tend to retain the final consonantal syllables of PG words more than WG languages. A great example is the PG gastiz, which in Old English became giest and in Old High German gast, but in Old Norse became gestr and in modern Icelandic gestur.

Another feature that we commonly notice is that the Nordic tends to insert gg before w and j in the PG. For example, compare the West Germanic zweiio (OHG) and Old English tweȝa with Nortwegian tueggia, Danish taweggiae. Also, compare German treu and English true with Icelandic tryggr and Danish trygg. This makes Nordic languages feel more consonantal.

My favorite feature of the Nordics the postpositional definite article. The definite article (in English, “the”) marks a noun that refers to a particular object. In the Nordic languages, it is often added as a suffix to the noun: some examples are below. I’m partial to agglutinating features like this!

The first row of this table is Old Norse, the ancestor language of the Nordics. As the oldest language, it makes sense to start here.

1.1 Old Norse

I was first exposed to Old Norse as a child reading the D’Aulaires Book of Norse Myths. I was introduced not only to Freja, Odin, and Baldur, but to such beautiful words as Ratatosk, Nidhogg, Huginn and Muninn, Ymir and Heimdall. Here, in these names derived from Old Norse, we see already many of the markers of Nordic already discussed, like the double g and the goms; 5 (which is actually the nominative masculine singular suffix, equivalent to the Latin -us, and so is properly omitted during English transcription).

Old Norse was the language of the vikings, a people originating in Scandinavia in what is today southern Sweden. They had a fiery and lengthy career tearing through much of northern and central Europe from the 8th to the 14th century. Journeying across icy waters on heavy-laden skiffs, they launched expeditions from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, as far east as Anatolia and, incredibly, as far west as America. Their language was as rich and varied as the places they traveled to. Here’s the UDHR for Old Norse:

Allir menn eru bornir frjálsir ok jafnir at virðingu ok réttum. Þeir eru allir viti gœddir ok samvizku, ok skulu gøra hvárr til annars bróðurliga.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We see the return of thorn (Þ) along with eth (ð), which represent respectively the unvoiced and voiced dental fricative. Phonetically, the language has a pretty complex vowel system, with each vowel having a long and a short form. This simplified over time.

Compared to Gothic, Old Norse is already more isolating. We see this in how gabauranai has been replaced with eru bornir, for example.1 It remains however an inflected language.2

Unlike Gothic however, we have a sizeable corpus from Old Norse, including the Poetic and the Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and many others. Norse was one of the most commonly-spoken languages in Europe, and left an indelible impact on many other languages as far as Portuguese and English. The Anglo-Saxon culture of the British isles was hugely influenced by these invasions, and so the British Isles— especially the northern parts — have marked influences of viking culture.

From “The Viking Language Part 1,” by Jesse L. Byock

After the twelfth century, Old Norse split into two daughter languages— Old East Norse and West East Norse.

Before I move on, however, I will once again calque my own name into Old Norse. This time it’s a bit easier than Gothic, though the procedure remains similar. The Old Norse word for to collect is safna. Agent nominalization is performed with the -ir suffix. And so we have Safnir.

1.2 East Scandinavian

1.2.1 Swedish

• L1 (native) Speakers: 10 million

• L2 speakers: 3 million

• Native To: Sweden, Finland, parts of Estonia

• Official in: Finland, Sweden, Aland Islands.

Finally, a language that’s actually spoken today! And boy, is it spoken: Swedish is the largest living Nordic language, and the fourth most spoken Germanic language overall.

It is mutually intelligible with its close cousins Norwegian and Danish, lending the Nordic sphere of Europe a great degree of cultural familiarity. In fact, if it weren’t for the ages-old rivalry between the King of Sweden and the King of Denmark, we may not speak of them as separate languages at all.

What does Swedish look and sound like? We begin as usual with the UDHR:

Alla människor är födda fria och lika i värdighet och rättigheter. De är utrustade med förnuft och samvete och bör handla gentemot varandra i en anda av broderskap.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Now that we’re looking at living languages, we can enjoy audio samples. Swedish is at 1:16 in this video.

We see that the isolating tendency has progressed further. Many words are directly descended from Old Norse with only slight phonetic changes, like ok → och and allir → alla. We see in broderskap “brotherhood” another nominalizing suffix, -skap, equivalent to German -schaft as in Wissenschaft or English -hood as in brotherhood. One of the most exciting parts of looking at the Germanic languages is seeing the correspondences not just among the words, but among the suffixes and affixes, too.

From the text you can see that Swedish is not as consonant cluster-heavy as English and German. While it still prefers closed syllables and compounding, the clusters are not quite as as ridiculous (*ahem* “strengths”?!?!) that mark English and German. This is true of the other Nordic languages as well.

Compounding words are a frequent feature of German morphology. I’ll use Swedish to illustrate it because I think the elements are particularly useful there. For example, we have modifying compounds, as in matematisk-naturvetenskaplig, “for mathematics and science” . We also have copulative compounds, which consist of several parallel elements, e.g. svensk-norsk-dansk, “Swedish-Norwegian- Danish”. Compounds are written in one word, but especially in copulative compounds and after proper names, hyphens are often used to make the structure clear, e.g. Kurosawa-film, “Kurosawa movie.”

While compounding is generally a strong feature of Germanic morphology, it seems to have weakened over time, at least in English. For example, we can’t coin the word memebook, it would have to be meme book. Even my spell checker tells me that blogpost is wrong, and that I need to write “blog post.” Lame!

If you watch the video, you’ll notice that Swedish feels almost sung. The tone of the speaker rises and falls with each turn of phrase and even within syllables. This is the Swedish pitch-accent, a characteristic it shares with Norwegian. There are two accents: a rising acute accent and a falling grave accent, though their exact realization varies by dialect. The pitch accent is pretty important because there are a number of minimal pairs with them— or words that vary only by pitch accent. How surprising it is to see tonality in a European language, given I associate this with Mandarin!

Swedish shares in common with the other Germanics a gender system, however unlike them it doesn’t call these genders male and female, but rather utrum (-en form, a.k.a. common gender) or neutrum (-ett form). These mean either and neither, respectively in Latin. Utrum comes from a merger of the masculine and feminine genders of Old Norse.

Grammatically, Swedish is very similar to English and German— like both these languages, it has lost most of its old Germanic inflection and only has two functional cases, with the accusative case appearing only in pronouns, exactly as in English. One fun feature is the reflexive pronoun, which is common to Nordic languages but has mostly been lost in WG languages:

Anna gav Maria sin bok: “Anna gave Maria her [Anna’s] book.” (reflexive)

Anna gav Maria hennes bok: “Anna gave Maria her [Maria’s] book.” (not reflexive)

“Collector” in Swedish is Samlare. Ticking off the last e gives us Samlar as our calque of Collisteru into Swedish.

1.2.2 Norwegian

• L1 (native) Speakers: 4.32 million

• Native To: Norway

• Official in: Norway

The divergence of Norwegian from Swedish is more political than linguistic. Sweden has been the junior partner in various leagues and kingdoms with the other Scandinavian nations for centuries, and it was not until as late as 1905 that it finally declared its independence from Denmark. As a result, Norwegian is a plant that has been blown about by the influence of larger, stronger Nordic languages, and it bears the marks of these influences at every level.

To start with, Norwegian is a split-brain patient. There are two official orthographeis : Bokmål “book language” and Nynorsk “New Norwegian”. To understand why, we need to take a look at the language’s history.

The Nordic languages remained a dialectical continuum, little-differentiated, until the early modern period ages. During that time they largely were not the languages of scholarship — that role belonged to Latin— but the languages of the common folk and, increasingly, of feudal administration. The vikings of Norway managed to establish a strong kingdom by the early modern period. Their successful conquests brought them Vinland in North America, Greenland, the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and even parts of Scotland.

However, the black death brought Norway’s prosperity to a halt. Its aristocracy decimated, the Kingdom of Norway could do little to oppose the Kalmar Union proposed by Denmark in 1380, with Denmark at the head.

Danish replaced middle Norwegian as the language of the elite. Norwegian ceased to be a written language. Much like the influence of Norman French on English, spoken Norwegian came under heavy influence of Danish. A new koiné merging the two sprang up in the cities. Meanwhile, rural farmers continued to speak an older, less mixed form of the language.

It was this older form that, starting in the 1840s, drew the interest of Ivar Aasen. In 1815, a new constitution declared Norway independent, and its official language Norwegian. But what *was* Norwegian? One answer is the Dano-Norwegian that characterized upper-class speech. Aasen wished to find another answer.

Traipsing the villages of Norway and carefully describing the sounds he heard, Aasen wrote a comprehensive dictionary of the sounds of rural Norwegian. From the old birthed the new: Aasen constructed a new orthography that was at once fully and purely Norwegian, while at the same time not the particular dialect of any village. It was to be:

“a kind of Middle Norwegian from which each dialect speaker could derive his dialect by a set of transformational rules. . . . . It was to be nobody’s dialect and everybody’s language, worthy to stand as an instrument of culture alongside Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese”

— Oftedal, Magne. 1990. “Is Nynorsk a Minority Language?” In Haugen, McClure, and Thomson 1990, 120– 29.

Thus was born Landsmål, a “rural national” language, renamed in the 20th century to Nynorsk. Norway chose to support both Nynorsk and the Danish-influenced Bokmål equally— they are both taught in schools and equally correct. Wikipedia has two versions in Norwegian— one in Bokmål and one in Nynorsk. Nynorsk represents an older, rural, purer form of Norwegian, whereas Bokmål represents a more learned and urban form with heavy Danish influence.

To grok the split language situation with Norwegian, imagine that Samuel Johnson in the early 18th century had decided to construct a new form of English, largely the same in grammar but purged of most French influence in orthography and syntax, in order to further British nationalism (especially for the scots) and celebrate the peasantry of his native isle.

Such a tung might look a bit like þis. Mayhap folks from þe sticks and not a borough would find such a tung easier to ken þan þe learn’d speech of burghers. I þink of a new trend growing among þe learn’d, of bending Johnson’s craft’d tung in servis of booklore. Mayhap it could draw even the king’s herries, and be inwrought to the stone of government, of matching stature (at least in law) wiþ þe older Frankish-soak’d tung.

Even in þis late aedj, þere is some hope among þe learn’d of fulfilling a like end. Anglish is a new tung, wanting to bring our speech back to its roots, and make it fully Germanish. From þe Anglish undertaking is birþ’d þe writ you now see.

Þat said, a Norwegian-like split will never happen in English. Given the manyness of english countrees, it is hard to faþom such a new tung getting good speed today.

More on Anglish in a later part.

Because both forms are equally correct, we have two UDHRs:

Bokmål

Alle mennesker er født frie og med samme menneskeverd og menneskerettigheter. De er utstyrt med fornuft og samvittighet og bør handle mot hverandre i brorskapets ånd.

Nynorsk

Alle menneske er fødde til fridom og med same menneskeverd og menneskerettar. Dei har fått fornuft og samvit og skal leve med kvarandre som brør.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

You can hear Norwegian at 2:36 in this video.

Bokmål and Nynorsk differ largely in orthography, though there are some differences in word order and words chosen, though in reality this just reflects the immense dialectical diversity of the language. Finally, certain vocabulary words differ; in particular, Nynorsk and even Bokmål have been a little more reluctant to adopt Latinate and German vocabulary words than Swedish or especially Danish.

As one can guess, with the urbanization of Norway has come the eclipsing of Nynorsk by Bokmål. In the Norwegian Language Council’s 2024 survey, the government found that around 80% of Swedes use Bokmal for work and personal use. Only 9% use Nynorsk for private writing, while 5% use English. English is almost as popular as Nynorsk!3

Comparing the UDHRs shows us that Norwegian is very similar to Swedish; their mutual intelligibility should come as no surprise. The main difference is the gender system: there are three in Nynorsk (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and Bokmål, feminine-masculine can optionally be merged to something more similar to the Swedish system.

To end our survey of Norwegian, we’ll do the traditional name translation. Collector in Bokmål is samler, in Nynorsk is samlar (identical to the Swedish term). For the sake of variety we’ll go with Bokmål’s Samler.

1.2.3 Danish

• L1 Speakers: 6 million

• Native To: Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein

• Official in: Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Faroe Islands, Greenland

Ah, the queen of the Nordics!

Denmark once owned a variety of colonies spanning four continents. Even today, Greenland and the Faroe Islands remain in the “Danish Realm,” autonomous but not sovereign. This makes Danish more widespread than the other Nordic languages, and as we’ve seen, its influence have been felt across every Nordic language.

Every territory ever owned by the Danish Empire. From Wikimedia

I owe this series partially to Danish. Part of the reason for writing it was my confusion between Danish and Dutch; early in life I didn’t even really understand that these were separate languages, much less what separates them. The key difference is that, despite being in northern continental Europe like Dutch, Danish is a Nordic language, a member of the Nordic family, while Dutch is a West Germanic language that we will cover in part IV.

It’s sad that I had such a fuzzy view of Danish for so long, because it’s a pretty important language. The first law texts in it are in about 1200, and it was in the late 14th century that Queen Margaret I decided to change the language of administration from Latin to Danish. This makes it the oldest modern Nordic prestige language.

Linguistically, Danish is interesting because of its incredible vowel complexity. The shades of meaning provided by differences in vowel length, depth, and quality are finer than most of us can hope to imagine. Ordinary IPA, without diacritics, is actually insufficient to describe the tiny degrees of the Danish vowel system.

The most important, and the most unique, feature of this system is the stød phenomenon. Certain words are distinguished only by the presence or absence of stød (meaning “thrust” or “push”), a property that changes how the syllable is pronounced. It resembles a partial glottal stop (the glottal stop is the sound between the two syllables of “uh-oh”), within the effected vowels and consonants. Consonants with stød are slightly shorter and feel “louder” than syllables without it. Watch this video to hear the difference, though it’s subtle. This might be parallel to the pitch-accent system of Norwegian and Swedish, and it combines with the very complicated vowel system to make Danish a heck of a language to learn.

Some of its consonants are weird, too. Its version of the ð sound, pronounced in the English “the” and the icelandic “maður”, isn’t a dental fricative but an alveolar voiced sonorant, pronounced without touching the tongue to any part of the mouth. I don’t blame the other Nordic peoples for being annoyed at having to learn this language!

With its phonetic alienness in mind, let’s look at the Danish UDHR:

Alle mennesker er født frie og lige i værdighed og rettigheder. De er udstyret med fornuft og samvittighed, og de bør handle mod hverandre i en broderskabets ånd.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Danish is quite isolating and has largely dropped cases. Like Swedish, it has only a neuter and non-neuter case system. This impacts the formation of plurals but little else. Like its siblings, it retains strong and weak adjectives and verbs.

As in Swedish, compounding in Danish is very productive. Much of the lexicon is derived from Latin, Greek, French, and English. Apparently, in contrast to other Germanic languages, there’s a debate in Denmark as to whether to nativize the orthography of these loanwords: contrast Norwegian sjåfør and Danish chauffør “driver.”

Collector in Danish is samler, similarly to the other languages. Now we shift to the West Nordic languages. I find the these far more interesting than the East Nordics. You’ll see why in a moment.

1.3 West Scandinavian

1.3.2 Icelandic

• L1 Speakers: 390,000

• Native To: Iceland

Wow.

Just wow.

Look at this language!

Hver maður er borinn frjáls og jafn öðrum að virðingu og réttindum. Menn eru gæddir vitsmunum og samvisku, og ber þeim að breyta bróðurlega hverjum við annan.

Here’s Old Norse again for comparison:

Allir menn eru bornir frjálsir ok jafnir at virðingu ok réttum. Þeir eru allir viti gœddir ok samvizku, ok skulu gøra hvárr til annars bróðurliga.

… and Danish.

Alle mennesker er født frie og lige i værdighed og rettigheder. De er udstyret med fornuft og samvittighed, og de bør handle mod hverandre i en broderskabets ånd.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Looking at these three examples, an inevitable conclusion comes to mind: Icelandic is a deeply old language. Its written form is little more than a dialect of Old Norse. In fact, it is so conservative that Old Norse is sometimes called Old Icelandic. Icelanders can still read the Prose and Poetic and Prose Eddas with little difficulty, as long as they are rendered in the modern orthography. This is a pretty famous property of Icelandic… but where did it arise from?

Buckle up, because I have a lot to say about this language.

1.3.2.1 History of Icelandic

Iceland was one of the last large islands in the world to be settled by humans. The Greeks of antiquity may have known about it, as they pictured the land of Thule in the far north of their maps. But no one settled there until the ninth century.

Documentation of this project was in Old Norse. According to one of these writings, the Landnámabók, or Book of Settlements, Iceland was discovered in the middle of the ninth century when a Norewegian named Naddodd was blown off course during a journey to the Faroes. It wasn’t until later that Norwegian sailor Flóki Vilgerðarson called it Ísland (“Iceland”).

Hundreds of years passed. By the eleventh century, wealthy Icelandic nobles sent their sons to Germany and, later, Copenhagen for higher study. There they learned Latin and all the subjects it opened. When they returned home, they brought a latinized orthography with them. A century later, these seeds blossomed into two flowers of world literature: the Prose and Poetic Sagas, which stand not only as great monuments to humanity but also as important records of Old Icelandic.

Printed works were introduced to Iceland in the year 1540 with Oddur Gottskalksson’s translation of the New Testament. Thus began the modern Icelandic langauge.

Iceland was very poor in the early modern period, and industrialized late. I first realized this when I read Jules Verne’s description of Reykjavik in Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in 1864:

“It was not an easy matter to lose oneself in the two streets of Reykjavik; I had therefore no need to ask my way. The town lies on a flat and marshy plain, between two hills. A vast field of lava skirts it on one side, falling away in terraces towards the sea. .. The longest of the streets of Reykjavik runs parallel to the shore. In this street the merchants and traders live in wooden huts made with beams of wood, painted red—mere log huts, such as you find in the wilds of America. The other street, situated more to the west, runs toward a little lake between the residences of the bishop and the other personages not engaged in commerce.

I had soon seen all I wanted of these weary and dismal thoroughfares. Here and there was a strip of discolored turf, like an old worn-out bit of woolen carpet; and now and then a bit of kitchen garden, in which grew potatoes, cabbage, and lettuce, almost diminutive enough to suggest the idea of Lilliput.”

— Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter 6, Jules Verne.

At the point Verne describes, Iceland was under Danish rule. Full independence didn’t come until 1944.

1.3.2.2 Icelandic Linguistic Purism

Despite its dismal state, romantic nationalism spread through the streets of Rejkavik. As we’ve seen with Norwegian, that brings linguistic purification and standardization. Itwas stronger in Iceland than anywhere else.

Surrounded on every side by a frigid ocean, Iceland had been isolated from the wider world for a long time. Not even the Danes bothered to penetrate deeply into such a swampy, icy backwater, and exchanges with Latin-tongued monks and French-speaking diplomats were limited. The result was that, by the 1880s, Icelandic had diverged very little from Old Norse, by far the least of all the Nordics.

This was like catnip to 19th-century linguists. They wanted a national language tolay claim to an unbroken chain of descent with its parent language while remaining as unmixed as possible from other national languages. Germanic linguists in particular wished to avoid the imperial and post-imperial influence of Latin, Greek, and the Romance languages.

While most Germanic languages had, by the nineteenth century, been thoroughly penetrated by romance influences (English most of all, followed by Dutch, then German), Icelandic remained almost completely untouched. The scholars and the public wanted to keep it that way. They developed a policy I have not seen anywhere else.

Instead of borrowing a loanword from a dominant language, Icelanders are very careful to make their own coinage purely from Old Icelandic and Old Norse roots. A good way to show this is to compare Icelandic’s technology terms with German:

I need to emphasize that, contrary to stereotypes of linguistic prescriptivism, this movement came from the bottom-up. Its ardent public support could not be more fierce. All the Islensk Malnefnd (Icelandic Language Committee) does is provide a Schelling Point.

Other European languages borrow their recent lexicon directly from French or, nowadays, English, making them feel bland and in thrall to whatever language is dominant at the time. The Icelandic policy has avoided this, encouraging creativity and an independent, vital literature. No wonder it’s so common for language weenies on Reddit ] to “ooooh” and “aaah” at Icelandic. The language is a carefully-cultivated work of popular art.

1.3.2.3 The Grammar and Properties of Icelandic

By the medieval period, the spoken language of the Icelanders began to diverge from the tongues of their continental cousins. The most obvious difference is that Icelanders retained the voice and unvoiced dental fricative (the th in “those” (ð) and “bath,” (þ) respectively) while the other languages turned it into a stop. This is one of the most amazing features of Icelandic, made all the more amazing by the fact that English is the only other Germanic language to retain it. English is usually the most innovative Germanic language!

I think you know what I’m going to say about the other layers of the language: they are similar to Old Norse! It retains all four cases and three genders of Old Norse, as well as the strong/weak adjective and verb distinctions.

Icelandic is my favorite Nordic language by far. It’s just so, so cool. It brings me great joy to be called a safnari.

1.3.3 Faroese

• L1 Speakers: 69,000

• Native To: The Faroe Islands

Faroese is the newest language on our list, only having gained official status in the nineteenth century. Until that time, people living on the Faroe islands considered themselves to be speaking Icelandic.

In the Early Modern period, the Faroes were colonized by, you guessed it, the Danish. As these things so, Danish replaced Latin as the language of prestige. A 1739 law required children to be literate in Danish to be confirmed in the church. Few learned men cared about whatever the Faroese gibbered in their own homes.

This state of affairs continued until 1848. This was a watershed year for romantic nationalism, and so it’s appropriate that it would be the year the Lutheran minister Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb penned a treatise christening “The Faroese Language,” and describing its grammar in the terminology of the age.

This lit the fuse for an explosion of Faroese literature. Writers, poets, and scientists joined pens in a great project to make their mother tongue a modern, independent language. They took the earthy, farm-and-hearth words that were then current in Faroese, and added a superstrate of largely Danish-derived words for science, theology, and philosophy.

The result was a language rather near to Icelandic. Let’s look at the UDHR:

Øll menniskju eru fødd fræls og jøvn til virðingar og mannarættindi. Tey hava skil og samvitsku og eiga at fara hvørt um annað í bróðuranda.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We see immediately the similarities. Phonologically, Faroese is written closer to Icelandic and spoken closer to Norwegian. The grammatical system is nearly identical to Icelandic. “Collector” in Faroese is savnandi.

Spelling does not follow pronunciation very closely, since Faroese orthography was chosen to preserve the language’s past. The result is that the language looks closer to Icelandic but is pronounced closer to Danish.

More than this, Faroese has a split that is rather reminiscent of the Norwegian split, though enshrined by custom, not law. In colloquial Faroese, a lot of words they use come from Danish, whereas written Faroese has been cleansed of these completely. Things like this make me really wonder about the classic English writing advice to “write things just as would say them.” This would be linguistically impossible in a lot of the languages we discuss. Is it really possible, or even helpful, to think this way about English?

2. Conclusion

There we have it, folks. Those are the Nordic languages.

At the end of such a long journey I want to write down a few observations about the languages as a whole.

We studied five languages here: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese. At least three of these were not widely recognized until the era of romantic nationalism. If Denmark still owned Scandinavia, we would call Swedish and Norwegian dialects of Danish.

Languages boundaries are mere human constructions. Their underlying attributes are real, but the lines that divide them are fake. As the saying goes, a language is just a dialect with an army.

Which makes you wonder about all the mere dialects of English that have armies. Why do Americans call their language English, rather than American? American English is a unique dialect, with plenty of vocabulary variation and a different pronunciation.

What about dialects like Nigerian and Indian, which are in many cases barely mutually intelligible? When Nigeria became independent, why didn’t it rename its dialect of English “Nigerian,” when it had every linguistic right to and every desire to separate itself from the colonizer?

I argue that it’s a matter of differing ideologies of independence. The Scandinavian countries achieved independence in the 19th century wave of romantic nationalism, which defined peoples with respect to the language they spoke. We often forget the strongly linguistic component to this nationalism. For most writers at that time, a language and a people were one and the same.

Fast-forward to the 1960s, and we see a very different cultural force animating these independence movements. Marxism and adjacent ideologies were by then much more important. While Marxists saw language as an important tool to recreate society, they did not see it as a component of the animating force behind their revolution. For these postcolonial revolutionaries, English and other colonial languages already belonged to the oppressed peoples, whether they drew a line to mark it as their own or not.

Contrast this with the Germanics, who took an interest not just in drawing lines but in enforcing them. Linguistic purism is a common theme in the history of every Germanic language. These languages were originally spoken only by uneducated barbarians. In order for scholars of the early modern period to take them seriously, they had to borrow a huge number of terms from Greek, Latin, and Vulgar Latin.

Later philologists saw this as ruining the beauty of their languages and sought to make their own Germanic terms with varying degrees of success. While every language has had some puristic history, it seems to be a particularly marked phenomenon among the Germanics due to the way they entered history and scholarship.

Our journey into the West Germanic languages will no doubt shed light on that question.

3 Bibliography

Books:

Ruth Sanders, The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Jesse Byock, Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas, 2nd ed. (2017)

Auwera, Johan van der, & König, Ekkehard. (2002). The Germanic languages. Routledge.

Wikipedia:

Linguistic Purism in Icelandic. Wikipedia. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic.

Swedish Language. Wikipedia. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language.

History of Iceland: Danish Iceland in the Beginning of the 19th Century. Wikipedia. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iceland#Danish_Iceland_in_the_beginning_of_the_19th_century.

Websites:

Viking Society for Northern Research. “Publications.” Accessed January 8, 2026. http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/.

Árnastofnun (Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies). National Language Policy and Planning in Iceland: Aims and Institutional Activities. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://ritaskra.arnastofnun.is/media/skraning_pdf/National_language_policy_and_planning_in_Iceland__aims_and_institutional_activities.pdf.

My maternal grandpa was born in 1926 and died in February 2025. I helped with his care in his latter days and was there for his death. A prolific writer, he wrote a memoir and a novel. These helped me compose this eulogy, which I give at his funeral. I hope that you will find in this not only an expression of genuine love, but an interesting snapshot of American life— both his and my own.

Eulogy for Robert Allton

By Collisteru

To be presented on Wednesday the 19th of March, 2025.

My grandpa Bob lived a life full enough to deserve the moniker given to his generation: the greatest. During nearly a century, he fought poverty and war; he moved hundreds of miles from his native roost, he contributed to the advancement of the nation, he loved and was loved.

The circumstances of his birth were not ideal. He was born in Peoria, Illinois just in time for the Great Depression. After his parent’s divorce in 1930, he moved into the care of his grandparents, where he lived with his sister and cousins. His younger brother died tragically in a car accident when Bob was eight, inspiring a habit of careful driving that kept him from the same fate.

Even though Bob struggled as a child, he saw bright lights that pointed his direction in life. He told me about how the new cars and electrical gadgets at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair sparked his love of technology. During his early years, Bob attended the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and the Young People’s Christian Union. He learned to play the Coronet with great skill, playing in marches and state-level events, beginning a love of music that would also follow him throughout life.

His proudest early accomplishment was enrolling in the Air Force in 1944. The young men around him said, “Why study history when you could be making it?” After finishing high school, he boarded a train bound for Biloxi, Mississippi to begin basic training. While Bob appreciated the new prestige, muscle, and discipline that the Air Force offered, the realities of war disillusioned him. His most striking memory of boot camp, and one he frequently related to me, was that the sole difference between him and the German prisoners of war was their uniforms.

Bob never saw war as the Treaty of San Francisco was signed before he finished training. His next step was Bradley University, where he joined the Alpha Pi fraternity and bonded with his cousin at basketball games. Although he dropped out two years in, the education he did get still helped him later in life.

Soon, after college, Bob met the love of his life at the Quadrant Single’s Club in Peoria. Iona and Bob had a brief courtship that blossomed into marriage in 1953.

For nine years, Bob bounced between odd jobs. For brief stints he moved to Florida and back, owned a business repairing TV sets, and worked at Pabst and at Caterpillar. He had especially fond memories of Caterpillar that he often mentioned to me. In 1962, he moved to Boulder to take advantage of the tech industry and found a stable career and life.

Among the first things Bob did after moving to Boulder was enrolling his two daughters in Sunday School at this church. The importance of religion to him can be surmised from the line he chose to begin his memoir with:

“My entire family, both paternal and maternal, were bound to the Universalist church and I was baptized there.”

For a few years in Boulder he worked as a service manager for Montgomery Ward and as a machinist for Granville-Phillips before starting his job at the post office in 1966. Bob took pride in his career and worked hard to provide for his family. He observed that doing this with no college degree would be far harder today, writing that “had I began my working career [in 1990], the opportunities to ‘work my way up’ would no longer exist.” He saw firsthand the ossification of American class structure.

However, Bob at this time Bob was able to work up the ranks of the post office until, by 1983, he became the facilities manager and supervised many locations. He retired with honors in 1990.

During retirement, Bob found more time for his many hobbies. Throughout life electronics and mechanics drew him in like a magnet. The following passage from his novel, which is almost certainly autobiographical, illustrates this well:

“Attracted by noise and motion of machinery, I ascended the metallic stairs to tred on a catwalk surrounded by throbbing and hissing implements… there was an abstract introduction-- the seed of a bond which grew to lifelong rapport with gauges, valves, levers, pipes, meters and electrical pathways.”

His love affair with mechanisms resulted in the birth of many of the amateur engineering projects that adorn the house to this day.

Art, especially writing and music, also remained important to Bob after retirement. In the 1990s he wrote a novel and his memoir, and for many years he enjoyed playing piano.

He was my only grandfather that I got to know personally and we cared deeply about each other. We shared a love for classical music, especially Tchaikovsky. We talked about subjects like history and electrostatics often-- he had a sharp mind, evidenced by both his curiosity for every subject in the sciences and the arts and by his successful mechanical projects. He helped take care of me when I was a child and let me live with him and see his last days as I went to college. He made obvious his confidence in and love for me.

He impressed us all with his longevity, a rare feat earned by not smoking, not drinking after age 61, and getting regular exercise by working around the house.

To me, Bob Allton exemplified resilience, curiosity, and devotion to family. From his humble beginnings in Peoria to his final days here in Boulder, he approached life with ingenuity and care. The mechanical projects throughout his home, the music he played, the stories he wrote, and the wisdom he shared will continue to inspire those of us fortunate enough to have known him. His legacy lives on, not just in what he built with his hands, but in what he built in our hearts.

Thank you.

Recently I’ve been working on Tsvi Benson-Tilson’s Radix. It’s been a blast, and has opened up a fast portal into a sub-problem of particular interest.

The point of Radix is to help you navigate Wiktionary’s etymology database. It builds pastward and futureward trees of etymology from the input word in any language. Many languages are assigned specific colors, and for some etymologies, this makes the trees very beautiful indeed.

Radix trees and their colors.

So far, the number of languages with default Radix colors is only a small fraction of all the world’s languages:

All the languages that have colors.

This means trees without those languages look very gray. We want all languages to have colors. They shouldn’t be assigned at random though— the colors should reflect the underlying linguistic relationship.

Desiderata

In the original color set, Latin is emerald green, French is teal, and the steps along the gradient between the two, Old and Middle French, are shades in between these two colors. This points us to a general notion: we want languages similar to each other to have similar colors. Likewise, languages that are very different from each other should have very different colors.

Further, we want our color set to express “in-betweenness” in two ways. The first way is that, if language B is the ancestor of A and C, it should have a color in between A and C. We will formalize that notion of “in-betweenness” later when we get to color spaces. The second way is that, if language B is closer to language A and to language C than language A is to C, then the color of B should be in between the colors of A and C.

If implemented correctly, this will result in language families having similar shades of color. For example, we might want the Romance languages to be bluish and the Germanic languages to be reddish.

Is there a way to get a color set with these desiderata without choosing all the colors explicitly? It turns out that there is.

Lexical Distance

An easy way to formalize the notion of linguistic distance is with lexical distance, which this blogpost by Stephan Steinbach made me aware of.

Steinbach says the method he used was developed by Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, a Ukrainian linguist almost as enigmatic as he was eminent. A prolific professor at the University of Kiev, his career straddled the fall of the Soviet bloc.

Tyshchenko’s interests appear odd to someone educated in the Anglo-American tradition such as myself. The first chapter of his magnum opus, Metatheory of Linguistics, available here, opines at length on epistemological concerns and the various dimensions of linguistics. He seems to be very much a continental structuralist linguist: interested more in the interplay of various dimensions of linguistics and the philosophy thereof, rather than categorizing and systematizing a specific language like an Anglo-American linguist.

I wasn’t able to find a direct citation from Tyshchenko on lexical distance. While he mentions it in Metatheory of Linguistics, section 4.100.6, he never explicitly outlines the algorithm anywhere in his work as far as I can tell. To make things easy on myself I’ll use the definition of Petronia and Serva.

To understand lexical distance we first need to define word distance. The word distance between two words is their Levenshtein Distance divided by the length of the longest word.

Levenshtein Distance is nothing more than the number of edits to get from one string to the other.

We divide this by the length of the longest word, so in the first example above the distance would be 2 / 3 = 0.6666, and in the second example it would be 6 / 6 = 1. This formalizes our intuition that the first word pair is closer to each other than the second.

To extend this notion of distance to languages, we’ll use the Swadesh List and compare each word in that list with its equivalents in each other language. The lexical distance between languages A and B is the average of the word distances between each parallel word in their respective Swadesh lists.

In this way, languages whose basic vocabulary is more similar will be close, and languages with divergent base vocabularies will be far away from each other.

The Language Map

We need to clean the data, which in this case means translating the orthographies in each language to the Latin alphabet. To keep things simple and to keep the colors well-defined, I’ll start with the European languages, but this technique can easily be extended further.

After all our work, we are rewarded with a distance matrix that looks like this:

Now we want to create a 3D point cloud from these distances, which we can do via Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), one of my favorite techniques from linear algebra. I won’t get into the details here but basically MDS for n dimensions identifies the most important n degrees of freedom among columns in a distance matrix, then generates an n-dimensional point cloud that is the best fit for that distance matrix for n dimensions.

From Vector Space to Color Space

We now have a point cloud of languages that looks like this:

We chose three dimensions because we want to superimpose this onto a color space, which is 3D, because it represents a linear combination of the three types of cone receptors in our eyes.

There are many color spaces. I used CIELAB since it’s the most common uniform color space (UCS), meaning equal distances on this color space correspond to equal differences among the colors. We will find this property useful.

The three dimensions of CIELAB are L (lightness), a (the green-red axis), and b (the blue-yellow axis). Superimposing the 3D scatterplot onto the color space gives us this:

… not too bad, eh? The following colors are assigned for each language:

I’m pretty happy with these colors, though I do have a few nitpicks. The Romance languages look so similar that it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance. This points to the fact that algorithmic generation isn’t enough to generate optimal colors for all languages. It is, however, a good first pass for the world’s seven thousand-odd tongues.

Limitations

The method has a few limitations:

1. It relies totally on phonology, so it doesn’t record any semantic differences. Further, it’s path-dependent on orthography. Some way to incorporate semantic differences in determining language distances would be great, but how to do this is non-obvious.

2. Don’t take these data too seriously since the data quality is low. I took the Swadesh Lists from the first GitHub dataset I found, and the data have some problems. For example, Gothic had a number of words missing and replaced with a stand-in “[Term?]” sequence, which artificially separated it from the other Germanic languages. In general, this method doesn’t do too well with low-resource languages such as older languages.

3. The method is not totally deterministic since scikit-learn’s MDS implementation isn’t totally deterministic. In my code (see below), I seeded the generator so the result is always the same and and I assigned the dimensions to achieve a color set I liked.

Conclusion

The notion of lexical distance seems very useful. People generally seem to have a notion of how close or far away languages are, and it’s awesome to see this reified and made quantitatively accurate. It would be magnificent to have a 2D map of distances for all the languages of the world— I’d be very interested in seeing what the equivalent of Steinbach’s map is for, say, the Semitic or Sino-Tibetan languages.

Coming Soon: Linguistic Sightseeing — The Germanic Languages Part III: The North Germanic Languages

Appendix

Link to code:

https://github.com/Collisteru/language_colors/blob/master/README.md

There are two ways of thinking about a career path: the object level and the meta level.

The object level represents what you will do. For example, if you’re applying to grad school, the object level is exactly what research you want to do— it isn’t “Theory of Computation”, it’s “I will find out if every 3D Turmite resolves into a highway.” While these types of ambitions seem obviously necessary to me for anyone who wants a good career, they remain surprisingly uncommon.1

Much more common is the meta level: “I want to work at Google”, or “I want to make six figures.” These focus on the accoutrements of work over the work itself. Now accoutrements matter— work-life balance is important, for example. However, in my experience people who focus on the meta level rarely succeed, and the few who do aren’t happy.

I suspect this is because object-level goals are usually expressions of love, while meta-level goals are attempts to navigate society’s structures. It seems better to live one’s life in pursuit of the love of what people, problems, and activities seem most fun and good, rather than be pushed around by the epiphenomena of how work is done.

For this reason, when giving career advice, I usually start with “what problem(s) do you want to solve? How do you want to provide value to society?” I think this is a much better question than “how much money do you want to make?”

Don’t know what to work on? Read. Further, use your reading to navigate the world, and get practice in navigating this world. Meet people. Do odd jobs. Travel. You will soon discover that the markets are, in fact, inefficient. The authorities around you have erred. There are no adults in the room. Will you shoulder your new responsibility?

Once your resolve settles on a problem, you must figure out how to achieve it, including what institutions will lead you best to that goal, and so forth. Once you’ve decided that, not only will you have a clear path that is fulfilling to tread, but you’ll also be a much better candidate for any institutions you want to get into. Never do something just because “everyone else is doing it:” do things only as a vector for your own independently-formed ambitions. Unfortunately, all advice from outsiders is limited because they’ll have developed a fundamentally different philosophy from you.

A whole category of career questions— where to work, how to get a specific job, what salary to aim for… are missing the point, at least when considered in isolation. The point of your career should be to help others and yourself, not to get into some kind of guild. Don’t settle for less. It might make economic sense, but you’ll hate yourself in time.

Welcome to part II of our short introduction to the Germanic Languages. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to read Part I where we discuss their origins. There we discussed what unites these languages— for the rest of the series, we’ll discuss what separates them.

The Germanic Language Family

is a tree with three branches: West Germanic, North Germanic, and East Germanic.

Map adapted from Wikipedia

The tree above show which languages belong to each branch. Green languages are living, red ones are dead.

East Germanic (EG), once the strongest branch during the family’s heyday, is nowadays extinct. We’ll start with EG, since it’s the least known and there isn’t that much to say about it compared to the other branches.

East Germanic:

At one point, the EG was a very important Germanic branch.

These languages were spoken by such unruly characters as the Vandals, the Visigoths, and the Ostrogoths, who you’ll remember from history class as the tribes who sacked Rome. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, these barbarian tongues for a brief time became ruling languages. However, as the Germanic warriors softened into nobles, they adopted the language of their subjects. Latin was more fit for administration.

Despite this change, the EG languages, particularly Gothic, continued to be widely spoken in Eastern Europe. It was not until the later eruption of Slavic peoples from Polesia that the EG languages were stamped out.

These languages, once imbued with great power, are today shrouded in mystery. We know about only one of them in any detail: Gothic.

Gothic

Gothic was the language of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. It has the oldest corpus of any Germanic language, but also among the smallest. Our knowledge of Gothic derives chiefly from translations of the New Testament and fragments of the Old by the bishop Ulfilas. .

Ulfilas Translates the Bible by Willhelm Lindenschmit, Wikimedia Commons

Ulfilas knew he needed a writing system for his translation. Now, the Goths already one: the runes we covered in Part I. But it was a pagan system, and simply wouldn’t do. Ulfilas took the Greek alphabet, tweaked it a bit to suit the new sound system, and the product was the Gothic alphabet:

Thus we see one of the first examples of a Christian missionary designing a new writing system to minister to barbarians, starting a theme in history and gave us at least one major world script.

As with other ancient alphabets, the Goths used letters to represent numbers. They used 𐌰 for 1, 𐌱 for 2, and so on. Certain letters were used only for this purpose in order to round out a decimal system, in particular 𐍁 and 𐍊.

The influence of Greek shows up especially in the letters for p and g. There are some feature that look strange to modern eyes, such as the almost-indistinguishable k and r. I wonder if these would have looked better at the time.

Because it’s so old, Gothic has helped us more than any other language to reconstruct Proto-Germanic— and if you’ve read part 1, you’ll recognize the similarity in the following translation of article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1

𐌰𐌻𐌻𐌰𐌹 𐌼𐌰𐌽𐍃 𐌲𐌰𐌱𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌰𐌽𐌰𐌹 𐌹𐌽 𐍆𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌷𐌰𐌻𐍃𐌰 𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸𐌰𐌽𐌳 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌼𐌹𐌸 𐍃𐌰𐌼𐌰𐌻𐌴𐌹𐌺𐌰𐌹𐌼 𐍃𐍅𐌴𐍂𐌹𐌸𐌰𐌹 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌹𐌷𐍄𐌴𐌹𐌼. 𐍅𐌹𐍃𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌰𐌽𐍃 𐍆𐍂𐌰𐌸𐌾𐌰 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌼𐌹𐌸𐍅𐌹𐍃𐍃𐌴𐌹𐌽 𐌿𐌽𐌳𐍂𐌴𐌳𐌰𐌽𐌰𐌹 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐌻𐌿𐌽 𐍃𐌹𐍃 𐌼𐌹𐍃𐍃𐍉 𐍆𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌳𐌾𐌰𐌽.

In Latin script:

Allai mans gabauranai ïn freihalsa wairþand jah miþ samaleikaim sweriþai jah garaihteim. Wisandans fraþja jah miþwissein undredanai skulun sis misso freidjan.

The alphabet isn’t too hard to read, eh? 𐌸 is transcribed as þ. This is a letter called the thorn, and it represents the th sound in many Germanic languages, including formerly English! Many people really like thorn, and you should too. Consider Þ your new friend.

We also see <j>, which we don’t know exactly what that sounds like but it was probably something like a <y> in modern English. <z> is pronounced as /z/ in English, giving this language a rather strange sound. <x> is pronounced as in the German Bach. <r> is pronounced as a tap as in the Spanish pero. This mix of sounds is quite rare in modern languages and gives Gothic a distinct character.

Grammatically, Gothic is similar to PG in many ways, including its great use of ablaut in its (many) strong verbs. One of my favorites is waírþan, warþ, waúrþun, waúrþans ‘become’.

To add some spice to our tour, I’ll calque my own name, Collisteru, into each language we talk about.

What’s a calque, you ask? It’s a type of translation where a word or phrase is borrowed from one language or another by literal morpheme-by-morpheme translation. For example, the word skyscraper has been calqued into many other languages by literally translating “sky” and “scraper,” as in gratte-ciel in French, Wolkenkratzer in German, grattacielo in Italien, and matenrō (摩天楼) in Japanese.

Collisteru is an approximate mangling of the Latin word “Collector,” which means, um, collector.

In Gothic, the verb “to collect” is galisan. We need to perform agent nominalization, which is when a verb is transformed into a noun denoting an agent that does that verb, as in push → pusher. How does agent nominalization work in Gothic? I found a hint in Joseph Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language, in which he calls the construction nomina agentis and says it is formed with the suffix -areis, which changes in the process, as in the following:

Excerpt from page 172 of Joseph Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language

Boka (book) → bokareis (scribe)

Laisjan (learn) —> Laisareis (teacher)

Liuþ (sing) → liuþareis (singer)

Collection — galists (galisan + þs)

The nomina agentis can be formed either from the verb, as in laisjan → laisareis, or from the noun, as in boka → bokareis. In this case I’ll form it from the noun for the sake of euphony. The verb in Gothic “to collect” is galisan. This makes the noun “collection” galists, according to this fansite. Putting it all together, we construct the Gothic word for collector as galistareis. This looks like 𐌲𐌰𐌻𐌹𐍃𐍄𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐍃 in the Gothic script. Pretty cool, if you ask me!

Gothic and Fantasy

As you probably guessed, Gothic influenced romantic and fantasy literature. Sadly, new composition in Gothic can never be as rich as that of Latin or Greek since the corpus is so small.

That hasn’t stopped nerds from trying. Tolkien wrote a poem in Gothic, the Bagme Bloma, for a colleague, and he even used it as an inspiration for his conlang Taliska. Others have composed Gothic poems and prose messages as art.

I think the potential of Gothic for art is undertapped, however. A Gothic-inspired artlang would make a great language for a barbarian fantasy people.

Humanity has yet to become fully conscious of Gothic.

Resources on Gothic:

English-to-Gothic Dictionary:

https://axtk.github.io/x/gothic?q=areis

Wulfila project, which aims to document the Gothic language: https://www.wulfila.be/

Joseph Wright’s excellent grammar. https://www.germanic-lexicon-project.org/texts/goth_wright_about.html

The Others

“But Collisteru!!!” I hear you cry, “What about the other EG languages?!?!?”

Okay, okay. You’re right. We should cover them here. Lord knows we’re not getting to them later.

Burgundian

The Burgundians, named after the region in East-Central France, were a Germanic tribe that in late antiquity managed to stake out a barbarian kingdom on the outskirts of the empire, near south Switzerland. We know only a few vocabulary terms from proper names.

They came from Poland, which is why linguists traditionally considered their language EG, but even this has recently come into dispute [https://books.google.com/books?id=tOnQDfRU-poC].

Vandalic

For Vandalic the grouping with Gothic is more certain. Some people even say there’s a dialectical continuum, and the language of the Vandals is actually Gothic.

The Vandals crossed the Rhine in the fifth century. They spread well into the Iberian peninsula and even into North Africa, making Vandalic the first multicontinental Germanic language. In the fifth century, they even established a Kingdom that spanned much of the Western Mediterranean.

All this means we know more about Vandalic than Burgundian, but still not much. For the most part it looks very similar to Gothic, as in the following examples::

Vandalic — geis

Gothic — geis

“Spear”

Vandalic — muts

Gothic — moþs

“Courage”

Vandalic — drincan

Gothic — drigkan

“Drink”

For more, I recommend the paper Tracing the Language of the Vandals.

Crimean Gothic

In the (unlikely) event you’ve heard of any East Germanic language other than Gothic, it’s probably Crimean Gothic. That’s because it survived into the 18th century. Despite this amazing fact, we still have frustratingly little information on it— hardly more than a bit of text recorded by the French diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Bubesq during his 1589 visit to Crimea.

We aren’t even totally sure if Crimean Gothic is an EG language (this is a pattern). It has certain sound changes and words in common with Gothic, but also it lacks certain phonetic merges found in Gothic, making the categorization questionable.

By 1794, Peter Simon Pallas reported no remnants of the language in Crimea, so the language was likely extinct by then.

Conclusion

That’s all for the East Germanic languages. As I said, I hope these languages, especially Gothic, receive more attention in the future— this is one of those many lost remnants of the past that seem to have almost been fully consumed by the fires of time. We can only rescue a scrap here and there. Even they are worth the trouble.

Until next time, 𐍃𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌹𐍃 𐌷𐌰𐌹𐌻𐍃!2

Note: This was written for “Speedhaven,” an event in which participants only had thirty minutes to write a piece. The theme was “The Last Echo.” I’m not happy with everything about this piece, but choose to publish as-is to keep with the spirit of the event.

Each morning begins with loss.

Late every night, I cross the glass screen into the the realm of dream. Every morning, crossing back, I struggle to capture the last few morsels and fragments of my sleep-ventures.

Sometimes this process is very bitter. A few days ago, I was a yellow dragon with blue spirals painted on her scales. I flew close to the wide gray ocean, and my nostrils were wet with salt and brine.

In the midst of the great sea rose eight towers arranged like a coronet. The angry waves splattered against the tower walls like militia charges. My wings brought me to one of these stone black spines. I had to penetrate the tower and kill the evil inside.

I entered; how exactly I don’t remember. I could communicate telepathically with a friend of mine, a sleek, black dragon. He told me what to do; avoid the sand on the floor, hop on the ledges (why could I not simply use my wings? This must be something else I’ve forgotten).

Unfortunately, before the climax of this dream, just as I saw the cape of my adversary in the tower’s innermost depths, the glass screen dissolved. I landed on my bed and rubbed the last beads of wet sleep from my eyes. I rushed to my notepad. My pen spilt ink as fast as water as I described the outline of the dream. I drew and tried to capture every fragment and detail, down to the last echo.

I do this every morning, and in this way I capture about 10 - 30% of the dream and lose the rest. At all times I feel frustrated by my inability to totally navigate the realm of dream. I think I am better at remembering my dreams than most, but all this does is tell me how much I’m missing.

——

It is this frustration that has brought me to the science of lucid dreaming. the oneironaut is very blessed indeed; Lovecraft describes him well in his incredible work “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.’ There, Lovecraft described dreams as they really are; I think: quests to another world, no less real than our own, that reflect something more real and more true about the nature of our souls. I sometimes joke that the protagonist, Randolph Carter; is my great-great uncle— given Lovecraft’s place and time, this is not so ridiculous as it may seem.

My interest in oneironautics was also sparked by the excellent, genius-level Chris Wayan; a Berkeley native, he probably lives less than ten miles from where we sit. He has taken great pains to illustrate his dreams: every night, he plunges into the realm of sleep and describes the narrative as he sees it, and his drawings are typically very vivid and reflect well the architecture of his inner mind. I am especially impressed by a dream sequence he had an illustrated— an adventure that took place over the course of ten dreams, in which Wayan found himself another species in another society.

—

So I have an ardent interest in dream science. I think that our modern life deprives us of many opportunities for adventure, but there is one thing that can never be taken away— our adventures in the dream-realm. To have control over your own dreams, to become an oneironaut, seems to me to be a very good skill indeed. I’ll admit that due to my schoolwork and Inkhaven, I have only stepped on the first threshold, which is consistent dream memory. I only do the occasional reality check, and haven’t yet started MILD and WILD.

If I ever achieve lucidity, the first thing I would do would be to return to a particularly beautiful castle I had once seen. On the upper floor there was a a great hallway, all blue and green, with a greenhouse-style window on its top left corner, that opened up to the stars.

Which stars, though, and which constellations? Could we find, among those sparkling pinpricks, our own sun?

Today is Thanksgiving. Here at Inkhaven, the volunteers have worked hard to feed us well. In some sense this is a first Thanksgiving, since for many residents it will be their first time celebrating this American tradition.

A commemoration for gratefulness is common to many cultures worldwide, but the American Thanksgiving derives from Calvinist culture. The cradle of the higher sort of American culture, the northwest, owes its warp and weft to those hard-nosed reformed Christians. Their services involved reading from scripture and gathered the whole community together to celebrate the winter harvest and their another year in a strange new world. We are given an example of this fromthe record of The day of thanksgiving at Scituate in 1636:

“In ye Meetinghouse, beginning some halfe an hour before nine and continued untill after twelve aclocke, ye day being very cold, beginning with a short prayer, then a psalme song, then more large in prayer, after that another Psalme, and then the Word taught, after that prayer— and then a psalme — then making merry to the creatures, the poorer sort being invited of the richer.”

— Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History by Diana Appelbaum Page 26

Nowadays we tie our celebrations to a particular “first Thanksgiving” of the Plymouth colonists in 1621. While the basic contours of this event are confirmed by history, many of the details remain fuzzy to us. We know for certain that the pilgrims did not intend to establish a holiday.

Intentionally or not, the children and the grandchildren of the New England colonists found in the First Thanksgiving a warm memory and perhaps an ideal to aspire to. For them, Thanksgiving became a combination of various Calvinist and secular agricultural traditions, and they celebrated it for hundreds of years during the colonial era. Its spread coincided with the increased closeness of the colonies, for whom the merits of the celebration were clear.

In 1789, George Washington confirmed the national appeal of the tradition when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. Given that he was neither a northerner nor a puritan, this should mildly surprise us. The only other federal holidays at that time were New Year’s Day, Independence Day, and Christmas.

After Christmas, Thanksgiving is my second-favorite holiday. It seems to fill an important need in the human psyche that is whithered by our modern age. All psychological research backs up the importance of gratitude as a mental health foundation.

We live in a culture of envy. Advertisers tell us to desire more no matter how much we have, and social media tells us to turn a green eye to our neighbors. Thanksgiving is one ofthe few aspects of our culture that frustrates this harmful trend.

However, for this purpose it may be weakening. As the Untied States have grown, the holiday has suffered from a few accretions. Black Friday, a day of sales and shopping, traditionally falls the day after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday, which falls on the next Monday, is Black Friday’s digital counterpart.

Growing up, the day after my mom and I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV, we would watch the crazed frenzy of Black Friday. The sheer animal awfulness of it was astounding to me— I felt that there was something about this that tainted the spirit of Thanksgiving.

I feel this even stronger today. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are contradictory to the spirit of Thanksgiving, which is about enjoying what you already have and not straining for more, more, more. It appears that COVID-19 has dealt Black Friday a fatal blow, but what does it matter if the rot moves from one realm to the other?

At its best, Thanksgiving is not a pressure valve. It’s not a time to get your gratitude over with so you can move on with your life. It’s a reminder that comes once a year to help you learn to be thankful every day of your life. Life, and everything in it, is a precious gift. We can all learn to better treat it that way.

English is a Germanic language. What the heck does that mean?

In this series, I’ll answer that question along with others I had about this mysterious and rich language family. This isn’t a comprehensive introduction to Germanic languages, nor should it be considered linguistically complete. My aim is to provide some interesting “hooks” that encourage further study. I call this “linguistic sightseeing,” since we’re taking a tour of the Germanic family tree to see only the highlights.

In this part I, we will discuss the origins of the Germanic languages and a few aspects of how the Proto-Germans spoke. In Part II, we’ll take a tour of the modern Germanic languages and discuss their quirks and histories.

1. History of Germanic Languages

1.1 Proto-Indo-European

Languages are grouped into families related by common descent. The most familiar example is the Romance family, which includes languages like Spanish, Italian, and French. All Romance languages derive from their common ancestor language, Latin.

We know about Latin because it has a large text corpus. It turns out, however, that there are parent languages that are older still. We don’t have corpi for these, but we can still learn about them by applying the laws of linguistic change in reverse. The most well-known of the reconstructed proto-languages is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a very ancient language that the grandfather of all Indo-European (IE) languages, including almost all European and North Indian languages, Persian, Pashto, and many others. Almost half of Earth’s people speak an IE language, making PIE likely the most influential language of all time.

Germanic is the branch of the massive IE family tree that belonged to the Germanic tribes. It began its split from the trunk before 1000 BC. The Proto-Germans originated in what is now Denmark, North Germany, and the Netherlands. From there they spread all across central Europe and northern Europe. It was during this spread that their language became distinct from PIE, developing into Proto-Germanic (PG).

An excellent map of ancient German tribes around the height of the Roman Empire. From Wikimedia.

1.2 Proto-Germanic

What sets apart PG from PIE? There are too many changes to go over in this post, but I’ll point out a couple that are particularly interesting or famous:

1.2.1 Grimm’s Law

Grimm’s Law is named after that Jakob Grimm of fairy tale fame, the first one to systematically explain it. Grimm described a series of sound changes he noticed between cognates of Germanic languages and Latin. It has turned out that this is a series of systematic sound changes during the development of the Germanic languages. See the chart below:

From The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectical Interrelations, by Hans Frede Nielsen

Seeing this rule in practice is relatively easy. For example, the PIE *pods1 became pes, pedis in Latin, but in Germanic in accordance with rule I the voiceless stop softens into a fricative, becoming the PG *fots, from which English gets the word foot.

1.2.2 The Force of the First Syllable

Another interesting change is that PG always put the accent on the first syllable of each word. This system has been lost in the descendants, but its influence has remained, reducing the values in the first syllables of each word during the transition from PIE to PG and coloring further the vowels on the others. Even in English today, if the accent of a certain word does not fall on its first syllable, that word is almost certainly non-Germanic in origin. For example, maple, thistle, nostril, and stubborn are all Germanic, while superb, advice, affair, dessert, and regret are all from French.

1.2.3 Verbs, Strong and Weak

Now we reach my favorite signifier of Germanic languages, the Strong vs. Weak verb distinction.

This will be familiar to those who’ve studied German. Strong verbs mark their past tense by changing an internal vowel, such as in the English sing/sung or the German werfen/geworfen (to throw). Meanwhile, weak verbs mark the past without any change to the internal vowel. In English, we mark weak verbs only with the suffix -ed: laugh/laughed. For German, the weak verbs are marked through the prefix ge-, as in lachen/gelacht (to laugh).

Weak verbs are more common than strong in Germanic languages, and when modern Germanic languages acquire a new verb it is always be weak. For example, in English when we “verb” a noun the new verb is always weak: we say I texted rather than !I toxt.2

The strong/weak verb distinction is a pretty strange aspect of morphology. What is its origin?

From the facts above you can probably surmise that strong verbs are older than weak verbs. In fact, the antecedent of strong verbs comes directly from PIE.

In PIE, ablaut was a system of regular vowel variations that signified meaning. There are traces of this system in all IE languages, such as in the Greek patera (father, accusative singular) and apatora (fatherless, adjective, accusative). Note the change from the inner e vowel to the o.

PIE verbs were very fluid; most of them had an inherent vowel most similar to the short e in modern English pet. The inherent vowel varied to mark the use of the word in the sentence. In Germanic, strong verbs are traces left over from the ablaut system: the English sing, sang, sung is a perfect example.

However, language speakers are lazy and tend to “sand down” the structures of language over time. The Germanic barbarians became tired of modifying their vowels to signify meaning and decided that affixes and suffixes are easier; this is the beginning of the weak verb system. Note the contrast with Romance speakers, which generally kept the ablaut system but simplified it. These are the choices, collectively made by groups over the evolution of their shared language, that cause language trees to split.

1.2.4 Example of Proto-Germanic

Here’s an example text in PG from this amateur website:

Segufriþuz nemiþi sinaz swerdam andi slahiþi sa drako.

Siegfried takes his sword and slays the dragon.

A couple hints on this text:

1. Þ is the thorn and is a common feature of Germanic orthography. It makes the “th” sound. The omission of the thorn from our modern alphabet is one of English’s many mistakes: representing this single, very important phoneme with the “th” digraph is ugly and confusing.

2. Those who know romance languages will see the common thread here from PIE: sinaz, meaning “his” in this example, is clearly a cognate with the Latin suus and French son.

There’s a huge opportunity for someone to adapt PG into a fantasy language. The addition of z sure make it sound like one, and this would be far better than the faux-Shakespearean attempted by so many lazy fantasy writers.

“What about the strange line at the top?!?!” I hear you scream internally. We can now come to the most fascinating part of proto-Germanic— the writing system.

1.2 Germanic Runes

Given their prominence in fantasy, I remember being flabbergasted that Germanic runes are a real writing system.

Unlike the writing of the Babylonians or the Phoenicians, runes were initially developed for religious purposes. Our oldest stone runic inscriptions involve magic spells and poems. While the Germanic tribes warred mightily with the Romans, they also picked up some of their ideas. One of them was the idea of writing, making the runic alphabet technically a daughter of the Latin alphabet. We see this in certain resemblances, like r, f, i, and h.

The first thing most people notice about runes is that they are only composed of straight lines. It takes a perceptive individual to also realize that runes lack horizontal lines!

We believe this is because they were originally carved into beech. When carving letters into wood, it helps to avoid both lines parallel to the wood grain (since these could split the wood) and curved lines (as these are too difficult to carve). According to Henriette Walter3 , a trace of this origin survives today. In most Germanic languages, the word for book and the word for beech are related. Take a look at the following table:

I would like to do more research on when and why these runic inscriptions died out. This may be a matter for the next part. In part II, we’ll go through the various Germanic languages, how and why they diverged from PG, and what their most interesting elements are. We’ll learn, among other things:

- Why English is the most Latinized of the Germanic Languages

- How Icelandic is the most conservative language on Earth

- Why some forms of German are higher than others

- How Gothic became extinct

- What’s going on with weird Germanic letters like å and ø.

Games fall along a continuum of skill-based and luck-based. Some games, like War, are purely luck-based and involve no choices. Others are purely skill-based, like Chess, in that there’s no hidden information and the player is presented with a choice on each turn.

The question came up during Inkhaven of where rock-paper-scissors (RPS) falls on this spectrum. At first, I thought RPS was a game of 90% luck and 10% skill. After all, maybe you can intuit your opponent’s leading move from their personality, and maybe you can pick up on a few patterns, but surely it’s largely the luck of the draw, right?

Right?

In some sense this is true. RPS is a symmetric game in which each move is game-theoretically identical to every other. We can see this in the payoff matrix:

The first column represents Player 1’s choices, the first row represents Player 2’s. The first number in each cell represents the payoff for Player 1, the second number represents the payoff for Player 2. If you do the minmax on this table you’ll see that there’s no pure Nash equilibrium. For both players, all strategies are equivalent, which means the optimal strategy is to play each move 33% of the time at random. This is known as a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. If two rational players meet in a tournament, whoever wins their best-out-of-five match will be a matter of chance.

Armed with this knowledge, I encourage you to test your RPS mettle. I coded a little app that lets you play repeated RPS games against an AI. See how long you can keep your win rate above 50%.

Rock rocks!!! Play rock by pressing p, scissors by pressing s, and paper by pressing p.

You may notice that it gets more difficult to consistently win against the AI over time — after 120 games, I’ve seen few people keep their scores above 60%. Why is this?

I encourage you to form your own hypotheses. The answer will be below the spacer.

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The Oracle’s Answer

Humans can’t achieve the RPS mixed Nash equilibrium because we can’t generate random numbers. The closest humans come is pseudorandomness, a pattern of random-looking results from the subconscious mind. Any half-decent AI can pick up on its underlying patterns and use them to their advantage.

Humans have certain biases when playing RPS. In a 2014 Chinese paper, a team of scientists documented these over the course of over 100,000 RPS games.

The simplest pattern is that players show a bias towards rock, possibly since it’s the easiest to form, as the count to three is typically conducted with both players making a fist. The AI takes advantage of this by leading with scissors.

After the first round, players show two tendencies:

1. If they lose, in the next game they tend to throw whatever beat them last round. For example, if they lost with rock against paper, they will most likely play paper next round.

2. If the player wins, they show a bias toward sticking with what they won with last time. So if a player won with rock against scissors, they’ll likely go with rock on the second trial.

These are the rules the oracle uses for the first five games. If the oracle wins against a player, they’ll play what beats their last pick in order to counteract rule 1. If the oracle loses, it’ll play what beats the last player’s pick to take advantage of rule 2. These are both good strategies to choose if you win against casual RPS players.

After these first few trials, the oracle shifts to a more sophisticated strategy. It records the user’s entire play history as a sliding sequence of five grams, like [RPSSP] or [PRSPR]. These are entered as the keys to a dictionary. Their values are the count of how many of each type the player threw after each five-gram.

For example, if the player has played the sequence RPSSSRSPR, the dictionary would look like the following:

[RPSSS]: {R: 1, P: 0, S: 0}

[PSSSR]: {R; 0, P: 0, S: 1}

[SSSRS]: {R: 0, P: 1, S: 0}

[SSRSP]: {R: 1, P: 0, S: 0}

Over time these five-grams repeat and the AI gets better at playing against the user. The AI chooses whatever would beat the action the player will most likely throw after the current five-gram.

This RPS oracle is an expansion on this implementation of the Aaronson Oracle by Nick Merrill. It doesn’t do quite as well as the Aaronson oracle because there are three choices rather than two: using multiple layers of n-grams would likely result in an improvement, as well as other heuristics to break ties. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither can be the optimal RPS strategy.

Introduction

It feels like Western pop culture is stagnating.

My parents enjoyed shows like Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that are not only still perfectly watchable, they feel like they could have been made today with only a few tweaks— as, in fact, they often are made today. Meanwhile, the shows that my grandfather enjoyed in the 1950s, like Leave it to Beaver or The Jacki Gleason Show, feel like they come from another planet.

It seems culture has slowed down. The subjective distance from the 1940s to the 1980s appears much shorter than the objectively-equal distance from the 1980s to 2020s. We can analyze this through the lens of TV, which is often more quotidien and closer to people’s lived experiences than films.

From the 1940s to the 1980s

To appreciate just how much of an alien world the 1940s was, I recommend watching shows from this era.

It’s hard to find available examples of television from the 1940s because it was so primitive, so I will start with the early 50s. Let’s take a look at an episode of the Philco Television Playhouse.

This was a critically-acclaimed series of television play adaptations, considered one of the jewels of the era. We have completely forgotten it today, and after watching an episode I think you’ll see why.

The show consists of a series of television plays. Yes, that’s right, “television plays” — it already feels like we’re closer to the 19th century than to 1960. We will take a look at the 1953 episode Marty.

There is so much about this play in just the first two minutes that is bizarre to us:

1. Our scenes zoomed-in view of a book to start with with the title screen. I guess this represents the “script” of the play? Playing in the background is a subgenre of classical music called Light Music. It was incredibly popular in the 40s and 50s, and you can think of Light Music as the Muzak of classical. It is mostly forgotten today.

2. We get pre-credits. We will get post-credits at the end, too, presented to us by Goodyear tires.

3. There’s no music in the opening conversation; there definitely would be in any modern TV movie. This is more similar to stage plays than modern films.

4. Marty Pilettie is a 36-year old butcher bachelor — the film opens with him being berated by a woman for not being married. He mentions his sister Florence’s marriage: “she got married… at St. John’s Church in Adams Boulevard.” Imagine memorizing what church your sister got married in, and mentioning t in casual conversation?

5. A woman tells Marty that he should be “ashamed of himself” for still being a bachelor at the ancient age of 36. When this was aired in 1953, the average age of first marriage for men was 23. Nowadays, the median age is 30, and Marty would be only slightly unusual.

I actually love many of these shows, in some sense because they show us just how much the past is a long-ago foreign country.

I’ll leave the other differences as an exercise to the reader, since now we should get to a 1980s TV show to see the difference…

From the 80s to the 20s

By the 1980s, the Hays Code was lifted, allowing more offensive and controversal content on TV. If you compare the 1980 list with the 1950 list, the difference should be striking. I, a Zoomer, recognize some of these shows (M.A.S.H.), and the one in the #3 slot is still going on!

Growing up, I watched quite a few movies from the 1980s… Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Jurassic Park. The Shining, IT, are all influential.

The 80s to 2020s gap feels like almost nothing compared to 1940s to 1980s gap. The 1940s to 1980s gap covers our values are pretty much the same, while there could be some nitpicks regarding the details of change, the pace of cultural change has certainly slowed down . nbitpicks regarding the deatails fo these movies, the pace fo change is certainly not the same as between the 40s and the 80s.

It seems like pop culture froze in the 80s.

This is a very subjective question, but we can try to find proxies to answer it numerically .

The Decline of Novelty

Much has been written about the fact that more and more movies come from franchises now. Adam Mastroianni has done the best quantitative work on this. He points out that the movies in the top 20 are more and more likely to be part of an ongoing series and uses this to show the oligopolization of culture. We can also use it to show the ossification of culture, as fewer new cultural ideas are being introduced over time.

Many of the franchises I see people interested in today are quite old: D&D, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superheros, Gangster, Rap, Pop, and Rock all have their origins in the 1970s or before.

In politics, I’m often struck by how many of the things we think we new, aren’t. Go back sixty years to the sixties, and we’re having the same conversations today about abortion, affirmative action, civil rights, immigration, cold war-esque interchanges with communist countries, and technological change. The rise of AI may be the only new issue.

Meanwhile, if you go back another 60 years , the most talked-about issue at the time was the battle between the gold standard and the silver standard.

Why Pop Culture Ossified

I think this is the inevitable result of cultural consolidation. The reason the 1940s and the 1980s seem so far apart is because they cross the greatest cultural gap in Western culture since the Protestant Revolution: the 1960s. The 60s changed everything about Western Culture— from our political mores, the way we dress, who we do and don’t accept, and more. Because of this, the past before this shift really does feel like a foreign country, where the time after it doesn’t feel that different.

After the seismic shift of the 1960s, culture has built a more-or-less continuous continuity until the present. This has allowed good movies like Star Wars to carve out the space of culture, but once these are carved out, the culture moves toward exploiting optimal areas rather than exploring new ones. This is what experimental history calls cultural consolidation.

It’s possible that AI will provide another civilization-level shakeup that might “reset” cultural consolidation. Something new will be reborn from the ashes— but it won’t be biological.

Matt Lakeman

https://mattlakeman.org/

I love travel writing, and I consider it an axiom that lovers of the adventure story will also love books about real-life adventures— travelogue.

If I ever write a sequel to Analog Writers who Inspire Me, Mark Twain would be on the list. His The Innocents Abroad and Roughin’ It are the stone tablets of the genre. Twain describes the locales he visits with a charming mixture of energy and acerbic wit. Just read the first four paragraphs of Innocents Chapter XIII to see what I mean.

Matt Lakeman is a mixture of Twain and Nintil. He travels to countries, usually poor ones obscure to tourists, and describes the situation on the ground. This he combines with exhaustive research on the country’s history, often from rather obscure books, to reach a rich, full-bodied introduction to each country. His Notes on Tunisia is a great example. This form inspired my France and Italy blogpost to my writing on Africa .

While Lakeman’s most famous works cover countries, I like his other work even more. One article I come back to a lot is The New Epidemic — My Experience of Losing a Friend to Heroin. His work on this was deeply touching; it is the only first-person perspective I have read on the Opioid Epidemic (though I wish to read more, right now the only book on this subject is Vance’s Hilbilly Elegy). He describes his friend’s descent into heroin addiction as he perceived it. I especially liked his wondering of whether addiction is overdetermined by our circumstances of birth, a question I’ve read almost nowhere else.

As I crawl through Lakeman’s archives, I notice his tendency to transcribe books. He’ll read a book in order to rewrite it into a blogpost in his own voice.

Some people might find this redundant… the lazy writer’s oldest excuse is “this has been done before.” Lakeman shows us just how false this is. He teaches us that synthesis alone can contribute to the contemporary conversation. Originality really is overrated.

Why did Lakeman start reproducing his reading? He tells us he began this practice as an aid to memory, but it became more than that: it became part of discovering oneself.

WALL-E depicts a dystopia on the Axiom. We are expected to feel that there is something wrong with life on the Axiom. Why? In some sense, they live a life of utopian ease, catered to by their robot 24-7. Some people even say that, if Wall-E took into account GLP-1s, everyone would consider it a utopia!

I still wouldn’t. The Axiom isn’t bad because its people are bad, it’s bad because its people are mere consumers. They do nothing to impress themselves and their desires upon the world they merely at all times consume. In this sense, they stand for nothing, and in doing so they completely forget themselves. By never creating this, they miss out on one of the most profound experiences of life, which Lakeman describes in his work:

“And most importantly, when I’m on my death bed 50+ years from now, I will remember writing my novel. I won’t remember 99.9% of my life, or 99% of the people I meet, or 99.9999% of the meals I ate, but I will remember the story I created. It’s a part of me.”

That’s part of the reason I write. I write to leave an impression on the world, but also because I want to leave an impression on myself: I write because writing leaves in its wake a well-ordered mind, it’s like sorting your books on a shelf, or organizing your mental file cabinet. It changes you and upgrades your thinking.

Bonus! Artist Who Inspired Me: Zarla Sheenaza

I first discovered Zarla’s work in 2016, when I was a young teenager in the Undertale fandom. She wrote one of the most most famous Undertale comics, Handplates. That introduced me to her work, but like all the other creators I admire on this list, it’s her prolific nature that drew me in. She has a giant gallery, and I ended up liking her respectawoman the most even more. I went through about two and a half weeks where I trawled through her whole LiveJournal, which was of immense length.

While Zarla isn’t the most incredible digital artist I can name, she’s had the most influence on me due to the sheer quantity of her publicly-available work. She has put years and years of work online, and it’s clear that the early internet influenced her heavily. As a kid and teenager, I spent immense amounts of time on the internet, and so anyone who had uploaded a large amount to the internet had an immense influence on me.

Zarla has quite a few objects that are incredibly obscure hidden in little nooks on her website. Among these, I want to highlight Girl & Triangle, even, uh, this.

Her style has influenced me immensely, especially my comics and line art (most of which has not been uploaded to the internet).

Zarla has had an immense influence on my comics and is the reason I make art today.

Nintil is another paradigmatic example of the internet scientist. You will understand Nintil if you think of him as the more approachable Gwern.

Most of Nintil’s posts consist of applying data analysis and interpretation to an relatively obscure problem. A great example is his study of the economic successes and failures of the USSR. Not only is it an excellent introduction to his work, it’s also the best summary of the subject on the internet. This reveals Nintil’s greatest strength; take a small niche and use data to explain it better than anyone else on the internet so far.

Nintil excels in translating bodies of obscure academic research into shorter, slightly less obscure blogposts. There are always two layers to this: the data and the interpretation. Data presentation alone requires a significant amount of work, including cleaning, filtering cells of interest, and proper display, including creative display in some cases. Scholarly interpretation requires even more depth, and when we get down to it, this is usually what the reader is looking for. Nintil excels at both.

For example, again from the USSR series, here’s his analysis on the effects of the Soviet employment system, which prioritized full employment over profit maximization:

“One way to think about this: Assume that we have two economies that consist of people digging ditches (people like ditches in this world) and related activities. Economy A uses the most efficient arrangement of people and capital for the task, but there exists some unemployment due to inefficiencies here and there, so that only 95% of working age people who want to work actually do so.

Economy B is the same as Economy A, but it has 100% employment, due to a government mandate that those who would be unemployed are to be hired. People take shifts to dig ditches.

At the end of the day, the same length/number of ditches are dug in both economies.

Some people would like Economy B: everyone has a salary, and people work less. Great, isn’t it? But the problem is that -assuming no companies go bankrupt- a) Salaries are lower b) No extra labor is easily available for new projects c) Some people work and earn less than they would like to

At the end of the day, it comes to a redistribution of wages and work time: Some win and some lose. Alternatively, this could be seen as a tax on the employed to redistribute to the unemployed. But the economic consequences of doing that in the long term are problematic [3].”

Nintil makes some mistakes here, like repeating “At the end of the day” in two paragraphs. He probably wrote this quickly. Yet the novel thought experiment, which is a the heart of the piece, is edifying. It’s a technique I want to reproduce.

I see Nintil as exemplifying many of the inherent advantages the blogpost has over the book. His blogposts are highly information-dense and skip introductions. Books were originally produced in a context in which the author was expected to take the reader on a more whole intellectual journey, so they often came with significant hand-holding and preliminaries. This tradition extends to the present day, even when it’s less needed thanks to the internet.

Meanwhile, blogposts can be shorter because they can void these preliminaries. Blogposts are forced to distill a thesis much more than books, which often have too much fluff. This doesn’t mean that blogposts are everywhere and always superior than books, but they are the right tool for certain jobs.

A major strength of Nintil is his sheer prolificity. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that this is a theme in all writers I admire. It turns out that it’s easy to be, say, the best internet researcher on the Soviet Union or the Bloom Two Sigma phenomenon when you’re willing to write 13,000 words on it!

We could ask why these internet quasi-academics aren’t just publishing in academic journals. There’s quite a huge number of reasons why this would be, enough to fill up an entire essay, but I’m going to cite just a few here:

1. Nintil’s work properly consists of a brief, high-level analysis of a certain topic. There’s no direct analogue to this in academia that would be considered publishable, the closest might be a meta-analysis, but this isn’t allowed to have as much interpretation as most blogpost readers might want. Large, high-level academic textbooks and monographs of the type Nintil cites are the closest, but the problem is that they have and make a significant novel contribution to the literature. This is great within its niche, but this isn’t necessarily what readers want from thinkers like Nintil .

2. Not everyone wants to be an academic. It’s a grueling life, often very difficult; PhDs are greatly over produced, and the majority of PhDs will never get a long-term faculty job, but a PhD is training for research in the academy, so most PhDs are training to do something they won’t actually get to do. Given that tenured positions are collapsing and may soon be extinct, going into academia isn’t the best option for most people bright enough to do it.

That doesn’t mean these can’t do research. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto with no PhD. In CS alone, Linus Torvalds, Chris Olah and François Chollet prove the value of intellectual output outside the ivory tower.

3. Academic incentives encourage writers to write poorly, making a lot of academic writing worse writing than its popular counterpart.

4. Even when there is a popular book available, these are almost always hidden behind a paywall in that you have to buy the book. It’s often the case that I’ll be interested in something, but not sufficiently interested to want to buy an entire book on it. Without blogposts, these sorts of people would have a much harder time finding the book.

Popular internet science writing is a valid genre, and Nintil is one of its best practitioners.

On the suggestion of Daniel Reeves, I have decided to split these into smaller chunks, so I can revise each one more individually and thus improve the whole.

Betaveros (Brian Chen)

https://beta.vero.site/

Betaveros repeats a common theme of this series by being very well known in a small community but completely unknown outside. Betaveros’ microcelebrity resides in the puzzlehunting community.

Puzzlehunting is a very nerdy hobby in which participants solve a series of puzzles in teams in order to find (hunt) some ultimate goal. Puzzlehunt puzzles usually don’t have instructions and involve pulling together threads from multiple domains of knowledge. As far as I know, puzzlehunting as an organized activity emerged in the 1980s with the MIT Mystery Hunt, and has since spread to various universities, cities, and computers throughout the world.

I first got into puzzlehunting in high school, so I came into it a bit earlier than betaveros’ guide, and I was very into it in high school. Unfortunately, this interest never got much farther than solving puzzles alone and showing them to some of my friends, who responded “I don’t know how I ever would have gotten that” when we saw the solutions. I could offer nothing better.

However, when I decided to return to this interest, betaveros’ guide to puzzlehunting was the first thing I saw. This is what drew me into his wide world.

At this point, I was a college freshman. My roommate at this time, Benjamin, was a math major from Taiwan. After I excitedly described betaveros to Benjamin, he told me, to my great delight and astonishment, that he had met betaveros.

It turns out that Benjamin and betaveros had gone to the same high school, International Bilingual School at Hsinchu-Science-Park, seven years apart. As a high schooler, Benjamin saw betaveros give a speech to the school about ambition, science, and success.

Only in his early twenties, how was betaveros already so well-known?

As a child, Betaveros had been child prodigy in the IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad Competition) circuit, winning a silver medal in 2011 and gold in 2012. The next year he won gold in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and has since continued a very impressive competitive programming career. In 12th grade, he quit olympiads to leave room for others .

Betaveros told me he got into math competitions as early as first grade, and pursued this interest for over a decade throughout his schooling. The truly amazing thing is that he was actually writing throughout this time. His website contains works from as early as 2006 and it looks like there was even older stuff on Wordpress beforehand. So as far as I know this is the only publicly-available blog of a child prodigy in math from a very early age.

That being said, his early math ability was better than his early writing ability, so many of these old articles are not that amazing in themselves; the most fascinating thing about them is that they exist at all.

I learned all this while binge-reading his blog late into the night in the bottom floor of my dorm towers. Whenever I think of these musty archives of his work, the Second Movement of Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings invades my head. Melancholy, O melancholy.

While at MIT, betaveros largely focused on competitive programming and math competitions, and in both of these pursuits he excelled and has posted a number of interesting topic deep-dives and retrospectives to his blog. His level of earliness to everything is astounding; he was just so far ahead of everyone his age at every age.

Further, betaveros’ blog is very well designed, I’ve already talked about why here. Larger than the mere visual appeal of his blog, a strong sense of mystery and fun pervades his entire oeuvre, and the level of creativity on display is astounding. For example, he’s embedded a puzzle into his own website that I covered here.

Prolificity is a trait I admire greatly in all writers who have it, and one look at betaveros’ blog [LINK] shows that he has it in spades. This isn’t even everything! His site implies that there is an old defunct Wordpress blog, but I haven’t been able to find traces of it from a cursory look.

In general, betaveros’ intellectual span, breadth, and power is astounding. From writing to politics to, of course, math and programming, his work is incredible. He now works on the interpretability team at Anthropic, and worked on one of its best papers. He’s even started drawing!

My only surprise with betaveros is that he’s not more well-known than he is. I can only guess that it’s because he doesn’t post frequently enough. But I think if he tried he could definitely be another Scott Alexander; his writing is certainly good enough to do this.

I consider betaveros the very epitome of the Zoomer intellectual. I know of no better.