Simon D. Levy Washington & Lee University Lexington, Virginia, USA

1. Language: The Broken Bridge Between the Sciences and Humanities; and How to Repair It • Simon D. Levy • Washington & Lee University • Lexington, Virginia, USA

2. The Two Cultures Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

3. Consilience? Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare? … Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is….

4. Comment #1: Respect the Classics, Man!

5. πανταδεδοκιμαζετετοκαλονκατεχετεπανταδεδοκιμαζετετοκαλονκατεχετε Omnia autem probate quod bonum est tenete. Examine all things; hold fast to what is good. --Thessalonians5:21

7. Poetry Is What Gets Lost in Translation ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος ουλομενηνἥμῡρί' Αχαιoῖςαλγε' εθηκε πολλὰςδ' ιφθῑμουςψῡχὰςΑϜιδι προϊαψεν ἡρωωναυτοὺςδεϜελωριατευχεκυνεσσιν οιωνοῖσιτε πᾶσι·Διὸςδ' ετελειετοβουλή· εξοὑδητα πρωταδιαστητηνερισαητε ΑτρεϊδηςτεϜαναξανδρῶνκαιδῑοςΑχιλλεύς.

8. ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆοςΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος anger-ACC sing goddess-VOC Pelias’son-GEN Achilles-GEN

9. Chapman (ca. 1600) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Achilles’ banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse, …

10. Lattimore (1951) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

11. Fitzgerald (1974) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, …

12. Fitzgerald (1974) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, …

13. Fagles (1990) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

14. Reck (1994) ΜηνιναϜειδεθεάΠηληϊαδεωΑχιλῆος Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ maniac rage:

15. I explained to [my students] what a profound change has taken place virtually within my lifetime and entirely within the life of my grandmother, certainly. For centuries and centuries everyone who'd been through university in the West knew and shared Horace in Latin. They shared it with all their contemporaries and with all those generations that had come before. And all that's gone now. One is isolated from educated people of one's own time and, without Latin (and to a slightly lesser extent Greek) isolated from one's educated predecessors. I'm sure there are and will be new compensating countergains. But the loss is very sad to me.… I found it terribly hard to convey the beauty and importance of Horace in translation. -- Richard Garner (p.c.)

16. But I HATE Memorization!

17. What Does This Have to Do with Science?

18. What Does This Have to Do with Science?

19. “Current Knowledge Will Soon Be Obsolete, So We Have to Teach More of It”

20. Comment #2: Computer Science and Linguistics Share a Common Foundation

21. Can We Study Poetry Scientifically? Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry.

22. Recursion (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002)

23. Recursion in Poetry I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

24. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

25. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

26. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

27. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

28. “Leaky” Levels [I]n a biologically evolved object like the human brain … a clean separation between levels of architecture and between software and hardware is impossible. This is because, first of all, these architectures we have been describing are all "leaky" virtual machines. That is, the underlying machine shows through when the surface structures are stressed or under certain situations. There are layers of representational structures and representations from other layers peek through at any given layer. -- Chandrasekaran and Josephson (1993)

29. Language Ungrounded: Metacircularity Our evaluator for Lisp will be implemented as a Lisp program. It may seem circular to think about evaluating Lisp programs using an evaluator that is itself implemented in Lisp. However, evaluations is a process, so it is appropriate to describe the evaluation process using Lisp, which, after all, is our tool for describing processes. An evaluator written in the same language that it evaluates is said to be metacircular. - Abelson & Sussman (1996)

30. Metacircularity

31. Natural Languages vs. Programming Languages • Ambiguity (British left waffles on Falkland Islands.) • Fault-tolerance(Something is missing this sentence) • Irregularity one two three four five six firstsecond third fourth fifth sixth

32. Prescriptivism vs. Insight: A Preposition Isn’t Something to End a Sentence With 1. She looked up the number. 2. She looked the number up. 3. She climbed up the hill. 4. * She climbed the hill up. (Fraser 1976)

33. Parting Shots I didn’t want to turn out boys who in later life had a deep love of literature, or who would talk in middle age of the lure of language and their love of words. “Words” said in that reverential way that is somehow Welsh. - Alan Bennett, The History Boys (2006)

34. Potential Topics for Debate & Discussion 1. Should everyone learn Latin & Greek? 2. Can modern linguistics give students greater confidence & mastery in their writing & speaking? 3. Are Latin & Greek Euro-Centric, or are they so “other” as to be novel for everyone?