Beckers

That is to say a visit to the newly opened Bechstein Hall, which we have been admiring from the outside for quite some time now, more than two and a half years if reference 1 is anything to go by. Rather longer than I would have said had I been asked. Possibly snapped above when it was still the showroom of a London piano manufacturer: '...In addition to the proximity to its old home, C. Bechstein were also drawn to the history of 18-22 Wigmore St. which was redeveloped by piano manufacturer and retailer John Brinsmead and Sons in 1892 as showroom, offices and warehouse, before installing  their own concert hall in 1894'.

The day started with the trolley, pork and snooze reported at reference 2. Waking, it was still cold, so I took a lift to the station. There was also the consideration that this was the first evening out for quite some time, so a bit of care was in order.

It did indeed seem cold on the station, despite my puffer jacket and so forth. I also noticed that there were quite few younger people about who seemed to be managing with far few clothes. Platform indicators boards were out and an announcer told us that there was a train stuck south of Dorking, which put paid to any idea one might have had of travelling to Horsham. But the 16:38 to Waterloo turned up on time - even if the indicator boards in the train were out too. Onto Bond Street on the tube, on which I was rapidly offered a seat by a small and shy young lady, on this occasion declined. It was only a few stops.

Onto to Olle & Steen to coffee and bun, with this last definitely counting as junk food, the sort of stuff noticed but not snapped at reference 3. It might also have been called a cinnamon bun, a sort of layered affair in which a brown layer was extremely sweet. Too sweet for me, but hopefully it was going to keep the cold out. 

While across the aisle from me were two chaps in business clothes, one very smartly turned out and with or affecting a fancy accent. He was talking more or less non-stop to the other chap. Was he making a pitch, trying for a role? Trying to impress? I shall never know, as I was not near enough to hear much of what was actually being said.

The draw was the Beethoven violin sonata, Op.47 No.9, aka Kreutzer. Performed by Coco Tomita (violin) and Simon Callaghan ( piano).

The hall turned out to be absolutely brand new, in fact not quite finished, with some snagging still to be done. I got the impression that it had been opened in rather a hurry, that it had been a push to be open in time for the scheduled concerts, of which this was one of the first. As well as the Beethoven, I thought the idea of doing a short concert twice, once quite early in the evening was a good one. I could perhaps manage the odd short, early in the evening? They were also keen to sell you food and drink.

Lots of brown wood, a lot of it of the matt plywood variety, rather than the high polish mahogany of the Wigmore Hall up the road, the first Bechstein Hall as it happens, renamed, in the margins of the First World War. Lots of rather narrow staircases with plenty of bends. Lots of staff, mostly but by no means all quite young. The sort of cloakroom and bar downstairs you might get in the middling sort of hotel, perhaps the sort that one used to get in Gower Street.

There also a Hoffman upright and a Zimmerman grand, the upright just visible in the middle of the snap above and the grand opposite it, to the right. Plenty of other pianos about upstairs, some which still had their transport plastic on. The birch ply backs to some of the uprights at least had not been stained or varnished and was still the native blond. Not a problem, provided it was kept facing a wall.

These two pianos reminded me that Bechstein had been bought up by a far eastern company, probably Chinese. But checking today tells me that memory is defective, yet again. There is or at least was a relationship between Samick and Bechstein, with Samick being a large Korean company, but it was not ownership and the two companies now largely go their separate ways. But all very complicated, as can been seen from references 6, 7 and 8.

The hall seated perhaps a hundred, in ten rows of ten, broken by a central aisle. Maybe twenty of us there, for seats which cost a good deal more than a seat at a comparable concert at the Wigmore Hall. All very intimate.

Also fairly hi-tech (which also suggested far eastern ownership to me), with a sky that could twinkle with stars, rather in the fashion of a Las Vegas casino shopping arcade, and with panels down both sides, rather like those you get in the escalators of the better tube stations. These ones came alive with the voice and face of an avuncular Edward Fox telling us to turn our mobile phones off just before the off. Which was rather funny - as I think it was meant to be.

I thought the musicians took a little while to bed down in the Debussy, not really my thing, but they really came to life for the Beethoven. I was very struck by how much difference it made being in a small hall and being so close to the musicians. A downside was an occasional harshness from the violin, not ironed out as it would be in a bigger space, but all upside apart from that. Very effective. We got another, short Debussy piece by way of encore, possibly the song 'Beau Soir' reimagined for the violin. Of which a Fazioli version is to be found at reference 9.

Tomita was playing from a computer, although she looked to be playing from memory most of the time, while Callaghan turned his own pages. And there was a large Bechstein crown above the piano which struck me as being more toothy than regal. Perhaps it should have been a little smaller.

A good show at an interesting new venue. It will be interesting to see how they get on. Although I must say, I was a little surprised at the poor design of the layout of the concert suite as a whole.

For once a visit to the Half Way House at Earlsfield; big hole (with shoring) and road closed outside, but quite busy inside, with just the odd free spot in the drinking area. I thought to take the Valpolicella, upon which the barmaid asked what on earth that was. I suggested she took a look at the red wine she had to offer, whereupon it was forthcoming. I noticed that over the half hour or so that I was there, most of the people in the bar area were in fact eating, at least eating something, if not quite 'dining'. Not real boozers.

The piano that used to live on the upstairs landing was missing. Last noticed in 2022 at reference 10, first noticed back in 2018. Piano No.1 in fact. With the catch being that the piano at reference 10 looks very odd, rather as if someone has taken most of the insides out and refashioned the thing as a piece of furniture. With just a hint that there was something wrong in 2022.

On the platform, a short game of aeroplanes, scoring a couple of rolling threes. Then a very big step up to the train, much more of a hazard than the long flight of stairs up from road level.

Lots of books at Raynes Park, but (unusually) nothing of interest. Then a short, busy train, which stops at the country end of the platform, leaving everyone with a walk back to the steps and the seats at the town end. Why do they do it? Perhaps one day I will try asking someone.

Home to bread and mushrooms. And a visit to the Bechstein Hall website, which seemed to be work in progress too. Reference 11.

PS: will there be a preference for young ladies?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/april-cello.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-768.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolleys-763-thru-765.html.

Reference 4: https://www.coco-tomita.com/about.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Sonata_No._9_%28Beethoven%29.

Reference 6: https://www.bechstein.com/en/die-welt-von-bechstein/tradition/bechstein-tradition-11/.

Reference 7: https://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/308835/re-the-search-part-5-who-really-owns-bechstein.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/piano.html.

Reference 9: https://youtu.be/i5sOgRgdsa4.

Reference 10: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/hammerklavier.html.

Reference 11: https://bechsteinhall.com/.

October 2023

This being some retweets from the October 2023 number of 'the drinks business', the glossy drinks trade magazine which is sometimes to be found on the Raynes Park Platform Library.

First, we have the bottling operation which is called Encirc. An integrated operation which appears to take in tankers of booze and the ingredients for glass at one end and spit out filled bottles for dispatch to the supermarkets and others at the other end. Inter alia an attack on line that the closer to the point of origin that you bottle the better. In the case of wine, all that bottled on the estate business. Two lines of attack being that it is a lot cheaper to shift booze in bulk and that it is a lot cheaper to use a bulk bottler than set up your own bottling lines.

I have not found out anything about the history of the company, what its roots were, but it is now a member of the Vidrala Group, from a small town south of Bilbao in Spain. A company which also appears to be about glass and bottles. A town which appears to be old and small enough to have allotments and stone walls.

Vidrala have a share price in Europe, so perhaps they are at the end of the chain. A share price which looks to have been fairly steady over the past five years at least.

Back with the drinks business, I read that the company shifts 460mn litres a year, mostly wine, which amounts to around half the bottling done in the UK. Taken at face value, this would suggest that a lot of the wine one can buy in places like Sainsbury's passes through their hands. Not to mention beer and soft drinks. Plus lots of science and sustainability. I guess they have to work to persuade the people making booze to trust them with it. I have failed to identify a customer for the Encirc offering, so perhaps said people are a bit coy. Better if the punter does not know their favourite tipple is getting shifted around the country in vehicles which look like petrol tankers.

Second, we have a different part of the business, the 2023 Sauvignon Blanc Global Masters, a wine trade promotion event which looks to have taken place in September last year at the Park Row Brasserie and Bar in London, an interesting looking outfit to be found at reference 4. Except that when you poke it, you find that it is just a glossy shell. There does not appear to be anything left inside.

But they are still visible in Street View. They live on in the digital world, if not the real one. I must try and pay a visit - with it being a good bet that the 'Crown' opposite is still up and running. Given the previous item in this post, appropriately close to Glasshouse Street, a street I used to visit in the past - can't remember why - but have not visited for years.

On the strength of the Masters write-up, I went out and bought three bottles of something called Volcaia Fumé, from Italy, via some people called 8wine.

Which I thought meant some warehouse somewhere on the Thames Estuary. But I was quite wrong: the efficient UPS parcel tracking service told me that the parcel started out in the Czech Republic and at the time of asking had made its way, through some government agency or other, to Nuremburg (aka Nürnberg). By this morning, it has reached Stanford Le Hope, which appears to be a modest little place just up the road from a facility called the London Gateway, to be found at reference 5. Which suggests to me that the parcel has been trucked from Nuremburg. Perhaps UPS run a truck service all over Europe. While DHL have more or less all of some middle sized airport in the Midlands. In any event, UPS say the parcel should be with by close of play Saturday. The festive wine store is shaping up. For the start of which see reference 7. Further report in due course.

Third and last, I read that Waitrose have teamed up with an cork company from the US called Amorim to sell wine in bottles without a capsule, that is to say with a naked cork. Naked, that is, except for some branding on the cork itself for Waitrose. The latest fashion in the closure trade?

Probably the people at reference 8, where I tried asking the AI assistant in the bottom right hand corner about capsule free corks, but he was a bit too keen on taking my details. I suppose he was filtering out tourists like myself and was only prepared to help if I was a genuine trade person. But maybe something promotional will turn up in my email.

In the meantime I have learned that Amorim are very keen on TCA, more particularly on the absence of TCA, which I now know is something with an unpleasant smell which may get into the wine from or through their corks. 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) or 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA) in the wine. The stuff that your wine waiter pretends to smell for when he opens your bottle: how many of them actually know what to smell for? See reference 9.

And if he can't tell and you don't know, does it matter at all?

PS: Tuesday morning: I now have a short email from Carson Guzowski of Amorim. 'Corks for wine bottles do not require foils/capsules for tamper proofing. The cork is sufficient to protect the liquid and it’s becoming quite common to see, at least here in the US, brands going capsule free'. I don't recall mentioning tampering, but I await coming across a capsule free bottle. I shall have to take a look in Waitrose. Maybe the security guard who now hangs around that part of the store will be able to help.

References

Reference 1: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.encirc360.com/. 'Part of the Vidrala Group, Encirc is based across three sites in Derrylin, Northern Ireland and two in England; Elton in Cheshire and The Park, Bristol. Encirc employs almost 2,000 people and each year we produce more than 3 billion glass containers for leading global brands. Encirc is also one of the leading wine, beer and spirits bottle fillers in the UK, enjoying a 40 per cent market share and bottling 18 of the top 20 wine brands in the UK'.

Reference 3: https://www.vidrala.com/en/.

Reference 4: https://www.wonderlandrestaurants.co.uk/park-row.

Reference 5: https://www.dpworld.com/london-gateway/port.

Reference 6: https://8wines.com/wines.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/fake-184.html.

Reference 8a: https://www.amorimca.com/.

Reference 8b: https://www.amorimca.com/products.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_taint.

Dying decision day

Today (Friday) is a very important day in the campaign to allow terminally ill people in the UK facing the prospect of an unpleasant death to call time when they have had enough of it. Otherwise known as assisted dying - assisted dying which does not involve taking oneself off to Switzerland (with suitable dental records) or plotting some more or less messy suicide.

Important because it will see our House of Commons debating Kim Leadbetter's private member's bill on assisted dying, a debate which may well come to a vote. A vote which might or might not reflect the long standing desire for change in a large majority of voting members' constituents.

The last such outing for the issue was the House of Lords debate in 2021.

An issue which is unlikely to affect a large number of people - perhaps as many as a small number of thousands, out of a total of well over half a million deaths each year - but one which is important to them.

For an easy read there is reference 1. For those with a taste for the arcana of the House of Commons, there are references 2 and 3.

PS 1: 15:55: stop press: neither Dignity in Dying at reference 1 nor Bing seem to have caught up, but Google is on the case. And at reference 5 we have: 'The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has passed its Second Reading – the Bill’s first key hurdle on its path to becoming law – with 330 votes in favour and 275 against. / This is the first time in history that the House of Commons has voted in favour of the principle of assisted dying for the terminally ill'.

And Sky News, of all people, were the first - on my laptop anyway - to tell me how the new MP for Epsom & Ewell voted. An aye, which is a very welcome change from the seemingly dyed-in-the-wool nay from her predecessor, Chris Grayling.

PS 2: 16:00: Bing has caught up now, with reports and results coming through.

PS 3: 16:10: perhaps Dignity in Dying are out celebrating this huge step forward in their long campaign. Website will have to wait!

PS 4: 07:26: they have now surfaced. I have the email.

References

Reference 1: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/. 

Reference 2: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3774.

Reference 3: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10123/.

Reference 4: England’s palliative care ‘postcode lottery’ casts shadow over assisted dying debate: Critics of proposed legislation argue for better end-of-life care ahead of vote on Friday - Laura Hughes, Amy Borrett and Anna Gross, Financial Times - 2024. This rather down-beat piece in the Financial Times was the source of the snap above.

Reference 5: https://humanists.uk/2024/11/29/breaking-mps-vote-in-favour-of-assisted-dying/.

Pianos 92, 93 and 94

The expedition just noticed at reference 1 was piano productive.

First up, this ever so tasteful Casio keyboard, probably in the window of the kitchen showroom which also appears at reference 3: 'timeless elegance with a modern twist'. A Casio keyboard reimagined by Nicholas Antony, yours for something over £1,500. Which I dare say is just loose change for those who can afford to shop for kitchens at reference 4.

People who appear to specialise in kitchens for the salles d'apparat - a phrase I liked in Simenon - in the sort of overblown country houses which often star in television costume dramas about minor gentry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Second up, a small Steinway grand, snapped in the window of their showroom in Marylebone Lane. I failed to work out how to get rid of the reflections.

Third up, a public piano on the way to the Sidings at Waterloo, rather in the way of pianos I have previously come across at motorway service stations. See, for example, reference 5. This one was actually being played and I did not like to interrupt.

I associate to an exchange, possibly on the letters page of the Guardian, about the performance of sublime music - perhaps some of Bach's music for solo violin - in busy public spaces. Busking it. In one camp, you had the people who deplored the indifference of the average passer-by to such performances. In the other, you had the people who preferred to organise performances into special occasions in special places. Like going to church or going to a concert. Or even having a meal out. There was a proper time and place for such things. One needed to make a performance of the performance, as it were. I was very much in the second camp.

From where I associate to the rather extreme stunts to which busking acrobats have to resort to hold their crowds in places like the open space in front of St. Paul's church in Covent Garden. Which church I am not sure that I have ever been in. Which holding starts to take on some of the aspects of a regular performance, with the crowd arranged in an open square, children in front, behind a rope and with an organised collection at the end.

Then, pushing on into the Sidings, we were intrigued by this relic from 1906. What was the attached building built for? Could we track it down at ground level? Something for another day.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/zelinsky.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/piano-91.html.

Reference 3: https://www.siematic.com/.

Reference 4: https://nicholas-anthony.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/piano-90.html.

Group search key: pianosk.

Zelinsky

Ten days ago off to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Zelinsky Quartet. Smetana No.1 and Beethoven Op.59 No.3. A quartet which we had heard at least once previously, a couple of years ago, as noticed at reference 1. The quartet themselves are to be found at reference 2.

An overcast, damp and mild day. But we took a chance on rain as, for most of the day at least, we would be in easy reach of cover.

On the platform at Epsom, confused on the platform by a tall tree standing out on the northern horizon, quite possibly a Wellingtonia. While the compass in Ordnance Survey on my telephone was recording 156 degrees. A confusion which pre-dated the investigations noticed at reference 3. It will be a challenge to try and find the tree in question on the ground.

Onto Olle & Steen, where I got the bun for BH right, that is to say the bun of the day, almond slice, but I got the coffee wrong. The barista had trouble understanding me and I thought it easier to settle for Americano with cold milk than decaff with cold milk. Wrong again!

Hall pretty full. I have enjoyed the Smetana in the past, but on this occasion I found it good it parts - but parts which, somehow, did not seem to hold together, at least not for me, not on this occasion. That said, the first one I turn up from the archive, reference 4, seems to have been a similar experience. But Beethoven was very good.

Decided that Waterloo was the place for lunch, more particularly the Polish Kitchen noticed at reference 5. An opportunity to offer BH the Sidings experience. So down into what was the Eurostar part of Waterloo, past the giant Wetherspoons - which looked pretty busy with people at late Sunday lunches, through the graffiti tunnel and so into the Polish Kitchen. Once again, plenty of cheerful young staff, some of them at least probably Polish, quite a few customers of all ages and the music was not too loud, which was a bonus.

There has been a fashion in the sort of restaurants we use to serve the cutlery in recycled tins, often tins which once held tomatoes or baked beans. I was not sure about the one snapped above, which seemed to be far too solidly made to be a container of that sort. Was it faking it? I almost scored it as a fake, but in the end decided against.

Kielbasa and black pudding pierogi to start, half boiled, half fried, with some salad on the side. Rather good and more filling than they looked. Fried front.

Bigos with bread on the side for the main course. Substantial and decent - but one felt it had been cooked for quite a long time, possibly quite a long time ago. I associate to the way that the sort of soups that I make deteriorate overnight; never as good the second day as the first. But the bread was surprisingly good.

Plus some of their fine bottled beer, half a litre of Perła, as before.

BH was impressed that they appeared to make their own cakes for dessert, but we were too full to try the apple slice, tempting though it looked.

Home the other way, that is to say taking the graffiti tunnel all the way underneath the station, coming out on the taxi ramp which leads to the side entrance to the top of Platform 1. To be amused on the way by two small girls, sisters, busily playing dens, standing up underneath a coat. Anything to get away from nosy parents.

Raynes Park Platform Library appeared to have been restocked, but the waiting room was locked, so we did not get to check out the new stock.

While on the train to Epsom, I wondered about the size of the food box the bicycle delivery man on the train was carrying on his back. Awkward, to say the least of it. But I know from experience that fitting a big box onto the bicycle itself is a bit awkward too. Be alright if that had been a requirement from the outset.

PS: I have been reminded today, that various parts of the record of my health are held in various different places in various different systems. There is a fair amount of overlap and quite possibly a fair amount of error, error in the sense that there is one story in one place and a slightly different story in another. Just like the records of criminals in the criminal justice system in the my days at the rather short-lived outfit called CJIT - which had the added complication that criminals are mixed up with each other in a way that patients usually are not. According to Bing, the abbreviation has been recycled and now stands for 'Criminal Justice Intervention Team' rather than 'Criminal Justice Information Technology'. Something to do with the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, itself part of the the Department of Health and Social Care. Perhaps the Cabinet Office run an internal market for initials.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/zemlinsky.html.

Reference 2: http://www.zemlinskyquartet.cz/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/compass-pain.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/beethoven-and-others.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/keeping-trim.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/pianos-92-93-and-94.html. It was also a good day for pianos.

Fake 184

Fake 184 was more plastic vegetation, this time from the start of the passage running down from Waterloo Road to Court Recreation Ground. Not clear (to me anyway) why one would want to add a couple of feet of fake ivy screen on top of a couple of feet of wooden fence of top of rather more feet of brick wall. Are they apt to be up to something which would attract Peeping Toms?

On the way, a stop to snap a cheap plastic dinosaur, acquired from a pavement on my way into town. It will be added to our small collection of same, perhaps to function as prey rather than predator. Dinosaurs' tea party? Market Square looking a bit bleak late morning yesterday. Even the street food people had not got their shutters up.

Rollator back in service, hopefully not for long. After which other peoples' trolleys will be back on the agenda. End-year target in jeopardy again.

Using which word reminds me that some years ago now, IBM made a big splash when their Watson product became the champion at a television panel game called Jeopardy! I wonder if the large language models we have now would turn their noses up at such a championship as beneath their dignity? And where is Watson now? When I have a moment, maybe I will check. See references 3 and 4.

Come to that, how would the large language models do at chess and go, long time targets of the AI community? Maybe here I should be looking here to Google's Deepmind, the product underneath their Alphafold, the thing that folds proteins for you, rather than Gemini and his friends, more conversationally orientated. For which see reference 5.

After the market square, back home to the rather more cheerful sight of my every-day mixed box - Quotidian Quaffers - from Caves de Pyrene of reference 6, people whom we started using after the plague shut down Terroirs in William IV Street - not quite sure that this was cause and effect, but the two events were around the same time. Three red, three white. Two French, two Italian, two Spanish. The reds imported for the Cave. One, possibly two, screw tops. One orgo. Water from Wales. At least the water originally came from Wales, but the bottle has now been reused several times, our having switched from jugs of table water to the more versatile bottles.

Plus, at the back, three interesting chunks of egg box moulding, which will no doubt be pressed into craft duties, along with the box proper, in due course.

30 days to go and almost set up.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/fake-183.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-769.html.

Reference 3: https://www.jeopardy.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/assisting-doctors.html.

Reference 5: https://deepmind.google/technologies/alphafold/alphafold-server/.

Reference 6: https://shop.lescaves.co.uk/lescaves-shopfront.

Group search key: fakesk.

Compass pain

Earlier in the month, back at reference 2, I reported acquiring the Ordnance Survey (OS) mapping app for my telephone. Which has proved very satisfactory - with the exception of the compass provided.

The app - having failed to find out how to do screen capture on the telephone - looks something like the Powerpoint sketch above.

Now both the vertical telephone or the horizontal telephone can be considered to be pointing in some particular direction. In the case of horizontal, the direction is parallel to the long axis of the case.

There are, in effect, two compasses. The proper compass is the rectangle at the top of the screen, just below the backward facing camera lens. You get a moving pecked scale running along the bottom, marked with letters for the points of the compass: NW, N, NE, E and so on, with your direction being given in the middle. Above that, you get a number in the range 0° thru 360° giving you your direction in degrees, with north being 0° or 360°, probably depending on the direction of rotation.

Then if you are actually on the map, you also get a red chevron, something like that on the snap above, where it is on the bend of Jubilee Way before you get to the railway bridge, the anti-clockwise Jubilee Way run having been popular during the plague and for a while after that. The chevron points in the direction that you are facing, that is to say in the direction of the telephone, in this case west, roughly parallel to the east-west lines of the National Grid marked in blue.

As you swing around, the chevron in the middle of the screen and the compass at the top of the screen swing around with you, more or less in sync.

But sometimes, it is quite wrong. On one occasion the map was displayed with the Grid running diagonally across the screen. Then just now, the compass was getting on for 180° out, saying roughly south when the telephone was pointing roughly north. Stopping and restarting the app seemed to cure that particular problem.

And other times it is slightly wrong. I am in the study upstairs, one of the back bedrooms, and if we assume that the front of the house is parallel with the road, with the walls of the study corresponding, the compass might be 20 or 30 degrees adrift of what I know to be the direction of the road. Furthermore, the direction of the chevron in the middle only approximates to that given by the compass at the top. Although one needs to remember that the chevron rotates quite slowly, and may take a few seconds to settle down to what it thinks is the right direction.

I had assumed that the telephone compasses were not magnetic, rather that they were driven by signals from the telephone masts dotted about, but if that is the case, why are they not more reliable?

Checking with my Ottawa magnetic compass (as first noticed at reference 3) is no good, as there is far too much steel in the study. I think the radiator is the main culprit. Not sure about the telephone and the laptop.

Checking with Gemini, he explains that the compass inside the telephone is based on a very small magnetometer built into its chip, nothing to do with telephone masts - but prone to the same problems with nearby iron & steel as magnetic compasses. He also suggests that the software involved is pretty complicated and can be a bit creaky. He tells me that there is no aerial strip giving direction, rather that direction is a function of the position of the magnetometer itself inside the chip, presumably fixed with respect to the case of the telephone. He talks of needing to calibrate the compasses, although he is the first so to do. 

I might say that his explanation seemed pretty good - although I shall not go to the bother of checking him.

Just presently, that is to say early Wednesday morning, leaving the Ottawa compass aside, the compasses on my telephone seem to be behaving themselves. We will see how long that lasts. I suppose I need to take both compass and telephone out into the middle of Court Recreation Ground, far away from any street lights or radiators, and see how I get on there. The land drains there are less than thirty years old and are probably plastic.

Maybe there will be further report later today.

PS 1: supplementary: I have just remembered about magnetic north. Gemini tells me that the telephone uses GPS and other location data, combined with declination data from some database, to make the correction. So the telephone masts probably do come into it after all. He reminds me that here in the UK, magnetic north is presently pretty close to true north. The same, for my purposes.

PS 2: Wednesday afternoon: Court Rec. didn't work. It was too cold and my hands were far too unsteady. But I did think that while the compass and the telephone roughly agreed, it was only roughly. Also that there was some interaction between the two. Also that to do the job properly a large, steady table, paper and pencil would be useful. I learned that, after the overnight rain and land drains notwithstanding, the football pitch at the eastern corner was saturated, not fit to play on, and that there was surface water draining out of the northern corner into the veterinarian car park.

PS 3: I have just noticed the descriptor 'Rota Disconnections Alpha Identifier: K' attached to our address on our electricity bill from EDF. Bing reveals this is all about rota disconnections in the event of some power emergency. Has it always been there, or is there some concern about the security of power supplies?

References

Reference 1: https://explore.osmaps.com/. Entry point for OS maps.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/black-park.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-quest-for-new-compass.html.

Nimby alert!

Microsoft Start brings me news at reference 1 this morning of nimbies to the west, in the middle of the wide ribbon of housing which has grown up between Woking and south west London. I have not tried to check, but I imagine that there are lots of houses there which are less than fifty years old. And I have no idea whether, in the scheme of things, 'hundreds of people have objected to a 461 homes plan on former Surrey green belt land' amounts to a huge backlash. Or is it more just a turn of speech from a journalist?

The orange spot marks the spot, a little to the north west of Wisley and its famous gardens, botanic and otherwise. Presently offering the best festive light show in this part of London.

With the map offered by Surrey Live being reproduced above. Are there claims of ancient woodlands housing at least a dozen near-extinct bats? Bats which are, perhaps, very common in President Putin's forests to the east and something of a delicacy there. Or perhaps a hut circle, awarded the Golden Spade (Third Class) by Time Team?

I associate first to all the residents in fairly new housing estates in Exminster, once a small village dominated by its mental hospital, now a housing estate, loudly objecting to still more houses in the next field. FIL, to his 80 year old credit and as a much longer-standing resident, did point out to them that their complaints did seem a bit rum.

Second, to all the immigrants who have comfortably settled in this country, having done their time in the care and hospitality sectors, taking a very dim view of the even newer arrivals. A problem that they have in the US on  much larger scale, being, in large part, a country of immigrants.

PS: I believe some countries, perhaps Ireland, have schemes whereby farmers with land near big towns do not get huge payouts. Things are so arranged so that they get a fair rate for the land, more or less agricultural prices, leaving developers with more space to build decent estates. Speculation in land brought under some sort of control.

References

Reference 1: Huge backlash to plans for 461 Surrey homes on former green belt as hundreds object - Chris Caulfield, Surrey Live - 2024.

Litter

The infection is spreading! The first hire bicycle has appeared in Manor Green Road.

As it happened, more or less the very same day, we read of irate residents of a block of flats near Norbiton Station have taken an angle grinder to one of such bicycles which had been dumped in their car park by people on the way to the station. Apparently it took such direct action to get any action out of Lime.

Yet another case of a company being reluctant to take responsibility for the collateral damage in the public space which results from their activity.

Possibly the building snapped above, although what it started life as is hard to say. More or less opposite the station. Very grand for a house, even for Norbiton. A school of some sort? A home for a gentleman artist?

And at least one of the flats is home to an operation called Aranstruck. To be found at reference 1. And to think that covenants on the deeds of dwellings sometimes used to forbid any sort of trade, other than that of doctor or dentist, for some reason exempt. Also exempt, as I recall, from certain restrictions on domestic building after the second world war. Restrictions down to the shortage of building materials.

Google tells me that the building used to be owned by the council and that the ground floor used to be the Register Office. But it does not tell me what it was before that. A house that got too grand for the times? See reference 2.

PS: stop press: we managed to break through to a score of more than 600 in this afternoon's game of Scrabble, the first time since April, as noticed at reference 3. A respectable combined score of 608, only flawed in this occasion my my losing by more than 40 points. Helped along by the move from the elderly OED to the relatively new Longmans dictionary, so 'moo' is not marked as slang and 'axil' is present. I might also say that while 'zo' was marked as dialect in OED, and should have been excluded, it is present in Longmans as a sort of Tibetan cow, so that way of getting rid of otherwise awkward 'z's stands.

References

Reference 1: http://aranstruct.com/.

Reference 2: https://moderngov.kingston.gov.uk/documents/s55761/35%20Coombe%20Road%20Report.pdf.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-flawed-victory.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/hammond.html. The arrival of Longmans.

Wanderer

Ten days ago to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Wanderer Fantasy (D760) for the first time since December 2022, as noticed at reference 1. A time when I could still do Waterloo to Marylebone in half an hour on a Bullingdon. Maybe I should give it another go. 

Over West Hill, to find that the small NCP pop-up car park behind the small block at the corner of West Hill and Station Approach closed and building action looking to be imminent. At long last the council, the heritage people and a builder have agreed on how many flats can be put on this site. Very convenient for both station and town.

A block which has housed all kinds of people over the years we have known it, including a sempstress, a DIY beer shop, a pop-in centre for young people in difficulty and my hairdresser, a gentleman I used for many years. A gentleman who had been into bigger things, but in his semi-retirement had taken some cheap upstairs rooms for his modest gents hairdressing business. A very good hairdresser he was too.

Something going on at Earlsfield when I got to Wimbledon, the sort of something which was apt to mean delay. And then we seemed to take a funny route, although it was hard to be sure about that, despite having done the proper route thousands of times. Gmaps on the telephone was unhelpful. And then we got to Clapham Junction at Platform 7. And to Vauxhall at the usually shut up Platform 5. So something was going on.

Looking at Ordnance Survey this afternoon, I find there are two ways to by-pass Earlsfield. First, a loop to the east, taking in Tooting and Balham. But that is a long way around and I think I would have noticed Balham. Second, a loop to the west, taking in Wandsworth, but that seems to take the train onto the northern clutch of platforms. 

According to reference 2, there are 17 platforms, starting at the top in the snap above, also from Ordnance Survey. But I can't find them all. Even though, in the olden days, I used to sneak out of a goods entrance off platform 17 on my way to the rather dusty, old-style establishment now called the Junction. Not sure that it was so called then.

I do rather better on this snap, turned up by Bing: all present and correct. And Platform 7 is the northernmost platform of the southern clutch. And it can only be reached from Wimbledon, not via Wandsworth. Concluding, that while something was going on, it had not involved a scenic route.

Onto the tube at Vauxhall and onto Oxford Circus. Past the nearing-completion Mark II Bechstein Hall, where I could see both pianos and builders through the windows. Hopefully the pianos still had their shrink wrapping on.

Deposited my togs and cycling gear in the cloakroom at Mark I Bechstein Hall, aka Wigmore Hall, and took a coffee in the bar, which also appeared to have been refurbished. Or perhaps just under new management. Hard to be sure as it is a while since I was in the place.

Some diversion from an older couple at the next table along, where the gentleman appeared to be lecturing the lady. Positioned so that I could hear the odd word but not see. Her occasional interjections appeared mainly to serve to prompt another slab of lecture from him. A lecture which was perhaps about how best to organise some sector or other, possibly health (given the proximity of a great deal of private health care) or education, but I did not hear enough to know. But I did hear the words 'socialists' and 'socialism' loud and clear from time to time, which suggests to me, again without hearing enough to know, that the gentlemen was against both, without being too rabid about it. Socialists I know don't tend to use the words in quite this way.

Hall about half full for a good concert. I liked both the Janáček ('In the mists') and the Debussy (Images, Book 1) more than I was expecting, and Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy almost always works, as it did on this occasion. Good tub thumping stuff.

Out to pull a Bullingdon at Chapel Place for the run down to Seven Dials for cheese, where I was unable to find a slot in any of the three stands I visited. In the end I just parked up outside the cheese shop in Shorts Gardens: a thief would have had to have been quick to grab it with me standing by the window inside the shop.

Then some trouble working my way out of Covent Garden into Kingsway. A regular warren of one-way streets and dead ends. Not to mention food delivery cycles popping up out of nowhere. But I got there in the end.

Down to Waterloo to pay my first visit to Fishcotheque, a place which has been there for a long time and which we have visited from time to time over the years. I was due to eat again later, so I settled for pie and chips rather than the full on fish and chips, and very good it was too. Plus the cup that cheers.

On the way, some part of my brain noticed the plaque on the wall, upper right in the snap above, purporting to advertise the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Whatever part of the brain it was was not on focus, because I thought to myself, that's not right. The line is White Star, not Blue Star. And then looking again, it was indeed white. So how did I get to blue, when I knew the answer already?

In any event, Bing does not offer any images which are much like the plaque. Not least because the big red letters are the wrong colour. So who knows what its standing in the Titanic world is?

I don't even know where this image comes from, other than Etsy. Google Images can say no more than retro vintage tin sign. So perhaps, at least, White Star really did make tin plaques as well as paper posters. They would be more durable. But where did they put them up?

And so home, despite there still being trouble with the trains. Along the way trying the braille labels for open and close on the door controls. I could not make much sense of them, but I did make enough to think that, maybe, if I had to, that this was something that I could learn. Or perhaps, could have learned ten years ago.

Out at Epsom to capture the trolley noticed at reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/impromptu-piano.html.

Reference 2: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Junction_railway_station.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-759.html.

Oneida

In the course of reading in reference 1 about consciousness, I came across the fact that Bantu languages have a lot of genders. More precisely, have rather a lot of categories in the grammatical slot that Romance languages use for gender, perhaps as many as fourteen compared with the Romance two or three. Looking into this, I came across pronominal prefixes, and looking into them led me to the Oneida. Which led to the present digression from Torey.

This in the context of Torey arguing that possession of language was an essential part of full-blown consciousness, as opposed to the sort of consciousness that quite a lot of animals can manage.

The Oneida are a tribe of First Americans, originally from what is now New York State, one of the Five Nations. Now reduced to around 15,000, of whom around one third live in Canada, to where pressure of European settlement had driven them. The Green Bay community, north of Chicago, seems to be the most prominent, at least in the present connection. Note the scale of the left-hand panel: the sloping grey rectangle of the reservation is very modest in size. 

I could not find a map of the reservation at reference 10, but Bing did turn up the one included above. One wonders when the rather curious shape firmed up, presumably in the course of more or less acrimonious squabbles about who owned what. Note that the river running down the middle is not the river which is clearly visible in the map taken from gmaps; rather, it is the rather inconspicuous creek running parallel to it, to the left. I notice also, bottom right, that the State of Wisconsin has its own coordinate system for maps. No national grid for them.

From the point of view of language, one of the northern Iroquoian group of languages. A complex language which missionaries started writing down more than two hundred years ago, but which was only properly captured in the first part of the twentieth century.

Some verbal grammar

Verbs describe actions, in the beginning visible events out in the world, which can be complicated. Events which take place in space and time which may or may not be that of the utterance or speech act. They may involve one or more persons or other objects of interest. In English, in so far as this is captured in language at all, it is mostly captured in a series of distinct words, grouped into one or more sentences. Some other languages wrap a lot more functionality into compound words, particularly verbs and nouns, modifying stems, adding suffixes and adding prefixes so to do. Oneida is one of these other languages.

Some of the grammar around verbs has to do with the origins of language in utterances or speech acts, in which connection we talk of first person, second person and third person. 

So, if I say ‘I cross the road’, I am talking about something that I am doing. I am the first person. Furthermore, the action is in the here and now and I am a crucial part of that action. My hearer or hearers are likely to be witnesses rather than participants. But if I say ‘you cross the road’, you are the second person and you are the crucial part of that action. It is still likely that the action is in the here and now and that I am witness to it. And then, if I say ‘he crosses the road’, we have the third person and the action has become a bit more remote, not involving either the person speaking or the person spoken to.

In English we often mark this sort of thing with pronouns, which may also carry information about sex and number: ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘they’. Or something which is not a person at all in which case we might use ‘it’. And are we talking about just one person or more than one? Some languages go further, for example, distinguishing the case when ‘we’ includes the person spoken to from that when it does not, that is to say when the second person is not included along with the first person. A tweak that language people call clusivity. Then what about animals which are not human, but which do have age and sex? Some languages are flexible here, sometimes putting them in with the humans, sometimes not, depending on the context.

Where English uses pronouns which are used with verbs, Oneida uses pronominal prefixes which are combined with verbs – and which do rather more work.

Note that this trio of first person, second person and third person is used to qualify the subject from that other trio of subject, direct object and indirect object – subjective, objective and dative to those with some Latin – which address a different aspect of the activity described by verbs.

Related to this second trio, there is a third trio – monadic, dyadic and triadic verbs – according to how many object slots a verb has. With the complication that there are a few languages which allow four. A tweak that language people call valence.

One is often interested in the sex of these people and slightly less often in their age – sex and age being two key properties of people, with the first being more visible and more permanent than the second. I associate to the sex, age and marital condition which were important to me in my days as a demographer.

In English, we do not do age with pronouns. Nevertheless, we do talk about men, women and children. We might add the qualifiers ‘young’ or ‘old’ to men and women and we might sex the children by talking about boys and girls.

There is also the distinction between definite (often ‘the’ in English) an indefinite (often ‘a’ in English). In the former case one is referring to someone or something which has already been introduced or which is already known, in the latter one is introducing someone or something new. 

Pronominal prefixes are the prefixes which languages like Oneida attach to their verbs to do some of this stuff. And Oneida does have a lot of them.

Onondaga and beyond

In the first instance, asking Bing about pronominal prefixes got me to reference 4, about the pronominal prefix system in Onondaga, another of the Five Nations, a lot smaller than the Oneida, for which see reference 7.

This takes me to reference 5, which appears to be the standard work on the subject, but which is not available online, at least not to me.

However, reference 4 includes a tabular presentation of the pronominal prefix system which is derived from that at reference 5. Presentation which I found difficult – so back to Bing, and that got me to reference 6 about Oneida, which I found rather more accessible. And then to reference 16 in which I found a good summary of the complicated Oneida pronominal prefix system. 

It turns out that Oneida has one of the most complicated systems of pronominal prefixes which has been documented, which is probably why Bing turned it up in the first place.

Oneida

Oneida has near 60 pronominal prefixes and every verb must have exactly one of them. These 60 prefixes come in something more than 300 varieties, with variety determined by the initial letter of the verbal stem being prefixed. These prefixes were first tabulated at reference 5, although there has been improvement since. But before getting onto them, there are a few preliminaries.

Gender

Oneida has four genders: masculine, neuter, feminine-indefinite and feminine-zoic. I am not clear about exactly how the two feminine genders are used, but it does seem to be clear that they can be used when the gender is not material, for animals and for some inanimate objects – which starts to encroach on the neuter territory.

Reference 4 has the tabulation snapped above.

In some languages the coding of gender is mixed up with the coding of number: how many people are mixed up in the various aspects of the action being described by the main verb. In English, we distinguish singular from plural, but we do not usually mark the special case of plural ‘exactly two’. Oneida does this more often, usually by using an appropriate pronominal prefix.

In other languages again, the coding of number is mixed up with the coding of the (social) relationship between speaker and hearer. Think the use of second person singular (‘tu’) in French.

Generally speaking, this coding is not very tidy, in the way that it would be in a relational database. There, thinking of a rectangular array of data, as in a worksheet of an Excel workbook, each attribute, like sex or age, is given its own column and is coded independently of other attributes. By default, an attribute can take any value in its defined range, without regard to any other attributes. Databases usually allow this default to be varied, so that, for example, one cannot apply the code ‘married’ to the marital status attribute of a person in the UK who is not also coded as being 16 or more years of age.

One might think in terms of four lines of organisation:

With there being a tricky interaction between the middle two of these.

Evolution of gender

At reference 11, the author presents some theories about the evolution of gender in Iroquoian languages. In his Figure 1, a version of which is given above, we are offered such a theory, a theory in which the first move was splitting out all the non-humans, animate or inanimate. After which feminine gradually moved from left to right. Note the ambivalent position of feminine in Oneida – an ambiguity which translates into grammatical and usage complications. He goes on to propose a variation in his Figure 2.

Age

Sex was thought of as a binary category, so not too difficult to code. While age, which might well be as important as sex from a talking and thinking about behaviour point of view, is a continuous variable and getting it down to a sensible number of generally agreed categories or codes – say two, three or four – is not going to be easy. And age, unlike sex, varies in time. 

Although there is an age angle to the choice of feminine sex in Oneida, I have not come across any coding of age more generally, by pronominal prefixes or otherwise.

Counting

Oneida has numbers in much the same way as we do, using the same base 10. The only oddity is their calling a thousand a box, possibly an allusion to a box full of dollars.

However, their usage of these numbers is a bit more complicated than ours.

One animal and two animals is OK, but if you want to say ‘five animals’, what you actually say is ‘five three-or-more-animal’. With the animal bit being wrapped in affixes which do the three or more bit. With the whole being qualified by the ‘five’.

But lots of words may not be wrapped in this way and you have to use a more general word which may. So, if you want to say ‘ten foxes’, what you actually say is ‘ten three-or-more-wild-animal fox’. You have to classify the foxes at the same time as counting them.

Counting people is different again.

Pronominal prefixes

Pronominal prefixes are used to add information to the verb stem about the participants in the event being described. Two other distinguishing features: first, the prefix is indivisible. One prefix does the whole job. Second it is prefixed to the verb, attached to the verb, rather than being placed in its vicinity. Not necessarily at the front as there maybe one more other prefixes.

The potentially complex structure of an Oneida verb is illustrated in the snap above, taken from reference 6, quoting from which we have: ‘… Every Oneida verb has a pronoun prefix attached to the front of the verb stem. There are three classes of these prefixes: transitive, subjective, and objective…’. Altogether there are about three hundred of them arranged in near 60 groups. Some of this is about what might be called real-world information, but getting to 300 from 60 is more a consequence of making adjustments to these prefixes for the convenience of speech. Remembering here that the speech came first; the grammar tries to describe what is, not what is wanted – although it may be used to help beginners in this last regard.

The pronominal prefixes say something about the objects – human, other animal or other – involved in the action of the verb concerned. Something about the subject and direct object from the trio of subject, direct object and indirect object already mentioned.

The tabulation above is lifted, with slight adaptation in red, from reference 16. Agent across the top, which I suppose approximates to subject, and patient down the left hand side, which I suppose approximates to object. So the columns correspond to the various kinds of agent and the rows to the various kinds of patient.

In both case the major divide is whether the participating object is the first, the second or some third person or persons. Bearing in mind that not all objects will be persons at all, but they can still be classified in this way for these purposes. To which the empty object is added, sometimes denoted ‘Ø’. First person agents are not allowed first person patients and second person agents are not allowed second person patients. Agent and patient may not both be empty: something has to be involved. Decodes for these prefixes are supplied in a footnote in reference 16. ‘3M.PL’, for example, stands for something which is masculine plural in the third person position.

This tabulation details the 59 pronominal prefixes which are applicable to verbs which start with a consonant and has been contrived so that all of these prefixes bar two appear just once. Prefixes are not divisible; they cannot be usefully analysed into parts.

Similar tabulations apply to other groups of verbs. 

Some examples, lifted from reference 16.

I suppose that Latin might be thought to be somewhere between English and Oneida in this regard. With Latin verbs being declined, being with suffixes which do some of the work of these prefixes.

Some other considerations

Torey’s building brick is the word. Does it make a difference to his argument that words in languages like Oneida are much larger than words in a language like English? In the former, a single word can translate into a simple sentence in English. While in English, the not much inflected nouns, verbs and adjectives relate in a simple way to a basic concepts like house, brick, hit and red. Basic concepts which one can see the young, not-yet-speaking human reaching for.

I associate to the fact that Romans, at least in the inscriptions on monuments, did not put spaces between words. Which leads to references 12, 13 and 14. A whole field of study about the relationship between consciousness, the spoken word and the written word. Which I shall attempt to dip into.

I also associated to the Gospel of St. John, the one that starts, in the authorised version, ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God …’.

A language not being written down must interact with the development of its grammar, of the sort to be found at reference 6 - it seeming improbable to me that the sort of complex grammar set out there could exist in the absence of writing. So the brains of children reared in Oneida speaking families in the past must somehow, largely, learn these complex rules in the background, without anyone actually enunciating them. Maybe the brains worked in rote learning rather than rule mode? I associate to the way that computers equipped with deep learning manage to learn all kinds of stuff – but without exhibiting rules and procedures which the owner of the computer can grasp. One might know in general terms how it all works, but translating that into accessible, organised details – details which one could perhaps modify – is another matter. Trying to fathom out the workings of the computer brain seems to be as tricky as trying to fathom out the workings of the real one.

I have not yet finished reading Ong at reference 14, but the argument there seems to be that Torey’s big step forward in consciousness with the invention of language is better thought of as two steps: the invention of language then the invention of writing. Noting that writing has been probably been around for less than 5% of the (say) 100,000 years or so that humans with language have been around. So St. John has rather simplified things. 

Ong also argues that the absence of reliable memory combined with the desire to remember, pushes the spoken word into particular channels, with results that will be visible in the early days of the written word, for example in the Iliad, in the Odyssey and in parts of the Bible. Ong has not yet argued that this impacts the grammar, but it seems quite possible that he – or those that build on his work – will. Maybe complex grammars are the product of an oral culture, grammars which might roll back as the written word rolls forward.

Then how accurate are native speakers of Oneida? Do they manage to get all the complicated prefixes and suffixes right? One suspects not.

Odds and ends

Oneida makes extensive use of the glottal stop, which in writing counts as a letter, written ‘ˀ’ (as in the snap from reference 4 above) or ‘ʔ’. The question mark towards the end of line 1 may be an error. See reference 8.

I was amused by the discovery of cranberry morphemes. So ‘chairman’ contains two free morphemes while ‘biological’ contains one bound and one free morpheme. A bound morpheme cannot stand alone. While the ‘cran’ of cranberry has no clear connection to the meaning of the word as a whole at all. So a cranberry morpheme. The ‘cob’ of cobweb counts as another such, even though cob is quite close to a very old word for spider. Maybe not a distinction which would stand too much nit-picking.

I was amused by reading in reference 14 that the words ‘grammar’, ‘glamour’ and ‘grimoire’ are all related. Where ‘grimoire’ is the French for a book of spells. You get them, for example, in at least one of the adaptations of Agatha Christie’s story ‘The Pale Horse’. When the written word was first invented, was first introduced to a people, it really did seem to be magical.

Conclusions

Oneida is one of the languages which have more complicated verbs than English, with the verbs expanding to take on functions which are carried by pronouns and other particles in English. And some of the nominal slots in its verbs are partially instantiated by pronominal prefixes to verbal stems. While in Latin, not as complicated in this way as Oneida, some of the nominal slots in its verbs are partially instantiated by the suffixes of its declensions. Some readers will remember ‘amo, amas, amat’ from their schooldays.

A lot of the complexity of these pronominal prefixes appears to reflect adjustments to facilitate speech. Which last is clearly important in a world without writing. So complexity which does not necessarily carry the sort of information we look for in the literate world. Perhaps more important from my point of view, the transition from the oral world to this literate world is likely reflected in changes in the nature, in the feel of consciousness.

There is also a sense that grammar has been imposed on language after the event. One is trying to write down neat and tidy rules for something which did not start out that way. Rules which are apt to gloss over all kinds of complications and details. That said, once a grammar is established, the language in question may evolve to fit the grammar better. I associate here to the way that Microsoft’s Word tries to enforce its idea of standard English grammar and spelling. Schoolboy geometry is rather different: one starts with the axioms which Euclid worked up more than two thousand years ago and just rolls them forward in the approved manner The three angle bisectors of a triangle really do meet at a point. The angles on a circle made from the endpoints of of a chord are all equal.

References

Reference 1: The crucible of consciousness: A personal exploration of the conscious mind – Zoltan Torey – 1999.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_people. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_language. 

Reference 4: Onondaga Pronominal Prefixes – Percy W. Abrams – 2006. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the State University of New York at Buffalo in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 

Reference 5: Oneida Verb Morphology – Lounsbury, Floyd G – 1953. Yale University. Available to buy but rather expensive.

Reference 6: Oneida Teaching Grammar – Clifford Abbott – 2006. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onondaga_people. 

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop. 

Reference 9: Two Feminine Genders in Oneida - Clifford Abbott – 1984. 

Reference 10: https://oneida-nsn.gov/. A community website for the Oneida.

Reference 11: A history of Iroquoian gender marking – Michael Cysouw – 1997.

Reference 12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua. 

Reference 13: The origins of silent reading – Paul Saenger – 1997. Still rather expensive. Must have been a successful and important book.

Reference 14: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong – 1982. Much more reasonable!

Reference 15: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=gospel+john+word. A little to my surprise, these posts do not bear on the matter in hand at all. Which surprised me as I had thought that they would.

Reference 16: Morphological complexity à la Oneida - Jean-Pierre Koenig, Karin Michelson – 2015.