Although linguistic sounds are themselves essentially arbitrary, in a small minority of cases, certain sounds do seem to have rather general semantic associations, either within a given language or even crosslinguistically. For instance, in English, many words including the sequence \fl\ (flee, flick, fly, etc.) refer to rapid movement, although it is difficult to argue that \fl\ is an English morpheme meaning “to move rapidly.” (One obvious objection to this analysis would be that if it is, we must treat, for example, \i:\ in flee as another morpheme, but what meaning could we ascribe to it?) Crosslinguistically, almost all listeners, whatever their first languages, agree that an object called eekeekee will be spiky, whereas one called oomoomoo will be rounded.

Belianine’s specific approach is based on the work of Charles Osgood (circa 1960). Belianine has applied this to Russian, and he now sees further (if arguably dubious) applications: “We may well hide our emotions, but still we can evaluate almost everything. What about the sounds of the English language? . . . This method may be helpful in finding a proper name for your company, and building your future.” One is invited to participate in an experiment using Likert-scale judgments, involving various phonemes and a range of opposed pairs of evaluative terms, starting with “good” and “bad.”

Unfortunately, there are several major problems with this project. First, some of the linguistic terminology used is informal and imprecise. In addition, certain phoneme clusters (such as \gz\ in exact) are included merely because they are typically spelled with a single letter. Judges are supposed to be reacting to sounds here; any effects relating to awareness of the spelling are surely at best a marginal issue.

More seriously, unannounced assumptions are made about the accent used by the (linguistically untrained) judge. Many nonlinguists who know a little linguistics might think that this would not be a major issue, because they would assume that inter-accent differences involve only phonetic realization, i.e., phonemic transcriptions are neutral between accents. In fact, this is often false. For example, London people on the one hand and most Liverpool people on the other have different phonemes in words such as bath (roughly \bäth\ versus \bath\). But even where it is true in a particular case, this is not enough for Belianine. Even naïve judges are reacting here to sounds rather than to phonemes, and hence to specific realizations (of which they are typically well aware in cases like this, because the realizations are not in complementary distribution). Thus, even if differences are only of this structurally trivial type, they will render responses from judges with noticeably different accents totally incommensurable.

For instance, in words such as the name Bob, there is no issue of phoneme selection; but in realizational phonetic terms, most Americans and Canadians nevertheless have a mid-length, unrounded, low central-back vowel, whereas most English and Australian people have a short, half-rounded, mid low-back vowel. If sounds and especially vowels are the things that matter here, people on either side of the pond are not even reacting to the same type of thing (vowel)! (English people hear Americans’ Bob as Barb, as is famously illustrated in Powell and Pressburger’s World War II movie, A Canterbury Tale.)

There is also a major methodological issue here. Apparently people’s answers are completely different if they are in different “moods,” but this is not factored into the analysis.

Some of these problems may reflect a lack of expertise and some may involve deliberate popularization. But one wonders where the project will go—other than commercially, that is!

I posted critical comments to the Web site. At first, there were some arguments from one site visitor who supported probabilistic treatment of accent differences. The specific method proposed would not be satisfactory, as it involves the often false assumption that there will be one dominant phonemic and phonetic form in each key word, with other forms constituting a small peripheral minority. For instance, for the name Bob, one would have to select as “basic” either the typical American/Canadian vowel or the typical English/Australian vowel, treating the other variant (and all further variants) as peripheral exceptions. This makes no dialectological or sociolinguistic sense, and how far either choice actually reflected the true patterning even for a given unsystematic sample of judges would obviously depend entirely on where and how the sample was drawn.

My offer to assist with dialectological information was ignored. After this, things went quiet.

The content of reversals is nearly always related to the equivalent FS dialogue: RS often gives additional information to accentuate or strengthen the FS speech. RS also tends to reveal an individual’s unspoken thoughts, which may be in total contradiction to their conscious FS. Therefore, RS can be used as an effective tool by psychological counselors, legal professionals, parents, teachers, politicians, etc. to discover unspoken truths. However, many less transparent RS sequences involve metaphors, which require elucidation by RS analysts. According to Oates, very young children begin to produce coherent RS (in the form of reversals of babbling, etc.) well before they produce normal FS in their first language (as early as midway through their first year).

Oates’s organization offers teaching materials, courses, counseling, etc., and its practitioners give advice based on RS-without necessarily having had any other relevant training (phonetics, psychology, etc.). On the other hand, they are involved with Neuro-linguistic Programming-a prominent, recent outgrowth of Korzybski’s General Semantics, which owes only a little to linguistics proper-and with various other, more obviously New Age, ideas. All this is rather alarming! Indeed, we know of several individual cases that are very scary indeed. For instance, we heard from a man in the U.S., who reported that after attending an RS course, his wife analyzed their infant daughter’s “speech” and decided that the child was saying (backwards) that her father had sexually molested her. The mother reported her husband to the relevant child-protection agency, and when that failed, she sought custody of the child and tried to have him banned from having any access to her.

If RS really existed, the consequences for our view of human linguistic and mental activity would (as Oates himself says) be very major. However, Jane Curtain and I examined Oates’s claims and found that they were implausible and not supported by the empirical evidence. There are major methodological and theoretical problems. Notably, Oates makes a misbegotten attempt to distinguish between “genuine” RS and phonetic coincidence, the accidental occurrence of very short sequences which are (almost) the same in FS and RS (i.e., phonological palindromes, e.g., dad) or where the reversal of the FS sequence yields another equally possible sequence (so that there is a pair of corresponding forms, each of which is (approximately) the reversal of the other (e.g., say/yes). These phenomena (both types) are labeled constants, and Oates does not regard them as genuine RS. It is actually very important for him to exclude such sequences, because his theory implies that different speakers (even with the same accent) may produce different reversals of the very same utterances, depending on their often covert attitudes, etc. This is also very convenient for Oates, in that it reduces the reproducibility of his investigations! Now, Oates is not actually consistent as to which sequences do and do not count as coincidental reversals; but, more importantly, the distinction between “genuine” RS and coincidental reversals is simply incoherent.

There are several other major problems for Oates’s theory, mostly involving his lack of familiarity with linguistics. All of his criteria for identifying “good” reversals run aground on these.

As well as considering the theory of RS on these fronts, Curtain and I replicated (with refinements) Oates’s initial experiment, which he says showed that RS could be readily heard by naïve listeners. Because Oates continually prompts listeners with the RS sequences he says they should hear, we set out to establish how far the sequences can be heard without prompting. We used Oates’s own favorite examples, as they appear on his own tapes. We were able to show not only that unprompted listeners cannot generally hear the RS sequences but also that it is quite possible to induce them to hear any of a range of different sequences in the same reversed material, as long as the sounds and especially the vowels in the successive syllables are similar.

More recently, Oates has tried to rebut our criticisms, but his remarks are incoherent. There are some further tests which could be done, one of which could be decisive: if Oates is right, it should be possible to obtain otherwise unknown, specific information from RS data alone. But we believe that the basic case for RS is so weak that the onus to demonstrate a case lies with its advocates. (We have offered to advise them.)

Several established scholars have already stated the view that Menzies at the very least overstates his case. He is not without expertise in navigation, though some might suggest that this is heavily slanted in the direction of hands-on experience rather than technical knowledge. He has also obtained support from some academic sources, notably an American astronomer, John Oliver of the University of Florida, who vigorously endorses some of his ideas. But I fail to see how the ancient and medieval Chinese, for all their possibly underrated astronomical prowess, could have “recorded pulsars . . . and neutron stars.”

Menzies is one of a group of writers who have recently argued that telescopes and other optical equipment were invented or perfected much earlier than orthodox historians of science believe; Robert Temple, David Hockney, and Philip Steadman come to mind. There may possibly be some truth to some of these claims, although in my view, Temple—whose work (e.g., Temple 2000) I know best—does not do enough to demonstrate his case. However, even standard nineteenth-century optical telescopes would have been of limited use for locating pulsars or neutron stars.

It must also be pointed out that Menzies puts forward a very one-sided case. For example, he ignores the objections (familiar to regular readers of skeptical books and journals; see e.g., Richardson 1999, 2001; Story 1978) to the views that the Dieppe Maps (sixteenth-century French maps based on sailors’ charts) show Australia and the Piri Re’is Map shows Antarctica (see McIntyre 1977, Hapgood 1996). In fact, he thinks Australia is on the Piri Re’is Map too.

Vinland Map

The small amount of linguistics in the book is not impressive. In one case, Menzies simply takes the word of a nonexpert source (an Indian bank employee!), who states that a sample of script “looks like” Malayalam and that Malayalam has largely ceased to be spoken. The latter is wildly wrong, and expert sources are readily available. On Australian wrecks and “ruins,” he identifies the Mahogany Ship (supposed to be buried in the sand on the Victorian coast but never actually found; see Loney 1974, McIntyre 1977, Nixon 2001, Nickell 2003) as Chinese. Most writers who believe in that ship think it is probably Portuguese, a relic of that nation’s sixteenth-century voyages to Australia, though the reality of these voyages is itself disputed. As noted, the Portuguese also allegedly provided input to the Dieppe Maps, which are said to show Australia, named “Jave la Grande” there (see again McIntyre 1977).

Menzies even takes the maverick Rex Gilroy seriously on his “Gympie Pyramid” theory (Gilroy 1995). To set the scene: in Australia and New Zealand, there are many unidentified nineteenth-century ruins as well as many rock formations identified by some as ruins. Many of these are proclaimed by Gilroy and others as Egyptian or Phoenician in origin; they accept a diffusionist account of early history rather like that of the early twentieth century’s “Manchester School” of archaeology. One such ruin, in Queensland, is the Gympie Pyramid. This is probably the remains of nineteenth-century vineyard terracing, but Gilroy and his associates, including a local author called Brett Green (Green 2000), believe that the ruinous structures which survive and photographs of now- vanished structures—together with artifacts associated with the site or with neighboring areas—do indeed suggest early settlement of the region by seafaring peoples from Asia and Europe. But—though he is better than Gilroy—Green is very uncritical in handling evidence, including linguistic evidence. Like so many other such writers, Green relies heavily on impressionistic comparisons of isolated, superficially similar forms, in this case, forms in local Aboriginal languages on the one hand and in ancient Mediterranean and Indian languages on the other.

Piri Re’is Map

Gilroy himself and his counterpart from New Zealand, Ross Wiseman (Wiseman 1998, 2001), actually think that they have found Egyptian and Phoenician inscriptions around Australasia. Some of these are natural formations which they are over-interpreting; others are “genuine” but contain undergraduate-level errors and are surely fakes.

In this context, it is interesting to note that the English-born arch-epigraphist Barry Fell, who is known to American skeptics from his time at Harvard, spent many years in New Zealand and continues to inspire local diffusionist accounts of the early history of that country. Many New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha (nonindigenous New Zealanders), are reluctant to accept the archaeological evidence that human settlement goes back only 1,200 or at most 2,000 years. Some also refuse to accept that pre-nineteenth-century settlement of New Zealand was entirely Polynesian. But so far, no finds have confirmed the diffusionist theories, and the same can be said for Australia.

On the other hand, Gympie is not far from Sarina, where the somewhat more scholarly but eccentric Val Osborn claims to have found a Phoenician port. We may yet hear more of the ancient seafarers who supposedly reached Australian shores long before the seventeenth-century Dutch or even the dreaded sixteenth-century Portuguese (if these ever did reach the Big Brown Land).

Menzies has been joined by Peter Dickson, who had an article in the journal Mercator’s World (Dickson 2002) linking the history of European maps and associated exploration around 1500 c.e. with Menzies’s claims. And, speaking of maps, James Enterline and Kirsten Seaver (the latter of “Vinland Map” fame; while others argue that the map is of genuine medieval origin, she is a leading and highly qualified proponent of the view that the map is indeed a forgery) have been having something of a battle, also in Mercator’s World, about Enterline’s prima facie rather implausible theory that maps of the Arctic originally of Inuit origin circulated in Viking Europe and had major influence on early-medieval voyaging in the area (Enterline 2002a, 2002b, Seaver 2002a, 2002b). Each of them has harsh words to say about the other. My own sympathies are with Seaver, but this too is an ongoing saga.

References

• Dickson, P.W. 2002. A secret first. Mercator’s World 7:4.
• Enterline, J.R. 2002a. Erikson, Eskimos & Columbus: Medieval European Knowledge of America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
• —. 2002b. Christopher who? Mercator’s World 7:4.
• Gilroy, R. 1995. Mysterious Australia. Mapleton, Queensland, Australia: Nexus Publishing.
• Green, B.J. 2000. The Gympie Pyramid Story. Gympie, Queensland, Australia: De Grene Enterprises.
• Hapgood, C.H. [1966] 1996. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press.
• Loney, J.K. 1974. The Mahogany Ship. Dimboola, Victoria, Australia: Loney.
• McIntyre, K.G. 1977. The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 250 Years Before Captain Cook. Medindie, South Australia: Souvenir Press.
• Menzies, G. 2002. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. London: Bantam Press.
• Nickell, J. 2003. Dowsing mysterious sites. Skeptical Inquirer 27:3 (May/June 2003.
• Nixon, B. 2001. A fresh perspective on the Mahogany Ship. The Skeptic (Australia) 21:1.
• Richardson, W.R. 1999. Imaginography. The Skeptic (Australia) 19:1.
• —. 2001. A non-existent continent. The Skeptic (Australia) 21:4.
• Seaver, K. 2002a. Review of Enterline 2002a. Mercator’s World 7:3.
• —. 2002b. Goodbye, Columbus. Mercator’s World 7:5.
• Story, R. 1978. The Space Gods Revealed. London: New English Library.
• Temple, R. 2000. The Crystal Sun. London: Century.
• Wiseman, R. 1998. Pre-Tasman Explorers. Auckland, New Zealand: Discovery Press.
• —. 2001. New Zealand’s Hidden Past. Auckland: Discovery Press.