In this geographic article the only elements required would be knowledge of place names, longitude and latitude and the length of a mile/kilometer and, as the article progresses, the definition of the temperature degrees. There are occasional more complex words and references to obscure things (e.g. cable ships) but they rarely disturb the narrative and provide corroborating detail rather than vital facts.
Exegesis is also easy when the subject matter is historical to the up-timers. In this case, there will probably be less new technology involved and less scientific terminology that will be unfamiliar to a 1632 reader. For example, the previous entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (Indian Mutiny) describes dragoons, artillery, various places in India and so on but lacks words about technology. Even explicitly technological articles are easy so long as the reader either is uninterested in precise details (e.g. the knowledge that vanadium is a metal may be sufficient for getting the gist of an article about steel) or has access to something that provides the interpretation of the necessary details.
Misunderstanding the Basics
Let us consider a short amusing tagline such as might be found in a current affairs magazine or a book on political theory:
"For every action there is an equal and opposite government program."
How is a poor down-timer going to work out what this is about?
To begin with at least three words are going to be confusing.
action has almost certainly changed its meaning, Cawdrey defines it as "the forme of a suite" which sounds like the definition of a legal action (today we talk about some statement as being "actionable"). Also in French "action" these days can mean a share in a quoted company (i.e. the same as the German AG—Aktiegesellshaft) so it is quite possible that a down-timer will think this refers to a lawsuit or a company share.
government is a word of misleadingly similar meaning (government is the act or method of governing, it does not mean the bureaucracy, etc., that it does today).
program is a word yet to be coined (and in this case one may find misleading meanings in looking at the word in other contexts—"government program" is not the same as "computer program" or "program of events").
Then, once that little difficulty has been taken care of, there is the minor issue of the fact that this is a deliberate misquotation of Newton's third law of motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Quite a lot of the reason why this quip is considered so apposite is that it equates government with the conservation of momentum and the like. Without understanding Newton, even if someone understands the words, there is something lacking. In the 1630's Galileo has just about invented the concept of inertia (which becomes Newton's first law) but the concept of a force and hence the concepts of conservation of momentum in a closed system need a good deal more brain work. Anyone exposed solely to classical Aristotelian laws of motion would utterly miss the point because these laws were (not to put too fine a point on it) wrong.
Newton's Third Law is just one of the thousands of phrases and quips which we expect educated people to be familiar with. There are many others. Just simple slang such as "Frog" for Frenchman or "Limey" for Englishman would be unfamiliar to a seventeenth century reader since they were coined in the eighteenth century.
Phrases That Flummox The Down-timers
A more complex example of a phrase that we take for granted is that "something is the last straw" (see below for where I used it). This phrase "the last straw" is an excellent example of a phrase that will be utterly incomprehensible to a down-timer. In seventeenth- century English there was an expression "'Tis the last feather that breaks the horse's back" which has since dropped out of use, replaced by "The straw that broke the camel's back" once the latter was coined by Charles Dickens. Dickens' expression has then been then shortened because everyone knows about the camel to being just "the last straw." A seventeenth-century native English speaker might be sufficiently smart to figure out that where they talked about the last feather, twentieth-century English talked about the last straw but I'd be surprised. A seventeenth-century nonnative English speaker is going to look at the phrase, understand every word, and still have no idea what it refers to. Indeed it is quite possible that such a speaker, if he knows about shoemaking will wonder if "last straw" is straw for making lasts (i.e. molds of people's feet) and wonder why twentieth-century Americans used straw when in the seventeenth century they use wood.
The problem gets worse when you involve foreign languages—especially when the foreign language has seen the meaning change. For example people talk about someone mounting a "kamikaze attack" on something or someone else. Unless the context makes it clear what a kamikaze attack is then this phrase is going to be meaningless. If by some mischance the word kamikaze is recognized as being Japanese then this will be a complete "red herring." To the seventeenth-century Japanese the Kamikaze was the wind sent by the gods protecting Japan that sunk and drove off the invading Mongol fleets in the late thirteenth century. There is no idea of suicide or self sacrifice in this meaning whatsoever. Amusingly, it is just possible that a seventeenth-century reader would understand what a "red herring" was since the Oxford English Dictionary quotes this phrase first appearing in print in The Gentleman's Recreation by Nicholas Cox in 1686:
The trailing or dragging of a dead Cat, or Fox, (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles . . . and then laying the Dogs on the scent.
Again the joke that "the French have no word for entrepreneur" would be literally true with regards to seventeenth-century France since at that time the root of the word—the verb "entreprendre"—just means to undertake something with all the connotations of risk taking lacking.
Simple phrases that come about because of a technology are going to be not just incomprehensible but inexplicable. Rocket science and rocket scientists are going to be misunderstood because in seventeenth-century Europe rockets are fireworks, no one has invented the words science or scientist and even once these two concepts have been derived the reason why rocket science is considered so difficult and requiring intellect will not be understood. On the other hand "brain surgery" would be something that a seventeenth-century person might be able to grasp if he were a bright spark but not if he were a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
The Advertisement Problem
Newspapers and magazines were not exactly widespread in the 1630's and the publishing model of today—where the basic costs are met through advertising revenue—was utterly lacking. A person who has never seen an advert is likely to be extremely confused when one interrupts the flow of an article. Ads, moreover, tend to deliberately push the bounds of language as well as of taste. If you are a person who is already struggling, having to get your head around adverts is likely to be the last straw. An ad will probably be both incomprehensible in its own right as a stand alone—what do you think a seventeenth-century person is going to get out of an ad for Viagra with Bob Dole for example?—but may also derail the comprehension of the article surrounding it. Flip through Time or Newsweek and you'll see ads taking up parts of a page in the same way that "sidebars" and graphs that relate to the article do. How is a person who is struggling with the language anyway going to be able to determine that the advert is irrelevant—especially when the concept of advertising is so missing?
A Worked Example of Incomprehension
What I am doing in this section is subjecting a piece of text to line by line analysis; weblog readers may like to think of this as a seventeenth-century fisking. The text I am using is from the March 22, 1999 issue of Time magazine. I'm only picking this because it is on the Internet so we can all read it—http://www.genome.ou.edu/gatesbook.html
Let's start with the title and lead in.
Bill Gates' New Rules
In Business @ the Speed of Thought, Microsoft's chairman says that only managers who master the digital universe will gain competitive advantage
BY BILL GATES
Interestingly @ may b
e understood almost correctly since its use as an abbreviation for the Latin ad (meaning to or towards) derives from medieval monks and was used to represent individual unit cost or weight (e.g. 6 apples @ $1.10 each ) in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi.
On the other hand there are quite a few words where confusion could arise.
Microsoft is not something that looks like a (company) name to seventeenth-century eyes, thus a "smallsoft" could perhaps be assumed to be some kind of cushion.
Chairman might be understood as the carrier of a sedan chair (introduced into London in 1634 but known in France and southern Europe for quite some time earlier). This would almost make sense of the small cushion.
Digital would probably be assumed to be something to do with fingers or toes.
It is quite possible that business (meaning company or enterprise) and the idea of a manager (as opposed to an owner) would be misunderstood.
If the 1980's were about quality and the 1990's were about re-engineering, then the 2000's will be about velocity. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business-process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity is great enough, the very nature of business changes.
Even ignoring the words such as "re-engineering" and "lifestyle" the first paragraph is so full of management consultant speak that I predict that it would convey very little meaning to a seventeenth-century reader (arguably it conveys very little to a twenty-first-century one either). The fact that consumers might be thought to be consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis sufferers) is just an additional detail.
To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It's like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system—the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers.
The noun function is defined by Cawdrey as "calling, or charge, or trade, and place wherein a man liueth." This is an excellent example of a word that has changed meaning—the fact that it has then been turned into a verb is just the frosting on the cake. Develop is likely to be another word which is only partially comprehended and thought to mean something like unfold or unwrap, that is the opposite of envelope. Nerves according to Cawdrey are sinews and humane means "belonging to man, gentle, curteous, bounteous" thus even if system is understood (it may not be) a human nervous system is not going to be something that is understood.
A company is likely to be understood in terms of a military organization, although, of course, there were also trading companies such as the East India Company or the Muscovy Company. The connection between company and business is likely to be unclear and their relationship with customers, a word which Hakluyt used to mean Customs officials though it may also be used in the twentieth-century sense as well, is almost certain to be misconstrued. Cawdrery defines decision as "cutting away," in the context of soldiers interacting with tax gatherers this makes some sort of sense—in the haakaa päälle sense that is!
A rough translation of this paragraph might therefore be:
To trade in the age of fingers we have unfolded a new way to make a finger's internal structure. This is like a bounteous collection of sinews. Groups of soldiers need to have the same collection of sinews. The capability (for soldiers?) to run in a good smooth fashion, to respond to changes good and bad, to quickly get learning about loot to the people in the military group who need to know, the ability to kill revenuers and tax inspectors quickly.
The successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that use digital tools to reinvent the way they work. To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are 12 key steps.
Again a rough translation should suffice:
The successful military group of the next ten years will be the ones who use finger tools to reinvent the way they work. To make finger learning liquid an internal part of your regiment here are 12 keys (for feet?)
One could continue but I think I'll stop here as I believe I have made my point. Examining text word by word is an excellent way to produce meaningless or misleading garbage.
Exegesis to the Rescue
So how might exegesis help dispel the vast fog of incomprehension that would face a hypothetical translator of the previous Time article?
If the article has been ripped from the magazine (or copied from it just on its own) and there are no other accompanying documents then there will be a lot of problems. The clever English and French scholars who deciphered lost Middle Eastern languages were helped because there was a lot of text for them to study. One reason why no one has yet managed to totally decipher Etruscan is that there are only a handful of tombstones written in Etruscan, however down-timers are unlikely to have just a single article to study; either they will have an entire magazine/book or they will have a series of clippings.
As the various documents are studied some word usage will become clearer. Thus it will become clear that (for example) corporation, company, enterprise and business are frequently synonyms and mean a commercial organization that produces, trades and sells things in a way similar to the aforementioned East India Company. Likewise customers, consumers, decisions, and so on. Even little words such as "key" will be understood as being used in a metaphorical way to mean critical, important etc. so that "key steps," "key points," "key issues" are understood to have nothing to do with locks. On the other hand it is quite possible there will be surprising gaps—the translation of "nerve" as "sinew" may remain because the existence and function of nerves is not known even though derivative expressions such as "nervous" and "getting on someone's nerves" could well be determined from context.
Another simple thing that exegesis can do is identify titles, acronyms and other simple abbreviations. It only takes a single document to write a phrase like "This is a problem facing many Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)" for the whole range of related acronyms be understood as job titles of the form Chief something Officer. Since both Chief and Officer are understandable to determine that anyone who is a Chief something Officer (CxO) is a senior manager within a company. Similarly, seeing a phrase like "companies such as Microsoft Inc., IBM Inc. are facing . . ." will help derive another rule: that Inc. identifies the previous word or words as a company name. This allows lists of company names to be created and thus when a different article just writes "Microsoft" or "Ford" there is no need to wonder what a "smallsoft" is or what river crossings have to do with motor vehicles.
However, this is just the first stage—it means that words that had some sort of counterpart in the seventeenth century can be translated and that names can be identified as names and possibly classified. The next stage is to start understanding new technologies and concepts. This is probably the main reason for reading these up-time documents but it is considerably more complex. For example, a word such as digital will cause a lot of trouble. "Digital," as used in the late twentieth century, is strongly entangled with computers and telecommunications and these are not technologies that are easily understood. But exegesis will help to elucidate both the meaning and some of the underlying technological concepts.
In order to understand "Digital" it will help to understand "Digit" and this latter is likely to be a simple task. Even when other words in the phrase do not make sense, enough exposure to phrases such as "3 digit area code," "7 digit telephone number" or "5 digit ZIP code" will help explain that digit means the numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. From that it will be possible to determine that "Digital" means "numerical" or "to do with numbers." This will not always help: "Digital Information" could be understood as lists of numbers and "digital communication" the technique of transferring numbers from one place to another. Both are in a strict sense true, but addi
tional exegesis will be needed to determine that this digital includes nonnumeric data encoded as a series of digits. This is a complicated concept and in our universe it was not really developed until the mid to late eighteenth century. However, encryption by substitution is something that is understood so with the right clues the idea of replacing letters with numbers can also be figured out. This may be a case where 1-800 numbers in ads are useful. Quite often the numbers are repeated as both mnemonic text and number such as "1-800-PRODUCT (1-800-776-3828)" and "1-800-BUY THIS (1-800-289-8447)"; enough of these examples will show that that letters A-Z can be mapped to the numbers 2-9 in a consistent manner and this will then lead to the idea that any document can be represented as a stream of digits.