What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

  The clerks who attend at the recording instrument become so expert in their curious hieroglyphics, that they do not need to look at the printed record to know what the message under reception is; the recording instrument has for them an intelligible articulate language. They understand its speech. They can close their eyes and listen to the strange clicking that is going on close to their ear whilst the printing is in progress, and at once say what it all means.♦

  In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.♦ He found a stock of twelve thousand E’s, nine thousand T’s, and only two hundred Z’s. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text.♦

  No such science, no such pragmatism informed the language of the drums. Yet there had been a problem to solve, just as there was in the design of a code for telegraphers: how to map an entire language onto a one-dimensional stream of the barest sounds. This design problem was solved collectively by generations of drummers in a centuries-long process of social evolution. By the early twentieth century the analogy to the telegraph was apparent to Europeans studying Africa. “Only a few days ago I read in the Times,” Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray reported to the Royal African Society in London, “how a resident in one part of Africa heard of the death—in another and far remote part of the continent—of a European baby, and how this news was carried by means of drums, which were used, it was stated, ‘on the Morse principle’—it is always ‘the Morse principle.’”♦

  But the obvious analogy led people astray. They failed to decipher the code of the drums because, in effect, there was no code. Morse had bootstrapped his system from a middle symbolic layer, the written alphabet, intermediate between speech and his final code. His dots and dashes had no direct connection to sound; they represented letters, which formed written words, which represented the spoken words in turn. The drummers could not build on an intermediate code—they could not abstract through a layer of symbols—because the African languages, like all but a few dozen of the six thousand languages spoken in the modern world, lacked an alphabet. The drums metamorphosed speech.

  It fell to John F. Carrington to explain. An English missionary, born in 1914 in Northamptonshire, Carrington left for Africa at the age of twenty-four and Africa became his lifetime home. The drums caught his attention early, as he traveled from the Baptist Missionary Society station in Yakusu, on the Upper Congo River, through the villages of the Bambole forest. One day he made an impromptu trip to the small town of Yaongama and was surprised to find a teacher, medical assistant, and church members already assembled for his arrival. They had heard the drums, they explained. Eventually he realized that the drums conveyed not just announcements and warnings but prayers, poetry, and even jokes. The drummers were not signaling but talking: they spoke a special, adapted language.

  Eventually Carrington himself learned to drum. He drummed mainly in Kele, a language of the Bantu family in what is now eastern Zaire. “He is not really a European, despite the color of his skin,”♦ a Lokele villager said of Carrington. “He used to be from our village, one of us. After he died, the spirits made a mistake and sent him off far away to a village of whites to enter into the body of a little baby who was born of a white woman instead of one of ours. But because he belongs to us, he could not forget where he came from and so he came back.” The villager added generously, “If he is a bit awkward on the drums, this is because of the poor education that the whites gave him.” Carrington’s life in Africa spanned four decades. He became an accomplished botanist, anthropologist, and above all linguist, authoritative on the structure of African language families: thousands of dialects and several hundred distinct languages. He noticed how loquacious a good drummer had to be. He finally published his discoveries about drums in 1949, in a slim volume titled The Talking Drums of Africa.

  In solving the enigma of the drums, Carrington found the key in a central fact about the relevant African languages. They are tonal languages, in which meaning is determined as much by rising or falling pitch contours as by distinctions between consonants or vowels. This feature is missing from most Indo-European languages, including English, which uses tone only in limited, syntactical ways: for example, to distinguish questions (“you are happy ”) from declarations (“you are happy ”). But for other languages, including, most famously, Mandarin and Cantonese, tone has primary significance in distinguishing words. So it does in most African languages. Even when Europeans learned to communicate in these languages, they generally failed to grasp the importance of tonality, because they had no experience with it. When they transliterated the words they heard into the Latin alphabet, they disregarded pitch altogether. In effect, they were color-blind.

  Three different Kele words are transliterated by Europeans as lisaka. The words are distinguished only by their speech-tones. Thus lisaka with three low syllables is a puddle; lisaka, the last syllable rising (not necessarily stressed) is a promise; and lisaka is a poison. Liala means fiancée and liala, rubbish pit. In transliteration they appear to be homonyms, but they are not. Carrington, after the light dawned, recalled, “I must have been guilty many a time of asking a boy to ‘paddle for a book’ or to ‘fish that his friend is coming.’ ”♦ Europeans just lacked the ear for the distinctions. Carrington saw how comical the confusion could become:

  alambaka boili [– _ – – _ _ _] = he watched the riverbank

  alambaka boili [– – – – _ – _] = he boiled his mother-in-law

  Since the late nineteenth century, linguists have identified the phoneme as the smallest acoustic unit that makes a difference in meaning. The English word chuck comprises three phonemes: different meanings can be created by changing ch to d, or u to e, or ck to m. It is a useful concept but an imperfect one: linguists have found it surprisingly difficult to agree on an exact inventory of phonemes for English or any other language (most estimates for English are in the vicinity of forty-five). The problem is that a stream of speech is a continuum; a linguist may abstractly, and arbitrarily, break it into discrete units, but the meaningfulness of these units varies from speaker to speaker and depends on the context. Most speakers’ instincts about phonemes are biased, too, by their knowledge of the written alphabet, which codifies language in its own sometimes arbitrary ways. In any case, tonal languages, with their extra variable, contain many more phonemes than were first apparent to inexperienced linguists.

  As the spoken languages of Africa elevated tonality to a crucial role, the drum language went a difficult step further. It employed tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours. The drums varied in materials and craft. Some were slit gongs, tubes of padauk wood, hollow, cut with a long and narrow mouth to make a high-sounding lip and a low-sounding lip; others had skin tops, and these were used in pairs. All that mattered was for the drums to sound two distinct notes, at an interval of about a major third.

  So in mapping the spoken language to the drum language, information was lost. The drum talk was speech with a deficit. For every village and every tribe, the drum language began with the spoken word and shed the consonants and vowels. That was a lot to lose. The remaining information stream would be riddled with ambiguity. A double stroke on the high-tone lip of the drum [– –] matched the tonal pattern of the Kele word for father, sango, but naturally it could just as well
be songe, the moon; koko, fowl; fele, a species of fish; or any other word of two high tones. Even the limited dictionary of the missionaries at Yakusu contained 130 such words.♦ Having reduced spoken words, in all their sonic richness, to such a minimal code, how could the drums distinguish them? The answer lay partly in stress and timing, but these could not compensate for the lack of consonants and vowels. Thus, Carrington discovered, a drummer would invariably add “a little phrase” to each short word. Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga—“the moon looks down at the earth.” Koko, the fowl, is rendered koko olongo la bokiokio—“the fowl, the little one that says kiokio.” The extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context. Every ambiguous word begins in a cloud of possible alternative interpretations; then the unwanted possibilities evaporate. This takes place below the level of consciousness. Listeners are hearing only staccato drum tones, low and high, but in effect they “hear” the missing consonants and vowels, too. For that matter, they hear whole phrases, not individual words. “Among peoples who know nothing of writing or grammar, a word per se, cut out of its sound group, seems almost to cease to be an intelligible articulation,”♦ Captain Rattray reported.

  The stereotyped long tails flap along, their redundancy overcoming ambiguity. The drum language is creative, freely generating neologisms for innovations from the north: steamboats, cigarettes, and the Christian god being three that Carrington particularly noted. But drummers begin by learning the traditional fixed formulas. Indeed, the formulas of the African drummers sometimes preserve archaic words that have been forgotten in the everyday language. For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one.”♦ The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea—is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne.

  Neither Kele nor English yet had words to say, allocate extra bits for disambiguation and error correction. Yet this is what the drum language did. Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room. The natural redundancy of English motivates the famous New York City subway poster of the 1970s (and the poem by James Merrill),

  if u cn rd ths

  u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa!

  (“This counterspell may save your soul,”♦ Merrill adds.) Most of the time, redundancy in language is just part of the background. For a telegraphist it is an expensive waste. For an African drummer it is essential. Another specialized language provides a perfect analog: the language of aviation radio. Numbers and letters make up much of the information passed between pilots and air traffic controllers: altitudes, vectors, aircraft tail numbers, runway and taxiway identifiers, radio frequencies. This is critical communication over a notoriously noisy channel, so a specialized alphabet is employed to minimize ambiguity. The spoken letters B and V are easy to confuse; bravo and victor are safer. M and N become mike and november. In the case of numbers, five and nine, particularly prone to confusion, are spoken as fife and niner. The extra syllables perform the same function as the extra verbosity of the talking drums.

  After publishing his book, John Carrington came across a mathematical way to understand this point. A paper by a Bell Labs telephone engineer, Ralph Hartley, even had a relevant-looking formula: H = n log s, where H is the amount of information, n is the number of symbols in the message, and s is the number of symbols available in the language.♦ Hartley’s younger colleague Claude Shannon later pursued this lead, and one of his touchstone projects became a precise measurement of the redundancy in English. Symbols could be words, phonemes, or dots and dashes. The degree of choice within a symbol set varied—a thousand words or forty-five phonemes or twenty-six letters or three types of interruption in an electrical circuit. The formula quantified a simple enough phenomenon (simple, anyway, once it was noticed): the fewer symbols available, the more of them must be transmitted to get across a given amount of information. For the African drummers, messages need to be about eight times as long as their spoken equivalents.

  Hartley took some pains to justify his use of the word information. “As commonly used, information is a very elastic term,” he wrote, “and it will first be necessary to set up for it a more specific meaning.” He proposed to think of information “physically”—his word—rather than psychologically. He found the complications multiplying. Somewhat paradoxically, the complexity arose from the intermediate layers of symbols: letters of the alphabet, or dots and dashes, which were discrete and therefore easily countable in themselves. Harder to measure were the connections between these stand-ins and the bottom layer: the human voice itself. It was this stream of meaningful sound that still seemed, to a telephone engineer as much as an African drummer, the real stuff of communication, even if the sound, in turn, served as a code for the knowledge or meaning below. In any case Hartley thought an engineer should be able to generalize over all cases of communication: writing and telegraph codes as well as the physical transmission of sound by means of electromagnetic waves along telephone wires or through the ether.

  He knew nothing of the drums, of course. And no sooner did John Carrington come to understand them than they began to fade from the African scene. He saw Lokele youth practicing the drums less and less, schoolboys who did not even learn their own drum names.♦ He regretted it. He had made the talking drums a part of his own life. In 1954 a visitor from the United States found him running a mission school in the Congolese outpost of Yalemba.♦ Carrington still walked daily in the jungle, and when it was time for lunch his wife would summon him with a fast tattoo. She drummed: “White man spirit in forest come come to house of shingles high up above of white man spirit in forest. Woman with yams awaits. Come come.”

  Before long, there were people for whom the path of communications technology had leapt directly from the talking drum to the mobile phone, skipping over the intermediate stages.

  * * *

  ♦ The trip was sponsored by the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa for the purpose of interfering with slavers.

  ♦ “A very short experience, however, showed the superiority of the alphabetic mode,” he wrote later, “and the big leaves of the numbered dictionary, which cost me a world of labor,… were discarded and the alphabetic installed in its stead.”

  ♦ Operators soon distinguished spaces of different lengths—intercharacter and interword—so Morse code actually employed four signs.

  2 | THE PERSISTENCE OF THE WORD

  (There Is No Dictionary in the Mind)

  Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song.

  —Ward Just (2004)♦

  “TRY TO IMAGINE,” proposed Walter J. Ong, Jesuit priest, philosopher, and cultural historian, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.”♦ To subtract the technologies of information internalized over two millennia requires a leap of imagination backward into a forgotten past. The hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing. This arises at the very dawn of history, as it must, because the history begins with the writing. The pastness of the past depends on it.♦

  It takes a few thousand years for this mapping of language onto a system of signs to become second nature, and then there is no return to naïveté. Forgotten is the time when our very awareness of words came from seeing them. “In a primary oral culture,” as Ong noted,

  the expression “to look up something” is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back—“recall” them. But there
is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace.

  In the 1960s and ’70s, Ong declared the electronic age to be a new age of orality—but of “secondary orality,” the spoken word amplified and extended as never before, but always in the context of literacy: voices heard against a background of ubiquitous print. The first age of orality had lasted quite a bit longer. It covered almost the entire lifetime of the species, writing being a late development, general literacy being almost an afterthought. Like Marshall McLuhan, with whom he was often compared (“the other eminent Catholic-electronic prophet,”♦ said a scornful Frank Kermode), Ong had the misfortune to make his visionary assessments of a new age just before it actually arrived. The new media seemed to be radio, telephone, and television. But these were just the faint glimmerings in the night sky, signaling the light that still lay just beyond the horizon. Whether Ong would have seen cyberspace as fundamentally oral or literary, he would surely have recognized it as transformative: not just a revitalization of older forms, not just an amplification, but something wholly new. He might have sensed a coming discontinuity akin to the emergence of literacy itself. Few understood better than Ong just how profound a discontinuity that had been.