Old skills never die
Sort of halfway following on previous item. I was curious to see if the acoustic properties of beadboard had been noticed by blind people, possibly used for directional guidance. No luck there, but bumped into a more definite connection.

Yesterday UncommonDescent mentioned an article about an entirely different way of writing embodied in the old Inca khipus. These are complex structures of strings and knots which have been understood for a long time as number records directly parallel to an abacus. Recently researchers have realized that the khipus could also record language as well as math.

I read the New Scientist article and pointlessly wrote a comment at UD. Repeating it:

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It’s a fantastic story, with math, linguistics, cryptography, and plain old adventure. The turning point happened when a local lady heard about the research and revealed that her village had been guarding a secret set of khipus for hundreds of years. They were secret because they were believed to chronicle a rebellion against the Spaniards. The villagers knew the story but had lost the skill of reading the threads.

Sabine Hyland had already laid out a sequence of combinations based on choice of fiber, color of fiber, and knot patterns, which seemed to yield 95 code groups. Just right for a syllabary. She got access to the sacred khipus for only 48 hours, desperately photographed and noted everything she could, and then started doing classic cryptography to find repeated patterns that agreed with the known names of the people involved in the story.

At this point only a few of the code groups are firmly identified, but the mapping is convincing enough that the work is moving forward, looking for more known stories.

The code appears to be somewhat parallel to Chinese ideograms, where one set of symbols carries metaphorical meaning and another set carries phonetic suggestions. In this case the paired sets aren’t expressed as ink on paper; instead they’re colors and fiber types and knot types.

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The article also mentioned that interpreting the code required both touch and sight, to catch the type and color of thread and the shape of knots.

While looking for an old reference to wall surfaces as they affect blind folks, I came across a nice connection to khipus.

From a history of the Tennessee blind school:

The first maps used by the blind were embroidered cloth or canvas. Eighty or one hundred years ago it was the fashion for ladies to work a great deal in worsted and silk. The " sampler" then employed leisure moments, as crocheting does at present; hence the most natural way of making maps was by embroidery, the needle-work representing the land, and the plain cloth the water. Boundaries were marked by coarse, corded stitches, and towns and cities by points made with the same work. The next contrivance consisted in pasting the ordinary map upon a board prepared for the purpose. Small pin tacks were driven in the board along the boundary lines, coarse thread was glued upon the river courses, and the broad-headed tacks showed the positions of towns and cities. Sand was glued upon the paper where lakes and seas occurred.

Skill lost, skill recovered!

Labels: Leth, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:26 AM