The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

twelve thousand E’s,

nine thousa...

only two hund...

now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come.

they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text.

how to map an entire language onto a one-dimensional stream of the barest sounds.

solved collectively by generations

of drummers in a centuries-long process of so...

the obvious analogy led people astray.

there was no code.

intermediate between speech and hi...

The drums metamorphosed speech.

John F. Carrington

born i...

church members already assembled for his arrival.

Eventually he realized that the drums conveyed not just announcements and warnings but prayers, poetry, and even jokes.

they s...

special, adapted ...

He drummed mainly...

“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.”

“If he is a bit awkward on the drums, this is because of the poor education that the whites gave him.”

linguist, authoritative on the structure of African language families:

thousands of dialects and several hundred distinct languages.

He noticed how loquacious a good drum...

The Talking Drums ...

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,

for other languages, including, most famously, Mandarin and Cantonese, tone has primary significance in distinguishing words. So it does in most African 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 th...

disregarded pitch altogether. In effect, they w...

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.

“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.

(most estimates for English are in the vicinity of forty-five).

The problem is that a stream of speech is a continuum;

Most speakers’ instincts about phonemes are biased,

by their knowledge of the written alphabet,

tonal languages, with their extra variable, contain many more phonemes than were first apparent...

the drum language went a difficult step further. It employed tone and only tone.

a language composed entirely of pitch contours.

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.

For every village and every tribe, the drum language began with the spoken word and shed ...

remaining informati...

riddled with am...

Even the limited dictionary of the missionaries at Yakusu contained 130 such words.

The answer lay partly in stress and timing, but these could not compensate for the lack of consonants and vowels.