Steorran worulde

I wonder if I could write a good poem about friendship. I wonder what it would take for me to do so.

I think the best poetry I've ever written is probably the two sonnets I wrote for my Renaissance Literature class at UBC; I've always been a bit shy about showing them to the world because, well, they're somewhat extravagant expressions of romantic love, which is just not a thing I do. (I think it's kind of funny that the only time I've ever written love poetry was when I wasn't in love. :-)

When I wrote them, I think it was important that I read a lot of sonnets by the authors we were studying, way beyond what was required for class. I think steeping myself in the poetry I was imitating was important for me to be able to write something in the same metre and at least a similar style.

I also think that I've really only been successful at writing bits of alliterative verse in Modern English when I've been reading Old English alliterative verse.

That suggests that to write in a particular style and metre, I might need to be reading that style and metre.

I have no idea what style or metre I'd want to write a poem about friendship in.

It just occurred to me to wonder: in my blind society, would sea water and fresh water both be thought of as varieties of water, or would they be thought of as separate kinds of liquid? Without both appearing clear, they're not as obviously groupable together and separate from other sorts of liquid. On the other hand, I'm sure it would be discovered that if you dry sea water up, you get salt, and if you add fresh water to salt, you get salt water, which might make sea water fairly easily recognizable as fresh water + salt.

I've been thinking about how the sun and its effects would be perceived and understood in the blind society I'm working on.

They would perceive the sun mainly as a heat source. They would likely conceptualize it as a fire, because fire is the main heat source that they would have close-at-hand experience of. (Well, and also body heat. But I expect sun-heat would be perceived as more like fire-heat than like body-heat, because fire-heat is more noticeable when you're not in direct contact with its source.) I think it's likely that their word for sun is morphologically derived from their word for fire.

They would perceive the sun as a heat source with a direction. On a fairly coarse level, the direction of the sun is directly perceivable as the direction of the heat on your body, and they would have experienced this from the beginning. They would also have observed pretty much from the beginning that objects block sun-heat (i.e., make shadows). (I wonder how quickly they would connect this to the concept of objects blocking sound, which they would definitely be aware of. In my limited length of time observing small variations in sound, I've definitely noticed sound shadows.) From observing the direction of shadows by feeling where there's shadow and where there isn't, they should be able to determine the direction of the sun with greater precision than simply feeling where the shadow is on their body. I expect they develop an awareness of the usefulness of shadows in determining sun direction quite early.

They would notice that some objects absorb more sun-heat than others. They'd notice that the kind of material makes a difference, but they'd also notice that some objects that are otherwise similar absorb sun-heat to different amounts (corresponding to light and dark colouration). For example, they might notice that some rabbit pelts (ones we'd call black) absorb more sun-heat than others (ones we'd call white).

They'd notice that on some days/at some times, sun-heat is easier to feel and to notice the direction of, while on other days (often cooler days, even in the same season), you can't feel the direction of sun-heat or feel a difference in where objects are blocking sun-heat. They'd notice a correlation between when you can't feel sun heat and when it rains - when it's raining, you can rarely feel sun-heat, and you usually can't feel sun-heat right before or after it rains. I think from this, they'd likely develop a conceptualization that there is something overhead blocking the sun, essentially making a shadow, and that this thing is the source that rain falls from. In other words, they could get a basic idea of clouds.

They'd notice that sun-heat gets more intense in the summer and less intense in the winter. They could either conceptualize this as the sun-fire getting stronger and weaker, or as the sun-fire getting closer and farther. My initial intuition was closer/farther, but now I'm less sure.

They'd also notice the phenomenon of sunburns. I'm not sure what that would contribute to their conceptualization of the sun.

They'd be aware of sun-related phenomena in plants and animals. They'd notice that some plants open their flowers when the sun is up and close them when the sun is down. They'd likely notice that some plants turn their flowers or leaves towards the sun. They'd notice that certain animals have certain behaviour patterns that are tied to the sun. (I wonder what they'd make of birds singing a bit before the sun comes up - how would they account for the fact that the birds know when the sun will be up before its heat is perceivable? Might they even get the cause and effect backwards and suppose that the birds call the sun up? But the birds probably don't sing like that all year, and the sun comes up all year.)

All this they would know by the time period I'm focusing on. A few posts ago, I mentioned that after the time period I'm mainly focusing on, they develop more sophisticated measurement and observation technology. This is basically a period of major scientific development - people who you could call scientists develop an interest in measurement, and in determining properties of things more precisely.

Among the measurement instruments they develop is one for observing the direction of the sun. Here's how I imagine it working. It's based on the idea of localizing light vs. shadow, except rather than localizing a shadow amid heat, it's localizing a spot of heat in an otherwise heat-dark room. (It's hard to know exactly how to talk about these things. I want to say an otherwise dark room, which it would be, but the visual darkness isn't what they care about.) The basic idea is that there's a smallish hole in the wall, which lets the sun-heat in. The sun-heat falls on a certain spot on the floor or wall. It's possible to measure both the horizontal and vertical angle from the floor/wall to the hole. These angles could be marked on the floor. I imagine the horizontal angles are marked on the floor/wall as lines radiating from the direction of the hole, and the vertical angles are marked as increments along those lines. The lines would be some sort of raised or indented pattern - a groove or a bump. How would you feel where the sun was? There are two possibilities. One is that you would feel it on your hand - possibly with a heat-absorbing mitt of some sort on your hand to help you feel it better - and the other is that you feel where the floor/wall is heated, in which case the floor/wall would be covered with some sort of heat-absorbing material - possibly charcoal mixed with some sort of binder. (Would charcoal mixed with clay work as a heat-absorbing paint?) In order to detect the sun over the whole range of angles it can be at, you would need multiple holes facing in multiple directions; in order not to confuse the lines on the floor, these would likely be in different observing rooms. You might be able to do it just with one facing southeast and one facing southwest, but I'm not sure. (I'm assuming a northern hemisphere location at the moment.)

(Would such an instrument really be better than just observing the direction and length of the shadow of an upright object? I think it would be more precise, but I'm not sure. Maybe if you just had a really tall pillar, you could measure the angle and length of the shadow just as precisely.)

Eventually, they may develop an instrument to detect heat, perhaps specifically sun-heat. I'm imagining something along the lines of a thermoscope, but built in such a way that rather than seeing the water level rise and fall in the tube, it would be possible to feel the water level rise and fall in the outer vessel. I still need to figure out the details of how such an instrument could plausibly work. It may also be that they don't use it to measure temperatures per se, but, by making the expand/contract portion of the instrument so that it is good at absorbing heat, they can make it more sensitive to detecting whether sun-heat is present, though not necessarily at measuring how much of it there is.

I was talking to Maria the other day and telling her a little bit about my calendar thoughts, and she, being a student of comparative religion, asked what their worship was like. I didn't know, but together with the idea that they have divinely-given weeks, and the idea I mentioned yesterday that their ecologically-based calendar system might be preserved for ritual purposes even after they develop 4-week months, an idea came together that I think fits.

Every village has a temple, likely in the middle of the village. There is a weekly communal worship ceremony on the first day of the week. This is integrated with the system of marking ecologically-determined periods. When the observations are made and confirmed that the natural signs of a new period have started, the start of that period is ceremonially recognized at the next weekly ceremony. If the period involves the beginning of production of some kind of food (e.g., ripeness of something), some of that food is brought as a thank offering, blessed, and distributed to the people. A period of the year thus always contains an integer number of weeks.

Because of the integration of this calendar with worship and subsistence life, it does not go away when months are introduced; rather, the two systems run alongside each other.[1]

I was telling Heather all about calendar systems and the thoughts I've been developing, and she asked a good question: why do they develop a month-based system at all? Why do they bother? What advantage is it to them over a purely ecological system?

At that time, I didn't have a good answer. I think I do now. The ecological calendar is very local, and will differ from village to village. Weeks, however, run in synchrony throughout the island. Week-based months will, too, and allow different villages to plan things and synchronize events. There is still some possibility that calendars will get off from each other by different observations of a year start, though. I think this is a good reason for intercalation to be based on months rather than on years. If they intercalate weeks, some villages might end up starting a month a week ahead of or behind another village's months. If they intercalate months, in every village months will start and end at the same time, though it is still possible that their year start determinations will differ and so which month it is might differ from village to village. Since intercalation of whole months is needed fairly infrequently (around every 20 years), it may be that this is something that is determined by a whole-island council or something like that, rather than by direct local observation.

[1] For a partial precedent, compare the Attic calendar; according to Wikipedia, there were three different calendars in use simultaneously:

* A festival calendar of 12 months based on the cycle of the moon
* A democratic state calendar of 10 arbitrary months
* An agricultural calendar of seasons using star risings to fix points in time

While I was poking around doing research for this post (specifically, trying to find evidence of Native North American cultures having ecologically-named and possibly ecologically-based months on a lunisolar calendar), I stumbled across a way of reconciling the cycles of solar year and lunar month that I hadn't heard of before. I came across it in the Musqueam reference grammar by Wayne P. Suttles. The evidence for how the Musqueam calendar worked is kind of thin, but other Salishan languages use the system described (p. 517):

One way of adjusting a lunar calendar to the solar year is to insert a thirteenth month every four years or so, as the Jewish and Chinese calendars do. Another, probably more common way is to begin counting moons with some event that is determined by the solar year, count up to, say, ten moons, stop counting, and then begin again when the event that you started with comes again. In this way a "Sandhill Crane Moon" will correspond to the coming of the sandhill cranes.

Counting moons, leaving a gap, and beginning the count again with the observation of something determined by the solar year is just what was done by people upriver from the Musqueam. According to Diamond Jenness (1955, 7-9), the Katzie, who spoke a Downriver Halkomelem dialect very close to that of the Musqueam, counted ten months beginning with the arrival of the sockeye in August of the Gregorian calendar, leaving a period covering June and July with two names but not regarded as part of the count. The Chehalis, an Upriver Halkomelem-speaking peoople, as reported by Charles Hill-Tout (1904, 334-35), began a count of moons with the chinook salmon spawning in October, counted ten moons, and stopped counting in July, leaving a period called by a term said to refer to the coming together of the ends of the year. Neither Jenness nor Hill-Tout gave any reason for this uncounted period. But James Teit (1900, 339), describing the practice of the Ntlakapmux (Thompson), is very clear about it. The Ntlakapmux began a moon count with the rutting of the deer or some other animal in the fall, counted eleven months, and left a period as "the rest of the year." "This indefinite period of unnamed months," Teit explains, "enabled the Indians to bring the lunar and solar years into harmony".

This isn't relevant for my blind society, but is worth being aware of for more general calendar-making, as another way things can be done.

The first step to figuring out a plausible system of timekeeping for my blind society is determining what natural cycles it could be based on.

Day and year
It's pretty obvious that day and year would both be observable. The day would be observable directly from day/night temperature variations and differences in the felt direction of the sun on non-cloudy days. It would also be observable indirectly through diurnal activities and phenomena in the living world - e.g. birds singing at dawn, flowers being open in the day and closed at night. Probably the natural time to mark the beginning of a day would be at a day/night boundary - either sunrise or sunset.

The year would be observable directly through differences in seasonal temperature/weather patterns; if they're in a sufficiently non-tropical location, it would also be observable through differences in day/night length; I'm not sure how noticeable differences in sun angle through the year would be. The year would also be observable indirectly through such things as plant growth and ripening, and animal migration and life cycles. It's not clear to me how you'd decide where to mark the beginning of a year, but I suspect animal and plant cycles would probably provide clearer marking points than weather and day length.

Lunar cycle: not observable
The moon, and thus the lunar month, would not be directly observable.

The lack of an obvious basis for a lunar month is interesting, because most Earth calendars have a month of some sort, whether it remains synchronized to the lunar month or not. There are, however, a few calendars that don't have months with lengths based on the lunar month; the ones I've seen use some other intermediate unit between days and years:

Akan calendar
Pentecontad calendar

There are also some other calendars that do include some reckoning of months, but also include a different sub-year group of days that is not dependent on the month:
Maya calendar
Javanese calendar

Other cycles
Although the lunar cycle would not be directly observable, the tidal cycle, which is related to the lunar cycle, would be. The society is located on an island in the ocean, so they would have experience with coasts and tides. What they would observe in tides depends on what kind of tides their location has. I learnt recently from Wikipedia that there are three main kinds of tidal patterns. Diurnal tides have one high tide and one low tide a day. Semidiurnal tides have two high tides and two low tides a day, with relatively similar heights for the highs and relatively similar lownesses for the lows. Mixed tides have two highs and two lows a day, but one high is significantly higher than the other, and one low is significantly lower than the other. My experience with tides is with mixed tides, and I had assumed they were universal. This map shows that most places in the world have either semidiurnal or mixed tides, so I can assume at least that my blind society would have experience with two highs and two lows a day. Of course, the point of bringing up the tidal cycle is that it's not exactly per day - a tidal day is longer than a solar day by about an hour. If I understand right, the tidal day and the solar day will resynchronize every month. Also, the relationship between the position of the sun and moon creates spring tides (when the tidal action of sun and moon is aligned at full and new moon) and neap tides (when the tidal action of sun and moon is crosswise at half moon). Tidal cycles might give a basis for the creation of a month or half-month period, but I'm not sure. It takes more to extract that from tidal patterns than from simple lunar phases. And how important the tidal cycle would be to them would depend on how much use they make of the ocean and intertidal zone.

Another observable cycle would be women's menstrual cycles. The length is approximately a month, but can vary considerably. And the timing is different for different women, so unlike astronomically-determined cycles, there's not a communally-accessible single standard.

I can't think of any other observable plausibly-useful natural cycles that are smaller than a year.

Small time units and echolocation
This observation is kind of irrelevant to the above thoughts about calendars, and is more relevant to the topic of time units smaller than a day, which I'm not really digging into right now.

They use echolocation. For sufficiently distant objects, this involves making a click and hearing a distinct echo a brief time later. Although their use of echolocation is so habitual that they usually primarily perceive the distance and location of the object, not the timing of the echo, I expect they would be able to be aware of the timing of the echo if they pay attention to it. This makes it likely that they would develop a concept of the speed of sound, and would be able to associate echo-times with distances. Since distances are easier to measure than times, it would be easy to speak about brief times in terms of the distance that echo-time corresponds to.

In my first major post about my all-blind society, I talked about possibilities for metalworking, and decided that bronzeworking seemed plausible but ironworking didn't really. For that, though, I was only really thinking about the last stage of the metallurgy process - how you turn bronze or iron into a finished object. To really make use of metal, you need more than that - you have to get the metal in the first place.

( Native metal vs. ore )

So, considerations of potential metals for use:
Iron:
Ore is abundant, but possibly hard to identify.
Blacksmithing iron is probably not plausible without vision - requires precise aim at objects too hot to touch.
Needs extremely hot temperatures for casting - likely not plausible.
Meteoric iron is easily findable if you're lucky enough to have a good large meteorite around.
Meteoric iron can to some degree be worked cold. Hitting cold objects that you can feel ahead of time to get a spatial model seems more plausible than blacksmithing.

Copper:
Ore is reasonably common, but possibly hard to identify.
Native copper does occur, and is probably easy to recognize, but possibly hard to find.
Can be cast at reasonably accessible temperatures - a technique that seems plausible without vision.
Can also be worked cold, through hammering and annealing.
Not very strong when not alloyed to make bronze, but still strong enough to be useful for tool-making.

Bronze:
Needs tin (or some other metals, but tin is preferable) as well as copper.
Tin ore is not very common, and also may be hard to identify.
Stronger than copper.

Gold, silver, electrum:
May be around in native format, but what would you use them for if you weren't using them for their appearance in decorative objects?

Lead:
I'm kind of ignoring it, but maybe I shouldn't. It needs ore identification, though, since it doesn't often occur native. It's relatively easy to extract. It melts at a rather low temperature, which is convenient. Of course it creates health issues, which may not be recognized.

I think I am going to say that they do not have access to tin, and therefore do not have bronze. And I don't think they make use of ores. However, I think I will say that they have a large iron meteorite, which they use for cold-worked tools. And there is native copper around, if they can find it; they probably find at least some of it, though I'm not sure in how great of quantities. They likely cast copper as well as cold-work it. But they likely still use stone tools as well.

It may be that this is only in the early period of their society, and that at some point they do figure out how to identify and smelt ores. I think they still won't have access to tin, though.

There's an island on Domil - a fairly large island, perhaps comparable in size to Ireland, perhaps not that big - where the whole population is totally colourblind. Most of the population is made up of rod monochomats (people who have only rods, no cones, in their eyes). I've long wanted to arrange it so that some families on the less-accessible northern coast of the island are (or contain) blue cone monochromats (people who have rods and blue cones in their eyes, but can't perceive colour since they don't have contrasting varieties of cones. [1])

However, I've never been sure whether it would be genetically plausible to have both those varieties of colourblindness in a population without also having some people with colour vision. The other day I found out a little more about the genetics of colourblindness. (I don't know very much about genetics, so I may use terminology wrongly or make other mistakes. Please correct me if so, especially if I'm making mistakes that will change the effects of genetics on my world.)

According to this page, rod monochromacy is autosomal recessive, encoded either on chromosome 2 or chromosome 8. I'll make the simplifying assumption that only one location is active in the population I'm working with. Recessive is good, because that means that in a population where everyone has the trait, then everyone has only the gene variant that causes the trait. (If the colourblindness gene variant were dominant, then there'd be a recessive colour vision gene variant that could be floating around in a population even when everyone had the coloublindness trait, and then colour vision could pop up in a subsequent generation.)

According to the same page, blue cone monochromacy (lacking both red and green cones) is an X-linked (recessive) trait just as the two basic kinds of red-green colourblindness are (red cone lack/diminished function and green cone lack/diminished function). Another page from the same site discusses in more detail how this works for red-green colourblindness, and so by extension for blue cone monochromacy. This also works out so that if the whole population has the trait, then everyone has only the gene variant that causes the trait.
( This gets long )

[1] Actually, blue cone monochromats may have a very small amount of colour perception based on the difference in wavelengths to which rods and blue cones are sensitive, especially around twilight. But it's very small, and I'm guessing it's minor enough that a vocabulary for these colours would likely not be developed.

One set of questions I've been asking about my imaginary blind society is:
a) At what point in technological/societal history did they branch off from a sighted society?
b) How do they get their food?
c) What kind of tool production do they have?

I've been thinking about prehistorical stages and whether they could plausibly have branched off at any of these.

Could they plausibly have started off with a stone-age hunter-gatherer society? I think tentatively yes. I can imagine that making stone tools might be possible without vision. There are two basic techniques involved, striking and pressure-flaking. Striking requires aim, but a combination of proprioceptive/tactile memory and echolocation might be enough. I suspect that pressure-flaking could be done on a purely tactile basis. (I've actually tried a bit of pressure-flaking at a flint knap-in event once - of course it was just a first attempt so I wasn't any good at it, but I have at least some idea of what's involved.) Okay, so let's say stone tools are possible. What about the hunter-gatherer aspect? Trapping and fishing seems highly plausible to me, but more active hunting seems more questionable. Hunter-gatherer societies are typically nomadic, but I don't think that needs to be an obstacle.

But they don't need to be a hunter-gatherer society. Some degree of farming seems pretty clearly possible. The simplest seems like vegetable-garden type farming. That's only a small step away from gathering - you plant the plants you'd gather in an easily available place so you have ready access to them when you want them, and you get rid of the plants you don't want so that the ones you do want can grow unimpeded. And it can be done with only human labour. What about staple crops? Do they grow grain? Root vegetables? Root vegetables fit more easily in a vegetable gardening pattern; grain farming usually involves labour animals. I'd need to do some more research to find out about how necessary labour animals are for grain farming. (What's the relative chronology of horse/cattle domestication and grain farming in the Neolithic Revolution?)

And that brings up the question of whether they have domestic animals and if so, of what sorts. It's easiest for me to imagine that they have small domestic animals - chickens, ducks, rabbits, honeybees. I'm sceptical about the practicalities of taming and managing large domestic animals - sheep, goats, cattle, horses, pigs, etc. - without being able to see. But I would gladly be persuaded that it's possible. Dogs are also something to consider. Potentially very useful - but feral dogs could be a problem.

Their technology also doesn't necessarily have to be merely stone-age. What about bronze/copper or iron/steel tools? One thing worth noting about historical technological development is that bronze tools were largely cast, while iron tools were largely blacksmithed, partly because the temperature needed to melt iron for casting is so high. I find casting more plausible than blacksmithing; with casting, you can make a mold by touch, then pour in the hot metal. With blacksmithing, you have to aim your hammer precisely at an object that's too hot to touch. Such aim seems difficult to achieve, especially when the object is so hot that you can't touch it to figure out details of its shape and location. So I am going to suppose that they have cast bronze/copper tools, but not blacksmithed iron tools. At some point they may develop furnaces hot enough to make cast iron.

So, current working assumption: small domestic animals used for meat, eggs, honey, skins, feathers. Garden-type farming, possibly including some grain farming. Trapping and fishing as well. No dogs or large domestic animals until I conclude that they're feasible. Bronze/copper tools, and possibly still stone tools. Could have separated from sighted society anywhere from stone-age hunter-gatherer society through bronze-age agricultural society.