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Reading Test 38
Flying the Coast
The development of an air service on the west coast of New zealand’s South Island
Cut off from the rest of the country by a range of mountains, the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island – or the ‘Coast’ as it is commonly known – was the country’s ‘wild west frontier’. But unlike Floriadna to the south, which was and still is an uninhabitable wilderness, the Coast in the 1930s was not only habitable, it was also potentially rich. Settlers hunted and fished, logged, milled and mined. They farmed where they managed to clear the forest and drain the swamps. It was pure survival at times. The isolation was inescapable, not so much because of the great distances that travellers had to cover, but rather due to the topography of the place – the mountains, gorges, glaciers, rivers and headlands – which necessitated long detours and careful timing with regard to weather and tides.
Bridges were few and far between in the early years and even ferry crossings were often impossible after heavy rains. Each river had its attendant ferryman or woman whose attention a traveller would attract with a rifle shot. It was the kind of country where one would greatly benefit from a pair of wings.
Maurice Buckley, a World War I pilot, was the first to give Coasters, as the residents of the region were called, such wings, by establishing the Arrow Aviation Company in 1923. That year he bought an Avro biplane on the east coast, which he transported across the country by rail, wagons, and flatcar resembling it in a local garage. When he opened for business the following year, the colourful Avro was an instant crowd-pleaser, and Coasters queued up for joyrides. For the first major flight, Buckley invited Mr Teichman, a local mountaineer, to join him. They flew over the Franz Josef Glacier and landed at Okarito. Afterwards, Teichman wrote about how extraordinary it was to look at the world from the air, ‘like taking the roof off the house and watching the performances from above’.
Next came an aviator named Bert Mercer, who made a reconnaissance flight to the Coast in August 1933 and started Air Travel (NZ) the following year. Mercer’s aircraft of choice was a DH83 Fox Moth. By comparison with the regular, open-air aircraft of the day, the Fox Moth was a plane that offered considerable luxury, housing four passengers in an enclosed forward cabin, plus a cockpit for the weather. Mercer opened for business in Reefton in 1934, picking up the airline’s first passengers and, on the last day of that year, commenced a regular delivery of mail, carrying 73kg, to Haast and Okuru. From that day on, the Fox Moth became a much-anticipated sight on the coast.
Mercer got on with everyone and won their respect by anticipating, then meeting their needs. One of those was setting up the first aerial shipping route to help transport a kind of small fish known as whitebait. This highly sought-after delicacy, which could be found only in the region’s rivers, was previously transported to markets in Greymouth by train. But the Fox Moth cut out the journey time and wait by night fishing and waiting city markets in perfectly fresh condition, Mercer relied on his senses what he could see and hear to navigate, flying inbound the weather and contours of the land. Although often warned to do so by aviation authorities, he refused to develop the instruments necessary to navigate the plane ‘blind’, using just its instruments on the console in front of him. The old habits were too hard to change.
With the outbreak of World War II, Mercer’s aircraft were considered so essential to the remote Coast that they were not militarised. In fact, the business continued to grow in the early years, thanks in large part to a government-issued subsidy, which allowed him to expand into neighbouring areas. Despite the war in far-off lands, life on the Coast was business as usual. The settlers were always in need of mail and transportation. In time, though, this presented Mercer with a pressing issue: with so many now joining the Air Force, the loyalty of his team dropped. In 1942 he wrote in his diary, ‘I am back to where I started eight years ago: on my own’.
The only solution to keep the airline going was to pack as much into every plane as possible and make every flight count. But some of Mercer’s newly formed team objected to the amount of cargo they had to carry, which for a small rural airline was a fact of life. One man, Norm Suttle, left the airline after a few months in protest about carrying more than was appropriate for the aircraft. This marked another decline in the airline’s fortunes. When Bert Mercer died in 1944, the airline was taken over by Fred Lucas, a man who shared Mercer’s pioneering spirit. Under Lucas’s leadership the newly formed West Coast Airways saw another decade of profitable returns. But in the following decade, times changed fast.
Helicopters were soon found to be ideal machines for the Coast terrain, and quickly took over the vast majority of the local air transport business.
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Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
Experts suggest ‘Shakespeare’ may have been a pseudonym – a pen-name – for another writer. Robert Matthews investigates
A
Even today, almost 400 years after his death, the works of the famous English dramatist William Shakespeare have lost none of their appeal, nor have questions about the source of his genius. For it really troubled that an ordinary actor from the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon should metamorphose into so extraordinary a dramatist? For some, the answer is obvious. Shakespeare was a genius whose gift is no more suspicious than that of the physicist Albert Einstein or the German statesman who devised the theory of relativity. But others have insisted that it is impossible for a man to have penned such sophisticated works. They believe that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for someone with far more impressive qualifications who wrote the plays that still play to packed theatres today.
But after long and largely fruitless debates, researchers are now turning to scientific methods to resolve the controversies surrounding Shakespeare. Ways of identifying the literary fingerprint of writers are currently being developed using computers. This analysis of features of literary style is known as ‘stylometry’, and while it researchers can recognise the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with impressive reliability.
B
The idea of using these basic scientific techniques to probe questions of authorship dates back to 1851, when the Victorian mathematician Augustus de Morgan suggested that different authors might be identified through the frequency with which they used words of different lengths. His idea attracted the attention of Thomas Mendenhall, an American physicist who devoted to using the length to investigate one of the oldest controversies about the works of Shakespeare: were they actually written by someone else?
C
As long ago as 1785, the Elizabethan writer and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was identified as a possible contender for having written Shakespeare’s works. Bacon’s possible motivation for wanting to be known as the author of such masterpieces is far from clear, but Mendenhall believed his methods might at least reveal telltale signs of Bacon’s hand in the plays. However, his results, published in 1901, revealed Bacon’s writing style to be quite unlike that of Shakespeare. But Mendenhall’s methods also revealed some key concerns.
Recognising the need to include large samples of writing from both authors, Mendenhall lumped all their works together, despite the fact that literary style can vary enormously between plays, poetry and philosophy, for example. His focus on word length as the sole ‘fingerprint’ of writing style was also questionable – for how could he be sure that some other characteristics would not give different results? But Mendenhall’s biggest fault was perhaps simply that he was too early of his time: he was attempting a task that cried out for the kind of computers not even conceivable over 100 years ago. More recently with their development scholars have been able to look for subtle peculiarities among the complete works of authors, which, in Shakespeare’s case, amount to over 800,000 words.
D
One of the key controversies now being probed is Shakespeare’s relationship with other dramatists. Was he a lone genius or was his work the result of collaboration? Traditional methods of investigating such questions have relied on traits like the use of metaphor, but these may be shared by different authors simply on cultural grounds. In contrast, modern stylometry focuses on far more fundamental characteristics which are less likely to be shared by others. The term ‘function words’ describes the words that are most frequent in the English language: words such as ‘the’, ‘and’ and ‘but’. They carry little meaning, but they are very useful for the flow of communication, and their frequency and distribution can be used to develop a ‘fingerprint’ for each author.
E
Stylometry has come up with little to encourage the continual number of experts who insist Shakespeare was simply too uneducated to create works of enduring brilliance. In 1996, literary scholar Ward Elliott and mathematician Robert Valenza of Claremont McKenna College, California, published the results of a stylometric comparison of the works of Shakespeare with those of over 30 of the supposed ‘real’ authors. Elliott and Valenza applied a battery of 51 tests to compressed texts and found that none of the claimants had a stylometric ‘fingerprint’ similar to that of Shakespeare. ‘I think the thesis that Shakespeare is too “important” to be an ordinary person,’ says Professor Kate McCluskey, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.
F
Elliott and Valenza’s research found something else too. Some of the earliest plays, notably Henry VI and the notoriously violent Titus Andronicus, seem to be a combination of Shakespeare and his brilliant contemporary the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was born in the same year as Shakespeare. Traditional scholars accept that Marlowe influenced Shakespeare’s early work, says Dr Thomas Merriam, one of Britain’s leading stylometry experts. Such texts exhibit the personality of Shakespeare through distinctive style of Marlowe’s actual text.
G
Some scholars remain cautious about basing new views of Shakespeare’s career on stylometric analysis of centuries-old texts: if they have been edited, amended or shortened, then the data from them is highly compromised,’ says Dr Markus Dahl of London University. Even so the results to date are in line with the growing view of Shakespeare as a hardworking professional who perfected his skills throughout his career.
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Saving languages
The campaign to keep minority languages alive.
A
Ten years ago, Michael Krauss, a professor at the University of Alaska, shocked his colleagues in the discipline of linguistics with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would disappear within a century. Krauss founded the Alaska Native Language Center to preserve as much as possible of the 20 tongues still known to the state’s indigenous people. Only two of these languages were being taught to children, and the rest were rapidly falling from use. Other linguists are making similar predictions. A survey in Australia found that 70 of the surviving 90 Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same is true for all but 20 of the other 176 North American languages in use.
B
Outwardly, the consolidation of human language might seem like a good trend that could ease the exchange of goods and information. Linguists don’t deny these benefits, but they acknowledge that small communities often choose to switch to the majority language because they believe it will boost their social or economic status.
C
Many experts in the field nonetheless mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. Some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of human speech, still far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which elements of grammar and vocabulary – if any – are universal. An English researcher, Nicholas Ostler, offers an example: ‘tea, spoken in northern Colombia, seems to have nothing comparable to a personal pronoun system – i.e. you, etc. Otherwise, I would have thought that personal pronouns were a linguistic universal.’ Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the range of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.
D
‘I think the value is mostly in human terms,’ says James Matisoff, a specialist in rare Asian languages at the University of California. Language is the most important element in the culture of a community. When it dies, you lose the special knowledge of that culture and a unique window on the world. But despite the constant talk about saving endangered languages over the past ten years, the field of descriptive linguistics has accomplished little in this respect. ‘You would think that there would be some organised response to this situation, some attempt to determine which languages can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear,’ says Sarah G. Thomason, of the University of Michigan. ‘But there isn’t any such effort.’
E
However, there are some signs of progress. The Volkswagen Foundation, a German charity, has created a multimedia archive in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars, dictionaries and other data. Contributors from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme are uploading their materials, and more than 20 languages have already been made available online through shared activities. So far, about 75 teams have completed the programme. ‘It’s too early to call this language revitalisation,’ admits Leanne Hinton of Berkeley. ‘In California, the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers. But, if nothing else, we prolong the survival of the language.’ This will give linguists more time to record it more comprehensively.
F
Complicating matters, dozens of institutions around the world are setting up digital libraries on endangered languages. This could create chaos, because the projects use non-standardised data formats, terminology and even names of languages. Gary F. Simons, of the Dallas-based research group SIL International, has been working to bring some order to this by building an ‘open languages data community’: a kind of digital card catalogue. This system will allow researchers to check their theories against a vast array of data.
G
However, even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it vanishes from use is a fossil skeleton. Linguists may be able to sketch an outline of the language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. As yet, there is no discipline of conservation linguistics. Almost every strategy to keep people speaking a language has succeeded in some places but failed in others. One factor that always seems to occur in the death of a language, according to Hans-Jürgen Sasse of the University of Cologne in Germany, is that speakers start regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language. Children pick up on the attitude, and prefer to speak the dominant language. This is how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic slipped into extinction.
H
Ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism, argues James Matisoff. Even uneducated people can speak a number of languages if they start as children. Many people in the world are at least bilingual, and in some places it is common to speak three or four languages. But in addition to the fact that children may pick up minority languages, there is also the danger that speakers of a majority language may trade to speakers of minority languages. The first step in saving dying languages may be to persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their own voices.
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