Cryptology and Language (and Teletubbies)

From left to right, the Teletubbies are: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. The spellings are of little importance, since the show was intended for pre-readers, however those are the official spellings of the names.

From a little prior research, I know that the Teletubbies was aimed at children who had not yet learned to speak through kindergarten. Their shape, colour, and their faces, were intended to reflect the infant's perception of the world in colour, movement and in terms of the parts of the face that are the most important.

The four Teletubbies are here also arranged in order of size and therefore (presumably, since young see the size and age relationship as exactly proportional) age. The youngest, "Po" has the phonetically simplest name. "Laa-Laa" (pronounced as two "long 'a's", "Lala") is only Twice as complex, by repeating the same syllable. "Dipsy" has two syllables, but they are different, and a plosive consonant followed by a sibilant - so at least twice as complex as "Laa-Laa". "Tinky Winky" leaps to four syllables but keeps the complexity low by repeating most of the sound, however it uses a sound formed from two consonants "nk" and is hence about two and a half times as complex as "Dipsy". This more-or-less linear progression of complexity matches the infant's growing perception of the complexity of language which seems to increase as you get older (and never seems to stop IMHO).

This is all very clever, and though this cleverness probably contributed to the success of the show, it is likely that it is an example of the kind of attention to detail and level of production values that went into the show, which altogether explain its success.

It also all leads me to wonder whether (assuming Teletubbies to be (as they appear) members of an Eloi-like alien race) as Teletubbies get older, their names become more complex according to a strict pattern.

Let us examine:

All names begin with con-vow: Ti, Di, La, Po. This must be the constant.

By comparing Po with Laa-laa it is easy to infer that when Laa-Laa was younger she was called simply "Laa" and that when Po is older he will be called "Po-po". Not "Poo-poo", however, as this would change the vowel sound?It is difficult, though, since "laa" is just an elongated "a" whereas "Po" is pronounced as a diphthong "Poe". We could perhaps infer that Laa-Laa was called "Lau" and Po will be called Per-per (with an unvoiced UK style R) then (remember this is about the sounds, not the spellings. If lɑː-lɑː was ˈlaʊ then pəʊ will be pɜː-pɜː .)

We can also infer from the comparison of "Tinky Winky" with "Dipsy" that the former was once known as "Tinky" and the latter will later be known as "Dipsy-*ipsy". That star is the sticking point. How do we work out what it ought to be? It might be that all Teletubbies just double up with the double u, but this leaves me unsatisfied. Double u (despite the convention in English of calling it a consonant) is a vowel, which suggests that a vowel is needed, but all the alternatives seem unpleasantly difficult to say:

Dipsy-Aipsy
Dipsy-Eipsy
Dipsy-Iipsy
Dipsy-Oipsy
Dipsy-Uipsy
Dipsy-Yipsy

Could the relationship be mathematical?

W is only three letters after T. This would give "Dipsy Ghipsy". I'm not altogether satisfied with this, so I'm going to move on to the most difficult question. Given that "Dipsy" must have been called "Dee-Dee" (diː-diː), we can infer that Laa-Laa will be called La**y. We even know that the vowel will shorten (from lɑː to  lɑ). But what will those two consonants be. I think we can only guess here. There are a number of consonants in English that can be paired and be followed by a "y"; (I'm also assuming that "nk" and "ps" are already taken) here are a few that might work:

Landy
Lasty
Lanty
Lamby
Lampy
Lacty
Lafty
Lalty
Lalky
Ladsy

Of these, I quite like "Lafty", so I'm going with that. This would give (as the fourth name) "Lafty Pafty" which is rather good. Sounds like an Italian clown.

Finally, Po, Per-Per would become Pelty (my arbitrary choice), then Pelty Selty.

Table:

1	2	3	4
Tiu	Tee-Tee	Tinky	Tinky Winky
Diu	Dee-Dee	Dipsy	Dipsy Ghipsy
Lau	Laa-Laa	Lafty	Lafty Pafty
Po	Per-Per	Pelty	Pelty Selty

This post illustrates the key techniques of cryptology and, indeed, of editing, exposing them as:

• detailed and meticulous research
• broad general knowledge
• fastidious attention to detail
• structured and logical approach
• guesswork

(And you now know what to call your four children as they grow up.)

Is anything 3rd person omniscient?

Following my last post, I've had some enlightening discussions with a few people. Below are some remarks by Becca Mills which helped me to move along in my own thoughts, which continue below the quotation.

I see your point, here, Harry - the writer is the "real" storyteller, and she's always a third-person figure vis-a-vis the story, even if she's writing biography (because she's writing about the past as the somewhat changed person her past experiences have made her).

The problem I see is that you're treating the third-person-omniscient narrative viewpoint as though it is not itself an artificial construct created for the purpose of narrating a story. You're presenting it as somehow more real or true to the actual situation, but in truth it's just as unreal as first- person and third-limited. The mind of the writer is omniscient vis-a-vis the story the way the Christian god is omniscient -- knowing all persons and events from outside time -- but third-person-omniscient narration isn't that kind of "knowing." That kind of knowing is capacious and alinear and is inappropriate for actual storytelling. TPO narration is still a linear and controlled release of info thru the "narrative voice," which is itself constructed for that purpose.

So I don't think we should think of TPO as the real narrative voice that undergirds all the others, which simply mascarade as being something other. But I do think it's useful to think actively about how artificial all the narrative modes are (and I don't intend "artificial" in a negative way, but just as describing some that is the product of art/artifice).

So I admit I'm glad someone sees what I'm aiming for, even if I don't see the target all that clearly yet myself, and I think that Becca's counterargument is a strong one. Why ought one narrative voice be any more original or authentic than the others? I don't think I have an answer for this. But Becca's clear thinking got me questioning my motivation for pursuing this in the first place.

Although the idea was provoked by a writer in difficulty over points of view, which happened to coincide with a whole cascade of threads on various fora where both readers and writers "rejected" particular narrative voices and points of view, I am beginning to wonder whether it is my background in theatre that is the cause of my desire to find an archetypal, atavistic, underlying voice.

Drama theorists, including Boal, Grotowsky and Barba, have, (guru-like, usually) proposed a sort of "story of the first theatre". They suppose that the primeval theatre can be deduced from study of the whole history of theatre in human cultures, and imagine a seminal event, where primitive hominins use performance for the first time as a conscious means of communicating ideas and (more importantly), culture.

I've never stopped to dismiss this storification of cultural history, even though it is exactly that. I dare say that part of the creation of theatre was a spontaneous act driven by a need to communicate something that could not be communicated any other way, but I also think that artifice is the core of the theatre. A very special kind of artifice, since all those who are members of a theatre's culture collude in the acceptance (known, on little evidence, as "willing suspension of disbelief") that the Stage is all the World.

I think this artifice is absent from story, because while theatre is an act of tribe or of culture—it confirms, reinforces, emphasises, the distinguishing characteristics of the culture to which it belongs even when it is challenging it—storytelling is an act of socialisation. I think that we hear and we tell stories as a way of making sense of eachother and of ourselves.

That's why it's essential that young children go through a phase of "telling tall tales". The child is practising the social activity of relating life and relating to life through stories. The child has observed that when others tell stories of a particular kind, it provokes a particular reaction, and the child wants to participate in this activity and in its consequences, and it makes little difference to the child whether a story is "true" or not. Indeed, the child is not lying any more than a cat is being cruel when it plays with a mouse.

The cat's life depends on its ability to hunt, and every opportunity to practise improves the cat's chances of hunting into it's old age. Storytelling is no less vital a skill for a human being to learn.

So I was wondering whether there was some element of those tall tales told by young children which is universal to, or which underlies, all stories.

One of the people who commented on my previous post suggested that I was failing to distinguish Narrator from Writer. This may have been so, but I am beginning to suspect that if anything, writers are making too much of a false distinction between them.

Even when Conan-Doyle is "narrating as Watson", he is still Conan-Doyle. Philip Marlowe is Chandler. Even Ishmael is largely Melville and Crusoe is much more Dafoe than he is Crusoe. It is all too easy to think of the narrator as someone else; I think that there are times when, even when the writer intends the narrator to be seen as a character, as a creation, that the writer should be careful not to forget that this is an artifice, an artifice in which the reader's complicity is required for it to succeed, and that (therefore) the reader's complicity must be sought.

Everything is 3rd Person Omniscient

This post arises from the following claim, that I made in my last post:

All stories are in 3rd person omniscient, whether you like it or not. Some stories look as if they are, and they are. Some stories look as if they are not, and they are.

So what does this mean?

I make this statement from time to time, and it's based more on a hunch than (thus far) a cogent argument. So rather than my usual rambling edifice, I'm going to try to explain why I have this hunch, or possibly instinct.

Firstly, a story needs someone to tell it. A real person. Whether he writes on the page or recounts to the room, he is a real, physical presence.

If a story has been made up, it must have been made up by someone. Since it comes from their imagination, they must know everything about the story, because anything they don't know, they can make up. Hence omniscient. The writer is always omniscient.

Non-omniscient points of view are a technique for restricting the flow of information from the writer to the reader, but the writer is always omniscient.

Can I tell a story where I'm not omniscient? If I told a true story, where I told my side of the story, based on what I knew, I suppose it would be 1st person restricted, but I doubt whether a POV definition is really meaningful in such a case. True stories become memoires, anecdotes and even biographies, because someone has, after the event, decided to present the event as a story. In such cases the writer knows more than he did at the time - if nothing else, he knows how the story will end, which he didn't know when the event was happening.

Which suggests to me that the writer is always omniscient.

But I also have this instinct that even POV is an illusion. 1st (or 2nd) person POVs are a sort of frame for 3rd person.

Now Robinson Crusoe is written in first person. Initially this presents me with a difficulty; one might suppose that storytelling arises from a need to communicate the events of one's life to others, and hence 1st person comes first. But a translation inevitably occurs, even in the mind of the teller: I am telling you a story about something that happened to me. Not me now, but me then. Every story must have an object, and that object is about me.

The main character of a story, then, is that story's object, the accusative of the story that is about him. That doesn't imply a 3rd person, but something does.

I think that something is related to the fact of knowing the ending; any telling, any bearing witness, becomes a story once the witness knows the end. Once the beginning, the middle, and the end become matters of the teller's choice, he will choose them according to his ideal of a good story. This encapsulation transforms real past events into a story. And this transformation into a discrete idea, "a story", separates the actors in the story from the continuum of their daily lives. Their story-self becomes someone else: a character. Once this story-self is created, the story can be passed on wholesale to another teller, who, knowing that it is not about him, may now chuse to tell it in the 3rd person, without changing the story.

I contend, indeed, that the "first person true story" only has a special effect on those who know personally the teller; for everyone else, it is a story whose truth is judged not on the claim of truth, but on the same standard as all "made up" stories: verisimilitude, or the appearance of truth. Hence the main character, the actor narrator, is for those who do not know him, a 3rd person.

To summarize, here, then, is what I think happens:

The writer knows all about the story, because he knows when it starts, he knows what happens throughout, and he knows how it ends, even at the beginning. The writer also knows who the story is about. The object of the story is a person that the writer has chosen to be the object. For me, these two facts make any story 3rd person omniscient.

The writer can them simply start writing.

Or he can chuse, for a variety of literary or strategic or even marketing purposes, to add an extra layer, the "imaginary narrator". He might, like Watson, know the whole story but not understand all of it, or be a POV that is really no more than a POV, like a man piecing together a story from security camera footage. I imagine the choices must be pretty broad, and many of them probably add a great deal to the variety and intensity of the reader's experience.

But behind all of them is the archetype of the story being told. And the archetype, the platonic ideal of any story, is related in the past tense, in the 3rd person, by an all knowing narrator*.

____

* at least, I think so. That's how it looks to me. But I wonder, Wittgensteinlike, how it would look to me if it looked as if it was all present tense first person restricted? I think I need to go lie down.