Tjiep-Tjiep, Cuicui, Kvirrevitt

One of Catherine Ball's great pages is that of the sounds of birds in languages worldwide. The title of this post is, hence, Afrikaans, French, and Norwegian—that noble old mix. English has a lot of sounds that cover bird noises, but I'd like to write about them on What Planet. Suffice it to say that they all make good descriptions of what I'm going to do here, which is (to borrow one of them) witter.

Since starting Strange Strands, I've mainly been working on either Phenny or my lights stuff, the latter of which has inspired some interesting lines of research. Yesterday I spent far too long attempting to find out the name of a particular mountain in Turkey, that I still don't know the modern name of, but at least I know it was at one time called "Ziaret" (which should probably be transliterated as "Ziyaret"). It's by Doğanyol, a town in the Malayta Province, according to a meteorological report from 1900.

I've also been writing to various places trying to secure rights of various images and pieces of writing connected to Anomalous Luminous Phenomena. I haven't done much writing around the subject, but I have been thinking about categorisation, especially with respect to William Corliss's categorisation schemes. I've generally been pursuing the colloquial approach of using words as folksonomies: in other words, if culures have invented a word for a phenomenon, then that's as good as a category. It's a radial category, in cognitive linguistics speak. But because of that radiality, that fuzziness to the categories established by the words, you can create a whole new subject just by studying the words—I guess it's a kind of philology. To be more scientific about things, one should pin down the categories with rigorous criteria, if it's possible to do that.

So I've been trying to create a taxonomy of the anomalous forms of light that I'm interested in by classifying them along various axes. For example, whether the lights are attached to objects or free-floating; their scale; the conditions under which they occur; the form of the lights; and so on. It's been interesting to note correspondances between some of these axes, these database columns. For example, free floating lights tend to be less well known to science than those with attachment. Also, attachment seems to correlate with the scale of the phenomenon: non-attached phenomena tend to be larger scale.

Corliss seems to have accidentally scattered some reports of what now have turned out to likely be sprites or blue jets, a lightning phenomenon, across various categories, which indicates that it's very difficult to create categories for things that you don't know the mechanisms behind yet—i.e. purely on their characteristics. So I've been trying to back-apply this to some extent to my beliefs about the kinds of light forms that I'm researching, and one of the conclusions I've had is that I can't say for sure that Will-o'-the-wisps are a chemiluminescent phenomenon. After all, there have been reports that Will-o'-the-wisps are cold flames, rather like St. Elmo's fire, which is electrical in origin. On the other hand, are there any forms of cold combustion in nature? Does phosphene burn so cold that one my heat a brass knob in it for several minutes without it changing in temperature?

Unfortunately this also means that I have to be very careful with the organisation of my site. How does one present such knowledge to the public when there isn't really much structure to it established? The traditional expositionary approach is to make sure that the elements of a thing are as clearly presented as possible, but that's not really possible here since the elements are the one thing that we don't know. There are reams of anecdotes, a few fuzzy pictures, some history, some tentative research, some folklore, some conclusions bandied about by various people over the year, and a very small smattering of scientific research on top of that by dedicated teams. And a few research papers which tend to get ignored.

I still think it likely that ball lightning and earth lights, for example, have the same carrier mechanism but different sources. That'd explain a lot, but on the other hand without a lot more hard data an dsome testable theories, it's difficult to say either way. As soon as you start to theorise, you're basically conjecturing without any means of proof, in this field at the moment. But that does make it an exciting field, since it's still up for grabs.