Jena, an Inn Dr. Werner Rolfinck, Dean of the Jena Medical College, was quietly seething. Beside him, Doctors Conrad "Kunz" Herbers and Wilhelm "Willi" Hofacker, both lecturers in iatrochemistry, were also suppressing their anger. There, in pride of place in one of the best inns in Jena, that charlatan Dr. Gribbleflotz was describing his philosophies to an enthralled audience. "This up-time "chemic,"" Dr. Gribbleflotz was saying, "is fine for technicians, cooks, and industrial processes. It certainly allows unlettered peasants to tend my caldrons and alembics and produce their powders and potions, but it completely ignores the spiritual component of alchemy." Phillip looked over his attentive audience. "Did you know that the up-timers produced Sal Vin Betula pills which were white?" At his audience"s collective shaking of heads, Phillip nodded. "Yes, it is true. White. For a pill that is supposed to reduce pain and reduce fever. When every competent alchemist knows blue is a soothing color that reduces pain and a cool color that reduces fever. They are such children in the Great Art. As my Great Grandfather Paracelsus- whose namesake I am-said: it isn"t enough to treat the body, one must treat the spirit. Which is why my amazing headache pills are superior to what the up-timers have, for my Sal Vin Betula pills are pale blue. Yes, Dr. Gribbleflotz"s Little Blue Pill is your friend."
Phillip paused for breath. He looked up, made eye contact with Doctors Rolfinck, Herbers, and Hofacker. He raised a hand in silent greeting before continuing his discourse.
"The nerve of the man. Did you see that? He waved to us as if we were his colleagues,"
muttered Dr. Rolfinck. "We are going to have to do something about the man. His conceit is beyond words. We have to do something about him."
Dr. Hofacker shook his head. "Our hands are tied, Dr. Rolfinck. The radio people pa.s.sed on the news that Dr. Gribbleflotz holds a doctorate from an inst.i.tution of some stature. It is best we ignore him."
While the doctors drank to drown their sorrows, on the other side of the common room Phillip continued to talk to his audience. He was getting into his stride talking about the topic dearest to him. Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz.
"Of course there are some up-timers that have a clue. I have been pursuing references in their library"s collection about pyramids, and crystal power. While much of it is obviously in conflict with well-established systems, some of their points are most amazing." Phillip removed his spectacles and drew a special up-time cleaning cloth from a pocket in his up-time style jacket. He exhaled onto the lenses and wiped them. After he slid the spectacles on, he smiled at his audience. "I am particularly interested in the combination of gems with the new metal, aluminum.
My careful calculations, corroborated by a most interesting tome in the Grantville Public Library, suggests that a pyramid composed of aluminum members with the appropriate colors and cuts of gems at the strategic points, especially these new faceted gems, could result in the invigoration of the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors. I am most anxious to pursue it. But as always, funding is problematic. Perhaps the new Aeolian Crystals will a.s.sist in it."
Phillip looked over his audience again. He had them in the palm of his hand. Tonight"s crowd would be happy to go home and spread the words of Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the Worlds Greatest Alchemist.
"You have heard of the Gribbleflotz Aeolian Crystals I am supplying the up-time radio technicians?" It was a rhetorical question. Aeolian Crystals were too new for any of the audience to have heard of them yet. "They allow the conversion of the Essences of Lightning the technicians have captured in their singing wires to be converted into sensible sounds. The crystals themselves sing. The up-timers insist on referring to them as "Roch.e.l.le salts," but I can a.s.sure you that they have no parallel in Roch.e.l.le, or any other part of France. No, the singing Aeolian Crystals are a purely German product of German alchemy and up-time technology." Dr.
Gribbleflotz paused dramatically. "We are calling the "earphones" Gribbleflotz" Aeolian Transformers. They are much better than those simplistic mechanical earphones produced by the jewelers" guild. Wire and bits of Iron! Ha! Cold Iron can never compete for the spirits of Sound with Salts of Sound Itself!!"
NON-FICTION
Exegesis and Interpretation of Up-timer Printed Matter
by Francis Turner
Derived from my Hobson"s Choice story, this article is about a subject that I think people frequently think is simpler than it actually is. It is my belief that down-timers who get their hands on purloined up-time books will generally have a hard time figuring out what is being talked about. Of course, in Grantville this is not too much of a problem since there are plenty of people who can interpret and/or answer questions. But a copy of a copy that makes its way to Spain (say) is going to be a whole different kettle of fish.
Some things to consider when examining a modern magazine from the point of view of a down-timer are: 1. linguistic changes including new words from foreign tongues (kamikaze, thug, gringo), chaynges inn spelinge, slang . . .
2. hidden a.s.sumptions of technology or science (e.g. electricity) 3. geographic changes (names of countries, regions, cities etc.) 4. advertis.e.m.e.nts
What Is Exegesis?
Exegesis is defined in the dictionary as "Exposition; explanation; especially, a critical explanation of a text or portion of Scripture." It is the sort of thing that monks, theologians and other literate people of the seventeenth century did all the time and is a word they would understand even if it is somewhat less well known today. Interpretation of a text is effectively just a translation; exegesis attempts to put the translation into context. Exegesis is the piecing together of clues from a variety of sources to arrive at the "correct" meaning for an obscure piece of text.
When the King James Bible was translated it involved a large amount of exegesis. The translators attempted (with only indifferent success) to locate Greek, Aramaic and Latin versions of the bible and then compare the different versions to try to determine what the original text was that should then be rendered into seventeenth-century English.
One thing that exegesis tries to solve is the case where there is a choice of meanings because a word has mutated over time or is a h.o.m.onym. A good example of this is the seventy-two virgins that some interpretations of the Koran believe is the reward awaiting martyrs in heaven.
Because of the way the Koran was written down originally there is considerable dispute about whether the relevant word really means virgins; it could apparently mean a lot of things, including a sort of white grape.
How Long Will This Be A Problem?
For historians in the 1632 universe, it will always be a problem because English will not develop in the same way as it did in this universe. For the majority of people, though, it is likely to be a shorter duration problem because eventually all the useful up-time literature will be translated into down-timer German and probably Latin and possibly English and French.
Moreover, there will also be produced basic primers of up-timer English and culture that will a.s.sist those who need the knowledge in much the same way that we use phrasebooks and dictionaries when traveling today. But, of course, anyone who stumbles across an up-timer newspaper hidden in an attic in 1793 will need to go and find a professional historian to help translate or dig up his primer of up-timer English.
Undoubtedly, in Grantville and surrounding/allied territories such primers will be quickly available, however although they can help with problems 1 and 3 above (and explain the concept of 4), problem 2 is going to remain a problem for people who haven"t been exposed to the relevant technology. Without knowledge of what an automobile is, for example, expressions such as "when the rubber hits the road," or "putting your foot to the floor," or "coming to a screeching halt" can be translated but the translation will lack much of the subtlety of the original and may therefore contribute to a cascading series of misinterpretations like the virgin/grape confusion mentioned above. However, such primers will never be able to list all concepts and phrases and will never be universally distributed so problems will remain. Scholars who are not allied with Grantville and lack direct access will undoubtedly study obscure up-timer texts for quite a few years and they will need the techniques of exegesis to do so successfully.
The Challenges of Up-timer English The greatest challenge is undoubtedly that the up-timer doc.u.ments are in English. Thus the first requirement for a down-timer who has gotten his hands on some Grantville printed matter is to locate someone who can read English well, which is not as simple as one might think.
Although Tudor and early Stuart England (and Scotland) had produced many works that today are universally recognized as cla.s.sics, in the 1630"s their fame had yet to escape the British Isles. English was, quite simply, not a language much learned in the 1630"s by foreigners. The international language of scholarship was Latin and works not written in Latin were generally shunned. Thus most people would learn their own native tongue and Latin during their education.
Further languages learned would generally be the ones of the major continental powers, that is to say, German, French and Spanish. Indeed this remained generally true for a considerable period.
An ancestor of mine who traveled central and southern Europe in the mid 1800"s had a number of useful conversations with academics and clerics in Latin since he did not speak either Italian or German and some of his conversants could not speak French (his other modern language).
Merchants and traders would, of course, learn other tongues; thus countries with trade with England, such as Holland and France, might have significant numbers of English speakers, especially in cities and ports, but other lands would typically have extremely limited numbers of them.
The second related challenge is the malleability of English and the lack of reference materials. To understand this it helps to look at works published in English at the time. Consider, for example, Hakluyt"s Voyages, which was produced near the end of Elizabeth"s reign, or the various versions of the Book of Common Prayer. One is immediately struck with the lack of the letter J and the mixing up of U and V not to mention the usage of Y as the (Icelandic) thorn (? = th sound) and the frequent abbreviation of common words. Today we have different idiosyncrasies, such as the acronym, which would appear just as peculiar to a seventeenth century reader. Spelling was quite radically different (and inconsistent) and although there was an English dictionary (Robert Cawdrey"s Table Alphabeticall, first printed in 1604) it only contained about three thousand words, many of which are not used (or used differently) today.
The third related challenge is the changes in handwriting. This will not, of course, apply to people who manage to get original books or photocopies, but those unfortunates who end up with handwritten copies or stolen notes will discover problems. Again this sort of thing is easy enough to figure out when you have someone to ask but it is a lot harder if you are stuck on your own without anyone to help.
When Interpretation Is Easy Sometimes, of course, it is reasonable for down-timers to find it easy to understand up-timer literature. Exegesis is easy when the book is intended to teach. Encyclopediae are easy and school textbooks are generally easy because they will proceed in a logical fashion and will have diagrams and sidebars explaining things. In addition, the context of the words are easy to grasp and, generally speaking, refer back to things discussed earlier. Of course book 3 of high school physics (for example) may refer back to things in book 2, but in my experience there will be a short reminder section before anything that is complex and important. Even in the event of excerpts (such as a particular entry in an encyclopedia), the text will normally be simple and not require additional data. Consider a random article in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica for example: INDIAN OCEAN, the ocean bounded N. by India and Persia; W. by Arabia and Africa, and the meridian pa.s.sing southwards from Cape Aguihas; and E. by Farther India, the Sunda Islands, West and South Australia, and the meridian pa.s.sing through South Cape in Tasmania.
As in the case of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the southern boundary is taken at either 40 5., the line of separation from the great Southern Ocean, or, if the belt of this ocean between the two meridians named be included, at the Antarctic Circle. It attains its greatest breadth, more than 6000 m. between the south points of Africa and Australia, and becomes steadily narrower towards the north, until it is divided by the Indian peninsula into two arms, the Arabian Sea on the west and the Bay of Bengal on the east. Both branches meet the coast of Asia almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, but the Arabian Sea communicates with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf by the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and Ormuz respectively. Both of these, again, extend in a north-westerly direction to 30 N. Murray gives the total area, reckoning to 40 S. and including the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, as 17,320,550 English square miles, equivalent to 13,042,000 geographical square miles. Karstens gives the area as 48,182,413 square kilometres, or 14,001,000 geographical square miles; of these 10,842,000 square kilometres, or 3,150,000 geographical square miles, about 22% of the whole, lie north of the equator. For the area from 40 S. to the Antarctic Circle, Murray gives 9,372,600 English square miles, equivalent to 7,057,568 geographical square miles, and Karstens 24,718,000 square kilometres, equivalent to 7,182,474 geographical square miles. The Indian Ocean receives few large rivers, the chief being the Zambezi, the Shat-el-Arab, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Irawadi. Murray estimates the total land area draining to the Indian Ocean at 5,o5o,ooo geographical square miles, almost the same as that draining to the Pacific. The annual rainfall draining from this area is estimated at 4380 cubic miles. . . .
In this geographic article the only elements required would be knowledge of place names, longitude and lat.i.tude and the length of a mile/kilometer and, as the article progresses, the definition of the temperature degrees. There are occasional more complex words and references to obscure things (e.g. cable ships) but they rarely disturb the narrative and provide corroborating detail rather than vital facts.
Exegesis is also easy when the subject matter is historical to the up-timers. In this case, there will probably be less new technology involved and less scientific terminology that will be unfamiliar to a 1632 reader. For example, the previous entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (Indian Mutiny) describes dragoons, artillery, various places in India and so on but lacks words about technology. Even explicitly technological articles are easy so long as the reader either is uninterested in precise details (e.g. the knowledge that vanadium is a metal may be sufficient for getting the gist of an article about steel) or has access to something that provides the interpretation of the necessary details.
Misunderstanding the Basics Let us consider a short amusing tagline such as might be found in a current affairs magazine or a book on political theory: "For every action there is an equal and opposite government program."
How is a poor down-timer going to work out what this is about?
To begin with at least three words are going to be confusing.
1. action has almost certainly changed its meaning, Cawdrey defines it as "the forme of a suite" which sounds like the definition of a legal action (today we talk about some statement as being "actionable"). Also in French "action" these days can mean a share in a quoted company (i.e. the same as the German AG-Aktiegesellshaft) so it is quite possible that a down-timer will think this refers to a lawsuit or a company share.
2. government is a word of misleadingly similar meaning (government is the act or method of governing, it does not mean the bureaucracy, etc., that it does today).
3. program is a word yet to be coined (and in this case one may find misleading meanings in looking at the word in other contexts-"government program" is not the same as "computer program" or "program of events").
Then, once that little difficulty has been taken care of, there is the minor issue of the fact that this is a deliberate misquotation of Newton"s third law of motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Quite a lot of the reason why this quip is considered so apposite is that it equates government with the conservation of momentum and the like. Without understanding Newton, even if someone understands the words, there is something lacking. In the 1630"s Galileo has just about invented the concept of inertia (which becomes Newton"s first law) but the concept of a force and hence the concepts of conservation of momentum in a closed system need a good deal more brain work. Anyone exposed solely to cla.s.sical Aristotelian laws of motion would utterly miss the point because these laws were (not to put too fine a point on it) wrong.
Newton"s Third Law is just one of the thousands of phrases and quips which we expect educated people to be familiar with. There are many others. Just simple slang such as "Frog" for Frenchman or "Limey" for Englishman would be unfamiliar to a seventeenth century reader since they were coined in the eighteenth century.
Phrases That Flummox The Down-timers A more complex example of a phrase that we take for granted is that "something is the last straw" (see below for where I used it). This phrase "the last straw" is an excellent example of a phrase that will be utterly incomprehensible to a down-timer. In seventeenth- century English there was an expression ""Tis the last feather that breaks the horse"s back" which has since dropped out of use, replaced by "The straw that broke the camel"s back" once the latter was coined by Charles d.i.c.kens. d.i.c.kens" expression has then been then shortened because everyone knows about the camel to being just "the last straw." A seventeenth-century native English speaker might be sufficiently smart to figure out that where they talked about the last feather, twentieth-century English talked about the last straw but I"d be surprised. A seventeenth-century nonnative English speaker is going to look at the phrase, understand every word, and still have no idea what it refers to. Indeed it is quite possible that such a speaker, if he knows about shoemaking will wonder if "last straw" is straw for making lasts (i.e. molds of people"s feet) and wonder why twentieth-century Americans used straw when in the seventeenth century they use wood.
The problem gets worse when you involve foreign languages-especially when the foreign language has seen the meaning change. For example people talk about someone mounting a "kamikaze attack" on something or someone else. Unless the context makes it clear what a kamikaze attack is then this phrase is going to be meaningless. If by some mischance the word kamikaze is recognized as being j.a.panese then this will be a complete "red herring." To the seventeenth-century j.a.panese the Kamikaze was the wind sent by the G.o.ds protecting j.a.pan that sunk and drove off the invading Mongol fleets in the late thirteenth century. There is no idea of suicide or self sacrifice in this meaning whatsoever. Amusingly, it is just possible that a seventeenth-century reader would understand what a "red herring" was since the Oxford English Dictionary quotes this phrase first appearing in print in The Gentleman"s Recreation by Nicholas c.o.x in 1686: The trailing or dragging of a dead Cat, or Fox, (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles . . . and then laying the Dogs on the scent.
Again the joke that "the French have no word for entrepreneur" would be literally true with regards to seventeenth-century France since at that time the root of the word-the verb "entreprendre"-just means to undertake something with all the connotations of risk taking lacking.
Simple phrases that come about because of a technology are going to be not just incomprehensible but inexplicable. Rocket science and rocket scientists are going to be misunderstood because in seventeenth-century Europe rockets are fireworks, no one has invented the words science or scientist and even once these two concepts have been derived the reason why rocket science is considered so difficult and requiring intellect will not be understood. On the other hand "brain surgery" would be something that a seventeenth-century person might be able to grasp if he were a bright spark but not if he were a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
The Advertis.e.m.e.nt Problem Newspapers and magazines were not exactly widespread in the 1630"s and the publishing model of today-where the basic costs are met through advertising revenue-was utterly lacking.
A person who has never seen an advert is likely to be extremely confused when one interrupts the flow of an article. Ads, moreover, tend to deliberately push the bounds of language as well as of taste. If you are a person who is already struggling, having to get your head around adverts is likely to be the last straw. An ad will probably be both incomprehensible in its own right as a stand alone-what do you think a seventeenth-century person is going to get out of an ad for v.i.a.g.r.a with Bob Dole for example?-but may also derail the comprehension of the article surrounding it. Flip through Time or Newsweek and you"ll see ads taking up parts of a page in the same way that "sidebars" and graphs that relate to the article do. How is a person who is struggling with the language anyway going to be able to determine that the advert is irrelevant- especially when the concept of advertising is so missing?
A Worked Example of Incomprehension What I am doing in this section is subjecting a piece of text to line by line a.n.a.lysis; weblog readers may like to think of this as a seventeenth-century fisking. The text I am using is from the March 22, 1999 issue of Time magazine. I"m only picking this because it is on the Internet so we can all read it- Let"s start with the t.i.tle and lead in.
Bill Gates" New Rules In Business @ the Speed of Thought, Microsoft"s chairman says that only managers who master the digital universe will gain compet.i.tive advantage BY BILL GATES.
Interestingly @ may be understood almost correctly since its use as an abbreviation for the Latin ad (meaning to or towards) derives from medieval monks and was used to represent individual unit cost or weight (e.g. 6 apples @ $1.10 each ) in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi.
On the other hand there are quite a few words where confusion could arise.
Microsoft is not something that looks like a (company) name to seventeenth-century eyes, thus a "smallsoft" could perhaps be a.s.sumed to be some kind of cushion.
Chairman might be understood as the carrier of a sedan chair (introduced into London in 1634 but known in France and southern Europe for quite some time earlier). This would almost make sense of the small cushion.
Digital would probably be a.s.sumed to be something to do with fingers or toes.
It is quite possible that business (meaning company or enterprise) and the idea of a manager (as opposed to an owner) would be misunderstood.
If the 1980"s were about quality and the 1990"s were about re-engineering, then the 2000"s will be about velocity. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business-process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity is great enough, the very nature of business changes.
Even ignoring the words such as "re-engineering" and "lifestyle" the first paragraph is so full of management consultant speak that I predict that it would convey very little meaning to a seventeenth-century reader (arguably it conveys very little to a twenty-first-century one either).
The fact that consumers might be thought to be consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis sufferers) is just an additional detail.
To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It"s like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system-the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers.
The noun function is defined by Cawdrey as "calling, or charge, or trade, and place wherein a man liueth." This is an excellent example of a word that has changed meaning-the fact that it has then been turned into a verb is just the frosting on the cake. Develop is likely to be another word which is only partially comprehended and thought to mean something like unfold or unwrap, that is the opposite of envelope. Nerves according to Cawdrey are sinews and humane means "belonging to man, gentle, curteous, bounteous" thus even if system is understood (it may not be) a human nervous system is not going to be something that is understood.
A company is likely to be understood in terms of a military organization, although, of course, there were also trading companies such as the East India Company or the Muscovy Company.
The connection between company and business is likely to be unclear and their relationship with customers, a word which Hakluyt used to mean Customs officials though it may also be used in the twentieth-century sense as well, is almost certain to be misconstrued. Cawdrery defines decision as "cutting away," in the context of soldiers interacting with tax gatherers this makes some sort of sense-in the haakaa paalle sense that is!
A rough translation of this paragraph might therefore be: To trade in the age of fingers we have unfolded a new way to make a finger"s internal structure. This is like a bounteous collection of sinews. Groups of soldiers need to have the same collection of sinews. The capability (for soldiers?) to run in a good smooth fashion, to respond to changes good and bad, to quickly get learning about loot to the people in the military group who need to know, the ability to kill revenuers and tax inspectors quickly.
The successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that use digital tools to reinvent the way they work. To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are 12 key steps.
Again a rough translation should suffice: The successful military group of the next ten years will be the ones who use finger tools to reinvent the way they work. To make finger learning liquid an internal part of your regiment here are 12 keys (for feet?) One could continue but I think I"ll stop here as I believe I have made my point. Examining text word by word is an excellent way to produce meaningless or misleading garbage.
Exegesis to the Rescue So how might exegesis help dispel the vast fog of incomprehension that would face a hypothetical translator of the previous Time article?
If the article has been ripped from the magazine (or copied from it just on its own) and there are no other accompanying doc.u.ments then there will be a lot of problems. The clever English and French scholars who deciphered lost Middle Eastern languages were helped because there was a lot of text for them to study. One reason why no one has yet managed to totally decipher Etruscan is that there are only a handful of tombstones written in Etruscan, however down-timers are unlikely to have just a single article to study; either they will have an entire magazine/book or they will have a series of clippings.
As the various doc.u.ments are studied some word usage will become clearer. Thus it will become clear that (for example) corporation, company, enterprise and business are frequently synonyms and mean a commercial organization that produces, trades and sells things in a way similar to the aforementioned East India Company. Likewise customers, consumers, decisions, and so on. Even little words such as "key" will be understood as being used in a metaphorical way to mean critical, important etc. so that "key steps," "key points," "key issues" are understood to have nothing to do with locks. On the other hand it is quite possible there will be surprising gaps-the translation of "nerve" as "sinew" may remain because the existence and function of nerves is not known even though derivative expressions such as "nervous" and "getting on someone"s nerves" could well be determined from context.
Another simple thing that exegesis can do is identify t.i.tles, acronyms and other simple abbreviations. It only takes a single doc.u.ment to write a phrase like "This is a problem facing many Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)" for the whole range of related acronyms be understood as job t.i.tles of the form Chief something Officer. Since both Chief and Officer are understandable to determine that anyone who is a Chief something Officer (CxO) is a senior manager within a company. Similarly, seeing a phrase like "companies such as Microsoft Inc., IBM Inc. are facing . . ." will help derive another rule: that Inc. identifies the previous word or words as a company name. This allows lists of company names to be created and thus when a different article just writes "Microsoft" or "Ford" there is no need to wonder what a "smallsoft" is or what river crossings have to do with motor vehicles.
However, this is just the first stage-it means that words that had some sort of counterpart in the seventeenth century can be translated and that names can be identified as names and possibly cla.s.sified. The next stage is to start understanding new technologies and concepts. This is probably the main reason for reading these up-time doc.u.ments but it is considerably more complex. For example, a word such as digital will cause a lot of trouble. "Digital," as used in the late twentieth century, is strongly entangled with computers and telecommunications and these are not technologies that are easily understood. But exegesis will help to elucidate both the meaning and some of the underlying technological concepts.
In order to understand "Digital" it will help to understand "Digit" and this latter is likely to be a simple task. Even when other words in the phrase do not make sense, enough exposure to phrases such as "3 digit area code," "7 digit telephone number" or "5 digit ZIP code" will help explain that digit means the numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. From that it will be possible to determine that "Digital" means "numerical" or "to do with numbers." This will not always help: "Digital Information" could be understood as lists of numbers and "digital communication" the technique of transferring numbers from one place to another. Both are in a strict sense true, but additional exegesis will be needed to determine that this digital includes nonnumeric data encoded as a series of digits. This is a complicated concept and in our universe it was not really developed until the mid to late eighteenth century. However, encryption by subst.i.tution is something that is understood so with the right clues the idea of replacing letters with numbers can also be figured out. This may be a case where 1-800 numbers in ads are useful. Quite often the numbers are repeated as both mnemonic text and number such as "1-800-PRODUCT (1-800-776- 3828)" and "1-800-BUY THIS (1-800-289-8447)"; enough of these examples will show that that letters A-Z can be mapped to the numbers 2-9 in a consistent manner and this will then lead to the idea that any doc.u.ment can be represented as a stream of digits.
Bibliography
Cawdrey"s Table Alphabeticall is available on line via Renaissance Electronic Texts at I have created a look up version at