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71-575: Alexander Thom (26 March 1894 – 7 November 1985) was a Scottish engineer most famous for his theory of the Megalithic yard , categorisation of stone circles and his studies of Stonehenge and other archaeological sites. Thom was born in Carradale in 1894 to Archibald Thom, a tenant farmer at Mains farm for Carradale House, and his wife Lily Stevenson Strang from the family of Robert Louis Stevenson . Her mother (Thom's grandmother) belonged to

142-610: A plane crash in 1945. He suggested several were built as astronomical complexes to predict eclipses via nineteen-year cycles. Thom went on to identify numerous solar and stellar alignments at stone circles, providing the foundations for the scientific discipline of archaeoastronomy . He further suggested the prehistoric peoples of Britain must have used a solar method of keeping calendar. Based on statistical histograms of observed declinations at horizon marks with no convenient star at −22°, +8°, +9° and +22° (except possibly Spica at +9°) between 2100 and 1600 BCE, he suggested

213-490: A 2 × 1 remen rectangle." see figure at right. The main weakness in this argument is probably that, in order to derive their yard, the builders of the megalithic monuments would have needed the remen and royal cubit, upon which this geometrical relationship relies. However, since the megalithic constructs of the British Isles and northern France predate the pyramids by millennia, this supposed counter-argument

284-440: A final book Stone Rows and Standing Stones , a 557 page tome published posthumously with the assistance of Aubrey Burl in 1990. Thom died on 7 November 1985 at Fort William hospital, aged 91. His body was buried near Ayr . Alexander Thom is survived by his daughter Beryl Austin, and his grandchildren. His son Archie survived him, but died ten years later, in 1995, from a brain tumour. In 1970, Thom appeared on

355-538: A highly accurate unit" and "little justification for the claim that a highly accurate unit was in use". In his book Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland. Aubrey Burl calls the megalithic yard "a chimera, a grotesque statistical misconception." Most researchers have concluded that there is marginal evidence for a standardized measuring unit, but that it was not as uniform as Thom believed. Some commentators upon Thom's megalithic yard (John Ivimy and then Euan Mackie ) have noted how such

426-727: A language with some independent meaning . Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching . Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect . Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over

497-657: A large family from Symington , upon whom had been bestowed the land by Robert the Bruce . His father trained the Church choir while his mother was pianist. Thom spent his early years at Mains farm until moving to The Hill farm at Dunlop , Ayrshire. Instilled with a good work ethic by his father, Thom taught himself industrial engineering and entered college in Glasgow in 1911 where he studied alongside John Logie Baird . In 1912 he attended summer school at Loch Eck where he

568-448: A length of 20 digits". A square with side length equal to the diagonal of a square with side length equal to one remen has an area of one square royal cubit, ten thousand (a myriad) of which defined an Egyptian land measure, the setat. John Ivimy noted that "The ratio MY : Rc is SQRT(5) : SQRT(2) to the nearest millimeter, which makes the MY equal to SQRT(5) remens, or the length of

639-461: A measure could relate to geometrical ideas found historically in two Egyptian metrological units; the remen of about 1.2 feet and royal cubit of about 1.72 feet. The remen and royal cubit were used to define land areas in Egypt: "On documentary and other evidence Griffith came to the conclusion that the square on the royal cubit was intended to be twice that on the remen; and Petri identified the remen as

710-876: A pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival comparatives ) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. Some languages are isolating , and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative whose words tend to have many easily separable morphemes (such as Turkic languages ); others yet are inflectional or fusional because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together (like some Indo-European languages such as Pashto and Russian ). That leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. A standard example of an isolating language

781-589: A period of 3000 years. Thom made a comparison of his megalithic yard with the Spanish vara , the pre-metric measurement of Iberia, whose length was 2.7425 feet (0.8359 m). Archaeologist Euan Mackie noticed similarities between the megalithic yard and a unit of measurement extrapolated from a long, marked shell from Mohenjo Daro and ancient measuring rods used in mining in the Austrian Tyrol . He suggested similarities with other measurements such as

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852-761: A possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb): kwixʔid-i-da clubbed- PIVOT - DETERMINER bəgwanəma i -χ-a man- ACCUSATIVE - DETERMINER q'asa-s-is i otter- INSTRUMENTAL - 3SG - POSSESSIVE t'alwagwayu club kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəma i -χ-a q'asa-s-is i t'alwagwayu clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE club "the man clubbed

923-399: A speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words: kwixʔid clubbed i-da-bəgwanəma PIVOT -the-man i χ-a-q'asa hit-the-otter s-is i -t'alwagwayu with-his i -club kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-is i -t'alwagwayu clubbed PIVOT-the-man i hit-the-otter with-his i -club A central publication on this topic is

994-654: A statistical analysis of sites would reveal whether they were measured by pacing or not. In an investigation for the Royal Academy Kendall concluded that there was evidence of a uniform unit in Scottish circles but not in English circles, and that further research was needed. Statistician P. R. Freeman reached similar conclusions and found that two other units fit the data as well as the yard. Douglas Heggie casts doubt on Thom's suggestion as well, stating that his careful analysis uncovered "little evidence for

1065-573: A television documentary produced by the BBC Chronicle series, presented by Magnus Magnusson and featuring well-known archaeologists Dr Euan Mackie , Professor Richard J. C. Atkinson , Dr A. H. A. Hogg , Professor Stuart Piggott , Dr Jacquetta Hawkes , Dr Humphrey Case and Dr Glyn Daniel . The programme discussed the difference between orthodox archaeology and the radical ideas of Thom. A pinnacle of his career, Thom finally got to publicly deliver his message on national television. Despite

1136-418: A word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word-form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem. Word-based morphology

1207-544: A year based on sixteen months; four with twenty two days, eleven with twenty three days, and one with twenty four. Thom's suggested megalithic solar year was divided by midsummer , midwinter , and the two equinoxes into four and then subdivided into eight by early versions of the modern Christian festivals of Whitsun , Lammas , Martinmas , and Candlemas (see Scottish Quarter Days ). He found little evidence for further subdivision into thirty two, but noted "We do not know how sophisticated prehistoric man's calendar was, but

1278-401: Is 'Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought It Was', by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler who propose the 366 geometry theory. Clive Ruggles has said that both classical and Bayesian statistical reassessments of Thom's data "reached the conclusion that the evidence in favour of the MY was at best marginal, and that even if it does exist the uncertainty in our knowledge of its value

1349-549: Is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. Word-and-paradigm approaches are also well-suited to capturing purely morphological phenomena, such as morphomes . Examples to show

1420-418: Is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s , -en and -ren . Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s " in the same sentence. Lexeme-based morphology usually takes what is called an item-and-process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence,

1491-550: Is anachronistic. Recent work by John Michell ( Ancient Metrology , The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth ), John Neal ( All Done with Mirrors ), Richard and Robin Heath (various works on British megalithic circles and on Carnac) make a case for the connection of the megalithic yard with a systemic relation of geodetics and the lunation cycle. A fresh proposal demonstrating a correlation between four units of measure (the royal cubit,

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1562-465: Is called "morphosyntax"; the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated. The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation. Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government . Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog

1633-418: Is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify the distinction. Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter's form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in

1704-424: Is of the order of centimetres, far greater than the 1mm precision claimed by Thom. In other words, the evidence presented by Thom could be adequately explained by, say, monuments being set out by pacing, with the 'unit' reflecting an average length of pace." David George Kendall had previously argued that pacing would have created a greater difference in measurements between sites, he concluded after investigation for

1775-399: Is to dogs as cat is to cats and dish is to dishes . In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning. In each pair, the first word means "one of X", and the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es ) affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities. One of

1846-414: Is why Thom encounters such opposition from certain groups. In his book Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland. Aubrey Burl calls the megalithic yard "a chimera, a grotesque statistical misconception." Archaeoastronomical publications. Megalithic yard Thom suggested that "There must have been a headquarters from which standard rods were sent out but whether this

1917-487: The -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats , and in plurals such as dishes , a vowel is added before the -s . Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", constitute allomorphy . Phonological rules constrain the sounds that can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in

1988-647: The Forth Bridge and later designed flying boats for the Gosport Aircraft Company. In 1917 he married Jeanie Kirkwood with whom he shared a long and lively marriage. He returned to the University of Glasgow and worked as a lecturer from 1922 to 1939, quickly earning his PhD and DSc degrees. He built his own home called Thalassa in 1922, along with a windmill to power it with electricity. His father died in 1924 and he took over running

2059-671: The Iron Age fortified settlement at Borre Fen measured 53.15 inches (135.0 cm) with marks dividing it up into eight parts of 6.64 inches (16.9 cm). Euan Mackie referred to five-eighths of this rod 33.2 inches (84 cm) as " very close to a megalithic yard ". A hazel measuring rod recovered from a Bronze Age burial mound in Borum Eshøj, East Jutland by P. V. Glob in 1875 measured 30.9 inches (78 cm). Keith Critchlow suggested this may have shrunk 0.63 inches (1.6 cm) from its original length of one megalithic yard over

2130-485: The Marāḥ Al-Arwāḥ of Aḥmad b. 'Alī Mas'ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE. The term "morphology" was introduced into linguistics by August Schleicher in 1859. The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form . Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals . For instance,

2201-563: The Metrological Relief in the Ashmolean Museum , Oxford. Thom's proposals were initially ignored or regarded as unbelievable by mainstream archaeologists. Clive Ruggles, citing astronomer Douglas C. Heggie, has said that both classical and Bayesian statistical reassessments of Thom's data "reached the conclusion that the evidence in favour of the megalithic yard was at best marginal, and that even if it does exist

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2272-463: The Royal Academy , that "The hypothesis of a smooth, non-quantal distribution of circle diameters (for Scottish, English and Welsh true circles) is thus rejected at the 1% level." Douglas Heggie casts doubt on Thom's suggestion as well, stating that his careful analysis uncovered "little evidence for a highly accurate unit" and "little justification for the claim that a highly accurate unit

2343-617: The Royal Aircraft Establishment team that developed the first high speed wind tunnel . Later, he was professor and chair of engineering science at Brasenose College , University of Oxford where he became interested in the methods that prehistoric peoples used to build megalithic monuments . Thom became especially interested in the stone circles of the British Isles and France and their astronomical associations. Thom (1955) in which he first suggested

2414-658: The conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense , aspect , mood , number , gender or case , organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables by using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive). The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating

2485-477: The megalithic yard as a standardised prehistoric measurement. He retired from academia in 1961 to spend the rest of his life devoted to this area of research. The Thom Building , housing the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford, built in the 1960s, is named after Alexander Thom. From around 1933 to 1977 Thom spent most of his weekends and holiday periods hefting theodolites and survey equipment around

2556-429: The prosodic -phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes . The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory. Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, but those of

2627-439: The syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has grammatical agreement rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs because the choice between both forms determines

2698-541: The Cultoon stone circle in Islay, also with a positive result. MacKie therefore broadly accepted Thom's conclusions and published new prehistories of Britain.[22] In contrast a re-evaluation of Thom's fieldwork by Clive Ruggles argued that Thom's claims of high accuracy astronomy were not fully supported by the evidence.[23] Nevertheless, Thom's legacy remains strong, Krupp wrote in 1979, "Almost singlehandedly he has established

2769-427: The addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent , for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in- , and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend . There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of

2840-573: The ancient Indian gaz and the Sumerian šu-du3-a . Along with John Michell , Mackie also noted that it is the diagonal of a rectangle measuring 2 by 1 Egyptian remens . Jay Kappraff has noted similarity between the megalithic yard and the ancient Indus short yard of 33 inches (0.84 m). Anne Macaulay reported that the megalithic rod is equal in length to the Greek fathom of (2.072 metres (6.80 ft)) from studies by Eric Fernie of

2911-478: The ancients' and became commonly associated with pseudoscience . In 1975, his wife, Jeanie died. In 1981 he underwent an eye operation and in 1982 he broke a femur falling on ice . He continued to write papers and undertook interviews and correspondence using a dictaphone with the assistance of audio typist, Hilda Gustin. He moved in with his daughter Beryl in 1983 in Banavie . Registered as blind , he concluded

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2982-407: The associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute. In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes . A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently , the morphemes are said to be in- , de- , pend , -ent , and -ly ; pend is the (bound) root and

3053-651: The concept of ' NOUN-PHRASE 1 and NOUN-PHRASE 2 ' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and". An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes , instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", in which 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes

3124-426: The countryside with his family member or friends, most notably with his son Archie. From studies measuring and analysing the data created at over five hundred megalithic sites, he attempted to classify stone circles into different morphological types, Type A, Type B, Type B modified, and Type D flattened circles, Type 1 and Type 2 eggs , ovals and true circles . His son Alan died in

3195-435: The effectiveness of word-based approaches are usually drawn from fusional languages , where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third-person plural". Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation since one says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-process theories, on

3266-610: The farm where he fathered three children, Archibald, Beryl and Alan. Thom helped to develop the Department of Aeronautics at the University of Glasgow and lectured on statistics, practical field surveying, theodolite design and astronomy . From 1930 to 1935 he was a Carnegie Teaching Fellow . During the Second World War , Thom moved to Fleet in Hampshire where he was appointed Principal Scientific Officer heading

3337-545: The form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between dog and dog catcher , or dependent and independent . The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives. An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation. The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact,

3408-461: The heavy criticism, he never vented his frustration on the archaeological profession; as he said in the Chronicle programme, "I just keep reporting what I find." Thom's proposed length for the Megalithic yard has been reused as such in several controversial books that claim this unit of measurement is a subdivision of the Earth's circumference in an alleged 366-degree geometry . One such book

3479-401: The history of a language. The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales". Morphology is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology , which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another. Conversely, syntax is concerned with

3550-513: The idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches. Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms: Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian . For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him, there

3621-685: The interesting thing is that he obtained declinations very close to those we have obtained as ideal". Thom explored these topics further in his later books The last was written with his son Archie, after they carried out a detailed survey of the Carnac stones from 1970 to 1974. Thom's ideas met with resistance from the archaeological community but were welcomed amongst elements of 1960s counter-culture . Along with Gerald Hawkins ' new interpretation of Stonehenge as an astronomical 'computer' (see Archaeoastronomy and Stonehenge ), Thom's theories were adopted by numerous enthusiasts for 'the lost wisdom of

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3692-411: The language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs] , which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. To "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats : it depends on

3763-449: The largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen , goose/geese , and sheep/sheep whose difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern or is not signaled at all. Even cases regarded as regular, such as -s , are not so simple;

3834-438: The lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate . Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat . Eat and Eater , on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts. Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin , one way to express

3905-405: The new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization ), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept. A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are

3976-587: The next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences. Morphological typology is a distinct field that categorises languages based on the morphological features they exhibit. The history of ancient Indian morphological analysis dates back to the linguist Pāṇini , who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar . The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, including

4047-462: The other hand, often break down in cases like these because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. The approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of

4118-452: The other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In words such as dogs , dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called "item-and-arrangement", treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other (" concatenated ") like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology , seek to maintain

4189-408: The otter with his club." That is, to a speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers - i-da ( PIVOT -'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma ("man") but to the verb; the markers - χ-a ( ACCUSATIVE -'the'), referring to otter , attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. In other words,

4260-418: The present indefinite, 'go' is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes 'goes' to be used. The '-es' is therefore an inflectional marker that is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category , but in the process of inflection,

4331-441: The quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme . Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon that, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding. There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways: While

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4402-695: The remen, the megalithic yard and the foot) examines the text of Euclid in light of the ancient cosmological implications of the dodecahedron's construction atop a cube. The approach demonstrates that the Egyptian Duat , as an encircled pentagram, is a shorthand glyph for the Platonic quintessence (dodecahedron) and that they both represented the fabric of the celestial canopy covering the earth (cube). In this example, given side AB equals 10 royal cubits (5.236067 meters), then side DB equals 20 remen and line GB equals 1 megalithic yard. The difference between

4473-401: The royal cubit and the megalithic yard is 1 foot. Morphology (linguistics) In linguistics , morphology ( mor- FOL -ə-jee ) is the study of words , including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language . Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes , which are the smallest units in

4544-433: The second kind are rules of word formation . The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). The distinction between inflection and word formation

4615-446: The standards for archaeoastronomical fieldwork and interpretation, and his amazing results have stirred controversy during the last three decades." His influence endures and practice of statistical testing of data remains one of the methods of archaeoastronomy. In his book Genes, Giants, Monsters and Men, Joseph P. Farrell states, "If Thom was right, the development of human civilization may have to be rewritten!" This Farrell surmises

4686-456: The uncertainty in our knowledge of its value is of the order of centimetres, far greater than the 1mm precision claimed by Thom. In other words, the evidence presented by Thom could be adequately explained by, say, monuments being set out by pacing, with the 'unit' reflecting an average length of pace." David George Kendall makes the same argument, and says that pacing would have created a greater difference in measurements between sites, and that

4757-426: The volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic , possessing the grammatical features of independent words but

4828-534: The word never changes its grammatical category. There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding . The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher , therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but

4899-650: Was in these islands or on the Continent the present investigation cannot determine." Margaret Ponting has suggested that artefacts such as a marked bone found during excavations at Dail Mòr near Callanish , the Patrickholme bone bead from Lanarkshire and Dalgety bone bead from Fife in Scotland have shown some evidence of being measuring rods based on the megalithic yard in Britain . An oak rod from

4970-602: Was in use". Euan MacKie, recognising that Thom's theories needed to be tested, excavated at the Kintraw standing stone site in Argyllshire in 1970 and 1971 to check whether the latter's prediction of an observation platform on the hill slope above the stone was correct. There was an artificial platform there and this apparent verification of Thom's long alignment hypothesis (Kintraw was diagnosed as an accurate winter solstice site) led him to check Thom's geometrical theories at

5041-797: Was trained in surveying and field astronomy by Dr David Clark and Professor Moncur. In 1913, aged just 19, he assisted in surveying the Canadian Pacific Rail Network. Thom graduated from the Royal College of Science and Technology and the University of Glasgow in 1914, earning a BSc with special distinction in Engineering. He suffered from a heart murmur and was not drafted during the First World War . Instead he went to work in civil engineering of

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