Wind Direction Words in the Sydney Language: A Case Study in Semantic Reconstitution
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wind direction terms in the Sydney Language differ in the various sources (from the First Fleeters onwards), and at first sight look confused. After some sifting it emerges that the early sources fall into two sets partly relatable by a quarter-turn in the terms for the four cardinal directions. There are also terms for intermediate directions and probably sea and land breezes, and terms relatable to the sun and tides. A recent treatment of the wind direction data by Gibson, who draws as well on work by Troy, interprets the records as indicating that some word meanings shift so much according to context that he questions whether the Sydney Language had words at all. However, there is order discernible here, fitting with regional evidence for the salience of cardinal directions. The main four directions may have been aligned to axes offset from the cardinal directions, or else participate in a kind of location-dependent quarter-turn rotation. I conclude with brief remarks on the methods for detecting order in patchy historical data, and on the public communication of linguistic findings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it