The Jonathan Fisher House will host a conversation with linguistics scholar Raoul Smith about his experiences discovering and analyzing Jonathan Fisher’s “philosophical alphabet” in the 1970s, held in the Howard Room at the Blue Hill Public Library on Wednesday, September 17 at 7:00 pm.

Fifty years ago, a young linguistics professor at Northwestern happened to notice some cryptic symbols on a painting of a horse in Antiques magazine. Having been an Air Force Russian code breaker, he thought this might be a code, and looking into it led him to discover the unpublished manuscripts of Jonathan Fisher hidden in Rockland’s Farnsworth Museum and Blue Hill’s Fisher House. Fascinated, Raoul Smith obtained national research grants to copy and study all those texts, to keypunch, print, decode, and analyze them, and in the space of a few years he had published many books and articles on Fisher’s scripts and what they tell us about the vocabulary and pronunciation of early New England. He then returned to pure linguistics, became the Director of the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University, and published a Dictionary of Artificial Intelligence in 1989. After retiring in 2000, he has returned to Russian texts.

Professor Smith, now living in Acton MA, will join by Zoom for a conversation moderated by Michael McVaugh, discussing why Fisher’s texts were such a compelling interest in Smith’s early career, how research went in Rockland and Blue Hill at the time, and what he might envision for the future of using computer techniques to decode Fisher’s later shorthand. Members of the audience are encouraged to raise their own questions and participate in the discussion. This program is free of charge and all are welcome.