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Glad to see another China post from Arglebargle. Great as always! The discussion of "if Rome/Carthage did X then we would be on the moon" got me thinking... I've always been interested how North and South America would have been affected if there was no Columbian contact. Would there have been, say, an Incan industrial revolution? If left to their own devices, I wonder if the native societies would have entered into their own "modern era". It's all very pie in the sky though, even moreso than most counterfactual musings in my opinion.
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Oct 3, 2014 21:20
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brozozo posted:Glad to see another China post from Arglebargle. Great as always! Given enough time, no doubt. But my understanding is the written word wasn't particularly developed in the Americas so it probably would've taken them much longer than it actually did. Ironically, the raping and pillaging of their lands probably speeded up the process since it gave a literate civilization access to huge development resources.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:49
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Arglebargle III posted:Yes and you can find it on youtube Thanks for this. All I know about this period (and the novel) basically comes from successive iterations of Dynasty Warriors so I am looking forward to having a vague idea of what is going on. Disappointed they skipped the Yellow Turban Rebellion though, it's a tradition 
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Oct 3, 2014 22:53
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Arglebargle III posted:Decline and Fall of the Han Empire – 184-189 AD This is great, thank you. I read Romance last year and it's great to get a better idea of what the actual history was, beyond the obviously made up stuff. Though even in Romance it is still obvious that Liu Bei was actually a dick.
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Oct 4, 2014 01:13
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Baron Porkface posted:Does anyone with archives have a link to Blurred's old bible history thread? seconding
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Oct 4, 2014 04:27
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Al Harrington posted:seconding  http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3381676&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Oct 4, 2014 04:42
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Exioce posted:Given enough time, no doubt. But my understanding is the written word wasn't particularly developed in the Americas so it probably would've taken them much longer than it actually did. Ironically, the raping and pillaging of their lands probably speeded up the process since it gave a literate civilization access to huge development resources. Lol. Wow. No. First off, human development isn't a single track nor does it proceed towards any one point. Second, there was actually a pretty extensive system of notation, if not an alphabet per say, in most of the Mesoamerican and Andean cultures.
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Oct 4, 2014 16:08
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Mesoamerican written language isn't well recorded because the Spanish systematically destroyed it.
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Oct 4, 2014 16:22
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Was it ever established whether the qipu was a language or a mnemonic?
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Oct 4, 2014 16:36
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The qipu probably wasn't a language although it seemed to have started developing the ability to be complex enough to record language. Essentially similar to the later stages of cuneiform script prior to full-blown writing, when it still mostly expressed number, types of goods, and minimal commercial-use language associated with the prior two.
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Oct 4, 2014 16:43
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See also: http://wintercounts.si.edu/html_version/html/index.html Not a written language, sure, but most Plains Indian bands kept winter counts. They're calendars with pictographs for each year (or winter/summer season in some cases) that were used in conjunction with oral histories. I realize this is not even remotely in the time frame of the anything you'd call ancient or classical, though.
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Oct 4, 2014 18:27
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Arglebargle III posted:Mesoamerican written language isn't well recorded because the Spanish systematically destroyed it. I know the Aztecs had some sort of written record-keeping system. Or I assume they did because in college I read a book featuring descriptions of Cortes's conquests written from the Aztec side. Yup, I remembered rightly. They were the ones the Spanish burnt the poo poo out of.
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Oct 4, 2014 20:26
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Nahuatl had kind of a pictograph system, if this wasn't adequate enough for development on x level or whatever argument you want to make, I don't know I'm not a linguist. Mayan script was a written language as we'd understand it. Natives in central and South America were organized under vast, socially complex state-like systems and in complete isolation were able to achieve scientific achievements that Europeans weren't familiar with. What would happen? To the New World if Europe never showed up is like, the biggest hypothetical in history, but New World societies weren't backwards or behind by any stretch.
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Oct 4, 2014 20:55
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Berke Negri posted:but New World societies weren't backwards or behind by any stretch. That they didn't know what the wheel was is also a myth: 
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Oct 4, 2014 22:47
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brozozo posted:Glad to see another China post from Arglebargle. Great as always! I don't really think so. IMO the industrial revolution was a one-off event triggered specifically in England, and not really the rest of Europe, by a combination of things happening at the right time in the right place. China and India didn't enter the modern era after being at a roughly steady state of development for hundreds of years. If you say, for example, that native Americans hadn't been susceptible to European illnesses and there was no die-off event, it probably would have ended up similar to Subsaharan Africa, with little cultural contact with Europe/the ME/India/China icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 4, 2014 |
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Oct 4, 2014 23:24
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icantfindaname posted:I don't really think so. IMO the industrial revolution was a one-off event triggered specifically in England, and not really the rest of Europe, by a combination of things happening at the right time in the right place. China and India didn't enter the modern era after being at a roughly steady state of development for hundreds of years. If you say, for example, that native Americans hadn't been susceptible to European illnesses and there was no die-off event, it probably would have ended up similar to Subsaharan Africa, with little cultural contact with Europe/the ME/India/China I'd say if Europeans had arrived slightly later and illness wasn't so pandemic that, at least for Central and South America, would have ended up more like China than sub-saharan Africa. In the sense of some colonial ports, foreign pressure on ruling bodies, but still largely un-colonized. Europeans basically showed up right in time for massive civil wars to break out, hopped in on the winning side, and then stood standing after disease took its toll. The whole "thousand spaniards showing up and conquering Mexico" is an exaggeration as its more like a thousand Spaniards and 20,000 indigenous soldiers.
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Oct 4, 2014 23:52
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the JJ posted:Lol. Wow. No. That's kinda my point. Mayan script aside, there doesn't seem to have been an alphabet per say, something that had existed and was relatively widespread in Europe and Asia for several thousand years. Notation is a vastly inferior tool for the transfer and storage of knowledge than an alphabet. That's not to say in an alternate reality where the Americas were left untouched they might not had some lucky leap that took them ahead of Europe, but all things being equal... Why do you think human development (technology specifically) doesn't proceed towards any one point? Oral > Notation > Alphabet seems rather intuitive to me. A civilization might skip the middle step or might not survive long enough to get to the last one, but give it enough time and that's where it'll go. It's like the eye - somewhere nature has gone independently multiple times.
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Oct 4, 2014 23:53
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Exioce posted:That's kinda my point. Mayan script aside, there doesn't seem to have been an alphabet per say, something that had existed and was relatively widespread in Europe and Asia for several thousand years. Notation is a vastly inferior tool for the transfer and storage of knowledge than an alphabet. That's not to say in an alternate reality where the Americas were left untouched they might not had some lucky leap that took them ahead of Europe, but all things being equal... Egypt had a writing system for literally thousands of years without developing an alphabet. How much more time do you think they would have needed?
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Oct 5, 2014 00:11
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Exioce posted:That's kinda my point. Mayan script aside, there doesn't seem to have been an alphabet per say, something that had existed and was relatively widespread in Europe and Asia for several thousand years. Notation is a vastly inferior tool for the transfer and storage of knowledge than an alphabet. That's not to say in an alternate reality where the Americas were left untouched they might not had some lucky leap that took them ahead of Europe, but all things being equal... The Inca Empire was a massive state that had logistics better than most of Europe of the time, down to censuses, delegated federal organization, roads, postal service. The Nahuatl peoples were more like confederations of vast city states but still sophisticated agriculture and trade infrastructure. Central Mexico is very tricky to suss out to because so much was immediately lost but I think it is telling that a latinized script of Nahuatl was created relatively instantly once the Spanish arrived. Pre-Contact New World will always be fascinating because they were so isolated from the millenia of indirect cross-trading of goods and ideas as the rest of the world but it is really wrong to think that they were somehow "behind".
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Oct 5, 2014 00:12
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homullus posted:Egypt had a writing system for literally thousands of years without developing an alphabet. How much more time do you think they would have needed? Impossible to say, of course, but my understanding of Egyptian script was that it was more like the Mayan script than a pure notation system i.e. a mix of pictures and phonetics. Egypt was no doubt slower on the take than its neighbours, perhaps for cultural reasons and many other reasons besides, but it was getting there.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:41
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Berke Negri posted:The Inca Empire was a massive state that had logistics better than most of Europe of the time, down to censuses, delegated federal organization, roads, postal service. The Nahuatl peoples were more like confederations of vast city states but still sophisticated agriculture and trade infrastructure. Central Mexico is very tricky to suss out to because so much was immediately lost but I think it is telling that a latinized script of Nahuatl was created relatively instantly once the Spanish arrived. Pre-Contact New World will always be fascinating because they were so isolated from the millenia of indirect cross-trading of goods and ideas as the rest of the world but it is really wrong to think that they were somehow "behind". Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Americas was behind in every way, no doubt they were ahead in many technologies, but on balance they must have been "behind" overall, because it was not them who sailed across an ocean and had the tech and logistics to conquer two entire continents. Disease of course played a part in that conquest, perhaps even the major component, but if they were "ahead" overall, they would have been the ones bringing their diseases to others rather than the other way round.
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Oct 5, 2014 00:48
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Exioce posted:Impossible to say, of course, but my understanding of Egyptian script was that it was more like the Mayan script than a pure notation system i.e. a mix of pictures and phonetics. Egypt was no doubt slower on the take than its neighbours, perhaps for cultural reasons and many other reasons besides, but it was getting there. China still doesn't use an alphabet. If you want to argue that everybody seems to end up developing or adopting a writing system given the chance, that I'd buy. I don't know of any developed civilization that rejected writing entirely. Then again I guess you wouldn't know about them since... they rejected writing.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:14
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Exioce posted:Impossible to say, of course, but my understanding of Egyptian script was that it was more like the Mayan script than a pure notation system i.e. a mix of pictures and phonetics. Egypt was no doubt slower on the take than its neighbours, perhaps for cultural reasons and many other reasons besides, but it was getting there. I want to be clear here: I am using "alphabet" in the sense of "a writing system of symbols representing consonants and vowels." China has sent a robot to the moon and still has not "advanced" to an alphabet. Egypt would never (really never!) have developed an alphabet without a change to that society. Thousands of years of writing all over the world, and not a single culture (so far as we know) developed a system with symbols representing individual consonants and vowels until the Greeks did. Technological advancement really isn't linear in the way you are imagining. Yes, those leaps are intuitive in retrospect and some cultures made them, but it's not a track or a race.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:29
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homullus posted:I want to be clear here: I am using "alphabet" in the sense of "a writing system of symbols representing consonants and vowels." China has sent a robot to the moon and still has not "advanced" to an alphabet. Egypt would never (really never!) have developed an alphabet without a change to that society. Thousands of years of writing all over the world, and not a single culture (so far as we know) developed a system with symbols representing individual consonants and vowels until the Greeks did. I don't think people usually use that strict a definition. Things like Sanskrit or Hebrew would be an alphabet in normal use; things like Chinese or Egyptian, no. I wonder about the case of Korean, Hangeul has both consonant and vowel representation but was developed long after the Greek and its derived alphabets. I wonder if they knew about it. I'm sure any Korean source would claim King Sejong invented it by himself as divine inspiration but maybe someone has written an objective study.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:35
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homullus posted:I want to be clear here: I am using "alphabet" in the sense of "a writing system of symbols representing consonants and vowels." China has sent a robot to the moon and still has not "advanced" to an alphabet. Egypt would never (really never!) have developed an alphabet without a change to that society. Thousands of years of writing all over the world, and not a single culture (so far as we know) developed a system with symbols representing individual consonants and vowels until the Greeks did. Japan/Korea did as well. If you're going to have an objective standard of "progress" I think you can fairly clearly put societies as more or less, but unfortunately advancement seems to be a lot more difficult than just waiting and often seems to require essentially random events to take place. Human society before the Industrial Revolution was pretty much a steady state after you got to an urban imperial level of advancement
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Oct 5, 2014 01:44
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think people usually use that strict a definition. Things like Sanskrit or Hebrew would be an alphabet in normal use; things like Chinese or Egyptian, no. I wonder about the case of Korean, Hangeul has both consonant and vowel representation but was developed long after the Greek and its derived alphabets. I wonder if they knew about it. I'm sure any Korean source would claim King Sejong invented it by himself as divine inspiration but maybe someone has written an objective study. The Mongols had a true alphabet back then, it seems pretty certain that the Koreans knew about it.
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Oct 5, 2014 01:46
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Grand Fromage posted:China still doesn't use an alphabet. I could be completely wrong, but weren't the Druidic Celts anti-writing?
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Oct 5, 2014 01:50
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:I could be completely wrong, but weren't the Druidic Celts anti-writing? I'm not sure either. There were people against it right away, but I'm not aware of anybody who was exposed to it long term (and not wiped out) that didn't eventually adopt writing. It's just too obviously useful.
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Oct 5, 2014 02:02
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I know the Aztecs had some sort of written record-keeping system. Or I assume they did because in college I read a book featuring descriptions of Cortes's conquests written from the Aztec side. Pretty sure one of my undergrad profs did the translation on that one. Most of the Nahuatl language writing we have is done with the Latin scripts (phonetically correct, more or less) from under the supervision of Spanish priests (how this did or did not effect the writing is, of course, a matter of debate.) The pre contact system is not quite pictographic, there's some phonetisism (e.g. A ruler whose name is phonetically the same as "Diving Falcon 3" is indicated by a seated ruler with a diving falcon trailing three number markers behind him.) but mostly there's just a unified symbolism. I'd call it like comic books or manga if that didn't have horribly infantile conotations. The records aren't meant to have a one to one relationship with a spoken sentence but you CAN tell an incredibly complex and detailed story with a few symbolic shorthands (speech bubbles, motion markers, number markers) I've seen plenty of maps, tax records, land ownership accounts, dynastic histories, all very intelligible and unambiguous. And I don't speak Nahuatl. That's a pretty good loving system. Also, if you measure civilizational/cultural advancement by relative capacity for genocide you may need to update your thinking.
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Oct 5, 2014 02:17
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the JJ posted:The records aren't meant to have a one to one relationship with a spoken sentence but you CAN tell an incredibly complex and detailed story with a few symbolic shorthands (speech bubbles, motion markers, number markers) I've seen plenty of maps, tax records, land ownership accounts, dynastic histories, all very intelligible and unambiguous. Oh man, is there really something like speech bubbles in the language? Dare I ask what it might be called so I can look up examples? I'm having trouble getting rid of this image in my head of Mesoamerican stylized Garfield-jaguar now for some reason.
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Oct 5, 2014 03:18
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Synnr posted:Oh man, is there really something like speech bubbles in the language? Dare I ask what it might be called so I can look up examples? Quetzalcoatl HATES Mondays!
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Oct 5, 2014 04:16
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Synnr posted:Oh man, is there really something like speech bubbles in the language? Dare I ask what it might be called so I can look up examples? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_scroll
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Oct 5, 2014 04:18
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Oh man this is great. The toucan vomiting out a rulers name and: "...two Mixtec rulers (photo above) are shown insulting two ambassadors through the use of "flint knife" icons attached to the speech scrolls.[7]" are fantastic. Now that I know what these are, I guess I really have seen them in artwork before and thought they were just some kinda of embellishment. Thats pretty neat!
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Oct 5, 2014 04:27
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homullus posted:Thousands of years of writing all over the world, and not a single culture (so far as we know) developed a system with symbols representing individual consonants and vowels until the Greeks did. You do realize that the Greeks didn't invent the alphabet, so much as took one letter for letter from the Phoencians? And they got it from... somewhere. Where exactly, I don't think anyone's entirely sure, but they didn't invent one out of whole cloth either. Also, those are just the precursors to the alphabet that we use (aka the best alphabet). It may have been invented independently elsewhere, and failed to suvive.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:28
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He's technically right because he said alphabet and not abjad.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:36
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Synnr posted:Oh man this is great. The toucan vomiting out a rulers name and: The whole 'we know it's a flint knife because it's a white and red thingy' is what I was talking about as far as symbolic shorthand.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:44
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think people usually use that strict a definition. Things like Sanskrit or Hebrew would be an alphabet in normal use; things like Chinese or Egyptian, no. I wonder about the case of Korean, Hangeul has both consonant and vowel representation but was developed long after the Greek and its derived alphabets. I wonder if they knew about it. I'm sure any Korean source would claim King Sejong invented it by himself as divine inspiration but maybe someone has written an objective study. Egyptians had an "abjad" alphabet, the same as Hebrew in that it usually did not indicate vowels directly, in about 3000 BC when they started using hieroglyphs - the hieroglyphs were for more formal occasions, the hieratic script as the abjad was called was used for less formal things because the scribes could write it much faster. We have a lot more of the straight up hieroglyphs around to look at because of their use in monumental purposes and carvings meant to last, while hieratic script was more often used for "lesser" duties like day to day paperwork or the like. Here's some of it from around 1400 BC: 
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Oct 5, 2014 04:55
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sullat posted:You do realize that the Greeks didn't invent the alphabet, so much as took one letter for letter from the Phoencians? And they got it from... somewhere. Where exactly, I don't think anyone's entirely sure, but they didn't invent one out of whole cloth either. Also, those are just the precursors to the alphabet that we use (aka the best alphabet). It may have been invented independently elsewhere, and failed to suvive. The Greeks actually did invent the alphabet, and it's kind of a big deal! What the Phoenicians had was similar-looking, but only consonants (which is called an abjad, or syllabary, as euphronius said). Nobody (that we know of) had symbols for their vowels as well. Why didn't the Greeks just take the Phoenician system letter-for-letter? One (compelling, to me) theory is that the Greeks turned the Phoenician syllabary into an alphabet not to keep track of accounts or laws, but expressly to write down Homer, because vowel quantity matters for scansion of epic hexameter.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:57
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What sort of advantage does an abjad have over an alphabet? Do you just write it faster?
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Oct 5, 2014 05:18
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Whn ppl knw wht dllct yr spkng vwls rnt rqrd.
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Oct 5, 2014 05:23
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