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MrNemo posted:
It's just very different from modern thinking because your origin mattered a lot more. Although we've got those cases of people rising from the depths and going from low rank to high, in the established systems, like the French one, their entire claim, their right to rule, was that they were hereditary leaders. Not good leaders, or wise, but hereditary. These time periods saw plenty of awful leaders, and plenty of ordinary people knew that they were smart and capable, but the system of leadership was tied in closely with religion and custom and tradition, when those things carried more weight than they do today. I mean, we are living in a nation that is capable of selecting Rick Perry as the leader of a large and important province despite being an utter disaster. Repeat this for Brownback and the rest. With the benefit of history and objectivity we can see incompetence and failure, but it's a lot harder for the actual person on the ground. So to the extent the opinion of ordinary people mattered, they were probably incredibly ill-informed, probably carrying a firm religious belief that good or bad leaders were part of the whole punishment/reward system of god or 'providence', and possibly completely fine with supporting an incompetent because of their own sense of familial alliance. This is feudal, though, and very different from Rome or Greece, but we should still remember that our observations and judgements on the leaders there are with benefit of history. And a lot of people are competent right up until their incompetent, or simply beaten by someone much better--like Marc Antony going down to the twin hammers of Augustus and Agrippa. Add in that 'competent' leaders tend to be ambitious, a lot of those competent dudes lead to civil war or massive societal changes as they take over the system. Continuing the family dynasty is the devil you know.
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May 25, 2015 13:53
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It's worth observing that titles aren't mere functions of contractual relations between liege and his man, though. They also have a proprietary nature. Being a count of x is not just something you are, it's something you own, and that idea is exactly how titles that start as non-heritable, appointed titles under Charlemagne become heritable.
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May 25, 2015 14:00
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I suppose this is stretching back to prehistory, but where does language for humans (or pre-humans) originate from? Like what's the general idea about how it evolved and developed?
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May 26, 2015 01:22
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If you have an answer, you'll probably get a Nobel prize. This is a big area Noam Chomsky writes in, for some reading suggestions. Here's my general understanding. Communication is useful for any animals that live in groups, so evolution would favor it. The idea of using sound to communicate originates somewhere well back in evolutionary history, since we see it in such a wide range of creatures. That probably started by accident and the animals that could cooperate survived better, and then we have communication by sound. How and where that becomes language is a huge mystery. For one, we don't actually have a good definition of language. Humans obviously have it, but what about other animals? Other primates are able to make a variety of sounds that communicate different things, which seem to have consistency. Chimps have culture, and different groups of chimps use different sounds to communicate ideas. Is that language? What about whales and dolphins? How about something like a cat or dog, which clearly can make different sounds to communicate a variety of emotional states? Or ants, which don't make sounds but are able to use different chemicals to relay information? Bee dancing? Where do we draw a line for language? Past that, there's an idea of a natural grammar. Basically the human mind has some set capability for grammar and the production of sound, which is a universal trait. Your grammar usage and phonemes then are programmed by the language you hear around you. There is a whole lot of disagreement about the details of this, but the bare bones idea seems to be hard to argue against. All humans (who don't have a brain defect) are able to acquire language naturally by being exposed to it, and there are no preferences for this language. Any human baby will acquire the language of the environment it is placed in, and all babies become equally fluent. Clearly there's something built into the brain.
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May 26, 2015 03:04
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Various species of parrots and parakeets have been successfully taught to use and think in English and other human languages at the level of young children, so clearly they stand the possibility of developing language on their own in the proper environment (and may have already done so).
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May 26, 2015 03:35
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The origin of language is probably something not very obvious, not especially  . It's probably like the Monty Hall Problem: something that doesn't make sense on the face.
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May 26, 2015 04:27
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Nintendo Kid posted:Various species of parrots and parakeets have been successfully taught to use and think in English and other human languages at the level of young children, so clearly they stand the possibility of developing language on their own in the proper environment (and may have already done so). Nah. It may still be a Chinese Room.
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May 26, 2015 04:30
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Obdicut posted:Nah. It may still be a Chinese Room. Yeah and so is every human on earth, just as likely.
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May 26, 2015 04:31
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Animal language experiments are controversial.
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May 26, 2015 04:50
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I change my answer. The natural language of humans is Hebrew, as proved by Frederick II.
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May 26, 2015 05:19
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I think any notion that the western lords and barons had to pay any homage or even acknowledge Constantinople died at the breached sea wall of the city during the sack (and the completely incompetent handling of this by the 6-7 Emperors during these two years) of the fourth crusade in 1204. And anyway, Constantinople was the seat of the rival church, which would have put a dampener on Catholic lords acknowledging what basically was a heretic church (the Orthodox church making itself subservant to the Catholic church was a big demand during the siege - but that's also because they hoped the Pope would rescind his Excommunication of the crusaders after they basically did everything he forbade them to).
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May 26, 2015 06:32
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Nintendo Kid posted:Yeah and so is every human on earth, just as likely. No, not at all, because I know I'm not a Chinese room, but I have absolutely no desire to get into this argument with you, I can't imagine anything more tedious. To drag this back into relevancy, does anyone know if Latin had heavy dialects--if the Latin spoken in Spain was significantly different than that of Rome?
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May 26, 2015 11:02
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Yep. Classical Latin was all the same but Vulgar Latin varied widely. Those variations led to the Romance languages, and you can trace them back by some voodoo that linguists do and I don't understand so I just trust them on it.
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May 26, 2015 11:09
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Grand Fromage posted:Past that, there's an idea of a natural grammar. Basically the human mind has some set capability for grammar and the production of sound, which is a universal trait. Your grammar usage and phonemes then are programmed by the language you hear around you. There is a whole lot of disagreement about the details of this, but the bare bones idea seems to be hard to argue against. All humans (who don't have a brain defect) are able to acquire language naturally by being exposed to it, and there are no preferences for this language. Any human baby will acquire the language of the environment it is placed in, and all babies become equally fluent. Clearly there's something built into the brain. The counterargument is that humans excel at statistical learning, and thus acquire language by exposure without any set pattern necessarily. Whereas Chomsky (at least at one point) argued that at some point humans evolved to have a "mental language" which they used to map the world in their mind, and it only later became spoken.
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May 26, 2015 11:16
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Yeah, it seems like language is probably connected somehow to our general knack for pattern matching. My impression of the state of the research is that more or less any idea is plausible because we just don't understand the brain very well.
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May 26, 2015 11:19
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep. Classical Latin was all the same but Vulgar Latin varied widely. Those variations led to the Romance languages, and you can trace them back by some voodoo that linguists do and I don't understand so I just trust them on it. It's pretty cool. I learned, last week, that apparently the f->h shift present in Spanish (and no other modern Iberian romance languages), for example: facere->hacer, was influenced by the Basque language, which didn't contain the /f/ phoneme. Same story with the merger of b and v into one super-consonant that I can never loving pronounce properly.
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May 26, 2015 12:19
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I think Chomsky had (when I was doing my MA, so going on 8 years ago now) narrowed language down to an outgrowth of our brain's ability for recursion. So being able to understand that 1+1=2 and then 2+1=3, etc. lead, after however long, to our capacity to start combining ideas and meaningful sounds into infinite combinations from a finite base of linguistic concepts. There was then that whole kerfuffle over the Piraha tribe supposedly lacking the ability to think recursively so it couldn't be an inherent cognitive function. There are lots of people that say that research is bullshit though too. Of course maybe they're all schizophrenic like the ancient Greeks.
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May 26, 2015 12:25
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This lectured/debate is in no way generally relevant as a whole to this question but the first 10 minutes of Chomsky speaking is him explaining at the most fundamental level his concept of natural language capability https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
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May 26, 2015 12:55
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PT6A posted:It's pretty cool. I learned, last week, that apparently the f->h shift present in Spanish (and no other modern Iberian romance languages), for example: facere->hacer, was influenced by the Basque language, which didn't contain the /f/ phoneme. Same story with the merger of b and v into one super-consonant that I can never loving pronounce properly. The Basque influence is possible (and in the case of the Gascon language highly probable), but there's often a tendency to explain these common sound changes through language contact even if it isn't necessary. The change from [v] and [b] to [β] for example is pretty common, you can see it in dialects of Portuguese too, and Japanese for example. [f] to [ɸ] to [h] to null isn't really weird either, although fast (Japanese, again, does the middle part).
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May 26, 2015 13:09
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Kanine posted:I suppose this is stretching back to prehistory, but where does language for humans (or pre-humans) originate from? Like what's the general idea about how it evolved and developed? Herodotus posted:Now the Egyptians, before the reign of their king Psammetichus, believed themselves to be the most ancient of mankind. Since Psammetichus, however, made an attempt to discover who were actually the primitive race, they have been of opinion that while they surpass all other nations, the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity. This king, finding it impossible to make out by dint of inquiry what men were the most ancient, contrived the following method of discovery:- He took two children of the common sort, and gave them over to a herdsman to bring up at his folds, strictly charging him to let no one utter a word in their presence, but to keep them in a sequestered cottage, and from time to time introduce goats to their apartment, see that they got their fill of milk, and in all other respects look after them. His object herein was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they would first articulate. It happened as he had anticipated. The herdsman obeyed his orders for two years, and at the end of that time, on his one day opening the door of their room and going in, the children both ran up to him with outstretched arms, and distinctly said "Becos." When this first happened the herdsman took no notice; but afterwards when he observed, on coming often to see after them, that the word was constantly in their mouths, he informed his lord, and by his command brought the children into his presence. Psammetichus then himself heard them say the word, upon which he proceeded to make inquiry what people there was who called anything "becos," and hereupon he learnt that "becos" was the Phrygian name for bread. In consideration of this circumstance the Egyptians yielded their claims, and admitted the greater antiquity of the Phrygians.
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May 26, 2015 14:57
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MrNemo posted:I think Chomsky had (when I was doing my MA, so going on 8 years ago now) narrowed language down to an outgrowth of our brain's ability for recursion. So being able to understand that 1+1=2 and then 2+1=3, etc. lead, after however long, to our capacity to start combining ideas and meaningful sounds into infinite combinations from a finite base of linguistic concepts. There was then that whole kerfuffle over the Piraha tribe supposedly lacking the ability to think recursively so it couldn't be an inherent cognitive function. There are lots of people that say that research is bullshit though too. Of course maybe they're all schizophrenic like the ancient Greeks. I will have to read The Bicameral Mind some time, because the idea seems so obviously full of holes and lacking in solid evidence that I'm interested in why it's apparently taken seriously by some psychologists and anthropologists.
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May 26, 2015 17:42
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Silver2195 posted:I will have to read The Bicameral Mind some time, because the idea seems so obviously full of holes and lacking in solid evidence that I'm interested in why it's apparently taken seriously by some psychologists and anthropologists. Isn't that the theory which basically says that ancient humans were all basically schizophrenic until one day somehow a switch was flipped globally that made the brain function how it does today? Because yeah, assuming that's the theory I'm thinking of, I can't see how it can be taken very seriously at all.
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May 26, 2015 17:47
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Kor posted:Isn't that the theory which basically says that ancient humans were all basically schizophrenic until one day somehow a switch was flipped globally that made the brain function how it does today? Because yeah, assuming that's the theory I'm thinking of, I can't see how it can be taken very seriously at all. I think it's a great book -- I highly recommend it, as it's an interesting read and an interesting idea. It's not that the switch flipped globally in an instant, but that it evolved in various places in the face of crises. It's . . . well, I am not a scientist, but it doesn't seem very likely. It's not as full of holes as you think, though.
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May 26, 2015 17:59
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Grand Fromage posted:If you have an answer, you'll probably get a Nobel prize. This is a big area Noam Chomsky writes in, for some reading suggestions. Here's my general understanding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language is probably the best example we have.
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May 26, 2015 18:02
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homullus posted:I think it's a great book -- I highly recommend it, as it's an interesting read and an interesting idea. It's not that the switch flipped globally in an instant, but that it evolved in various places in the face of crises. It's . . . well, I am not a scientist, but it doesn't seem very likely. It's not as full of holes as you think, though. I am also not a scientist, but it seems to have so many holes I doubt it could float in a kiddie pool. I'll take your word for it and check the book out for myself though.
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May 26, 2015 18:06
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Kor posted:I am also not a scientist, but it seems to have so many holes I doubt it could float in a kiddie pool. I'll take your word for it and check the book out for myself though. Yeah, it really does. The biggest one I can think of is that multiple groups of humans in multiple places evolved the exactly same mutation or whatever he calls it at the same time. Also the people who hold to it these days seem more like a cult than a research institute.
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May 26, 2015 19:40
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yeah, it really does. The biggest one I can think of is that multiple groups of humans in multiple places evolved the exactly same mutation or whatever he calls it at the same time. I thought it was just a Neil Stephenson plot device.
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May 26, 2015 22:51
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Read the book. It's loving brilliant, and the fact that its thesis is probably extremely wrong doesn't really take much away from it.
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May 26, 2015 23:30
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Obdicut posted:I thought it was just a Neil Stephenson plot device. Oh heavens no. (Check out how much of that page was obviously written by people from the "Julian Jaynes Society".) This nonsense shows up in history threads every so often. Like a bad penny.
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May 27, 2015 02:01
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At some point, people must have become conscious because we evolved from animals that are not.
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May 27, 2015 07:34
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
blowfish posted:At some point, people must have become conscious because we evolved from animals that are not. That point was probably not 3000 years ago 
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May 27, 2015 09:06
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MrNemo posted:Honestly I find it weirder once you realise how government authority worked in the purely personal feudal sense. Really came home to me listening to the History of the Crusades podcast when Richard I comes along and supports Guy for the throne of Jerusalem because, while he wasn't of particularly high ranking nobility, was an indecisive, untalented and uncharismatic miliary leader and had just managed to screw up badly enough that he had lost nearly every city in Jerusalem aside from the one controlled by someone who was opposed to his rule; he was from the same area of France as Richard and so nominally owed fealty to him (and thus Richard had responsibility to him) and both claimed descent from a water fairy in French mythstory establishing familial ties. As someone from the Balkans, I don't have such problems grasping that. I think much of the world still relies on tribal/familial bonds that the modern, western world discarded. In those countries there are powers structures that band together based on their ancestors living in the same area two hundred years ago. You don't give your support to someone who is competent or democratically elected, you give it to "one of yours".
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May 27, 2015 09:12
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MrNemo posted:Honestly I find it weirder once you realise how government authority worked in the purely personal feudal sense. Really came home to me listening to the History of the Crusades podcast when Richard I comes along and supports Guy for the throne of Jerusalem because, while he wasn't of particularly high ranking nobility, was an indecisive, untalented and uncharismatic miliary leader and had just managed to screw up badly enough that he had lost nearly every city in Jerusalem aside from the one controlled by someone who was opposed to his rule; he was from the same area of France as Richard and so nominally owed fealty to him (and thus Richard had responsibility to him) and both claimed descent from a water fairy in French mythstory establishing familial ties. I take it you have never worked in a company that employed some questionable hiring tactics like nepotism?
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May 27, 2015 09:32
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:That point was probably not 3000 years ago Maybe, but Jaynes' whole idea was that that's roughly the point in history where we can start to observe genuine introspection in literature.
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May 27, 2015 09:59
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Ras Het posted:Maybe, but Jaynes' whole idea was that that's roughly the point in history where we can start to observe genuine introspection in literature.
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May 27, 2015 10:05
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At best you can judge the few educated who actually wrote down their thoughts, but what about the legions of analphabets?
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May 27, 2015 10:15
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Ras Het posted:Maybe, but Jaynes' whole idea was that that's roughly the point in history where we can start to observe genuine introspection in literature. I'm not saying you agree with him but that argument is easily muddied to the point of irrelevance by pointing out that literature is heavily constrained by context, such as general or specific literacy, cost/availability of writing materials, survival of materials to historians, and role of literacy in that society - administration vs story telling. I haven't read his theory but I feel like if I did, there would be a huge gaping hole called "oral tradition" that he hand-waves away because the evidence is too hard to fit into his theory. e: Actually, re: that bit about oral tradition, I'm skimming the wikipedia article now and I don't even know where to begin. I'm seeing a strong theme of schizophrenia here but it's not in the science Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 10:28 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 10:23
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JaucheCharly posted:At best you can judge the few educated who actually wrote down their thoughts... Edit: What's the explanation in this theory for people who hear the voice of the divine after we developed modern brains? Are they just crazy? Edit 2: Isn't there introspection in Gilgamesh, after Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh thinks about his own death? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 10:36 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 10:27
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HEY GAL posted:Not even--all you can judge is their aesthetic choices, their preferred literary style. To turn around from literature to making arguments about brain structure isn't even wrong, it's so out there. I bet the 'theory' pounces on anyone from that time period who does show introspection as just an early-evolver.
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May 27, 2015 10:44
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