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Siivola posted:I just imagined a graph where the axes increased left and down and Bitcoin is going DOWN DOwn down!
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Oct 29, 2016 15:13
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Quidam Viator posted:Annoying as poo poo former Latin teacher here to take your bait. The term we have received, "pollice verso" means only to turn the thumb.  That makes perfect sense. I can understand how thumbs up wouldn't mean "heaven" to a roman, but surely thumbs down could mean "send them to the underworld"?
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Oct 29, 2016 15:16
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Platystemon posted:So the y‐axis increases in the upward direction because that’s where the Abrahamic god lives? It's also where the idea of 7 and 12 being special numbers comes from, apparently. 3 was the vertical number, representing the supernatural world - heaven, hell (or the underworld generally), and earth 4 was the horizontal number, representing the human world - north, south, east, and west So 7 was the sum of everything in the universe, while 12 was the product.
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Oct 29, 2016 15:20
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In Chinese, "the day after tomorrow" (houtian) uses the same character as "behind" (houmian). The "day before yesterday" (qiantian) uses "in front" (qianmian). This is really confusing for native English speakers.
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Oct 29, 2016 15:20
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The rationalisaiton I’ve seen for “thumbs down means he lives” is that it represents the lowering of a sword.
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Oct 29, 2016 15:20
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Rutibex posted:
That could well be, but as someone elso posted: we simply don't know for sure. I've seen the theory that thumbs up was "leave the earth" (i.e. "die"), whereas thumbs down could be seen as "stay on the earth". Maybe they even pointed their thumbs at their own neck or breast instead, symbolising the death blow which was traditionally aimed at the heart or neck? We only know for certain what they traditionally yelled: "mitte!" or "missum!" for "Let him go!", and "iugula!" for "Slit his throat!"
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Oct 29, 2016 15:23
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Platystemon posted:The rationalisaiton I’ve seen for “thumbs down means he lives” is that it represents the lowering of a sword. It could also be taken to mean "take your sword, hold it pointing down and slam it into his goddamn face"
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Oct 29, 2016 15:27
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HisMajestyBOB posted:In Chinese, "the day after tomorrow" (houtian) uses the same character as "behind" (houmian). The "day before yesterday" (qiantian) uses "in front" (qianmian). This is really confusing for native English speakers. 那個 pls. Both "before" and "after" can mean "in front" and "behind", respectively, in English. Think of fore and aft on a boat. The great thing about Chinese grammar is that a lot of it just fits together like that. Fun history: it's believed that beer is the foundation of civilization. Alcohol brewed from grains may well be the reason we settled down and started cultivating grains in the first place. The ancient Sumerians had a goddess of beer named Ninkasi, and a hymn they sang while brewing. What's interesting is that wildly different cultures all appear to have brewed something like beer for a long time. Barley was discovered to have been in China some five thousand years ago, much longer than previously thought, and it was used for (of course) beer. I wanna be this guy's friend. venus de lmao has a new favorite as of 15:59 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 15:57
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HisMajestyBOB posted:In Chinese, "the day after tomorrow" (houtian) uses the same character as "behind" (houmian). The "day before yesterday" (qiantian) uses "in front" (qianmian). This is really confusing for native English speakers. I can't remember where (maybe it was this thread?) I heard that some south American languages have this same reversed conception of how time is perceived on a horizontal axis: the future is behind you because you can't see it, and the past is in front of you because you can see it.
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Oct 29, 2016 15:58
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Red Bones posted:I can't remember where (maybe it was this thread?) I heard that some south American languages have this same reversed conception of how time is perceived on a horizontal axis: the future is behind you because you can't see it, and the past is in front of you because you can see it. More Chinese fun: "next" is "down" and "previous" is "up". Next week is xia ge xingqi/xia zhou/xia ge libai (three words for week, yes) and last week is shang... etc instead of xia. Xia and shang also mean under and on top of, respectively. It only sounds absurdly difficult if you get hung up on trying to translate it in your head and understand it from an English-language perspective, but if you work on internalizing how it's used in Chinese it just fits and it feels more natural. Learn Chinese, it's a kickass language. Come join us in the Chinese thread 
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Oct 29, 2016 16:02
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The ancient Egyptians used the direction of the flow of the Nile for "south" and "north". South was "upstream" and north was "downstream." It was very confusing to them when they conquered the Hittites up the Asian coast and got to the Euphrates River. It flowed south, or "upstream."
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Oct 29, 2016 16:25
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Hey let's move this meeting next week forward, so that it is closer to today.
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Oct 29, 2016 16:28
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Deteriorata posted:The ancient Egyptians used the direction of the flow of the Nile for "south" and "north". South was "upstream" and north was "downstream." there's a couple other languages too, one has instead of north/south/east/west, its mountainside/riverside/upstream/downstream makes sense imo
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Oct 29, 2016 16:29
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NFX posted:Hey let's move this meeting next week forward, so that it is closer to today. See we need that fixed point 
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Oct 29, 2016 16:30
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Bertrand Hustle posted:那個 pls. Both "before" and "after" can mean "in front" and "behind", respectively, in English. Think of fore and aft on a boat. In the year 900 Håkon the Good of Norway made it illegal to not brew beer for christmas. If you failed to do so for three years you could be exiled.
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Oct 29, 2016 16:42
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Alhazred posted:In the year 900 Håkon the Good of Norway made it illegal to not brew beer for christmas. If you failed to do so for three years you could be exiled. I can see why they called him "The Good" 
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Oct 29, 2016 16:54
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it's a contraction, his full title is Håkon the Good and Toasted
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Oct 29, 2016 17:00
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håkon røv siger vi
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Oct 29, 2016 17:14
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Of course, plenty of beer isn't always a good thing as king Fjolnir discovered in first century bc. After a big party Fjolnir had to go to the toiled, took a wrong turn and drowned in a huge vat of beer.
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Oct 29, 2016 17:39
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Alhazred posted:Of course, plenty of beer isn't always a good thing as king Fjolnir discovered in first century bc. After a big party Fjolnir had to go to the toiled, took a wrong turn and drowned in a huge vat of beer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzv0SvPLfOo
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Oct 29, 2016 18:00
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Quidam Viator posted:
Please do. That post was very informative and the exact kind of information I love to pick up.
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Oct 29, 2016 18:03
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Oct 29, 2016 18:51
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Chichevache posted:Please do. That post was very informative and the exact kind of information I love to pick up. Seconded. Those were some dang fun facts.
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Oct 29, 2016 19:17
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Bertrand Hustle posted:More Chinese fun: "next" is "down" and "previous" is "up". Next week is xia ge xingqi/xia zhou/xia ge libai (three words for week, yes) and last week is shang... etc instead of xia. Xia and shang also mean under and on top of, respectively. next being down makes perfect sense in a language that's written in columns going downward, honestly. Is this Mandarin you're talking about, by the way?
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Oct 29, 2016 21:15
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føkk dei
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Oct 29, 2016 21:35
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Oh Classical Chinese  . What a horrible writing system, even for actual Chinese people. It's a good thing they never tried to pass their linguistic system onto other cultures.....Oh. Oh my god. Vietnamese, what the gently caress is this? This isn't a loving....oh my god. Japanese, WHAT IS THIS .It's kind of funny how little appreciation we have for China in the West. China is a cultural hegemon of the Far East, and, much like British people, Chinese are everywhere in the East.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:37
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On a good note, frustration with the terribleness of the Chinese writing system spawned a Korean writing system called Hangul. Hangul is actually so easy that you can literally learn to read Korean (if not understand it very well) without actually speaking any Korean.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:42
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Red Bones posted:next being down makes perfect sense in a language that's written in columns going downward, honestly. Is this Mandarin you're talking about, by the way? Yeah, Mandarin. Hasn't been regularly written that way in a while, although it can be and is still easily readable in that format.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:01
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In Sparta you could only have your name inscribed on your tombstone if you fell in combat or were a woman that died during childbirth http://www.history.com/news/history...linkId=16432341 "Butt" is a real unit of measurement. A butt load of wine is 129 gallons http://gizmodo.com/butt-is-an-actual-unit-of-measurement-1622427091 London didn't reach its pre WW2 (1939) population until January 2015 http://www.citymetric.com/skylines/week-when-londons-population-will-finally-overtake-its-previous-peak-606 Nostalgia4Dogges has a new favorite as of 00:52 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 00:46
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Nostalgia4Dicks posted:In Sparta you could only have your name inscribed on your tombstone if you fell in combat or were a woman that died during childbirth and there are 18 faggots in a butt: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3783487#post462171408
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Oct 30, 2016 02:05
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A White Guy posted:On a good note, frustration with the terribleness of the Chinese writing system spawned a Korean writing system called Hangul. Hangul is actually so easy that you can literally learn to read Korean (if not understand it very well) without actually speaking any Korean. A better comparison for China might be the Roman Empire. Britain is fairly recent on the world stage, compare them to Japan.
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Oct 30, 2016 02:30
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Chichevache posted:A better comparison for China might be the Roman Empire. Modern China has been around for about 70 years, modern Britain has been around for about 375 years.
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Oct 30, 2016 02:49
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Rutibex posted:Modern China has been around for about 70 years, modern Britain has been around for about 375 years. And China flexing its muscles outside of East Asia is pretty recent; the Brits mucking around in East AfrIca or South America goes back centuries, China using soft power in those regions is quite recent.
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Oct 30, 2016 04:48
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A White Guy posted:Oh Classical Chinese Yeah, written Japanese is hilarious. Two sets of syllable characters, one huge pile of non syllable characters, and they are all essential because words in Japanese come from combining the characters and the different syllable sets are needed to show where one word ends and the next begins,and other fun context sensitive things. No wonder the Koreans just said gently caress it and invented hangul instead.
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Oct 30, 2016 08:08
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Hogge Wild posted:and there are 18 faggots in a butt: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3783487#post462171408 
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Oct 30, 2016 13:25
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Deteriorata posted:It's also where the idea of 7 and 12 being special numbers comes from, apparently. Umberto Eco on numbers posted:"Gentlemen," he said, "I invite you to go and measure that kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters -- in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words, to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle. The sum of the heights of the two front corners and the two rear corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10H8, which is the formula for naphthalene." Numbers are a hoax.
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Oct 30, 2016 13:47
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Chichevache posted:Please do. That post was very informative and the exact kind of information I love to pick up. Vaginal Vagrant posted:Seconded. Those were some dang fun facts. OK, but I'll try to be conservative and keep it to history. The problem with so much of this is that it veers very strongly into speculations about what people were thinking and HOW they were thinking thousands of years ago. I mean, I could write you a long-rear end diatribe about the dimensional evolution of life from point-like single cells and radial life in essentially zero dimensions, to the origin about 600 million years ago of mouth and rear end parts, thereby creating the 1-dimensional line of food-forward, poo poo-behind, to the 570 Mya evolution of some ur-bilaterian with, obviously, bilateral symmetry, with two quasi-symmetrical sides implying planar surfaces (planarians???), and then on to the gradual evolution of fully 3d-orientable organisms that weren't stuck living in a single layer like the benthic layer. And THEN as an encore, I could demonstrate how the human metaphors in multiple languages tie their conceptual progressions to the exact same progression through degrees of freedom in thought and creating an orientable universe as written language evolves. But you can obviously see the danger here. Sure, our sense of which direction is RIGHT, whether or not you're moving FORWARD in life, or LEFT BEHIND, or if your fortunes are RISING all use this basic spatialization to metaphorize more abstract topics. But notice how many of the responses to my original post started talking about different languages and time! The origin of written language, in some ways, can be described as the origin of time-sense and time-manipulation, and it is a layer of metaphors about metaphors that encode the uniqueness of different civilizations, in ways that are abstruse as gently caress, like this past two paragraphs. gently caress talking about time metaphors, that's a 10-page post. So let's keep it simple: We'll just talk about how Western civilization gradually encoded the idea that UP IS GOOD and DOWN IS BAD. Let's start by bringing back an encoding I mentioned before, from the Greco-Roman world. Both the Greeks and Romans had very vague spatialization of where gods, afterlives, and spirits could be. Up and Down were both valid dimensional preferences. I'll talk about this more later. In the Axial Age, we're getting a lot of information about which lateral choice is the good one, and it's very consistently the right hand. The Right Hand of the Hebrew God was referred to as the acting hand and the hand of power, but it took Jesus and Paul to connect the prime seat to be someone sitting at "the right hand of the Father". Simultaneously, we see the Buddha's ascent to enlightenment under the Bodhi tree occur only when he reaches to the Earth with the RIGHT hand. But notice, the up/down orientation is not exactly on-existent but more indeterminate. However, a lot of the transition to an idea of upness vs. downness is communicated through hand symbolism. You start getting the real impact of the preference for up over down only after the fall of the Roman Empire and through the path from medievalism to modernism. Again we can go to statuary. Christ statuary of the the early Medieval, Romanesque style often features "Christ in Judgment", with both hands up in "talk to the hand style". Christ metaphorically acts as the force holding the worldly order in place. Sometimes one hand holds the book of judgment. It's not till the prosperity of the high middle ages that we get a dual Christ on cathedral facades: One hand up in warning, one reaching down in welcome up into heaven. After Luther wrecks the Church's poo poo, we get the "Christ of Welcome", with both hands opened down to try to bring people up to heaven, because the idea of heaven being UP had been very clearly established, and PLEASE LIKE US INSTEAD OF THE PROTESTANTS. It's facile to mention the first real concretization of this in Dante: we all know that this first vernacular work firmly cemented a GEOMETRY of evaluation that clearly established two poles, two very clear extremes of GOOD-UP, and DOWN-BAD, and handedness is written alllll the way through it as well. In the Greco-Roman world, the idea of divinity being just... UP was just unimaginable. Contracts could be validly drawn for all human purposes in any direction. Sure, killing and cursing were part of human life, but so were things like protection and warding and binding. All of these things were frequently prayed for in a cthonic or earthly direction. If you look up Defixiones, or Curse Tablets, you'll see that "Curse" doesn't match our current connotation; you could put a lead tablet down into a spring to try to get someone to fall helplessly in love with you. The afterlife was gray and indeterminate. Your household gods and the gods of your fields were often acknowledged by pouring grain or wine onto the Earth. Now, all I've done is reel off a bunch of data to you. The main thing about ANY play like this, about how thoughts evolved, is that only the broadest generalizations apply; I can find you contradicting examples from different cultures, evolving at different rates ALL OVER THE PLACE. But the main thing I'd wish for people to take away from this is that there is a very interesting connection between the preferences we give to each side of our common polarities that is based on everything from biology to culture, but is constantly unobserved. You can find all sorts of treasures hidden in broad daylight if you look in the right place and keep up the good work.
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Oct 30, 2016 21:52
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Quidam Viator marry me.
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Oct 31, 2016 06:04
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That was wonderful
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Oct 31, 2016 08:53
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That's super interesting, can you recommend some literature about it? 
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Oct 31, 2016 08:55
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