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It also doesn't help that the way English is spoken has changed throughout the centuries, and the language is littered with artifacts of different pronunciations. How much did Latin change throughout the ~1,000 years it was actively spoken as a primary language throughout the empire? edit: VVV I thought the French/Italian/Spanish romance languages postdated the empire? VVV SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 00:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:How much did Latin change throughout the ~1,000 years it was actively spoken as a primary language throughout the empire? Go look at some early Spanish, Italian, or French writings. 
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Jul 29, 2017 00:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:How much did Latin change throughout the ~1,000 years it was actively spoken as a primary language throughout the empire? Some of the oldest Latin we have (the Carmen Saliare) was different enough from the Latin of Caesar and Cicero that Horace didn't understand it. If the Romans were even close on its age, it was hundreds of years old at that point.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:57
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cheetah7071 posted:With a few exceptions, writing systems are pretty garbage because they came about by minimally modifying a different language's system rather than making something that actually fits your own language. American English has about 15 linguistically distinct vowels and about 25 linguistically distinct consonants (both vary with dialect), but we represent them with 26 characters. A customized English writing system devised by a modern linguist might have around 25 characters but it would have tons of diacritics to compensate if it went that route. Spelling is guaranteed to be a nightmare if you want to represent American, British, and Australian English all with the same system lol yeah its cool how they invented hangul from the ground up to be as rational as possible
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Jul 29, 2017 01:49
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cheetah7071 posted:Basically all writing systems except like Korean and Cherokee are garbage and Latin is no exception Korean writing, despite the protests of Korean nationalists, does not accurately reflect the spoken language. It's decent but not perfect by any means. Cherokee writing I know nothing about to comment.
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Jul 29, 2017 04:29
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Apparently Inuktitut writing is pretty slick and good.
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Jul 29, 2017 04:31
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I suspect many Native American languages would have fairly sensible written alphabets, they don't seem shy about adding additional letters for sounds that the Latin alphabet doesn't really do. Plus the fact that the alphabets were developed relatively recently probably means there haven't been too many shifts in the spoken language away from what the alphabet was developed to represent.
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Jul 29, 2017 04:45
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Grand Fromage posted:Korean writing, despite the protests of Korean nationalists, does not accurately reflect the spoken language. It's decent but not perfect by any means. Cherokee writing I know nothing about to comment. I don't really know a ton about Korean but what I've heard leads me to believe that at least at the time of its conception, it was the most linguistically-driven orthography ever made. Any language that hasn't had spelling reform in the past hundred years or so has pretty bad spelling though. The case of Cherokee is actually a really cool story (one which I'm sure many people in this thread have heard even if they've forgotten because it's retold in Guns, Germs and Steel). Basically, some Cherokee businessman (a blacksmith I think) observed white people dictating things and then having them read back from the markings on paper later by someone else. This was literally all he knew about how writing worked: that the symbols somehow recorded language and could be transformed back into speech. He first tried to replicate it with a pictographic system, but gave up on that when he passed a thousand symbols with no end in sight. He ended up settling on a syllabary, which works pretty well for Cherokee because it has limited coda consonants (like Japanese). Because he was making the system out of whole cloth rather than adapting a neighboring culture's system, it reflected Cherokee pretty well, or at the very least didn't try to cram 14-16 vowels into 5 symbols like English does. One cool thing is that he knew the form of the Latin alphabet but not the meanings of the characters, so you have things like "R" representing the e sound. PittTheElder posted:I suspect many Native American languages would have fairly sensible written alphabets, they don't seem shy about adding additional letters for sounds that the Latin alphabet doesn't really do. Plus the fact that the alphabets were developed relatively recently probably means there haven't been too many shifts in the spoken language away from what the alphabet was developed to represent. Yeah I don't doubt languages given an orthography by modern linguists have sane alphabets. I'm not aware of any examples though; usually Linguists just write down what they hear in IPA rather than making a new system for each language they study.
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Jul 29, 2017 04:58
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cheetah7071 posted:Basically all writing systems except like Korean and Cherokee are garbage 
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Jul 29, 2017 05:01
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you're right, I forgot IPA
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Jul 29, 2017 05:04
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cheetah7071 posted:The case of Cherokee is actually a really cool story (one which I'm sure many people in this thread have heard even if they've forgotten because it's retold in Guns, Germs and Steel). Basically, some Cherokee businessman (a blacksmith I think) observed white people dictating things and then having them read back from the markings on paper later by someone else. This was literally all he knew about how writing worked: that the symbols somehow recorded language and could be transformed back into speech. He first tried to replicate it with a pictographic system, but gave up on that when he passed a thousand symbols with no end in sight. He ended up settling on a syllabary, which works pretty well for Cherokee because it has limited coda consonants (like Japanese). Because he was making the system out of whole cloth rather than adapting a neighboring culture's system, it reflected Cherokee pretty well, or at the very least didn't try to cram 14-16 vowels into 5 symbols like English does. One cool thing is that he knew the form of the Latin alphabet but not the meanings of the characters, so you have things like "R" representing the e sound. Heard you talkin' bout my boy Sequoyah 
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Jul 29, 2017 05:20
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cheetah7071 posted:I don't really know a ton about Korean but what I've heard leads me to believe that at least at the time of its conception, it was the most linguistically-driven orthography ever made. Any language that hasn't had spelling reform in the past hundred years or so has pretty bad spelling though. That's the tale Korean nationalists like to tell. Nobody knows the reality. In any case, today it has all the same problems as other writing systems. Learning languages with completely different writing systems from Europe has made me appreciate English writing. I used to believe the "lol this is so bad and makes no sense" thing but I don't anymore. The flexibility of English writing is great compared to rigidly inflexible systems like Hangeul or Hanzi. Anyway this is not ancient at all.
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Jul 29, 2017 06:42
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written sanskrit loving owns
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Jul 29, 2017 09:55
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If you want a real writing system, look no further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug
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Jul 29, 2017 10:09
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Grand Fromage posted:If you want a real writing system, look no further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug what the gently caress
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Jul 29, 2017 12:07
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Grand Fromage posted:That's the tale Korean nationalists like to tell. Nobody knows the reality.  uh yes we do, they literally found the documentation from when it was invented that goes over the whole thought process behind it and its development and everything.Hangeul does run into a lot of the same issues other alphabets do though at this point yeah, it was invented nearly 600 years ago so the language has changed significantly, and a number of letters have been dropped or changed uses. Plus, while it was pretty scientifically derived, ironically one of the intentions was to help in pronunciation of Chinese, not just Korean- the double consonants (ㅉ ㄲ ㅆ etc) for instance were initially made for phonetically transcribing Chinese sounds, and only got taken up for Korean usage later on. Still though, I'm not a linguist but unless you're comparing it to IPA or something then I think it pretty drat well translates to the spoken language compared to most alphabets out there. It's probably just the Gyeongsang dialect you were exposed to that's all messed up. cheetah7071 posted:The case of Cherokee is actually a really cool story (one which I'm sure many people in this thread have heard even if they've forgotten because it's retold in Guns, Germs and Steel). Basically, some Cherokee businessman (a blacksmith I think) observed white people dictating things and then having them read back from the markings on paper later by someone else. This was literally all he knew about how writing worked: that the symbols somehow recorded language and could be transformed back into speech. He first tried to replicate it with a pictographic system, but gave up on that when he passed a thousand symbols with no end in sight. He ended up settling on a syllabary, which works pretty well for Cherokee because it has limited coda consonants (like Japanese). Because he was making the system out of whole cloth rather than adapting a neighboring culture's system, it reflected Cherokee pretty well, or at the very least didn't try to cram 14-16 vowels into 5 symbols like English does. One cool thing is that he knew the form of the Latin alphabet but not the meanings of the characters, so you have things like "R" representing the e sound. From my undersrsnding nobody's presented any substantive evidence, but sometimes you hear that the written language might have only been truly invented in a handful of locations, but just spread in sorta this fashion, right? That people saw others writing or heard of them writing and the idea spread thst way, rather than people coming up with it whole cloth. Its not just writing, either; I've been reading a lot about ancient East Asia lately and it's interesting how many innovations people think actually spread by way of the steppe rather than being invented independently, even back before pastoral nomadism had developed. Both bronze and iron working for instance, are hypothesized these days to have spread to China via Mongolia or Manchuria; on the flip side, pottery might have originally spread to the near east and Europe in the opposite direction..
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Jul 29, 2017 15:18
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Koramei posted:
And who wrote those? You don't think Sejong's royal court had any reason to embellish the truth? Koramei posted:Still though, I'm not a linguist but unless you're comparing it to IPA or something then I think it pretty drat well translates to the spoken language compared to most alphabets out there. It's probably just the Gyeongsang dialect you were exposed to that's all messed up. Gyeongsang is more off because of the different vowels but it still has issues even in "standard" Korean. ㄱ is two different sounds, ㅊ is ch unless it's at the end of a syllable and then it's a T, which there is already the letter ㅌ to represent, also there are six other letters that turn into T at the end of a syllable, etc. It's just the same as every language. The spoken form has changed since the writing was created, and there hasn't been a writing reform other than the couple old letters that aren't used anymore. I only bring it up because of the annoying Korean insistence that it is a perfect alphabet that is "scientific" and superior to all others. Koramei posted:From my undersrsnding nobody's presented any substantive evidence, but sometimes you hear that the written language might have only been truly invented in a handful of locations, but just spread in sorta this fashion, right? That people saw others writing or heard of them writing and the idea spread thst way, rather than people coming up with it whole cloth. Yeah we don't really know how many independent inventions of writing there were. At minimum there were two, since it had to originate independently in the old and new worlds. Beyond that it's ??? However, from what I've read the evidence is quite strong that alphabetic writing specifically was invented only once in the Near East and spread from there. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 15:34
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Grand Fromage posted:And who wrote those? You don't think Sejong's royal court had any reason to embellish the truth? Uh what, so do you think them making up the whole scientific reasoning behind an alphabet they just happened to randomly luck into makes more sense than just... using that reasoning beforehand to actually invent it? I'm not saying there aren't a ton of myths surrounding Hangeul but your claim we have nothing to go on regsrding its background is demonstrably wrong and seems to be more informed by: quote:I only bring it up because of the annoying Korean insistence that it is a perfect alphabet that is "scientific" and superior to all others. than you actually being rational here. This isn't ancient history though, like you said. They go over a lot of this stuff in "a history of the korean language" by Lee and Ramsey in case people are interested in learning more though, and they explain it a hell of a lot better than I could too.
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Jul 29, 2017 16:06
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I never said we have nothing to go on. I said we don't know. There is a single source, written specifically to tell everyone how great they were. I have never read it because I can't, and I distrust modern historiography from places that have a serious issue with nationalist revisionism of their history. There are many such places and Korea is one of those. One of the things I like about ancient history is there aren't Romans anymore and nobody has an axe to grind about it beyond the occasional weirdo on the internet. You run into a bunch of annoying issues when the cultures still exist.
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Jul 29, 2017 16:16
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so what, the alternative hypothesis is that someone not associated with the sejong court invented it, and they took credit for its creation afterwards
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Jul 29, 2017 16:21
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Hah, ancient history isn't safe either in East Asia There are a lot of very good Korean and international scholars studying Korea these days though, you shouldn't just dismiss it all out of hand. I understand what you're saying (and Korean history's been one of my main interests for the past few years so I'm pretty acutely aware of it) but Korean historiography has come strides in the past few decades and a lot of Korean academics are very aware of what you're talking about. Especially with a work written for an international audience that's got a non-Korean name attached.
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Jul 29, 2017 16:25
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Phobophilia posted:so what, the alternative hypothesis is that someone not associated with the sejong court invented it, and they took credit for its creation afterwards No. There are claims of it existing prior to the Sejong era but nothing that's been proven. It's derived from Chinese characters and there are hypotheses that it's based on or just lifted from some form of simplified character writing, sort of like Nüshu. Surprisingly enough, a lot of those claims are made by Chinese historians.  Another country with a dubious modern historiography.There's no credible evidence I'm aware of that it was created elsewhere than the court of Sejong. Some of the letters were certainly forms from simplified handwriting, like how the Japanese kana were derived. The stuff about how it was designed so the shape of the letter tells you its sound and anyone could therefore learn it just by staring at the letters and absorbing the pure light of their jeong or whatever is where we get into the weird poo poo. It's just an alphabet. There's an interesting question about whether it was invented independently. I find it unlikely--we have records of people from as far away as Arabia living in Gyeongju during the 600s and traders coming from all over to Korea during Unified Silla, so I can't see how they never found out about alphabets. The whole "hermit kingdom" thing is a Joseon era artifact, Korea wasn't always isolationist. Koramei posted:Hah, ancient history isn't safe either in East Asia Oh I don't dismiss it, I read a lot of Korean history. I just look at it with a more critical eye than I do with like Hittites or something because I know the issue exists. Same when I'm reading Chinese history or Japanese or, god forbid, Serbian. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 16:31
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Grand Fromage posted:There's an interesting question about whether it was invented independently. I find it unlikely--we have records of people from as far away as Arabia living in Gyeongju during the 600s and traders coming from all over to Korea during Unified Silla, so I can't see how they never found out about alphabets. The whole "hermit kingdom" thing is a Joseon era artifact, Korea wasn't always isolationist. Funny you mention Arabic merchants- there was a significant Muslim community in Korea from the times of the Mongol Empire (or perhaps earlier) until Sejong in the 1400s, right around when Hangeul was invented. We know this because he passed a decree to outlaw them from praying and wearing Muslim garments (or it mighta been head coverings, I can look it up later) while they were in the Royal court, since it was allegedly too disruptive. also yeah, a lot of our predispositons about Korea (many of which are shared by Koreans, which feeds into the infuriating inferiority complex thing) were informed pretty wholly by Imperial - era Japanese historiography and sinocentric Chinese scholars, both of whom had an interest in minimalizing the peninsula's importance. It's only started to get challenged (by credible scholars) pretty recently. I know you often have the reflexive opposite reaction, but the more I've learned about Korean history the more I think it's been pretty hard done. The sinocentrism, incidentally, extends to a lot of China's (former, now consumed) neighbors too. How many people have actually heard of the Shu? I always learned that East Asian civilization pretty much sprouted in its entirety from the central plains cultures, and while obviously they're responsible for a hell of a lot, it was really just one of many distinct cultures in the region- it's just that it's the only one that got to keep its voice. Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 17:03
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Koramei posted:The sinocentrism, incidentally, extends to a lot of China's (former, now consumed) neighbors too. How many people have actually heard of the Shu? The Shu are pretty cool, I started reading about them after noticing Shu in names everywhere and discovering that's because I'm living in the Shu capital. They made impressively bad strategic decisions when dealing with Qin.
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Jul 29, 2017 17:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:edit: VVV I thought the French/Italian/Spanish romance languages postdated the empire? VVV As written language. As spoken language things diverged quickly - the Spanish accent was mocked well before the fall of Rome, and there is some question as to how intelligible it was at that point. https://books.google.com/books?id=y...0accent&f=false
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Jul 29, 2017 22:42
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Phobophilia posted:so what, the alternative hypothesis is that someone not associated with the sejong court invented it, and they took credit for its creation afterwards Hangul was invented in Bolivia.
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Jul 29, 2017 23:40
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http://tibgracchus.tumblr.com/post/163168396590/neural-networks-roman-names " neural networks & roman names SO after asking my dad really nicely he did the actual computery bit of uhh. a recurrent neural network to make silly fake roman names. we used a (slightly edited) version of this List Of All Romans as the training set and it. Created some weird poo poo  then it tried really hard to spell ‘gaius’ and ‘lucius’   here it’s trying to do praenomina with varying success   here are some actual names!!! kind of  and some Not Quite Names    who the gently caress is titinus  FINALLY. my favourite dictators;  and  "
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Jul 30, 2017 03:22
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Gaius Julius Anus was Caesar's nickname after he went to Bithynia
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Jul 30, 2017 03:50
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"Every woman's lover, and every man's whore."
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Jul 30, 2017 19:46
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Jack B Nimble posted:Slight derail but..Short sentences are good for general utilitarian writing but, like, Faulkner style long sentences are good too? Has opinion really turned so far against long sentences in, say, academia/college? Like I know journalists have to write for everyone, but are long sentences just bad now? As Grand Fromage can attest, when trying to teach English writing to students who write in their native language with few breaks, you need to break them down brick by brick before they can write what would be seen as a essay that "makes sense" in English. You need the fundamentals and know what standard writing will look like before you also can break the form and still be understood.
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Jul 30, 2017 21:03
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Grand Fromage posted:If you want a real writing system, look no further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug I cataloged Tibetan religious texts once and it was terrible. Without the cards that came with each bundle, the traditional Tibetan "book" is a stack of pages in a box, it was pretty hard to even romanize the characters for the reasons given in the video. I did get to meet a lama though, which was cool. He didn't speak English but I assumed he was a big hitter.
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Jul 31, 2017 00:35
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It's good to vary sentence length to give the reader a break between parsing complex language. With all long sentences you lose a sense of rhythm too.
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Jul 31, 2017 02:04
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Mods please change my username to Marquintus Titinus
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Jul 31, 2017 04:43
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I'm Aulius Albius Flpider
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Jul 31, 2017 04:52
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I'm essaeus FusPlla
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Jul 31, 2017 05:02
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what do u guys think about the whole weber theory that protestantism is the reason for the emergence of capitalism? (if there's a better thread to ask this pls link me) edit: i should clarify i dont actually think this Kanine fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Aug 5, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 05:38
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Refined horse poo poo. I'll leave it for someone not on a phone to elaborate. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 06:07
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cheetah7071 posted:Basically all writing systems except like Korean and Cherokee are garbage and Latin is no exception I know this is tongue in cheek but what's the issue with South Slavic languages? They are difficult for non-Slavs to learn but once you get there pronunciation follows writing (and the other way too) really well. Letters are always pronounced the same. OK, words can be written down wrong based on ije/je and č/ć variants but it never produces confusion in actual communication. Native speakers err with that too.
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Aug 2, 2017 08:57
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Kanine posted:what do u guys think about the whole weber theory that protestantism is the reason for the emergence of capitalism? I mean I thought it was industrialization.
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Aug 2, 2017 09:03
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Doctor Malaver posted:I know this is tongue in cheek but what's the issue with South Slavic languages? They are difficult for non-Slavs to learn but once you get there pronunciation follows writing (and the other way too) really well. Letters are always pronounced the same. OK, words can be written down wrong based on ije/je and č/ć variants but it never produces confusion in actual communication. Native speakers err with that too. The issue is that I don't know anything about them so I wouldn't think to mention them. Are those the ones saint Cyril developed the writing for? I guess that would make them share the property other good orthographies have that they were intentionally created by a single person who isn't just blindly copying what the neighbors are doing.
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Aug 2, 2017 09:07
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