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HEY GUNS posted:a number of icons of the virgin mary show her wearing a veil made of cloth with arabic writing around the edges. sometimes this is real arabic writing, sometimes it is fake as gently caress Fake Arabic was pretty common not only in late medieval / renaissance art but also fancy housewares and even on money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Kufic
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Apr 19, 2018 21:08
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Fakin' it is eternalbennyfactor posted:Fake Arabic was pretty common not only in late medieval / renaissance art but also fancy housewares and even on money Man a lot of these are really beautiful
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Apr 19, 2018 21:17
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aphid_licker posted:Fakin' it is eternal You should get some calligraphy stone  Also known by different variations upon "arabic writing stone"
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Apr 20, 2018 04:16
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Guildencrantz posted:There's a shitload of fake rune writing on random Norse objects as well. I think I posted about this before, but apparently the consensus is that, since engraving runes on people's things was a legit profession and they were supposed to be magic, the fake runes must be forgeries. Meaning charlatans who couldn't actually write, but could copy the symbols, fooled illiterate Vikings out in the boonies into paying them for writing gibberish on their axes or combs or whatever and then skipped town before anyone caught on. "Hey Ragnar check out these sweet runes on my axe. They mean Strength and Courage*." *Actual translation: potatoes on sale I guess at least it's not tattoos. 
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Apr 20, 2018 06:45
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bloom posted:"Hey Ragnar check out these sweet runes on my axe. They mean Strength and Courage*." I dunno, it'd be pretty impressive to have the runes for a plant that only existed in the other hemisphere imo
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Apr 20, 2018 06:55
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cheetah7071 posted:I dunno, it'd be pretty impressive to have the runes for a plant that only existed in the other hemisphere imo  I may not have thought my post all the way through.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:01
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If anyone cares I finally got around to making my Paleolithic/fantasy themed CYOA in the games forum. I figured some people in this thread might enjoy it.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:10
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bloom posted:"Hey Ragnar check out these sweet runes on my axe. They mean Strength and Courage*." https://twitter.com/skrivafel/status/986344287381094405
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Apr 20, 2018 07:55
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I love stuff like that, it's like an easter egg for anyone who can actually understand it. Like how in Return of the Jedi, Lando's copilot is speaking (profane?) nonsense in, IIRC, swahili. Swahili speakers were laughing out loud in cinemas to the confusion of onlookers.
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Apr 20, 2018 14:34
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cheetah7071 posted:I dunno, it'd be pretty impressive to have the runes for a plant that only existed in the other hemisphere imo A hemisphere the Vikings did in fact get to, though! If anyone from Europe was going to have a word for potato pre-Columbus, it was them. (Probably there weren't any in Newfoundland at the time, mind you)
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Apr 20, 2018 16:09
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Polynesian had a word for sweet potato pie Columbus
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Apr 20, 2018 16:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Polynesian had a word for sweet potato pie Columbus 
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Apr 20, 2018 16:51
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Arglebargle III posted:Polynesian had a word for sweet potato pie Columbus Well known European place Polynesia...
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Apr 20, 2018 16:54
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feedmegin posted:A hemisphere the Vikings did in fact get to, though! If anyone from Europe was going to have a word for potato pre-Columbus, it was them. I'm imagining Vikings making it to Mesoamerica, and all I can think of is Olmec heads and Mayan step pyramids covered in runes that say poo poo like "Bjarni and Snarfi were here!!"
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Apr 20, 2018 17:48
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Grand Fromage posted:The people of Lebanon and coastal Syria are the modern descendants of the Phoenicians. There's never been a major resettlement/genocide of them as far as I know. Wait so The Etruscans picked up their alphabet?
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Apr 20, 2018 18:04
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The Etruscans got their alphabet from Greeks, but not the version the Greeks use today. For example, the alphabet the Etruscans borrowed from had H (the Greek letter eta) for the sound H stands for in English, but in the Ionic alphabet which later became standard for Greek, that letter came to stand for an open e sound because in Ionia they'd stopped pronouncing intial h-sounds kind of like in Cockney.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:08
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By my understanding, there's generally two ways alphabets get adopted. One is an existing alphabet gets adopted wholesale with maybe a few letters changed to account for the uniqueness of the new language. The other is someone sees or hears about the idea of an alphabet, and then makes one from whole cloth for their language. The phoenecians are the only people to invent from whole cloth without even having heard of the idea from someone else
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Apr 20, 2018 18:20
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cheetah7071 posted:By my understanding, there's generally two ways alphabets get adopted. One is an existing alphabet gets adopted wholesale with maybe a few letters changed to account for the uniqueness of the new language. The other is someone sees or hears about the idea of an alphabet, and then makes one from whole cloth for their language. The phoenecians are the only people to invent from whole cloth without even having heard of the idea from someone else What's the sequence/chronology of Phoenecian and Hebrew?
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Apr 20, 2018 18:25
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CommonShore posted:What's the sequence/chronology of Phoenecian and Hebrew? Phoenician->Aramaic->Hebrew. There’s also paleo-Hebrew, which was used pre-exile (and continued to be used by those who weren’t exiled) and is independently derived from Phoenician.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:30
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Grevling posted:but in the Ionic alphabet which later became standard for Greek, that letter came to stand for an open e sound because in Ionia they'd stopped pronouncing intial h-sounds kind of like in Cockney. Eh? What's the spiritus asper for in that case?
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Apr 20, 2018 18:33
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cheetah7071 posted:By my understanding, there's generally two ways alphabets get adopted. One is an existing alphabet gets adopted wholesale with maybe a few letters changed to account for the uniqueness of the new language. The other is someone sees or hears about the idea of an alphabet, and then makes one from whole cloth for their language. The phoenecians are the only people to invent from whole cloth without even having heard of the idea from someone else Joke's on you, the Phoenecians got theirs from the Bolivians, who came from space.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:37
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Chamuska posted:Wait so The Etruscans picked up their alphabet? It's a pretty interesting chain. If I remember right: Phoenician alphabet (Semitic language family) -> Greeks (Indo-European language) -> Etruscans (it's own language family essentially) -> Latins (Indo-European). And of course from Rome the alphabet gets spread around to Europe. The History of English is a really cool podcast that spends a good chunk of change tracing the early language families and developments, and part of that on the alphabet too.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:40
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feedmegin posted:Eh? What's the spiritus asper for in that case? Attic Greek still had breathing, but adopted the Ionic alphabet before they also lost it. It was lost wholesale in all Greek eventually. I don't think they actually used spiritus asper in classical Greek though; that probably came about later, I want to say in the Middle Ages but it might date back to Hellenistic times.
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Apr 20, 2018 19:02
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A neat little tidbit is that a lot, if not all, of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet are still close to being actual words, like Bet->Bayit, which means house. My understanding is then the Greeks took the letters with pretty much their original names , but the names don't mean anything in Greek.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:21
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Elyv posted:A neat little tidbit is that a lot, if not all, of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet are still close to being actual words, like Bet->Bayit, which means house. My understanding is then the Greeks took the letters with pretty much their original names , but the names don't mean anything in Greek. With exceptions - omicron and omega literally mean 'little o' and 'big o' respectively.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:27
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feedmegin posted:With exceptions - omicron and omega literally mean 'little o' and 'big o' respectively. That's cause the greeks wanted vowels n' poo poo for some reason.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:59
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I don't know who came up with the idea of adding spaces between words, but that guy was a genius.
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Apr 20, 2018 21:22
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y ws gng t sy tht smtc lngs lk hbrw nd rbc r mch sr t cmprhnd wtht vwls bt n hndsght, ths snt s bd fr n flnt nglsh spkr
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Apr 20, 2018 21:23
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:y ws gng t sy tht smtc lngs lk hbrw nd rbc r mch sr t cmprhnd wtht vwls bt n hndsght, ths snt s bd fr n flnt nglsh spkr A friend showed me the same concept with different text a few years ago. It's still fun to see in action, though it would take getting used to.
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Apr 20, 2018 21:25
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The world's first written language actually arose earlier than most of you think: it was an almost impossible to decipher collection of abstruse symbols that took a scribe 15 years to learn and could only represent the nouns "grain" "ox" "priest" and several hundred conjugations of the verb "to pay". All examples of it were destroyed by mobs of angry peasants for some reason.
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Apr 20, 2018 22:13
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Gully Foyle posted:It's a pretty interesting chain. If I remember right: I listened to some history of english podcasts a couple of years ago, it's pretty good but I've forgotten most of it. Recently though I've been relistening to history of the ancient world (I last heard it about 4 years ago), and got to the episode about the phoenicians yesterday. That podcast says the phoenicians had a colony on Sardinia and so they traded a lot with the etruscans, so maybe there was some influence directly? I imagine in writing/alphabet at least if they are trading. Also they mention that the Greeks did eventually adopt the phoenician alphabet (and added all the vowels in), but that was way later because at the time of the phoenicians trading with sardinia and the etruscans the Greeks were in their 'dark ages' after the bronze age collapse. E: Well the mainland I guess, not so much Cyprus and Anatolian Greeks. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 23:11
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:y ws gng t sy tht smtc lngs lk hbrw nd rbc r mch sr t cmprhnd wtht vwls bt n hndsght, ths snt s bd fr n flnt nglsh spkr y r cnt s hrd t rndr ths wy th
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Apr 21, 2018 00:06
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Fo3 posted:I listened to some history of english podcasts a couple of years ago, it's pretty good but I've forgotten most of it. The mycenaean greeks used linear b, derived presumably from the minoans. It was iirc a syllabary, not an alphabet. That got lost and the phonecian-derived alphabet shows up later on.
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Apr 21, 2018 00:11
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Dalael posted:I don't know who came up with the idea of adding spaces between words, but that guy was a genius. Apparently it was monks in Ireland, who took one look at Latin writing and decided,"Well gently caress that."
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Apr 21, 2018 10:54
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Jerusalem posted:Apparently it was monks in Ireland, who took one look at Latin writing and decided,"Well gently caress that." You see dots between words earlier than that. Eg Trajans Column
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Apr 21, 2018 11:02
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on the note of elaborate forgeries of nonsense scripts, there's a good chance that is precisely what the voynich manuscript is: something a noveau riche merchant paid for in order to impress his fellows maybe the guy showing it off was completely laughed out of the room by his peers, but a half century later lunatics now think it contains hidden knowledge of the bolivian atlanteans
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Apr 21, 2018 13:20
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I've been trying to find out when the spiritus asper came to be used for breathing, but so far the only information I've been able to find is that it's "post-classical". The Ionic alphabet was adopted almost everywhere around 400 BC, so for a while aspiration before vowels may have just not been part of standard orthography.
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Apr 21, 2018 13:22
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I have a feeling some of the random runic inscriptions might actually be obscure spells. Certain runes were associated with certain deities and/or concepts which is where the Runic magic comes in. Basically using say the wealth rune on your coin purse to help you prosper at trade or a victory rune and Týr's rune on your axe to give you an edge in combat. Someone writing a bunch of seemingly incoherent nonsense on a bowl or cloak or threshold might be some spell lost to time. I should stress that I've only read like 4 books on this and some of them were primarily about the magical sigils of early modern Icelandic magic which may have developed out of runic magic. So I might be full of poo poo.
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Apr 21, 2018 14:34
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Grevling posted:I've been trying to find out when the spiritus asper came to be used for breathing, but so far the only information I've been able to find is that it's "post-classical". The Ionic alphabet was adopted almost everywhere around 400 BC, so for a while aspiration before vowels may have just not been part of standard orthography. Hellenistic times according to a philologist I could ask, but in the beginning it was only used sporadically. From approximately the 10th century they began to be used more consistently.
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Apr 21, 2018 15:12
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Banana Canada posted:Go shopping in mainland China for some clothes with hip "English" slogans or design elements and you'll see variations on all of this today. Badly translated or misspelt phrases, copied non sequitur words or sayings, "lorem ipsum" style lifting of blocks of texts from a random book or news article, voweless gibberish, etc. A year ago I had some students in Taiwan making flower arrangements for mother's day. They were wrapped in some kind of fancy paper that had English on it. I took one and read it. It consisted of the same two articles over and over again: A Dave Barry column about horseracing/gambling? (can't remember exactly) The scandal about Nancy Reagan's astrologist This is apparently used in Taiwan/China for many different kinds of flower arrangements. And I can't even remember if I told this story before in this thread or another.
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Apr 22, 2018 13:50
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