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Slim Jim Pickens posted:"Han Chinese" is not really an ethnic group, it's more like "mainstream Chinese society". The shared script and semi-shared language is much different from polyglot Europe or Africa, but it's not like a unified identity. China is composed of a bunch of regions, which are recognizably different from each other despite the shared language. Think Californians vs Texans vs the Deep South vs New England etc. in America.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:24
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Japan has a better claim to being Chinese than the Mongols do.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:24
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Nessus posted:I figured one thing that has probably helped with Chinese identity is the writing system. I have heard that Confucius could read something written in modern Traditional Chinese, and would understand it (if maybe not the references), although he would pronounce it completely differently. I have no idea how close this is to reality, Fromage probably has a better idea. The characters would be recognizable but Classical Chinese is an entirely different language. Confucius would understand modern Chinese about as much as a Roman would understand modern Italian. You'd recognize bits at most. It is true you can communicate by writing with people who don't speak Mandarin today, I've done that.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:27
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CommonShore posted:One thing I don't know offhand is how early modern people made manuscript ink for writing on porous paper media. each ink ages a different color and wallenstein's writing is the blackest i've ever seen. on small sheets of almost see-through paper, still white. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 00:38
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Mr Enderby posted:Edit: and I refuse to believe Hey Guns doesn't make his own ink.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:40
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Modern iron gall formulations have the good behaviour to not eat through the page.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:42
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Platystemon posted:Modern iron gall formulations have the good behaviour to not eat through the page.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:43
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HEY GUNS posted:that's because you are looking at them now, not 500 years in the future There’s probably some truth to this, but homemade ink is aggressively corrosive to nibs and commercial ink isn’t, so it’s not the whole story.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:47
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Platystemon posted:There’s probably some truth to this, but homemade ink is aggressively corrosive to nibs and commercial ink isn’t, so it’s not the whole story. the "commercial ink" you buy for your metal pen is chemically different from the "commercial ink" i buy for reenacting HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 00:50
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I see. You have interesting corner shops.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:56
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Mr Enderby posted:As far as I know those are two different methods. You either make ink with gallnuts and iron, or you make it with soot.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:57
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Platystemon posted:I see. for instance the guy who runs my hostel also runs a boarding house for apprentices.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:58
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep. I was curious how far it went and a student showed me in their Chinese history textbook where it was arguing Mongols had always been Chinese (mostly the "argument" was about the Mongol economic relationship with northern China) so the Yuan Dynasty was not a foreign conquest. Also fun how you'll simultaneously get an assertion the Mongol Empire was Chinese, but that China has never engaged in imperialism and only been a victim of it. Adding on to this - There was a school of historiography in the US that was called the New Qing History which was a revision of previous interpretations of the Manchus and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). This includes people like Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, and Peter Perdue. Previous historians emphasized how much the Manchus, which took over after the fall of the Ming in the 17th century, 'became Chinese' or 'Sinicized', whereas the New Qing historians emphasized how much a 'Manchu' sense of identity was retained among the ruling nobility, and how the Qing Empire was, in fact, an empire, of which China and the Han Chinese were only the largest part. This is a complicated topic in contemporary China, as it casts doubt on the claims of the government on how Tibet and Xinjiang are 'inherently Chinese'. While some academics in mainland China were interested at first, this led to an outraged reaction. In an official journal published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there was a major essay full of pure venom about the field but also filled with personal attacks on the writers. It's almost a caricature of a bad academic argument. It still uses the official terms of "unifying the frontiers" to refer to the Qing's military conquest of what is now called Tibet and Xinjiang, and refuses to consider any claim these areas have not "always been a part of China". http://www.cssn.cn/zx/201504/t20150420_1592588.shtml If you can read Chinese, here you go.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:11
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Nessus posted:My grandfather figured he knew enough that he could have given Napoleon primitive radios, which he estimated would probably have let him more effectively conquer Europe. That plus explaining history would, he thought, let Napoleon do better, including crushing the Tsar, whose government would later get his older brother killed in the 1905 war with Japan. It would have also improved the situation of the Jews throughout Europe and probably would have headed off the Holocaust even if he didn't expect it would cure anti-Semitism. Potatoes, tomatoes, and maize, sure, but tobacco isn't what I'd call a boon.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:20
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HEY GUNS posted:washes off better than modern ink but will stick in the lines around your fingernails HEY GUNS posted:yeah, the black of the former is a chemical reaction so you don't need a pigment The colour is from iron (II) oxide. Chemicals that remove rust will remove it. Old books recommend various acids, but nowadays there gentler chelation‐based rust removers like Evapo‐Rust. I’ve used ER to remove iron gall stains from paper, cotton cloth, and wood. Stains on wood took a few applications. I don’t recall purposefully using it to to remove ink stains from my hands, but I assume it did. SDS says it’s safe for skin contact and I’ve handled it without gloves to no effect. HEY GUNS posted:the "commercial ink" you buy for your metal pen is chemically different from the "commercial ink" i buy for reenacting All of the “walnut” ink I could find for sale was actually made from peat moss or synthetic dyes. I made my own by steeping walnut husks. It smells amazing when it’s on the stove.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:26
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CommonShore posted:The difference with paper is that it barely even needs specialized or technical knowledge to pull it off, to the extent that anyone who has seen it done once can work it out enough to get started on making some rough but workable sheets from a heap of rags, a bunch of cotton, some cattails, or whatever. The knowledge involved is more the difference between doing it and doing it well. And as a technology it would have far-ranging implications considering the shittiness of papyrus and the cost of parchment and vellum. Paper I think is one of the few things I think a modern time traveler is likely to be able to make that would be immediately and obviously valuable and useful to classical people. However I was watching some paper making videos and it seems surprisingly difficult to get right. Getting good long fibers is surprisingly difficult, you can't just use any wood pulp. In traditional Japanese and Korean paper-making they only use the inner bark of a single species grown just for paper, because it produces especially long fibers. Linen rags are probably the best source of raw material but working those is still pretty fiddly. Like here's a terrible video of a nerd trying to make several types of ancient writing surfaces from scratch, and loving it up horribly each time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYC4SWeVleo
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Sep 20, 2019 01:33
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cheetah7071 posted:I have no doubt that the successor states to the USA will try to evoke our imagery and claim more continuity than actually exists I can't wait for Canada to rename itself the Holy United Provinces of America.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:39
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Mods new thread title tia
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Sep 20, 2019 01:48
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Just play After the End
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Sep 20, 2019 05:11
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punk rebel ecks posted:The conversations in here really put in perspective just how incredible China is. They've had and more or less maintained world superpower status from the BC to this day. Imagine if the Roman Federation was a thing or if Greece was a present day superpower. Wow they did all of that from Taiwan eh?
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Sep 20, 2019 05:49
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HEY GUNS posted:the ink you use to write with metal nibs is not the same as iron gall ink, that's why people changed it.
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Sep 20, 2019 08:10
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cheetah7071 posted:It's a shame that archaeology is so bad at detecting politics, I'd love to know if this was true in the Americas as well It somewhat is in Central Mexico. Teotihuacan is THE state in the Early Classic, nothing else outside the Zapotec state has the sort of material evidence for such a widespread state in the area. Then they fall around CE 550, how is still HEAVILY debated. Then you get various altepetl (city-states), of which Tula is one of the most famous, that fission and fusion from around CE 1100 until CE 1300, when many of them are united under Azcapotzalco, then that falls with Tenochtitlan leading rebellion against their empire, as some altepetl join what will become the Triple Alliance (the Aztecs as typically meant, the people Cortez found), others don't and form a variety of alliances. A lot of these altepetl appeal to the past for authority, even ones like the Mexica who claimed to be newcomers, but drew legitimacy from ties to Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc as deities and from seeking the approval of the Priests of Quetzalcoatl at Cholula for their rule, outside their Triple Alliance state. A lot of this gets reconstructed through archaeology because the histories, especially for CE 900-1350 or so, are very, very embellished and artifact provenance sourcing along with settlement patterns shine quite a bit on where state boundaries existed and who is interacting with who by looking at those patterns. Anything non-Maya or Zapotec before the end of the Classic Period it's all archaeology. Appeals to the past and arguing they were a successor state was accomplished through use of certain symbols that held meanings of state power and authority are a likely how a lot of states also drew up power. The Triple Alliance did it a lot with their Toltec myths, and more generally from the time of the Olmec Horizon, rulers start to wear mirrors as pectorals and that is kept around until the Triple Alliance, across languages and cultures. It even seems to diffuse to the Chaco Regional System. I know less about it, but there are some similar dynamics along the Peruvian coast with various states going through fission-fusion proceses. The Chaco Regional System on the Colorado Plateau also seems to undergo some similar patterns. The Aztec Regional System that succeeds it also seems to purposefully build their Great Houses in a form very similar to the Chaco Canyon core Great Houses at a time where that system/state is in decline, either trying to reestablish the system closer to allies in the Northern San Juan or attempting to usurp the system while maintaining ideological legitimacy. KiteAuraan fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 08:19
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Silver2195 posted:Potatoes, tomatoes, and maize, sure, but tobacco isn't what I'd call a boon. Chilies.
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Sep 20, 2019 08:32
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This talk of USA successor states and Cascadia reminds me of the It Could Happen Here podcast. It lays out a real plausible outline of a conflict that could lead to the fall of the USA and the rise of those successors. Also, it convinced me that Cascadia would be a lousy place to live since it would almost certainly be Christian Dominionist theocracy lead by Supreme Leader Matt Shea or some other similar nutjob. I started listening to Mike Duncan's The History of Rome and I've been enjoying it. I like the short episode format. Thanks to all those that recommended it.
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Sep 20, 2019 08:33
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Really? Like, they're claiming that Mongolians, the people who speak a completely different language and historicaly had a completely different lifestyle, are Han Chinese? I feel like this distinction gets played up too much for places that aren't western. Like I grew up ashkenazi jewish and speaking a mix of french and yiddish at home but still am extremely an american from the United States of America and anyone can tell it as soon as I open my mouth, and I've got no idea how to do usury to medieval alsatians or whatever our traditional lifestyle is.
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Sep 20, 2019 09:15
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Bourricot posted:You can buy iron-gall inks safe for use in fountain pens, thanks to a much less acidic composition.
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Sep 20, 2019 09:29
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HEY GUNS posted:if you make your own pens out of feathers it's free I’m imagining you attacking geese with a pike.
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Sep 20, 2019 09:37
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cheetah7071 posted:Look if I want to see a united earth alternate history I have to give radios, trains, and transoceanic boats to somebody, might as well be the romans One of the more popular GURPS infinite worlds series was Johnson's Rome, a parallel world in which an rear end in a top hat southerner ports into the Roman empire, teaches them about cellphones and mechanics and bribes a roman admiral to "discover" the Americas so he can have his cigars.
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Sep 20, 2019 11:31
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Holy hell I finally made it through the entire thread. It only took a few months of sporadic downtime  On the subject of time machines, wouldn't you need to also travel an exceptionally long distance to actually arrive at the point in space the earth occupied thousands of years ago? If you just went back 2000 years from where you are now you'd just end up floating in the void.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:33
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The space 2000 years where earth was isn’t there anymore either. Lots of problems with time travel.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:35
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We could just go with the premise that if you can figure out time travel, you can probably figure out how not to reappear in empty space.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:38
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Speaking of Ghengis Khan - is it a hard g or soft g? I’ve always heard gang-is but someone I knew at one point said it jeng-is and I honestly don’t know what is technically correct.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:48
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Mr. Nice! posted:Holy hell I finally made it through the entire thread. It only took a few months of sporadic downtime Kind of. It’s true that Earth is moving with respect to the Sun and the Sun is moving with respect to the centre of our galaxy and our galaxy is moving with respect to other galaxies. But there are all measured against other objects. You can’t, like, pull up the debug display for reality and find a static coordinate system. Referencing to the surface of Earth is as valid as any other reference point, more or less (because it’s not an inertial reference frame). The solar system only does about one and a third light–years of its orbit in two thousand years, so if your time machine were referenced to the galactic centre, you would still end up closer to the Sun than to any other star.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:49
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Mr. Nice! posted:Speaking of Ghengis Khan - is it a hard g or soft g? I’ve always heard gang-is but someone I knew at one point said it jeng-is and I honestly don’t know what is technically correct. He puts the “chin” in “Chinggis Khan”.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:51
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Mr. Nice! posted:Speaking of Ghengis Khan - is it a hard g or soft g? I’ve always heard gang-is but someone I knew at one point said it jeng-is and I honestly don’t know what is technically correct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2bvPzvFlP8
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Sep 20, 2019 15:03
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Mr. Nice! posted:Speaking of Ghengis Khan - is it a hard g or soft g? I’ve always heard gang-is but someone I knew at one point said it jeng-is and I honestly don’t know what is technically correct. The spelling comes from Italian — g as in gelato, gh as in spaghetti. Genghis, not Ghengis.
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Sep 20, 2019 15:13
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Thanks for the pronunciation assistance. Would help if I spelled his name right.Platystemon posted:Kind of. I thought the galaxies were moving away from the location of the big bang not necessarily each other. There should be a point where all of the prior traveled paths of the various galaxies intersect.
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Sep 20, 2019 16:08
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Mr. Nice! posted:Thanks for the pronunciation assistance. Would help if I spelled his name right. This is physics not history but everything is moving away from everything else. There is no central point of origin. The space itself is "stretching" rather than galaxies "moving". The analogy I always found helpful was the surface of a balloon being blow up. The balloon itself is stretching, and there's no point on the surface of the balloon that everything is moving away from. e: The evidence that the big bang was not at a discrete location in pre-existing space that it began exploding into, but is rather the origin of all of the visible universe, is that the cosmic background radiation is everywhere. The radiation is in a real sense, looking at the big bang. If you look 12-13 billion light years away, what you see is the light it admitted 12-13 billion years ago. And we see the same thing in every direction--the remnants of the big bang. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 17:10
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cheetah7071 posted:This is physics not history but everything is moving away from everything else. There is no central point of origin. The space itself is "stretching" rather than galaxies "moving". Every point on the surface is moving away from a point in the balloon, though. If you could uniformly inflate a balloon from the center, each point would be equidistant. Even if not uniform, it would be possible to trace a path from each point based upon its expanding motion that would all cross through some central point. The big bang happened at a spot. It may not be the exact "center" of the universe, but everything is still expanding relative to that spot. We can only observe the movement relative to other actual bodies, but that doesn't mean that they do not come from a central origin. To say there is no central point kindof runs counter to the entire theory of the big bang. Granted it's been 10 years since I took physics I&II in college, but afaik the big bang is still the consensus universal origin. On topic, I think it was Fauxton who mentioned it, but teaching the Romans how to make a good chronometer probably would have resulted in a lot more sea-exploration than before. The chronometer changed western nautical navigation in an extreme way. It's crazy to me that polynesian people were able to navigate without it.
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Sep 20, 2019 17:21
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cheetah7071 posted:This is physics not history but everything is moving away from everything else. There is no central point of origin. The space itself is "stretching" rather than galaxies "moving". But what's on the inside of the balloon, what media is the balloon filling with, what is the balloon filling into? This is like one of those "observable universe > (speed of light)*(time since big bang)" things, isn't it? 
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Sep 20, 2019 17:22
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