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Perestroika posted:Here's a possibly little weird question: Roughly how nocturnal were ancient cities and people? I recently read a thing about how artificial lightning in the middle ages (e.g. candles, lanterns, etc.), while decently available, was kind of a pain in the rear end in terms of soot, brightness, and smell. I recall reading a paper somewhere that detailed exactly how dangerous nights were in the ancient world. In Roman cities, the general gist of it was that most law abiding citizens went to sleep at sundown, save for the very rich who could continue to hold their private parties (as they had their personal bodyguards to escort them to the various villas). The criminals who came out to operate at night in the back alleys (and if they got caught, they'd get the usual punishments like hands cut off, sold into slavery, and etc, depending on the severity of the crime), along with visitors to the various brothels (both the high class and low class ones), so you could say that there was some sort of nightlife, but only if you stuck close to the main roads where the patrols were. If you're talking about the Western medieval world, it would be more or less the same, except that there would be less guards on patrol, and there would be no guarantee that the guards wouldn't shake you down for extra cash (since many of them were just mercenaries, or they just didn't get paid enough by the local lord.) I do not know how it was in the Islamic world, so you'd have to ask someone who knows more about them. LingcodKilla posted:Pretty decent argument I suppose. However the countries most widely known for the renaissance all had very similar languages no? Italian, French, Spanish with Latin bridging the gap? The upper class generally didn't stay in one place by the Renaissance (one of the reasons for the technological boom was that transport became much cheaper around that time); there would be Spanish merchants in Italy (Alexander Sixtus, the famous Borgia Pope who also funded a lot of scientists and innovators at the time, was Spanish for instance, and faced a great deal of discrimination from the local Italian cardinals on his rise to power), Italian innovators running around trying to sell their inventions to the various Kings and rulers of minor principalities and etc. Names like "Francesco", which meant Frenchman in Italian, were pretty common, indicating that either there were a lot of mixed marriages going on, or that the people of one particular culture just admired the habits of another. Among the upper classes (which generally most innovators were), they did all have a common tongue, which was Latin. However, that was the language they just used to communicate with each other; most of the time, people think in the native language, so that probably has an impact on what sort of inventions people come up with. While those languages are similar, people do think very differently in them; Italians were known for their charm (even today they use a great deal more hand motions than speakers of other languages), and the French were considered to be masculine and warrior like, while German was considered a language of barbarians. Everyone also wanted to learn Greek, as the Greek speaking refugees from Constantinople bought a great number of texts over, which had major impact on the sciences and the culture of Western Europe as well. Arabic was also very useful, as there were a lot of texts taken back to Europe from the Crusades. EDIT: Another big thing about the Renaissance; basically everyone who was educated in any way at all spoke multiple different languages. One of the awards that you could earn at the time was the title of Oraculum Septilingue, which means you know seven different 'high' languages (Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic). Cetea fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 11:50
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:At this point I can only conclude you're willfully misinterpreting people so you can make this argument. You, on the other hand, are not interpreting what they said
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Sep 8, 2020 11:51
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Ras Het posted:It clearly is. "If we didn't have different races there wouldn't be any conflicts between them" is racist. Dude even if I did say that and I didn’t there’s always religion to kill each other over.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:54
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Isn't English basically the default language of international science journals now anyway?
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Sep 8, 2020 11:57
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The way we treat language is actually a bit different from history; it's not that long ago that say, French was the official 'language of diplomacy' among most of Europe, which people who didn't speak it natively would use to converse with each other, mostly ruling class folks. Hence, 'lingua franca'. English of course often serves a similar role today. For the Romans it'd probably be Greek. And of course, it's not uncommon for a society's ruling class to be from conquerers who speak a different language than their subjects. It's quite well known that it's very easy for young children to learn multiple languages when they're raised around people speaking them, as pretty much anyone you meet raised in a multilingual community can attest.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:57
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Nessus posted:Isn't English basically the default language of international science journals now anyway? The international language of science is still Latin and Greek in many ways, in terms of classifications in biology and the like; most papers are currently written in English of course, but this is more or less temporary; usually the most powerful state on the international stage will publish the most papers, and you can never really guess who will be the most powerful state around in say, 300 years time. Latin has a huge advantage for classification because as a non-living (but not quite dead either) language, it doesn't change arbitrarily, and therefore is perfect for describing constants. At any rate, a good Scientist wouldn't be monolingual; for example as a Biologist, knowing Latin helps you understand the phylogenetic tree a lot more easily than if you just had to remember the scientific name for absolutely everything without understanding what that name meant.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:09
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Having one common language for trade or scientific publications is one thing, everyone being monolingual in that one language is pretty drat different.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:11
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Emerged monolingualism > Whatever it is we have now > Forced monolingualism
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Sep 8, 2020 12:15
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Kassad posted:Having one common language for trade or scientific publications is one thing, everyone being monolingual in that one language is pretty drat different. Yeah, LingcodKilla was pretty obviously talking about a global scientific lingua franca and not global monolinguism.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:16
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In the late 1800s to early 1900s German was basically the common language of academia.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The way we treat language is actually a bit different from history; it's not that long ago that say, French was the official 'language of diplomacy' among most of Europe, which people who didn't speak it natively would use to converse with each other, mostly ruling class folks. Hence, 'lingua franca'. English of course often serves a similar role today. For the Romans it'd probably be Greek. And of course, it's not uncommon for a society's ruling class to be from conquerers who speak a different language than their subjects. The expression "lingua franca" doesn't derive from French but from the trade pidgin used around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and beyond
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Sep 8, 2020 12:17
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yeah, LingcodKilla was pretty obviously talking about a global scientific lingua franca and not global monolinguism. In that case, technically Latin would be the perfect global scientific language, as it would not be (as) politically charged, most of our scientific base already uses Latin words anyway, and we know the language won't change randomly and confuse future scientists because some teenagers decided to come up with new slang words which eventually become the vernacular. It's also why biologists still name every new species they find using either Latin or (more rarely), Greek.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:20
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Cetea posted:The international language of science is still Latin and Greek in many ways, in terms of classifications in biology and the like; most papers are currently written in English of course, but this is more or less temporary; usually the most powerful state on the international stage will publish the most papers, and you can never really guess who will be the most powerful state around in say, 300 years time. Latin has a huge advantage for classification because as a non-living (but not quite dead either) language, it doesn't change arbitrarily, and therefore is perfect for describing constants. Literally the only thing Latin is useful for is botany, and it's not perfect for the job - just a holdover of the early scientific elite all knowing Latin - try telling a Chinese botanist that Latin is actually good for classifications and not just a confusing nightmare making their job harder. You do not need to know anything more than English in modern science, unless you're treating mathematics as a language in it's own right. Being able to hear and decipher a latin name is a novelty at best anyways - you'll only see them when looking something up anyways. And it's utterly irrelevant to modern physics and chemistry - where everything has been in english for the past 50ish years (which does add barriers to many prospective scientists from non anglephone countries especially outside europe)
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Sep 8, 2020 12:21
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Literally the only thing Latin is useful for is botany, and it's not perfect for the job - just a holdover of the early scientific elite all knowing Latin - try telling a Chinese botanist that Latin is actually good for classifications and not just a confusing nightmare making their job harder. Given rising geopolitical tensions, knowing only English may soon restrict people to only papers from certain geographical regions; this is why using a mostly dead language is more conductive to global research; at the very least, people feel that the barrier to entry is equal, you know that it'll still be perfectly readable centuries down the line because the language doesn't change, and of course you can still publish in your native language as well if you wished (this was the one of the reasons why the elites used Latin in the past). The point is that having a single language is pretty much unenforceable anyway, and people will continue writing papers in whatever language they want. Learning new languages is also proven to simulate your neurons and helps slow or prevent mental decline, even if we ignore the advantages that the perspective of different languages brings. In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is basically nothing at all, and in the future it's highly likely that you'd need to know multiple different semi dead languages to actually understand where certain scientific terms come from. English changes very quickly, and it'll be pretty likely that 20th century English (along with all the papers we've written in the past 50 years) will become unreadable in five centuries or so, which will not be great for the readability of scientific knowledge down the line, as you'd have to know multiple different 'dead' languages if you wanted to do more than memorize terms. Cetea fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 12:29
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IIRC, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Assyrian and Persian empires, not because it was the language of the Assyrians, but because it was the language of the people they'd conquered and then spread around their empire since they were big on forced relocation.
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Sep 8, 2020 15:30
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Cetea posted:English changes very quickly, and it'll be pretty likely that 20th century English (along with all the papers we've written in the past 50 years) will become unreadable in five centuries or so, which will not be great for the readability of scientific knowledge down the line, as you'd have to know multiple different 'dead' languages if you wanted to do more than memorize terms. I mean, how many scientific papers do you need to read right now that are from 1500? (Where they would generally have been in Latin, to boot).
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Sep 8, 2020 16:43
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Latin from Arabic from Greek
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Sep 8, 2020 16:46
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Also there is and was a lot of science in Russian journals
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Sep 8, 2020 16:47
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Trying to have a universal language of science is like trying to make elons boring company for traffic congestion. A stupid solution to something that can be easily addressed. If journals could be accessed without having to go through those academic publishing companies, better resources for universities to translate or increase accessibility, you have already removed a big hurdle. Deciding on a universal scientific language will end up putting the onus of learning another language on someone else (i.e romance language to Chinese or indian sphere etc). If I had to learn one more language to go to university or take science courses as a kid, I probably would have just given up, since by the time I was 6 I was already speaking 3 languages at home and learning English for school. Plus if math, science in highschool's and middle school are taught in some international science language what happens to the native language? It only gets used in its own specific class? gently caress that. Or archeology, anthropology and history for that matter, is that a science that needs to be discussed in an international language? Those fields are already having to come to terms with it's long colonial history as different places from the global south have people from those place write and study their own history on there own terms. ughhhh fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 18:06
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No it isn't, don't be hyperbolic. Its a frequent claim from this person
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Sep 8, 2020 18:44
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I mean, it sure would be nice if there were funding to get all that history stuff translated into one language (and then another, and another, and...)
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Sep 8, 2020 18:49
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Cetea posted:The scientific argument against switching over to a single universal (or rather planet wide) language is that people with different languages think about problems in a different way. It's common knowledge that people who speak multiple different languages also think differently depending on the language they're using at that time, and have different personalities based on the language they are speaking (i.e Chinese is much easier to do simple arithmetic in, while Latin is one of the best languages for poetry and classification). If everyone switched to a single language, this perspective could be lost and we might miss out on scientific breakthroughs and the like. A completely homogeneous society also tends to lose creativity over time; it's why Europe during the Renaissance was such a boiling cauldron of innovation and different ideologies. America was, and continues to be a giant mixing pot of cultures, which also tends to benefit it in terms of creativity and long term GDP growth. I thought Sapir-Whorf was widely discredited I'm not up to date on linguistics research though
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Sep 8, 2020 18:53
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cheetah7071 posted:I thought Sapir-Whorf was widely discredited Only the so-called "strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" is discredited, I think. Language clearly does influence thought to some degree, but how much and and in what ways is still controversial.
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Sep 8, 2020 19:30
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the idea that people who speak a foreign language fundamentally think in a different way than you do is pretty racist tbh
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Sep 8, 2020 20:24
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I honestly think this words gets thrown around way too often in this thread when much better words would apply.
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Sep 8, 2020 20:50
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Dalael posted:I honestly think this words gets thrown around way too often in this thread when much better words would apply. This is the future Atlanteans want.
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Sep 8, 2020 21:05
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My family speaks french in the US and our bellicose method of thought led to constant feuds with our perfidious, mercantile neighbours
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Sep 8, 2020 21:08
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Sarern posted:This is the future Atlanteans want. Please, its racist not to call them Bolivians.
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Sep 8, 2020 21:14
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Tunicate posted:the idea that people who speak a foreign language fundamentally think in a different way than you do is pretty racist tbh Idk, is it racist to think European languages are better suited to creativity and expression while Chinese is best suited to simple math ?
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Sep 8, 2020 22:24
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tbh it's kinda racist to associate language with race at all
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Sep 8, 2020 22:31
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Delthalaz posted:Idk, is it racist to think European languages are better suited to creativity and expression while Chinese is best suited to simple math ? This is the kind of statement that should at least be accompanied by links to a couple of well regarded scientific journal articles backing it up, yes.
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Sep 8, 2020 22:39
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I struggle to imagine how you'd even test that in a way that accounts for all the other covariates and confounding factors
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Sep 8, 2020 22:40
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Arglebargle III posted:tbh it's kinda racist to associate language with race at all Arguably even associating language with culture is asking for trouble. Think about how many very different cultures speak English to one extent or another (and for the sake of this example pointedly ignore the historical reasons why some of those varied cultures speak English in the first place).
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Sep 8, 2020 22:41
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Koramei posted:This is the kind of statement that should at least be accompanied by links to a couple of well regarded scientific journal articles backing it up, yes. I agree!
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Sep 8, 2020 22:45
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cheetah7071 posted:I struggle to imagine how you'd even test that in a way that accounts for all the other covariates and confounding factors For sure. And as such yeah, I think it is something you shouldn't be thinking, at least to the point of basing any actual arguments off it. Linking it back to ancient history, because this argument is actually very relevant to the historiography side of it, that kind of statement rings pretty close to some very orientalist views that have plagued how we view East Asia(n history) in the west.
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Sep 8, 2020 22:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Arguably even associating language with culture is asking for trouble. Yeah, and I think it can be very destructive to how we even view the two, even by experts. Take ancestral Koreanic/Japonic, which I've been reading more about lately--the modern academic consensus is that Japonic was spoken on the Korean peninsula, then spread to Japan via the peninsular Yayoi migrants. This seems to be pretty close to universally accepted these days, with the sole exception of Korean academia, for whom it's still a really touchy subject. Silly nationalism wrt 2500 year old peoples aside, I think this is mostly because it's viewed there as saying that Japanese people have an older claim to the Korean peninsula than Koreans do, based apparently on some assumption that all the Japonic speakers packed up and moved to Japan or something, and are completely detached from later peoples that moved in and created Korean culture. From an archaeological standpoint though we know that this didn't happen at all--the culture of those Peninsular Japonic speakers can be traced directly to the later Korean states, and so all the way to modern Koreans. A significant number migrated to Japan for sure, but vastly more stayed behind; they just changed the language they spoke. But because of this weird outdated assumption that the language is inextricably attached to the culture, there's still a lot of resistance to accepting this in Korea.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:03
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Delthalaz posted:Idk, is it racist to think European languages are better suited to creativity and expression while Chinese is best suited to simple math ? It probably comes down to your overall definition of racism, but probably, yeah. Designating that traits that coincide with race determine your overall mental capacity and capabilities seems pretty racist. I have heard that Korean is so intuitive with its written language that you can flash a bunch of numbers to a native reader and they'll automatically add them all up, and I've read a few things on how a language differentiating colors with words helps people differentiate them with their eyeballs, but those are much lower-order things compared to the overall generalizations that people want to be able to make. I do think it's plausible that the individual characteristics of people's brains as hardware and the ways that language can help people's brains structure thoughts like software could have a lot of overall effects, but there's not really any good way to definitively measure either of those and people seem prone to using conclusions from less-definitive measures to leapfrog to wild and crazy conclusions that if feels like that kind of research would have poor returns anyways. What seems more certain is that people tend to learn best in whatever their native language or dialect is rather than learning a new one to even be able to learn "properly".
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Sep 8, 2020 23:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:What seems more certain is that people tend to learn best in whatever their native language or dialect is rather than learning a new one to even be able to learn "properly". I hope this isn't veering into the anecdotal, but I am really curious about this. I learned my second language as an adult and I definitely find I don't intuitively remember stuff from it as well as I do in my native language. Like it's not at the point where I don't remember the general gist of a conversation or something, but where in English I'll often remember distinct phrases from what we were saying that stuck we me, for my second language it's usually much less specific. Harsh words also feel a lot more cushioned when I hear them. It could well be that I'm just not as fluent as I think I am, so I wonder how it is for people that have spoken multiple languages for much longer. Even though I don't have to actively translate things in my head anymore, it feels like there is still a translation bubble or something that keeps things from being quite as vivid.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:I have heard that Korean is so intuitive with its written language that you can flash a bunch of numbers to a native reader and they'll automatically add them all up Even then written language is an invented tool, which can be adapted to be more suited to some tasks and less suited to others. Or even in extreme cases like mathematical or musical notation drop any connection to natural language entirely in order to excel at communicating information in a very niche area. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 23:34
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did the ancient egyptians pee
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Sep 8, 2020 23:35
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