Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Stringent
Dec 22, 2004


image text goes here
GF, I feel like I'm kind of responsible for unleashing this, so I'm going to apologize regardless of whether I actually did it or not. For what it's worth the thread at least knows who it needs to double check sources from, so that's some level of comfort. I'll be more careful in the future.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Cetea
Jun 14, 2013

evilweasel posted:

the point is a relatively simple one: that the statement


is correct in a specific, important way when discussing language; and that it is especially inappropriate to go "lol do you even speak english" in response to that because it's correct.

what people appear to be conflating is the discussion of is there a meaningful real-world distinction between "rights" and "power" - essentially, a legal realist argument that there's no such thing - with the discussion of is there a meaningful difference in the implications of the words. and it's obvious there is: invoking rights is, generally, making a moral argument that it is wrong to violate them. invoking power is making a different sort of argument: it's about who actually has power and who doesn't.

if you are unaware of the distinction, and use the wrong one in english you will change the meaning of what you say, in a way that significantly changes the message that a listener receives. this is true even if you hold the position that the english idea of "rights" is utter nonsense. language doesn't need to reflect reality!

the idea that there's something inherent about a language that makes it possible or not possible to express certain ideas has, i think, been roundly rejected. language evolves: to the extent that a language had no natural analogues of the english idea of "rights" but it became a topic of discussion in that language would likely result in something that conveyed the appropriate implications evolving and being well understood. english does that all the time, even to the extent of just plain appropriating the word - for example, schadenfreude - and i'm sure other languages do so as well (i am, obviously, less familiar with other languages as opposed to english, my native language, so i use english examples).

but it is particularly appropriate to discuss in the context of discussing ancient languages, where it's much easier for that implication to be lost because it may be extremely difficult to reconstruct, today, that it had such implications.

I fully agree with the idea that language evolves over time, but that does take time; to the older generations, a certain word would hold a different meaning than to someone born recently; this is relevant in China because the concept of Human Rights is still mostly alien to anyone who isn't an academic or an activist and you can't talk about it openly to better dissect and understand its meaning. One of the best things about English is how rapidly it does adapt to new ideas (using Tsunami instead of Tidal Waves for instance to more accurately reflect the phenomenon). If you read any older primary text in its original language, it becomes pretty clear how easily things get lost over time, even if it's the same language (Shakespeare is a great example, as it has a ton of toilet humor and innuendo that just goes over your head if you read it with a modern British accent).

Oh and to the above post, I wasn't directing it at you, but it's usually the case on the internet that people talk past each other, and refuse to attack the argument itself. Evilweasel has just hit the nail directly on the head IMO, so I feel like that's all there is to it.

Cetea fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Sep 9, 2020

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
Pet peeve, but the word "rights" as used by philosophers like Locke, or in documents like the Declaration, should be read to mean "morally justified" not "objectively real" or even necessarily "enforceable." The natural law argument is that such fundamental rights are always, universally, morally justifiable and thus have a fundamental deductible "reality" in the sense that a mathematical equation is "real".

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Stringent posted:

GF, I feel like I'm kind of responsible for unleashing this, so I'm going to apologize regardless of whether I actually did it or not. For what it's worth the thread at least knows who it needs to double check sources from, so that's some level of comfort. I'll be more careful in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1CGauwoKcw

Cetea
Jun 14, 2013

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Pet peeve, but the word "rights" as used by philosophers like Locke, or in documents like the Declaration, should be read to mean "morally justified" not "objectively real" or even necessarily "enforceable." The natural law argument is that such fundamental rights are always, universally, morally justifiable and thus have a fundamental deductible "reality" in the sense that a mathematical equation is "real".

Yeah, this is pretty much what I was getting at with my comparison of human rights to the speed of light, but you worded it more eloquently than I did.

Stringent
Dec 22, 2004


image text goes here

lol

Mr. Nice!
Oct 13, 2005

c-spam cannot afford



Cetea posted:

Yes they did, but they did not do it in a single generation (as proven by the different dates of settlement in the various island chains, with New Zealand being the last place to be colonized by the Polynesians around 1200 C.E). So in the length of time it took one generation of Polynesians to get from one place to another, Sargon went further. So yes, ten generations of Polynesians did travel further than Sargon in one, but that is not a fair comparison IMO; it would be like ten generations of people from the 1750s to 1950s made more money than one person from 1945 to 2000. The Polynesians had access to the same navigational tools that Sargon did, which was an understanding of the stars and how they related to cardinal directions; at the same time, Sargon predated the Polynesians by thousands of years, and he also had access to many other technologies that the Polynesians did not have, such as metallurgy. Otherwise if you include multiple generations, you could say that the Africans who first left Africa and eventually arrived in Australia after thousands of years were more advanced than Columbus sailing from Europe to the Americas.


Pakistan is an example of the expanse that Sargon had some influence over; it is separate from his ocean going expeditions. Maybe I'd read it again. (All these ad-hominems are amusing, but expected on the internet).

Just because the first explorers didn’t travel the full expanse does not mean that the trade routes they discovered ceased. The pacific is really loving big and the polyneseans sailed all the gently caress over it. Yes, it took them a while to colonize the whole thing, but Sargon wasn’t the first human to step foot in any place he traveled.

The polynesian people that sailed to south america and back traveled further in their lives than Sargon.

mossyfisk
Nov 8, 2010

FF0000
The main thing this stupid conversation shows, most shockingly, is that literate cultures have more detailed historical accounts than non-literate cultures.

How on earth would we know?

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


i don't fully agree with some of cetea's points, but i also don't understand why some posters are acting like cetea's posts are so outrageous they have a license to just be rude. it's not like we've got :agesilaus: in here. well, the sargon stuff i haven't read yet so i'll reserve comment on those posts for later.

it's extremely obvious that different languages have "equivalent" words which actually possess differing implications, evoke different feelings, are related to other words or historical events in a specific way that affects how they are perceived, etc. this is a baseline truth of translation. aside from the driest, most factual text, it is very difficult to render exactly, 100% the same meaning (including all of the very small implications) in a translation. if you try to literally evoke every single nuance, it can even come off like those terrible victorian latin translations.

if you need a roman example, let's look at res. your dictionary will tell you that it means "thing". and yet, it has a whole dimension to it that springs from its use in res publica that has nothing to do with how modern english uses the word - res carries a connotation of government, public affairs, etc., but only sometimes, other times it's just a straightforward word for "thing". old english and norse, of course, also put these two meanings together in the word "thing" - the term for a parliament - but this was lost in the language's evolution.

point being, yes, language clearly affects thought in the rather narrow sense that words with similar dictionary meanings but different implications and associations lead you to think about the subject of that word differently. it has nothing to do with the structure of the language, but rather its context, and no language is superior in any quantifiable way, although different people often prefer the literary qualities of one language over another. no concept is "unexpressible" in a particular language in the way that the real sapir-whorf weirdos would have you believe, but neither is one language simply a 1:1 cipher for another.

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Sep 9, 2020

Cetea
Jun 14, 2013

Mr. Nice! posted:

Just because the first explorers didn’t travel the full expanse does not mean that the trade routes they discovered ceased. The pacific is really loving big and the polyneseans sailed all the gently caress over it. Yes, it took them a while to colonize the whole thing, but Sargon wasn’t the first human to step foot in any place he traveled.

The polynesian people that sailed to south america and back traveled further in their lives than Sargon.

I'd need a direct source for that specific event (i.e records or archaeological evidence that prove it was the exact same individual), but even if they did so, they did not use more advanced technology than Sargon did (he had access to advanced mathematics that were used to do basic astronomy). Instead it would be the equivalent of someone with a running a marathon going faster than someone with a bicycle (or just some other athlete); it is very impressive, but it is not a feat rooted in scientific development. I am not specifically referring to the scientific method, which did not exist at all at the time, but rather the sum total of knowledge that their culture had access to. That was the base of my original argument: no oral culture had a more sophisticated technological base than a culture with a written language. If the Polynesians used compasses to navigate rather than the stars, that would be a more compelling argument, but they did not. What they did was entirely doable by say, Egyptians (their ships were not more advanced, we have some in the museum here). Similarly, what the builders of the Stonehenge did is quite advanced for an oral culture, but again they simply rolled the stones with logs underneath them (similar to the Easter Islanders much later) across vast expanses of land with a lot of labor, nothing that the Egyptians could not do themselves (and the Pyramids were bigger and logistically more impressive).

Of course, the Polynesians did not have access to all the resources the Akkadians did, but that was exactly why they didn't have a written language in the first place. If they ever found a land with rich natural resources and gold deposits, along with the environmental pressures such as higher population densities, then it becomes more likely that they'd stumble onto metallurgy, the written word, sophisticated government systems and etc in the same way that the proto-civilization in the fertile crescent did, and from there on their society would have advanced exponentially, as it did elsewhere.

EDIT: Famously, oral cultures do tend to produce individuals with superior memory compared to people in cultures that do have a written language. Socrates famously said "And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

I would say the best example of an oral culture that was 'better' than a culture with a written language would be the various nomadic tribes that conquered the Empires of the world. The "Sea-Peoples" of the Bronze age collapse, and later on the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his descendants who crushed the Song Dynasty in China, the Abbasids, and many others. However, you could also argue that it was because they were so adaptable, using their initial invasion to capture technologically advanced equipment from their enemies to then further expand. In the case of the Mongols, they immediately adopted writing as soon as they could, and developed one of the most efficient postal systems in the medieval world; no one would deny that Genghis in particular was a logistical genius, add that to the natural mobility of the Mongol culture, and he had an army that was professional, well trained from birth (everyone learned to ride before they walked, as the famous saying goes), and it's no wonder that they were able to bring nearly most of the developed world at the time to its knees; if they had a better succession system, it's highly likely that they would have kept on being a major power up to modern times, but their custom of going all the way back to Mongolia every time a Great Khan died really put a damper in their campaigns.

Cetea fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Sep 9, 2020

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




Stringent posted:

GF, I feel like I'm kind of responsible for unleashing this, so I'm going to apologize regardless of whether I actually did it or not. For what it's worth the thread at least knows who it needs to double check sources from, so that's some level of comfort. I'll be more careful in the future.

Debate about language can be really contentious. The French Academy of Sciences actually banned any discussion about the origin of language because they were so loving fed up with the debate.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Cetea posted:

I'd need a direct source for that specific event (i.e records that prove it was the exact same individual)

now you're being unreasonable

we only know for sure that the polynesians visited south america at all due to DNA evidence in the descendants of the children they had with south americans. we know that somebody went back from south america to polynesia with sweet potatoes, in light of the DNA evidence, since sweet potatoes were already established in polynesia before any european influence could have brought them there.

i don't really see the point of this oral culture vs written culture thing you're arguing for. the language debate was much more interesting.

evilweasel
Aug 24, 2002

i think it is reasonable to say that written records are a tremendous help in a number of areas without knocking the genuinely impressive amounts of information cultures or groups have been able to retain without it

what you cannot do without written language, and what you can do much more easily with written language, are two very different things. human ingenuity at solving problems without tools you would think would be needed (because we take them for granted now) is immensely impressive, and i recall reading about the polynesian method of navigation and it was incredibly impressive poo poo to the extent we are still only kind of theorizing how it works/worked and it basically seems like magic.

Cetea
Jun 14, 2013

Jazerus posted:

now you're being unreasonable

we only know for sure that the polynesians visited south america at all due to DNA evidence in the descendants of the children they had with south americans. we know that somebody went back from south america to polynesia with sweet potatoes, in light of the DNA evidence, since sweet potatoes were already established in polynesia before any european influence could have brought them there.

i don't really see the point of this oral culture vs written culture thing you're arguing for. the language debate was much more interesting.

I was responding to the claim that an individual went directly there in their lifetime and back, rather than it being a simple one way trip on both sides, and that somehow it made them more advanced than the Akkadians, which I do not believe is the case at all. At any rate, this was started by another person who wanted to support the position that oral cultures could be just as scientifically advanced as a culture with a written language (which I personally feel is extremely difficult to support, given that every oral culture that encountered the written word immediately adopted it for themselves as soon as possible, proving that clearly they thought it was a superior development compared to what they had in the past).

evilweasel posted:

i think it is reasonable to say that written records are a tremendous help in a number of areas without knocking the genuinely impressive amounts of information cultures or groups have been able to retain without it

what you cannot do without written language, and what you can do much more easily with written language, are two very different things. human ingenuity at solving problems without tools you would think would be needed (because we take them for granted now) is immensely impressive, and i recall reading about the polynesian method of navigation and it was incredibly impressive poo poo to the extent we are still only kind of theorizing how it works/worked and it basically seems like magic.


This is a very good point; oral cultures tend to produce individuals with vastly superior memory, as I detailed in another post above (Socrates disliked writing, which is rather ironic since people love reading about him). It's similar to how a blind individual can use the part of their brain normally reserved for vision for hearing and spatial awareness, allowing them to not run into walls. If I closed my eyes and walked around outdoors at a normal walking speed, you can be sure that I'd bump into something and just fall over in a few seconds, even if it is my own neighbourhood.

Cetea fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Sep 9, 2020

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Cetea posted:

Lol, I'll take that as a complement.

You should, I spent years teaching in China and read a whole lot of Chinese student writing, you don't have any of the errors/tics that instantly give away "Chinese native speaker writing in English" to me. However you learned was great.

Stringent posted:

GF, I feel like I'm kind of responsible for unleashing this, so I'm going to apologize regardless of whether I actually did it or not. For what it's worth the thread at least knows who it needs to double check sources from, so that's some level of comfort. I'll be more careful in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNUOkqzcVA

Typo
Aug 19, 2009

Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Ghost Leviathan posted:


Honestly I'm more interested in how China got so dysfunctional and unable to effectively respond to what turned into open military conquest from Europe.

To a large extent it's because the Early Qing emperors allowed the state to wither away whereas the Tokugawa built up one of the most centralized and efficient states on earth during the 1700-1800s. When the clash with colonialism came: the Japanese state was simply able to respond much more effectively than the Chinese state.

Neither of those were inevitability.

Fly Molo posted:

An alt-history where the Taiping rebellion wins, and they spend the next century exporting Christo-socialist revolution abroad. :blastu:


This exists btw:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/all-about-my-brother-a-taiping-rebellion-timeline.146230/

Typo fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Sep 9, 2020

CommonShore
Jun 6, 2014

A true renaissance man


I'm nth-ing the sentiment that the poster in question has excellent written English that does not seem Chinese at all

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.
To explore the concept further, I'd point out that the French equivalent word for "right" is droit, which has associations with concepts like direction and the singular "way forward" (tout droite), as well as a heavier emphasis on the legalistic and theological aspects of a right (perhaps in part due to its component similarity to the word for king, roi). I'm no etymologist, but certainly different languages emphasize different aspects of word meaning.

https://sites.google.com/site/etymologielatingrec/home/d/droit

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

Words differ depending on which language game you are playing

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

As someone mentioned above a word gets meaning from the context of the human activity in which it was used (Wittgenstein called it a Way of Life) .

Mr. Nice!
Oct 13, 2005

c-spam cannot afford



Cetea posted:

I was responding to the claim that an individual went directly there in their lifetime and back, rather than it being a simple one way trip on both sides, and that somehow it made them more advanced than the Akkadians, which I do not believe is the case at all. At any rate, this was started by another person who wanted to support the position that oral cultures could be just as scientifically advanced as a culture with a written language (which I personally feel is extremely difficult to support, given that every oral culture that encountered the written word immediately adopted it for themselves as soon as possible, proving that clearly they thought it was a superior development compared to what they had in the past).

It wasn't a one-way trip, though. We know because south American potatoes were grown by Polynesian people across the entirety of the pacific. We have DNA evidence in humans to know they traveled and traded with the Americas and we have sweet potatoes on the islands that originated in South America.

Also the people of Madagascar are Polynesian. They conquered the Indian Ocean, too. My point was Polynesian sailors had trade networks that traversed hundreds or thousands of miles of open ocean. No one else comes close to that level of nautical skill until the modern age. These weren't one and done trips.

Ras Het
May 23, 2007

when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

Mr. Nice! posted:

Also the people of Madagascar are Polynesian.

Ehh, I don't really know the history of the settlement but Malagasy is from a different subfamily of the Austronesian languages than Polynesian, so at least the word used should be different

Kassad
Nov 12, 2005

It's about time.

Stringent posted:

Am I having a stroke, wasn't the route to Pakistan over land?

Nah there was some shipping. It makes sense since sailing is generally faster (especially compared to going through the mountains of Iran) and they could have stayed near the coast the entire trip.

NikkolasKing
Apr 3, 2010



Silver2195 posted:

Spartan pederasty was supposedly such a successful social institution that Spartan women started banging adolescent girls too.

Pederasty was socially accepted or outright encouraged in almost all Greek city-states, so there's no reason Sparta would be an exception. Though no doubt Plutarch is idealizing or otherwise garbling the details in some way as usual.

As I understand it, Spartan pederasty and overall homosexuality was pretty different from in Athens. Not surprising given all the other immense differences.

quote:

Homosexual relationships between older and younger youths were an approved part of the boys’ upbringing (see Xen. Lac. Pol. 2.12–13, claiming that if based on admiration for the boy’s character it was “pure” and the “finest education,” but if focused on the youth’s beauty it was condemned). Though this was probably not a compulsory part of the age-classes system, a boy from c.12 was invited to form a lasting relationship with an older “lover” (erastes), who was to act as his role-model, develop his character, and encourage his adherence to the disciplined lifestyle. State approval is indicated by the rule that a lover might be fined by magistrates if his boyfriend showed insufficient endurance (Plut. Lyc. 18; see Cartledge 2001: 91–105; Ducat 2006a: 196–201; Davidson 2007: 315–343). Up until c.20, youths would eat their austere and limited food collectively, under supervision; but lovers might occasionally introduce their adolescent boyfriends into their adult common messes (syssitia), for them to get a taste of them as continuing “schools of self-discipline,” to hear political discussions, and see entertainments appropriate for free men (Plut. Lyc. 12). The expectation was that in due course a boyfriend would be admitted to his lover’s mess, when, at c.20, they would also be admitted into the army (possibly mess-members served in the same army units).

I'm no expert but it seems to me when people speak of "Ancient Greek" this or that, it's a bit misleading, kinda like claiming American this or that, as if California is the same as Alabama. Even if Sparta was just weird and an outlier in the Greek city-states, Athens also seemed to have a lot of peculiar things about it. Its misogyny was apparently much greater than most other Greek states, even if not all were as "liberal" with their women as Sparta was.

Don Gato
Apr 28, 2013

Actually a bipedal cat.
Grimey Drawer

Typo posted:

To a large extent it's because the Early Qing emperors allowed the state to wither away whereas the Tokugawa built up one of the most centralized and efficient states on earth during the 1700-1800s. When the clash with colonialism came: the Japanese state was simply able to respond much more effectively than the Chinese state.

Also to really oversimplify, Japan's real ideological struggle at the top wasn't whether or not to modernize, but who should be in charge and how hard they were going to imitate the west. The Shogun's faction is traditionally thought of as being the backwards looking traditionalists but they spent vast efforts and money reforming and modernizing the state, and they were opposed by the Imperial factions who... Had spent vast resources and efforts to modernizing. There were large groups of Shishi that were 100% trying to get Japan back to the supposed golden age of NO FOREIGNERS EVER but the most extreme traditionalists had a way of dying in hare-brained schemes to kick out the foreigners by killing a few and assuming the rest would leave, or at the very least would kill them back in a suitably glorious way. Plus, Japan had Western studies as a field of study for centuries at this point so there was already a cadre of educated professionals who understood on a theoretical level things like steam engines, and the Shogun had a general idea of what the political situation in Europe was, albeit filtered through the Dutch who liked to play up how important they were*.


*This led to fun times in post-Perry Japan as all the western scholars in Japan could speak Dutch, and found out the hard way it wasn't nearly as widespread a language as the Dutch made it seem like.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.

Don Gato posted:

the Shogun had a general idea of what the political situation in Europe was, albeit filtered through the Dutch who liked to play up how important they were*.


*This led to fun times in post-Perry Japan as all the western scholars in Japan could speak Dutch, and found out the hard way it wasn't nearly as widespread a language as the Dutch made it seem like.

Haha I'd never heard about this, that rules.

Typo
Aug 19, 2009

Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Don Gato posted:

Also to really oversimplify, Japan's real ideological struggle at the top wasn't whether or not to modernize, but who should be in charge and how hard they were going to imitate the west. The Shogun's faction is traditionally thought of as being the backwards looking traditionalists but they spent vast efforts and money reforming and modernizing the state, and they were opposed by the Imperial factions who... Had spent vast resources and efforts to modernizing. There were large groups of Shishi that were 100% trying to get Japan back to the supposed golden age of NO FOREIGNERS EVER but the most extreme traditionalists had a way of dying in hare-brained schemes to kick out the foreigners by killing a few and assuming the rest would leave, or at the very least would kill them back in a suitably glorious way. Plus, Japan had Western studies as a field of study for centuries at this point so there was already a cadre of educated professionals who understood on a theoretical level things like steam engines, and the Shogun had a general idea of what the political situation in Europe was, albeit filtered through the Dutch who liked to play up how important they were*.


*This led to fun times in post-Perry Japan as all the western scholars in Japan could speak Dutch, and found out the hard way it wasn't nearly as widespread a language as the Dutch made it seem like.

Just to add to this, this one gets badly mangled by the "last samurai". Which portrays Saigo's rebellion was "traditional vs modern" militaries.

In reality Saigo's rebellion was fought with rifles/artillery and western military advisers on both sides. And the struggle was less over technology and more over what amounted to the Meiji government cutting welfare payments to unemployed samurais.

Crab Dad
Dec 28, 2002

behold i have tempered and refined thee, but not as silver; as CRAB


You can’t compare hugging coast lines to traveling the pacific. It’s like comparing paper planes to jet liners in complexity. Land navigation among established trade routes is even more trivial. What the Polynesians did with what they had available is a goddamn miracle of science, oral tradition and bravery.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Don't those stick charts count as some kind of written language though? At the very least, there's the same general principle of external information storage.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Science and scientific advancement as we know them - the investigation of natural phenomena on the expectation they follow rules that can be harnessed for the good of humans - is a modern invention, about the 17th century in the west. While the greeks were big into philosophy, greek philosophy about how the world works was tied into their philosophy of ethics - how the world should be. They were also averse to experimentation to prove or disprove phenomena, and sharing results of such in a standard manner - again fairly recent inventions. The world is not Civilisation where scientific advancement happens over time naturally unless regressed by a "dark age" - science is a certain idelogy and philosophy of thought that would be alien to many intellectuals of the ancient world.

Experimentation in order to prove/disprove phenomena goes back way further, its just that they had dumb experiments that lead to weird results.

One recorded example: "I was told that stamping this frankincense with mystical seals could cure scorpion stings. I tried several variations of it, and the part that makes it effective is the mystical seals, you can put them on any substance and the expensive frankincense is unneeded".

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

SlothfulCobra posted:

Don't those stick charts count as some kind of written language though? At the very least, there's the same general principle of external information storage.

Maybe but how to use them is oral so ... it’s all language games !!

Carillon
May 9, 2014






Cetea posted:

Imagine a world with no written word (which is most of human existence); knowledge was passed down orally, which is not conductive to scientific advances because all knowledge becomes part of a giant telephone game. With each generation, the words change slightly until the original story is lost entirely. Now if a written language existed, but the barrier to entry was extremely high, then the knowledge transfer becomes much harder because there's nobody to read it. This is pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the dark ages, as basically only monks and priests could read. Scientific advances did continue, but were much slower compared to the later eras. Imagine if you were a modern person who could not read; I doubt you could contribute in any meaningful way to scientific advances except for becoming a test subject.



I'd push back here about your conception of the Dark Ages. For one, the conception of 'dark ages' isn't rooted in modern historical understanding of the period, but a way to frame the achievements of a later group as more worthy or closer to a 'classical' standard then what came before. It distorts our understanding of what did happen and leads to that silly chart of 'advancement' as if human civilization was just some sort of tech tree.

NikkolasKing
Apr 3, 2010



I'm more of a philosophy nerd than pure history but my understanding is that the Early Modern philosophers were big on disparaging the Middle Ages as much as possible. Hence the infamous "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" That isn't to say Descartes, Newton, etc. weren't impressive thinkers who contributed important work but the Enlightenment very much defined itself as the light bearers of objective knowledge saving the world from the darkness and ignorant superstition of the past, specifically the Middle Ages. And the Enlightenment won so this narrative has been culturally accepted.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


SlothfulCobra posted:

Don't those stick charts count as some kind of written language though? At the very least, there's the same general principle of external information storage.

There's a very loosely defined concept of proto-writing that includes pictograms and stuff. I don't think a chart would count as writing, but it is a method of storing information. The definition is messy, but a true writing system will record the actual language, so someone with no knowledge of the content of the message but who can read the symbols and knows the language they represent will be able to understand it fully. The Polynesian stick charts are a memory aid, but you couldn't just make one and then show it to someone else and expect them to understand it. It requires explanation.

It's like a tally stick. It's not writing but it is helping you remember something externally.

Nothingtoseehere
Nov 11, 2010


Tunicate posted:

Experimentation in order to prove/disprove phenomena goes back way further, its just that they had dumb experiments that lead to weird results.

One recorded example: "I was told that stamping this frankincense with mystical seals could cure scorpion stings. I tried several variations of it, and the part that makes it effective is the mystical seals, you can put them on any substance and the expensive frankincense is unneeded".

Isolated experimentation does, yes. An dominant ideology that the workings of the natural world can all be discovered through experimentation, and that such experimentation can be useful to people's lives so should be wildly spread, no. In other ages, intellectuals found other problems as most worth investigation - theology in the middle ages (for if you could through reason be closer to god through theology to understand Him better, that was the highest good) or philosophy for the greeks and romans which primarily answered "how does a man obtain happiness?" and the answers to "how does the world work?" just came bundled in the same ideological package.

Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Sep 9, 2020

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

edit: n/m

galagazombie
Oct 31, 2011

A silly little mouse!
t kinda depends on how you define "The Dark Ages" though. A lot of times people don't use "Dark Ages" and "Medieval/Middle Ages" as synonyms. In this case the Dark Ages refers to a particular era of Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval periods before Charlemagne, where Western Europe very much did undergo a period of economic collapse, severe population decline, a breakdown of centralized authority, plummeting literacy levels, violent migrations, and other assorted bad times. The problem is using the term to refer to the entirety of the Middle Ages instead of just a specific part of it in a specific region (The Western Empire).

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Cetea posted:

Oh, I thought it was obvious that my native language was Chinese.

If you hadn't said this and I only knew you were a non-English speaker I would've assumed Finnish or Dutch or from one of those other places where everyone who writes in English does it better than most of the actual native speakers can manage.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Hey thread, your substitute for the substitute mod popping in here. (fake edit: Yes, I know Fromage is posting in here and I asked him about this. He's dealing with some IRL poo poo and taking a break, which is fine.)

You guys are generating a bunch of reports as of late. As in, all of the A/T reports for something like the last week and a half. Please do me a favor and chill the gently caress out. A lot of the reports have been people being generically lovely in the thread. None of it has really jumped out as something that I, a person who doesn't read this thread, need to swoop in and stomp on right away but the raw volume tells me something wonky is going on in here.

So don't be lovely to each other.

I'm going to start reading this thread again (I forget why I stopped in the first place - I think I just got behind and didn't want to catch up) so at least I'll have some context for what's going on.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Mister Olympus
Oct 31, 2011

Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies
I was possessed by an evil spirit and don't know where else to post this

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 9, 2020

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply