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Fixed it in the post
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Jan 2, 2021 10:40
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Mister Olympus posted:If you have jstor access this might be good reading. The coincidences are pretty funny.  Is this intentionally making GBS threads on China or what?
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Jan 2, 2021 11:27
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I already asked about this in the milhist thread, but figured it'd fit here as well: Assume a Roman soldier gets killed during a campaign (just a standard casualty, rather than Teutoburg level "the whole legion get's wiped out", if that matters). Is there some kind of a process that starts? Does the state inform the next of kin, or does the dude just never show up at home? Is there some kind of compensation for the surviving family?
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Jan 2, 2021 11:45
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Prefix: I'm just an enthusiastic amateur, please correct me if I have this totally wrong. That doesn't sound right to me. I haven't studied them in great detail, but my understanding is cuneiform was much more of a writing method, like "cursive" or "binary encoding", than it is any specific alphabet or character set. It was used to write over a dozen different (often utterly dissimilar) languages in a huge swath of territory over a period of about three thousand years, sometimes used by half a dozen or more languages simultaneously.
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Jan 2, 2021 11:49
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Fuschia tude posted:That doesn't sound right to me. I haven't studied them in great detail, but my understanding is cuneiform was much more of a writing method, like "cursive" or "binary encoding", than it is any specific alphabet or character set. It was used to write over a dozen different (often utterly dissimilar) languages in a huge swath of territory over a period of about three thousand years, sometimes used by half a dozen or more languages simultaneously. My understanding is that cuneiform arose as an ideographical representation of Sumerian. Then Sargon of Akkad conquered all of Sumeria, but made a major effort to adopt and assimilate Sumerian culture. He even went so far as to appoint his daughter the head priestess of Inanna, and gave her the task of harmonizing the Akkadian and Sumerian religions. In the process, he created a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian society, and there was a need to represent Akkadian using cuneiform. But Akkadian is a Semitic language, while Sumerian was a language isolate. So the scribes instead created a syllabary out of the Sumerian cuneiform, and used that to represent Akkadian phonetically. (Some ideograms were kept). Later on, this syllabic cuneiform spread to other languages in the region, most of which were also Semitic. Meanwhile, Sumerian actually died out as a spoken language, but continued to be used by scholars (much like Latin). Those scholars continued to use the ideographical cuneiform. It's also worth bearing in mind that as a writing system, it was around for about 3,500 years.
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Jan 2, 2021 12:41
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Lead out in cuffs posted:My understanding is that cuneiform arose as an ideographical representation of Sumerian. Then Sargon of Akkad conquered all of Sumeria, but made a major effort to adopt and assimilate Sumerian culture. He even went so far as to appoint his daughter the head priestess of Inanna, and gave her the task of harmonizing the Akkadian and Sumerian religions. In the process, he created a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian society, and there was a need to represent Akkadian using cuneiform. I'm always in awe at how just loving long cuneiform was in use, until I remember that if you go from the mythical founding of Rome to today, Latin is now closing in on 3000 years usage itself. Which begs the questions, are there more writing systems that were in use for multiple millenia? Cuneiform, Latin, maybe the Chinese writing system? Oh, and of course Egyptian hieroglyphics must have been in use for at least a couple thousand years, too. So that's like, four writing systems with multiple millennia running times? Edit: Egyptian hieroglyphics must be a special case, considering as far as I know it was only used for Egyptian, not for multiple languages like the other writing systems.
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Jan 2, 2021 12:55
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Sanskrit for sure. Hebrew was around in more or less modern form for 2.2K years, but if you draw a line with Aramaic and Phoenician, you could argue that it goes back further. Also I'm not sure how long the Mesoamerican scripts were around, but possibly those too?
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Jan 2, 2021 13:03
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Libluini posted:I'm always in awe at how just loving long cuneiform was in use, until I remember that if you go from the mythical founding of Rome to today, Latin is now closing in on 3000 years usage itself. Arabic and the Arabic writing system nearly fit the bill, and given Arabic's link to Islam I think it's a safe bet that it's going to be around for quite awhile.
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Jan 2, 2021 13:07
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Loezi posted:I already asked about this in the milhist thread, but figured it'd fit here as well: There would have been a burial club for each century of men into which everyone paid dues to cover the cost of their cremations and grave markers. As to informing next of kin, Roman soldiers were not technically allowed to have their own families. The military authorities didn’t rush around trying to prevent soldiers from getting effectively married, but it didn’t show any respect for whatever semi-legal relationships they were in either. Also the length of military service (20+ years) meant that the modern style of leaving your wife and kids at home was not really feasible. If you had a family it was likely to be among the camp followers, and therefore would likely be on the scene to take part in your funeral, together with your burial club and probably the guys in your specific tent (tent groups were the smallest unit of the army and yours would have been the closest to you personally). If you had any family that was more distant (parents or siblings back home?) then I think it’s more probable that these groups would have tried to notify them than that the state takes on the responsibility. If nobody bothered to do that then yeah, it’s entirely possible you might just drop off the earth as far as your family was concerned. If you’re an officer on the other hand (and remember legionary officers, particularly centurions, had a relatively high casualty rate) then I think it is far more likely that you would have someone who needed to get notified of your death and your commander might well notify them himself. skasion fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 14:03
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skasion posted:(and remember legionary officers, particularly centurions, had a relatively high casualty rate) What's the reason for this? Is it a large fluffy hat making you a more obvious target? Or just more likely to be in the thick of things? There's a bit in Claudius the God where a legionary talks about some ruse of Claudius being clever, but seeing as they avoid battle, unhappy that the absence of officer deaths limited promotion potential. Kinda makes more sense now.
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Jan 2, 2021 15:07
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Elissimpark posted:What's the reason for this? Is it a large fluffy hat making you a more obvious target? Or just more likely to be in the thick of things? Might well have been both. Centurions were supposed to be the toughest soldiers and lead from the front, at least ideally — just flipping through Gallic Wars will give you lots of examples of centurions who merited a shout-out for being first over a wall or whatever. And they would have also been obvious targets for any enemy even without the fancy hats, since they were shouting the orders.
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Jan 2, 2021 15:27
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Libluini posted:Egyptian hieroglyphics must be a special case, considering as far as I know it was only used for Egyptian, not for multiple languages like the other writing systems. Scarodactyl fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 17:19
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Scarodactyl posted:The first phonetic alphabet apparently developed from using Egyptian heiroglyphs to phonetically represent a semitic language (likely because the Egyptians had semitic-language speaking workers in their turquoise mines). It is likely the direct, distant ancestor of the Latin alphabet and all its cousins. Interesting, thanks. I've always imagined cuneiform must have been the ancestor of Latin, since it was so widespread in use. I remember reading a book about Archaic Greece, and was fascinated by how different Ur-Greek was from both later Greek and Latin. For one, I did not expect it to be a logogrammatic language where translation of many words is still very much in question. (At least around 2011, the date of the edition I had, maybe there was progress during the last 9 years?) It would be neat to see why Greek and Latin are so different, and why that is. My pet hypothesis is that Greek was influenced more by Cuneiform, while Latin was more influenced by other writing systems (I think the Etruscans used a different system from both Greek and Latin, but my knowledge here is kind of hazy and limited).
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Jan 2, 2021 18:52
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Stringent posted:
No. Japanese has an additional layer of “readings” (onyomi/kunyomi etc.) on top of the basic characters.
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Jan 2, 2021 18:59
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Elissimpark posted:What's the reason for this? Is it a large fluffy hat making you a more obvious target? Or just more likely to be in the thick of things? I have no actual knowledge of why this would be the case for the Roman army, but in the modern era junior leadership tends to be very dangerous because leadership usually requires being in dangerous places. The common anecdote given is British Lieutenants in WW1, who became casualties at very high rates (higher than the ranks they were leading). skasion posted:There would have been a burial club for each century of men into which everyone paid dues to cover the cost of their cremations and grave markers. This is the later (western) Imperial army you're describing right? I'm curious what the differences would have been for the Republican army which was more rooted in citizen soldiery, and I think there was a six year service limit until the Second Punic War? The age old problem of trying to discuss a poorly documented 2000 year old institution. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 19:44
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Libluini posted:Interesting, thanks. I've always imagined cuneiform must have been the ancestor of Latin, since it was so widespread in use. The Etruscan, and later Latin alphabets were derived from a Greek alphabet used on the island of Euboea that was brought to Southern Italy.
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Jan 2, 2021 19:52
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Stringent posted:
Having now studied both, hanzi is way easier to read than kanji. And no kana, which isn't a big deal or anything but is another layer of complexity. Lead out in cuffs posted:Prefix: I'm just an enthusiastic amateur, please correct me if I have this totally wrong. My level of cuneiform knowledge is I looked it up on wikipedia and found references to what looked to be analogous to Chinese radicals. I would defer to anyone who actually knows cuneiform. Libluini posted:Which begs the questions, are there more writing systems that were in use for multiple millenia? Cuneiform, Latin, maybe the Chinese writing system? Chinese writing is known back to ~1600 BC. It's recognizable, though pretty different. If you go a thousand years ish later you get seal script, which is close enough to modern characters that it's mostly readable. If we define the same system as how far can you go back and still read it if you know the modern version, Chinese is ~2500ish. Latin script is roughly the same, Old Italic is recognizable but not really readable, but once you're into "proper" Latin inscriptions you can read those just fine.
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Jan 2, 2021 20:00
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Stringent posted:
Japanese basically has chunks of the Chinese writing system embedded into it and used in tandem with their phonetic alphabet. That makes it more complex than either a normal alphabetic writing system or just a pictogram system, and that's before you get into their propensity to sometimes scatter english in roman characters as well. The main use for this complexity is puns.
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Jan 2, 2021 20:35
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I dunno about the 3 or 4 systems Japanese uses, but a mixed system is still helpful; Chinese characters aren't really suited for agglutination like in Japanese, but are still really useful for representing nouns, especially in e.g. a scientific context where specificity matters.
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Jan 2, 2021 20:47
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PittTheElder posted:This is the later (western) Imperial army you're describing right? I'm curious what the differences would have been for the Republican army which was more rooted in citizen soldiery, and I think there was a six year service limit until the Second Punic War? When you have an army that's rooted in citizen soldiery then units are generally made up of people from the same area. You're probably marching with your friends, family, neighbors, etc. Unless they all get wiped out someone's probably going to be coming home eventually to let everyone know what happened.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:16
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Japanese has a shitton of loanwords from Chinese (similar density to romance words in English) and a character will typically represent both the borrowed morpheme from Chinese which is represented by that character, as well as the word in Japanese with the same meaning. So every character can represent two different sets of sounds. Also some words are compounds in Chinese and just have the same sets of characters represent the Japanese translation of that word despite it not being a compound at all in japanese.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:22
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Grand Fromage posted:
IMP ZH PRIMVS AVG SINA MAGNA
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Jan 2, 2021 22:52
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Isn't every in-use writing system on the planet just modified Egyptian hieroglyphs or modified Shang characters? Even stuff invented from scratch like Cherokee or Hangul still based their shapes around them. We'd also have Cuneiform and whoever invented the Meso-American writing systems but they all have no modern descendants. It's just amazing to me that despite all the linguistic diversity in the world and all the weird incompatibilities between languages, we all write them down based on the same principles. Me and some guy speaking Vietnamese on the other side of the planet are both cribbing from the same old Egyptian scribe.
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Jan 2, 2021 23:18
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Apparently there's this https://omniglot.com/writing/eskayan.htm
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Jan 2, 2021 23:26
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All the various Brahmic scripts originate in India. Various Indian languages, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, etc.
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Jan 2, 2021 23:32
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galagazombie posted:Isn't every in-use writing system on the planet just modified Egyptian hieroglyphs or modified Shang characters? Even stuff invented from scratch like Cherokee or Hangul still based their shapes around them. We'd also have Cuneiform and whoever invented the Meso-American writing systems but they all have no modern descendants. It's just amazing to me that despite all the linguistic diversity in the world and all the weird incompatibilities between languages, we all write them down based on the same principles. Me and some guy speaking Vietnamese on the other side of the planet are both cribbing from the same old Egyptian scribe. My understanding is that there's two definitely independent inventions of writing, and two maybe independent. The definitely independent ones are Mesopotamia and Central America, of course. The maybe-independent ones are China and Egypt. By independent I mean, invented by people who hadn't even heard of writing from their neighbors. If you're just looking for people who heard of the idea but worked out the details for themselves, Egypt and China are certainly independent by that definition, as is Cherokee. I guess the only point of disagreement there is I thought it was inconclusive whether Egypt was fully independent or derived from cuneiform (in idea, if not in script). e: and I have no idea about the various Indian writing systems, I just haven't heard them brought up in discussions of independently invented writing systems
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Jan 2, 2021 23:33
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India just gets ignored a lot. And has the same problem that you can't be 100% for sure they didn't get the idea from Mesopotamia, but as far as I can find the scripts seem to originate there.
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Jan 2, 2021 23:38
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I wonder sometimes if writing isn't older than we know since so much former land has been lost to the sea in the last 15000 years.
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Jan 2, 2021 23:54
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Zopotantor posted:No. Japanese has an additional layer of “readings” (onyomi/kunyomi etc.) on top of the basic characters. The other thing is that the article specifies Akkadian cuneiform, ie Sumerian script being used to represent a completely different language. So in that way it's analogous to Kanji, which is Chinese script adapted to represent a completely unrelated language (Japanese). Scarodactyl posted:The first phonetic alphabet apparently developed from using Egyptian heiroglyphs to phonetically represent a semitic language (likely because the Egyptians had semitic-language speaking workers in their turquoise mines). It is likely the direct, distant ancestor of the Latin alphabet and all its cousins. Ancient Egyptian was also a Semitic language, for what it's worth. Grand Fromage posted:My level of cuneiform knowledge is I looked it up on wikipedia and found references to what looked to be analogous to Chinese radicals. I would defer to anyone who actually knows cuneiform. I get the impression (from ePSD) that there are a lot of words made up of multiple characters, so in a way they're like radicals. But I also get the impression that most of the compound words correspond to actual compound words in spoken Sumerian, whereas the compound characters correspond to simpler, monosyllabic words. Sometimes the compound characters are written in sequence, like the words, though, so I believe there's some academic debate as to which are which.
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Jan 3, 2021 00:10
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Grand Fromage posted:India just gets ignored a lot. And has the same problem that you can't be 100% for sure they didn't get the idea from Mesopotamia, but as far as I can find the scripts seem to originate there. While it's still a debated topic, the consensus is that the various Indian scripts are based on Semetic ones. having both archeological and morphological evidence. Aramaic being the most commonly ascribed direct predecessor. So the Indian subcontinent is cribbing from Egypt just like we are.
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Jan 3, 2021 00:16
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Libluini posted:Interesting, thanks. I've always imagined cuneiform must have been the ancestor of Latin, since it was so widespread in use. So, the Archaic Greek alphabet is known as Linear B and is not the direct ancestor of the Classical/Modern Greek alphabet. It is somewhat unique in that it went completely extinct during the Greek "Dark Age" following the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Greek society lost literacy, which is one of the few times that has happened I believe. The later Greek alphabet descends from the Phoenecian alphabet and has a totally different lineage.
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Jan 3, 2021 04:40
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does anyone have recommendations on good writing on the secessio plebis? is it reasonable to describe the secessio plebis as the first general strike in history, if not necessarily the first strike?
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Jan 3, 2021 05:26
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Libluini posted:Interesting, thanks. I've always imagined cuneiform must have been the ancestor of Latin, since it was so widespread in use. The version i heard was that the Greeks got it from the Phonecians, but the Greek language had different phonology, so they modified it for their own use by dropping consonants that they didn't use and then adding vowels. Then the Etruscans got it from the Greeks and did basically the same thing, because apparently Etruscan didn't have certain types of voiced consonants. And then the Latins got it from the Etruscans, and modified it once more. This happened over like 300 years.
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Jan 3, 2021 05:30
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galagazombie posted:While it's still a debated topic, the consensus is that the various Indian scripts are based on Semetic ones. having both archeological and morphological evidence. Aramaic being the most commonly ascribed direct predecessor. So the Indian subcontinent is cribbing from Egypt just like we are. The similarities between the scripts are just what one would expect from such an adaptation. For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental from retroflex stops; in Brāhmī the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single prototype. Aramaic did not have Brāhmī’s aspirated consonants (k, t), whereas Brāhmī did not have Aramaic's emphatic consonants (q, ṭ, ṣ); and it appears that these emphatic letters were used for Brāhmī's aspirates: Aramaic q for Brāhmī kh, Aramaic (Θ) for Brāhmī th (ʘ). And just where Aramaic did not have a corresponding emphatic stop, p, Brāhmī seems to have doubled up for its aspirate: Brāhmī p and ph are graphically very similar, as if taken from the same source in Aramaic p. The first letters of the alphabets also match: Brāhmī a, which resembled a reversed κ, looks a lot like Aramaic alef, which resembled Hebrew . Here’s a chart.
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Jan 3, 2021 06:38
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let me make it larger
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Jan 3, 2021 06:39
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Ancient Egyptian was also a Semitic language, for what it's worth.
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Jan 3, 2021 08:07
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Given all the alphabet talk I was curious about number systems as well. I know a lot of the world has adapted the so called arabic numerals, but how many other approaches are still commonly used and are there any other common ones not based 10? Also were the roman numerals as bad as they seem? Or was it equivalent/easier one you were used to it?
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Jan 3, 2021 08:10
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Carillon posted:Given all the alphabet talk I was curious about number systems as well. I know a lot of the world has adapted the so called arabic numerals, but how many other approaches are still commonly used and are there any other common ones not based 10? roman numerals are pretty awful for math, but on a practical basis most calculations past what you can do in your head were done on an abacus and the results recorded with numerals. you can get really fast at abacus use with practice so this was fine for what they needed it for.
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Jan 3, 2021 08:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:Japanese basically has chunks of the Chinese writing system embedded into it and used in tandem with their phonetic alphabet. That makes it more complex than either a normal alphabetic writing system or just a pictogram system, and that's before you get into their propensity to sometimes scatter english in roman characters as well. Much like with English, people tend to be aware of the quirks of the language they speak and use it for jokes at every opportunity. 'A man walks into a bar' and all that. Carillon posted:Given all the alphabet talk I was curious about number systems as well. I know a lot of the world has adapted the so called arabic numerals, but how many other approaches are still commonly used and are there any other common ones not based 10? From what I remember in schools, once you get into the mindset, Roman numerals clearly have their own uses, especially with how they work like tally marks. A lot better at smaller increments, but it's larger specific numbers that become incredibly unwieldy and where Arabic numerals become so much more useful.
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Jan 3, 2021 08:40
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The Kaktovik numeral system combines the positional notation of Arabic numerals with the tally-like capabilities of Roman numerals.
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Jan 3, 2021 09:29
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