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HookedOnChthonics posted:you'd trace along with your finger and read aloud as regular practice *drags finger over sheet of glowing glass* hmm yes, how quaint
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Mar 20, 2021 07:21
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Sitting at a bus stop alone and totally psyching myself out by thinking about: "If someone offered to show me a donkey eating figs, would I dare to watch it?"
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Mar 20, 2021 07:46
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Mar 20, 2021 07:54
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How could you not?
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Mar 20, 2021 07:55
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twoday posted:Sitting at a bus stop alone and totally psyching myself out by thinking about : this is known as chrysippus' basilisk
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Mar 20, 2021 08:02
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mycomancy posted:Wait wait wait. You're telling me that most people in these times who were literate read out loud like my seven year old does? I don't know. Even if you are literate, how often you get to actually read? There aren't daily newspapers or cheap airport novels. Reading is a skills that needs to be kept up.
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Mar 20, 2021 10:08
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I think part of Einhard's boast there comes from Charlemagne's postion in society; Frankish nobility of the period were not expected to be literate, so Karl's own keen interest in theological matters made him stand out.
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Mar 20, 2021 10:58
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I thought Big Chuck was famously illiterate?
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Mar 20, 2021 16:16
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twoday posted:Sitting at a bus stop alone and totally psyching myself out by thinking about : sitting at the airport, rotating a donkey eating figs in my head
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Mar 20, 2021 16:30
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Tricky D posted:i love reading poo poo about salic law because it's so dumb yet taken very seriously So in France, the 'no girls allowed' policy was formally adopted in the 1300s when the king died. He was only like 5 months old, but still, he was king. He had an older sister (Joan) and two uncles. A lot of people were like, "I guess we're having a lady king" but one of the uncles showed up at Paris with an army and surrounded it. He called up a bunch of professors and bishops and told them, "hey nerds, tell everyone why girls can't be king" and so they came up with an interpretation of Salic law that said "girls can't be king". And everyone was like, "hey, you make some good points, also, nice army, why don't you be king instead?" Of course, that ended up screwing over France even more because while both uncles died without having kids, Joan grew up to get married and have a bunch of kids. But when the second uncle died, well, they'd already said no girls can be king, so she was out of the running. The next guy in the line of succession was King of England, and no right thinking Frenchman would allow a perfidious son of Albion on the French throne, so they passed the 'super-Salic' law which said not only no girls can be king, but the kingship couldn't even pass through them. Which really ticked off the English, who started a little thing called "the Hundred years war" to try and claim the French throne.
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Mar 20, 2021 16:34
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a fatguy baldspot posted:I thought Big Chuck was famously illiterate? iirc he couldn’t write
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Mar 20, 2021 18:47
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Fish of hemp posted:I don't know. Even if you are literate, how often you get to actually read? There aren't daily newspapers or cheap airport novels. Reading is a skills that needs to be kept up. reading is really, really good - i think people can somewhat understate this when we look at ancient historical people, particularly urban populations like roman cities. it is genuinely an extremely useful skill for navigating many elements of their lives and their world and it's not that hard to teach the easy stuff - ask anyone who has visited a foreign speaking country and they'll probably be able to tell you "cafe", "drug store", "toilet" etc. there was and is still an enormous amount of graffiti anywhere humans are allowed which to me again strongly suggests that even if someone couldn't pick up a book and read it, there more than likely able to associate certain shapes with concepts and maybe even write "i was here and i hosed your sister" on a nearby wall. humans are humans.
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Mar 20, 2021 20:23
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reading literature in rome was a major social activity in part due to the expense and scarcity of copies but also roman high society was practically based around the institution of the dinner party.
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Mar 20, 2021 21:23
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i kind of suspect we have a bias because some kinds of literacy is much more likely to be preserved than others. like, we do not have almost anything written in wax, and i want to say that was one of the primary ways people learned the language i always assumed it must have been how it was used. i wanna say in rome a stencil was a pretty common gift i always figured that a wax tablet was the equivalent of scratch paper. cheap, reusable, you could have a few on the go at once if you needed to and even if your literacy is limited it's nice to have somewhere to tally something.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:09
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yeah tabula cerae were the day to day notebooks because you only commit ink to vellum/papyrus if you know its worth the cost. one wipe and the wax is rasa again for your next note the principal of economy in latin writing reflects this and is really cool cause their style and taste tended strongly towards omission of obvious words like "is/to be" and not repeating vocab that is used twice in a sentence and counting on the reader to know to take it with each clause. part of why reading aloud would have been natural us that when you are saving as much space as possible on the scroll and lack a punctuation system it is often much easier to hear the meaning than see it blended together.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:20
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HookedOnChthonics posted:iirc he couldn’t write It's probably this. Einhard, a close personal advisor, wrote the first western European reinvention of the academically reliable biography about him, and noted him as an adult learner who never quite mastered writing. Which would fit with either him learning to read and then deciding that it was so valuable his administrators should too, or with him deciding it was a valuable skill and going full not-just-the-president-also-a-member as the first student of the first of his schools. The idea of being able to read but not write sounds absurd to us now, but it's only in the 1950s that they began to be classed as one skill, and modern examples of them as separate skills still abound (the expansion and recomplexification of Japan and the PRC's simplified character sets as typed entry, which comes with a prompt for more specific forms, becomes more common; Japan and HK/Taiwan's conservative concern in pedagogy that typed entry doesn't qualify as educationally useful writing, due to a significant number of students learning Chinese characters best through handwritten repetition; the west's own rapid conversion over the past couple decades from considering blockscript rude graffiti for the least dextrous to considering it standard writing.) I wonder if it's possible that Charlemagne's "semiliterate" writing was him able to fart out meandering approximations of the Roman inscription style if handed charcoal and wood or an awl and a wax tablet, but mostly at a loss with physically driving a pen or composing his thoughts far enough in advance to make it through a page without having to cross half of it out.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:31
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Mandoric posted:I wonder if it's possible that Charlemagne's "semiliterate" writing was him able to fart out meandering approximations of the Roman inscription style if handed charcoal and wood or an awl and a wax tablet, but mostly at a loss with physically driving a pen or composing his thoughts far enough in advance to make it through a page without having to cross half of it out. I would be curious to know how much spelling would matter for someone in that position to be considered literate as well. That is, it's one thing to be able to read an inscription and determine the meaning, it's another to be able to manipulate whatever they used for writing and produce letters on a tablet or vellum or whatever, it's a third thing to know the correct sequence to not produce the Carolingian equivalent of "hukt on fonix wurkt fer mee".
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Mar 20, 2021 23:49
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in the case of latin there is only really one possible sound for how to spell something so the phonics is the real word. sucks having a mongrel dog language like english
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Mar 20, 2021 23:53
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Real hurthling! posted:in the case of latin there is only really one possible sound for how to spell something so the phonics is the real word. Latin notionally had a 1:1 mapping, but didn't it have several different almost-1:1 mappings depending on time and place even in the Classical period, only the received of which was internally coherent, and didn't this heavily break down when Gaulish or Germanic words began to merge in (pretty relevant for someone speaking LSL whose mother tongue was Franconian?) Like, for example, initial i /j/ developed into the consonant sound /dz/ in French pretty early (as well as in insular Gaelic, whether by derivation from the French or it sharing whatever aspect of Gaulish prompted the change, and in English definitely derived from the French usage in contrast to the other Germans, the Slavs, and the Iberians retaining it as /i/-/j/ in all positions.) Learning /i/ as i and then being confused about what to put when you wanted to say /j/ is already far enough from a 1:1 for an adult learner, learning /i/ as i and i as /i/ is really going to be awkward in a heavily-religious setting when you want to talk about Jesus and your teacher expects Iesu /je:su/ for the guy you know as something like Ihesus /ʒɛzyz/.
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Mar 21, 2021 00:39
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good info and yah theres tons of extant misspellings out there that arent just mistakes and sounds deffo changed throughout latins lifespan as a language. vergil uses archaic olla instead of illa (that woman) when talking about really old rear end women like the sibyl as just a really easy example Real hurthling! has issued a correction as of 01:05 on Mar 21, 2021 |
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Mar 21, 2021 01:01
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Cerebral Bore posted:political theory at the time saw the emperorship as a continuation of the roman empire, and this in turn implied that the holder wielded universal power over all christendom because that's what the roman emperors used to have and this in turn implied that you could only have one legitimate emperor. of course the pope often had other ideas about who the real ruler of the christian world should be, which led to a series of conflicts between pope and emperor during medieval times Makes sense. The cachet of claiming a connection between your politics and the Roman empire makes sense - though weirdly, just reading what you wrote, it almost seems like 'Emperor' was some sort of title you could claim like other aristocratic titles. I wonder if that was some of the appeal.
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Mar 21, 2021 01:48
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vyelkin posted:There are very influential historians of empire who basically argue that empires are some of the oldest and longest-lasting forms of state structure (along with city-states iirc). Their basic definition is that an empire is a centrally-governed polity that rules over multiple territories or peoples, and rules by institutionalizing difference and hierarchy. That is, it comes up with ways of defining its populations or territories that rules them by differentiating them from one another, rather than by amalgamating them--it rules over a diverse state but works to maintain that diversity rather than reducing it. Thanks for the effort post! I don't have much to add, except that if legal systems being different for different peoples is an important part, you could see modern Canada as an empire, as it has British common law for 9 provinces, French-style civil law for Quebec (which includes language laws that wouldn't pass muster under the Constitution) and occasionally different laws for indigenous peoples from treaties that predate the nation.
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Mar 21, 2021 01:59
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 me, after pointing out that the romans had six emperors in one year and had multiple augusti running in the tetrarchy so it wasn’t an exclusive club
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Mar 21, 2021 02:22
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Nebakenezzer posted:Makes sense. The cachet of claiming a connection between your politics and the Roman empire makes sense - though weirdly, just reading what you wrote, it almost seems like 'Emperor' was some sort of title you could claim like other aristocratic titles. I wonder if that was some of the appeal. persons in certain positions had 'imperium' which was direct control over whatever was under their charge, but it was not a title just a level of authority. what we call the roman 'emperors' were originally private citizens. augustus' real 'title' was princeps, which translates roughly to 'the first'
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Mar 21, 2021 03:40
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augustus went to great lengths to operate under the appearance of restoring the republic and an independent senate, claiming an advisory role as "first citizen" at that point very few people had been alive to witness what a non death spiraling republic looked like and the big propaganda push + finally an end to civil war helped sell the fiction
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Mar 21, 2021 03:44
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as i recall there wasn't actually a position called "emperor" for a long time, augustus just installed himself into every important office of the roman republic because that was enough to wield autocratic power and everybody else followed suit. later on the title became formalized as an actual position though.Nebakenezzer posted:Makes sense. The cachet of claiming a connection between your politics and the Roman empire makes sense - though weirdly, just reading what you wrote, it almost seems like 'Emperor' was some sort of title you could claim like other aristocratic titles. I wonder if that was some of the appeal. yeah, those who claimed the title did so by coming up with a plausible-sounding explanation for why they were the real heir to rome. though on the flipside since the title implied universal power and because there could logically only be one real heir to rome you couldn't just become a legitimate emperor by founding some new empire, but rather you had to take the existing title for yourself. this happened plenty of times in both the holy roman and byzantine empires where some usurper seized the crown though a civil war or palace coup, and also later served as a justification for the russan tsars and ottoman sultans to start calling themselves legit emperors because they claimed to be the heirs to the byzantine empire by succession and conquest respectively
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Mar 21, 2021 10:50
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I've always been fascinated about how obscenely wealthy Augustus was. Though I'm sure that his freedom to spend it was curtailed a lot more by the senate than modern billionaires' wealth is. 
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Mar 21, 2021 16:53
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i think it was more curtailed by the fact that most of his wealth was in the form of landholdings
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Mar 21, 2021 18:08
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Shenzong is a weird choice even just inside the Song dynasty, I guess they were using some very optimistic reads on the New Policies? Which is a bit odd because in their methods thing in the top left (which has some very important/good caveats!) they say that Shenzong had "absolute control" but the New Policies only work at all on the basis of the private sector's interactions with the public sector.
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Mar 21, 2021 18:50
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augustus' wealth on the chart doesnt account for the 70% of that gdp of egypt being given away free but i guess you can view that as him buying his mandate
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Mar 21, 2021 18:54
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Real hurthling! posted:augustus' wealth on the chart doesnt account for the 70% of that gdp of egypt being given away free but i guess you can view that as him buying his mandate maybe this is the real reason why Zuck wanted to copy Augustus?
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Mar 21, 2021 19:18
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Cerebral Bore posted:as i recall there wasn't actually a position called "emperor" for a long time, augustus just installed himself into every important office of the roman republic because that was enough to wield autocratic power and everybody else followed suit. later on the title became formalized as an actual position though. An imperator was a victorious general. It would be like if MacArthur had pulled a coup and every subsequent ruler of the United States styled himself as a five‐star and maybe also president, but the latter title was of secondary importance.
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Mar 21, 2021 20:34
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etalian posted:maybe this is the real reason why Zuck wanted to copy Augustus? That or taking up the glamor of the Roman Empire
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Mar 21, 2021 21:51
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I remember that someone posted about a podcast about ancient religions and cults earlier in the thread, but I can’t seem to find it. Anyone know a good podcast about the subject?
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Mar 22, 2021 08:58
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https://shwep.net
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Mar 22, 2021 09:06
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shwep
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Mar 22, 2021 10:07
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not much what’s shwep with you?
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Mar 22, 2021 10:41
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SHALASHASKA HAWKE posted:not much what’s shwep with you? If you must know, I just shwept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.
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Mar 22, 2021 17:30
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oh I ran into this the other day while looking for something else, I was wondering if it is any good. I’ll give it a try
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Mar 22, 2021 19:08
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The Atomic Man-Boy posted:If you must know, I just shwept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Try India
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Mar 22, 2021 19:35
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