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Taishi Ci posted:It's not witch-queens, but I'll take a stab at the passage on the "Five Kings of Wa" from the Book of Liu-Song:
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Jun 28, 2022 11:41
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Wa is Japan, like the original name before they started calling it Nippon/Nihon, I think. It means "land of harmony" or something like that. Specifically southern Japan I assume.
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Jun 28, 2022 12:19
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Wa is just generically Japan. Yamatai, Himiko’s kingdom / the most important part of Wa, had a big debate surrounding where it’s actual location was until the 2000s, but is now pretty firmly thought to have been near the later capitals in the center of the country.Alhazred posted:Seems to me that they kept her locked up and killed everyone that knew after her death. I think I wrote about this in more depth a while ago, but while this was basically the traditional idea, there’s been some pushback against this interpretation, or the often-advanced idea her brother was the one with real power — the same exact language (about seclusion) is used to describe a number of later Japanese (male) emperors that are interpreted as holding a lot more power.
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Jun 28, 2022 12:36
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FFT posted:Context was how the Predators (of Predator [1987] fame) use a segmented LCD numeral/alphabet system where each digit/letter is a vertical pair of asterisks: Someone earlier in the thread posted a diagram showing how the cuneiform symbols changed over time as different languages adapted it for different mediums. So while it would be impractical to make a segmented LCD that displayed the characters precisely as they appear there, consider how stylised roman characters are depicted on our segmented displays. I am confident it would be possible to come up with a font that someone who read cuneiform could tolerate. There's no magical formula for working out how many segments you'd need though, it's a much more artistic process than that. Here is a fun video on someone designing segment displays that you can kind of extrapolate the process for other languages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTB5XhjbgZA Also keep in mind that Chinese characters are far too complex and just use dot matrix displays instead, so that is always an option.
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Jun 28, 2022 12:59
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That was the specific video I had in mind about the dififculties of segmented displays actually lol
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Jun 28, 2022 13:11
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Medenmath posted:Wa is Japan, like the original name before they started calling it Nippon/Nihon, I think. It means "land of harmony" or something like that. Specifically southern Japan I assume. The character 和 read “Wa” in modern Japanese means “harmony”. The original character the Chinese used, 倭 also read “Wa” means “bowed, bent” or even “dwarf”. You can see why they changed it. Wa refers to the entirety of Japan—the Chinese recognized there were different “countries” within it: Himiko’s Yamatai was the one they found most significant, but obviously was not a highly organized state controlling the whole archipelago or anything. Koramei posted:I think I wrote about this in more depth a while ago, but while this was basically the traditional idea, there’s been some pushback against this interpretation, or the often-advanced idea her brother was the one with real power — the same exact language (about seclusion) is used to describe a number of later Japanese (male) emperors that are interpreted as holding a lot more power. Given that she gained the throne by what sounds like demagogic popular acclaim after a long period of civil strife, isolating herself from the public and letting everyone know she had sorcerous powers sounds like an attempt at a safe bet. For a vaguely contemporary comparison you can look at the ritualized theatrics and rear end-kissing of the tetrarchic court of Diocletian, a fairly obvious reaction to his own upstart origins. skasion fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 13:14
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Taishi Ci posted:It's not witch-queens, but I'll take a stab at the passage on the "Five Kings of Wa" from the Book of Liu-Song: “General Who Conquers The Caitiffs” is such a good title
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Jun 28, 2022 13:38
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At what point does the major kingdom in Japan stop being a tributary to the Chinese Empire? I tried a bit of a wiki dive but didn't get anywhere very quickly. In these posts they are kings and queens, and around 600 CE there's an Emperor of Japan (I think?), what happens in between?
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Jun 28, 2022 13:47
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The passages on Wa that appear in the Book of Jin, the Book of Southern Qi, and the Book of Liang are mostly just repeating the information found in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, but the Book of Liang does have some extra items of interest:quote:有獸如牛，名山鼠；又有大蛇吞此獸。蛇皮堅不可斫，其上有孔，乍開乍閉，時或有光，射之中，蛇則死矣。 Taishi Ci fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 15:36
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Splode posted:At what point does the major kingdom in Japan stop being a tributary to the Chinese Empire? I tried a bit of a wiki dive but didn't get anywhere very quickly. In these posts they are kings and queens, and around 600 CE there's an Emperor of Japan (I think?), what happens in between? I feel like you're asking two different questions. Japan as a tributary to China is something that's going to ebb and flow over time, because its largely going to be a question of China's power projection. For the most part Japan was not really in a sustained tributary relationship with China: the more sustained relationship from the Chinese side was to view Japan as a haven for pirates, not exactly a group easy to negotiate with or treat well. There's definitely quite a lot of variation, but the default is less "tributary" and more, IDK, dismissal. 600s CE is still very early in Japanese history. The usual chronology is that Japan has a pottery neolithic age (Jomon period) from 14,000 to 300 BCE, then there's a bronze age period where we have no real political information about from 300BCE to 300CE called the Yayoi (these are the first to show up in Chinese records), then we enter the Yamato period sometime around 250CE and there's the Kofun period (which has some history but I mean we named the period after a type of tomb, we're VERY reliant on archaeology for tor this one) and Asuka periods as subdivisions of that. In 703CE there's a big reform that turns the kings into an Imperial Household. Medenmath posted:Wa is Japan, like the original name before they started calling it Nippon/Nihon, I think. It means "land of harmony" or something like that. Specifically southern Japan I assume. To get a little more into it, it's an exonym (not unlike "Japan"). The Wei used 倭國 (wakoku, koku being just "country" like in China 中國, so Wa is the Japan-specific element). 倭 is a homophone of 和, peaceful and is still used a lot in a lot of Japanese contemporary stuff, for example 和装 "wafuku" - Japanese clothing (as opposed to like suits), 和食 "washoku" - Japanese cuisine (as opposed to pizzas). Current Japanese imperial era is 令和, "reiwa", and the period that milhist nerds are going to be very familiar with was 昭和, "showa" (the Showa period was very long but importantly includes all of WW2). The endonym that Japan used before 日本 "nihon" was 大和, which bear with me is not pronounced "daiwa" but "yamato." Kanji pronunciations are a nightmare.
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Jun 28, 2022 15:36
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Tulip posted:he endonym that Japan used before 日本 "nihon" was 大和, which bear with me is not pronounced "daiwa" but "yamato." Kanji pronunciations are a nightmare. This right here is one of two reasons I gave up taking Japanese in college. Reading your sentence I was smirking at thinking I knew how to pronounce "daiwa," then finished your sentence and my eye twitched. The other reason I gave up was my instructor knowing I did the stroke order wrong on a 20+ stroke character without watching me write it. gently caress
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Jun 28, 2022 15:45
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And here I thought taking putonghua as a "fun" class was dumb. Now I somehow have an associate's in History but cannot form a sentence in putonghua, let alone write a character in hanzi. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 15:59
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TipTow posted:This right here is one of two reasons I gave up taking Japanese in college. Reading your sentence I was smirking at thinking I knew how to pronounce "daiwa," then finished your sentence and my eye twitched. Haha got'em I actually love kanji and it kept me going for 6 years of studying Japanese and when I took Chinese I full on would have failed if I didn't love the characters (I failed literally every spoken test lolol), but I cannot pretend for even a second that it is easy or intuitive. The example I've used in the past to illustrate this is 下, which for the most part means "down" or "below." On its own it is pronounced "shita," and can be used in compound words like 下着 "shitagi" underwear. However, the most common way you run into it is as the "kuda" in 下さい"kudasai," which weebs may recognize as "please" but is the imperative of the verb 下さる "kudasaru." "Shimo" is another common pronunciation, such as in the city 下関市 "Shimonoseki," and this pronunciation has a baffling array of uses, meaning anything from "lower" to "downriver" to "away from Tokyo" to "genitals." And just to wrap up sometimes it is "ge," "ka," or "moto." Have fun!
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Jun 28, 2022 16:06
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quote:. And ten thousand li (about 3,500 miles) off to the southwest are the People of the Sea; they have black bodies and white eyes, and they wear no clothes and have an ugly appearance, but their flesh is delicious, and travelers sometimes shoot and eat them  Who are these apparently delicious humans?
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Jun 28, 2022 16:50
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quote:The serpents have skin so tough that it cannot be chopped, and on top of them is an orifice which they can swiftly open or close and which sometimes glows; if one shoots an arrow into it, then the serpent dies. This is actually based on historical records from ancient Japan... now we have this giant enemy snake here, and you have to attack its weak point for massige damage.
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Jun 28, 2022 17:06
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I believe that is in reference to Godzilla
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Jun 28, 2022 17:18
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feedmegin posted:
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Jun 28, 2022 17:22
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I was thinking a flavorful ape of some sort
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Jun 28, 2022 17:29
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Yeah I think it's more likely some kind of tasty monkey and that got lost in translation.
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Jun 28, 2022 17:38
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Or you know racism meant that flavorful ape and long pork got mixed up
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Jun 28, 2022 17:42
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Splode posted:Also keep in mind that Chinese characters are far too complex and just use dot matrix displays instead, so that is always an option. God those dot matrix displays for hanzi are often awful though. Especially some of the traditional characters are just an unreadable mess. TipTow posted:This right here is one of two reasons I gave up taking Japanese in college. Reading your sentence I was smirking at thinking I knew how to pronounce "daiwa," then finished your sentence and my eye twitched. Hanzi is so much easier than kanji. Characters have one reading, that's it. I saw a couple with two but that was rare. Of course, there is the other side where the language is entirely homophones so there are like 150 characters that are "shi". Tones don't narrow it down all that much, and good luck when you live in Sichuan where tones are uh, flexible.
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Jun 28, 2022 17:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Or you know racism meant that flavorful ape and long pork got mixed up Of course that is a great deal south of Japan/China/etc.
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Jun 28, 2022 18:30
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Nessus posted:I'm not sure it's even necessarily racism, I know orangutans' name came from a term meaning pretty much directly 'man of the forest.' They also thought orangutans were actually perfectly capable of understanding and using speech but did not do so, lest they be expected to work. Well the text said 3,500 miles to the south west of Japan, which is pretty much where Indonesia actually is. So maybe they are talking about orangutans. It seems significantly more plausible than travelers casually commiting cannibalism.
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Jun 28, 2022 18:48
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Orangutans aren’t black, and it seems hard to believe someone would mention them without calling attention to the fact that they’re covered in hair. Also wouldn’t the ancient Chinese have known what orangutans were? I’m positive there’s Classical Chinese word for ape and idk what other apes they would have known about if not orangutans. skasion fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 19:04
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skasion posted:Orangutans aren’t black, and it seems hard to believe someone would mention them without calling attention to the fact that they’re covered in hair. Orangutans do have black skin under that hair though. To me the account sort of reads like Herodotus, where things are being repeated that have details left out or have been misinterpreted. It just seems like a more likely explanation than human cannibalism. Also yeah, ancient Chinese might have known about orangutans, but maybe not. Asia is really big and China is like 5,000 km from Indonesia. In a time before widespread knowledge and information someone might have seen drawings, or heard stories that have changed through a string of different tellings, but I doubt they saw very many live specimens. In a similar vein, the Carthaginians thought gorillas were a type of savage people initially, and Carthage is a similar distance from where Hanno the Navigator is presumed to have encountered them in western Africa. It's not outlandish to me to believe the same sort of misunderstanding is what's happening in the story above.
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Jun 28, 2022 19:25
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Orangutans do have black skin under that hair though. To me the account sort of reads like Herodotus, where things are being repeated that have details left out or have been misinterpreted. It just seems like a more likely explanation than human cannibalism. It's not exactly unknown for sailors and explorers to resort to cannibalism when they get hungry enough. The implication that travelers (from Japan?) are deliberately going out of their way to hunt the People of the Sea like animals and eating them goes beyond that and is certainly horrifying, but that could be an exaggerated extrapolation from one or two actual incidents of cannibalism.
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Jun 28, 2022 19:38
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Another thing that I find puzzling: "they are more than four thousand li (about 1,500 miles) from Wa, and the journey there by boat can take a year." That's a pretty slow boat trip; with a speed of two knots, it only would take about a month to make a voyage like that.
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Jun 28, 2022 19:53
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Silver2195 posted:Another thing that I find puzzling: "they are more than four thousand li (about 1,500 miles) from Wa, and the journey there by boat can take a year." That's a pretty slow boat trip; with a speed of two knots, it only would take about a month to make a voyage like that.
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Jun 28, 2022 19:59
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Well the text said 3,500 miles to the south west of Japan, which is pretty much where Indonesia actually is. So maybe they are talking about orangutans. It seems significantly more plausible than travelers casually commiting cannibalism. What’s wrong with cannablism? Eating foreigners is no big deal and shouldn’t impact much.
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Jun 28, 2022 20:01
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feedmegin posted:
Orcas. They don't wear any clothing, live in the sea. and have black skin with white 'eyes'. They are also less sexy than
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Jun 28, 2022 20:03
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Nessus posted:I imagine it was coast-hugging and might not have been sailing at night, which would increase that figure a lot Maybe. My surprise at the timeframe is based on the figures given in this article: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html But it's possible that, e.g., voyages take a lot longer in the Pacific than in the Mediterranean; I'm not a expert in this sort of thing by any means.
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Jun 28, 2022 20:11
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You're dealing with a larger body of water although there are abundant coastlines and more little islands that would probably be fine for 'ok we need to wait out this storm' or 'ok let's anchor near this place for the night' purposes. You also do get periodic typhoons and such.
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Jun 28, 2022 20:21
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Given the author's obvious unfamiliarity with the place, it's also possible that he heard some traveler complaining "one time it took us a full year" and jotted that down as a reasonable estimate of trip length, instead of griping about one disastrous voyage. e: and possibly second or third hand griping if he didn't talk to anyone who had been there themself
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Jun 28, 2022 20:23
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The cannabalism taboo was pretty strong in classical China. Not sure what that says about this text. Like if a text says someone boiled and ate a prisoner it's definitely meant to portray them as an insane sadist.
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Jun 29, 2022 00:11
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Splode posted:Someone earlier in the thread posted a diagram showing how the cuneiform symbols changed over time as different languages adapted it for different mediums. Cuneiform was basically ideographic, or at least semi-ideographic (although also semi-phonetic). The complete character set was about 1,000. So a lot fewer than Chinese, but still far more than you could reasonably represent using a segmented LCD. Like, check out the Unicode page: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U12000.pdf I'm pretty sure you would have to fall back to the dot-matrix solution.
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Jun 29, 2022 00:15
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Arglebargle III posted:The cannabalism taboo was pretty strong in classical China. Not sure what that says about this text. Everyone is anti-cannabilism until you get really hungry.
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Jun 29, 2022 00:18
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I don't know how this thread is on the ethics of ancient coins, so maybe I'll get poo poo on for this. But my logic is, I wouldn't buy most artifacts that have any actual value, they should be in a museum, but when it comes to Roman coins from everything I've heard they're loving everywhere because the Roman empire was massive. Most have almost no real value and if they end up in a museum they're just kept with the thousands of others in a box somewhere in storage unless there's something special about one. So when it comes to Roman coins, ehh whatever I don't feel too bad about getting one. So I got one, which was really hard to get shipped to China and I honestly expected customs to steal it, because that's a thing here and I thought they'd be like "drat, silver, this is getting 'seized'" but I really wanted it for sentimental reasons (obviously, since it's Marcus Aurelius, this is all about Stoicism to me.) So, my denarius, ~171CE Marcus Aurelius on the front, Roma on the back holding Victory and a spear.   Just thought I'd share here maybe someone would think it's cool.
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Jun 29, 2022 03:32
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Dope coin. I haven’t made the jump into silver yet myself.
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Jun 29, 2022 04:05
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Coinage is a funny thing since in both ancient and modern times, currency is a tricky thing to deal with as a country and an individual. It takes a certain level of resources and organisation to be able to mint currency after all. (and now I want to play Civ again...)
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Jun 29, 2022 05:00
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BrainDance posted:I don't know how this thread is on the ethics of ancient coins, so maybe I'll get poo poo on for this. But my logic is, I wouldn't buy most artifacts that have any actual value, they should be in a museum, but when it comes to Roman coins from everything I've heard they're loving everywhere because the Roman empire was massive. Most have almost no real value and if they end up in a museum they're just kept with the thousands of others in a box somewhere in storage unless there's something special about one. So when it comes to Roman coins, ehh whatever I don't feel too bad about getting one. Of course, I'd prefer to purchase them from a museum or something myself, just because that way the money goes to them instead of some coin scalper. There's also a thread in SA mart selling them! Though it's a goon's hobby so stock is very sporadic.
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Jun 29, 2022 06:23
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