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I'm pretty sure I know which came first, but did written language start with letters and such, or were the first words written down more like kanji or cuneiform?
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Apr 18, 2023 18:15
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Leave posted:I'm pretty sure I know which came first, but did written language start with letters and such, or were the first words written down more like kanji or cuneiform? I think it’s well established that the earliest writing systems were pretty much just a picture of a thing it represented, with maybe some marks or such for stuff like counting. So it looked more like hieroglyphs or cuneiform than anything in the modern world, but even then those two are a few levels of abstraction away from the origins. The modern Latin alphabet is something like four or five generations removed from the Phoentian it derives from, which itself is probably four or five generations deep.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:34
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George H.W. oval office posted:Keeping with the early human development is there any evidence of the first language or what it would have been most similar to? Everything already mentioned is good, but the best source we have for this is contemporary sign languages that arose in communities where one or "preferably" more children were born deaf but there was no existing sign language to use in the area. Essentially, the parents would make something up along with the kids, and the kids would then become fluent speakers of this newly created language. Long story short, it starts with simple concepts like animals and feelings but within a generation or two it turns into something that's comparable to old languages.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:43
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Leave posted:I'm pretty sure I know which came first, but did written language start with letters and such, or were the first words written down more like kanji or cuneiform? I think you can make a decent argument that cave paintings count as "written language", in the sense that they are a recorded form of communication.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:44
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I think you can make a decent argument that cave paintings count as "written language", in the sense that they are a recorded form of communication. That doesn't really make sense
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Apr 18, 2023 19:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I think you can make a decent argument that cave paintings count as "written language", in the sense that they are a recorded form of communication. poo poo yeah, you could. I mean, a sign that looks like 🚫 has no words in it, but the message is still clear. 🦬🦬🦬 on a cave wall sounds like written language to me, albeit a little basic, but gently caress it, I couldn't have done any better.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:58
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Qubee posted:Just did some bloodwork, vitamin D came back very low (surprise surprise). How long will it take for my body to get back to a sufficient level of vitamin D if I'm going out in the sun every day for 10-15 minutes with exposed arms, face, legs? Are we talking weeks, or quicker? Mike Fallopian posted:It depends on your weight and body fat, as well as how low your levels are. Anywhere from weeks to months is likely. Late response, but the amount of vitamin D you generate from sunlight also depends significantly on your geographic location. When I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency in 2009, my doctor told me that if you live farther north than the 40-degree latitude line (in the US, that's basically farther north than cities like NYC, Chicago, and Salt Lake City), the sun's rays aren't strong enough between Sept and March for you to produce adequate amounts of vit. D. (I have to assume that your skin tone plays a role in this, too.) I remember this because I was living in Boston at the time and had previously lived in Montana (both spots north of 40 degrees latitude), and although I regularly spent hours outside on most days of the year, my vitamin D level was close to the point where kids develop rickets. My doctor prescribed me 50,000 IU of vitamin D, taken once a week, for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, my levels were on the low side of normal. Since my levels have dropped low enough to need that prescription 3-4 times over the years, I just take a 5,000 IU supplement every day now and that's been working fine.
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Apr 18, 2023 21:31
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Ras Het posted:That doesn't really make sense Perhaps not, depending on how prescriptive you are about what "written language" is. I'm using a very broad definition here: it is recorded and it communicates. For example, someone from the same culture might look at a painting and get the message "we were out hunting and got surprised by a bear, and now this guy only has one arm." Keep in mind that, by my understanding, early written language had extremely vague syntax and grammar. There was a lot of interpreting going on. So if you're basing your definition of "written language" on some bar of clarity or precision, you may be artificially excluding things that are the precursors of the stuff you accept as "written language". I can well believe (lacking evidence to the contrary) that there's a smooth causal lineage from early paintings through to pictographs, cuneiform, and other more widespread writings.
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Apr 18, 2023 21:42
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Rabbit Hill posted:Late response, but the amount of vitamin D you generate from sunlight also depends significantly on your geographic location. When I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency in 2009, my doctor told me that if you live farther north than the 40-degree latitude line (in the US, that's basically farther north than cities like NYC, Chicago, and Salt Lake City), the sun's rays aren't strong enough between Sept and March for you to produce adequate amounts of vit. D. (I have to assume that your skin tone plays a role in this, too.) I wonder if there's a correlation between rates of vitamin D deficiency and spooky black metal music.
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Apr 18, 2023 22:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Perhaps not, depending on how prescriptive you are about what "written language" is. I'm using a very broad definition here: it is recorded and it communicates. For example, someone from the same culture might look at a painting and get the message "we were out hunting and got surprised by a bear, and now this guy only has one arm." But how do you distinguish between visual art and writiting then? I am by no means an expert on the development of early writing, but I think a key step is abstraction, that the symbol that looks like a cow begins to stand for things other than "cow", and that secondary meaning is communicated systematically. Obviously there's a gray area, but I don't think it's illuminative to extend the idea of writing to something which we in our cultural context would not consider linguistic communication.
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Apr 18, 2023 22:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Perhaps not, depending on how prescriptive you are about what "written language" is. I'm using a very broad definition here: it is recorded and it communicates. For example, someone from the same culture might look at a painting and get the message "we were out hunting and got surprised by a bear, and now this guy only has one arm." your username checks out at least. One of the points in differentiating between iconographic communication and written language is that it's even more of an abstraction from the content to the message. These weird little lines you're looking at don't look anything like the point I'm making visually, but they communicate meaning nonetheless. Art communicates something, absolutely, and there is almost certainly a through-line from art to writing in the same way that there's a through-line from animal vocalizations to language. It's not prescriptive to point out that there's a difference in how the words are commonly used. It's also fine to make up your own definition, as you have here, and talk about it - it's an interesting point - but you're using words that have an agreed upon meaning to do so, so you should expect some push back.
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Apr 18, 2023 22:48
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Y’all are way overthinking this. Simply declare the smudges on the cave wall to be orthography and outside the scope of linguistics. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 22:50
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I would argue (non expertly) that a quality that would distinguish written language from artistic narrative, is productiveness, i.e. the ability to form infinite new messages from a finite set of symbols. Cave art would not fit this, though it surely had some hand in the development of more productive symbols. (This is also one of the qualities that linguists use to distinguish human language from animal communication)
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Apr 18, 2023 22:51
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alnilam posted:I would argue (non expertly) that a quality that would distinguish written language from artistic narrative, is productiveness, i.e. the ability to form infinite new messages from a finite set of symbols. do logographic chinese or egyptian characters meet this criteria?
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Apr 18, 2023 22:59
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Yes, they can be (and are) strung together to form an infinite number of possible messages, but a painting of a hunting trip with a bear attack cannot be used to tell additional stories without inventing additional symbols.
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Apr 18, 2023 23:14
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If anything, we clearly need there to be some kind of difference between language and decoration. cave paintings seem to be decoration to me, same with most clothing and sculpture. I don’t have a good definition of language other than it should probably be operational somehow. It needs to be able to tell someone to do something. This whole discussion reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Here’s a version of it https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf quote:Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn't have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn't the meat that made the difference. It was the story. Which is fun to think about at least.
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Apr 18, 2023 23:47
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Ras Het posted:But how do you distinguish between visual art and writiting then? I am by no means an expert on the development of early writing, but I think a key step is abstraction, that the symbol that looks like a cow begins to stand for things other than "cow", and that secondary meaning is communicated systematically. Obviously there's a gray area, but I don't think it's illuminative to extend the idea of writing to something which we in our cultural context would not consider linguistic communication. (and Captain Monkey said something similar) By my understanding some of our earliest "writing" was just simplified icons of real-world things. Like, if you're a merchant and you traded 10 chickens for another merchant's goat, you might have a clay ball made with 10 chicken stamps and your personal mark on one side, and 1 goat stamp and the other guy's mark on the other side, to record the trade. This isn't a generative language which can produce a wide range of meanings, but it can communicate an awful lot of useful stuff in terms of trading. My experience with software indicates that you can get an awful lot accomplished with a very limited symbol set; you may not be able to do everything*, but you can still find significant value. Hell, I made a small domain-specific language for my videogame, and I intentionally made it not be a "complete" language. Every time I needed to express a new concept, it was easier to add a new symbol to the language (which I then taught the core program to interpret) than it was to make the language complicated enough to express that concept internally. It wouldn't surprise me if the development of early written languages proceeded similarly...but of course I don't know. If there's anyone reading this with an actual background in archaeo-linguistics, a) I'm sorry for all this baseless speculation, and b) I'd love to hear what you have to say! * does Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem apply to the concepts a language can express? TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 23:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:(and Captain Monkey said something similar) (chicken ten times) = (goat) is still a lot more 'language' than a picture of a specific thing that happened. Even the language you're making is using new symbols to mean new things, and combining them in new ways in the way that a single piece of art simply isn't. You can't recreate that tableau in a new setting and have it mean something else in the same way that even icons can be recreated and moved into new meaning. Context, grammar, and meaning are all needed for language.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:12
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The Wikipedia article on the history of writing is a pretty good read
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Apr 19, 2023 00:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:* does Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem apply to the concepts a language can express? No. Goedel's theorems are specifically about formal systems that can model arithmetic. They're unrelated to discussions on linguistics.
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Apr 19, 2023 00:55
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tuyop posted:If anything, we clearly need there to be some kind of difference between language and decoration. cave paintings seem to be decoration to me, same with most clothing and sculpture.
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Apr 19, 2023 01:05
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I don't think a useful definition of language includes paintings, all types of art have messages and often narratives. They're proof of intelligence and communication but they don't do much for reconstructing any kind of spoken language, which I expect is older than the 64,000 years of the oldest known cave painting.
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Apr 19, 2023 01:44
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Incidentally, the Science, Academics and Languages subforum has a linguistics thread, which recently had some discussion about old (but not oldest) writing.
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Apr 19, 2023 02:24
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This is not a place of honor. These are not decorations. This is not a language. 
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Apr 19, 2023 02:49
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alnilam posted:I would argue (non expertly) that a quality that would distinguish written language from artistic narrative, is productiveness, i.e. the ability to form infinite new messages from a finite set of symbols. Cave art would not fit this, though it surely had some hand in the development of more productive symbols. (This is also one of the qualities that linguists use to distinguish human language from animal communication) Cave art can encode the message of "N deer" for arbitrary N.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:08
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i dont think there is any way to identify a "first language". i think most likely, family groups began vocalizing/gesturing to each other and developed their own internal languages and some of them spread while others died out, and i would bet that this happened fairly simultaneously across multiple areas, i doubt there was one specific group that came up with it first.
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Apr 19, 2023 04:09
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Some cave paintings may indeed have been (or included) a type of writing system - see https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cave-painting-calendar-earliest-writing/ and https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...6FE857840B4FE19 - markings on the various animals might have communicated life cycles and how they related to the seasons (this animal has babies in spring, this one in fall, whatever). It's a neat story too, bunch of the work was done by an amateur, and it only got published a few months ago.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:00
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Earwicker posted:i dont think there is any way to identify a "first language". James IV of Scotland will have your head for this. It’s Hebrew.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:13
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Leave posted:I'm pretty sure I know which came first, but did written language start with letters and such, or were the first words written down more like kanji or cuneiform?
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Apr 19, 2023 06:17
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The gently caress is thins thing on my thumb? I thought it was a tiny splinter or something but I don't see anything and it's not changing in appearance at all. A bit more visible after it's been in the water for a bit though, otherwise it's a bit less prominent. Very mildly  if you're easily grossed out I supposehttps://i.imgur.com/91E7duIl.jpg
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Apr 19, 2023 13:24
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mobby_6kl posted:The gently caress is thins thing on my thumb? I thought it was a tiny splinter or something but I don't see anything and it's not changing in appearance at all. A bit more visible after it's been in the water for a bit though, otherwise it's a bit less prominent. Looks like maybe a wart to me
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Apr 19, 2023 13:30
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If a cannonball was fired at me, and I had perfect aim, and could strike it anywhere I want, would I be able to put counterspin on it with a gun by firing at it, or change it's trajectory with a small caliber bullet.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:06
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Does anyone recognize these collapsible milk crates and have any idea where to get them not 3 at a time and not for $46 each and not from uline: https://www.uline.com/BL_313/Milk-Crates It is only this very specific model I'm interested, not any of the other million collapsible milkcrates on amazon. My dad has had one probably my whole life, I've had one for years, they really hold up well and I'm trying to find one or two more. The only markings on mine are MADE IN USA on the bottom. Google lens is what got me to the ULine site but I can't find them anywhere else. I've searched my email for every folding collapsible crate related keyword I can think of and cant find where I ordered mine from. Surely there is some magic word or brand name that will help me find them but my google-fu is weak. E: found a manufacturers name on it but they seem to be defunct.  a Euro crate seems to be pretty similar dimensions
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Apr 19, 2023 20:17
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Boba Pearl posted:If a cannonball was fired at me, and I had perfect aim, and could strike it anywhere I want, would I be able to put counterspin on it with a gun by firing at it, or change it's trajectory with a small caliber bullet. No. You either directly hit it with the bullet, in which case the cannonball overwhelms the mass of the bullet, or you rely on friction to attempt to alter the trajectory of the ball, and bullets lack the necessary mass to alter that either.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:19
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Imagine a cannonball balanced on a point, and you try to spin it with your hand. It takes effort (=energy), because the cannonball is heavy. Bullets don't actually have all that much kinetic energy to them, which means that they can't really alter the motion of other objects very well. Movies that show people getting knocked backwards by bullets are, as usual, just faking things. Machine Gun Jetpack goes into some of the details involved in using bullets to impart motion.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:52
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Being fair I was under the impression that people showing knockback from bullets was more about a physical shock reaction as opposed to the pure force of the projectile.
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Apr 19, 2023 21:23
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Boba Pearl posted:If a cannonball was fired at me, and I had perfect aim, and could strike it anywhere I want, would I be able to put counterspin on it with a gun by firing at it, or change it's trajectory with a small caliber bullet. Been playing Like A Dragon: Ishin! lately? 
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Apr 19, 2023 21:48
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I get anxiety when taking prescribed meds cause of a bad experience in the past. Has anyone ever been prescribed Vitamin D3 at 50,000 IU? I had very low levels from a blood test and the doc told me it's common practice to megadose one capsule a week for a few weeks. I can't help but get worried at the thought of taking such a large dose, even though I know it will be fine. I feel like I'll start getting weird side effects immediately after taking one pill.
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Apr 19, 2023 22:07
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Qubee posted:I get anxiety when taking prescribed meds cause of a bad experience in the past. Has anyone ever been prescribed Vitamin D3 at 50,000 IU? I had very low levels from a blood test and the doc told me it's common practice to megadose one capsule a week for a few weeks. I can't help but get worried at the thought of taking such a large dose, even though I know it will be fine. I feel like I'll start getting weird side effects immediately after taking one pill. Here you go Mayo clinic posted:Taking 60,000 international units (IU) a day of vitamin D for several months has been shown to cause toxicity. This level is many times higher than the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for most adults of 600 IU of vitamin D a day. Not a doctor etc and you should generally not trust internet medical advice, but be picky about your sources if you must, and Mayo clinic's website tends to be a decent source.
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Apr 19, 2023 22:15
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Okay I feel a lot better about taking the prescribed capsules now. Thanks. I'll just get another blood test in 4 weeks or something. Or I might go back to the doctor tomorrow and ask him for a weaker dose lol
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Apr 19, 2023 22:19
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