Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

FreudianSlippers posted:

I can sometimes kinda sorta puzzle the meaning out of Old English texts as an Icelandic speaker.

I imagine it was a lot easier back in Old Norse times when pronunciation was somewhat different.

Part of the reason I ask is because recently we�ve been watching scandinavian crime shows on netflix, and the dumb perfect swords n boobs show The Last Kingdom. In the former, even with modern english, some basic sentences in danish or norwegian sound like they could be thickly-accented english. Like ��oh my god he�s dead!!!��

And the latter obviously has danes and saxons just meeting and chatting.

But like, hearing really basic danish and norwegian sometimes reminds me of parsing old english. I need help for most of it, but sometimes stuff like ��t w�s god cyning�� comes up and I could easily be convinced that�s the dialect of some small english subregion today. I know exactly what that means.

# ? Jan 28, 2024 23:51

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# ? May 10, 2024 16:45

Crab Dad: Dec 28, 2002; behold i have tempered and refined thee, but not as silver; as CRAB

More swords and leather. I don�t recall that many boobs or moobs.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 00:36

Tulip: Jun 3, 2008; yeah thats pretty good

feedmegin posted:

I am trying to put the 18th century idea of universal human rights in the context of previous not-universal-but-heading-gradually towards-it ideas of rights for specific but larger and larger communities in the run-up to that.

I'm certainly not talking about the 21st century and I'm sorry if I gave that impression.

Edit: if you mean 'the Church is quite specifically unhappy about' um, well, that's a fairly common figure of speech and has an implicit 'at the time' attached to it, I'm not saying Pope Francis is fuming about it. Fair point though I should have noticed that was ambiguous.

All cool, just some tense confusion at the end of the day.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 00:57

Groda: Mar 17, 2005; Hair Elf

Mr. Nice! posted:

Yeah. Old english is very closely related to all the old germanic languages. It's mutually intelligible with modern Frisian dialects, for example.

Old Frisian and Anglo-Saxon might have been close enough to be hard to differentiate, but I'm calling nonsense on a speaker of Anglo-Saxon understanding modern spoken Frisian. Cherrypick the right set of words -- fine -- but the same thing could be done with Swedish, Dutch, Spanish etc.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 01:00

Omnomnomnivore: Nov 14, 2010; I'm swiftly moving toward a solution which pleases nobody! YEAGGH!

The Vikings sword n boobs show had a bunch of Old English and Old Norse dialogue to show that they couldn't easily talk to each other, at least in the early seasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EPoGQZbLD0&t=11s

# ? Jan 29, 2024 01:10

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

ulmont posted:

And https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/12/a-reindeer-farmer-at-king-alfreds-court.html (�This is a story about a gift-giving man, who lived in the �north-most� place and owned 600 reindeer. Sounds like anyone familiar? Well, he wasn't Santa, if that was what you were thinking. The man in question was Ohthere, an intrepid explorer from medieval Scandinavia, who visited the court of King Alfred the Great in the late 9th century and told the king about his travels. We know Ohthere's story from a 10th-century manuscript held at the British Library,�)

...an explorer named "Oh There"?

# ? Jan 29, 2024 01:19

LITERALLY A BIRD: Sep 27, 2008; I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Ah, sorry, I've got no idea myself, just observations. Just saying that there's a lot of potential reasons for what seem like incongruities to us, and I've always found the kind of domains and aspects of polytheism interesting.

Mad Hamish posted:

There's an entertaining bit in Pratchett's Pyramids where all the Gods who are the Sun God get into a big fight over the actual Sun, because it turns out that it being the Eye of Horus, the Aten, a flaming orb being pushed across the sky by a dung-beetle, Re in the Boat of Millions of Years, and gods only know what else, all at the same time, presents some logistical difficulties.

I am currently reading Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, as recommended by fellow thread enthusiast Charlatan Eschaton, which is about the theory of mythopoeic thought. Here is an explanation of that from Wikipedia:

quote:

According to the Frankforts, "ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians"�the Frankforts' area of expertise�"lived in a wholly mythopoeic world".[7] Each natural force, each concept, was a personal being from their viewpoint: "In Egypt and Mesopotamia the divine was comprehended as immanent: the gods were in nature."[8] This immanence and multiplicity of the divine is a direct result of mythopoeic thought: hence, the first step in the loss of mythopoeic thought was the loss of this view of the divine. The ancient Hebrews took this first step through their doctrine of a single, transcendent God:

quote:
"When we read in Psalm 19 that 'the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,' we hear a voice which mocks the beliefs of the Egyptians and Babylonians. The heavens, which were to the psalmist but a witness of God's greatness, were to the Mesopotamians the very majesty of godhead, the highest ruler, Anu. [...] The God of the psalmists and the prophets was not in nature. He transcended nature � and transcended, likewise, the realm of mythopoeic thought."[8]
The ancient Hebrews still saw each major event as a divine act. However, they saw the divine as a single being�not a myriad of spirits, one for each natural phenomenon. Moreover, they didn't see the divine as a will within nature: for them, the divine will was a force or law behind all natural events.

Some Greek philosophers went further. Instead of seeing each event as an act of will, they developed a notion of impersonal, universal law: they finally abandoned mythopoeic thought, postulating impersonal laws behind all natural phenomena.[7] These philosophers may not have been scientific by today's rigid standards: their hypotheses were often based on assumptions, not empirical data.[9] However, by the mere fact that they looked behind the apparent diversity and individuality of events in search of underlying laws, and defied "the prescriptive sanctities of religion", the Greeks broke away from mythopoeic thought.[9]

And the contents of the section labeled "Criticism":

quote:

Religious scholar Robert Segal has pointed out that the dichotomy between a personal and an impersonal view of the world is not absolute, as the Frankforts' distinction between ancient and modern thought might suggest: "Any phenomenon can surely be experienced as both an It and a Thou: consider, for example, a pet and a patient."[7] Furthermore, Segal argues, it is "embarrassingly simplistic" to call the ancient Near East "wholly mythopoeic", the Hebrews "largely nonmythopoeic", and the Greeks "wholly scientific".[7]

Robert Segal is probably correct that things are getting very oversimplified in this book but it feels nevertheless as though they are being oversimplified from the right direction, if that makes sense. Typically we the modern humans are always peering back at ancient belief through telescopes of our current philosophy. The Frankforts wish to have us up close instead, with microscopes and magnifying glasses, to establish that this way of thinking was fundamentally different from the ways of thinking that are employed today, and so there is relentless emphasis of the way it was, they believe, the standard ground from which all ancient speculative thought arose. I feel like the "why not both" meme could apply here but understand their desire to impress this upon me, the ever-modern reader.

Anyway I liked this section talking about the multiplicity of forms involved with the Sun God, and was reminded of the quoted posts above

I thought you both might like it too.

Before Philosophy posted:

Enough has already been said about the central importance of the sun in this scene. Something must be said about his motive power on his daily journey. Most commonly he is depicted as moving by boat, and the bilateral symmetry which the Egyptian loved gave him a boat for the day and another boat for the night. Various important gods formed the crews of these two boats. This journey might not be all stately and serene: there was a serpent lurking along the way to attack the boat and presumably swallow the sun; battle was necessary to conquer this creature. This is, of course, the common belief in many lands that eclipses occur when a snake or dragon swallows up the sun. But a true eclipse was not the only phenomenon involved; every night an attempt to swallow up the sun was met and conquered in the underworld.

The sun might have other motive power. It seemed to be a rolling ball, and the Egyptians knew a rolling ball in that pellet which the dung beetle pushed across the sand. So a beetle, a scarab, became a symbol for the morning sun, with an afternoon counterpart in an old man wearily moving toward the western horizon. Again, the symbol of the falcon soaring in apparent motionlessness in the upper air suggested that the sun disc also might have falcon wings for its effortless flight. As before, these concepts were felt to be complementary and not conflicting. The possession of many manifestations of being enlarged the glory of the god.

To move the concept of the sun even farther from the physical, from the notion of a fiery disc which swung around the earth every twenty-four hours, we must here note other aspects of the sun-god, R�. As supreme god, he was a divine king, and legend said that he had been the first king of Egypt in primordial times. He was thus represented in the form of a bearded deity with a disc as his crown. As supreme god, he loaned himself to other gods, in order to enlarge them and give them a primacy within geographical or functional limits. Thus he was both R� and R�-Atun, the creator god, at Heliopolis. He was R�-Harakhte, that is, R�-Horus-of-the-Horizon, as the youth- ful god on the eastern horizon. At various localities he became Montu-R�, a falcon-god, Sobek-R�, a crocodile-god, and Khnum-R�, a ram-god. He became Amon-R�, King of the Gods, as the imperial god of Thebes. As we have said, these separate manifestations enlarged him. He was not simply a solar disc. He had personality as a god. Here we revert again to the distinction between the scientific concept of a phenomenon as �It� and the ancient concept of a phenomenon as �Thou� given in chapter I. There it was said that science is able to comprehend the �It� as ruled by laws which make its behaviour relatively predictable, whereas the �Thou� has the unpredictable character of an individual, �a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself.� In these terms the apparently antic and protean character of the sun becomes simply the versatile and ubiquitous reach possible to a very able individual. Surprise at this being�s many-sided personality may ultimately give way to an expectation that he will be able to participate in any situation with specialized competence.

It reminded me a bit of this rather more succinct sentiment as well, from a university talk on the philosophy of polytheism.

Edward P. Butler posted:

Polytheism is essentially maximal diversity in maximal solidarity.

edit: come to think of it is that first Wikipedia blip not just describing pantheism versus theism, basically

LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 29, 2024

# ? Jan 29, 2024 01:20

Mr. Nice!: Oct 13, 2005; c-spam cannot afford

Groda posted:

Old Frisian and Anglo-Saxon might have been close enough to be hard to differentiate, but I'm calling nonsense on a speaker of Anglo-Saxon understanding modern spoken Frisian. Cherrypick the right set of words -- fine -- but the same thing could be done with Swedish, Dutch, Spanish etc.

Eddie Izzard wouldn't lie to me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

# ? Jan 29, 2024 01:37

sullat: Jan 9, 2012

feedmegin posted:

I was thinking of Catholics in France specifically - and I would invite you to consider whether 'universal' for them at the time included the perfidious Musselman, the atheist or indeed (as we can see from the middle ages on numerous occasions) Jewish people. As I say, rights for Christians in Christendom is a different matter and obviously goes back a lot further - but you gotta be Christian first.

The 'Englishmens' rights' thing is separate, this is the whole Norman Yoke idea the Levellers etc come up with during/before/after the English Civil War, and yes the Catholic Church obviously doesn't give a fig about that idea.

Well it certainly wouldn't include the Cagots

# ? Jan 29, 2024 03:09

Mad Hamish: Jun 15, 2008; WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING IN LIFE.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

I am currently reading Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, as recommended by fellow thread enthusiast Charlatan Eschaton, which is about the theory of mythopoeic thought. Here is an explanation of that from Wikipedia:

And the contents of the section labeled "Criticism":

Robert Segal is probably correct that things are getting very oversimplified in this book but it feels nevertheless as though they are being oversimplified from the right direction, if that makes sense. Typically we the modern humans are always peering back at ancient belief through telescopes of our current philosophy. The Frankforts wish to have us up close instead, with microscopes and magnifying glasses, to establish that this way of thinking was fundamentally different from the ways of thinking that are employed today, and so there is relentless emphasis of the way it was, they believe, the standard ground from which all ancient speculative thought arose. I feel like the "why not both" meme could apply here but understand their desire to impress this upon me, the ever-modern reader.

Anyway I liked this section talking about the multiplicity of forms involved with the Sun God, and was reminded of the quoted posts above I thought you both might like it too.

It reminded me a bit of this rather more succinct sentiment as well, from a university talk on the philosophy of polytheism.

edit: come to think of it is that first Wikipedia blip not just describing pantheism versus theism, basically

Having read Robert Graves, the term 'mythopoeic' makes me want to break out in hives.

Fukkin
Celtic tree calendar

# ? Jan 29, 2024 03:18

LITERALLY A BIRD: Sep 27, 2008; I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

Wikipedia posted:

The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by the English writer Robert Graves. First published in 1948, the book is based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine; corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961. The White Goddess represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative and idiosyncratic perspective. Graves proposes the existence of a European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death", much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired and represented by the phases of the Moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies.[1] Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son.

I assume you are referring to this/something like it? Yeah, that sounds terrible, I don't blame you

e: ah yes, there's the tree calendar :lol:

LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Jan 29, 2024

# ? Jan 29, 2024 03:28

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

Does anyone have a link to that hilarious review of The White Goddess that imagines how Graves would interpret Cinderella?

Edit: Found it: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HAB4PBE5K0M4

# ? Jan 29, 2024 03:37

LITERALLY A BIRD: Sep 27, 2008; I knew you were trouble
when you flew in

lmao, thank you

# ? Jan 29, 2024 04:00

Mad Hamish: Jun 15, 2008; WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING IN LIFE.

LMAO holy poo poo that's loving incredible.

Graves was a great novelist, even if poo poo did get a bit weird in King Jesus and Seven Days in New Crete, but my god TWG is one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever read.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 04:54

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Mad Hamish posted:

LMAO holy poo poo that's loving incredible.

Graves was a great novelist, even if poo poo did get a bit weird in King Jesus and Seven Days in New Crete, but my god TWG is one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever read.

Listen: I am the author and my fetish is the root of all mythology and religion.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 04:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

This came up in another context, but what evidence is there for early mathematics, especially in cultures just now getting literacy?

The context is an RPG setting where nebulous forces prevent the implementation of several advanced concepts, including numbers beyond "nine" (quantities beyond that can be counted as "many"). That seemed... implausibly low.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:02

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

they're prolly referencing piraha counting, not any ancient stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Lexicon

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:03

The Lone Badger: Sep 24, 2007

Nessus posted:

This came up in another context, but what evidence is there for early mathematics, especially in cultures just now getting literacy?

The context is an RPG setting where nebulous forces prevent the implementation of several advanced concepts, including numbers beyond "nine" (quantities beyond that can be counted as "many"). That seemed... implausibly low.

I would get around that by using a base-9 counting system.
�There were enough of them to make nine, and another nine, and then six more.�

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:05

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

Nessus posted:

This came up in another context, but what evidence is there for early mathematics, especially in cultures just now getting literacy?

The context is an RPG setting where nebulous forces prevent the implementation of several advanced concepts, including numbers beyond "nine" (quantities beyond that can be counted as "many"). That seemed... implausibly low.

Nine is on the high side, actually; some languages don�t have numbers above two.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:09

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

the counting stuff is deffo colored by daniel everett's 40-year slow-burning vicious academia war against chomsky

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the counting stuff is deffo colored by daniel everett's 40-year slow-burning vicious academia war against chomsky

Yeah? What's the deal with that?

The Piraha thing is interesting but as the article itself said, these might be more comparative terms than anything. I can buy not having words for every number between one and some arbitrary future number, but it seems like you would have to have some kind of interior estimative capacity, imperfect as it might be, to determine which is more or fewer.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:25

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

chomsky's overarching linguistic theory of everything states that peeps have a universal grammar that has an innate (and only innate - unlearnable) capacity to do syntactic stuff only, because semantics stuff is meaningless. the essential biological thing about the grammatical structures is that grammar is always recursive, along with a bunch of other stuff. everett went to the jungle and according to him found out that piraha has no embedded clause structure, no recursion in the grammar, none of the syntactic stuff that chomsky was insistent was the innate hallmark of all human language. after 40 years of arguing over whether one's wrong or not they hate each other personally and would frankly kill each other in a knife-fight if they were young and violent men

i actually do have a horse in the race, inasmuch as i used to be jay mcclelland's postdoc's minion. jay and his buddies dave rumelhart and geoff hinton and others decided to test if that poo poo was unlearnable by making computers learn it. that was v0 circa 1986 of the technology that openai, google, etc uses to go and make language

bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jan 29, 2024

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:30

cheetah7071: Oct 20, 2010; honk honk; College Slice

it never particularly struck me that the two were incompatible. Recursion is very useful for communication but that wouldn't mean every language would choose to use it, even if recursion is a hard-wired part of our brain. It suggests that a very large majority of languages would use it, which is true whether or not there's one exception.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:37

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

cheetah7071 posted:

it never particularly struck me that the two were incompatible. Recursion is very useful for communication but that wouldn't mean every language would choose to use it, even if recursion is a hard-wired part of our brain. It suggests that a very large majority of languages would use it, which is true whether or not there's one exception.

the two of them think it's incompatible. they think it's so, so, fuckin incompatible. hundreds and hundreds of pages of increasingly personal attacks

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the two of them think it's incompatible. they think it's so, so, fuckin incompatible. hundreds and hundreds of pages of increasingly personal attacks

We will just have to see which of the two of them ~~agree with me about current events~~ wants it more.

What exactly is recursion in this context, anyway?

# ? Jan 29, 2024 05:58

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

Nessus posted:

We will just have to see which of the two of them ~~agree with me about current events~~ wants it more.

What exactly is recursion in this context, anyway?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#In_language

you can just stick in more clauses in a sentence infinitely. some fucker wrote an entire novel in one sentence once for shits and giggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks,_Newburyport

# ? Jan 29, 2024 06:01

Groda: Mar 17, 2005; Hair Elf

Mr. Nice! posted:

Eddie Izzard wouldn't lie to me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

Frisia, notable region of North Holland.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 08:15

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Groda posted:

Frisia, notable region of North Holland.

Well, yeah? The Westfrisian Islands belong to the Netherlands, for example.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 08:28

EricBauman: Nov 30, 2005; DOLF IS RECHTVAARDIG

It's a dirty trick the Frisians played on everyone:
West Friesland is in North Holland. East Friesland is in Germany. Friesland proper is in between them. And Groningen? Don't worry about that

# ? Jan 29, 2024 12:29

Groda: Mar 17, 2005; Hair Elf

At this point, the only people still calling the Netherlands "Holland" in English are Dutch tryhards.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 12:41

EricBauman: Nov 30, 2005; DOLF IS RECHTVAARDIG

North Holland is a province of the Netherlands

# ? Jan 29, 2024 13:36

A_Bluenoser: Jan 13, 2008; ...oh where could that fish be?...; Nap Ghost

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the two of them think it's incompatible. they think it's so, so, fuckin incompatible. hundreds and hundreds of pages of increasingly personal attacks

The vehemence with which a point is argued is inversely proportional to its importance.

Therefore academic disputes are particularly bitter because the stakes are so low.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 14:12

Koramei: Nov 11, 2011; I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

some fucker wrote an entire novel in one sentence once for shits and giggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducks,_Newburyport

gently caress

# ? Jan 29, 2024 14:23

Sleng Teng: May 3, 2009

A_Bluenoser posted:

The vehemence with which a point is argued is inversely proportional to its importance.

Therefore academic disputes are particularly bitter because the stakes are so low.

To be quite honest that�s part of why some of these disputes are very funny (when you aren�t involved, at a distance)

# ? Jan 29, 2024 15:19

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

In this case, I think the stakes are so high for Everett because he sees it as a proxy for empiricism vs. rationalism.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 15:41

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

Radio lab has a program about how if not taught people think about numbers logarithmically and that�s how baby�s think about them.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/91698-innate-numbers/transcript

# ? Jan 29, 2024 17:32

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?