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Koramei posted:I don't think this is really a fair characterization. He basically always defers to the guests for expertise, I think the only flaw that makes it come out this way sometimes is that he and the guests seem to try to make a "thesis" each show gets based around to give it some direction, so when there are guests that aren't totally on board with that or disagree with the other guests they can end up taking the conversation in a valid but unrelated direction and end up cut off. They write an outline of their points ahead of time and I'm pretty sure he's relating that rather than his Melvynn Bragg Opinions the vast majority of the time in these kinds of situations. Maybe he's mellowed since I gave up on the show then (quite a long time ago), because back when I listened to it it would be all "no no no, wait a second, isn't it the case that [x]", with the guests then trying to politely explain why [x] was nuts
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Oct 27, 2018 03:56
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Yeah he mighta gotten better. I remember listening to some older episodes way back and not liking it so much, but I've listened to most of it (the history stuff anyway) from the past 5 years and I can't really praise it enough at this point. I thought it was just my tastes changing but maybe it's not just that. I do think it is straight up the best podcast/radio show out there, on history anyway. It's not totally flawless but I think he generally handles the guests really well.
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Oct 27, 2018 04:01
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Listening to absurdly erudite scholars become increasingly incensed and undecorous is like, the entire point of In Our Time. Didnt know they had Ferguson on though, that's icky
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Oct 27, 2018 04:03
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Koramei posted:In Korean history there's a couple of major artifacts--the Gwanggaeto Stele and 7 Branched Sword--that both have script on them that, especially because the script got damaged, can variously be interpreted to mean either that some kingdoms in southern Korea were subject to Japan, or...literally the complete opposite, that Japan was subject to some kingdoms in southern Korea, depending on how you want to interpret it. hahahahaha i bet they love this
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Oct 27, 2018 04:47
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Mantis42 posted:It ends with an awkward sex scene between two historical figures who show up despite the butterfly effect meaning they probably shouldn't have even been born in this timeline, like all Turtledove novels. My favorite thing about Harry Turtledove is that he personally complimented my cats on Twitter Did Appian or Suetonius do that for any of you?
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Oct 27, 2018 04:53
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underage at the vape shop posted:hahahahaha i bet they love this Oh don't worry there's definitely not a nightmarish and insane argument about it that completely obliterates all historiography of that period.
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Oct 27, 2018 04:55
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Grand Fromage posted:Oh don't worry there's definitely not a nightmarish and insane argument about it that completely obliterates all historiography of that period. That sums up my experience with East Asian history in general.
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Oct 27, 2018 05:01
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In the English-language academia, there’s been a big project to study this stuff in the first millennium over the past decade (The Early Korea Project) and it’s managed to address a lot of sensitive issues in what’s from what I hear basically the most objective and insightful material on it in any language period, but then it got its funding pulled a few years back after its major Korean sponsors realized it wasn’t just “promoting Korean history in the West” like they wanted. (Incidentally, the final publication from that is literally covering “Early Korea-Japan Interactions” and it’s due to be released...any day now, so expect posts on that when I get my hands on it.) It’s frustrating because it’s such an interesting period, but a lot of what makes it so interesting is also completely incompatible with the (nationalism-based) conceptions most of the Korean and Japanese historians (and their funders) want to frame it from. This is a subject that actual historians have a lot of trouble talking about and I probably wouldn’t put it like this if I knew better, but to give a really simplistic take, it’s entirely possible there were “Japanese” chiefs that held dominion over “Korean” chiefs, and also “Korean” chiefs holding dominion over other (or maybe even the same!) “Japanese” chiefs...at the exact same time. Japan and the southern parts of Korea were both incredibly decentralized through most of the first millennium, the way they got conceived of as internally unified or necessarily even constrained just to the Korean peninsula or the Japanese archipelago by 20th century historians might not be much how it was in reality. Migration from the Korean peninsula to Japan was virtually constant for like 1000 years from ~400 BCE-600 CE; it’s theorized to have been like 3000 people moving every year at times—and at the same time, there were probably plenty of people that moved back in the other direction. The polities in both were intimately linked, and to separate them, or have one or the other in a superior/inferior position as opposed to the politics being a complete and total mess, is probably completely inaccurate. It’s a shame it may never get the actual attention from historians it deserves just because the people today want to look at the period as being ancestral to their now discrete nation states.
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Oct 27, 2018 06:24
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FAUXTON posted:My favorite thing about Harry Turtledove is that he personally complimented my cats on Twitter i can absolutely guarantee that if suetonius were talking to me today he'd make multiple comments about pussies
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Oct 27, 2018 06:39
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Harry Turtledove also translated the Chronicle of Theophanes, Confessor.
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Oct 27, 2018 07:10
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Koramei posted:In the English-language academia, there’s been a big project to study this stuff in the first millennium over the past decade (The Early Korea Project) and it’s managed to address a lot of sensitive issues in what’s from what I hear basically the most objective and insightful material on it in any language period, but then it got its funding pulled a few years back after its major Korean sponsors realized it wasn’t just “promoting Korean history in the West” like they wanted. (Incidentally, the final publication from that is literally covering “Early Korea-Japan Interactions” and it’s due to be released...any day now, so expect posts on that when I get my hands on it.) It’s frustrating because it’s such an interesting period, but a lot of what makes it so interesting is also completely incompatible with the (nationalism-based) conceptions most of the Korean and Japanese historians (and their funders) want to frame it from. What's the current theory on the relatedness of Japanese and Korean? Are they both still considered isolates? It's weird that there was this much interconnectedness but the two languages remained confined to their respective geographic territories.
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Oct 30, 2018 01:33
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It’s really important to emphasize there isn’t “a” theory, there’s several, each with a lot of backing, and by and large they contradict each other. That goes for a lot of things in Japanese and Korean history really, even in lots of places where there shouldn’t be such entrenched arguments given what we know these days, although for the linguistics especially there’s so much up in the air that most of the theories are at least potentially valid. Anyway with that in mind, as far as I know the leading school of thought in the west* is that they didn’t remain confined at all: proto-Japanese was actually what was originally spoken on the Korean peninsula, and then was brought over by migrants starting sometime around ~400-300 BCE, displacing the language (and probably the people too) spoken in the archipelago before it, which was unrelated and likely closer to what the Ainu speak today. Then on the Korean peninsula sometime later, other groups would come and bring proto-Korean with them, which eventually predominated there and left the proto-Japanese speakers on the archipelago as the isolate they are today. How related proto-Japanese and proto-Korean were before that point is pretty up in the air. I think most scholars think they were at least somewhat, even if very distantly, but there’s pretty divergent theories about where proto-Korean came from. And that’s if this theory is the right one at all; even the old theory that used to be favored by Japanese scholars that it was just an extra special language that evolved in its own unique way hasn’t been explicitly disproven really. e: Relating to my earlier point, (if this theory is the right one) proto-Japanese wasn't displaced by proto-Korean on the peninsula instantly, and it was probably spoken in places for some time. The Chinese histories mention the Mahan people (southwestern peninsula) and Jinhan/Byeonhan (southeast) spoke distinct languages. It's entirely possible the histories were wrong, as they are with many things, but there's very strong evidence for proto-Japanese words in some old Koreanic languages and proto-Japanese toponyms show up throughout the peninsula, so that might speak the incomprehensibility of it all along some kind of unitary ethnic line. Also, while Old Korean (the language of Silla, coming after proto-Korean) is fairly clearly in a different family from Old Japanese, we know much less about the language of Baekje (who succeeded the Mahan), so there's a theory it was the "bridge" that would relate Korean and Japanese into the same ancestral language family. *significantly less popular in Japan, and plenty of western scholars do disagree too Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 30, 2018 23:58
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That’s super interesting. Is there any reading you’d recommend about this period for a casual reader?
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Oct 31, 2018 04:56
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what about phonemes? Like for instance I know korean has weak consonants like g/k as well as stronger versions. Is that something shared by japanese?
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Oct 31, 2018 08:43
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The phonology of Korean and Japanese is fairly distinct, though honestly even having learned Korean and spent years there sometimes I can't tell them apart without paying attention to the dead giveaways like verb endings. It's more that grammatically and structurally they're incredibly similar. I've known many people who were fluent in one language and able to speak the other reasonably well simply by substituting words but using the grammar of the language they knew. It's not quite as interchangeable as say Spanish/Italian, but maybe like German/Dutch. They also share a massive amount of vocabulary, but that's all borrowed from Chinese so it doesn't mean too much. But yeah both countries have a huge nationalist investment in their languages being isolates and there's not a consensus about it. The problem is that just by looking at them, it seems obvious they're related because they're so, so similar. But it's possible for two languages to be unrelated and then grow to become similar like convergent evolution in biology, I guess? Linguistics isn't my field.
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Oct 31, 2018 16:55
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Grand Fromage posted:I've known many people who were fluent in one language and able to speak the other reasonably well simply by substituting words but using the grammar of the language they knew. It's not quite as interchangeable as say Spanish/Italian, but maybe like German/Dutch.
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Oct 31, 2018 17:04
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Grand Fromage posted:But it's possible for two languages to be unrelated and then grow to become similar like convergent evolution in biology, I guess? Linguistics isn't my field. Through extensive contact, yes, absolutely
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Oct 31, 2018 17:39
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Dadliest Worrier posted:That’s super interesting. Is there any reading you’d recommend about this period for a casual reader? For Korea, no.  There's been a lot of scholarship on this stuff over the past few decades but not much effort to make it accessible or engaging to read. Depending on how you define "casual," overarching stuff Sarah Nelson's The Archaeology of Korea is a little bit dated now but not too inside baseball, and Gina Barnes' China, Korea, Japan series (there's 3 editions but they're not that different if it's easier to get an older one) goes in broad strokes over most of the history, but she's aiming for a textbook audience and steers clear/tends to stay conservative with most of the recent scholarship that there's more debate on. Both of those skew heavily towards archaeology so some parts are still super dry despite trying to be more accessible than most Korea-related history books do though. Michael J Seth's A History of Korea From Antiquity to Present is what I'd recommend as an actually readable for someone with casual interest, but despite being 500 pages long it's pretty sparse on details in lots of places and like Gina Barnes', steers clear of the debates.For Japan, Japan Emerging edited by Karl Friday is imo very good and while it's not just about the ancient stuff, some of the authors go over it in some depth. William Wayne Farris' Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures is all about this period, and his Japan to 1600 brings parts of it more up to date, and I think he's one of the more readable of these writers. For the linguistic stuff I was just talking about, Mark Hudson's Ruins of Identity has a chapter that goes over all the major theories on the Japanese side in some detail (and talks about lots of other stuff past linguistics too in the other chapters), although it's 20 years old now so some stuff's come together more since then. Grand Fromage posted:The problem is that just by looking at them, it seems obvious they're related because they're so, so similar. But it's possible for two languages to be unrelated and then grow to become similar like convergent evolution in biology, I guess? Linguistics isn't my field. Me either, but from the words of one of the foremost linguists on this: Alexander Vovin posted:Although modern Korean and Japanese are remarkably similar typologically, so that it is possible in most cases to provide a word-to-word translation, it appears that the more we go into the past, the more tantalizing differences we discover, even if we limit ourselves to the history of the written language. Although typology cannot be used as evidence in establishing genetic relationships between languages, the fact that Korean and Japanese are typologically more similar now than they were in the past suggests that convergence, not divergence, was at work. Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 17:54
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So here's a quick question about Latin. I concocted a little sentence for the hell of it a while ago, and while I put a good bit of effort into making it as grammatically correct as I could, I'm curious how well I actually did, even with as short and basic as it is. Cum puer eram, mema salsa erant. When I was a boy, memes used to be funny.
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Oct 31, 2018 18:43
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I think I'd go pluperfect for the second verb
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Oct 31, 2018 19:29
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The History of Japan podcast is also decent and long-running. The host focuses more on Meiji and after than I'd like since that's his field, but there's a lot of good content in there. I don't recommend binging the entire back catalog like I did because he has some annoying language tics that you notice when you do that.
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Oct 31, 2018 20:57
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http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-277 Here's a paper by Vovin that looks at some of the ancient languages of the Korean peninsula and their similarities to Japanese.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:20
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This is a dumb, overly-artifacted facebook meme but it still made me chuckle
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Nov 1, 2018 00:44
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eszett engma posted:http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-277 Oh I hadn't seen this, thanks for linking it. He says what I was trying to say but way more clearly and succinctly: quote:Japonic . . . at its height it was spoken both on the Korean Peninsula and on the Japanese islands. It is also universally accepted today that Japonic speakers probably migrated from the Korean Peninsula to Japanese islands around 700–300 B.C. and eventually assimilated the local aboriginal languages. Roughly one thousand years later, the Peninsular Japonic languages shared the same fate, being gradually assimilated by the Koreanic languages. I did not know it was universally accepted, as far as I know in Asia anyway there's still some dissent, but he's definitely in a better position than I am to make that judgment call.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:32
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Nov 1, 2018 01:39
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It's a matter of being universally accepted today because the alternatives no longer make sense, rather than everyone's big on it, right? That is, theories about "never were in Korea, came straight from China" and "came through Korea, but way earlier" really don't hold up anymore.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:39
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Hah, yeah I guess that's a good way of putting it. There's a lot of people who still argue for the other theories but often because their arguments are based on nationalism more than actual evidence. But they often still get lip service paid to them, or sometimes even a lot of credit when they get read by people that don't realize, so sometimes it can take a really long time to get discredited. I guess Alexander Vovin's bucking the trend. e: there is also lots that is genuinely still more up in the air, I don't mean to imply that all dissent is just nationalist bullshit. (But a lot is) Koramei fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 02:16
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 Happy Halloween Here are two ancient ghost stories: 1. Youtuber 'Invicta' bring us a spooky Roman Ghost Story by way of Pliny the Younger 2. From 4th Century China's Soushen Ji ("In Search of the Supernatural") comes a a love story from the beyond the grave. 
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Nov 1, 2018 03:36
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It's kinda funny how pants were viewed as peak barbarism for a long time. The persians for example was seen as umanly because they fought in pants.
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Nov 1, 2018 09:26
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Thanks thread for reminding me that Rome exists.
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Nov 1, 2018 09:40
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Alhazred posted:It's kinda funny how pants were viewed as peak barbarism for a long time. The persians for example was seen as umanly because they fought in pants. I thought that wearing leather trousers was seen as evidence of the Persian disregard of physical comfort? I may be getting this entirely from Tom Holland...
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Nov 1, 2018 10:14
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Mr Enderby posted:I thought that wearing leather trousers was seen as evidence of the Persian disregard of physical comfort? I may be getting this entirely from Tom Holland... I doubt ut because Holland also writes that pants were considered unmanly In Sparta.
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Nov 1, 2018 13:26
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Alhazred posted:I doubt ut because Holland also writes that pants were considered unmanly In Sparta. Found it, in Persian Fire.. "Yes, Cyrus had proved himself a steely and indomitable opponent. As had his Persian subjects, a people so toughened by poverty that they had uncomplainingly endured the sternest hardships — even, notoriously, to the extent of wearing leather trousers."
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Nov 1, 2018 13:46
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I think it was the romans that specifically saw pants as unmanly, mostly because gauls and germans wore them. same way they basically considered facial hair effete around caesar's time despite facial hair being an obvious male trait. was not so much a logically consistent thing but just "barbarians do it so its bad"
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Nov 1, 2018 14:15
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The point of hairiness = unmanliness isn’t to suggest that hairiness is effeminate, it’s to suggest that it is animalistic and uncivilized and above all, poor. It shows that you can’t afford a tonsor.
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Nov 1, 2018 14:19
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skasion posted:The point of hairiness = unmanliness isn’t to suggest that hairiness is effeminate, it’s to suggest that it is animalistic and uncivilized and above all, poor. It shows that you can’t afford a tonsor. i thought that things like goatees were specifically thought of as effete, in addition to any other stereotypes they cooked up
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Nov 1, 2018 14:23
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I think the effete thing came from its association with Greeks and other assorted eastern trash. Of course then the gayest emperor had a beard and everyone followed suit until Constantine but people are bad at consistency.
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Nov 1, 2018 14:29
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Mr Enderby posted:Found it, in Persian Fire.. Holland gives us a masterly and gripping overview of the ancient Persians. They were regarded by the Greeks as "hilariously effeminate" because they wore trousers, and their kings and nobility even sported platform heels and luxuriant false beards and moustaches.
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Nov 1, 2018 18:11
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I hate Persian luxury
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Nov 1, 2018 21:40
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JesustheDarkLord posted:I hate Persian luxury They let ladies leave the house sometimes! What corrupt decadence!
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Nov 1, 2018 21:52
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