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Grand Fromage posted:Stuff about the "fall."
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May 25, 2012 09:02
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So how much fixing of fights was going on? Considering how much it seems bribery was part of the government did it become part of the entertainment as well, or did they have rules against that?
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Jun 8, 2012 08:33
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Nenonen posted:Not just them, though. Wikipedia knows dozens of towns called Neustadt in Central Europe, and there's at least two Nystad's in Norway and Finland. The same story with Novgorods in Russia. And I wouldn't call New York, Nouvelle Orleans etc. pinnacles of originality either. Also the various Newports. And let's not forget things like the Sahara Desert (cahra is Arabic for desert), the Gobi Desert (gobi is Mongolian for desert), the River Esk (esk being Celtic for river), and the crowning glory of Pendle Hill from pen (Celtic for hill), hul (Old English for hill), and hill (modern English for hill).
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Jul 16, 2012 08:08
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Grand Fromage posted:It's kind of strange how trade is looked down upon in so many societies, but I suppose it makes sense as a wealth alternative and therefore threat to the landholding aristocracy. Ancient China does virtually the same thing with its traders, though the Confucian justification is that traders just move stuff around and don't make anything, therefore their labor is not respectable. It comes from Latin pompa (a procession) from the Greek pempein (to send). I suppose it's possible that the name Pompey is related to pompa, though.
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Aug 30, 2012 01:50
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Grand Fromage posted:That's a shame. It would've been glorious to imagine he was such a pompous rear end that his name is still the word for it today. If it's any consolation, crass does from crassus (thick, fat, dense), though again it was probably a word before it was a name, like caesar. Edit: Also, brute comes from brutus (heavy, dull, stupid). Golden_Zucchini fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Aug 30, 2012 |
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Aug 30, 2012 01:55
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Mr Havafap posted:You sure? I double checked, and pomp as in pompous does derive as I described above, but pom- as in the city of Pompeii (named for its five districts) comes from the Oscian as you said. I still don't have anything specific on Pompey, but I'd think the Oscian origin more likely than the Greek one. Edit: On further reseach it seems that Pompey's father was from an area that spoke an Osco-Umbrian language rather than a Latin or Greek language, so yeah, Pompey seems to be the Sabellian version of Quintus. Golden_Zucchini fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 2, 2012 01:13
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Grand Fromage posted:If Philip hadn't died we'd probably be talking about Philip the Great and maybe about Alexander being his top general or something. But of course Alexander did a great Not to mention founding and renaming cities after yourself. How many Alexandrias and Alexandrettas and so forth were there?
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Sep 27, 2012 01:03
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job of getting his own message out. Bringing your own personal propaganda team with you as you conquer everything and start invading semi-mythical lands is a good move if you want to be remembered well.
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Vigilance posted:Considering how strategically important a position Constantinople was in, how come it took so long for the Romans to settle it? There'd been a city there since the Greeks founded one in 657 BCE. It was renamed Constantinpole (city of Constantine) after Contantine's death, but before that it used its original Greek name of Byzantion, which is where the term Byzantine Empire came from.
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Sep 28, 2012 02:41
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Kopijeger posted:Pretty sure "-polis" comes from the greek πόλις meaning "city". Unless I am gravely mistaken, the Latin equivalent would be "urbs". The name may have been coined by Latin-speakers, but it still seems to be a Greek name. Whichever language the name came from, I think the more important question is this: which would rather have to say over and over again to huge groups of students? Byzantine or Constantinopolitan? Edit: Oh hey, another page.
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Oct 11, 2012 06:34
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Tao Jones posted:Well, I guess I walked into it. How ambiguous would the use of λόγος have been to contemporaries? Obviously it was open to interpretation even then, but they would have had abetter idea of what he meant given that they had the cultural context, right? There are plenty of words in English that have a whole suite of meanings, but context both in and out of the text helps us narrow down which subset of meanings the author meant. I guess I'm asking how much meaning has been lost even when we have (close to) the original text, or even if we're able to gauge something like that.
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Nov 25, 2012 21:33
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Mr Havafap posted:'Herm' is just short for hermaphrodite, which in turn is Hermes and Aphrodite combined. Yeah, but he's wondering why it's Hermes' name that's used to indicate the male half of hermaphrodite rather some more "manly" guy like Zeus or Ares. According to Robert Graves it's because Hermaphroditus was the result of a quick fling between Aphrodite and Hermes.
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Jan 9, 2013 23:56
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House Louse posted:Yeah - what aspects of Hermes' myth made people tell the story of him bonking Aphrodite and having a hermaphrodite child? I thought the herms were named for him directly because he protected travellers and merchants. It was more of a side effect of Aphrodite's myth. Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus and rather unhappy since he was so ugly. She started sleeping around with other guys, Ares in particular, and Hephaestus caught wind of it. Hephaestus then decided to catch them at it by pretending to go on a trip, then snared Ares and Aphrodite in a bronze net. Once they were caught, Hephaestus summoned all the other gods there to witness their (and his) shame. Apollo made a comment to Hermes to the effect of "Embarrassing but worth it, huh?" Hermes responded with an emphatic yes, and once the whole thing was settled Aphrodite, never one to learn from her mistakes, rewarded Hermes for his enthusiasm with a night all to themselves. Hermaphroditus was the result. As I look further I see that Hermes was also a fertility god early in his career, which would explain his connection with the phallus and why there were an important part of herms, which was indeed named for him as god of travelers and crossroads. That might also explain why he was chosen as the father of Hermaphrodite: I can see male fertility god and female sex/reproduction goddess combining to make a being that is fertile unto itself. That's pure speculation, though.
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Jan 10, 2013 09:53
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Ah, but he was clearly asking about venting machi
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Jan 10, 2013 22:26
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I.W.W. ATTITUDE posted:I like to imagine they brought out some some big burly guy who just throttled the convicted, Homer Simpson-style, but if I am remembering correctly, they had a device- the garrote. It was like a board with a rope looped through two holes and some kind of wench on the back, and the executioner twists the wench after the convicted's head is placed through the loop. I think this method of execution continued to the 20th century in some spanish-speaking countries. Not to be a dick, but I think you mean winch, although now I can't stop picturing a young woman holding the ends of a rope around someone's neck while she does the Twist. For some reason I'm finding this ceaselessly amusing. I'm probably just tired.
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Jan 19, 2013 08:47
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Writing was only invented out of whole cloth two or three times in the entire history of humanity. Cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent was the father of every written language in Europe and Western Asia, whether it was directly copied/adjusted or another culture heard about this writing concept and decided to make their own. It happened again in Central America and spread among the various cultures there. Finally, there's debate over whether the Chinese invented writing in isolation or if they heard about people to the west using marks to represent speech beforehand. The timing could go either way.
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Mar 9, 2013 20:04
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Grand Fromage posted:Maybe. I suspect they didn't, the Chinese characters are originally pictographs. Cuneiform is the first totally abstract writing system, as far as I know. But there's all kinds of debate and theorizing that I don't really understand since I'm not a linguist. It's been a bit since I've read up on this so I could be misremembering, but sullat is right. cuneiform stared out as pictorial representations (or as close as they could get using clay and a stylus) and developed into more abstract forms as it became impractical to put enough detail into the pictographs to keep them representational and differentiate between all the things they needed to keep track of. The Phoenician alphabet came along because they heard about this "writing" concept and decided to copy it (specifically the Egyptian version) without understanding how hieroglyphs actually worked. Basically, they knew writing represented spoken words, so they assumed that the symbols represented the sounds spoken rather than the concepts being talked about. Thus, an alphabet. Japan did something similar but instead of symbol=individual sound they went symbol=syllable and ended up with with kana.
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Mar 10, 2013 07:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Sure, every language has swear words. It's hard to directly translate them, so usually they're translated by intention, but I do believe the Latin word that's translated into gently caress is the same sort of sex vulgarity as it is in English. I'm not an expert in Latin, but face-gently caress is a pretty good translation there. Oral sex basically came ( and still comes) in two flavors. Everyone knows of fellatio, which is where the person whose mouth is involved is the one in charge and is in control of all the motions. Irrumatio (a word which obviously comes from irrumabo above) is where all the motion comes from the guy whose dick is being sucked and is the kind of thing you'd see on Max Hardcore. If you really want to see the difference, look up videos for blow jobs (fellatio) and gagging (irrumatio), though I warn the latter is generally not a pretty sight.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:23
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According to David Anthony in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language mentioned earlier in this thread (thanks for pointing that out, whoever it was, it was a fascinating read), there's also evidence that the host/guest relationship was particularly important in the culture that spoke Proto Indo-European. As cultures and languages often spread together, it would make sense for that importance to be a part of all the cultures influenced by PIE speakers, i.e. almost every ancient Eurasian culture north of the Fertile Crescent, from the Atlantic to the western Himalayas and on into western Mongolia. Specifically, he cites that "host" and "guest" come from the same PIE root *ghos-ti-. From this and other evidence he theorizes that this relationship was part of how they viewed themselves in relation to the gods and thus was also a model of how people should behave toward each other. As they encountered other cultures with different beliefs, this belief in the guest-host relationship became an identifying feature and a way of knowing who was part of your group and who wasn't. Thus, as the PIE speakers spread throughout Eurasia they spread the importance of guest-host with them.
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May 1, 2013 16:03
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Jerusalem posted:I always love being reminded that the people of 2000-2500 years ago were pretty much exactly like us, only without the benefit of widespread education and a lot of technological advances. The fact that a lot of the graffiti preserved in Pompeii is the ancient equivalent of scribblings on school desks and bathroom walls (or internet forums) is hilarious to me. My favorite is probably,"Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog" I think that's what you meant to type. But yeah, I also find it funny but almost more heartening that people then were the same as they are now. With my occasionally very low opinion of humanity in general it kind of helps to know that we're no worse off today than we were 2000 years ago, human nature-wise, at least.
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Jul 4, 2013 05:05
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Squalid posted:Humans have very drastically altered the ecology pretty much everywhere on earth. For example prior to the introduction of agriculture there weren't any heaths in England. They are an entirely artificial ecosystem totally dependent on man for their continued existence. Changes like this are easily observable through the analysis of pollen in lake or sea sediments. 1491 by Charles C. Mann goes more in depth about the pre-Columbian human impact on the Amazon basin as well as the Mississippi River valley and the forests of the eastern coast of North America. It seems there was a lot of manipulation of the environment to further human ends, but it was in a different style than what had happened in Europe so the Europeans who came along after the epidemics didn't recognize it as such and assumed things had always been that way. It's a good read. You should check it out.
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Sep 23, 2013 03:09
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ughhhh posted:They could have followed some 'minor' character like titus pullo dealing with daily life and finding jesus and becoming a revolutionary. I just wanted more titus pullo and lucius varinus. Or they could go the I, Claudius route and have Caligula claim to be this new messiah the Jews say is coming. Did he actually do that or was that way too far below his radar to even notice?
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Oct 24, 2013 03:37
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Alekanderu posted:I don't think there are any names anywhere that are just sounds strung together, at least not in Western culture. All (proper) names that I know of mean something in some language, or are derived from names that mean something, ie John which (in the original Hebrew form of Yohanan) means "graced by Yahweh". Yeah, the main reason we think of modern western names as not having a meaning is that the original meanings are from languages that very few (if any) people speak anymore. In addition, most modern western names are so changed from the originals that even the native speakers of whatever language it cam from probably wouldn't recognize it.
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Oct 26, 2013 20:33
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Grand Fromage posted:Some bits stolen from Wikipedia. Sort of. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the Seres were the particular group that the Greeks got their silk from, hence Greek Serikos to Latin sericum, both meaning silk. From the quotations above Seres was obviously used to refer to the Chinese, as well. However, the word China itself and the prefix sino- come from Latin Sina, a latinized version of Qin.
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Jan 9, 2014 03:49
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Ha! I learned all the Greek I know through my math classes and the occasional etymology and even I could spell it better than that.
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Jan 29, 2014 04:52
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Ainsley McTree posted:Seriously, God bless the Arabs (or whoever created those numerals, I'm tired and the wikipedia page is making my head spin) for coming up with an actual good system for writing numbers. Arabic numerals were actually invented in what's now India, though I forget which part of it and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up right now. They're called Arabic numerals because the Arabs were the one who introduced them to Europe.
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Feb 14, 2014 03:18
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Isn't Cedrik a Gothic name, too? The amount of Germans I know with that name is insane. I had a similar thought about Ludovicus (the Roman form of the seed for modern Louis, Ludwig, Luigi, Luis, etc) but that was Old High German, not Gothic.
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Feb 27, 2014 03:00
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