History questions not worth their own thread IV

[NedimNapoleon]

I've studied Bosančica aka Bosnian Cyrillic, but I had no need to learn a language, just an Alphabet. I've always been fascinated with ancient languages, I've read much about Linear A, but Easter Island script also intrigues me. I'm currently studying Latin, but I wouldn't mind taking up learning another ancient language.

 

[LightSpectra]

I wonder if the Voynich manuscript's text would count as an "undeciphered language", since even if it's not a hoax, there's nothing else like it.

 

[Arakhor]

Has anyone had any experience with learning a "dead" language (apart from Latin) and how hard is it. Does anyone know Ancient Egyptian or Sumerian cuneiform. Also what written languages remain undeciphered?

There's a professor in the British Museum, I believe, who can read cuneiform as easily as reading a newspaper, but I expect that he's unusual, even in his field.

 

[NedimNapoleon]

Interesting, I realize that learning such languages can be extremely difficult because of the lack of use and the differences between such languages and lets say English. Breaking small codes has always been a small hobby of mine, but I assume deciphering a language is a whole new deal. If you guys had to choose one undeciphered language to be deciphered, which one would it be? I would choose either Linear A (for obvious reasons) and the Indus Valley script, even though the sources are rare.

 

[Flying Pig]

Linear A seems only to have been used for record-keeping, so I doubt that it would be very interesting.

 

[Bowsling]

The Etruscan language is still mostly unknown, although the alphabet is a close relative of Latin.

This book may be of interest to you as well.

 

[Yeekim]

What one word would you use to describe the political, economic, and social system of the modern world? Make sure you encompass the United States, Sweden, Zimbabwe, China, and North Korea. That should give you some idea of the scope of feudalism.

Whoever said it has to be one word? I specifically wrote

word (or words)

, so give me one for England and another for Wales, if that's what it takes.

Anyway, with the exception of North Korea, the word I would use is "capitalism".

 

[Lord Baal]

There's a professor in the British Museum, I believe, who can read cuneiform as easily as reading a newspaper, but I expect that he's unusual, even in his field.

One of my professors at university read Ancient Egyotian with that kind of fluency.

 

[Algeroth]

Has anyone had any experience with learning a "dead" language (apart from Latin) and how hard is it. Does anyone know Ancient Egyptian or Sumerian cuneiform. Also what written languages remain undeciphered?

I have some experience with Classical Chinese. It's not that hard - as long as you work with textes that have marked end of each sentence and marked names. Otherwise it is very difficult. Also I got textbook of Classical Greek for christmass, so I'll see how hard it'll be.

 

[Plotinus]

I think Plotinus might have studied the same languages I have.

I'm a poor linguist. I find grammar relatively easy to learn but vocabulary nigh-on impossible. The only "dead" language I have any real familiarity with is Latin (my imperfect knowledge of which was gained almost entirely from podcasts). I did learn a little Attic Greek but didn't get very far. I simply couldn't remember what all the words meant. I know my limitations too well to try going anywhere near anything like Hebrew.

I can read seventeenth-century French surprisingly well, but I don't think that quite counts. It's just like modern French except that they write "-oit" instead of "-ait" in the imperfect, and they use subjunctives correctly.

There's a professor in the British Museum, I believe, who can read cuneiform as easily as reading a newspaper, but I expect that he's unusual, even in his field.

I think that must be unusual. My master's supervisor is a classicist and one of the most erudite people I have ever known, and I remember him mentioning once that he hadn't read all of a particular author in the Greek, only the less long and boring works. It was a big relief to me that even he evidently found English translations to be at least marginally easier than the original. It must be rarer still to be able to read something like cuneiform, which no-one would learn before adulthood, with genuine fluency.

 

[Flying Pig]

Whoever said it has to be one word? I specifically wrote, so give me one for England and another for Wales, if that's what it takes.

Anyway, with the exception of North Korea, the word I would use is "capitalism".

You end up with 'English society', 'Welsh society', and so on.

'Capitalism' to describe Cuba, the USA and France? This is the feudalism problem all over again - they have very little in common beside that descriptor, so grouping them together actually hurts your ability to understand them, rather than helping it - if you try to understand France as being like the USA, you'll immediately come unstuck, because they're totally different places with totally different backgrounds.

 

[Yeekim]

This is the feudalism problem all over again - they have very little in common beside that descriptor

Yes.

so grouping them together actually hurts your ability to understand them, rather than helping it.

Only when I lend this one term undue importance and make an erroneous presumption that just because some common denominator exists, all of them must be completely alike.
I simply have never felt that by using this word I somehow "impart a sense of uniformity to the concept".
The problem seems to be that some narrow clique of medievalists has first created a faux image of "feudalism" as some sort of a uniform "system" and now another equally narrow-minded clique is trying to strike the whole concept off the record, ignoring that it still carries entirely useful and workable meaning, since, like Adam Smith or Marx.

 

[Flying Pig]

Only when I lend this one term undue importance and make an erroneous presumption that just because some common denominator exists, all of them must be completely alike.

Well, that's what terms do - even if it doesn't automatically do that, it does invite the less careful to make that connection. Even then, it invites them to assume that there is a meaningful common denominatior, and quite frankly there isn't - the term does nothing to help our understanding of them, and has the potential to harm it, and therefore shouldn't be used.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Why were penny-farthings even conceived instead of just going straight to the safety bicycle?

 

[Plotinus]

Because you can't have a normal-size wheel with the pedals directly on it, because the bike will go very slowly (unless you pedal incredibly quickly). You need a way of converting the relatively slow revolutions of the rider's feet into fast forward movement.

The obvious way of doing this is to make the wheel to which the pedals are attached very large. Then, each revolution of that wheel will move the bike forward a long way.

The much less obvious way of doing it is to remove the pedals from the wheel altogether, connect them to the wheel via a chain, and use gears of different sizes to ensure that the wheel revolves more rapidly than the pedals. That means that each revolution of the pedals will again move the bike forward a long way, but without the obvious disadvantages of having an enormous wheel.

The reason why we don't ride penny-fathings today is that the safety bicycle is a far better way of solving this problem. The reason why people did ride penny-farthings for a time is that, although the safety bicycle is a better solution, it is a less obvious and more difficult one. It is more complex and harder to make right. In other words, people simply didn't think of it. And when they did think of it, it took some time to refine the design in such a way that it was reliable, easy to make, and affordable.

Also, the large wheel of the penny-farthing gave a much smoother ride over rough terrain, because pneumatic tyres had not been invented yet either. The early bikes were called "bone shakers" for a reason. The introduction of pneumatic tyres in the late 1880s were a major reason why safety bicycles became much more popular, because it made them much more comfortable.

 

[ParkCungHee]

The problem seems to be that some narrow clique of medievalists has first created a faux image of "feudalism" as some sort of a uniform "system" and now another equally narrow-minded clique is trying to strike the whole concept off the record, ignoring that it still carries entirely useful and workable meaning, since, like Adam Smith or Marx.

We don't ignore it, we disagree. We find that feudalism is actively unhelpful, and the example that started this is a singularly wonderful example of this.

The collapse of Roman power saw a drastic divergence of social models in Britain, with Wales and other Brythonic speaking areas moving in one direction, and Saxon territories moving in a very different one. Their development were influenced by different origins and motive factors, and share no more in common with each other than they do with what came beforehand, or came afterwards.

Nonetheless the single rubric of "feudalism" is applied to this process, which somehow the introduction of the Normans to England possibly added to.

It is not simply in the details that feudalism is wrong. It is an idea that is unproductive even in the broad strokes.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I think Yeekim's problem, as is mine also, is that, while we get the whole "feudalism As A Thing lumps too much together," we've seen nothing to tell us what it should be instead. You've knocked down the wall, proving that it's unstable. But you haven't built a new wall to hold the house up!

Or, to quote myself from the other thread about feudalism:

If not feudalism, then what?

All we're getting is "it's really complicated." So what. All of history is really complicated.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I think Yeekim's problem, as is mine also, is that, while we get the whole "feudalism As A Thing lumps too much together," we've seen nothing to tell us what it should be instead. You've knocked down the wall, proving that it's unstable. But you haven't built a new wall to hold the house up!

We're saying there should never have been a house there in the first place. It's not simply that it lumped too many things together, but that it lumped things which should never have been lumped together.

It's not a matter of simply abolishing a word, but an entire paradigm shift that is necessary.

 

[Flying Pig]

Well, we're suggesting that instead of building a block of flats and forcing everybody to live in it, we need lots of different houses: nobody's happy in the block of flats; they'd be much happier living on their own in houses built around them, rather than a one-size-fits-all block which doesn't actually suit anyone.

How's that for a metaphor?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Yes, I understand all that. But my point is, you're only half-done with your job. You still need to build the new house. Until that happens, all you've done is say "this is wrong" without providing us with what is right. Thus I remain skeptical that this isn't simply being objectionable to existing paradigms to be fashionable (not that I think you are doing that, but that who has convinced you is doing that). If you do understand what existed instead, you have not communicated how French feudalism was different from English or Italian feudalism, you have only communicated that it was different. As a scholar I'm not obliged to simply take your word or the word of any of the authors that have been referenced thus far, who have essentially done the same thing.