Looking for a map of ancient Greece
dean
Thanks for any recommendations.
Dean
Ed Cryer
"dean" <deanb...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1132979963.0...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Or, failing that, a decent modern map (on one side only).
>
> Thanks for any recommendations.
>
> Dean
>
This one is cool. You can zoom in and out.
http://www.ancient-greece.org/images/maps/ancient-greece101.swf
Ed
Ken Quirici
That is cool, but I can only zoom in one 'scale' - is that a fault of
my Mac? Can you zoom in several 'notches'?
BTW it looks like a satellite photo- I'm thinking the white is
cloud cover? Or is that mere foolishness?
Thanks.
Ken
dean
would be nice.
-D
Neeraj Mathur
> Thanks to you, but I really want a paper one! With an index too, that
> would be nice.
In that case, look for a copy of Barrington's atlas of the Classical world
in a local (university?) library.
Neeraj Mathur
Ed Cryer
"Ken Quirici" <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote in message
news:1133049869.5...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
I can zoom in several notches with WinXP, until the word "Delos" fills the
whole screen.
I think you're right about satellite picture.
Ever used Google "Earth" program? Maybe it was taken from that or something
like it.
Ed
AVC
> Ed Cryer wrote:
>>
>>This one is cool. You can zoom in and out.
>>http://www.ancient-greece.org/images/maps/ancient-greece101.swf
>>
>>Ed
>
>
> That is cool, but I can only zoom in one 'scale' - is that a fault of
> my Mac? Can you zoom in several 'notches'?
> Ken
>
I can zoom in several scales on my Mac (I use OSX 10.4.3 and Safari 2.0.2).
Groet,
Adelheid
Ken Quirici
I have OS 9.2 on a G3, using Netscape Nav. 7.0. Also something called
Macromedia Flash Player 7 which is doing the actual display.
I just retried it and now I can't get it to zoom even once. Of course
Netscape had previously just crashed and I reran it w/o restarting
the Mac.
Oh well, another reason to get OSX 10.4.3, which is a darned good
reason to replace the venerable G3. Which I will do as soon as I can
afford it, quam celerrisime.
Thanks.
Ken
Ed Cryer
"Ken Quirici" <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote in message
news:1133049869.5...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
This reminded me of a few years back when I was flying from the UK to a
Greek island. While waiting for the next vodka and orange to arrive I looked
out of the window and saw lots of white things down below. I wondered if it
might be the Alps. So, when the stewardess turned up with my drink I asked
her; and she said she'd go and ask the captain.
Well, I waited and waited, but she never came back with the answer. It
worried me at the time that maybe the captain didn't know either. {:-
Ed
Ken Quirici
> This reminded me of a few years back when I was flying from the UK to a
> Greek island. While waiting for the next vodka and orange to arrive I looked
> out of the window and saw lots of white things down below. I wondered if it
> might be the Alps. So, when the stewardess turned up with my drink I asked
> her; and she said she'd go and ask the captain.
> Well, I waited and waited, but she never came back with the answer. It
> worried me at the time that maybe the captain didn't know either. {:-
>
> Ed
Well if you were 1/2 way (from your windswept Northlands) there
it would've been? And a vodka and orange is a vodka and orange
juice is called in the States a damned I forget! A tequila and orange
juice is I believe a Tequila Sunrise which is a not-bad movie. I
started
out with vodka and orange juice and moved to gin & tonic. And now
alas the occasional ale.
heu! iam fere numquam bibo.
BTW did the Romans have spirits and mixed drinks? (Apart from
wine and water). And a word for alcohol, assuming they knew
it? Well actually if they knew it that means they had a word
for it. Is believing what I said a known philosophical position?
Somebody make me stop!
Thanks.
Ken
Aidan Karley
> While waiting for the next vodka and orange to arrive I looked
> out of the window and saw lots of white things down below. I wondered if it
> might be the Alps. So, when the stewardess turned up with my drink I asked
> her; and she said she'd go and ask the captain.
>
which included a caution to the effect that "the white bits on the satellite
photographs aren't clouds - they're the waste heaps from gold mines".
--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Mon, 28 Nov 2005 08:51 GMT
Aidan Karley
> BTW did the Romans have spirits and mixed drinks? (Apart from
> wine and water).
>
have encountered freeze-concentration of liquors. I *think* that
distillation was first reported from India in the not-long-pre-Roman
period, so there's good reason to expect them to have known of it. My
limited knowledge of Roman times leaves me with the impression that
they mention spirits and particularly "tinctures" (extracts of plants
or animals made with strong alcoholic spirits).
--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
John Briggs
>
> BTW did the Romans have spirits and mixed drinks? (Apart from
> wine and water). And a word for alcohol, assuming they knew
> it? Well actually if they knew it that means they had a word
> for it. Is believing what I said a known philosophical position?
> Somebody make me stop!
The Romans did NOT have spirits. The word 'alcohol' is, of course, of
Arabic origin - as is the technique of distilling.
--
John Briggs
Ken Quirici
I think you're right. 'Algebra' too. But I thought Muslims weren't
allowed to take alcohol? Even in beer? Is that a more recent
prohibition? I wonder if the Koran forbids alcohol.
Thanks.
Ken
Neeraj Mathur
> I think you're right. 'Algebra' too. But I thought Muslims weren't
> allowed to take alcohol? Even in beer? Is that a more recent
> prohibition? I wonder if the Koran forbids alcohol.
There are quite a few Arabic words in English, including many that start
with 'al-', which is the definite article in Arabic. 'Alchemy' is another
example, from which 'chemistry' was a derivation.
Alcohol is indeed prohibited in Islam; this goes back to Muhammad's days
(I'm not sure if it's in the Koran). But that hasn't stopped many Muslims
from drinking! A lot of Sufi poetry (Rumi is my favourite Sufi poet) deals
with drinking and intoxication in a mystical sense. The Mughal emperor Babur
was introduced to a life of vice and drinking as a teenager by his cousins
in Central Asia; later in life, just before one of his major battles in
India, he boosted the morale of his troops by taking a solemn vow never to
touch alcohol again and then making a huge show of having all of his
palatial wine stores brought out and spilled upon the dirt. (It apparently
worked: his troops, their zeal suitably fortified, were victorious in that
battle.)
Neeraj Mathur
Ken Quirici
> "Ken Quirici" <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote in message
> news:1133230653.7...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> > I think you're right. 'Algebra' too. But I thought Muslims weren't
> > allowed to take alcohol? Even in beer? Is that a more recent
> > prohibition? I wonder if the Koran forbids alcohol.
>
> There are quite a few Arabic words in English, including many that start
> with 'al-', which is the definite article in Arabic. 'Alchemy' is another
> example, from which 'chemistry' was a derivation.
>
> Alcohol is indeed prohibited in Islam; this goes back to Muhammad's days
> (I'm not sure if it's in the Koran).
If it goes back to Muhammed's days, then it goes back also to the
culture/religion(s) that surrounded him - in Arabia. What were the
Arabs before Muhammed? There were some Jews, but they don't
have a prohibition against alcohol as far as I know. Also some
what-d'you-call-em naturalistic religions - primitive, nature-
worshipping? And what else? Zoroastrianism because the
Muslims took over their Persia. And maybe thru trade, rumors of
Greek myth and religion. The upper part of Arabia, between the deserts
and Palestine, was a trade-criss-crossed area.
Thanks.
Ken
> But that hasn't stopped many Muslims
> from drinking! A lot of Sufi poetry (Rumi is my favourite Sufi poet) deals
> with drinking and intoxication in a mystical sense.
Speaking of which, is the ghazal (sp?) an offspring of Sufi poetry? By
Sufi you mean a sect of [mystical] Muslims?
>The Mughal emperor Babur
> was introduced to a life of vice and drinking as a teenager by his cousins
> in Central Asia; later in life, just before one of his major battles in
> India, he boosted the morale of his troops by taking a solemn vow never to
> touch alcohol again and then making a huge show of having all of his
> palatial wine stores brought out and spilled upon the dirt. (It apparently
> worked: his troops, their zeal suitably fortified, were victorious in that
> battle.)
>
Or maybe they thought the only way they could get alcohol now
that Babur had destroyed their stores of it was by
defeating their enemies and stealing THEIR alcohol! :-)
Thanks.
Ken
> Neeraj Mathur
Andrew Dalby
Muslims developed spirits and used them medicinally. This is not to
claim that all Muslims take this view, only that many have done and
surely some do now. (I have non-Muslim friends who claim to use whisky
just the same way.) If you use spirits as a vehicle for herbs/spices
such as aniseed, gentian, mastic, etc., well, these essences really do
have digestive and other medicinal effects. Whether you think these
outweigh the possible ill-effects of the alcohol is up to you ...
Romans, so far as anyone knows, never did distil alcohol. Yet there are
a couple of reports in ancient sources of wine that would 'catch fire'.
Wine never will, but spirits will. So did they manage it after all?
Andrew
Neeraj Mathur
> If it goes back to Muhammed's days, then it goes back also to the
> culture/religion(s) that surrounded him - in Arabia. What were the
> Arabs before Muhammed? There were some Jews, but they don't
> have a prohibition against alcohol as far as I know. Also some
> what-d'you-call-em naturalistic religions - primitive, nature-
> worshipping? And what else? Zoroastrianism because the
> Muslims took over their Persia. And maybe thru trade, rumors of
> Greek myth and religion. The upper part of Arabia, between the deserts
> and Palestine, was a trade-criss-crossed area.
What do you mean by 'primitive, nature-worshipping' religions? Would you use
'primitive' to describe Greek religion, or Norse, or Hinduism?
Zoroastrian beliefs are unlikely to have been very widely spread at this
time in Arabia, although there were definitely some Persians around. One of
the early followers of Muhammad was a Persian named Salman, so there must
have been some of them in the region. Zoroastrians were also accorded
special status in early Islam, along with Jews and Christians, as 'people of
the revealed books' or something like that. Early Islam considered these
groups spiritual kindred and allies.
Greek religion is very unlikely to have been in the area - we're talking
about the 600's AD, and Greece and the Byzantine Empire would have been
Christian now for several centuries.
There are some clues to the religions of Arabia in the Koran, which I, not
being Muslim, have read extremely little of. They are decried as
'idol-worshippers', so they likely made images of their gods which served as
the focus for prayer and ritual. Probably the gods worshipped and the
methods were similar to things in the Old Testament (of which, again, I have
read little).
The so-called 'Satanic Verses incident', dramatized fascinatingly by Salman
Rushdie in his novel, but first mentioned in the century or two after
Muhammad, refers to three goddesses worshipped in Mecca, Lat, Manat, and
Uzza. The Koran mentions the three of them by name; the story goes that this
was followed by a verse that said 'These three are the exalted birds whose
intercession is to be desired', implying that they were being enfolded
within Islam as something like angels. When the Meccans heard this verse,
they realised that becoming Muslims wouldn't make them change their rituals
or prayers, and stopped persecuting the Muslims. However, some time later,
Muhammad was told by the angel Gabriel (Gibreel in Arabic) that he had added
the verse wrongly; he then recanted the verses in question, had them struck
from the Koran, and said that they had been told to him by Satan's trickery
(Shaitan in Arabic). The entire incident is disputed by many Muslims;
Rushdie uses this incident as a way in to the text that basically undermines
the claims to authenticity and legitimacy of the Koran in their entirety -
between that, the passages that target Ayatollah Khomeini, and the ones
where the prostitutes of a Meccan brothel all take as 'stage-names' the
names of the Prophet's wives, it's easy to understand the price on his head.
(The novel is definitely worth reading; at it's core, it's about Indian
immigrants in Britain and the confrontation between expectations and
reality.)
Anyway, so those three goddesses were worshipped in Arabia at the time of
Muhammad. This is about where my general knowledge runs out, so I'd suggest
looking in something like the Encyclopedia of Islam for more details.
Neeraj Mathur
Robert Stonehouse
<ken.q...@excite.com> wrote:
>John Briggs wrote:
>> Ken Quirici wrote:
>> > BTW did the Romans have spirits and mixed drinks? (Apart from
>> > wine and water). And a word for alcohol, assuming they knew
>> > it? Well actually if they knew it that means they had a word
>> > for it. Is believing what I said a known philosophical position?
>> > Somebody make me stop!
>>
>> The Romans did NOT have spirits. The word 'alcohol' is, of course, of
>> Arabic origin - as is the technique of distilling.
>I think you're right. 'Algebra' too. But I thought Muslims weren't
>allowed to take alcohol? Even in beer? Is that a more recent
>prohibition? I wonder if the Koran forbids alcohol.
The index to the Arberry version gives two references.
1. Surah 5, The Table, verse 90:
O believers, wine and arrow-shuffling,
idols and divining-arrows are an abomination,
some of Satan's work; so avoid it; haply
as you will prosper.
Satan only desires to precipitate enmity
and hatred between you in regard to wine
and arrow-shuffling, and to bar you from
the remembrance of God, and from prayer.
Will you then desist? And obey God
and obey the Messenger, and beware;
but if you turn your backs, then know that
it is only for Our Messenger to deliver
the Message Manifest.
2. Surah 2, The Cow, verse 219:
They will question thee concerning
wine, and arrow-shuffling. Say: 'In both
is heinous sin, and uses for men,
but the sin in them is more heinous
than the usefulness.'
(I quote these in reverse order because otherwise it would
not appear what arrow-shuffling is: some kind of divination,
apparently.)
--
Robert Stonehouse
To mail me, replace invalid with uk. Inconvenience regretted
Ken Quirici
> "> and Palestine, was a trade-criss-crossed area.
>
> What do you mean by 'primitive, nature-worshipping' religions? Would you use
> 'primitive' to describe Greek religion, or Norse, or Hinduism?
>
No. I did NOT mean it in a derogatory way. I meant something like the
various religions of the American Indians (is that PC?), or similar
pre-writing cultures that survive still (or until recently), in
particular,
those where animals were believed to have 'patron gods' that hunters
e.g. could pray to. I did not mean more sophisticated (I realize that's
a value-laden word) religions with an extensive body of myth that was
enlarged and preserved by the written word, like Greek religion, Norse,
or Hinduism.
> Zoroastrian beliefs are unlikely to have been very widely spread at this
> time in Arabia, although there were definitely some Persians around. One of
> the early followers of Muhammad was a Persian named Salman, so there must
> have been some of them in the region. Zoroastrians were also accorded
> special status in early Islam, along with Jews and Christians, as 'people of
> the revealed books' or something like that. Early Islam considered these
> groups spiritual kindred and allies.
>
I was thinking, and perhaps did not express myself clearly, that
Zoroastrian beliefs, as the belief system of a conquered nation/state,
would have an affect on the conquerors. Maybe they didn't. I'm sure
conquered peoples have a greater effect on language (and genetics:-))
than on religion, altho didn't the Romans assimilate most of their
conquered gods into their 'national pantheon'? Except of course the
God of the Jews who was intolerant of others. But this does raise
the interesting question of what religions did the Romans suppress,
besides the Christian? I'm not sure exactly how the Romans related
to Judaism - e.g., was the revolt in the 1st c. AD a religious movement
or a nationalist one?
Your remark about the Zoroastrians being considered 'people of the
book'
is very interesting. I'm going to try to follow up on that.
> Greek religion is very unlikely to have been in the area - we're talking
> about the 600's AD, and Greece and the Byzantine Empire would have been
> Christian now for several centuries.
>
Well there's that trading crossroads up north between Arabia and
Palestine
which must have seen Greeks and Hindus, to name two of a wide variety
of traders I imagine passed thru. In those days I think of traders as a
kind of live TV.
I had no idea the subject matter of the novel was as you describe it.
It
indeed seems worth rreading.
> Anyway, so those three goddesses were worshipped in Arabia at the time of
> Muhammad. This is about where my general knowledge runs out, so I'd suggest
> looking in something like the Encyclopedia of Islam for more details.
>
> Neeraj Mathur
Thanks.
Ken
Aidan Karley
wrote:
> > What do you mean by 'primitive, nature-worshipping' religions? Would you use
> > 'primitive' to describe Greek religion, or Norse, or Hinduism?
> >
>
> No. I did NOT mean it in a derogatory way. I meant something like the
> various religions of the American Indians (is that PC?), or similar
> pre-writing cultures that survive still (or until recently),
>
--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Neeraj Mathur
> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>> What do you mean by 'primitive, nature-worshipping' religions? Would you
>> use
>> 'primitive' to describe Greek religion, or Norse, or Hinduism?
>>
>
> No. I did NOT mean it in a derogatory way. I meant something like the
> various religions of the American Indians (is that PC?), or similar
> pre-writing cultures that survive still (or until recently), in
> particular,
> those where animals were believed to have 'patron gods' that hunters
> e.g. could pray to. I did not mean more sophisticated (I realize that's
> > a value-laden word) religions with an extensive body of myth that was
> enlarged and preserved by the written word, like Greek religion, Norse,
> or Hinduism.
I know you didn't mean to be derogatory; I want to question, nevertheless,
the idea that a religion becomes more complex with the literacy of its
people. I'm not convinced that that's true, and I wouldn't think that Native
American religions (that's what I was taught in school, although I think the
most PC term was becoming 'First Nations', at least in Canada) are any less
'developed', if that word has any meaning, than Greek, Germanic, or Indian
religions (which is why I mentioned them). After all, literacy in these
three cultures was a very late phenomenon, in comparison with their beliefs
themselves (and Homer and Hesiod were the heirs to pre-literate oral
traditions, as we know).
>> Zoroastrian beliefs are unlikely to have been very widely spread at this
>> time in Arabia, although there were definitely some Persians around. One
>> of
>> the early followers of Muhammad was a Persian named Salman, so there must
>> have been some of them in the region. Zoroastrians were also accorded
>> special status in early Islam, along with Jews and Christians, as 'people
>> of
>> the revealed books' or something like that. Early Islam considered these
>> groups spiritual kindred and allies.
>>
> I was thinking, and perhaps did not express myself clearly, that
> Zoroastrian beliefs, as the belief system of a conquered nation/state,
> would have an affect on the conquerors. Maybe they didn't.
I was a bit confused about this; I thought that you were asking about
pre-Islamic Arabian religious practices. Persia was not concurred by the
Arabs until the Caliphates - that is to say, after Islam. So I was trying to
think about ways that Persian religion could have been felt in Arabia up to
the time of Muhammad; the best I could come up with was the presence of
Persians like Salman, who probably came, as you say, as traders.
Incidentally, I'm not sure how much Zoroastrian belief and/or practice
survived in Persia after the Arab conquest; virtually everybody was either
killed, converted, or forced to emigrate (the migrants settling mostly in
India, in Gujarat and Bombay). The early Caliphs, as I understand it, felt
they had a strong duty to convert people to Islam, and weren't afraid to use
force to do so. I'd be surprised if anything Zoroastrian survived much more
than a generation or two.
> I'm sure
> conquered peoples have a greater effect on language (and genetics:-))
> than on religion, altho didn't the Romans assimilate most of their
> conquered gods into their 'national pantheon'? Except of course the
> God of the Jews who was intolerant of others. But this does raise
> the interesting question of what religions did the Romans suppress,
> besides the Christian? I'm not sure exactly how the Romans related
> to Judaism - e.g., was the revolt in the 1st c. AD a religious movement
> or a nationalist one?
I think that separating the two is a bit of a modern trap that we need to be
wary of; come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the Jews did
separate them (we are largely a product of their ideology) in a way that the
Romans couldn't understand, leading to a further source of friction.
Emperor-worship was widespread in the eastern half of the empire since
Augustus - Antony, in fact, and perhaps earlier - except amongst the Jews.
Herod was the archetypal client-king, but the more his favour grew with
Augustus, the less autonomy he had; Augustus eventually basically decided
his inheritance, and later took direct control of Judaea and other places
from his sons. I am studying this period right now (yesterday being the last
day of term, I will resume in January) and I'm sure that the Jewish
rebellion will figure; we've been focussing on internal history right now,
for the most part.
>> Greek religion is very unlikely to have been in the area - we're talking
>> about the 600's AD, and Greece and the Byzantine Empire would have been
>> Christian now for several centuries.
>
> Well there's that trading crossroads up north between Arabia and Palestine
> which must have seen Greeks and Hindus, to name two of a wide variety
> of traders I imagine passed thru. In those days I think of traders as a
> kind of live TV.
Yes there would have been traders from Greece, but what I was saying is that
for the last three hundred years those traders would have been Byzantine
Christians, so I don't think it likely that the old Greek religion would
have found any expression in sixth and seventh century Arabia.
As for Hindus, I have no idea if they were travelling that far at that time.
Indians, historically, are very strange people in their relative lack of
curiosity in the world beyond the subcontinent. After Buddhism's migration
to Southeast Asia - in the time of the Mauryas!! - India has seemed very
little interested in the rest of the world. I think it's more likely that
they simply let the Arab traders come to them, and probably by a sea route,
to the ports in Gujarat.
> I had no idea the subject matter of the novel was as you describe it. It
> indeed seems worth rreading.
It's a great book; it has basically four or five different, concurrent,
plots, and its style is very similar, I find, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez'
"magic realism". Some people can't stand the writing, but I think it's
brilliant.
Neeraj Mathur
Ken Quirici
Aidan Karley wrote:
> In article <1133580943....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, Ken Quirici
> wrote:
> > > What do you mean by 'primitive, nature-worshipping' religions? Would you use
> > > 'primitive' to describe Greek religion, or Norse, or Hinduism?
> > >
> >
> > No. I did NOT mean it in a derogatory way. I meant something like the
> > various religions of the American Indians (is that PC?), or similar
> > pre-writing cultures that survive still (or until recently),
> >
> Animism / animistic religions ?
That's what I meant! Thank you.
Ken
Ken Quirici
Native Americans it is. Altho First Nations does seem to capture
the long history more precisely.
As far as religion increasing in complexity with the
advent of writing, it occurred to me that the one example, of
the complexity of the Greek religion, might be due to
cross-pollination from all the myths of the Eastern Mediterranean
basin and Mesopotamia - and many if not most of those religions
were at least partly preserved (at least when the Greeks
themselves developed writing) in written form in the
older languages of the older cultures in the area. It
was quite a melting pot of religious and cosmological
ideas.
But I think you're right on the general point that it
is not intrinsic to religions that the advent of writing
results in a greater complexity. Just like the old notion
that it was an intrinsic characteristic of languages
that they evolve into more complex forms is now
discredited, and even the notion of biological
evolution fostering greater complexity is questioned.
BTW, is there a metric for linguistics? Or for 'systems of
thought'? Not as far as I've heard. But to take an
obvious example, the bee 'dance' I read about decades ago
in Scientific American (it must be 30 years or so) - which
I think I saw recently has been discredited - would be a
language clearly less complex than any human language
(not to sound species-challenged!). If you're not familiar
with that 'dance', it was supposed to be a way bees
communicated the location of food to their fellow-worker bees
by various fixed evolutions in flight - little dances in
the air.
>
> I was a bit confused about this; I thought that you were asking about
> pre-Islamic Arabian religious practices. Persia was not concurred by the
> Arabs until the Caliphates - that is to say, after Islam. So I was trying to
> think about ways that Persian religion could have been felt in Arabia up to
> the time of Muhammad; the best I could come up with was the presence of
> Persians like Salman, who probably came, as you say, as traders.
>
You're right, I meant pre-Islamic. And the Persian traders would not
have
brought news of Zoroastrianism?
> Incidentally, I'm not sure how much Zoroastrian belief and/or practice
> survived in Persia after the Arab conquest; virtually everybody was either
> killed, converted, or forced to emigrate (the migrants settling mostly in
> India, in Gujarat and Bombay).
I assume that most of the population converted? However, earlier you
mentioned that Zoroastrianism was considered, as a monotheism, to
be tolerated? For example in Spain weren't the indigenous Christians
allowed to stay Christian?
>The early Caliphs, as I understand it, felt
> they had a strong duty to convert people to Islam, and weren't afraid to use
> force to do so. I'd be surprised if anything Zoroastrian survived much more
> than a generation or two.
>
> I think that separating the two is a bit of a modern trap that we need to be
> wary of; come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the Jews did
> separate them (we are largely a product of their ideology) in a way that the
> Romans couldn't understand, leading to a further source of friction.
> Emperor-worship was widespread in the eastern half of the empire since
> Augustus - Antony, in fact, and perhaps earlier - except amongst the Jews.
> Herod was the archetypal client-king, but the more his favour grew with
> Augustus, the less autonomy he had; Augustus eventually basically decided
> his inheritance, and later took direct control of Judaea and other places
> from his sons. I am studying this period right now (yesterday being the last
> day of term, I will resume in January) and I'm sure that the Jewish
> rebellion will figure; we've been focussing on internal history right now,
> for the most part.
>
What's the overall scope of your course?
>
> Yes there would have been traders from Greece, but what I was saying is that
> for the last three hundred years those traders would have been Byzantine
> Christians, so I don't think it likely that the old Greek religion would
> have found any expression in sixth and seventh century Arabia.
>
Any earlier exposure, from the pre-Roman (e.g. Alexandrian) era would
have long since evaporated, been forgotten?
BTW, my Penguin Atlas of Ancient History show trade up til around
230 AD funnelling thru Petra, primarily coming from Italy/Rome
(actually it seems to show ALL trade to Petra coming from Rome). But
by 362 AD, all the western trade to Arabia has been replaced by trade
funnelled thru Constantinople, and Petra seems to be gone.There's just
routes from the Egyptian and Palestinian coasts gathering and
running down along the Red Sea coast of Arabia. All of which confirms
your above.
> As for Hindus, I have no idea if they were travelling that far at that time.
> Indians, historically, are very strange people in their relative lack of
> curiosity in the world beyond the subcontinent. After Buddhism's migration
> to Southeast Asia - in the time of the Mauryas!! - India has seemed very
> little interested in the rest of the world. I think it's more likely that
> they simply let the Arab traders come to them, and probably by a sea route,
> to the ports in Gujarat.
>
I guess it took the gunpowder age to allow the Europeans (e.g.
Portugese) to take at least some of that trade over from the
Arabs? By the way, when you refer to Arab traders, do you
mean Arab from some particular part of Arabia, stretching let us say
from the Nabataeans all down the coast around to the Persian Gulf?
Or some particular part of Arabia?
Neeraj Mathur
> As far as religion increasing in complexity with the
> advent of writing, it occurred to me that the one example, of
> the complexity of the Greek religion, might be due to
> cross-pollination from all the myths of the Eastern Mediterranean
> basin and Mesopotamia - and many if not most of those religions
> were at least partly preserved (at least when the Greeks
> themselves developed writing) in written form in the
> older languages of the older cultures in the area. It
> was quite a melting pot of religious and cosmological
> ideas.
There is something to this - an awful lot of Hesiod, for instance, seems to
have parallels in Near Eastern stories. Martin West is particularly fond of
this line of enquiry, and has done a lot to make it mainstream - see, in
addition to his mammoth commentaries on Hesiod, his book *The East Face of
Helicon* for more.
> BTW, is there a metric for linguistics? Or for 'systems of
> thought'? Not as far as I've heard.
By 'metric', are you asking if there's a way to measure 'complexity' in a
language? Until about a century ago, people (European people) tended to
think that analytic languages, like Chinese, are the most primitive (cf the
myth that Chinese has no grammar), that agglutinative languages like Turkish
or Japanese are more advanced, and that inflected languages like Latin or
Hebrew are the most advanced, most civilized. This is now considered
obviously false - especially considering that most modern Western European
languages, despite their inflectional roots, are becoming more and more
analytic: this would require the ability of a language to 'devolve' as it
were. Also, more detailed study of most of these languages has shown that
typology is quite unstable in a language, and most linguists believe that
the overall level of complexity is about the same for all natural human
languages (changes which simplify one thing lead to complexities somewhere
else).
> But to take an
> obvious example, the bee 'dance' I read about decades ago
> in Scientific American (it must be 30 years or so) - which
> I think I saw recently has been discredited
I didn't know that it had been discredited! Do you remember where you saw
that?
> You're right, I meant pre-Islamic. And the Persian traders would not have
> brought news of Zoroastrianism?
I have no real idea. I imagine they would have practiced their religion, but
I can't guess how much of an impact this had on their Arab hosts.
> I assume that most of the population converted? However, earlier you
> mentioned that Zoroastrianism was considered, as a monotheism, to
> be tolerated? For example in Spain weren't the indigenous Christians
> allowed to stay Christian?
You're right, there is a conflict here which I don't understand.
Zoroastrians, like Christians and Jews, had special status; yet the religion
disappeared from Persia, as many who adhered left for India. I don't know
the details of Islamic imperial policy, and I imagine it showed much
variation in time and place.
> What's the overall scope of your course?
This paper is entitled 'Rome, Italy and Empire under Caesar, Triumvirate and
Principate: 46 BC - 54 AD', which covers the period from the death of Pompey
to the accession of Nero. Set texts that we read as primary documents
include Tacitus 1, 11, and 12 in Latin; Suetonius' Lives from Julius to
Claudius (Augustus read in Latin, the others in translation), the Res Gestae
in Latin, and Caesar Bellum Civile 1 and 2 in translation, along with Seneca
'Apocolocytosis' and a huge load of Cicero's letters and inscriptions from
the period. Dio and Velleius have figured largely too in translation, but
are not set texts (surprisingly, although they probably figured there's so
much else that's already mandatory..!) I've written essays over the last
eight weeks on the nature of the evidence from the historians, Caesar's
reforms and plans for the constitution, the rise of Octavian during the
Triumvirate, Augustus' constitutional settlements, external policy during
the early Principate, the succession, and the Senate during the Principate.
I think there will be four or five more topics next term, hopefully looking
a bit further outward. (This is what you were asking, right?)
> Any earlier exposure, from the pre-Roman (e.g. Alexandrian) era would
> have long since evaporated, been forgotten?
I'd imagine so - wouldn't you?
> BTW, my Penguin Atlas of Ancient History show trade up til around
> 230 AD funnelling thru Petra, primarily coming from Italy/Rome
> (actually it seems to show ALL trade to Petra coming from Rome). But
> by 362 AD, all the western trade to Arabia has been replaced by trade
> funnelled thru Constantinople, and Petra seems to be gone.There's just
> routes from the Egyptian and Palestinian coasts gathering and
> running down along the Red Sea coast of Arabia. All of which confirms
> your above.
That's very intriguing - I wonder what caused the shift at that time.
> I guess it took the gunpowder age to allow the Europeans (e.g.
> Portugese) to take at least some of that trade over from the
> Arabs?
Probably; Europe doesn't really start to look outwards until about the
1400's or so. There are likely a lot of causes; I'd assume that the
political stability of large kingdoms (like England, or Castile & Aragon)
had something to do with it, as did the move from feudalism towards cities.
And, as you say, gunpowder. I find it fascinating, though, that during the
same period nobody looked outwards in other parts of Eurasia! The major
states were, in addition to the Europe taken as a whole, the Ottoman Empire,
the Mughal Empire in India, and China, all of which had approximately equal
resources and economies, technology, and learning. Only Europe looked beyond
itself, with amazing results: by 1900, it had by far the largest economy and
techonological advances, largely at the expense of the Turks and,
particularly, India. Manmohan Singh, PM of India and a former Oxford
economist, gave the figures thus at his address here over the summer: "As
the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison
has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in
1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as
low as 3.8 per cent in 1952."
> By the way, when you refer to Arab traders, do you
> mean Arab from some particular part of Arabia, stretching let us say
> from the Nabataeans all down the coast around to the Persian Gulf?
> Or some particular part of Arabia?
I don't know enough to be able to specify; I've never really studied the
history of this area.
Neeraj Mathur
Ken Quirici
>
> There is something to this - an awful lot of Hesiod, for instance, seems to
> have parallels in Near Eastern stories. Martin West is particularly fond of
> this line of enquiry, and has done a lot to make it mainstream - see, in
> addition to his mammoth commentaries on Hesiod, his book *The East Face of
> Helicon* for more.
>
And Graves spends a lot of space on parallel myths in different
cultures.
Is he in 'bad odor' in mythic circles?
>
> By 'metric', are you asking if there's a way to measure 'complexity' in a
> language?
Yes, exactly.
>Until about a century ago, people (European people) tended to
> think that analytic languages, like Chinese, are the most primitive (cf the
> myth that Chinese has no grammar), that agglutinative languages like Turkish
> or Japanese are more advanced, and that inflected languages like Latin or
> Hebrew are the most advanced, most civilized. This is now considered
> obviously false - especially considering that most modern Western European
> languages, despite their inflectional roots, are becoming more and more
> analytic: this would require the ability of a language to 'devolve' as it
> were. Also, more detailed study of most of these languages has shown that
> typology is quite unstable in a language, and most linguists believe that
> the overall level of complexity is about the same for all natural human
> languages (changes which simplify one thing lead to complexities somewhere
> else).
>
It sounds as tho linguists have only a 'seat of the pants' sense
of the complexity of a language, rather than any precise measure.
I would have thought that Chomsky's approach would have enabled
some sort of measure. Or even structural linguistics.
>>
> I didn't know that it had been discredited! Do you remember where you saw
> that?
>
Well I thought it was in a recent TLS, so I did a search for 'Frisch',
the scientist who came up with the explanation for the dance for the
bees, and all I came up with was a March 2005 (at least the only ref.
'recent' enuf) ref to a book about bees that sounded very interesting
and also mentions that Frisch DID in fact come up with an explanation
for the dance. So the ref if it is in TLS must be to the theory w/o
mentioning Frisch. I tried 'honeybee dance' and 'bee dance'
and got nowhere. BTW I also tried a straight Google search on 'bee
dance' and came up with a lot of stuff, which mostly seemed to be
unaware that the theory had been debunked. Maybe I was dreaming.
> I have no real idea. I imagine they would have practiced their religion, but
> I can't guess how much of an impact this had on their Arab hosts.
>
> You're right, there is a conflict here which I don't understand.
> Zoroastrians, like Christians and Jews, had special status; yet the religion
> disappeared from Persia, as many who adhered left for India. I don't know
> the details of Islamic imperial policy, and I imagine it showed much
> variation in time and place.
>
> This paper is entitled 'Rome, Italy and Empire under Caesar, Triumvirate and
> Principate: 46 BC - 54 AD', which covers the period from the death of Pompey
> to the accession of Nero. Set texts that we read as primary documents
> include Tacitus 1, 11, and 12 in Latin; Suetonius' Lives from Julius to
> Claudius (Augustus read in Latin, the others in translation), the Res Gestae
> in Latin, and Caesar Bellum Civile 1 and 2 in translation, along with Seneca
> 'Apocolocytosis' and a huge load of Cicero's letters and inscriptions from
> the period. Dio and Velleius have figured largely too in translation, but
> are not set texts (surprisingly, although they probably figured there's so
> much else that's already mandatory..!) I've written essays over the last
> eight weeks on the nature of the evidence from the historians, Caesar's
> reforms and plans for the constitution, the rise of Octavian during the
> Triumvirate, Augustus' constitutional settlements, external policy during
> the early Principate, the succession, and the Senate during the Principate.
> I think there will be four or five more topics next term, hopefully looking
> a bit further outward. (This is what you were asking, right?)
>
That's exactly what I was asking. It sounds very interesting.
> > Any earlier exposure, from the pre-Roman (e.g. Alexandrian) era would
> > have long since evaporated, been forgotten?
>
> I'd imagine so - wouldn't you?
Sort of. The question was not quite rhetorical, since I was reserving a
little mental space for a theory that some tribe had absorbed and
preserved it, perhaps in grossly adulterated form.
>
> > BTW, my Penguin Atlas of Ancient History show trade up til around
> > 230 AD funnelling thru Petra, primarily coming from Italy/Rome
> > (actually it seems to show ALL trade to Petra coming from Rome). But
> > by 362 AD, all the western trade to Arabia has been replaced by trade
> > funnelled thru Constantinople, and Petra seems to be gone.There's just
> > routes from the Egyptian and Palestinian coasts gathering and
> > running down along the Red Sea coast of Arabia. All of which confirms
> > your above.
>
> That's very intriguing - I wonder what caused the shift at that time.
>
I would imagine it was the shift of power to the Eastern Empire, which
had by far the greater population and economic size. Rough-cut theory.
> > I guess it took the gunpowder age to allow the Europeans (e.g.
> > Portugese) to take at least some of that trade over from the
> > Arabs?
>
> Probably; Europe doesn't really start to look outwards until about the
> 1400's or so. There are likely a lot of causes; I'd assume that the
> political stability of large kingdoms (like England, or Castile & Aragon)
> had something to do with it, as did the move from feudalism towards cities.
> And, as you say, gunpowder. I find it fascinating, though, that during the
> same period nobody looked outwards in other parts of Eurasia! The major
> states were, in addition to the Europe taken as a whole, the Ottoman Empire,
> the Mughal Empire in India, and China, all of which had approximately equal
> resources and economies, technology, and learning. Only Europe looked beyond
> itself, with amazing results: by 1900, it had by far the largest economy and
> techonological advances, largely at the expense of the Turks and,
> particularly, India. Manmohan Singh, PM of India and a former Oxford
> economist, gave the figures thus at his address here over the summer: "As
> the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison
> has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in
> 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as
> low as 3.8 per cent in 1952."
>
Is there any evidence that the sheer number of European states, and
their intense interrelationships and competitions, provided a spark or
incentive or energy or creative impulse that led them to try new
things?
I say this because the other states - India, China, the Ottoman
Empire - had no real competition at what they considered their
'level' - there was no power with whom any of them was jockeying
for position. They sat contemplating themselves, as it were.
> > By the way, when you refer to Arab traders, do you
> > mean Arab from some particular part of Arabia, stretching let us say
> > from the Nabataeans all down the coast around to the Persian Gulf?
> > Or some particular part of Arabia?
>
> I don't know enough to be able to specify; I've never really studied the
> history of this area.
>
> Neeraj Mathur
Thanks.
Ken
George Durbridge
<snip>
> Europe doesn't really start to look outwards until about the 1400's or
> so. There are likely a lot of causes; I'd assume that the political
> stability of large kingdoms (like England, or Castile & Aragon) had
> something to do with it, as did the move from feudalism towards cities.
> And, as you say, gunpowder. I find it fascinating, though, that during
> the same period nobody looked outwards in other parts of Eurasia!
Not entirely. The Portuguese and Dutch found Arab traders in India,
Indonesia and Africa, and the Chinese sent out fleets to explore the
Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century. The Arab presence seems to
have been less intrusive than the European powers (but cf Zanzibar) and
the Chinese interest was transient.
George Durbridge
> Incidentally, I'm not sure how much Zoroastrian belief and/or practice
> survived in Persia after the Arab conquest; virtually everybody was
> either killed, converted, or forced to emigrate (the migrants settling
> mostly in India, in Gujarat and Bombay). The early Caliphs, as I
> understand it, felt they had a strong duty to convert people to Islam,
> and weren't afraid to use force to do so. I'd be surprised if anything
> Zoroastrian survived much more than a generation or two.
It wasn't as dramatic as this. Zoroastrianism still continues in Iran, as
a tolerated (but discouraged) religion of a small and local minority,
fewer than the Parsees in India. It was displaced slowly over several
centuries. Did the Parsees really arrive as early as the seventh century?
Ed Cryer
>
> It sounds as tho linguists have only a 'seat of the pants' sense
> of the complexity of a language, rather than any precise measure.
> I would have thought that Chomsky's approach would have enabled
> some sort of measure. Or even structural linguistics.
>
>>>
archetypal pattern against which to measure it. Given that, you could then
step through all languages and draw up a table of how closely or distantly
they approach the model.
But (and I don't think I need spell this out in full) where is the
archetype?
All languages are in a state of evolution. You can do comparative analysis
on them; group them into family-trees etc. But beyond that you make value
judgements of what you prefer.
One thing that has struck me is how language-usage appears to hit some kind
of peak with the ebb and flow of empire-building. Decline and fall of
literature and flowery language in the wake of the rise to dominance of a
people.
This is true of ancient Greece (Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC),
Golden and Silver Latin (1st c BC, 1st AD in the Roman world), and then
English in late Elizabethan England and then the 18th century.
Both Greek and Latin went into decline after their peaks. Is this true of
English now?
Ed
Neeraj Mathur
there than myself who can give fairer answers than I can. (To sci.lang
people: the question posed is about whether there is a way to measure the
complexity of a language.)
"Ken Quirici" <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote in message
news:1133668171.9...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> It sounds as tho linguists have only a 'seat of the pants' sense
> of the complexity of a language, rather than any precise measure.
> I would have thought that Chomsky's approach would have enabled
> some sort of measure. Or even structural linguistics.
Well alright, I suppose I could have been more specific.
You can measure the complexity of the phonology of a language: how many
phonemes does it have? What is the ratio of vowels to consonants? There is a
huge range here: English, with less than 50 phonemes, is an average sort of
language; many Pacific Island languages have far fewer phonemes, and some
Caucasian ones have far, far more (I think some have upwards of 130!). Then
you can look for segmental vs supersegmental phonemes (ie, tones).
You can measure the complexity of syllable structure in the language.
Mandarin Chinese has a very simple syllable structure, and even accounting
for phonemic tone, the total number of possible syllables is less than 1000
(rough and ready number, not a checked figure, but in that ballpark). On the
other hand, Germanic languages have many possible syllables, and many
phonemes per syllable: consider English 'strengths', which has seven
phonemes in a single syllable. I've not seen any hard figures for the number
of possible syllables in English that I remember, but it's far higher than
in Chinese.
Talking about syllables, we're moving towards morphology, so let's talk
about words. Languages vary widely in the number of syllables permitted per
word. English, generally speaking, favours fewer syllables per word; some
Southeast Asian languages are (as I understand) almost completely
monosyllabic. On the other hand, you have langauges like Latin, where
monosyllabic words are few and far between; Turkish has very long words, and
some Native American languages produce mammoth words of more than ten
syllables.
As you can probably guess, tihs is related to syntactic strategies:
generally, languages with very huge words are polysynthetic, agglutinative
languages. Inflected languages tend to produce words in the 2-4 syllable
range. Analytic languages, like English or Thai, produce smaller words and
favour monosyllables.
While we're talking about syntax, you will notice that some languages, the
analytic ones that favour monosyllables, have very complex and detailed
rules about ordering the units of a clause or a sentence, while inflected
and agglutinative languages allow much more freedom in this regard.
Now, all of these factors work against each other. Let me explain what I
mean: a language that has very few syllables will not be able to have a very
large number of monosyllabic words, or its possible vocabulary will be tiny.
A case in point is Mandarin Chinese, where, despite orthographic custom,
most words have two or more syllables (there is some controversy, as I
understand it, over whether these are compounds; sci.lang people will sort
that out for us). If your morphology is very complex then word order
regulation is less complex: compare Latin's nominal morphology with Greek's,
and notice how Greek is much more regulated (Greek has an article, which
constrains word order in a way that Latin does not).
So if you were to evaluate any one feature of a language, and maybe give it
points relative to a chosen base language, you will find that while you
might find a large range of variation in any one area, overall the range
would be much smaller. What it comes down to is that any natural human
language should be capable of expressing any thought that any human produce,
and be able to learned by any normal human. If there were an 'optimal' way
of doing this, why would any given language not settle upon that method?
Neeraj Mathur
Ruud Harmsen
<neem...@hotmail.com>: in sci.lang:
>/ consider English 'strengths', which has seven
>phonemes in a single syllable. I've not seen any hard figures for the number
>of possible syllables in English that I remember, but it's far higher than
>in Chinese.
In theory, or in practice? Also counting syllables that are perfectly
possible and pronounceable, but just do not happen to occur?
>Talking about syllables, we're moving towards morphology, so let's talk
>about words. Languages vary widely in the number of syllables permitted per
>word.
What is your definition of 'word'?
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
Neeraj Mathur
> And Graves spends a lot of space on parallel myths in different cultures.
> Is he in 'bad odor' in mythic circles?
He's never appeared on one of my reading lists, but then our approach to
Hesiod et al has been literary, not anthropological.
>> > Any earlier exposure, from the pre-Roman (e.g. Alexandrian) era would
>> > have long since evaporated, been forgotten?
>>
>> I'd imagine so - wouldn't you?
>
> Sort of. The question was not quite rhetorical, since I was reserving a
> little mental space for a theory that some tribe had absorbed and
> preserved it, perhaps in grossly adulterated form.
Yeah I was thinking that too, but I haven't convinced myself that it's
possible, given how public religion was in Greece and Rome. I think that,
when the Arabs had contact with Greek religion, they probably 'understood'
it in terms of their own religion, the way that Caesar (for instance)
describes the Celts of Gaul. It would be hard, if this is true, to see how
the foreign elements would then impose upon their own practice.
> I would imagine it was the shift of power to the Eastern Empire, which
> had by far the greater population and economic size. Rough-cut theory.
But then wouldn't there have been more trade with Arabia, brought as it were
closer to the grasp of the economic power of the empire?
> Is there any evidence that the sheer number of European states, and
> their intense interrelationships and competitions, provided a spark or
> incentive or energy or creative impulse that led them to try new
> things?
>
> I say this because the other states - India, China, the Ottoman
> Empire - had no real competition at what they considered their
> 'level' - there was no power with whom any of them was jockeying
> for position. They sat contemplating themselves, as it were.
This makes sense - the idea that European states got where they did because
of competition with each other. Another point is that Europe was much less
self-sufficient than other places; it needed foreign goods more than say
China or India did, which could produce most of what they needed themselves
(I'm thinking of groceries and stuff at this point). Nevertheless, India was
composed of several kingdoms; until the late Mughals defeated just about
everybody, there was no such nation as 'India', and even then it was hardly
a unified entity until the British decided it should be. There were Rajput
kingdoms, Maratha kingdoms, Bengal was separated, the South had many
kingdoms and empires; all of them seem to have spent a lot more energy on
just fighting each other than in building global strategies.
What's your expertise, Ken?
Neeraj Mathur
Neeraj Mathur
"George Durbridge" <gdur...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.12.04....@bigpond.net.au...
> It wasn't as dramatic as this. Zoroastrianism still continues in Iran, as
> a tolerated (but discouraged) religion of a small and local minority,
> fewer than the Parsees in India. It was displaced slowly over several
> centuries. Did the Parsees really arrive as early as the seventh century?
I'm sure I've read that they arrived in large numbers in teh 8th century;
not sure about earlier. Do you know of any decent histories that might shed
some light?
Neeraj Mathur
Peter T. Daniels
>
> I'm going to cross-post this to sci.lang, since there are better linguists
> there than myself who can give fairer answers than I can. (To sci.lang
> people: the question posed is about whether there is a way to measure the
> complexity of a language.)
A topic that was done to death here not long ago.
I got a few chapters into a Benjamins book purporting to clarify the
issue, but it still hadn't gotten around to language so I set it aside.
If someone wants a reference, ask and I'll extract it from the bottom of
the stack.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Ken Quirici
>
> This makes sense - the idea that European states got where they did because
> of competition with each other. Another point is that Europe was much less
> self-sufficient than other places; it needed foreign goods more than say
> China or India did, which could produce most of what they needed themselves
> (I'm thinking of groceries and stuff at this point). Nevertheless, India was
> composed of several kingdoms; until the late Mughals defeated just about
> everybody, there was no such nation as 'India', and even then it was hardly
> a unified entity until the British decided it should be. There were Rajput
> kingdoms, Maratha kingdoms, Bengal was separated, the South had many
> kingdoms and empires; all of them seem to have spent a lot more energy on
> just fighting each other than in building global strategies.
>
> What's your expertise, Ken?
>
> Neeraj Mathur
I really have no area of scholarly expertise Neeraj. But I read
and am interested in a wide variety of fields, which I have a feeling
most of us here, you included, do. You on the other hand clearly
have an actual, or several actual, areas of expertise.
So what is your expertise? I would hazard a guess that there
are more than one, of the real kind.
Thanks.
Ken
George Durbridge
No decent histories, but rummaging around on the 'net suggests that the
relevant history is mainly based on folk history, that in all likelihood
there was a fairly long period of migration, which was perceived as escape
from the Moslems as early as the 8th century, but not a single sharply
defined event, and that there is some migration of Zoroastrians to India
even now. Two stray facts may be relevant to the persecution issue: in
the 19th century, the Bombay Parsees interceded with the Persian
authorities to have a discriminatory tax lifted from the Persian
Zoroastrians, and Zoroastrianism was very much a "state church" of the
Sassanids.
Ken Quirici
> >>>
> Just how do you quantify a given language? I guess what you need is some
> archetypal pattern against which to measure it. Given that, you could then
> step through all languages and draw up a table of how closely or distantly
> they approach the model.
> But (and I don't think I need spell this out in full) where is the
> archetype?
>
This has been moved over to sci.lang, where there were only 2 replies,
the latest of which was, basically, we already did this to death and
got
nowhere.
My current view is, the language reflects the world as the speakers
know it. As the world gets more complicated (mainly in our (human)
case thru technology and science) the language needs to get more
complicated. As far as I can see the English language is not more
syntactically complicated than it was say in Shakespeare's time; but
it has a larger (net since we've lost words as well as gained)
vocabulary. It also seems that the English language is now divided
into all the dialects of the sciences and arts, some of which,
mathematics and logic, e.g., actually have different syntaxes, as
well as the what I might call koine of English. I'm not sure if it's
valid linguistically to speak of a language as having dialects that
are used ALONGSIDE of the main language, or in addition - that is,
dialects that are speciality languages (maybe pidgins - is that the
right word?).
Anyway, I used to think the neolithics, the barbarians in Europe from
say 10k-5k BC, had a much simpler world view, and therefore simpler
language. Yet their language, at some point this 'first' Indo-European
language people talk about, seems to be more complicated
syntactically (and its an inflected, not agglutinative or isolating, to
use the jargon, language). Which is to say the least confusing. Do
inflecting languages tend to replace syntax with vocabulary because
as time goes on the complexity of the world becomes too much to
reflect in syntax per se?
In other words, did that proto-Indo-European language have a
complex syntax but a simpler vocabulary?
> All languages are in a state of evolution. You can do comparative analysis
> on them; group them into family-trees etc. But beyond that you make value
> judgements of what you prefer.
>
Well I was hoping to make 'measurements' of some kind, not value
judgements - like, e.g., and I'm sure this is not the RIGHT
measurement, but it's the kind of thing I mean - what is the deepest
syntax 'tree' that the language can sustain - that is, deepest in the
sense of subordination - coordinate clauses don't count - any language
can be made essentially infinite in syntactical 'width' simply by
adding 'and' clauses to a sentence - but is there a limit to the
depth of meaningful subordination? That is, beyond a certain point,
again confining myself to inflected languages, does the inflection
become unable to sustain further subordination - one can no longer
keep distinct the subordinate clauses? Or is any language we know
of capable of the same virtually infinite depth of subordination?
This is just one direction I might go.
> One thing that has struck me is how language-usage appears to hit some kind
> of peak with the ebb and flow of empire-building. Decline and fall of
> literature and flowery language in the wake of the rise to dominance of a
> people.
> This is true of ancient Greece (Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC),
> Golden and Silver Latin (1st c BC, 1st AD in the Roman world), and then
> English in late Elizabethan England and then the 18th century.
>
> Both Greek and Latin went into decline after their peaks. Is this true of
> English now?
Do you think English is the language of a nation in the ebb of
empire-building?
What happened to English English when its empire fell? Did it become
baroque, rococco, as I think you mean? Over-elaborate, as the
Renaissance in art declined (value judgement! but I think I agree) into
the Baroque? But wasn't the Baroque also the era of the growth of
the French 'empire' of Louis XIV? And other European powers?
You might be right tho, except that I don't think English is yet on the
wain. It might be on the cusp.
>
> Ed
Thanks.
Ken
Neeraj Mathur
> I really have no area of scholarly expertise Neeraj. But I read
> and am interested in a wide variety of fields, which I have a feeling
> most of us here, you included, do. You on the other hand clearly
> have an actual, or several actual, areas of expertise.
>
> So what is your expertise? I would hazard a guess that there
> are more than one, of the real kind.
I don't think we're all that different. I can't really claim expertise in
anything, being still an undergraduate.
My high school studies in Canada were mostly focussed on maths and sciences.
I enjoyed it and did well, and was offered scholarships by Canadian
universities to do a degree in Astrophysics. Through high school, I'd been
learning Latin basically on my 2.5 hour bus rides to and from school (public
transit in suburban Toronto sucks), and reading lots of Classical literature
in translation - Hesiod, Ovid, Euripides, Aristophanes, Homer. Amongst my
science applications, I put in one to do an arts degree; as luck would have
it, that's the one offer I decided to accept.
So now I'm here at Christ Church, Oxford, doing a BA in Classics and
Oriental Studies. The first half of my course was straight Classics, where
the focus was on reading vast amounts of literature in the original. While
reading the Aeneid and bits of Cicero, Livy, Propertius, Lucretius and
Catullus, I was taught Greek, with time to read four books of the Iliad and
the Meno, the Bacchae and Herodotus 1. My 'special subjects' in this half of
the course were Latin Love Elegy (basically reading Propertius Books 1 - 3,
and a book each of Tibullus and Ovid), Philosophy (where I stepped out of
the ancient world and studied Descartes' Meditations), and Historical
Linguistics and Comparative Philology. I loved everything I studied (with
the exception of Lucretius), but did particularly well with linguistics; I
won the prize in the examinations on that subject.
The second half of my course has seen the addition of the '... and Oriental
Studies' bit: I have been learning Sanskrit and studying Sanskrit
literature. Some of it is fascinating reading in its own right, some I find
interesting because of my Hindu background, and some is absolutely
mind-blowing as a Classicist.
(I have now become fairly convinced that any proper and thorough reckoning
of Homer is impossible without some knowledge of and access to the Indic
material - particularly in the case of the Odyssey, but also in general
terms for the idea of oral poetry in an ancient context. Our time seems to
be living through an 'Orientalizing Revolution' as Hellenists are finally
becoming aware of the influence of the Near East on Greece; the next great
revolution, which will hopefully occur within a generation (but will
probably take far longer), will open up the Indian material. So far
explanations of the relevant findings have tended to come from Indologists
and are generally along the lines of an appeal to inherited Indo-European
traditions; I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation (the contact
seems too detailed to be that old) and in general, I've found that modern
Indologists are rather the second- and third-rate Classicists, like myself,
who have found themselves bigger fish in smaller ponds, so to speak.)
Sanskrit makes up three of my eight finals papers, which I shall sit in this
coming May-June; the other five are: Early Greek Hexameter Poetry (Homer,
Hesiod, and the Hymns), Greek Literature of the 5th Century, Roman History
(Caesar to Claudius), Ovid, and a much more theoretical paper in
linguistics, covering both various advanced topics in Indo-European
reconstruction and general linguistics to boot. I am also offering a thesis,
as an additional subject (it will replace my lowest mark, unless it itself
has that honour), on the development of the Greek hexameter (I'm trying to
explore a possible connection between linguistics and literary criticism in
Homer, if it exists).
The area then that I've studied more than anything else is Classical
literature; the subject I'm probably best at is linguistics. In addition to
the above, I am fascinated by political history in all its guises - hence my
choice of that history topic, otherwise rather isolated. I find the
political history of Europe particularly fascinating - not just in Roman
times, but in the late Mediaeval and particularly early modern times. I am
also very interested in the history of India and of the Islamic world. Above
all, though, I love learning languages and enjoying literature. I'm not
going to be a stellar literary critic at any point (all this '2:1 - First
borderline' nonsense), but I love getting inside the minds of a culture to
the extent that their texts allow. I find modern literature rather
uninspriring, but I love German and French poetry, from Chretien de Troyes
and the Nibelungenlied to Baudelaire and Strauss' Hofmannsthal. I also find
Muslim stories and poetry amazing - Islam, or perhaps Sufism, produces a
passion in words, in tales, in music that takes my breath away. I realise
that the biggest gap in what I've exposed myself to is China and Japan: my
experience of Chinese poems is virtually limited to the (mis-)translations
and transformations they undergo in becoming Mahle's 'Das Lied von der
Erde' - which, as a horn player devoted to the
Wagner-Bruckner-Strauss-Mahler line, is for me just about the greatest
musical and spiritual experience.
In short, I'm a jack-of-all-trades but good for none; I'm a lover of this
our world and to the meanings which our people, our human race, have given
it through their art, history, institutions, their lives. I'd like nothing
more than to continue my degree, expand it if possible, and keep learning
until I could claim an 'expertise', which I sorely lack right now, and
contribute meaningfully to that field. Lack of resources makes this path
somewhat impossible; this time next year I'll either have a 'real' job or
trying to get a busking license as a horn player on the Underground. My only
hope to avoid sinking into a rather miserable and futile existence is the
continued pleasure of living the greatness of humanity in groups like these.
Neeraj Mathur
Ed Cryer
Yes, it's a pity about that sci.lang reluctance to tell us more. I was
rather optimistic from some of the things that Neeraj wrote about phonemes
and the like that maybe there were tools available to prise language apart
and do some kind of analysis. Not the philosophical kind that I'm used to,
but more limited to technicalities; and not just grammatical technicalities
either.
That would seem to be a prime target for a computer program. (NB. American
spelling. In the UK by convention we use that for all computer ones, but
"programme" for the rest.)
This would be something different from, say, a Wittgensteinian exploration
in "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" or the later "Philosophical
Investigations". Logical atomism or language games; language depicting the
underlying structure of the world, or merely some local paradigmatic view.
Ah well, maybe for another day.
Ed
pointed
English. Complexity is inherently a comparitive concept - e.g. a
monosyllabic word is less complex than a polysyllabic word from a
purely phonic standpoint. Conversely, from a definitive standpoint, the
"simpler" word may be eons more complex. I would start by making a list
of linguistic traits - sound, grammar, occurence of idioms/slang,
derivative languages, syntax, style, etc. Then I would take 2 languages
that I knew or had some familiarity with and start comparing them. List
differences and similarities. Make a numerical rating system for each
point of comparison, then a cumulative rating system based on all the
data you've collected.(But...It would seem to me that one would have to
devise a weighting value for each qualification...hmmm...)Then keep
throwing other languages into the mix, ad infinitum. I would recommend
including languages that are as diverse as possible. Classical Greek
and Latin are miles away phonetically but they are grammatically,
mechanically, and structurally so alike that it's almost scary. If you
tried to make a language complexity rating system comparing those 2
languages, you wouldn't really show any complexity because they are
just too similar and 2 samples from umpteen-gazillion languages spoken
on this globe is not a representative sample. From the standpoint of
math, the error factor would be so high that it would negate the value
of any results tabulated. I've never studied linguistics, just
languages, but if you want to take a wack at this project for shits and
giggles in your spare time, drop me a line.
poppy...@yahoo.com
pointed
Neeraj. You are right about the article in Greek.
There is an optimal way of learning languages that all vocalizing races
HAVE settled upon (albeit not formally) - what Heinlein refers to as
the "naturalistic" method. It's basically learning by osmosis - you are
born to speaking people, you hear a spoken language, become sensitized
to words and patterns and most importantly, form associations between
words and CONCEPTS rather than words and other words. When a person who
speaks English natively thinks of the word "girl", the conceptual
association is immediate and automatic. When said person thinks the
word "puella", he/she associates "puella" to the WORD "girl" rather
than the concept. This is the block that keeps many people from
becoming fluent in a second language easily, and in my estimation at
least, explains why young children often learn new languages more
easily than adults with large vocabularies and codified speech
mannerisms. The best language teacher that I ever had in my life taught
Japanese orally and sans textbook and required the class to associate
phrases with pictures, not English words.
Bobby D. Bryant
> I'm going to cross-post this to sci.lang, since there are better
> linguists there than myself who can give fairer answers than I
> can. (To sci.lang people: the question posed is about whether there
> is a way to measure the complexity of a language.)
To start with the people who want to measure it will have to agree on
a definition of 'complexity'. Definitions about; there is no
universally accepted on. (Google for "definitions of complexity".)
Once you've agreed on what 'complexity' means, you can start trying
to see how to apply it to language.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Ken Quirici
>
> I don't think we're all that different. I can't really claim expertise in
> anything, being still an undergraduate.
>
(sigh) Maybe the educational system IS different over there. I thought
you were a grad student teaching a section (as they called them at
BU).
> My high school studies in Canada were mostly focussed on maths and sciences.
> I enjoyed it and did well, and was offered scholarships by Canadian
> universities to do a degree in Astrophysics. Through high school, I'd been
> learning Latin basically on my 2.5 hour bus rides to and from school (public
> transit in suburban Toronto sucks), and reading lots of Classical literature
> in translation - Hesiod, Ovid, Euripides, Aristophanes, Homer. Amongst my
> science applications, I put in one to do an arts degree; as luck would have
> it, that's the one offer I decided to accept.
>
So was that the two cultures thing? You chose the humanities? You
certainly staked out your claim to it; you certainly paid your dues, as
they say. Was that 2.5 hours each way? That does suck.
> So now I'm here at Christ Church, Oxford, doing a BA in Classics and
> Oriental Studies. The first half of my course
What is that, 2 years for the first half?
> was straight Classics, where
> the focus was on reading vast amounts of literature in the original. While
> reading the Aeneid and bits of Cicero, Livy, Propertius, Lucretius and
> Catullus, I was taught Greek, with time to read four books of the Iliad and
> the Meno, the Bacchae and Herodotus 1. My 'special subjects' in this half of
> the course were Latin Love Elegy (basically reading Propertius Books 1 - 3,
> and a book each of Tibullus and Ovid), Philosophy (where I stepped out of
> the ancient world and studied Descartes' Meditations
I'm imagining you started with the Ionian philosophers and then the
perennial favorites A & P. Then a leap to Descartes? How was that
work?
>), and Historical
> Linguistics and Comparative Philology.
Philology! A living field of scholarship?
> I loved everything I studied (with
> the exception of Lucretius), but did particularly well with linguistics; I
> won the prize in the examinations on that subject.
>
Did you dislike Lucretius for his cosmology, or his Latin? Or both?
> The second half of my course has seen the addition of the '... and Oriental
> Studies' bit: I have been learning Sanskrit and studying Sanskrit
> literature. Some of it is fascinating reading in its own right, some I find
> interesting because of my Hindu background, and some is absolutely
> mind-blowing as a Classicist.
>
The last statement caught me by surprise.
> (I have now become fairly convinced that any proper and thorough reckoning
> of Homer is impossible without some knowledge of and access to the Indic
> material - particularly in the case of the Odyssey, but also in general
> terms for the idea of oral poetry in an ancient context.
Do you see a transfer from the Indic material to say the pre-Homeric
oral 'tradition'?
> Our time seems to
> be living through an 'Orientalizing Revolution' as Hellenists are finally
> becoming aware of the influence of the Near East on Greece;
And this is way before Alexander?
> the next great
> revolution, which will hopefully occur within a generation (but will
> probably take far longer), will open up the Indian material.
It must be difficult teasing the evidence out.
>So far
> explanations of the relevant findings have tended to come from Indologists
> and are generally along the lines of an appeal to inherited Indo-European
> traditions; I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation (the contact
> seems too detailed to be that old) and in general, I've found that modern
> Indologists are rather the second- and third-rate Classicists, like myself,
> who have found themselves bigger fish in smaller ponds, so to speak.)
>
Well I would never have characterized you as a second- and third-rate
Classicist. But as Elisha Cook, Jr. said to Bogey after Bogey had
just got a thorough beating ('Best I've ever seen' Elisha blithely
said)
and asked why Elisha didn't step in and help, 'I always let a guy make
his play' or something to that effect.
> Sanskrit makes up three of my eight finals papers, which I shall sit
By 'sit' you mean 'defend'?
>in this
> coming May-June; the other five are: Early Greek Hexameter Poetry (Homer,
> Hesiod, and the Hymns), Greek Literature of the 5th Century, Roman History
> (Caesar to Claudius), Ovid, and a much more theoretical paper in
> linguistics, covering both various advanced topics in Indo-European
> reconstruction and general linguistics to boot. I am also offering a thesis,
> as an additional subject (it will replace my lowest mark, unless it itself
> has that honour), on the development of the Greek hexameter (I'm trying to
> explore a possible connection between linguistics and literary criticism in
> Homer, if it exists
forgive my ignorance. I would have thought that connection was
philology. I take it you mean, you're going to study Homer to
see if you can study him by combining linguistics and lit-crit? Or
am I missing the boat? At first I thought you meant Homer was subtly
but consciously EXPRESSING a connection, but that of course
borders on the absurd. Right?
).
>
Where do you find the time? You must put in at least 8 hours a day on
your scholarly endeavours. Lord how I envy you.
> The area then that I've studied more than anything else is Classical
> literature; the subject I'm probably best at is linguistics.
There's a branch of linguistics that's sort of like automata theory? Is
this what you mean?
> In addition to
> the above, I am fascinated by political history in all its guises - hence my
> choice of that history topic, otherwise rather isolated.
Caesar to Claudius? Hmm. Which guise is that? And why do you
call it 'rather isolated'? Ans. - because I read books that discuss
this sort of thing.
> I find the
> political history of Europe particularly fascinating - not just in Roman
> times, but in the late Mediaeval and particularly early modern times.
> I am
> also very interested in the history of India and of the Islamic world. Above
> all, though, I love learning languages and enjoying literature. I'm not
> going to be a stellar literary critic at any point (all this '2:1 - First
> borderline' nonsense
This went completely over my head. Would you care to fill in a little
background?
), but I love getting inside the minds of a culture to
> the extent that their texts allow. I find modern literature rather
> uninspriring,
except Rushdie? What about Musil? And I think you recommended,
if it was you, Broch's 'Virgil'. And the 'Rings of Saturn' guy, damned
if
I forgot his name.
> but I love German and French poetry, from Chretien de Troyes
> and the Nibelungenlied to Baudelaire and Strauss' Hofmannsthal. I also find
> Muslim stories and poetry amazing - Islam, or perhaps Sufism, produces a
> passion in words, in tales, in music
part of the classical raga tradition is Muslim, isn't it?
> that takes my breath away. I realise
> that the biggest gap in what I've exposed myself to is China and Japan: my
> experience of Chinese poems is virtually limited to the (mis-)translations
> and transformations they undergo in becoming Mahle's 'Das Lied von der
> Erde'
>- which, as a horn player devoted to the
> Wagner-Bruckner-Strauss-Mahler line, is for me just about the greatest
> musical and spiritual experience.
>
> In short, I'm a jack-of-all-trades but good for none;
You're just at the beginning!
> I'm a lover of this
> our world and to the meanings which our people, our human race, have given
> it through their art, history, institutions, their lives. I'd like nothing
> more than to continue my degree, expand it if possible, and keep learning
> until I could claim an 'expertise', which I sorely lack right now, and
> contribute meaningfully to that field. Lack of resources makes this path
> somewhat impossible; this time next year I'll either have a 'real' job or
> trying to get a busking license as a horn player on the Underground.
I assume you mean a job in Academia? There's always the U.S. And I
vaguely heard of Italy as a place where Sanskrit studies were active.
Northern Italy. Torino?
I would hazard a guess that you will come with good
whatever-you-call-them
over there - grades - and recommendations, possibly connections?
> My only
> hope to avoid sinking into a rather miserable and futile existence
This will never happen.
> is the
> continued pleasure of living the greatness of humanity in groups like these.
>
> Neeraj Mathur
I'm glad you take pleasure here Neeraj. Me too. I can see how this
group can seem to have some 'greatness', as one of those shared
efforts we do on occasion, now that you mention it. Actually,
thanks for the perception.
Ken
Peter T. Daniels
>
> I'm hardly a linguist though I have studied a few languages outside of
> English. Complexity is inherently a comparitive concept - e.g. a
> monosyllabic word is less complex than a polysyllabic word from a
> purely phonic standpoint. Conversely, from a definitive standpoint, the
> "simpler" word may be eons more complex. I would start by making a list
> of linguistic traits - sound, grammar, occurence of idioms/slang,
> derivative languages, syntax, style, etc. Then I would take 2 languages
> that I knew or had some familiarity with and start comparing them. List
> differences and similarities. Make a numerical rating system for each
> point of comparison, then a cumulative rating system based on all the
> data you've collected.(But...
That sounds like Steve Martin's(?) recipe for becoming a millionaire:
(1) Devise a cure for cancer ...
> It would seem to me that one would have to
> devise a weighting value for each qualification...hmmm...)Then keep
> throwing other languages into the mix, ad infinitum. I would recommend
> including languages that are as diverse as possible. Classical Greek
> and Latin are miles away phonetically but they are grammatically,
> mechanically, and structurally so alike that it's almost scary. If you
> tried to make a language complexity rating system comparing those 2
> languages, you wouldn't really show any complexity because they are
> just too similar and 2 samples from umpteen-gazillion languages spoken
> on this globe is not a representative sample. From the standpoint of
> math, the error factor would be so high that it would negate the value
> of any results tabulated. I've never studied linguistics, just
> languages, but if you want to take a wack at this project for shits and
> giggles in your spare time, drop me a line.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Sorry to post twice on the same topic. I just read what you wrote,
> Neeraj. You are right about the article in Greek.
> There is an optimal way of learning languages that all vocalizing races
> HAVE settled upon (albeit not formally) - what Heinlein refers to as
> the "naturalistic" method. It's basically learning by osmosis - you are
> born to speaking people, you hear a spoken language, become sensitized
> to words and patterns and most importantly, form associations between
> words and CONCEPTS rather than words and other words.
And that ability goes away with, approximately, the achievement of
puberty. That's why second-language-learning is different from
native-language(s)-learning.
> When a person who
> speaks English natively thinks of the word "girl", the conceptual
> association is immediate and automatic. When said person thinks the
> word "puella", he/she associates "puella" to the WORD "girl" rather
> than the concept. This is the block that keeps many people from
> becoming fluent in a second language easily, and in my estimation at
> least, explains why young children often learn new languages more
> easily than adults with large vocabularies and codified speech
> mannerisms. The best language teacher that I ever had in my life taught
> Japanese orally and sans textbook and required the class to associate
> phrases with pictures, not English words.
Ed Cryer
>>
>> Both Greek and Latin went into decline after their peaks. Is this true of
>> English now?
>
> Do you think English is the language of a nation in the ebb of
> empire-building?
> What happened to English English when its empire fell? Did it become
> baroque, rococco, as I think you mean? Over-elaborate, as the
> Renaissance in art declined (value judgement! but I think I agree) into
> the Baroque? But wasn't the Baroque also the era of the growth of
> the French 'empire' of Louis XIV? And other European powers?
>
> You might be right tho, except that I don't think English is yet on the
> wain. It might be on the cusp.
>
>>
>> Ed
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ken
>
I think English is the dominant world language at the moment, and shows
every sign of staying that way for some time to come. USA influence; and
then not least M$ on the Net.
In Spain kids compete with each other to sing in the streets songs by
Madonna, Robbie Williams, Cold Play. They have no idea usually just what the
words mean, but they know the originals so well that they can detect minimal
degrees of approach to or distance from the CD.
English is cool all over the Spanish-speaking world. I was studying Spanish
using the Net a few years back. One of my regulars lived in Caracas,
Venezuela. We had a voice link-up. One day I patched into him while he was
on a group talk-in with lots of others all over S. America. He introduced me
to them as his English friend. Loads of them said hello in all kids of ways;
"Hiya kiddo"; "How do, son"; "How's it hangin', babe?"; this latter from a
Latina who sounded so sexy that I almost packed my bags and emigrated there
and then. {:-
About 30 or so years back students in Science Faculties at British
universities had to take an exam paper to display competence in German. This
because so many white papers were published then in German. But not now. It
looks as though English has taken on what Latin did for educated
communication during the Middle Ages. But with an important difference. It's
also used at all levels of society, in many countries. So it won't become
"dead" in the sense that Latin did.
Ed
cohen...@gmail.com
http://www.ancient-greece.org/images/maps/ancient-greece101.swf
then read this:
Arms and the Man
In "John Donne and the Anthropomorphic Map," Noam Flinker wrote:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ASSA-No8/NF3.html
>> Renaissance commonplaces about the connections between
the microcosm and the macrocosm take on greater relevance when
read in the context of what Gandelman called "The Mediterranean
as a Sea of Sin" in light of an anthropomorphic map by Opicinus
de Canistris. He explains: "One sees 'the woman', mulier, whose
head and nose constitute the coastline of North Africa (present
Morocco and the Cape of Tanger), thrusting her nose toward the
ear of 'the man', vir, whose head is constituted by Spain and
whose armed hands correspond to the Italian peninsula and
Greece. ... <<
The drawing at
http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/LMwebpages/230A.html
includes a map that is very similar to the one described above.
SICILY / TRINACRIA
Sicily was colonized by both the Greeks and Phoenicians
at about the same time. There is a history of Sicily at
http://sights.seindal.dk/sight/613_Trinacria.html
I think Trinacria is a Greco-Phoenician term: Greek tre = 3
+ Semitic nun-kuf-resh NiKa:R = to jab, poke, pierce.
Therefore, the weapon in his right hand is a trident,
the business end of which is the triangular Sicily.
Legs and the Woman
The symbol of Sicily is the Triskele, a strange figure composed
of a head of woman from which three human legs are folded at
the knee. Its possible origins (Greek, Phoenician, Minoan) are
mentioned at http://www.csssstrinakria.org/tringlis.htm
A Sinister Reversal
It seems that names associated with the left side of the body
are reversed to differentiate them from names associated with
the right side of the body.
GREECE
Southern Greece is a "network of islands". Greece, a toponym
the Greeks themselves do not use, is a reversal of Semitic
samekh-resh-gimel SaRaG = knitted. Therefore, he has a
(weighted) net in his left hand.
CRETE
Crete is a reversal of TaR[K]is = a small shield. This word was
borrowed into Talmudic Hebrew from Greek as taf-resh-yod-samekh
TaR[K]iS = shield. This word evolved into English target, perhaps
from the practice of hanging a shield from the branch of a tree and
shooting arrows at it?
Tetragrammaton
For the equivalence of Hebrew yod, Greek K, and Latin CR, see
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/ABOUT-WORDS/2004-03/1080368844
Retarius
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/warriorchallenge/print/print_gladiators_profile.
html
The Retarius ... would use his lead-weighted net to ensare an opponent
... and then move in for the kill with his trident. ... If his cast
missed its object, the Retarius could retrieve it via an attached cord.
To see a picture of a gladiator with trident, net and shield, go to
http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/retiarius.html
Needless to say, Poseidon/Neptune was a very important god around
the Mediterranean basin. He customarily held a trident in his right
hand.
Fatherland to Motherland: An ancient sex-change operation
OK. I must admit that treating a female Europa as a Retiarius
complete with trident, net and shield is very uncomfortable. So,
let's assume that "she" really was Neptune and reverse his name:
nePtuNe => eNutPen => euRoPa, changing the N to R, dropping
the t that cannot be easily pronounced before a P, and dropping
the (now) final n.
English does not tolerate a TP combination except in concatenated
words like breastplate, bulletproof, dustpan, footprint, marketplace,
nitpick, outpatient, rustproof, and saltpeter.
ciao,
izzy
Israel "izzy" Cohen, BPMaps moderator
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps
Ed Cryer
<cohen...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1133918216.1...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
I take my hat off to this, izzy. It sounds very medieval. Ever read any
Paracelsus; pre-scientific? Things "sign" each other in strange combinations
of relationships that involve words, ideas, things, supernatural events. You
find the planet Mercury signing the metal mercury; and that's only the
beginning of a fascinating tour into the inner mysteries of alchemy et al.
Umberto Eco explored this moral universe in his novels; especially
"Foucault's Pendulum".
Ed
Joe Bernstein
<neem...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Zoroastrian beliefs are unlikely to have been very widely spread at
> this time in Arabia, although there were definitely some Persians
> around. One of the early followers of Muhammad was a Persian named
> Salman, so there must have been some of them in the region.
There were Arab tribes living within the Sasanid Persian Empire, and
others living on its edge and operating as clients. The Sasanids also
once or twice conquered their way across much of Arabia. Admittedly,
the concept of "Persian" the Sasanids promoted didn't include "merchant"
or indeed much of anything that would get one to travel other than
soldiering, but I'd expect Zoroastrianism to have been familiar in
at least several parts of (shortly) pre-Islamic Arabia.
Particularly since it went through such a spectacular revival and
elaboration right in the century before Muhammad.
> Zoroastrians were also accorded
> special status in early Islam, along with Jews and Christians, as
> 'people of the revealed books' or something like that. Early Islam
> considered these groups spiritual kindred and allies.
> Greek religion is very unlikely to have been in the area - we're talking
> about the 600's AD, and Greece and the Byzantine Empire would have been
> Christian now for several centuries.
I have read that another of the "people of the book" was the Sabians
of Harran.
From here out, I'm not as sure of my memory, but anyway: As I
understand it, we know that the Sabians did very advanced Platonic
religion of some sort, or at least so Greeks at some point thought.
But we don't know much else. There is a recentish book on them
(title something surprising like <The Sabians of Harran>) that I
*think* claims they actually were doing Mesopotamian paganism, with
Sin rather than Marduk or Asshur as their main deity, but with
enough Neoplatonic gloss to fool the Greeks and Muslims both.
Whether or not this is true, I find it hilarious.
Separate from *that*, there's the Burushaski of Afghanistan, who I've
heard were still practicing a religion derived from (older forms of)
Greek paganism in the 19th century. I don't know how true this is,
but I didn't hear it in a tabloid...
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
Joe Bernstein
Ken Quirici <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote:
> But this does raise
> the interesting question of what religions did the Romans suppress,
> besides the Christian?
Oh, a longish list. But most other bans were more or less local.
For example, Druids were illegal in Britain but not in Gaul, or so
I've heard. The cult of the Great Mother (Cybele, I think) was long
illegal in Rome itself, but not proscribed in the East. And...
> I'm not sure exactly how the Romans related to Judaism
Well, it varied, but by and large they tolerated it. There were
two main issues:
1) Palestinian Jews kept rebelling. This was eventually addressed
by banning them from Jerusalem (see bans, local, above).
2) Alexandrian Jews kept rebelling. But so did every other ethnic
group in Alexandria; dealing with rebels was just part of the job
in governing that city.
A couple of interesting tidbits about Roman Judaism: This is an
early example of "good for the Jews" not matching "good in general" -
Nero, for example, was apparently good for the Jews, while we know
about Vespasian... And under Rome, Judaism did a lot more
converting than has been its subsequent norm.
> Well there's that trading crossroads up north between Arabia and
> Palestine which must have seen Greeks and Hindus, to name two of a
> wide variety of traders I imagine passed thru. In those days I think
> of traders as a kind of live TV.
If you were to go to my website, and drill down through "Half of Asia,
for a Thousand Years" to the "Main Guide", you'd find in that a sort
of paean to a book by one Manfred Raschke that is still, as far as I
know, the most useful book on the subject of trade on the Silk Road
in the early centuries AD. Anyway, Raschke examines the evidence in
mind-boggling detail, and concludes that essentially all traders of
whom he finds record were residents of the Roman Empire - largely
residents of Syria, but not exclusively. This in contrast to the Arab
seamen who often outcompeted those of Roman Egypt on the Indian Ocean.
(A book mentioned in the "Some More Books" section of "Half of Asia"
is useful on Indian Ocean trade.)
I don't *think* Raschke takes sides between "This is because our records
of other societies [except China] are poor" or "This is because the
traders really *were* all Romans", but I'm not sure - it's been a
few years, and I might be misremembering. He's quite definite that
the Han Chinese Empire did not include traders on the Silk Road, period.
For other references on trade, see the start page of "Half of Asia";
one or two of the footnotes give everything I know, except, again,
the book listed under "Some More Books". In particular, for the
period in question Raschke is much less pertinent, and you have to
rely on (inferior) other books instead. (Most of the 6th century
is in fact later than "Half of Asia"'s period.)
Joe Bernstein
notes, of which only the last contains material that's even remotely
on-topic here. Sorry.
In article <dms7v5$cq3$1...@news.ox.ac.uk>, Neeraj Mathur
<neem...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Native American religions (that's what I was taught in school,
> although I think the most PC term was becoming 'First Nations', at
> least in Canada)
"Native American" is the PC term in the continental US (I think part
of the point of "First Nations" is that the Inuit aren't considered
part of the same group as the rest, and the Na-Dene might not be, so
Canada has more reason to use that phrase).
But "American Indian" is the term most people of the ethnicity in
question seem to prefer.
The preference appears to be *different* from the "African American"
vs. "Black" situation, which is superficially similar. "African
American" seems to be popular as a slightly more *formal* term than
"Black", and may be expected in contexts where respect is especially
desired. In contrast, I don't think I've ever seen a person from
the group in question expect "Native American", and I *have* seen
them deride it a lot.
> Incidentally, I'm not sure how much Zoroastrian belief and/or practice
> survived in Persia after the Arab conquest; virtually everybody was
> either killed, converted, or forced to emigrate (the migrants settling
> mostly in India, in Gujarat and Bombay). The early Caliphs, as I
> understand it, felt they had a strong duty to convert people to Islam,
> and weren't afraid to use force to do so. I'd be surprised if anything
> Zoroastrian survived much more than a generation or two.
You are profoundly misinformed.
Many of the main holy books of Zoroastrianism were first written down
in eastern Iran in the 9th and 10th centuries of the Christian era,
because over *two to three centuries* after the Muslim conquest, the
Zoroastrians had *gradually* fallen away, partly due to the benefits
one got by converting, and partly because Islam was an especially
exciting thing to do in the context of eastern Iran shortly before
our millennium.
The emigration to India may have begun already at the time of the
conquest - I'm not sure, and not sure anyone knows for sure - but the
Indian Zoroastrians didn't become the main creative body of the faith
until centuries later.
If you want, I'll provide references. There's actually an entire
book specifically on "just how and when did the Zoroastrians convert?"
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you're usually a reliable and rational
poster to this newsgroup; I thought it particularly important to
correct a stereotype coming from you, in this case the stereotyped
image of intolerant early Caliphs.
(As opposed, mind, to intolerant *later* Muslim rulers, who did
indeed do much to encourage Zoroastrians to flee to India, though
I think the religion's equivalents to the Vatican and such are
*still* in Iran. For that matter, early Caliphs weren't angels
of the diversity faith; they were just too busy using fire and
sword against pagans and other countries, to engage in using it
against their own non-pagan subjects. In some areas they came as a
major relief; Sasanid Persia, for example, had gotten almost as fond
of religious persecution as Byzantine Rome, in the final pre-Islamic
century. See on this inter alia <Iraq after the Muslim Conquest>
or some similar title, author Moroney I think.)
> As for Hindus, I have no idea if they were travelling that far at that
> time. Indians, historically, are very strange people in their relative
> lack of curiosity in the world beyond the subcontinent. After Buddhism's
> migration to Southeast Asia - in the time of the Mauryas!! - India has
> seemed very little interested in the rest of the world. I think it's
> more likely that they simply let the Arab traders come to them, and
> probably by a sea route, to the ports in Gujarat.
India also sent missionaries north at some point. Possibly in Maurya
times, but most of our actual evidence of Buddhism in Central Asia is
from later (starting in the Kusana period).
They *appear* to also have sent missionaries west. The evidence tends
to be exaggerated for nationalist purposes, but it's there; there were
people in the West who had clear enough ideas about Buddhism to
strongly suggest that actual Buddhists had traveled at least as
far as Iran. The scanty info seems to start in classical Greek times,
and to remain present (though never as copious as the BS supplied by,
e.g., Ctesias) for centuries. The translation-from-Sanskrit enterprise
that began in Sasanid Persia also suggests contacts.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point - "Nobody ever leaves India"
is indeed a pretty consistent theme of history. I'm just pointing
out a few more exceptions, probably even less demographically
significant than the Southeast Asian example.
John Briggs
> In article <1133580943....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> Ken Quirici <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote:
>
>> But this does raise
>> the interesting question of what religions did the Romans suppress,
>> besides the Christian?
>
> Oh, a longish list. But most other bans were more or less local.
> For example, Druids were illegal in Britain but not in Gaul, or so
> I've heard. The cult of the Great Mother (Cybele, I think) was long
> illegal in Rome itself, but not proscribed in the East. And...
It depends what you mean by illegal - the worship of Cybele (Magna Mater)
was formally inaugurated at Rome in 203 BC.
--
John Briggs
Joe Bernstein
<neem...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Ken Quirici" <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote in message
> news:1133633057.8...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> > As far as religion increasing in complexity with the advent of
> > writing, it occurred to me that the one example, of the complexity
> > of the Greek religion, might be due to cross-pollination from all
> > the myths of the Eastern Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia - and
> > many if not most of those religions were at least partly preserved
> > (at least when the Greeks themselves developed writing) in written
> > form in the older languages of the older cultures in the area. It
> > was quite a melting pot of religious and cosmological ideas.
> There is something to this - an awful lot of Hesiod, for instance,
> seems to have parallels in Near Eastern stories. Martin West is
> particularly fond of this line of enquiry, and has done a lot to make
> it mainstream - see, in addition to his mammoth commentaries on Hesiod,
> his book *The East Face of Helicon* for more.
There's an idea that sort of super-sizes this, that I've had a lot of
trouble tracking down; by this time, years after I started looking,
I'm seriously worried that the idea is original with me (ergo not
well supported by the evidence). Whether this idea is correct or
not makes a huge difference to my own work, so this is annoying,
and I'll try again to fish for anyone who can tell me anything
about it.
The argument goes like this. We know that the concept of "Twelve
Olympians" is a relatively late and minor bit of Greek religion.
We know further that it isn't the Indo-European norm to have gods
sitting around in councils, whereas it *is* the Semitic norm (cf.
Akkadian and Ugaritic examples; I mean, these gods are much *more*
conciliar than for example Egyptian, Hindu, or Norse ones). We know
that normal Greek religion centred on the specific gods of specific
places - Athena and Poseidon for Athens, for example.
So
1) The Homeric council of the gods is an example of the kind of
acculturating to Phoenician ideas that the Greeks were doing
like mad in the 8th/7th centuries anyway.
(This part, I've at least seen *adumbrated* by e.g. West, Gregory
Nagy, and Jenny Strauss Clay.)
2) This means that in looking at Homer-as-we-have-him, we are
looking at a text whose core religious ideas are a *construct*,
possibly even consciously created to serve the Panhellenic
ideology of the time.
(This part is what's crucial to my work on the history of, ahem,
fantasy, and what I haven't found explicitly anywhere. Jenny
Strauss Clay gets close, but not all the way, at least not before
her new book which I haven't had the chance to read yet. I once
thought I'd seen it claimed that Uvo Hoelscher states this in full,
but after years of not finding clear references, not finding my
*original* source for this reference, and not getting anywhere in his
<Die Odyssee>, I gave up.)
Joe Bernstein
John Briggs <john.b...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > The cult of the Great Mother (Cybele, I think) was long
> > illegal in Rome itself, but not proscribed in the East. And...
> It depends what you mean by illegal - the worship of Cybele (Magna Mater)
> was formally inaugurated at Rome in 203 BC.
Huh. Do I have the wrong goddess, or did I remember completely wrong?
I remember that the particular religion in question is the one with
priests who castrated themselves, and that at least one ornery Cato
railed against it. But it's been a *long* time since I looked at
Roman religion...
Neeraj Mathur
"Joe Bernstein" <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
news:dncedb$7q0$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> You are profoundly misinformed.
[snip info about the gradual conversion of Iran to Islam]
> If you want, I'll provide references. There's actually an entire
> book specifically on "just how and when did the Zoroastrians convert?"
>
> I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you're usually a reliable and rational
> poster to this newsgroup; I thought it particularly important to
> correct a stereotype coming from you, in this case the stereotyped
> image of intolerant early Caliphs.
Thanks for setting me straight. As I mentioned, this is not an area I'm
particularly well-read on, and I thought I made clear that my statements
were suppositions rather than my interpretation of the history. I asked
earlier if anybody could offer some relevant bibliography, so if you could
post some books, I'd be very interested (not to 'check your references', but
just to further my knowledge).
You talk about 'the benefits of converting'; my understanding was that
various taxes were applied to non-Muslims (as compensation for not serving
in the army, which they were forbidden to do). I associated this with the
sorts of taxes that Aurangzeb reintroduced in India, that Akbar had
abolished. These were always presented to me as being an especially grievous
form of oppression of non-Muslim communities, causing much suffering and
hardship. I back-imputed this to the Caliphate; what was the situation like
under them? What was their economic policy vis-a-vis their conquered
peoples, and how oppressive would it have been perceived as being? Put
another way, were the incentives to conversion based on positives (like baby
bonuses in the past in Canada), or negatives (like the persecution under
Aurangzeb)?
[snip for brevity]
> I'm not disagreeing with your main point - "Nobody ever leaves India"
> is indeed a pretty consistent theme of history. I'm just pointing
> out a few more exceptions, probably even less demographically
> significant than the Southeast Asian example.
Thanks again for the examples. Once more, though, I would point out that
what we're seeing is the (limited) export of Buddhism. No other Indian
culture seems to look outward, and even the Buddhists don't seem to return
to spread information about the lands they've visited.
What do we make of the embassies Augustus claims to have received from
India? Is he telling a literal truth, and if so, who went to see him?
Neeraj Mathur
John Briggs
> In article <Lhjmf.11658$E14...@newsfe7-win.ntli.net>,
> John Briggs <john.b...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
>>> The cult of the Great Mother (Cybele, I think) was long
>>> illegal in Rome itself, but not proscribed in the East. And...
>
>> It depends what you mean by illegal - the worship of Cybele (Magna
>> Mater) was formally inaugurated at Rome in 203 BC.
>
> Huh. Do I have the wrong goddess, or did I remember completely wrong?
> I remember that the particular religion in question is the one with
> priests who castrated themselves, and that at least one ornery Cato
> railed against it. But it's been a *long* time since I looked at
> Roman religion...
You're remembering it slightly wrong :-)
--
John Briggs
Andrew Dalby
> 2) This means that in looking at Homer-as-we-have-him, we are
looking at a text whose core religious ideas are a *construct*,
possibly even consciously created to serve the Panhellenic
ideology of the time.
>(This part is what's crucial to my work on the history of, ahem,
>fantasy, and what I haven't found explicitly anywhere ...
This idea of a 'Panhellenic ideology' at the time of the Iliad (650? or
long before?), though often expressed, does indeed sound like fantasy
to me. Where, really, is the evidence for it? The Iliad doesn't even
have a single name for this people; and the 'current enemy' in the
Iliad, the Trojans, have half the Olympian gods on their side!
Andrew Dalby
> culture seems to look outward ...
1. Not so limited. Buddhism was also exported to China, whence many
pilgrims made journeys to Buddhist holy places in India in medieval
times. There was continuing cultural exchange, with massive translation
of the massive Buddhist (Mahayana) scriptures, over many centuries.
Then Tibet, Mongolia, Japan ...
2. Wasn't Hinduism exported too, to Java and Sumatra for example?
3. To go back to a Buddhist (converted) monarch, Asoka claimed in his
inscriptions to have introduced various aspects of civilization
(including some medicinal herbs, the point that originally interested
me, but also charitable works more generally) to the Greek states to
his west, at least as far west as Libya and Anatolia.
Jim Braun
> ... there's the Burushaski of Afghanistan, who I've
> heard were still practicing a religion derived from (older forms of)
> Greek paganism in the 19th century.
Do you mean the Kalash people?
Erich Schneider
> 2. Wasn't Hinduism exported too, to Java and Sumatra for example?
It is apparently not clear if this was a case of Hindus proselytizing,
or of local rulers importing Hindu priests in order to increase their
prestige through conducting elaborate rituals.
--
Erich Schneider er...@caltech.edu
George Kincaid
> >
>> This reminded me of a few years back when I was flying from the UK to a
>> Greek island. While waiting for the next vodka and orange to arrive I
>> looked
>> out of the window and saw lots of white things down below. I wondered if
>> it
>> might be the Alps. So, when the stewardess turned up with my drink I
>> asked
>> her; and she said she'd go and ask the captain.
>> Well, I waited and waited, but she never came back with the answer. It
>> worried me at the time that maybe the captain didn't know either. {:-
>>
>> Ed
>
> Well if you were 1/2 way (from your windswept Northlands) there
> it would've been? And a vodka and orange is a vodka and orange
> juice is called in the States a damned I forget! A tequila and orange
> juice is I believe a Tequila Sunrise which is a not-bad movie. I
> started
> out with vodka and orange juice and moved to gin & tonic. And now
> alas the occasional ale.
>
> heu! iam fere numquam bibo.
>
> BTW did the Romans have spirits and mixed drinks? (Apart from
> wine and water). And a word for alcohol, assuming they knew
> it? Well actually if they knew it that means they had a word
> for it. Is believing what I said a known philosophical position?
> Somebody make me stop!
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ken
>
Ken Quirici
That's it! How soon they forget.
Thanks.
Ken
pointed
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > That sounds like Steve Martin's(?) recipe for becoming a millionaire:
>
> (1) Devise a cure for cancer ...
>
pointed
> I take my hat off to this, izzy. It sounds very medieval. Ever read any
> Paracelsus; pre-scientific? Things "sign" each other in strange combinations
> of relationships that involve words, ideas, things, supernatural events. You
> find the planet Mercury signing the metal mercury; and that's only the
> beginning of a fascinating tour into the inner mysteries of alchemy et al.
>
*** Full metal semiotics? ;-)
> Umberto Eco explored this moral universe in his novels; especially
> "Foucault's Pendulum".
That was a book and a half. A little abstruse for someone whose
historical education is as sadly lacking as mine - I don't know much
about the Templars or Rosicrucianism so I had a hard time separating
fact from fiction. I LOST the book with only 'bout 120 pages to
go...I'll have to pick it up again and reread it - this time with the
appropriate prepatory reading. The ideas were interesting and the
plotline engaging, though. Thats the only Eco I've ever read outside of
a list of points that define a "cult" classic that was published in
some Twin Peaks analysis that I read years ago.
Kate
*Ecce, Homunculi!*
gdv...@yahoo.com
Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>
> So if you were to evaluate any one feature of a language, and maybe give it
> points relative to a chosen base language, you will find that while you
> might find a large range of variation in any one area, overall the range
> would be much smaller. What it comes down to is that any natural human
> language should be capable of expressing any thought that any human produce,
> and be able to learned by any normal human. If there were an 'optimal' way
> of doing this, why would any given language not settle upon that method?
>
I agree with most of what you say, but some languages (like German) are
more irregular than others. Constructed languages (like Esperanto)
contain no irregularities. I would say that German is more complex than
Esperanto because it has more irregularities.
Also I think that there are some languages that allow more ambivalence
in meaning than others and that have a less complicated grammar.
Joachim Pense
>
> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>>
>> So if you were to evaluate any one feature of a language, and maybe give
>> it points relative to a chosen base language, you will find that while
>> you might find a large range of variation in any one area, overall the
>> range would be much smaller. What it comes down to is that any natural
>> human language should be capable of expressing any thought that any human
>> produce, and be able to learned by any normal human. If there were an
>> 'optimal' way of doing this, why would any given language not settle upon
>> that method?
>>
> I agree with most of what you say, but some languages (like German) are
> more irregular than others. Constructed languages (like Esperanto)
> contain no irregularities. I would say that German is more complex than
> Esperanto because it has more irregularities.
I do not know, but I strongly believe that there are constructed languages
with many irregularities, perhaps there are some with more than any natural
language.
Joachim
Lee Sau Dan
gdvbqz> I agree with most of what you say, but some languages
gdvbqz> (like German) are more irregular than others. Constructed
gdvbqz> languages (like Esperanto) contain no irregularities. I
gdvbqz> would say that German is more complex than Esperanto
gdvbqz> because it has more irregularities.
It's naive to compare complexity based on superficial features only.
Aren't binary numbers simpler (than decimal numbers), because it only
needs 2 digits: 0 and 1 (instead of ten: 0 ... 9)?
Isn't English easier than Esperanto because it has only 26 letters in
the alphabet, while Esperanto has 28?
When you go deeper and more abstract, you'll often find that things
that are apparently "simpler" at the surface are really much more
complicated and irregular inside. OTOH, things that look complicated
from outside may indeed be based on some highly regular and consistent
internal structure.
gdvbqz> Also I think that there are some languages that allow more
gdvbqz> ambivalence in meaning than others and that have a less
gdvbqz> complicated grammar.
Check out Malay-Indonesian. Some people find it easier than
Esperanto. (Of course, there is no scientific definition of "ease".
Comparisons of ease are highly subjective.)
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
Ron Hardin
> Check out Malay-Indonesian. Some people find it easier than
> Esperanto. (Of course, there is no scientific definition of "ease".
> Comparisons of ease are highly subjective.)
It's called reification. They used to measure comfort in cars, so as to put it
in ads. Comfort exists, and as proof, we are measuring it.
A fine example is ``power,'' which you can acquire, steal, obtain; and lose.
Or phlogiston, the cause of fire, and the cause of a lot of searching-for back when,
that resulted in chemistry and a loss of interest in phlogiston.
Like ``intention,'' it doesn't happen in the present but is used in accounts and
explanations, and it's reified when you search for it instead of listening to
the account which it is part of.
``It was easy to learn'' is pretty complex in detail, but the account isn't.
It's an ``It was easy to ...'' genre.
Probably learned as ``It's easy. You try it.''
--
Ron Hardin
rhha...@mindspring.com
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
izzy
borrowed. My son read it before I did and I had to return it after I
had read only about 30 pages. So, I also have to get another copy and
read it.
As for Paracelsus, what I browse on the Internet is indeed medieval and
abstruse. But no, I have not read anything he wrote (translated into
English).
Of course, the result of what has happened in the past is the present,
and what does happen in the here-and-now will determine the future. And
one can see traces of past conflicts between religious and secular
political forces for control over nation-states in the current
so-called "War on Terror".
I can see how "my" anthropomorphic maps contributed to the rise of
nation-states through concepts such as the divine rights of kings
(inherited from the god or goddess whose territory they rule over),
etc. But some of my compatriots believe that the Templars are alive and
well and influencing current events in Israel. For example, see the
writings of Barry Chamish at http://www.redmoonrising.com/chamish.htm
I can "translate" Rosicrucian as the Secret of the Cross (from Aramaic
RaZ = secret, compare Latin sub rosa), and more than a little current
esoteric knowledge is related to Hebrew and Christian Kabbala, but I
find it rather far-fetched to believe that the actions of current world
powers are being manipulated by the leaders of secret societies that
originated in medieval times.
Nonetheless, a collective consciousness such as that evidenced by
Douglas Hofstadter's "Aunt Hillary" does exert influence over the
actions of individual ants whose behavior may benefit the colony while
destroying themselves. It seems that Western concepts such as
individual freedom and (individual) human rights prevent the Western
mind from understanding the mentality of fanatical fundamentalists.
This is probably enough nonsense for one day.
izzy
gdv...@yahoo.com
Lee Sau Dan wrote:
> >>>>> "gdvbqz" == gdvbqz <gdv...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> gdvbqz> I agree with most of what you say, but some languages
> gdvbqz> (like German) are more irregular than others. Constructed
> gdvbqz> languages (like Esperanto) contain no irregularities. I
> gdvbqz> would say that German is more complex than Esperanto
> gdvbqz> because it has more irregularities.
>
> It's naive to compare complexity based on superficial features only.
>
If you look at a language, it may seem to be more complicated in some
ways than another language. On the other hand it may be simpler in
other ways. Overall any 2 languages chosen at random are likely to be
equally as complicated. This is because all languages need to be able
to express complex meanings. The complexity is there because the
complexity does something, and the complexity has to come somewhere, in
one place or another.
Irregularity, however, doesn't do anything. It is unnecessary
complexity. It adds to the complexity of a language while adding
nothing to the ability of a language to express complex meanings. The
complexity of irregularity does not find its match in simplicity in
another area of language. Irregularity can only add to the complexity
of a language, which is why no artificial language would be created
that had built-in irregularity.
If you wanted to create an artificial language, there are many
different ways you could do it. You could have an inflected,
agglutinating or isolating language. Overall, each artificial language
should have the same level of complexity. An isolating/analytical
language has rules about the order of words that matches the complexity
that inflected languages have in word endings. However, you would never
invent a language with irregularities in it.
> Aren't binary numbers simpler (than decimal numbers), because it only
> needs 2 digits: 0 and 1 (instead of ten: 0 ... 9)?
>
I wouldn't say that binary numbers are simpler that decimal. There are
more digits, but that makes it easier to express decimal numbers. Base
12 makes it even easier to express decimals. One third in base 12 is
0.4, in base 10 is 0.3 re-occurring and I don't know what it is in
binary.
> Isn't English easier than Esperanto because it has only 26 letters in
> the alphabet, while Esperanto has 28?
>
If a language has more phonemes, then I would guess words on average
can be shorter.
> gdvbqz> Also I think that there are some languages that allow more
> gdvbqz> ambivalence in meaning than others and that have a less
> gdvbqz> complicated grammar.
>
> Check out Malay-Indonesian. Some people find it easier than
> Esperanto. (Of course, there is no scientific definition of "ease".
> Comparisons of ease are highly subjective.)
>
Intelligent people are intrigued by a different type of language and
not put off by it. Once someone grasps essential principles of a
language, I see no real problem in progressing further. Different
phonetic structures can be a problem. A good teacher is vital.
Lee Sau Dan
gdvbqz> Irregularity, however, doesn't do anything. It is
gdvbqz> unnecessary complexity. It adds to the complexity of a
gdvbqz> language while adding nothing to the ability of a language
gdvbqz> to express complex meanings.
The irregularities helps to make the language more compact. They also
provide extra information for error-correction.
gdvbqz> The complexity of irregularity does not find its match in
gdvbqz> simplicity in another area of language. Irregularity can
gdvbqz> only add to the complexity of a language, which is why no
gdvbqz> artificial language would be created that had built-in
gdvbqz> irregularity.
Esperanto has it -- if you look more carefully beyond the so called
"16 basic grammar rules". Interlingva has 3 verb declensions,
modelled after the Romance languages.
>> Isn't English easier than Esperanto because it has only 26
>> letters in the alphabet, while Esperanto has 28?
>>
gdvbqz> If a language has more phonemes, then I would guess words
gdvbqz> on average can be shorter.
At the expense of a more complicated sound system. It's a trade-off.
Erich Schneider
> Irregularity can only add to the complexity
> of a language, which is why no artificial language would be created
> that had built-in irregularity.
Unless you were trying to create a language that mimicked the
complexity of natural languages, e.g. Mark Okrand's Klingon.
--
Erich Schneider er...@caltech.edu
Joachim Pense
>>>>>> "gdvbqz" == gdvbqz <gdv...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> gdvbqz> Irregularity, however, doesn't do anything. It is
> gdvbqz> unnecessary complexity. It adds to the complexity of a
> gdvbqz> language while adding nothing to the ability of a language
> gdvbqz> to express complex meanings.
>
> The irregularities helps to make the language more compact. They also
> provide extra information for error-correction.
Not in all cases. There are irregularities that (1) make the language less
compact, and some that (2) reduce error-correction information.
Examples: (1) "Glaswegian" is less compact than "Glasgower". (2) "beat" has
the past tense "beat". Information is lost.
Joachim
Odysseus
>
> Lee Sau Dan wrote:
>
<snip>
>
> > Aren't binary numbers simpler (than decimal numbers), because it only
> > needs 2 digits: 0 and 1 (instead of ten: 0 ... 9)?
> >
> I wouldn't say that binary numbers are simpler that decimal. There are
> more digits, but that makes it easier to express decimal numbers. Base
> 12 makes it even easier to express decimals. One third in base 12 is
> 0.4, in base 10 is 0.3 re-occurring and I don't know what it is in
> binary.
One-third in base two is 0.010101.... Note that multiplying 1/3 by 2
twice and subtracting 1 yields 1/3 again, hence the alternating
digits. In base sixteen it's 0.5555..., as 1/3 * 16 - 5 = 1/3.
Your example for base twelve is "easier" only because 3 is a factor
of 12 but not of 10. Try expressing one-fifth (which, of course, is
just 0.2 in decimal) in duodecimal and this time you'll get a messy
repetition. (In binary too: since 1/5 * 2^4 - 3 = 1/5 again, it's
0.00110011..., or in hexadecimal 0.3333....)
--
Odysseus
Herman Rubin
>> Lee Sau Dan wrote:
><snip>
The Sumerians were the first to use the same digits in
every position, base 60. However, they did not use 60
characters. The Egyptians used one character per position,
base 10, repeated as many times as needed. The other early
base 10 systems about which I know used 27 characters
(Greek, Hebrew) or 6 characters (Roman) for three places;
they were aware of the similarity in different places.
There is a tradeoff between length and number of characters.
With too many characters, the operations become difficult
to remember. I doubt that the Sumerians and Babylonians
memorized base 60 tables; we know that they did multiplication
and division with finite-length sexagesimal fractions 4000
years ago. Base 60 has the advantage of division by 2, 3,
and 5, and they did use multiple places.
There were some computers which did not use base 2 internally,
but not many. From one standpoint, base 3 is better, and in
that case, the characters used were, as we would call them,
1, 0, -1. This has advantages as well; there is no "best",
but it is easiest to make devices with two stable states.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hru...@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
gdv...@yahoo.com
Base 10 is good for expressing half and one-fifth, but not a third or a
quarter or a sixth. So base 12 is better than base 10. If only those
clever people in Baghdad had changed the Indian system from base 10 to
base 12 before they passed it onto us. They could have saved us a lot
of trouble.
gdv...@yahoo.com
language may be more compact than an agglutinating language or an
isolating language. Inflected languages do seem to have many
irregularities, but that could be because the examples we have are of
Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, German and Latin. I wonder if
there are any languages that are not Indo-European, and are they
regular. Perhaps agglutinating languages like Turkish tend to be
regular.
The irregularities make it difficult to understand meanings sometimes.
Agreement between nouns and adjectives can make sentences less
ambiguous.
Eurasiatic languages seem to be mostly agglutinating, with
Indo-European the odd one out.
Ruud Harmsen
>I don't think irregularities make a language more compact.
I do think so. One of the problems with Esperanto is that the frequent
word "estas" is two syllables, whereas related languages have thing
like "est", "es", "é".
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
Rich Alderson
> Inflected languages do seem to have many irregularities, but that could be
> because the examples we have are of Indo-European languages like Sanskrit,
^^
> German and Latin. I wonder if there are any languages that are not
> Indo-European, and are they regular. Perhaps agglutinating languages like
> Turkish tend to be regular.
First off, didn't you mean to write "I" where you wrote "we"?
"Inflecting" languages can be agglutinative or synthetic; I think you mean
"synthetic" where you write "inflecting".
"Irregularities" are simply the historical remains of previous regularities
which have undergone (possibly multiple) systemic changes (usually but not
always phonological). Over time, such remnants are often remodeled into new
regularities. They are neither good nor bad, and while possibly irritating
to students are quite frequently the source of inspiration to the experts.
There are thousands of non-Indo-European languages in the world, many times as
many as there are Indo-European languages. Even if you left out a word such as
"synthetic" and intended to write
I wonder if there are any synthetic languages that are not Indo-European,
and are they regular?
the answer is still yes, there are hundreds of synthetic languages that are not
Indo-European in the world, for example the Kartvelian and Semitic families.
("Regular" is in the eye of the beholder, though. There are "irregularities"
in the agglutinative Finnish and Turkish.)
> The irregularities make it difficult to understand meanings sometimes.
Only for learners early in their exposure. After all, babies learn these
things without a day's devoted study, so it doesn't seem to be inherent in
"irregularities" to be difficult.
> Agreement between nouns and adjectives can make sentences less ambiguous.
Oh?
> Eurasiatic languages seem to be mostly agglutinating, with Indo-European the
> odd one out.
You've made quite a study of the question, then? I'd be interested to see the
statistics you've collected on the subject. In thirty-six years study of the
Indo-European languages, and of linguistics both historical and theoretical, I
don't recall having see that particular claim propounded, and I'd like a chance
to study your materials.
--
Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon |
ne...@alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against |
"You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and |
--Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
Lee Sau Dan
Ruud> 22 Dec 2005 06:47:28 -0800: gdv...@yahoo.com: in sci.lang:
>> I don't think irregularities make a language more compact.
Ruud> I do think so. One of the problems with Esperanto is that
Ruud> the frequent word "estas" is two syllables, whereas related
Ruud> languages have thing like "est", "es", "é".
And it Spanish/Italian, the inflect form already indicates the person,
so that the personal pronoun for the subject can be, and usually is,
omitted. e.g. "ho" means "I have" in Spanish/Italian. "ha" means
"you have"; "he" means "he/she/it has".
--
Lee Sau Dan
Lee Sau Dan
gdvbqz> Try dividing 12 by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Now try dividing 10 by
gdvbqz> 2, 3, 4 and 6. Base 10 is good for expressing half and
gdvbqz> one-fifth, but not a third or a quarter or a sixth. So
gdvbqz> base 12 is better than base 10.
How is base 12 better than base 10, if the former cannot be divided by
5?
gdvbqz> If only those clever people in Baghdad had changed the
gdvbqz> Indian system from base 10 to base 12 before they passed
gdvbqz> it onto us. They could have saved us a lot of trouble.
You should have advocated base 60, then, because 60 is divisible by 2,
3, 4, 5, 6.
But why discriminate the number 7, then? why don't we use base 420?
Base 10 (or 20) has something natural in it: we have 10 fingers (and
10 toes). Base 5 could work well, too!
Peter T. Daniels
>
> gdv...@yahoo.com writes:
>
> > Inflected languages do seem to have many irregularities, but that could be
> > because the examples we have are of Indo-European languages like Sanskrit,
> ^^
> > German and Latin. I wonder if there are any languages that are not
> > Indo-European, and are they regular. Perhaps agglutinating languages like
> > Turkish tend to be regular.
> "Inflecting" languages can be agglutinative or synthetic; I think you mean
> "synthetic" where you write "inflecting".
In the grand 19th-century typology that the cranks like to continue to
pretend has some great philosophical significance, the categories were
inflecting, agglutinating, and isolating. The first were IE and Semitic,
the second "Ural-Altaic," and the third Chinese.
Subsequently, the British discovered southern India and "polysynthetic"
was added to the canonical list. (It was also good for the Northwest
Coast languages that came along a little later.)
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
gdv...@yahoo.com
'est' is more compact than 'estas', and I agree that inflected
languages seem to be more compact than agglutinating languages. If only
word endings always had the same meaning (or set of meanings) there
would be no problem. However, I seem to remember that in Sanskrit the
word ending for neuter words is the same for the nominative as it is
for the accusative. I think this may be true for Latin too? This is not
true for masculine and feminine words in Sanskrit. This is what I mean
by irregularity and there are many other examples of it. They can make
sentences ambiguous. Irregularity adds complexity to a language,
complexity that adds nothing to meaning but detracts from it.
gdv...@yahoo.com
>"synthetic" where you write "inflecting".
Your terminology is different from mine and may be more up to date.
>> The irregularities make it difficult to understand meanings sometimes.
>Only for learners early in their exposure. After all, babies learn these
>things without a day's devoted study, so it doesn't seem to be inherent in
>"irregularities" to be difficult.
I am quite certain that in any language, because of the structure of
that language, people will encounter ambiguities in statements. In
Sanskrit there are some word endings that are shared between nominative
and accusitive, or between dative and ablative. Irregularities of this
sort make statements difficult to understand sometimes for anyone.
>> Eurasiatic languages seem to be mostly agglutinating, with Indo-European the
>> odd one out.
>You've made quite a study of the question, then? I'd be interested to see the
>statistics you've collected on the subject. In thirty-six years study of the
>Indo-European languages, and of linguistics both historical and theoretical, I
>don't recall having see that particular claim propounded, and I'd like a chance
>to study your materials.
This is a discussion group where there is room for speculation.
Ruud Harmsen
>(...) I seem to remember that in Sanskrit the
>word ending for neuter words is the same for the nominative as it is
>for the accusative. I think this may be true for Latin too?
And probably in every other IE language that still has inflection.
German, Old English; Icelandic?
Must be very old. I read some theory about that somewhere, Can't
remember where.
Joachim Pense
That's indeed very old (and I think it is one of the very few rules without
an exception, at least in Latin). It goes back to early PIE, where neuter
words (the "inanimate" class, vs. the animate, originally not yet divided
into masculine and feminite) could not be the subject of a transitive
sentence; hence they did not have a nominative case.
The IE languages developed ways to talk about inanimate agents: In Hittite,
the instrumental became an ergative case; in most other IE languages, the
accusative developed a second function as a nominative.
Joachim
Helmut Richter
Rich Alderson wrote:
> There are thousands of non-Indo-European languages in the world, many times as
> many as there are Indo-European languages. Even if you left out a word such as
> "synthetic" and intended to write
>
> I wonder if there are any synthetic languages that are not Indo-European,
> and are they regular?
>
> the answer is still yes, there are hundreds of synthetic languages that are not
> Indo-European in the world, for example the Kartvelian and Semitic families.
When reading a Georgian grammar, my impression was that "agglutinative"
fits quite well, and "synthetic" less so.
> ("Regular" is in the eye of the beholder, though.
Of all features of languages that contribute to what is perceived as
complexity, morphological irregularity is probably the only one that is
measurable at least to some extent, and insofar less "in the eye of the
beholder" than purported complexity of word order or vocabulary or
phonology of a language.
> There are "irregularities"
> in the agglutinative Finnish and Turkish.)
The question was not whether agglutinative languages are free from any
irregularity but whether there are synthetic languages that have a similar
low level of irregularity as, for instance, Finnish and Turkish. *Such*
languages would have been better examples to counter the message that
synthetic languages are generally the less regular ones.
Helmut Richter
Odysseus
>
<snip>
> Try dividing 12 by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Now try dividing 10 by 2, 3, 4 and 6.
> Base 10 is good for expressing half and one-fifth, but not a third or a
> quarter or a sixth. So base 12 is better than base 10.
As Lee and others have pointed out, your "better" is arbitrary and
subjective. It's true that 12 has more factors than 10 does (in an
old-fashioned classification system 12 is called "abundant" while 10
is "deficient"), but that's not the only criterion for the utility or
"goodness" of number bases. For a couple of criteria under which the
decimal system is arguably "better", the duodecimal system requires
two more distinct symbols for its digits, and it's difficult to make
it work with finger-counting. Any choice of base will have certain
advantages and disadvantages for a given purpose -- just as each
language has more efficient, precise, or subtly nuanced means of
expressing certain ideas than would be possible in others. But only
chauvinists will insist that any one language is objectively or
universally "better" than the others.
--
Odysseus
Joe Bernstein
and over the next few days in response to old posts, here and on
soc.history.ancient (but with similar groups of people reading, far
as I can tell). Basically, various conversations had reached points
where, to contribute, I'd have to go to libraries, and I hadn't made
time to do that. My apologies for the delays.
In this case, this is my first comment on the topic, anyway.
In article <1133668171.9...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Ken Quirici <ken.q...@excite.com> wrote:
> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
[and I suspect, but am not sure, that this next bit is Ken Quirici
again...]
> > > BTW, my Penguin Atlas of Ancient History show trade up til around
[this is the solo work of one Colin McEvedy]
> > > 230 AD funnelling thru Petra, primarily coming from Italy/Rome
> > > (actually it seems to show ALL trade to Petra coming from Rome). But
> > > by 362 AD, all the western trade to Arabia has been replaced by trade
> > > funnelled thru Constantinople, and Petra seems to be gone.There's just
> > > routes from the Egyptian and Palestinian coasts gathering and
> > > running down along the Red Sea coast of Arabia. All of which confirms
> > > your above.
> > That's very intriguing - I wonder what caused the shift at that time.
> I would imagine it was the shift of power to the Eastern Empire, which
> had by far the greater population and economic size. Rough-cut theory.
The shift is probably an artifact of historical assumptions as mixed
with archaeology.
Two different coffee table type books I consulted about Petra said
the same thing. Roughly: 'People used to think Petra had died, as
shown by archaeology, because of the earthquake during Julian's reign,
as proposed by history; but they thought wrong, as newer digs have
shown.' That said, both books also do acknowledge that Petra was not
as thriving after the quake. (The books' authors are Glenn Markoe and
Jane Taylor.)
Now, *my* copy of the Penguin Atlas is the first edition, not the
more recent revised one; I don't know whether McEvedy has taken into
account the more recent digs, nor whether he studied them to figure
out whether a) Petra was still big enough post-360 to show on his
maps (which show trade *routes* but show *cities* by a strict
criterion of population as estimated by McEvedy), and b) it still
had enough trade to justify showing a trade route through it. In
other words, he could have known, when doing the new edition, that
Petra survived the quake, but *still* have decided that it didn't
need to be on the AD 362 map. Or the new edition could show Petra
on that map, for all I know.
But anyway, the obvious explanation for Petra's absence from the
*first* edition's AD 362 map is the simple one: as of then, people
still thought the earthquake had done the town in.
And *that* said, McEvedy does offer even in the first edition an
explanation for the trade route shift: "Arabian trade suffered
from the loss of the Indian transit traffic [due to discovery of
the monsoon winds]; the Nabataeans' importance declined and the
emphasis shifted north towards the boom towns of Palmyra and
Hatra on the last stretch of the silk route." This is from the
text accompanying the AD 230 map of towns and trade.
(Um. Further, I note that the trade routes shown on the two maps,
AD 230 and AD 362, are as regards Arabia pretty much the same,
which is good because the monsoon winds were known long before
AD 230! I was going to spin some kind of theory about the Sasanids
or the Ethiopians interfering with Yemen trade, but McEvedy isn't
going to back me up, so I guess I won't. Looks like the *only* shift
under discussion is Petra's vanishment, on which see above.)
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
Joe Bernstein
Andrew Dalby <akd...@hotmail.com> wrote:
[quoting Neeraj Mathur]
> >the (limited) export of Buddhism. No other Indian
> > culture seems to look outward ...
> 1. Not so limited. Buddhism was also exported to China, whence many
> pilgrims made journeys to Buddhist holy places in India in medieval
> times. There was continuing cultural exchange, with massive translation
> of the massive Buddhist (Mahayana) scriptures, over many centuries.
> Then Tibet, Mongolia, Japan ...
This is, um, loose.
Near as I can tell, *direct from India* conversions would be Central
Asia and China. Maybe Tibet. Mongolia and Japan definitely did not
convert from India.
I don't know, though, what the story is as regards (continental)
Southeast Asia.
Item by item:
Central Asia is certainly a case of direct conversion from India
(taken as including Pakistan). We know appallingly little about
the process but there's no real alternative, and the schools
represented in Central Asia tended to be those prominent in the
northwest of the subcontinent anyway, providing a good corroboration.
Obvious candidates for the conversion role would be Asoka and the
Yavanas (that's Greeks to you non-Indologists). The Kusanas are
also appealing but are somewhat too late to have begun the process.
The problem with Asoka is that none of the actual evidence of
Buddhism really present in Central Asia dates to his reign, but
this isn't insuperable. It's certainly possible that Asoka's
initial efforts bore little fruit, but enough so that the Bactrian
Greeks later took to Buddhism in a big way.
China, oddly enough, is *not* primarily a case of conversion from
Central Asia. The Chinese did in fact get several major texts in
Central Asian versions (yet another thing "Half of Asia" on my
website has details on), but by and large they were clueful enough
to want to go to the source. Perhaps two thirds of their translators
came *from* Central Asia, but they translated primarily Sanskrit
texts, and several crucial people came from at least Kashmir and
Pakistan, if not from India proper. All of that said, we do know
a fair amount about the Chinese experience, and from what little
I've read, it was originally a Central Asian initiative, followed
by enthusiastic Chinese activity; while a few Indian scholars went
to China, by and large, there was very little effort put forth
*from India* to make things happen.
Tibet I don't know a *lot* about, but it got its Buddhism pretty
specifically from Nepal, so it depends on whether smooshing Pakistan
into India means also smooshing Nepal into India.
Mongolia got its Buddhism from Tibet. Duh.
Japan got its Buddhism from Korea and China. If any Japanese ever
went to India for texts before the Meiji Restoration, it's news to
me. Note that by the time the Japanese got interested, China had
a huge supply of Sanskrit material anyway. But most Japanese
Buddhism has always been in sects with limited actual Indian source
support anyway.
> 3. To go back to a Buddhist (converted) monarch, Asoka claimed in his
> inscriptions to have introduced various aspects of civilization
> (including some medicinal herbs, the point that originally interested
> me, but also charitable works more generally) to the Greek states to
> his west, at least as far west as Libya and Anatolia.
OK, this is true.
Joe Bernstein
John Briggs <john.b...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote: [and again...]
> >>> The cult of the Great Mother (Cybele, I think) was long
> >>> illegal in Rome itself, but not proscribed in the East. And...
> >> It depends what you mean by illegal - the worship of Cybele (Magna
> >> Mater) was formally inaugurated at Rome in 203 BC.
> > Huh. Do I have the wrong goddess, or did I remember completely wrong?
> > I remember that the particular religion in question is the one with
> > priests who castrated themselves, and that at least one ornery Cato
> > railed against it. But it's been a *long* time since I looked at
> > Roman religion...
> You're remembering it slightly wrong :-)
OK, fine. So I went and looked it up myself. Looks like there
were weird restrictions - notably, no Roman citizen could do the
self-castration thing - but in general, I was off base.
See p. 200 in "Religious Toleration in Republican Rome" by John North,
which is pp. 199-219 of <Roman Religion> ed. Clifford Ando, a volume
in <Edinburgh Readings on the Ancient World> ed. Michele George and
Thomas Harrison. [Edinburgh]: Edinburgh University Press, c 2003.
Original publication, however, <Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society>, 25: 85-103, 1979.
Joe Bernstein
<jimb...@hevanet.com> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > ... there's the Burushaski of Afghanistan, who I've
> > heard were still practicing a religion derived from (older forms of)
> > Greek paganism in the 19th century.
> Do you mean the Kalash people?
No, but whether or not I did, what I'd heard was apparently wrong.
The deal, apparently, is that there used to be a whole lot of pagans
with various religious beliefs and practices in the Hindu Kush, holding
their own surrounded by Muslims. The general name in 19th century
colonialist English for these folks is Kaffirs. The Burushaski were
a specific Kaffir group. The Kalash were another such group, but a
relatively poorly regarded one driven to the fringes of the Kaffir
region. This, however, was fortunate for them, because when the
British agreed with the ruler of Afghanistan on a border, the Kalash
were on the British side of it, and so did not experience the Afghan
ruler's genocide of the pagans. (To be more precise, he killed the men,
dispersed the women, and sent the kids off to be brought up as Muslims,
also dispersed. At least that's what the book I looked at about the
Kalash claimed; I saw comments elsewhere to the effect that this
genocide wasn't as complete as this, but not substantiated.)
Anyway, though, I went through a bunch of books with varying degrees
of diligence and without finding anything specifically linking Kaffir
religions with Greek. There were comments to the effect that the
Kaffirs were Noble Savages comparable to the ancient Greeks in some
of the 19th century stuff; there was speculation in ditto that
individual groups could be *descended* from Alexander's men, though
I didn't find any Western writer who took this seriously (apparently
it's a claim made by some 19th century Kaffirs, possibly under the
influence of rumours about Alexander rather than actual tradition).
But nothing saying "Sure, Kaffir God X is Zeus in disguise." And
most of the religions seem way more structured than anything I'd
think of as Hellenic or Hellenistic paganism - they basically all
seemed to be systems with one male and one female god, possibly
with various subordinate demigods/fairies/demons.
Karl Jettmar has written a comprehensive study of the religions of
the Kaffirs, but, well, it's in German, and my German is pretty weak.
So I looked at the section on the Burushaski, but aside from a
general sense "This doesn't look Greek to me!" didn't get a lot out
of it; anyway Jettmar's treatment of the Burushaski is more or less
as an appendage to his more extensive treatment of a different group.
Joe Bernstein
deeply disappointed - I thought the survival of Hellenic paganism
to the 19th century was just WAY COOL, so without intending any
disrespect to Kaffir religions, I really think this is a bummer...
Joe Bernstein
<neem...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Joe Bernstein" <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
> news:dncedb$7q0$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> > If you want, I'll provide references. There's actually an entire
> > book specifically on "just how and when did the Zoroastrians convert?"
> I asked earlier if anybody could offer some relevant bibliography, so
> if you could post some books, I'd be very interested (not to 'check
> your references', but just to further my knowledge).
Well, OK.
I don't have a lot, though. My research on these regions has been
profoundly scattershot, prompted by a cascade of different specific
tasks, but the period AD 630 to 1000 is pretty much a global hole in
my knowledge, and certainly so for the areas now Muslim.
But I do have this much:
For the conversion specifically, approached in terms that will
doubtless be familiar to you: <Conflict and Cooperation:
Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian
Society>. Jamsheed K. Choksy. New York: Columbia University
Press, c 1997.
For the major Zoroastrian works written between the 8th and 10th
centuries AD, um, this is a standard feature of *any* account of
Middle Persian literature, because the physical majority *of*
that literature is composed of the books in question. I list
a whole bunch of these accounts in the relevant bit of <Half of
Asia>, but my *guess* is that the easily found <Persian Literature>
ed. Ehsan Yarshater would do the job. Or you could just go to
the venerable old "Sacred Books of the East" series and look at
the Dinkard or however they spell it, and the other Zoroastrian
books therein *other* than the Zend-Avesta itself.
One warning, though: This is one of the few topics for which the
<Cambridge History of Iran> is manifestly inadequate. Literature,
in particular, is bizarrely divided: non-Muslim writings up to
the 1100s or so are in the Sasanid volume, while the early Caliphate
volume covers only Muslim writings. I *think* but am not sure that
the early Caliphate volume is similarly blinkered as regards non-
Muslims under the Caliphate.
> You talk about 'the benefits of converting'; my understanding was that
> various taxes were applied to non-Muslims (as compensation for not
> serving in the army, which they were forbidden to do). I associated
> this with the sorts of taxes that Aurangzeb reintroduced in India,
> that Akbar had abolished. These were always presented to me as being
> an especially grievous form of oppression of non-Muslim communities,
> causing much suffering and hardship. I back-imputed this to the
> Caliphate; what was the situation like under them? What was their
> economic policy vis-a-vis their conquered peoples, and how oppressive
> would it have been perceived as being? Put another way, were the
> incentives to conversion based on positives (like baby bonuses in the
> past in Canada), or negatives (like the persecution under Aurangzeb)?
Well... I don't have references to offer on this, just bloviation.
Which I think is to be expected based on what I said above. So
please allow me to bloviate at some length...
1. There are grievous forms of oppression and then there are
grievous forms of oppression. In this case, let's compare.
Umar after Khusrau II or Heraclius. Let's see, would I rather pay a
tax and stop building new houses of worship, or would I rather be
subject to arrest, torture, and execution? Gosh, this is a *tough*
decision... Now, admittedly Zoroastrians who had been Sasanid
subjects (as "Melkites", what we would call "Orthodox", who had
been Roman subjects) would find the transition to second class
galling. I mean, think about it - which is worse for a warrior caste
(and the Sasanids had castes), paying a tax, or being barred from
the military? But still, as oppression goes, Muslim oppression in
the 7th century was a *much* better deal than Christian or
Zoroastrian oppression was.
Aurangzeb after [Shahjahan after Jahangir after] Akbar. Let's see,
would I rather pay a tax and stop building new houses of worship,
oh, *and* give up a bunch of houses of worship too, or would I
rather live my life in peace and quiet? Gosh, this is a *tough*
decision...
So, you see.
2. I'd be pretty shocked if the jizya taxes under Aurangzeb were
identical to those under Umar or Uthman. I don't have any actual
evidence at all here, but seems to me, naively, that since in Islam
the kind of religious disagreement you do with theology in Christianity
or Buddhism gets done instead with law, it logically follows that for
any given topic of Muslim law - such as jizya - there are likely to
be, um, different approaches that could be taken. And if I were
Umar, trying to govern an immense polyglot empire most of whose
people were used to a significantly more organised form of existence
than I myself came from, I'd probably take a different approach from
the one that Aurangzeb, trying to piss off as many people as possible,
would choose. But hey, maybe I'm just wrong about all this.
3. It's not obvious to me that it's possible to classify all the
incentives to conversion as positive or negative. "Unable to
serve in the army" means one thing to members of the Sasanid
military caste, another thing to merchants, and a third thing to
kids running away from farms, for example.
4. In the relatively small numbers of Melkite Christians in the
areas Umar and Uthman conquered from Rome, we see that governments
couldn't just dictate religion to their peoples and always make it
stick. So maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that nevertheless,
there were probably a lot of people in Iran who were Zoroastrian
just because it was the thing to do. (Zoroastrianism never really
encouraged conversion, so I don't think this was as much a reality
in Iraq.) These people would've converted for more or less *any*
benefits, over time.
OK, that's probably enough bloviation. Choksy has actual info.
Joe Bernstein