Balashon discusses an interesting development in Hebrew:
I recently came across an early draft of the speech my son prepared for his bar mitzva, ten years ago this month. It was rather nostalgic to see it again. And while I enjoyed hearing his points, I was actually more fascinated with the typos and misspellings in this first draft. On the one hand, they prove that he actually wrote the speech himself, which was impressive for a 13 year old. But it also was cute to enter the mind of a kid who grew up in Israel, spoke English at home, and tried to straddle both worlds when writing his speech.
One of the most curious phrases he used was “the tearing of the Red Sea.” Normally, in English we say “the splitting of the Red Sea.” But he directly translated the Hebrew phrase kriyat yam suf קריעת ים סוף. The verb kriya, from the root קרע, means “to tear” and so in the literal sense, his translation to English was logical.
But this actually brings us to a more substantial question. Why do we call it kriyat yam suf? In the Bible, the verbs used to describe the splitting of the sea are baka בקע (as in Shemot 14:16, 21, Tehillim 78:13 and Nechemiah 9:11), or less frequently, gazar גזר (as in Tehillim 136:13). Both roots mean to split, with various nuances. So why did Rabbinic Hebrew (like in the Dayenu song found in the Haggadah) prefer a different Biblical root: kara?
I found a detailed discussion of the question in this article […] The author, Tzion Okashi, focuses primarily on the distinction between baka and kara, and suggests two possible reasons for the later use of kara. One might be from Aramaic influence, as is frequently found in words adopted in Rabbinic Hebrew. He point out that the Aramaic translations of the Bible use the root בזע to translate both בקע and קרע, which may have led to the shift of one usage to the other.
The other answer I found more interesting. He says this is due to a change in the perception of the nature of the event. While the Torah uses the word baka, that is generally applied to the splitting of a solid, hard object, like a rock or a block of wood. That type of splitting can not be repaired or restored. The action of kriya, however, is associated with the tearing of softer items like garments (as is practiced, for example, in Jewish mourning.) According to this theory, those who preferred to refer to kriyat yam suf visualized the sea closing up on itself after the split. The split was not permanent, just as clothing can be repaired, or a zipper can close the opening in a garment. Okashi writes that the Tanach chose to focus on the force of the miracle, which split the sea as one would break open a block of wood, while the Sages preferred the image of the water letting Israel pass through, only to close upon the pursuing Egyptians.
I’m curious about “the splitting of the Red Sea”; it seems to me “the parting of the Red Sea” is much more common in English. Is “splitting” common in Jewish usage?
i don’t think i’ve heard “splitting” – but i’m very rarely in a synagogue space, where the usage is more likely to be different from the general (christian) u.s. version.
I’ve heard “splitting of the Red Sea” before, but not frequently enough that it doesn’t sound distinctly odd.
[For some reasons I cannot edit my previous comment.]
I did a quick Google search, with a query that included “parting of the sea,” but not the word “split,” and this article by an American Conservative Rabbi and professor, which consistently uses “splitting,” was on the first page of results. So this clearly is a usage that some in the English-speaking Jewish community prefer, although I suspect that, in spite of the subtleties Balashon mentions, it arose as a calque from Hebrew.
[And now, after posting this second comment, both comments are editable. Weird.]
The New JPS translation (1985) of Exodus uses split to translate וּבְקָעֵהוּ ûḇqāʿēhû “and split it”:
https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.14.16?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Similarly, to translate וַיִּבָּקְעוּ wayyibbāqəʿû “were split”:
https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.14.21?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Similarly, in בָּקַע bāqaʿ “he split” in Psalms:
https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.78.13?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
And בָּקַעְתָּ bāqaʿtā “you split” in Nehemiah:
https://www.sefaria.org/Nehemiah.9.11?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
The NJPS translation uses part twice in II Kings 2, when Elijah parts the waters, to translate וַיֵּֽחָצוּ wayyēḥāṣû “(the waters) parted”, with the verb חָצָה ḥāṣāh:
https://www.sefaria.org/II_Kings.2.8?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
https://www.sefaria.org/II_Kings.2.14?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
The ever-useful Sefaria has a number of English translations of the Haggadah. The translation of קרע qāra‘ in the Dayenu (‘it would suffice us’) recitation is “cloven” in the first English Haggadah (Alexander 1787), “divided” in five 19th century versions (Levi 1837 through Green 1897), and “split” in Sefaria’s own, recent version. There are probably many 20th century translations but I haven’t checked those.
Green’s 1897 translation bowdlerized “Who knows nine? Nine are the months of birth” to “There are the nine Jewish Feasts” (while keeping the original Hebrew intact), as “more in consonance with our modern ideas of what is adapted for the perusal of children.”
Victorians were weird.
Wow, that’s really something.
Elie and Marion Wiesel’s 1993 version has “parted”.
Scherman’s Family Haggadah (1981/2008) has “split”.
Riskin’s 1983 version has “divided”.
Etc. etc. The 20th century saw a proliferation of English Haggadahs, from traditional to hippie to communist, Passover being the warmest and fuzziest holiday of the Jewish year, the last to be abandoned by the non-religious. So much so that it took me decades to realize how vicious some parts of the haggadah are.
Y – I wrote up a one page description of Hanukkah for my son’s non-Jewish girlfriend, who had no religious education at all, complete with illustrations (“Hanukkah on a Page”), and she gave it to her parents, who loved it. So I did one for Purim, and then Passover. And they liked them, but, my son told me in confidence, they’re a little bit disturbed by all the killing.
from all this, i wouldn’t be surprised if the appearance of “split” rather than “parted” has to do with the new emphasis in the late 20thC on english translations of the tanakh constructed to maximize their difference from the king james version bible and other widespread english renditions of the christian text. and, of course, with the process (that i apparently can’t stop bringing up, b”sh soloveitchik) of substituting literalistic text-fetishism for established community practice.
In this two part essay, I spoke about the different Hebrew words used to describe the “splitting of the sea” and the nuances between those terms:
Part 1 – https://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/8211
Part 2 – https://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/8220
literalistic text-fetishism
The examples suggest that these translations may be the work of people who imagine that “correct” translation entails always using the “same word” in the translation to correspond to the “same word” in the original. Quite a number of modern Christian translations*, at least, explicitly strive to do this. The basic conceptual blunder involved was explicitly repudiated already by the translators of the Authorised/King James Version.
* Of the kind characterised by an attitude to the text which is not so much reverent as outright superstitious. The translators almost always describe them as being more “accurate” than competing versions.
i wouldn’t be surprised if the appearance of “split” rather than “parted” has to do with the new emphasis in the late 20thC on english translations of the tanakh constructed to maximize their difference from the king james version bible and other widespread english renditions of the christian text.
Yes, this had occurred to me too.
[And now, after posting this second comment, both comments are editable. Weird.]
I have been exploiting this for years. For reasons I have not succeeding in identifying, it happens not infrequently that, some time after I add a post and well within the edit time (for example, with 12 minutes remaining), the “Click to Edit” field/icon disappears. It disappears when I leave the page and return, or stay on the page and do a “refresh” – but not always.
When this happens, I add a second post with only an “x” in the text box. This reactivates the “Click to Edit” field/icon in the first post. After editing it, I delete the second post.
I reported this long ago in a post that, apparently, not many people saw or heeded. This surprises me no more than it would have surprised Eeyore in my place.
As I just noticed, the “Click to Edit” field/icon sometimes fails to reappear after editing a post and pressing “Save”.
I now suspect the following: at least two Javascript callback functions and a “race condition”. In other words, somebody has a tenuous understanding of how to deal with asynchronous processes in Javascript programs.
It’s a common failing, surprisingly, given that everyday life is crawling with asynchronicity. It often starts when you wake up before the alarm goes off – having been woken by the dog, whose circadian clock has busted.
— The root qr‘ ‘to tear’, I hazard to say, does not refer necessarily to soft material, even less so to something than can be reattached. Rather, as in English, it emphasizes a sideways motion in taking something into two pieces. bq‘, like English ‘split’, refers to a crack opening by itself (like the earth splitting open and disposing of Qoraḥ) or, in the causative, by others (Abraham splitting wood for the sacrificial pyre).
The vivid story of Moses and the Red Sea must have been told endlessly and vividly with many variations, up to and past Charlton Heston. Perhaps in some he motions the sea apart by spreading his hands, and in others with a downward splitting motion. The use of a different verb in the Rabbinic version could reflect another oral version of the story.
— I’m guessing that the use of ‘split’ in later English versions simply reflects a desire for a more accurate translation of the Hebrew source, just as has happened with biblical translations, as well as avoiding the slightly archaic verb ‘to part’.
The event is a theme reservoir for theopoesy. [I refer to Sloterdijk’s latest book Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen, and a Luhmann quote therein.]
“biblical translations” – Christian translations of Exodus systematically have “divide” (Russian too).
Often expressions evolve because perception, usage and context evolves. It is of course, more interesting if what has changed in this case was symbolism rather than langage, but my first idea would be Aramaic (this rather impies than excludes new visualization and new metaphor. cf. Y above). And Hebrew itself is hardly fully static. Enlgish “to split” can figuratively mean “divide”. This can make “splitting of the sea” more acceptable than it could be if “split” were a wood-only verb. The more common this abstract meaning is, the more acceptable (if not desirable) the literal tranlation becomes.
For Exodus 14:16 web-Septuagint has ῥῆξον. Aorist Active Imperative 2nd Person Singular. I still do not know where I to look conveniently all the recensions (I still want to figure this out: the Bible is the source of too many things in Russian), so thus far I am limiting myself to study Bibles. The source of all knowlege gives “break asunder, tear, rend, shatter” for this verb. And passive “to be inscribed”. link.
When this happens, I add a second post with only an “x” in the text box. This reactivates the “Click to Edit” field/icon in the first post. After editing it, I delete the second post.
Fairly consistent for me as well, but I hadn’t thought of making the second post symbolic – thanks for the idea!
In the second chapter of 2 Kings the waters of the Jordan are (in the KJV) “divided” at the intervention of Elijah in verse 8 but are then subsequently “parted” at the intervention of Elisha 6 verses later. Are there two different Hebrew verbs in play (and if so is there elaborate rabbinical commentary about the subtle differences between them), or were the KJV translators engaging in elegant variation rather than fall into the always-same-English-word-for-any-given-Hebrew-word trap?
At least in English what happens to the Jordan (to allow passage over it as if dry ground) in chapters 3 through 5 of Joshua seems quite different from both this and the Exodus passage, i.e. rather than the waters being split/divided/parted, the water upstream suddenly halts and accumulates while the water at the crossing point continues to flow downstream thus predictably leading to a bare riverbed just as if the upstream flow had been blocked by a dam rather than by the LORD. I don’t know what it means that the 2 Kings passage involves the same body of water as the Joshua passage but uses verbs more akin to the Exodus passage, but perhaps there is a voluminous specialized literature on the topic.
For Exodus 14:16 web-Septuagint has ῥῆξον.
A rhegmatogenous retinal detachment is one caused by a tear in the retina (as opposed to traction or exudation.)
I just felt that people should know.
Christian translations of Exodus systematically have “divide”
The 1588 Welsh Bible has hollta “split” (as in hollti blew “split hairs”, hollti coed “chop wood.”)
Are there two different Hebrew verbs in play
No. It’s the Niph’al of חצה “divide” both times.
The KJV translators expressly stated that they did not set out to translate the same word the same way every time.
I am grateful for the professional skill of the retinal surgeon who intervened before a retinal tear in my right eye managed to produce a rhegmatogenous detachment, but I have never quizzed him on his knowledge of Septuagint Greek. (By chance he is son-in-law to a now-retired Episcopalian bishop, of a generational cohort that definitely needed to show *some* proficiency in Greek in order to get through seminary, but it has been a long long time since you could assume the average American M.D. as opposed to M. DIv. had a >50% chance of an education that included Greek. Indeed when you go back far enough to the days when the median American with a bachelor’s degree had studied Greek you also reach the days when medical schools would admit applicants without a bachelor’s degree.)
In the LXX it looks vaguely like it’s probably two very different forms of the same Greek verb although I haven’t done the work to make sure that’s the case and it’s not a false-friend situation. I know the KJV translators did not adopt the same-word-every-time policy, but they likewise didn’t adopt a mandatory different-English-word-every-time-just-to-keep-things-interesting policy, so I am grateful to have clarity on what they did in this particular instance.
Doubtless this has been discussed by others, but Moses raising his arm over the sea and splitting it is paralleled later, in chapter 18, where he raises his staff to strike the rock and bring water out. This is told again in Numbers 20.
(The moral of the story is, read the instructions.)
The Welsh version in 2 Kings has two slightly different but obviously related and basically synonymous verbs meaning “become separate.” Elegant slight variation …
Incidentally, I should retract my ungracious implication above that the use of “split” in the Exodus translation is a manifestation of a braindead word-for-word transliteration strategy; this is plainly not the case here. JWB’s example shows very clearly (by contrast) that the original word in Exodus is not a colourless “divide”, and it seems entirely legitimate to go for a more dynamic sort of effect in translating it into English.
In the LXX it looks vaguely like it’s probably two very different forms of the same Greek verb
Nope, two different verbs: διῃρέθη 3sg. aor. pass. of διαιρέω in verse 8, διερράγησαν 3pl. aor. pass. of διαρρήγνυμι in verse 14. (The first verse has singular “water”, the second plural “waters”, with what would in classical Greek be an ungrammatical plural verb, since ὕδατα is neuter and should take singular agreement.)
The Vulgate has divisae sunt in both verses.
I appreciate the fact that my laziness has induced the provision of more accurate information by someone with better Greek than mine, viz. TR. Good to know that the LXX translators, who are often accused of wooden overliteralness, could mix in a little elegant variation when they wanted. But subtle variation, as if they were Welsh.
….and maybe they were!
Taylor Branch used “Parting the Waters”, and his work was my bible going back a few years.
baqa in the Old Testament (biblehub), 51 occurence: baqa
qara in the Old Testament, 63 occurences: qara
It looks like baqa is a general “bursting” root, while qara is a specialized clothing root. Curiously, most examples of metaphiorical use are Isaiah-Ezekiel-Hosea (it is maybe unsuprising) and in Jeremiah it looks like polysemy.
I woundn’t call qr‘ a ‘specialized clothing’ term any more than English rip or tear are.
Not necerssarily more so. In English you too use “break through”, where in Russian you “beat” or “tear” through (“break” is possible… and more intimately associated with cracking).
But when looking at baqa examples I can’t even confidently tell what meaning is basic. Baqa is applied to bottles or wineskins too, once with subsequent mending, Joshua 9:4:
… wə-nō-ḏō-wṯ ya-yin bā-lîm, ū-mə-ḇuq-qā-‘îm ū-mə-ṣō-rā-rîm.
… and wineskins old and torn and mended
Well, I will list examples for qara. Disclaimer: I am not trying to say a new word in Biblical criticism (I do not know the langauge!), but I am curious because Russian semantical space is so much shaped by the Bible.
(1) clothes (~43 times)
(2.1) metaphors with a clothing parallel
1 Samuel (2 times), 1 Kings (6 times), 2 Kings (1 time), God is speaking.
Tearing the kingdom or Israel out of Saul’s hand, Solomon’s son’s hand, house of David. Refers to two episodes. Both times accompanied by tearing a prophet’s clothes (and an explanation that the same will happen to the kingdom).
Ecclesiastes 3:7: “A time to rend, and a time to sew”
Ezekiel 13:20-21 (God is speaking):
And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls! Will ye hunt the souls of my people, and will ye save the souls alive that come unto you? And will ye pollute me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, to slay the souls that should not die, and to save the souls alive that should not live, by your lying to my people that hear your lies?
Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against your pillows, wherewith ye there hunt the souls to make them fly, and I will tear them from your arms, and will let the souls go, even the souls that ye hunt to make them fly. Your kerchiefs also will I tear, and deliver my people out of your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand to be hunted; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
Joel 2:13, (God is speaking):
“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning.” So rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the LORD your God. For He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion.
—-
(2.2) metaphors without a clothing parallel:
Psalm 35:15: “they tore me”
Isaiah 64:1 (prayer): “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down,…”
Hosea 13:8, (God is speaking):
I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend (qara: wə·’eq·ra‘)the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them (baqa: tə·ḇaq·qə·‘êm).
(3) other:
1 Kings 13:3 (God is speaking), 13:5: an althar will be/is “rent and the ashes poured out”.
Jeremiah 4:30: you enlarge your eyes with paint
Jeremiah 22:14: cut out windows for [palace]
Jeremiah 36:23 – Jeremiah 36:24: And as soon as Jehudi had read three or four columns, Jehoiakim would cut them off with a scribe’s knife and throw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll had been consumed by the fire. Yet in hearing all these words, the king and his servants did not become frightened or tear their garments.
My very impressionistic reading of BDB is that kara is about getting the two sides apart and baka focuses more on what apears in between the sides that come apart. In that sense baka is more fitting for parting the Red Sea because the focus is on the passage that opened up. Even if true, the mystery of why Rabbinic Hebrew switched to kara remains. They have already had the word written for them in the story, even if the subtleties of meaning were gone. Could it be that they focused more on the God’s power over the mighty river and less on the usefulness of this act for the Israelites?
@drasvi: It’s not Biblical, but the premier example of cloth as a religious metaphor may be this extended conceit from the Anglo-American poet, minister, and physician Edward Taylor (c.1642–1729).
Interestingly, Taylor, like Kafka, asked that his work not be published after his death, and his family complied. However, they did not destroy his bound composition books, and his poetry was eventually discovered and printed in the early twentieth century. It is unknown whether during his lifetime, Taylor’s poetry was purely a person exercise, or whether he shared his compositions with his circle of friends.
(For me personally, Taylor is associated with the realization that I had that my high school American Literature teacher was just not qualified to teach the class. She knew how to critique student writing, but she did not know enough about American history to teach a historical literature survey. Nor was she actually any good at analyzing literature; she admitted that she took the district-wide midterm exam herself before administering it to us—and scored a failing grade.)
While searching for something else, I came across an article that explains Exodus 14 as being another example of an interlace narrative from disparate sources (P and J), similar to that of the Noah and Ark story.
What Really Happened at the Sea
I note that they use the word “split” consistently to refer to and translate the Hebrew.
The other thing I was trying to search for was this:
Some time ago, I read an article which described the scene at the Red Sea, and said something like how strange it was that Pharaoh had not believed that there was a miracle taking place when the sea had split into twelve parts.
While I have vague memories of hearing or seeing this claim before, I was surprised to see it claimed as being what had “really” happened. This was a midrash, and like many midrashim, it is inconsistent with or contradictory to the text of the Tanach and/or with other midrashim. So why was the author writing as if the Midrash were true?
I have not yet found the original article, but I also wondered, where did the idea that the sea had split into twelve parts come from? It looks like it was Midrash Tanhuma:
https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Beshalach.10
Unfortunately, despite finding this, I am still confused: Neither the Hebrew text nor the English translation offer any clue as to why “twelve paths” is derived from the verse. Note that the English text here uses the word “divide” twice, even though the Hebrew has “neḥĕlaq” (was divided, or separated) when referring to the twelve paths, but cites the same word from Exodus usually translated as “split”. Regardless, whence twelve paths?
But perhaps the confabulatory aspect of midrash ought to not be examined too closely.
Maybe it recalls the tearing (qr‘) of a cloth into twelve pieces (1 Kings 11:30–31), symbolizing the dissolution of the Israelite kingdom.
but it is paths, שְׁבִילִים
Sure, but the twelve-ness of it is suggestive.
I confess I don’t understand exactly what “tore into twelve paths” means. Maybe twelve dry tunnels through the watery dome?
How would this fit with a theory* that the Exodus is a distorted or metaphorical account of the liberation of Canaan from Egyptian rule? Was it the land that split into petty states and allowed the Habiru tribes to (re)enter?
*) ‘Theory’ used in the meaning “my own unsubstantiated speculation”.
It wouldn’t: this is from the Midrash Tanhuma, an early medieval homiletic composition.
I know. But is there a way to suppose a preserved metaphorical understanding on the way to medieval homilies? (I’m showing my ignorance on a different level.)
I am ignorant too, but I imagine that by the time the Midrash was written, even old metaphors were built on the received biblical text. Maybe someone was envisioning the twelve tribes, each passing through its dedicated path.
That does sound more plausible.
@Trond Engen: What the Exodus narrative clearly does represent is a distorted retelling of the disastrous consequences of a major volcanic eruption. (The most likely culprit would be the Minoan eruption around 1620 B. C. E.) Whether that was associated with a departure of Semitic-speaking peoples from Egypt is much less clear (although there are reasons to think that there may have been population movements guided by the column of the eruption). If you set aside the order of events and look broadly miracles that are supposed to have occurred during the Exodus (the core of the story, the signs and wonders, from verses 7 to 14), most of them are things you would expect from a massive (volcanic explosivity index 7) eruption: fouling of the fresh waters; ecological disturbances, including vermin; dust that settles on the skin and causes boils; (burning) hail; darkness; large numbers of deaths; people slain by the withdrawal and return of the sea (i.e. a tidal wave); and a pillar that is made of smoke by day but glows like fire at night. The fact that this last one is described in the Torah as a guidepost for the Hebrews leaving Israel is the reason to think that there may really have been a group that migrated northward in response to the eruption, then further on to Canaan.
In Rabbinical tradition, the twelve paths across the sea are normally interpreted as being meant for the twelve tribes, which would make that a fairly late addition to the tradition, presumably even later than some of the other changes that were needed to transform the cultural memory of the miracles into an account of a managed exit from Egypt. Of course, there is also lots of other stuff that is fairly late by this measure. For example, Exodus 14, which is a real mishmosh (meaning it is hard to be really sure what Documentary source certain bits come from, although certain elements—for example, the hardening of the Egyptians’ hearts—are particularly associated with fairly well distinguised sources). For example, this breakdown splits verses 19 and 20 half each between the E and J sources. Some of that division looks pretty reliable, since there is a mention of the angel of the lord, which is a hallmark of E passages. However, even the putative J parts are clearly of variable age, since there is the bit about the pillar glowing like fire at night (at original aspect of the narrative), but J also places the pillar in the immediate vicinity of the Hebrews’ camp (marking it as a later elaboration of the story). An even later elaboration of the tradition has this pillar become the divine presence that hovers over the ark later in the Torah.
Perhaps in some he motions the sea apart by spreading his hands, and in others with a downward splitting motion. The use of a different verb in the Rabbinic version could reflect another oral version of the story.
i love this reading! and i’m excited to think with it about other texts (from the tanakh and elsewhere)…
—
@Brett:
judy grahn (in her latest, Eruptions of Inanna) reads enheduanna’s poem on inanna’s destruction of mount ebih as a depiction of the goddess as a volcanic eruption; she then (in the course of making a fascinating case for enheduanna’s inanna as a poetic or folkloric source for the job narrative) makes an argument for understanding leviathan as volcanic rather than cryptidic*. i think it deeply misses the point of any of these texts to try to make them into accounts of specific eruptions** [see peevery below], but the ancient eastern mediterranean clearly saw divine power and volcanos as tightly intertwined.
—
[peevery warning]
the one direction of inquiry that we know is useless for finding insight into the phrasing of the parting (or even the tearing) of the red sea is pretending that the mythic narrative has anything to do with actual events. we know there was no historical exodus. we know there was no historical ‘egyptian captivity’. (just as we know there was no roman expulsion of jews from palestine.) the semantics of qr‘ and bq‘ have much more to tell us than any attempt to transmute myth into history (and that’s why midrash is an ever-flowing well – as the collection of sources Reuven brought together shows so beautifully – and biblical archaeology and zionist historiography are pits of ash marked “this is not a place of honor”). which is not to say that (for example) the volcanic interpretation of the plagues isn’t compelling! just that what it is is a compelling angle of view to help understand what divine power meant to the creators and transmitters of a showstopper of a mythic narrative, not a way to identify a factual basis for a putative historical account.
[end peevery]
—
* which poses very substantial problems for the caterers at the messianic feast.
** at least until we can establish whether the inhabitants of thera spoke basque or welsh.
A 100,000 ft. column rising from the Thera volcano wouldn’t be visible from anywhere in Egypt, and whatever historical events are recorded in Exodus occurred centuries after that eruption.
rozele: the one direction of inquiry that we know is useless for finding insight into the phrasing of the parting (or even the tearing) of the red sea is pretending that the mythic narrative has anything to do with actual events. we know there was no historical exodus. we know there was no historical ‘egyptian captivity’. (just as we know there was no roman expulsion of jews from palestine.)
But it might be fruitful to explore if (and to which degree) actual documented events may have contributed to the narrative that was recorded after centuries of oral elaboration and politically motivated reinterpretation.
whether the inhabitants of thera spoke basque or welsh
Thera as in Santorini? IIRC the consensus is that they almost certainly spoke a dialect of (Mycenaean) Greek. I suppose that’s probably more closely related to Welsh than to Basque.
(Looking it up, Thera was in fact a Minoan rather than Mycenaean site [i.e. Linear A as opposed to Linear B], which does make the question a lot less clear. I’ve heard of the “Akrotiri” excavations but I thought they were from the British military base of Akrotiri on Cyprus.)
see peevery below
That’s fine peevery, and I’m glad I subscribe to your newsletter.
a depiction of the goddess as a volcanic eruption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funicul%C3%AC%2C_Funicul%C3%A0#Original_Neapolitan_lyrics
About layered texts, I just read a publication about one of our vaccines. There are three of them. One is good. It caused international outrage one year ago.:\ Another one does not seem so at all but its owners have good connections. Because of this, the top government officials used this vaccine:/ The third one is within its phase 3 but the developers are not willing to share information about the efficacy.
I read the preprint by the developers of the second vaccine. The trial involved a group of people who received placebo, but it is not even mentioned. What is mentioned is that among people who received the vaccine were 807 employes of Rospotrebnadzor (the main controlling body) and its institutions 37 of them known to have caught corona, 2 died – just within a few months since vaccination. No data for others than these 807, apart of that they also distributed a questionnaire. 516 people completed it, 71 of 516 said that they have been in contact with someone known to be infected, 3 of 71 caught it. In conclusion they proudly say: “95.8% of people with an established contact with a source of infection did not fell ill, which demonstrates the protective activity of the vaccine”.
I was perlexed, because it is like: “we will share no details, but it is even worse than Russian average”, and at the same time accompanied by promotion attempts. Then I realized that the person who wrote it was told to promote it – but does not represent the people who want to promote it and does not want to do that.
My take on the pracice of interpretating things like Exodus as misunderstood natural events is close to rozele’s. It’s 90% speculation at least, but the result masquerades as rigorous natural science. In the case of Exodus, it presumes that people living in the eastern Mediterranean basin did not know what a volcano is, and that they never figured out what had happened in the years and centuries after.
Actually no. 624 kilometers. In kilometers the approximate formula for the distance to the horizon is 113 km * √n, where n is your height in kilometers (as long as you are short compared to the Earth size:-))
A twice as tall column will be seen in Lower Egypt. In the north-west.
Wikipedia has the lat-long of Avaris, at or near the alleged land of Goshen (30°47′14.7″N 31°49′16.9″E), and also of Santorini/Thera caldera (36°23′44″N 25°27′33″E). The two points are 857km apart.
I don’t think there’s any reason to think that a vertical column of ejecta would stay vertical for very long, as opposed to expanding and dispersing.
And the glowing part would be shorter than the full column.
Someone else was wondering about the “twelve paths” question:
https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/25767/midrashic-sources-regarding-the-sea-splitting-into-twelve-paths
Although I don’t know the dating/direction of influence of those sources with respect to the Midrash Tanchuma (which is, oddly enough, not mentioned in the responses). At least some hint of reasoning exists for the extrapolation/exegesis/confabulation, by one commentator:
Thread won, day saved (6 minutes before midnight).
@Stu, most developers have a tenuous understanding of how computers do what they do, so ship anything that worked at least 2 of the first 5 times* they tested it. (I’m not a tester, can you even test asynchronous stuff or do you have to formal-prove it?)
_______
* I’ve been in the game for 42 years now. But the money’s good. However, “we can’t put your Perl code in production, there is no second pair of eyes.” Time to learn new tricks soon, maybe.
most developers have a tenuous understanding of how computers do what they do
Even for developers like thee and me, our understanding is based on how computers worked in the 1970s. The chips and compilers we have today work very hard to maintain that illusion, but are useless for understanding performance.
“biblical archaeology and zionist historiography are pits of ash marked “this is not a place of honor”)”
I am not interested in debating ideology on this language blog so I have been trying to ignore this comment, although it’s difficult not to take it as a personal attack.
I will say that Rozele is a kook, a member of the Naturei Karta of the left.
I think I will will take a break from language hat. It’s a pity, as I’ve enjoyed it for many years as a place to go when I just can’t bear politics anymore. But if it’s going to be a politics blog, I don’t need it – there are better places for that.
I won’t get into a political argument here either, because I like to come here to escape politics as well. I don’t even know exactly what rozele refers to, because it’s such a roundabout reference (“this is not a place of honor” is an obscure reference to long-lived radioactive waste sites) though I can guess, and if I have it right, I agree with the statement. Anyway, this never became a debate.
But it bothers me to have people here called names. I don’t remember the last time it happened. There have been some raised voices here, but they are about opinions, not about people. You call her comment “a personal attack” but I can’t see any trace of her saying anything about you personally or reacting to anything you said.
Besides, I like reading what rozele writes, and these specific insults (“kook”, “Neturei Karta of the left” [fundamentalist haredis who happen to be more anti-Zionist than most]) don’t make any sense to me.
I like reading what rozele writes
You are not alone …
(Incidentally, thanks for explaining the reference. The joke had gone over my head.)
People get triggered by the Z-word all the time.
“biblical archaeology and zionist historiography are pits of ash marked “this is not a place of honor”
I don’t even know 1) what this means and 2) why it is objectionable.
But I’m pretty ignorant of Judaism of any flavour. Perhaps rozele was having a go at Bloix; I simply can’t see it.
I was sad to see Noetica go, for reasons unknown, and now I’ll be sad if Bloix does too. Can’t we just accept that different people have different opinions, even if we find those opinions weird or objectionable? Hat and I have had a few dingdongs over the years but that hasn’t caused me to leave the group. This is a place where opinions are expressed, some more informative and intelligent than others, some wackier than others, some really take the cake, but they are (almost) always interesting. Can’t we all just listen, respond, and debate without taking umbrage at random comments?
* We had a more recent example of a commenter (his name has slipped my mind) leaving because of one random comment. He was a regular commenter and had intelligent things to say. It was a real loss to see him go.
Sometimes commenters get up people’s noses with loud-mouthed comments and eventually leave. One of them emailed me privately later with the view that Hat was only running this blog to drum up business. But even they had interesting things to say from time to time. I miss them all.
it’s difficult not to take it as a personal attack.
I will say that Rozele is a kook, a member of the Naturei Karta of the left.
You’re the only one making personal attacks, and I wish you’d knock it off. I’ll be sorry if you go, because I enjoy your contributions, but if you’re going to see politics in everything, you aren’t going to enjoy it anywhere as far as I can tell. Why not stick around and try to be less thin-skinned? Also, rozele is a treasure and I don’t like seeing her insulted (though I know she, a usenet veteran, can take it).
This is a place where opinions are expressed, some more informative and intelligent than others, some wackier than others, some really take the cake, but they are (almost) always interesting. Can’t we all just listen, respond, and debate without taking umbrage at random comments?
Hear, hear.
One of them emailed me privately later with the view that Hat was only running this blog to drum up business.
Ha! I wonder what kind of business they had in mind? I’ve been retired for years now. And back when I was working for an Evil Corporation, I had to hide the existence of the blog for fear of Consequences. People have some strange ideas!
Ha! I wonder what kind of business they had in mind?
‘Twas a decade ago, Hat.
As for the dispute at hand, Bloix says he wrote up a one-page description of Hanukkah for his son’s non-Jewish girlfriend. I assume that he finds rozele’s dismissive stance on the historicity of the Exodus story objectionable.
Predictably I’d never heard of Neturei Karta so I looked them up. They apparently call for a “peaceful dismantling” of the State of Israel because Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The state of Israel is therefore a rebellion against God. This makes them anti-Zionist. (Pretty heady stuff.)
Having been told once by Hat that disputes which seem ridiculous or trivial to us moderns were deadly serious to the ancients, I won’t dismiss such sensitivities as trivial. They are obviously important to the people involved. But surely there is a way to coexist despite differences.
Indeed.
For what it’s worth as background, I grew up with two brothers, and we had frequent arguments that our parents had no success in tamping down; I tended to make the kind of friends who liked to yell and throw around phrases like “You stupid idiot!,” which disconcerted my wife. I have no problem with heated debate. But I have aged into enough respectability that I prefer to keep attacks focused on ideas rather than people. When peevers show up here spouting silly ideas about language, I try to point out that their ideas are wrong without calling them bad people, though my vivid style of discourse may leave them feeling wounded anyway. Too bad! It’s a hard world out there, and we all need to absorb the lesson that we’re all wrong about almost everything almost all the time.
I am the opposite of some of the people above. I have to restrain my own politics when I’m here and I don’t especially like that, and sometimes I slip up. (And sometimes I stay away.) But I have many positive reasons for coming here, and am basically aware the the general absence of political topics makes the positive things possible.
I don’t see the absence of overt politics as apolitical though. It’s more like the (ever so reluctant) acceptance of the status quo.
There are multiple workable strategies for co-existence but they tend to require tacit agreement on which will be pursued in a given context – if everyone (or almost everyone, almost all of the time) does A that works, and likewise if they do B, but if half of them are trying to do A while the other half are trying to do B, instability will result. Unless you add C, which would be something like “if someone seems to be violating the tacit agreement at hand, consider ignoring them rather than rising to the bait, and see if that makes the problem go away.”
I don’t see the absence of overt politics as apolitical though. It’s more like the (ever so reluctant) acceptance of the status quo.
Which implies that if you don’t accept the status quo every single conversation you have, whether it’s about the weather, dinner, or language, has to explicitly involve politics. Which (with all due respect) is a silly idea. You just like arguing about politics. Which is fine! But don’t make it sound like a moral triumph.
I like arguing about politics too! But this isn’t the place for it.
I do remember thinking, when reading about Biblical archaeology, the Dead Sea scrolls, etc., that this area of intellectual enterprise, in the present state of the world, is a horrific snakepit, always already politicized, and the only way to remain safely civil on the topic is to never mention it at all. So I’m with rozele.
You don’t have to always talk about politics. But if you never do, that makes a statement. I very seldom talk about baseball, for example, or chemistry, but I don’t have the thought in the back of my mind “Never talk about baseball or chemistry”.
This rule has allowed LH to survive as a civilized forum far longer than any other blog I can think of, so I suppose it’s a good thing. But I do get restive.
I know you do, and believe me, I appreciate your restraint.
Bloix says he wrote up a one-page description of Hanukkah for his son’s non-Jewish girlfriend. I assume that he finds rozele’s dismissive stance on the historicity of the Exodus story objectionable.
Did you mean Passover? Hanukkah is referred to the Hellenistic period.
I will miss seeing Bloix’s contributions here (although, as I have mentioned before, I cross paths with him occasionally on other Web sites as well). I don’t always agree with his political views, but I respect them. Honestly, there are some other regular commenters here who have interesting contributions to make regarding linguistic issues, but whose opinions on politics—when they express them—I do not respect. However, I make a point not to get drawn into political discussions at this site. That’s not what this community is about, and I think too much overt politics could ruin the site.
There are of course well-known exceptions to the supposed “try to avoid overt politics” norm on this site, such as the “the more Welsh Supremacism the Merrier” loophole. To some extent any serious attempt to talk about historical linguistics is going to contradict some questionable-at-best historical claim that is important to some side of some nationalistic/irredentist/separatist/whateverist controversy. So trying to keep those discussions from getting derailed while still keeping them going on the linguistic question that has political consequences is a somewhat different goal than trying to eschew gratuitous “controversial politician-in-the-news so-and-so is a big poopyhead” remarks that would appear to have little salience to the topic at hand.
I don’t even consider those political. Welsh Supremacism is simply common sense, while nationalistic/irredentist/separatist/whateverist controversy I put in the same category as any other sort of peevery, to be squashed wherever possible.
The funny thing is that Rozele’s comment seemed to be a direct reply to Brett’s discussion of some possible ways in which the Exodus story might reflect actual, specific events. Brett seems to have taken Rozele’s reply philosophically, or maybe with some amusement, as I did. I tend to assume the Tanakh is close enough to history that it may over time be possible to tease out more of the historical basis behind it, but I still enjoyed Rozele’s tart overstatement of the other position. People are welcome to take offense at tart statements, but I was quite surprised Bloix would think it was directed at him.
What unites us is more important than what divides us.
We should all proceed together in harmony, united by our shared belief in the vacuousness of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.
I say more: we have more in common with our Chomskyite foes than with the canaille who cannot understand why anybody would care about such things at all. Yes, there is a place amongst us even for our deluded generative brethren.
*murmurs in civilized appreciation*
I was trying to write a comment on this latest disturbance in a cup of herbal tea, but all good points that I intended to make were already expressed. Biblical archeology and zionist historiography supported both by American Protestantism and the state of Israel are not in any danger so Rozele’s is pretty much “voice of one crying in the wilderness” (as they say it in Russia). The one point that surprised me is the supposed expultion of Jews from Palestine under Romans. I thought “zionist historiography” emphasizes continuous Jewish presence in Eretz Israel sinse time immemorial.
It’s always nice to have points of view different from one’s own forcefully expressed. A modicum of personal affront is a small price to pay for the educational value of a contrarian view.
Quite possibly there was some chain of free-associations within rozele’s mind that made it seem to fit, but from my POV the reference to “zionist historiography” didn’t really seem to me to flow particularly naturally from the prior discourse as an obvious companion to biblical archaeology but sort of came out of nowhere. (Part of my perspective as to why this seemed a non sequitur is an impressionistic sense that currently holding Zionist views is not particularly predictive of believing the OT narratives to be reasonably historically accurate. Heck, the average Palestinian Christian may be more likely to be an OT literalist than the average secularized Israeli Jew of hawkish political views. But maybe others have different views on that?)
People who bring up Zionism (in order to say something contentious about it) when no one was talking about Zionism, or who bring up some other hot-button issue, including one of different political valence, (in order ditto) when no one was talking about it, are predictably more likely to give offense than those who venture their contentious opinions on contentious subjects when they are more obviously salient to the prior discourse. How the predictably offended person (and sometimes it’s more predictable that someone will be than to predict who in the group it will specifically be) should best respond is a separate question, of course.
I came across the Bible archaeology problem in a Christian context. The book I was reading (possibly the Cambridge Bible Commentary) basically tried to accommodate recent archaeology to the Anglican tradition to the degree possible, without ever developing the possibility that archaeology had undermined the traditional interpretation in serious ways.
Just recently, I had occasion to remark how much archaeology can bring to philology. I was reading Benjamin J. Noonan’s Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact (2019) and found this treatment of Hebrew קִנָּמוֹן kinnāmôn:
“No evidence…”? This treatment is from 2019, but already beginning in 2013 important facts had been added to the dossier of Hebrew kinnāmôn by two interesting articles, on analysis of some small early Iron Age (11th–late 10th century BCE) Phoenician clay flasks in which some traces highly indicative of cinnamon (or cassia or malabathrum) were found. From Gilboa (2015) “On the Beginnings of South Asian Spice Trade with the Mediterranean Region: A Review” Radiocarbon 57(2):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275248879_On_the_Beginnings_of_South_Asian_Spice_Trade_with_the_Mediterranean_Region_A_Review
(Boldface mine.) I suppose the candidates for the aromatic in the flasks would be cinnamon, cassia, or malabathrum (C. malabathrum or C. tamala, Hindi तेज़ पत्ता tez pattā).
And here is an earlier publication of the same facts in Namdar et al. (2013), “Cinnamaldehyde in Early Iron Age Phoenician Flasks Raises the Possibility of Levantine Trade With South East Asia”, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 13:
http://dor.huji.ac.il/Download/Article/Namdar2013_MAA_13-2.pdf
It appears that these significant findings, if they still hold up, have been slow in becoming known to philologists. There is still the problem of what exactly Classical authors were describing and what exactly they could buy in the market when they used the words κιννάμωμον, κίνναμον, cinnamomum, cinnamum. (Maybe there was significant adulteration?) But now this Phoenician physical evidence has to be added to the dossier. I would be interested to know when physical traces of Cinnamomum first show up in Egyptian embalming practices.
Very interesting, thanks!
I thought “zionist historiography” emphasizes continuous Jewish presence in Eretz Israel since time immemorial.
…I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything like that being emphasized. In fact until I looked it up just now I hadn’t even realized that it was true; though in retrospect of course it was – there were Jewish communities approximately anywhere and would-be Israel was no exception.
Sorry, that should be qinnāmôn in the transliteration of the Hebrew (I shouldn’t have mixed modern and Biblical systems for קִנָּמוֹן .) Windows 10 text capture system works really well. I didn’t have to type any of that from Noonan!
Also, rozele is a treasure and I don’t like seeing her insulted
Yes, she is, and I don’t either, even if I phrased it more dryly.
[Neturei Karta] apparently call for a “peaceful dismantling” of the State of Israel because Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the coming of the Jewish Messiah.
A number of haredi groups find the Israeli state distasteful, and to various degrees have attempted to balance that distaste with the political and financial benefits the state gives them. Neturei Karta have been utterly uncompromising. Their embrace of the Palestinians does not come from any humanistic or liberal point of view: it is to publicly declare and demonstrate their complete disdain of Zionism.
the semantics of qr‘ and bq‘ have much more to tell us than any attempt to transmute myth into history (and that’s why midrash is an ever-flowing well – as the collection of sources Reuven brought together shows so beautifully – and biblical archaeology and zionist historiography are pits of ash marked “this is not a place of honor”)
Biblical archaeology and Zionist historiography are uncontroversially controversial. Both work under the pressure of myths which need preserving: for the one, the literalness of biblical history; for the other, the right to Jewish settlement in Palestine. Both mythologies have had to contend, first, with myth-free scientific treatments, and second, with reactioaries (e.g., respectively, the wholesale dismissal of biblical Judean history in the works of Israel Finkelstein; and the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi Jewish origins). The politicizing of these fields certainly makes them toxic in a sense.
That happens whenever any national foundation myths meet objective history. In the case of Israel it’s only that they have significant present-day practical implications.
I thought “zionist historiography” emphasizes continuous Jewish presence in Eretz Israel since time immemorial.
On the contrary: it emphasizes a reversal of the supposed casting away of the Jewish nation from its land two thousand years previously, by returning the diaspora to it.
Supposedly, the village of Peqi‘in (פְּקִיעִין) in the northern Galilee is the only place which has had continuous Jewish settlement from the era of the Second Temple to modern days (there is a of course a mythic element to that story, too.)
Y, you obviously know better, but maybe there was a change of zionist thinking around 1948 or 1967 when advertising the immigration/return to Israel became less salient (outside the Soviet block) and explanation that Jews have no less right to live in Israel/Palestine than Arabs more so?
Heck, the average Palestinian Christian may be more likely to be an OT literalist than the average secularized Israeli Jew of hawkish political views.
And the most vehement opponents of a State of Israel are fanatically scrupulous interpreters of the scriptures, it would seem. This makes for some strange bedfellows (as noted).
the more Welsh Supremacism the Merrier
Did you by any chance happen to read my original post about Bloix’s departure, which contained a reference to Welsh supremacism that I later took out for fear of touching on nationalist sensitivities?
@Bathrobe. To your question, no (I guess from the timestamp I was still in the process of waking up for the day when you edited it). But I must have felt the same Welshness in the Zeitgeist, regardless of time zone.
Did you by any chance happen to read my original post about Bloix’s departure, which contained a reference to Welsh supremacism that I later took out for fear of touching on nationalist sensitivities?
Yes, and I didn’t realize you’d edited it. I hope you weren’t fearful of treading on DE’s sensitivities — I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have objected — but I admire your commitment to collegiality.
Collegiality? Huh!
I was afraid that an irreverent dig at our resident Welsh nationalist would detract from my message to Bloix!
maybe there was a change of zionist thinking around 1948 or 1967 when advertising the immigration/return to Israel became less salient (outside the Soviet block) and explanation that Jews have no less right to live in Israel/Palestine than Arabs more so?
I’m no expert, but my impression is this: in the early years there was certainly more emphasis on filling up Palestine, and the idea that all or most of the world’s Jews could and should end up there was prominent. In the early years after independence the country was well-populated and cleansed of much of its Palestinian population. It continued to absorb refugees, first from Europe, then from the Middle East, which stretched its resources. At this point the idea of Israel being a country of refuge was stronger than ever, but the presence of a large American diaspora, which was wealthy and generous, was not considered a bad thing anymore. At present Israel is struggling with a large and growing population and not enough housing and other land resources. The idea of bringing in immigrants is paid lip-service, but is not considered an essential goal. Emigration from Israel, especially if one maintains their identity as an Israeli expat, is no longer the taboo it was decades ago.
As to the issue of Jewish vs. Palestinian right to the land, that was a hot topic right from the start of the Zionist movement, and it never stopped being so, although different factions reacted in very different ways to this issue. And here we are.
our resident Welsh nationalist
Actually, I’m more of a Welsh cutural imperialist. I’m even prepared to countenance a retrospective amnesty for the illegal immigration of the English to Lloegr, but I feel that they should make some effort to integrate with our culture, learn the language etc.
Most of the politics discussed here (when it is) is framed in terms that are not a part of my reality as a culturally Reformed Lutheran Protestant living in a functioning welfare state with radically different ideas of who the “other” is than in English-or Hebrew-speaking countries — so not expressing an standpoint should not be taken as opining that political discourse is bad, I just don’t have the involvement needed to have one. (I know that’s not an obstacle for people elsewhere, but in these august halls I feel it’s a matter of ethics to speak only of that whereof I know).
On the other hand I do have a perverse tendency to try to derail discussions by bringing up Danish phonetics on the flimsiest of pretexts, and about half the time it does make you lot go “Ooh, shiny!” as intended. (Though nothing comes to mind today, sorry).
bringing up Danish phonetics on the flimsiest of pretexts
No pretext is needed for bringing up Danish phonetics. The topic is evergreen.
Amusing exercise in Danish phonetics.
Go to the Google Translate, listen to pronunciation of “stedsegrøn” and try to figure out what happened to d, g and r…
I’m bearing this in mind, but I’m tempted to violate it as stimulated by a comment further down:
This made me wonder if Cinnamomum is resistant to treatment with Roundup (or glyphosate, as the journalists now seem to call it), if it lacks a normal shikimate pathway. Roundup acts as an uncompetitive inhibitor of 3-phosphoshikimate 5-carboxyvinyltransferase and brings about a huge increase in the concentration of a toxic intermediate of the shikimate pathway. As animals in general, and humans in particular, have no shikimate pathway it used to be argued that Roundup must be harmless to people. My faith in this argument was shaken after I looked up the chemical structure of Roundup, and I thought it unlikely that such a simple molecule had just one metabolic effect.
I’ve just done that: no trace of d, g or r. It sounds like [stɛɪ̯sekwɑn] to my anglophone ears.
On the other hand I do have a perverse tendency to try to derail discussions by bringing up Danish phonetics on the flimsiest of pretexts
Just to reinforce DE’s point: that’s not a derail, that’s a rappel à l’ordre. Danish phonetics is (are?) as ancient and honored a topic in these halls as Dravidian, Basque, or hats. (Loved the pope hat in the other thread.)
“ קִנָּמוֹן cannot be derived from the common Semitic word for ‘reed’”
The one that gave us cinnamon words in most langauges of Europe (and also “cane“, “canon” and “canal”*), I assume?
By the way, French cannelle first appears in the first half of 12th century. I have just seens this date, early 12th century, for Babylon-Cairo. And it is the Crusades.
Suffixation (-elle) is unsurpising for a Slavic speaker (корица is кора with feminine noun and diminutive -ица). But if this word resulted from the increased contact with cinnamon or words for it, the first part can be some 12th century word from Semitic or Greek in the Holy Land reinterpreted as canne “cane”, with or without -el, rather than just from canne as such.
—-
* “From Middle English cane, canne, from Old French cane (“sugar cane”), from Latin canna (“reed”), from Ancient Greek κάννα (kánna), from Akkadian ???? (qanû, “reed”), from Sumerian ???????? (gi.na). Related to channel and canal.” says Wiktionary.
appears in the first half of 12th century
Trésor de la langue française:
1re moitié xiie s. subst. (Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem, éd. P. Aebischer, 211 : Il i vendent lur teiles e lur siries, Coste, canele e peivre, altres bones espices); 1619 subst. mettre (qqc.) en canelle « mettre en morceaux » (Aubigné, Faeneste, IV, 9 ds Hug.); fig. 1798 mettre qqn en cannelle « le déchirer par ses discours » (Ac.). B. 1728 adj. « de la couleur de la cannelle » (Vuippens, Reg. not., 3058, 84 ac ds Gloss. des patois de la Suisse romande : Une cappe de fin drap canelle). Dér. de canne « roseau, conduit », suff. -elle* en raison de l’aspect que prend l’écorce du cannellier en séchant; le mot existe dans la plupart des lang. rom. sans qu’il soit possible de déterminer son cheminement; le lat. médiév. cannella ne semble pas attesté en ce sens av. le xiie s. (Mittellat. W. et Du Cange, s.v. canella¹, domaine ital.); l’intermédiaire du port. (REW³, nº1602b) est sans doute à écarter, le Portugal ne semblant pas avoir pratiqué l’importation des épices aux xiie-xiiie s. (Cor.); l’intermédiaire du prov. (EWFS²) ou de l’ital. (Cor.) est possible mais insuffisamment établi [la date ca 1100 pour le judéo-fr. kaniele donnée par FEW t. 2, p. 202a, n’est pas sûre, le ms. du vocab. hébraïco-fr. édité par E. Boehmer ds Rom. Studien, t. 1, p. 163 sqq. étant de la 2e moitié du xiiie s.].
stedsegrøn
I can (or imagine I can) hear everything but the d; the r is uvular, in that way you Continentals have it.
d, g and r — that’s a damn computer. In my ‘lect it’s [sd̥ɛsɞg̥ʁɶn] — small caps [ɶ] if your sans-serif font conflates it with lower case (like mine does), though I’m not 100 on the quality of the /ə/. You can tell the d is there because the [ɛ] is short. The historical dictionary does list [sd̥ɛðsɞ] as attested, though (volume edited 1943) — MLG genetive of stede, corresponding to G stetig — and since it’s a book word, I would not be surprised to hear it from YPNAD either. The G and the R have their central Danish values, nothing to see here, move along please.
I think I peeved about true and common cinnamon here recently. (The latter being Cassia). Unsurprisingly, it’s kanel in Danish.
@drasvi
https://anglo-norman.net/entry/canele_1
There are two citations from 1150-1200, although the manuscripts are stated to be later copies. This would provide some support for the judeo-French earlier date.
everything but the d — it was very evident in the GT text-to-speech I got. It’s a non-sibilant palatoalveolar voiced fricative (anathema to the IPA), and your brain probably just edited it out as being too alien. Even for an alien.
[stɛɪ̯sekwɑn] — substituting ɪ̯ for the “soft d” is in fact a good fallback until you learn the real thing; there are probably minimal pairs, but even Danes admit they are similar. Some Funen dialects unabashedly conflate them. What we don’t understand is how furriners hear it as some sort of L. (Even the cromulently Danish-named Peter Ladefoged, IIRC. But I probably don’t and it was John Wells).
/g/ is [g̥] as noted — /k/ is clearly aspirated, even before resonants, but if you aren’t sensitive to VOT there is not much to separate them. [ʁ] is in fact uvular, but fricative not approximant, and no lips are involved in the production. [ɶ] has the same tongue position as [ɑ], it’s just rounded — maybe if you listen in French you can hear it.
I wanted to say that [i] is just a kind of a /d/, but I ddd not:(
“amom also appears in the spice terms amomon and cardamom”
Glad that someone commented on that! English cinnamon, so unlike Russian koritsa and similar to Russian kardamon keeps confusing me.
amomon and cardamom, said to originate in the same general region
But are there any Amomum spp. at all in the Horn of Africa / South Arabia? Is not it rainforest stuff?
There’s also this, unambiguously coming from a human:
https://forvo.com/word/stedsegrøn/#da
What we don’t understand is how furriners hear it as some sort of L
The -d- does sound rather L-like, now Lars has pointed it out.
This is without doubt due to the influence of the closely related Scandi-Congo language Dagbani, in which Proto-Western-Oti-Volta *r has become /l/ throughout, instead of falling together with /d/ (as [ɾ] after vowels) as it has in Mampruli.
Mystery solved!
Or is he Dars?
Darsay he might be.
Ultimately named for the daurel. Dingua became lingua in Latin innit. That Forvo guy clearly belongs to the YPNAD, but not as egregiously as some.
EDIT: Alternative form daurus, OL dacrus, cf δάφνη. I knew those republicans were to blame. We refute the corruptions of Cicero and his cohorts and shall henceforth be known as Dars. Except I’m sure Akismet won’t let me.
And the Red Sea has come back together again, and Pharaoh’s army got drownded under a sea of Danish phonology.
For some reason I’m craving a cinnamon danish right now.
The pre-Hebrew etymology of cinnamon was surveyed back in 2008 at Balashon (to circle back to the original post!). After discarding several bad theories, he was left with a best guess that the cinnamon in the Bible came from China, with the cin part maybe referring to China—in any case cin would seem to mean something that distinguishes cinnamon from cardamom, and could be the same as the čin in Persian dârčin ‘cinnamon’ (where the dâr part means tree). Then the comments disputed whether China was called cin at the time the Bible was written. But that was all based on written records, so the archaeology is valuable.
“Nearly unanimous” strikes me as an inflated description of a handful of ancient texts: we don’t know what else was written and didn’t survive, or wasn’t written. And why would anyone count Herodotus as an unimpeachable source? (Noonan doesn’t mention the part about cinnamon being collected by giant cinnamon birds, which make their nests out of it on cliffs!) Classical writers could have known that cinnamon was shipped in by Arab traders via the Red Sea, without knowing where it came from before that; the source could have been a trade secret.
I’ve enjoyed it for many years as a place to go when I just can’t bear politics anymore.
I haven’t been able to bear the argumenta ad baculum that pass for political discussion in public fora for decades now, so I may not even notice it when it does arise. The last time I remember it was Etiénne vs. Paul Ogden, and that was about linguistic politics specifically (in Canada).
We should all proceed together in harmony, united by our shared belief in the vacuousness of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.
Well, no; Norvin (Richards, presumably) gets plenty of respect here on the rare times when he contributes, and he deserves it.
(Get that é accent fixed.)
… actually Herodotus isn’t overly credulous about the giant cinnamon birds, he’s just quoting somebody else’s story, repeatedly marked with “it is said”. And he hedges in the same way about the location. A translation via Perseus:
* This is annotated at Perseus as Ethiopia; Noonan takes it as “Felix Arabia”, i.e. southwestern Arabia; but it sounds to me like it could be anywhere, or nowhere.
“Nearly unanimous” strikes me as …
Yes, as if he rebuting something and proving something else. But this all is a mere direction of search, I think the meaningful way to interpret what he said is: “we should pay some atention to Arabia and the Horn of Africa.”
He must have liked the part about Troglodytes.
the part about Troglodytes.
Actually I have all of his references open in English, so maybe I should post them.
Cardamom, amomon:
Pliny, 12.28., amomum, amomis, Pliny, 12.29 cardamomum
Dioscorides, Mat. med. 1.6 kardamomon, 1.14: amomon
Theophrastus, Hist. plant. 9.7.1-3, καρδάμωμον, ἄμωμον (also κινάμωμον and κασία)
Cardamom, amomon, origins:
Pliny:12. 28 “The clustered amomum(1) is very extensively used; it grows upon a kind of wild vine that is found in India, … “…Amomum is produced, also, in that part of Armenia which is known as Otene; as, also, in Media and Pontus….”,
Pliny:12. 29. cardamomum: “…It is gathered in the same manner both in India and Arabia. …”
macadamia
Dioscorides, 1-6, kardamomon: “…..The best cardamomum is brought out of Comagene, Armenia and Bosporus. It grows too in India and Arabia. … ”
Dioscorides, 1-14 amomon: “….the best is brought out of Armenia with a good colour, a pale reddish wood and a very fragrant smell. Because it grows in plain and watery places that from Media is weaker. It is large, a pale green, soft to touch, and full of veins in the wood, resembling origanum in its smell. That which comes from Pontus is a pale red, neither long nor hard to break, clustered, full of fruit, and biting to smell. …”
“….Some adulterate amomum with amomis [Amomis pimenta] that is like amomum yet without smell and without fruit. It grows in Armenia and has a flower like origanum….”
Theophrastus, Hist. plant. 9.7 καρδάμωμον, ἄμωμον : “As to all the other fragrant plants used for aromatic odours, they come partly from India whence they are sent over sea, and partly from Arabia, for instance, komakon(5) as well as cinnamon and cassia. The fruit called komakon is said to be distinct(6) from this ; the komakon of which we are speaking is a perfume which they mix with the choicest unguents. Cardamom and Nepaul cardamom some say come from Media ; others say that these come from India, as well as spikenard and most, if not all, of the other species.”
(5) – see Pliny 12.63.
I wonder if the name comes from Cumin (e.g. Sumerian gamun) with metathesis.
So Herodotus passed along the story that they harvested cinnamon using the observation that birds often bring things to their nest that the construction won’t support. And they transported it by putting it on a raft and then jumping in and flutter-kicking it across the ocean.
I’m not sure this is a place of honor. Exodus is a like an incontrovertible proof in a work of geometry by comparison.
cinnamon, cassia, malabathrum:
Pliny, Nat. 12.41, why Arabia was called “happy”: “Arabia produces neither cinnamon nor cassia; and this is the country styled “Happy” Arabia! ”
Pliny, Nat. 12.42: cinnamomum, xylocinnamum>, Pliny, Nat. 12.43: cassia, also:
Pliny, Nat. 12.44 cancamum, tarum: “From the confines of the country which produces cinnamon and cassia, cancamum1 and tarum2 are imported; but these substances are brought by way of the Nabatæan Troglodytæ, a colony of the Nabatæi.”
Herodotus, Hist. 3.110 casia, Herodotus, Hist. 3.111 cinnamon, Herodotus, Hist. 3.112, ledanon
Dioscorides, Mat. med. 1.11 malabathron, 1.12 kassia 1.13 kinamonon – see the link to 1.14 above.
Theophrastus, Hist. plant. 9.7.1-3 κινάμωμον, κασία: origin (see the link and quotation above), Theophrastus, Hist. plant. 9.5.1-3 κινάμωμον, κασία: description.
Herodotus’s story of the Arabs gathering cinnamon sounds like it belongs to the same phylum of folktales as the much later Second Voyage of Sinbad, where they use the skinned corpses of animals to collect diamonds from the valley of snakes, which are then carried out of the valley by rahks.
But as ktschwarz says, Herodotus always qualifies the silly stories with “it is said” or the like. That’s why he’s a better model for historians than the sainted Thucydides, who expects you to believe what he says because he said it and he Knows.
cromulently Danish-named Peter Ladefoged
It has been said that A Course in Phonetics explains everything about the subject except how to pronounce the author’s name.
Herodotus isn’t particularly credulous: he is careful to attribute most opinions to their sources without taking a position himself. There is a famous exception: he reports the claimed circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenicians hired by Pharaoh Necho II, but says he does not believe it because the expedition reported seeing the sun in the northern sky — which is exactly why we do believe it.
“it is said”
the famous: There they said (what some may believe, though I do not) that in sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right hand.
P.S. I noticed John’s comment only now:)
>Herodotus always qualifies the silly stories with “it is said” or the like. That’s why he’s a better model for historians than the sainted Thucydides, who expects you to believe what he says because he said it and he Knows.
I’m not sold on the Sidney Powell defense. This was her lawyer’s claim yesterday, that everything she said about the election was based on affidavits. She was just relaying what they said.
I’m happier with historians who leave out the parts about cutting up chunks of asses so large that they break through nests built of cinnamon sticks; or the parts about sky-connections to data manipulators at Italian aerospace companies doing the bidding of the Chinese.
But are there any Amomum spp. at all in the Horn of Africa / South Arabia? Is not it rainforest stuff?
I have often wondered if the ancient Mediterranean knew imported korarima (Amharic ኮረሪማ korärima), an important spice in Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aframomum_corrorima
And in West Africa, grains of paradise (most familiar to North Americans from Sam Adams’ Summer Ale):
http://gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/Afra_mel.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aframomum_melegueta
English cinnamon, so unlike Russian koritsa and similar to Russian kardamon keeps confusing me.
And then Norwegian kanel, which makes me think of caramel.
So they compensated the absence of Amomum by creating a genus Aframomum! I was going to do that, to check the list of Zingiberaceae genera, and forgot somehow. And likely I would not do that and would not have learned about it, thank you!.
They could send it down the Nile!
(in the vicinity of Lake Tana and Gelemso)
Lake Tana (Amharic: ጣና ሐይቅ) (previously Tsana[1]) is the largest lake in Ethiopia and the source of the Blue Nile.
(P.S. I understand, of course, that the Blue Nile is not very suitable for sending anything and has numerous waterfalls:) But anyway)
I’m happier with historians who leave out the parts about cutting up chunks of asses so large that they break through nests built of cinnamon sticks; or the parts about sky-connections to data manipulators at Italian aerospace companies doing the bidding of the Chinese.
So you would have been happier if Herodotus had left out the unbelievable story about the circumnavigation of Africa?
I find the politics here relatively palatable, i.e., not too extreme and relatively humane. Except for the Russian and Welsh nationalists, of course, but they add a bit of needed perspective …. well, the Russian maybe, the Welsh is quite outré. John Emerson perhaps regards himself as extreme, but I just see him as someone brave enough to pull the veil of illusion from worldly affairs.
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “respect” is my attitude to Norvin. Like Russian and Welsh nationalists, he is of course welcome here and it is good that he can represent the Chomskyan point of view. But he doesn’t say much and doesn’t come here often.
I approve of the Welsh nationalists, out of fear. They are masters of Llap Goch.
Looking for Llap Goch, I found this: https://mymemory.translated.net/en/Welsh/English/llap-goch. Mind boggling.
I don’t know if “respect” is my attitude to Norvin
Worthy of respect for the same reason as Almeida Samo*: remains polite and helpful in the face of a generally hostile audience. This is no small virtue, and I respect it greatly, it in all earnestness.
* Seriously. Compare and contrast (to his enormous advantage) with the occasional transient Hindutva lunatic who stumbles in … KONGO!
Llap Goch
Sadly, merely an invention of some Cambridge folk. Our real techniques are much more terrifying. Utter demoralisation of the enemy is the objective. I will say no more than that cynghanedd plays a part.
For Llap Goch, this is a serious, authoritative source on that terrible and fearsome art.
…cynghanedd plays a part.
And the toughest of Oulipian toughs stammer half-forgotten prayers through bloodless lips…
I see that you have encountered the Black Bards of Carmarthen. Do not give up hope of recovery! There are authenticated cases of people returning to near-normal life eventually.
This is no small virtue, and I respect it greatly, it in all earnestness.
Same here.
sounds like it belongs to the same phylum of folktales as the much later Second Voyage of Sinbad
…yeah, I noticed that it was uncannily reminiscent of Sindbad, but hadn’t realized it was that similar. I wonder what’s more plausible: that the authors of Sindbad read Herodotus and got the story from there, or that it survived that long independently.
Then the comments disputed whether China was called cin at the time the Bible was written.
IIRC the consensus is that this name refers to the Qin dynasty (3rd century BC), which would, I believe, put it slightly too late.
[EDIT: apparently there’s a theory that it refers to the older State of Qin, which would have been the first Chinese state to be encountered on the Silk Road for several centuries prior to the unification.]
A glance at the index of Al-Nadim (Al-Fihrist) shows that many classical sources were already known and quoted in Arabic writings in the 10th century and we have the Arabic versions of many of the classical sources, for example Josephus (Pines 1971), who was quoted extensively by Arab writers such as Al-Shahrastani.
Herodotus, Manetho, Plutarch, Plato and Plotinus among others were known and it was perhaps these sources which were being referred to by Al-Biruni (Al-Athar. 84) when he said that he acquired ‘Books which had die periods of reigns of the kings of Ashur of Mosul, and the periods of the kings of the Copts who were in Egypt and the Ptolemaic kings …’
…
Knowledge of ancient Egyptian also came from Arabic translations of many of the classical writers, whose works included references to ancient Egyptian language and scripts. These included Homer, Herodotus, Plutarch, Chaeremon, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus (Budge 1929: 179ff; Iversen 1993: 38ff). These classical writers were widely quoted by Al-Nadim (Al-Fihrist: 315), Ibn Fatik (Mukhtar. 54), and Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah (Tabaqat: 50).
…
It was common for long passages to be quoted from classical writers such as Homer, Herodotus, Iamblichus, Plato, and Plotinus even in Arab literary works, for example in the writings of Al-Sajistani and of Ibn Fatik.
From “Egyptology: The Missing Millennium : Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings” by Okasha El Daly, Daly El.
Also Herodotus:
>Other Indians dwell near the town of Caspatyrus and the Pactyic country, north of the rest of India; these live like the Bactrians; they are of all Indians the most warlike, and it is they who are sent for the gold; for in these parts all is desolate because of the sand. In this sandy desert are ants, not as big as dogs but bigger than foxes; the Persian king has some of these, which have been caught there. These ants live underground, digging out the sand in the same way as the ants in Greece, to which they are very similar in shape, and the sand which they carry from the holes is full of gold.
We can trust this, because he didn’t say “it is said,” but presented it straight. That’s why it’s helpful that in other places, he says “people are saying.” No, no, that’s the phrase that other reliable source, Donald Trump, uses.
Likewise this:
>These Indians whom I have described have intercourse openly like cattle; they are all black-skinned, like the Ethiopians. Their semen too, which they ejaculate into the women, is not white like other men’s, but black like their skin, and resembles in this respect that of the Ethiopians. These Indians dwell far away from the Persians southwards, and were not subjects of King Darius.
It’s interesting that he doesn’t mention whether he was told this or can vouch for it himself, no? Perhaps some Ethiopian merchants were resident in Halicarnassus?
All the hours of the Byzantine monks, working to preserve the heritage of the great Greek historian and western civilization by dutifully copying down Herodotus’s fable, presented straight, about the color of the semen of the Ethiopians and the southernmost of the Indians…
If Herodotus hadn’t survived, it’s likely some other, better historian or annalist would have been preserved instead.
Even the authors of Tanakh cite sources. One day, maybe we’ll find a crumbling fragment of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. Or an actual record of the Egyptian-sponsored periplus.
I just read this:
No idea if it’s true, but I like it.
coming back to this thread after some days away from the machine, so by way of clarification:
i certainly didn’t intend a personal slight to Bloix, whose contributions here i appreciate whether or not i agree with them. and rest assured that if i ever were to intend a personal slight to anyone on here, i’d have the grace to go after them by name.
please do not associate my antizionism (or that of the rest of my many-generations-veltlekh, many-generations-anticolonialist family) with misogynist fundamentalists like NK, who agree with their zionist mirror-images on everything except a single detail of the timing (in relation to the arrival of the messiah) at which they feel jewish theocratic rule over palestine is acceptable.*
by “zionist historiography” i was quite specifically referring to the 19thC innovation of writing jewish history as a unitary “national” narrative of Blut und Boden beginning with an interpretation of the Tanakh as a historical document**, rather than the preceding model of assembling the complex documented histories of and changing relationships among the many distinct jewish communities of the world.
—
* if anyone is in need of high-quality invective against jewish antizionists, i can refer you to the archives of Der Tog and Vokh from late 1929 (english-language material, past or present, is generally rather shoddy at best).
** a grafting of myth onto history required by its teleological approach, in order to authorize a state-building project according to the rules of christian european nationalism.
pronounce the author’s name — that’s because he was English, not Danish, and pronounced it the only sane way in English. (His parents moved to London to start a business, I think, and he was born there). But Peter was (and is) a common enough given name in Denmark that he would fit right in.
Now to pronounce Peter Ladefoged in Danish — are you sure you really want to know? (The surname is a common noun as well, ~ ‘barn sheriff’ or Manager of Agriculture at a manor. The functionary in charge of oppressing the peasants was the ridefoged, nobody took that as their family name…)
There’s also this, unambiguously coming from a human:
I hear a glottal stop for the “d”. More interesting, I hear a diphthong [øy] for “ø”. Is it really spoken that way?
I’m happier with historians who leave out the parts about cutting up chunks of asses so large that they break through nests built of cinnamon sticks; or the parts about sky-connections to data manipulators at Italian aerospace companies doing the bidding of the Chinese.
To each their own, of course, but I find it extremely interesting to know what stories were being told at any period of time. That gives you a window in peoples’ minds.
If Herodotus hadn’t survived, it’s likely some other, better historian or annalist would have been preserved instead.
That’s a very bold assertion. Maybe there wasn’t one on the Greek market. From what I have seen of Greek historiography and geography, they all have their share of hearsay and fantastical tales, especially when they move beyond immediate contemporary history and neighborhoods. Don’t get me wrong – I would love to have more sources, too. But I would never wish for one of the few we have not to exist. And maybe it would have been the other way round, if Herodotus wouldn’t have existed, they might have copied a more unreliable and fantastical source.
If Herodotus hadn’t survived, it’s likely some other, better historian or annalist would have been preserved instead.
To each his own. I think he’s one of the greatest and would rather Thucydides were burned if there were to be a bonfire of the vanities.
glottal stop — I think there is some glottal constriction / creaky voice there, but it’s not a full-on stød. Some people do a bit of creaky on all syllables. Cp and which has stød and a bonus glottal because vowel-initial.
If you want to isolate stød, compare hus and huse (same speaker for both).
“Knowledge of ancient Egyptian also came from Arabic translations of many of the classical writers, whose works included references to ancient Egyptian language and scripts. These included Homer, Herodotus, Plutarch, Chaeremon, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus ”
He is listing Greek authors “whose works included references”, not authors known from Arabic translations.
Chaeremon wrote a book about hieroglyphics. Tzetzes (Byzantine) wrote an “exegesis of the Iliad” and used Chaeremon’s book (I think there was some suggestion that Homer knew hieroglyphics). This is how we know that Chaeremon wrote a book about it, for the book has not been preserved.
Utter demoralisation of the enemy is the objective.
That is very difficult, for как известно the English have no morals in the first place.
We can trust this [ant story], because he didn’t say “it is said,” but presented it straight.
That more recent historian and biographer L. Sprague de Camp accounts for this by telling us that Herodotus was himself deceived:
I read Herodotus twice when I was still in HS. I loved reading firsthand reports on Babylonia and Egypt, to say nothing of the Scythians (and Tomyris). I was aware that some stories weren’t true but appreciate the anecdotes anyway.
I remember years ago reading a work about Thucydides (I wish I could remember which, exactly) that made the point that a large part of the impression he gives of reliability is actually due to qualities of his style, with that high seriousness thing going on (κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί, forsooth) that Herodotus wasn’t into at all.
It also made the point that we are rarely in a position to cross-check Thucydides’ actual facts, but that when we are, he is worryingly often wrong.
Tacitus (by a natural progression of thought) is a rather different case. As someone pointed out, it could never have crossed his mind at the time that his works would end up as almost the sole surviving literary evidence for much of his period (discounting gossips like Suetonius), which puts his pretty evident biases in a rather different light: he wouldn’t have expected us not to have several highly positive accounts of Tiberius’ reign and character to compare his own with, for example. And Tacitus is still scrupulous enough with fact, that a fair bit of evidence for the picture being more complex than he seems to suggest is actually drawn from his own works.
cynghanedd — didn’t help with the soccer tonight, is it?
That’s the game with the oddly shaped ball, isn’t it? I knew someone who was quite into that once.
@de, lars
The game where rugby tackles lead to being sent off for more than ten minutes. Surely referees must be more lenient, as it is an easy thing to forget ????
Yes, It’s the one where you have to be able to splinter the shins of opposing players with an inflated leather thing interposed, and ears are supposed to stay attached. But fewer reports of long term brain damage than in the other footballs, I’m informed. Even cricket has more head injuries.
That’s the game with the oddly shaped ball, isn’t it?
The very one.
@drasvi: Homer seems to be completely ignorant of writing. There is no mention of Linear B in his epics, much less of hieroglyphics.
The game where rugby tackles lead to being sent off for more than ten minutes
I see. It sounds frankly unworkable. An Oulipian game, perhaps …
The oddly shaped ball one is lawn bowling, with its sorta but not really round ball.
Books which had [the] periods of reigns of the kings of Ashur of Mosul
I wonder how much was, in fact, known about the Assyrian and/or Babylonian (probably not Sumerian) chronology in the medieval and/or early modern period, prior to the (re)discovery of cuneiform tablets. IIRC a lot less survived from the works of Berossus than from those of Manetho (which provided a reasonably complete list of pharaohs, though a lot of the early names have almost nothing in common with the actual otherwise attested names).
Incidentally, it had been noted that the Shahnameh has a fairly reasonable account of the Sassanids, but replaces the Achaemenids with a sequence of entirely fictional rulers. I wonder if that was out of legitimate ignorance, or if the author in fact knew of the Achaemenids but had a literary and/or political reason to exclude them.
One day, maybe we’ll find a crumbling fragment of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. Or an actual record of the Egyptian-sponsored periplus.
I’m personally hoping for (at least) a copy of the Turin King List (or another list of similar quality) that isn’t in as much absolute tatters as the one historians currently have.
highly positive accounts of Tiberius’ reign and character
My impression is that Tiberius is usually perceived positively, but mostly in contrast to his blatantly negative successors Caligula and Nero – so bad (especially the former) as to give an impression of the time of Tiberius as a relative golden age.
I have no idea what does Tacitus say about him though.
(Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were variously negative but in any case brief. IIRC the opinion on Vespasian is split. Claudius was a relative nonentity.)
Even cricket has more head injuries.
IIRC the British crown prince Frederick (in)famously died of a cricket head injury. Though admittedly the various forms of football had not diverged yet in his day.
his blatantly negative successors Caligula and Nero
I recently read a review of a book making the case for Nero as unjustly slandered by historians sucking up to his successors (in much the way Richard III was slandered by Tudor historians and playwrights) — nobody’s saying he was an angel, but he may not have been much worse than the imperial average.
by historians sucking up to his successors
To his successors whom, exactly? Trajan and Hadrian? IIRC a lot of the accounts of “Nero bad” that we have are from the Christian and/or Jewish side, and Vespasian/Titus/Domitian were, if anything, worse to the Jews, and IIRC only maybe slightly less so to the Christians.
(Galba/Otho/Vitellius, and to a lesser extent Nerva, ruled too briefly to do much in any direction about the Jews and/or Christians in particular.)
I have no idea what does Tacitus say about him though
A brilliant (because Tacitus) character assassination, basically. The general consensus seems to be that Tiberius was a stand-in for Domitian, Tacitus’ actual contemporary as Emperor when he started his political career. Bitter much?
To be fair, Tiberius probably wasn’t very nice; on the other hand, it’s not easy being the third-choice eventual successor to the Saviour of the World (because the favourites went and died), when nobody much liked you except your mother up until that point, even though you’d been doing much of the actual, like, work to keep the show on the road for stepdad.
To put things in perspective, both Tacitus and Suetonius were born around Nero’s time and wrote about him 60 years later. It would be like a 60 year old American writing now about Kennedy or Johnson. My guess is that it’s too close in time to get away with a hatchet job.
It doesn’t seem to have inhibited either of them …
I think you were on pretty safe ground bashing the Julio-Claudian dynasty (apart from His Holiness the Founder) under the Flavians.
It would be like a 60 year old American writing now about Kennedy or Johnson.
Or a 60 year old Russian writing now about Khrushchyov or Brezhnev. The capability of getting away with a hatchet job heavily depends on the availability of pre-existing smear campaigns; I suspect that a lot of what people remember of Khrushchyov these days is actually what other people told them (not much of it pleasant).
We most definitely can’t have Tacitus’ context. But there officially ass-licking works, famously Veleius Paterculus. I once cited a fragment about Langobards form him. A longer quotation of the same:
Sorry, it is longer than I thought:/ But as I have posted it, I will leave it as it is. Anyway, I quoted it because the story about the German in the boat.
Yes, I was thinking of VP. “Arse-licking” certainly seems appropriate. The sort of author Tacitus himself doubtless had in mind when he mentioned the obnoxios (“fawning”) at the very beginning of the Histories. Paradoxically, I think that the memory of Tiberius is actually better served by the hostility of a Tacitus than the servility of a Paterculus; I suspect that Tiberius Caesar, a cynical old bugger with a fair line in mordant wit himself, would probably have agreed.
(not much of it pleasant).
Yes, but our record in live expectancy is 1964 – the year when Khruschev was ousted. It went up 64, then it was going down gradually. Then it instantly went up to the same level in 85. (Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign) and then reached that level again in… 2012.
I haven’t seen anyone discussing this specific parameter (for any country), which is a bit surprising. Do people think thatlife of your children (“life expectancy” is how long an average person will live if every year is the same as this one – so child mortality affects it catastrophically) is an relativly unimportant component of the quality of one’s life? It is important.
Gorbachev is the most hated leader ever (a traitor! and and idiot.) and Khruschev is seen as an idiot.
—-
Another hated leader is Yeltsin. So, speaking of life expectancy: Since 80s it was falling, the worst year was 94, it almost returned to the Soviet level by 98 and went down again (the crisis) and kept falling util 2003. Bad, but this bad is structured differnetly.
Do people think that life of your children (“life expectancy” is how long an average person will live if every year is the same as this one – so child mortality affects it catastrophically
The trick in most of Africa is to survive until you’re five years old. Once you get there, your life expectancy is not so different from that in the West.
If Herodotus hadn’t survived, it’s likely some other, better historian or annalist would have been preserved instead.
Without Herodotus we might well have lost our main source for knowledge about the most formative event in early Greek history, since AFAIK the only other known historian who may have written a complete, detailed history of the Persian Wars was Hellanicus, and I don’t know any particular reason to assume he was any more reliable.
This always seems to confuse people when talking about the past. An average life expectancy of 40 doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone (or even anyone) is dying at that age – you could just as well have half the people dying before the age of 10 and the rest after 70.
Of course, it’s almost certainly somewhere in between, with deaths in childbirth and war and industrial accidents among the inexperienced taking out a certain proportion of young adults – but the point is that people at what we would still consider fairly advanced ages aren’t nearly as rare as it looks at first, especially as a proportion of the adult population.
At the time, with no special insight into Russia or knowledge of Russian affairs, the adulation Yeltsin got in the US seemed odd. As time went on it looked more and more cruel and malicious.
The first intimation I ever had that there was more to the story of Gorbachev, a hero to the West, than our simple heroes-and-villains narrative allowed for, was an interview I saw with Irina Ratushinskaya. Her bitter contempt for him was very evident. That was not what my preconceptions had led me to expect.
Westerners are always surprised to learn that his popularity rating in Russia hovers in the low single digits.
Superficially Yeltsin, like Khrushchev, seemed human, if messy. Brezhnev appeared a cold, heartless, scary bureaucrat (and his two brief successors as well). Gorbachev seemed like any European head of state, kinda boring but meaning well.
Given the enormities of economic (and political) chaos in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the Communist regime, it should really be no surprise that many of the leaders involved in the transition are extremely unpopular in Russia today. In retrospect, it seems like a certain degree of economic shock was probably unavoidable, but the transition to a market system could still have been handled with a lot less upheaval and pain.
I imagine part of it is that there were very few people who knew how to run a market-based economy, and who had a path to power.
Kosygin and Andropov, right? Do I get the $200?
They say there was a lot of outright looting by organized crime, ex-CP functionaries,and outlanders.
The story we hear in the West is filtered through the (Western) press, which sticks to its own particular (black-and-white) narrative. After all those years of unmitigated evil, the new guy who is friendly to the West has to be a hero. I suspect they didn’t ask many Russians.
We all know the Western press is subject to heavy bias. The question is whether this is the result of deliberate distortion or manipulation, orchestrated by the establishment/owners, or whether it represents some kind of “consensus” among the press corps, who, of course, would have been brought up on previous reporting about Russia. Mr Emerson?
Andropov and Chernenko.
Andropov and Chernenko.
“Today, at the age of 72 and without regaining consciousness, Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko took up the duties of General Secretary of the Communist Party…”
(Ironically enough, he was actually slightly younger than his US contemporary Ronald Reagan. Andropov was even younger.)
Whatever else you can say about Gorbachev, he quickly came to terms with letting democracy in. That is factual. Whether people thought that was worthwhile is a matter of personal taste.
No doubt Yeltsin had his flaws, but he was the first Russian ruler since Boris Godunov to be worth an opera. https://thetakeout.com/boris-yeltsin-texas-supermarket-opera-1841909510
Are there any authoritative books on the collapse of the Soviet Union? Looking back, it seems surreal.
Countries that follow Western/American advice on transitioning to a free market and democracy often suffer terribly. Mongolia is a case in point. The Mongolians followed standard Western advice of the time (1980s neoliberalism), which lauded the benefits of “free competition” and “competitive advantage” and letting the economy find its own level. As a result, most of the old industries that the Russians had established (carpets, processing of agricultural and pastoral products, etc.) completely collapsed, bringing great hardship to the population.
I mostly agree with everything said above:)
I suspect that a lot of what people remember of Khrushchyov these days is actually what other people told them (not much of it pleasant).
I have strong suspicion that my personal accounts of Khruschev are basically the product of “One million two hundred” policy.
Under Khruschev’s “peaceful initiative”, the Soviet army size was cut by 1.2 million.
This piece of political propaganda is totally forgotten in the West (and basically in the former Soviet Union too).
But what those officers who suddenly found their military carriers destroyed told to their grandchildren about Comrade Khruschev was obviously not very nice.
I haven’t seen anyone discussing this specific parameter (for any country), which is a bit surprising.
In percentage terms, the largest increases in welfare of Russian people since the martyrdom of Good Tsar Nicholas, occurred during reigns of Putin, Brezhnev and Khruschev (in that exact order).
Brezhnev appeared a cold, heartless, scary bureaucrat
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Cold, heartless bureacrat
Not sure what happened. Please delete the previous post.
Brezhnev appeared a cold, heartless, scary bureaucrat
Russian image of Brezhnev is more like shorturl.at/EMV18
What exaclty is “welfare”?
At the lowest levels of Maslow pyramid, it’s pretty straightforward – eating well, living in comfort and enjoying some peace.
I got hung up on one word in the quotation from Velleius Paterculus:
A canoe? That’s a New World word, it sounded weird in a Roman history (but that’s probably just me paying too much attention to etymology). Was there a word for canoe in Latin? Let’s see, the Latin is:
cavatum, ut illis mos est, ex materia conscendit alveum
literally: “climbed into a cavity hollowed out of timber, as is their custom”
Tum adpulso lintre
“Then, his tub having struck (the bank)”
reversus in naviculam
“returned to his little boat”
So Paterculus wasn’t using a specific word for canoe; instead he described it and then used words for “little boat”. Linter is glossed in Lewis&Short as ‘trough, vat, tub’, and by transference as ‘boat, skiff, wherry’, just as in English a boat can be called a tub.
But if there were ancient dugout canoes in Europe (like this one), why did all the European languages need to borrow a word for them from Taino? Somebody asked that question on reddit and got an answer: apparently dugouts had been replaced by clinker-built boats and forgotten by the time of Columbus.
No doubt Yeltsin had his flaws, but he was the first Russian ruler since Boris Godunov to be worth an opera.
Not quite an opera, but Ken MacLeod provides a few pages of the sadly otherwise nonexistent Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy, written in blank verse a few centuries in the future.
A canoe? That’s a New World word, it sounded weird in a Roman history
As I’ve recently laid into Robert Graves for his linguistics, it is right to praise one of his happier usages: in the Claudius books, Germanic soldiers carry assegais.
Damn. I missed the Jeapordy question. I have no memory even of the man Chernenko.
all — they are eger (singular ege) in Danish; dugouts made from oak trees seem to have been in use at least into the 19th, and on Bornholm the name was even transferred to small clinkerbuilt fishing boats. Authors born in the late 18th use the word plainly, a historical work from 1897 has it in scare quotes–but archeologists also use the word for their dugup dugouts. It was clearly a mistake that Columbus didn’t have a Danish sailor along. (MLG had eke, OE had ac, so either inherited or derived from “oak” in parallel).
So in Danish, kano is specialized to the type that I believe was originally made from birch bark on a wooden framework, in its Danish recension (like the one my father owned) typically with thin plywood instead of bark. But when talking about exotic places, dugout canoes are included.
I think of the prototypical canoe as the birchbark-or-modern-substitute kind, not the dugout kind, but apparently the dugout kind was what was in use by the locals in the Caribbean from whom Columbus borrowed the word into Spanish. And then I guess the French or whoever first encountered the birchbark style farther north thought it similar enough not to grab onto a different loanword from an Algonquin language?
Are there any authoritative books on the collapse of the Soviet Union?
I highly recommend David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick knows Russian and had spent a lot of time in the country, and he tells the story very well.
Under Khruschev’s “peaceful initiative”, the Soviet army size was cut by 1.2 million.
That obviously affected a tremendous number of people; another factor people in the West tend not to know about is his anti-religion policy — if I recall correctly, he had more churches demolished than Stalin. Contrary to popular Western belief, there were a lot of Christians in the Soviet Union right up until the end; brutal persecution made them hide their belief but didn’t turn them into atheists.
straightforward
@SFReader, “welfare” that excludes survival rate?
I mean, seriously. Your survival is important.
I’ve started on several comments just to reload the page and see the discussion(s) moving way beyond whatever point I was trying to make. But one point I will make in defence of Herodotus: He is not only a source on ancient geography but on the worldview of and information available to well-travelled intellectuals of his day. We may not always be able to check his facts, but when we are we know the extents (or limits) of knowledge. In the case of the source of cinnamon, he relates several stories, some of which are obvious tall tales, and some of which conflate different trade routes. He gives a pretty good description of the monsoon trade on the Indian Ocean, but he doesn’t understand that the eastern source is South India and not Ethiopia. Ethiopia (and whoever the Troglodytes were supposed to be) would also have traded with the ports of South Arabia, so it’s an easy error to make when you work from decriptions by Nabateans on the market in Damascus or something. And another: People knew there were weird animals out there, some of which were hunted in strange places and in elaborate ways as sources of exotic and valuable goods. Without physical evidence how was anyone to know which of the tales were true?
Yeah, but clearly he should have anticipated the scientific discoveries of succeeding millennia. Onto the trash heap with you, old man!
@Trond, no objections to your main point, but were not Troglodytes mentioned by Pliny rather than Herodotus? (Herodotus: “Where it comes from and what land produces it they cannot say, except that it is reported, reasonably enough, to grow in the places where Dionysus was reared.” )
Wikipedia has a funny line:
When the Sieur de Joinville accompanied his king, Louis IX of France to Egypt on the Seventh Crusade in 1248, he reported – and believed – what he had been told: that cinnamon was fished up in nets at the source of the Nile out at the edge of the world (i.e., Ethiopia).
Corrorima, a cardamom-like thing which Xerîb spoke about is said to grow around Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile:-/
@Drasvi: I lost track somewhere, but the general point stands.
It does. I just was not sure that it is not me who is confusing the authors here:) (On the other hand: Ryan’s point is unexpected for me and thus interesting. )
“welfare” that excludes survival rate?
At some levels of Maslow pyramid, increased spending power simply translates into more spending for alcohol consumption with not so nice effects on health and male life expectancy. This is exactly what happened in the Brezhnev era, but it’s important to realize that it’s a surprising by-product of increasing incomes in a population unaccustomed to more cultured ways of leisure, not a sign of deteriorating welfare.
One thing about Brezhnev, he was a superb gift to cartoonists, even more so than Stalin and Yeltsin. No one made a better anthropomorphic bear.
@Y: My favorite political caricature of Brezhnev is from the original version of “The World According to Ronald Reagan.” I thought the holstered missiles carried by the leaders were a brilliant touch. In most respects, the more commonly seen revised version of the poster (featuring Gorbachev) was better, but I think the central caricature of the Soviet leader was superior in the Brezhnev version.
SFReader, your previous comment is a prose version of Было шесть, а стало восемь.
Было три, а стало пять — всё равно берём опять!
Даже если будет восемь — всё равно мы пить не бросим…
Get you a copper kettle:-E
The video for the 1984 song “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood depicts a fight between two men made up as Konstantin Chernenko and Ronald Reagan (both then in office). This is the only appearance of Chernenko in western popular culture that I am aware of.
That is a wonderful bit of cultural trivia, thanks!
http://www.allrussias.com/images/chernenko_01.jpg
re canoes, see John McPhee’s lovely
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/02/24/the-survival-of-the-bark-canoei
also on kindle
An unexpected translation in Demography of Russia in English: 25% are “Spiritual but not religious”. The question was whether people agree with: «Я верю в Бога (в высшую силу), но конкретную религию не исповедую» “I believe in God (in a higher power), but I do not profess a specific religion”, shortened (in the Contents section in the Russian text) to rather ugly “believes without religion”
I do not think “spiritual” can be used this way in Russian and have no idea what it meant here:( I do not think in English you can say : “he is spiritual” in the sense “he is not an atheist” either.
Well, maybe the desire of sociologists to classify produced this usage. But again, if I were asked in Russian “are you spiritual?” my asnwer would be “what? :-/ “. In English, apparently, people’s jaws do not drop.
To me it would mean something like “Do you believe in mumbo-jumbo like crystals and auras?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_but_not_religious
It’s pretty standard usage in English. WP cites someone as making the probably pertinent point that “the meaning of the term ‘spirit’ is more narrow* in English than that of other languages” which may explain why it seems more natural in English than Russian, say.
(Personally, I find it an irritating attitude. Given me a good solid atheist any day in preference!)
* I’m not sure I agree (quite apart from the fact that “other languages” are hardly all the same in this regard.) “Different” would be better than “more narrow”, perhaps.
Åndelighed is a direct calque of spirituality, or probably Geistlichkeit or something French. It covers believing in reincarnation, speaking with the departed or communing with nature without being religious, even reading the Tarot or your palm maybe, while crystals, reflexology and magnetic bracelets are not spiritual. They may coincide in many adherents, though. Angel decals on your fender can go either way I think.
It also covers deep religious feelings, though. Excluding some more practical approaches to Christianity. (Be at the church on time and say your prayer at table, there’s the job done).
(Gejstlighed, on the other hand, is ~ ‘clergy’).
To me it would mean something like “Do you believe in mumbo-jumbo like crystals and auras?”
I personally would probably rather see it applying to belief in souls, or karma, or maybe true love or something, or for that matter spirits as such. Just not in any particular religion.
(Offhand I actually can’t think of a good way to describe that sort of thing in Russian.)
OTOH the phrasing as given in Russia would give me an impression closer to “I do not consider my belief system to be sufficiently close to any other religion I’ve heard of to be considered part of it” – i.e. something like “religious but not part of an established confession”.
[EDIT: apparently that’s not what confession means in English; I was thinking of Russian конфессия. Is there an English word for that?]
JanFoM: “Confession” as you’ve used it is IMHO coherent and understandable English, even though that’s not the primary sense of the word. “Denomination” would probably be more idiomatic in American English, although perhaps arguably problematic in its own way depending on who you ask (because its core meaning arose in an intra-Protestant context and thus its extension to non-Protestant and indeed non-Christian groups may rub some the wrong way).
(Gejstlighed, on the other hand, is ~ ‘clergy’).
And that’s also the meaning of Geistlichkeit. “Spirituality” is the loan Spiritualität.
Russian
Духовный отец “spiritual father”:
1. a priest you confess your sins to, who tries to figure out what you should do to stop being such an asshole, colloquially духовник 2. any similar person.
But this person is as spiritual as your brother in arms is in arms. A ‘father’ in a specific sense. A “spiritual person”, is she a “person” in a specific sense (but not in biological sense)? I do not think so.
I think rare and somewhat ad hoc colloquial (at least I hear it rarely): “he is very spiritual”
But I think it is an attempt to describe someone whose certain qualities imress you. But he is spiritual in the same way a holy man is.
Я вышел духвный
А вернулся мирской
БГ – “I went out spiritual, and I returned worldly” this line onse made me think what he could mean by ‘spiritual’ here, because it is an unusual usage:)
Did he flew out as a spiritual entity and returned with a pocketful of iPhones and eyes shining or what?
Mostly “spiritual” is an aspect of the world.
It is not “pertaining to spirituality”, where the latter is some sort of activity. Anything is spiritual.
In Russian the actual question is about one’s opinion. “Do you believe in love?”. Like this. Does not necessarily imply practice any other than how people normally…hm, love, and does not exclude it (no one prevents you from burning candles).
In English (but not Russian) it too makes me think about “crystals and auras”.
But both in English and Russian I do not see it used in a classificatory way (as in the poll) to describe kinds of persons, in a manner: “he goes to sinagogue, so he is spiritual”, “he does not attend a sinagogue, church or anything but he […], so he is not religious but spiritual”, “he never thinks about such things so he is not”.
It is a different usage from [classificatory as well] “a practicioner of Spirituality” which I suspect in the poll (crystals – but it can give you a “believer” if you apply “a form of spirituality” to religions ) but also do not see in normal human English speech outside of polls.
Is not it a notion “under construction” invented by pollers?
It’s pretty standard usage in English. WP cites someone as making the probably pertinent point that “the meaning of the term ‘spirit’ is more narrow* in English than that of other languages”
Wiki also refers to a “seminal” poll from 1997 as one of the early exmples – and then refers to a movement than began with some book in 2000:/
There was something back then about how you weren’t supposed to tell Chukchi jokes about Chernenko, because of his vaguely Siberian look and because Chukchis are people you make unflattering jokes about.
Forgotten short-termers like Malenkov or (Roman Emperor) Otho at least had some drama about getting into power or out of power. Chernenko didn’t even have that, and he wasn’t scary like Andropov.
The Benjamin Harrison of the Soviet Union.
@hat: are you referencing the wrong Pres. Harrison?
I remember Malenkov and Molotov as a pair, like a comedy team. Names only.
@hat: are you referencing the wrong Pres. Harrison?
Not @hat, but I suspect probably not; the other Pres. Harrison is right next to Malenkov and Otho in terms of at least having some drama about being so short-term.
(Though I would probably have chosen Polk or Coolidge, or maybe Tyler, rather than either Harrison.)
Harrison is one of the least well-known presidents among the general public; a 2012 article in New York selected Harrison as the “most forgotten president.”
Both Harrisons are pretty much forgotten, so it’s hard to remember which of the two was forgotten because he died immediately after taking office.
Schoolkids really ought to know more about the second President Harrison than they do. I need to figure out how to package my agenda in this regard as Critical Harrison Theory in order to provoke a national controversy that will result in millions of people on social media suddenly developing strong but ill-informed opinions on the topic.
Chester Arthur, though.
There’s a story behind Arthur. He took office when Guiteau killed Garfield, and Guiteau was not simply demented, but a demented Stalwart— the Republican faction to which Arthur also belonged, put on the ticket for balance. it is my guess that Arthur was very closely watched during his term.
Useful list of duplicated presidents:
Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Roosevelt, Bush.
Chester Arthur was also the first president to be dogged by rumors that he was not a “natural born citizen” and accordingly ineligible for the office, with an alleged conspiracy to hush up his supposed actual birth in an exotic foreign locale. (Canada, to be specific.)
Useful list of duplicated presidents:
Adams, Harrison, Johnson, Roosevelt, Bush.
For context, the Adamses and Bushes were father-son pairs, the Harrisons were grandfather and grandson, the Roosevelts were distant (sixth, IIRC) cousins, and the Johnsons probably got their surnames indepedently.
“Spirit” is a difficult word. Think “spiritual pollution” as used by the Communist Party of China, where “spiritual” is a translation of 精神. I am sure many people originally did a double take when they first saw that term. How can the Communist Party know anything of the realms of the spirit?
A Chinese definition of 精神 is: 指人的情感、意志等生命体征和一般心理状态, which Google Translate gives as “Refers to a person’s vital signs such as emotion, will and general mental state”. 体征 ‘signs’ actually is a physiological and medical term referring to abnormal changes found in examining a patient.
This isn’t actually a very useful definition. 精神 is used in Chinese in exactly the same way as English, as in expressions like ‘dispirited’ or ‘That’s the spirit’. It can be understood as a person’s general emotional and psychological state.
This term goes back to the 1980s when Deng Xiaoping used it in the following way:
“精神污染的实质是散布形形色色的资产阶级和其它剥削阶级腐朽没落的思想，散布对社会主义、共产主义事业和对于共产党领导的不信任情绪。” “有一些同志热衷于谈论人的价值、人道主义和所谓异化，他们的兴趣不在批评资本主义而在批评社会主义。” “资产阶级常常标榜他们如何讲人道主义，攻击社会主义是反人道主义。
Google Translate is actually reasonably good on this (with slight editing):
“The essence of spiritual pollution is to spread the corrupting thought of the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes of all kinds, to spread distrust of socialism, communism, and the leadership of the Communist Party.” “Some comrades are keen to talk about human values and humanity. Their interest is not in criticizing capitalism but in criticizing socialism.” “The bourgeoisie often flaunt how they speak of humanitarianism and attack socialism as anti-humanism.”
Pollution of the spirit isn’t the pollution of the soul at all (which is how it sounds in English); it’s pollution of the mental and psychological wellbeing of people who are ardently striving after socialism.
(I am using Google Translate because I’m lazy. To translate it myself would require a lot of time, care, and energy, which I don’t have at the moment.)
Ghost in the Shell, a famous manga and anime. Not only it is titled in English (how do you translate it from Japanese when they use so much English?) and refers to both “Ghost in the Machine” and some concept from the manga itself and God knows what (and I do not know what he means by “shell”) – the author keeps also playing with Japanese words for “soul” etc.
Russian fans are already accustomed to a translation with a word prizrak.
Another translator used “spirit”. During an enthusiastic argument with people who did not like this, there was an exchange:
“The main pretension to prizrak is wrong associations…” (in English it would be “wrong connotations”, but “associations” is any sort of things that come to mind when you hear it: that are linked to it in your mind. Including your personal memories, smells, anything).
“But how do you understand for yourself the phrase prizrak kommunizma?”
“To be understood in this figurative sense prizrak must be followed by a noun in genitive. ”
Ha-ha. In the anime some Chinese assassin is quoting Marx too. Some modified version of “a spectre is haunting Europe, a spectre of communism”, just with capitalism. With yet another Japanese lexeme (different from both Japanese translations of communist manifesto that I would able to find:()
——
And if the author did not reference anywhere William Blake, I am surprised.
How can the Communist Party know anything of the realms of the spirit?
If they are good cadres, they would…
“Religious work cadres must fully understand the meaning and responsibilities of the work they are engaged in, earnestly study Marxist-Leninist philosophy and religious theories, and the Party’s policies, familiarize themselves with relevant laws, master knowledge of religious work, and be good at uniting religious people and believers, gradually become religious cadres with good political quality, excellent work style, and high professional knowledge. Party committees and governments at all levels should care about religious cadres in politics, work, and life.” (c) Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Several Issues Concerning Further Doing a Good Job in Religion, 1991.
I’ve never seen or read Ghost in the Shell, but according to Japanese Wikipedia it is the subtitle of the first volume of the series in Japanese; it is apparently a reference to Arthur Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine.
The Japanese title is 攻殻機動隊 Kōkaku kidōtai ‘shell-attacking special forces’ or something like that.
You would have to have read or seen the series/movie, but it appears that the relationship with ‘spirit’ is rather roundabout.
@ SFReader
That circular is referring specifically to religious work cadres. I don’t think ordinary cadres would be expected to know anything of spirituality.
Russian fans are already accustomed to a translation with a word prizrak.
To be precise, the usual translated name is Призрак в доспехах, literally something like “Ghost in armor” – a name that gave a fairly strong mental image of a literal armored ghost. Basically unrelated to the actual plot of the (quite futuristic) anime.
That said, I don’t think that this mental image would have changed much if призрак was replaced by some other (near-)synonym; it was the в доспехах (“in armor”) part that was a blatant mistranslation. Meanwhile if it was, say, призрак в раковине, it would (…as far as I can tell, anyway) at least be fairly obviously metaphorical without too much of a distracting literal mental image.
(Google tells me that the most likely relevant meaning of shell is оболочка in Russian, but [призрак] в оболочке would probably have felt even more uncomfortably literal – the word sounds too scientific to be a good quick metaphor.)
I think “Ghost in the Shell” is a reference to this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine
and ultimately to Descartes.
(Koestler just popularised it – and distorted it.)
It is very much relevant to the theme of the Manga/Anime, in fact, what with it being all about cyborgs musing about whether they’re still human without human bodies (and a whole arc with a villain – sorta – who has no body at all.)
Welsh ysbryd is both “spirit” and “ghost”; English has performed the remarkable trick of swapping the meanings of the two words with each other completely over the past few centuries, which seems logically impossible, but has happened anyway …
In my spirituality was neutral grain spirits are primary.
And who said the English word has a narrower reference than in other languages …
(The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.)
Ghost is an old word that originally had the meaning ‘spirit’ in English. As in ‘the Holy Ghost’. That is the sense in which it’s used in reference to Descartes. It is obviously highly related to the theme of the anime/manga, but the problem of translation appears to be just as much a problem of English as it is of Japanese.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Masamune Shirow had ever read anything by either Gilbert Ryle or (FTF) Arthur Koestler when he created Ghost in the Shell. Shirow was probably just vaguely familiar with the English phrase “ghost in the machine” and some of the associated philosophical ideas.
It is the question that I wanted to ask here (actually it keeps confusing me for a decade). What are exact relations (meaning, style, history, anything) of ghost and spirit given that there is both Holy Ghost and Holy Spirit.
For some reason I thought that DE will be the most enthusiastic about the question.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Masamune Shirow had ever read anything by either Gilbert Ryle or (FTF) Arthur Koestler
I’m not sure why you would say that. There is a Japanese translation of Koestler entitled 機械の中の幽霊 kikai no naka no yūrei, where 幽霊 yūrei refers to a ghostly or malevolent spirit.
Shirow has obviously got the English subtitle ‘Ghost in the Machine’ from somewhere, and ruling out the most obvious source — a translation of Koestler — seems strange.
Unless he got it as some kind of meme floating around in Japanese culture, which is always a possibility as these kinds of memes often do gain traction in Japan, but the question then becomes, where did the Japanese get the meme come from? It is pretty obviously from some kind of English source, just as likely Koestler, Ryle, or Decartes.
In this connection I would like to mention a Japanese chef I knew who had worked abroad. He talked about the importance of “play” in human culture, citing the expression Homo Ludens. It wasn’t till much later that I realised there was a famous book of that name by Huizinga.
I think you greatly underestimate the extent to which various intellectual currents have entered Japan from the West and gained circulation in that country.
In present-day American English, ghost refers to apparitions of dead individuals. Spirits are rarer in that sense, and are, to my mind, abstract. Ghosts can be visible, or make noises, or move Ouija board’s planchette. Places can have spirits, which are more like supernatural miasmas, not so individual. So in modern usage, Holy Ghost is a fixed archaism, and I think Christians less averse to modernism, typically protestants, use Holy Spirit.
Spiritualism, born in the 19th century, refers to what I would call ghosts.
Bad editing practices.
One group of translators kept translating Πνεῦμᾰ τὸ Ἅγῐον as Holy Spirit and the other as Holy Ghost.
And King James failed to ensure consistency.
And existence of two words for the same concept is due to the bastard nature of English language – everything has to have two words – one Germanic, one Latin.
Holy Ghost and Holy Spirit are synonyms. Ghost is disfavored now, I suspect, because colloquially ghosts are the wraiths of deceased persons, and often malevolent.
Later edit:
Shirow could easily have got the title from the translated version. Unlike some countries (here’s looking at you, Mongolia), Japanese translations almost always give the title of the original. For a Japanese, “The Ghost in the Machine” is just about the easiest kind of English you could imagine.
As others have mentioned, “ghost” originally meant “spirit”. It is cognate with German geist. Since the meaning later changed to “malevolent spirit”, “Spirit” became the preferred term, but the archaic “ghost” still clings on. Another example is “give up the ghost”, which means “die”, and originally meant “give up the spirit”.
Bathrobe, I did not read the manga, I have seen the anime and films. It is one of the most popular series in Russia. Some of them I liked, some impressed me by their athmosphere (I think some films or OVAs). Some did not.
In the world of the anime people (and possibly not only) have ‘ghosts’ (in Japanese… gostu, an English word), discussed as routinely as hands and cyberbrains. These can be manipulated and used for word-play too (e.g. when a character is asking a character what her gostu is telling her – an idiomatic Russian counterpart could be heart of intuition – and it is not clear whether in that world the heart idiom has evolved or the character made it up – but it happens amids of a discussion of what is ‘ghost’) and the author makes a point of referring to many words and concepts similar to this.
And in one episode two cyber-geniuses (means: instant Google search:-)) exchange literary references and allusions in a library.
It is translator’s nightmare I am afraid. You can translate Ghost in the Shell as “Ghost in the shell” and gostu as гост becuase it is English in Japanese. But you need a diglossic society for this.
Kōkaku kidōtai presents a problem too. But only a hardcore fan will spend sleepless nights looking for a Perfect translation:
@ drasvi
Thanks for the background. As I said, I haven’t read the series or seen the movie. What you say confirms the “diglossic” nature of the story.
Japanese are familiar with the word ゴースト gōsuto. I suspect that, given the translation of the title of Koestler’s work using 幽霊 yūrei, the emphasis in the series is on the modern concept of “ghost”, not the Descartian concept, which simply means “spirit”. The possibility of a crossover in meanings here is very interesting.
gōsuto – Yes, sorry, I used gostu as I would do in spoken Russian. I think to a Russian ear it is going to sound like that, but it makes no sense here:-)
and the author makes a point of referring to many words and concepts similar to this.
To clarify: English has spirit, ghost, soul etc. (and there is an old Christian tradition of distinguishing between Greek words of this kind and phylosophies built upon this) and Japanese has its selection of words, but the central concept of the manga (I think) and the anime is gostu – which resembles soul (and I would say ‘consciousness’:-)) in that you can wonder whether an AI has it – but it can be accessed.
And judging by cyberbrains, your actual brains do not matter much.
The point was that he does not avoid Japanese words either, conversely – he even quoted the communist manifesto ( this word: 亡霊).
diglossic
And the song in the anime begins in Russian…
@SFReader, you made me think about the first translators of the Bible as anime fans. A nice image.
@January First-of-May, “shell” is the part that I do not understand.
But I like rakovina for some reason.
@drasvi
Another anime with Russian song:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_und_Panzer
Re obitel’ in Vysotski song, I think he may have chosen it for the syllable bit’.
In Japanese, ゴースト usually refers to a 亡霊 or 幽霊, a spirit of the dead. However, the Wikipedia entry on ゴースト says this about Ghost in the Shell:
漫画・アニメ『攻殻機動隊』（1989年）で扱われる魂・心・自我にあたる概念。
(Roughly) In the manga / anime “Ghost in the Shell” (1989), “ghost” is a concept equating to ‘soul, mind, ego’.
Shirow has taken considerable poetic licence in his use of this term. Whether this is a result of his knowing the original meaning of ‘ghost’ in English, or is just his particular take on (or creative skewing of) the concept of ‘Ghost in the Machine’, is not clear without considerable extra context (e.g., watching the movie or reading the Koestler book).
Shirow
From now on, I am going to spell Narutow.
“shell” is the part that I do not understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(computing)
(This is probably not the only intended metaphor.)
As for раковина, it means “shell” as in mollusc shell, prototypically seashell (note that tortoise and egg shells have different terms in Russian).
Narutow
IIRC there’s a decent argument for Nalt.
Holy Ghost in a Nutshell.
—
For the computing shell the underlying image, I am afraid is скорлупа (ореховая) and ядро (kernel).
I do not know whether for English speakers the pair shell-kernel directly evokes an image of a nut (and thus was used as a metaphor) or they were already abstract words for abstract core its complement.
you made me think about the first translators of the Bible as anime fans
I knew a perfectly orthodox fellow-believer who felt that the book of Revelation, often abused as source material by the more peculiar sort of Christian (notably the Trumpophile Tendency), would instead find its true purpose at last by being made into an anime. (Well, he actually said “It would make a great cartoon.”)
(Now that I’ve written that, it occurs to me that someone must have actually done it already.)
Bible anime: in Ethiopia there’s a tradition of presenting Bible stories in cartoon form. What I saw was on cloth.
The woman beside me was indignant about what she thought were errors in the Ethiopian version of Solomon and Sheba, which is pretty central for Ethiopians and maybe Copts.
From Chinese Wikipedia:
“攻壳机动队”一名属于和制汉语，来自日语原名“攻殻機動隊”，意译则是“装甲机动防暴警察”的意思。士郎正宗为原本作品起的名字则是英语的“Ghost in the Shell”，只不过在出版时杂志社方面考虑到观众还是选用了日语名，“Ghost in the Shell”则成了《攻壳机动队》的副标题，在日本出版时这两个名称都是同时出现，《攻壳机动队》打入欧美市场时则选用了英文名“Ghost in the Shell”，《攻壳机动队》如今在西方也被以《Ghost in the Shell》所知。
“Ghost in the Shell”直译为“躯壳中的鬼魂”，不过“Ghost”一词也是《攻壳机动队》中的术语，指义体无法复制代表人类个性的意识。人造的义体、假肢、电子脑不过只是“shell”——一个空壳，无法复制的Ghost才是真正定义每个人存在的“灵魂”，没有Ghost的机器人或者仿生人仅仅是由人工智能驱动的哲学僵尸，并不是真正的人类。《攻壳机动队》世界中的义体化、电子化人类就相当于“Ghosts in shells”——栖息在人造躯壳里的人类意识。士郎正宗称，之所以选用这一名称，是在向匈牙利裔英国作家阿瑟·库斯勒致敬。后者一篇名为《The Ghost in the Machine》的论文最初给予了士郎正宗关于Ghost的灵感。“The Ghost in the Machine”（即“机器中的鬼魂”）则原本是英国哲学家吉尔伯特·赖尔创造的一个名称，用来讽刺法国哲学家笛卡尔关于心物二元论的主张。心物二元论——即人类心灵与肉体是两个可分离的独立部分的概念——是每一版本的《攻壳机动队》都常讨论到的一个本体论哲学话题。
A rough-and-ready translation based on Google Translate (it falls down in a few places but the gist is there):
The name “攻壳机动队” is a Japanese-created Chinese term. It comes from the Japanese original name “攻殻機動隊”. The translation means “Armored Mobile Riot Police (装甲机动防暴警察)”. Shirow Masamune’s name for the original work was the English “Ghost in the Shell”, but the magazine chose the Japanese name in consideration of the audience at the time of publication, and “Ghost in the Shell” became “攻壳机动队”. The subtitle “Ghost in the Shell” appeared at the same time when it was published in Japan. When “攻壳机动队” entered the European and American markets, the English name “Ghost in the Shell” was chosen. “攻壳机动队” is still available in the West under the name “Ghost in the Shell”.
“Ghost in the Shell” can be literally translated as “a ghost inside a shell”, but “ghost” is also a term in “Ghost in the Shell” referring to the inability of prostheses to replicate as representing the consciousness of the human personality. Artificial prostheses, artificial limbs, and electronic brains are just “shells”- empty shells that cannot replicate are what truly define each person’s “soul”. Robots or bionics without a ghost are philosophical zombies driven only by artificial intelligence, not real human beings. The prostheticised and electronicised humans in the world of “Ghost in the Shell” are equivalent to “ghosts in shells”- human consciousness living in an artificial body. Shirow Masamune said that the reason for choosing this name was to pay tribute to the Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler. The latter’s book entitled “The Ghost in the Machine” originally gave Shirow Masamune the inspiration for the ghost. “The Ghost in the Machine” was originally a name created by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle to satirize the French philosopher Descartes’ claims on the dualism of mind and matter. The dualism of mind and matter—that is, the concept that the human mind and body are two separable parts—is an ontological and philosophical topic often discussed in every version of “Ghost in the Shell”.
Get you a copper kettle
And once you’ve got that chainik, hock it!
I do not know whether for English speakers the pair shell-kernel directly evokes an image of a nut (and thus was used as a metaphor) or they were already abstract words for abstract core its complement.
Hmm. Well, my understanding is this. WhenIwerealad, shell program was a technical term for the boilerplate parts of a program: whenever you could, you chose a suitable shell and then filled in the missing parts to make it do whatever you wanted. This served an analogous role to programming frameworks in modern times.
I am reasonably sure that Multics was the first operating system to call its user command interpreter a shell. The speculative part is that I think the Multics shell was called that because it was rather like a shell program: it located the code corresponding to the command you typed and then dynamically loaded it; in other words, there was no difference between programs and libraries except that programs expected to be invoked as part of the shell (though it was certainly possible for other libraries to invoke a program in the same way by mimicking the shell’s calling conventions). Unix and all its descendants retained the name shell even though their command interpreters no longer worked like this; dynamic loading returned to Unix only much later at a time when the modern shell conventions were already established.
Kernel is more recent, appears to be a Unix invention: in Multics it was the supervisor and in earlier operating systems as the executive. VMS used both kernel and executive for the inner and less-inner parts of the operating system, and internally Windows does the same. Windows NT internals were originally modeled on VMS, and it may be no coincidence that incrementing each letter of “VMS” gives “WNT”.
The BASIC “interpreters” on the first computers I got access to did have ways of loading and saving programs, and in that way they weren’t much different from the RT-11 KMON (Keyboard Monitor) at my first job — except that the latter loaded machine code from disk instead of tokenized BASIC. That was not called a shell, and I don’t think worked as one; programs were self-contained and included all library code in each binary. The BASICs could be called shell programs if you wanted.
The closest I came to an environment with shell programs was probably COBOL, but since it was a student project and we didn’t have to interact with a preexisting production environment, the IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT divisions were essentially empty when we started, we had to add all files and so on ourselves.
In the middle stages of the personal computer era, a DOS shell was a program that provided an alternative interface for running programs and executing operating system commands. A DOS shell would typically have pre-built menus for copying, renaming, and other core file management functions; more menus could be customized with the applications that the user wanted. Depending on one’s preference, using a DOS shell could be either a godsend or an annoyance. I remember an article in a computer magazine reviewing a number of DOS shell packages, with the tagline: “Whoever said beauty was only skin deep never saw the face of a DOS prompt.”
As a consequence, the Windows desktop, taskbar, Start menu, etc. etc. are collectively known as the Windows shell.
I have now read the paper by the designer of the Multics shell, who just says that he coined the word SHELL [sic] without any explanation of why he chose it.
DOS shell?
So Masamune’s shell (if he meant computing) could be [a] DOS Shell? Not command line interface, not UNIX?
When everyone here were using Norton Commander (and then sometimes Volkov Commander and some maybe DOS Navigator (Moldovan) and now FAR), he was staring at this?
—
“Everyone” should be taken literally:) I think the number of IBM PC users who used Norton Commander here exceeded 99%. MS DOS is, of course, the first system most people here would think about in the context of computers in that time. But DOS Shell is the last piece of software that would come to anyone’s mind in the context of MS DOS.
I’ve used both. I think my computer came with DOS Shell and then I got Norton Commander installed.
But I could be wrong. It was over thirty years ago.
I mostly fondly recall the game called Elite – spent countless hours roaming the Galaxy.
Norton Commander was one of the DOS shells reviewed in that article I mentioned. Wikipedia describes Norton Commander as an “orthodox file manager,” which is not a term I was familiar with. Confusingly, the Wikipedia article on “file manager” programs uses a difference sense of shell, referring to the ability to access the “underlying OS shell via command line.”
Elite… I think I remember it. And I think it was ZX Spectrum that I used for playing it.
—
Though honestly, it were MUDs that I have the most fond and beautiful memories about.
I recall Norton Commander (or something that looked a lot like it, but probably the original) from my childhood, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually used it myself, as opposed to looking at my parents using it. I would probably have been about 4-7 years old at the time.
There is but One True Shell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29
A little late, sorry, but, let us not forget
Higgledy piggledy,
Benjamin Harrison,
Twenty-third president
Was, and, as such,
Served between Clevelands and
Save for this trivial
Idiosyncrasy,
Didn’t do much.
(John Hollander)
By “didn’t do much,” all Hollander means is that the history he was taught as a child in the New York City public schools, which was of course courtiers’ history devoted to the glorification of FDR as the apotheosis and natural Hegelian consequence of all prior American history, did not have much room for Harrison in its narrative, and he never had the curiosity to investigate further.
To the extent Harrison achieved comparatively little, there is perhaps a cautionary tale that ought to be better known — he succeeded in enacting a significant change in tariff policy that he incorrectly thought that his narrow 1888 victory (plus Republican success in Congressional races that year) had given him a popular mandate to pursue, but it turned out that he had seriously misgauged the public mood and the resultant backlash was one key factor leading to the Republicans losing control of the House in the 1890 mid-terms, which then made it difficult for the President to get other things accomplished.
Nobody expects the Benjamin Harrison Fan Club!
@J.W. Brewer: Hollander seems to be writing that verse explicitly from the point of view of someone who doesn’t actually understand much about the time period in question. “Served between Clevelands,” indicates that the speaker does not realize that Grover Cleveland was president twice (on either side of Harrison).
Anyway, how would you fix it? “Served between Cleveland” is even more bizarre. It’s the same kind of problem as “Mature trees have been planted every 100 meters, and there are no saplings between them.”
Perhaps it is correct that the speaker is not supposed to seem to know much about the time period in question, such that he can’t tell you anything about Cleveland other than the notable bit of trivia that he served non-consecutive terms, but I tend to agree with John Cowan that the use of “Clevelands” does not actually carry much implicature that the speaker believes it was two different Clevelands.
I always took served between Clevelands as a joke, because that’s the whole genre.
I personally subscribe to a whiggish view of presidency, namely, that presidents not supposed to do much. The less a president is doing, the better. Or at least, the less a president is seeking to do on their own initiative, the better. Obviously, presidents must respond to events. But that proved to be not a workable approach, which suggest that I have to change my views, which is obviously outrageous.
that he incorrectly thought that his narrow 1888 victory (plus Republican success in Congressional races that year) had given him a popular mandate to pursue
In retrospect, he should probably have realized that he could not have possibly had a popular mandate, having lost the popular vote.
(1888 is one of, so far, five US presidential elections where the popular vote winner did not get the presidency. The others are 1824, where the popular vote winner got by far the most electoral votes, but not enough for a majority, and lost in the second round; 1876, where a lot of electoral votes were disputed, and a partisan commission awarded them to the other guy; 2000, where everything hinged on the extremely close result in Florida; and 2016. In addition, in 1880, the popular vote was almost tied, but the electoral vote winner was very slightly ahead.)
Depends on what you mean by “popular.” Harrison almost certainly would have won the “popular vote” in 1888 if Southern blacks (who were, in those far-off days, a reliable Republican constituency) had not in many instances been unlawfully prevented from voting. And indeed one of the great what-ifs of Harrison’s presidency was the ultimate failure of the last serious federal legislative effort (for approx. 75 years) to roll back the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks, which passed the House in 1890 but stalled in the Senate, and then could not pass the House the following year because it had fallen under the control of the pro-disenfranchisement party. But, as the saying goes, that was in another country and besides the wench is dead. All of that said, the reasons Southern blacks tended to vote Republican in those days if not prevented from voting did not necessarily have much to do with tariff policy.
The subsequent irony is that having just consolidated their control over the now-Solid South via racial exclusion, the Democrats then badly screwed up their national coalition in the realigning election of 1896, which had the regrettable side effect of showing the Republicans that they could fairly easily obtain national majorities even writing off the entire South, which in turn thus regrettably diminished the practical Republican incentive to fight against disenfranchisement of their probable voters in the South.
Separately, I would encourage January-First-of-May to take a sufficiently critical attitude toward “official” history as told by the winners as not to assume his list of five instances is complete, above and beyond the point I made above about why the 1888 numbers are tainted (for reasons that continued for many decades thereafter). In particular, there is absolutely no good reason to think the standardly-reported popular-result vote totals of the 1960 presidential election are *true,* although that doesn’t necessarily mean that Kennedy necessarily *lost* on that metric so much as it means that the true outcome on that metric may be unknowable due to the fog of war (plus some structural oddities in Alabama which means that you can’t actually work the Alabama results into your national totals without making a bunch of inherently contestable methodological choices).
Talking about a popular vote winner before the Civil War is even more fraught, methodologically speaking. In the early days, electors in some states were appointed directly by the legislature, without a popular vote. South Carolina continued to handle things that way up through the 1860 election. Through the Era of Good Feelings, many states set property requirements for voters. And even after the Civil War, eligibility for the franchise was not standardized across the states; that did not come about (legally or pragmatically) until the twentieth century.
I have read that in Chicago there was so much fraud in The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election that Nixon was planning to contest it, but that advisers familiar with Illinois politics convinced him that the countervailing cheating by Republican bosses in outer Illinois was enough that the election challenge would take forever and that its outcome would be uncertain.
Looked at the 1888 election results. Harrison became president winning 5,443,892 votes.
United States population in 1890 was almost 63 million.
9 out of 10 Americans didn’t vote for the president.
Overwhelming popular mandate….
Well, most of the population didn’t have votes …
The closeness of the Democratic candidate’s victory in 1960 is exaggerated (in both the popular total and the electoral college vote) by the fact that Alabama and Mississippi appointed slates of unpledged Democratic electors. Since the electoral college count was not dangerously close, many of them felt comfortable throwing their votes away, rather than voting for the Catholic Kennedy. However, had Nixon carried Illinois and Missouri, most or all of them would have instead voted for Kennedy.
On most calculations the 1888 presidential election had a higher turnout percentage of eligible voters (even including de facto disenfranchised adult black male citizens in the denominator) than any presidential election since then, at somewhere around 79 or 80%. The comparable percentage last November was a bit over 66%, which was the highest in 120 years. 1904 (which 2020 exceeded on this metric) was down dramatically from 1888, especially but not only in the Deep South where the disenfranchisement efforts that were already well underway in 1888 had completed their work (in some places trying to exclude poor whites as well as blacks). For example, almost twice as many votes were cast in Mississippi in 1888 as in 1904, and the 1888 number was itself down around 30% from the total number of votes cast there in 1876. Mississippi also demonstrates the partisan effect of the shrunken electorate, with the percentage of votes cast for the Republican ticket dropping from around 32% in 1876 to around 26% in 1888 to under 6% in 1904.
But the Republican ticket in 1904 won a blowout victory nationwide whereas 1876 and 1888 had been very close calls. Which gets back to my previous point that the GOP’s post-1896 ability to win national majorities w/o being competitive in the South reduced their incentive to attack the disenfranchisement of their own likely voters in the South.
plus some structural oddities in Alabama which means that you can’t actually work the Alabama results into your national totals without making a bunch of inherently contestable methodological choices
Forgot about that part. I suppose this puts 1960 is in the same category as 1880: the same guy won both, but the popular vote was extremely close.
@Brett – the whole strategic point of the unpledged electors (Alabama’s situation messier than Mississippi’s, as I adverted to above) was the hope of depriving both of the major candidates of an outright electoral college majority of pledged electors and then offering their votes to whichever of the two promised to be least hostile to the continuation of Jim Crow, ideally getting them into a bidding war against each other. Because, on the officially reported results, Kennedy got a clear EC majority, we never got to find out just how flexible either of the candidates would have proven in courting those votes.
John Emerson is right that the true outcome in Illinois is unknowable. I tend to think it’s >50% likely but not necessarily >85% likely that Nixon would have won a hypothetical honest count there, but it’s also true that an investigation would likely have revealed that both sides had cheated in Illinois even if the Democrats had done so a little more extensively, such that they benefited on net. The problem beyond that, however, is that just reclassifying Illinois from narrow Kennedy win to narrow Nixon win would not be sufficient to deprive Kennedy of his EC majority, so you would need to flip another state or states to change the bottom-line outcome. Texas was the likely suspect, if only because everyone knew that LBJ couldn’t not cheat, just as a matter of temperament. But it’s much less clear (certainly not >50% imho) that there was cheating in Texas of a magnitude that would have changed the result.
@J.W. Brewer: Some of Alabama’s electors had announced publicly, prior to the election, that they were going to vote for Kennedy, and they did so. Apparently, Wikipedia does not count them as “unpledged electors,” although they were not officially “pledged” according to the usual meaning of the term (as it is applied in other states). Moreover, my understanding was that a number of other electors from Alabama and Mississippi had made it clear privately that, if their votes were actually going to matter, they were committed to voting for Kennedy. How things would have actually played out, if it looked like the election was going to go to the House of Representatives without those votes, we can never know for sure, but I suspect that, in extremis, those anti-Catholic, segregationist electors would have come home to the Democratic fold.
I think we can know exactly when the Republicans decided to concede the South (now the Solid South) to the segregationist Democrats.
Reconstruction ended in 1877, but it was a state-by-state district-by-district battle and in 1896 NC still elected a Republican governor and. Republican Congressman.
In 1896, however, a well-organized paramilitary group overthrew the Republican mayor of Wilmington NC, a predominantly black city with a black middle class. The pretext was an insult to white womanhood.
The pleas for help from the Republican governor of the state to the McKinley Administration were not answered, and by 1900 the state was entirely under white supremacist Democratic control.
Why no response? The NC Republicans were in alliance with.the Populists on state issues, even though the Populists were in alliance with the Democrats nationally. Obviously an unstable situation, but just one sign of the way that the Populists threatened both the Democrats and the Republicans, often on issues upon which the two major parties were in basic agreement.
By conceding the whole South to the Democrats and allowing the white supremacists to violate the law with impunity, the Republicans allowed the Southern Democrats to destroy the Southern Populists too, not just the biracial Southern Republicans. And this effectively destroyed the Populist threat, dividing the Populist voters between the two parties. And as someone said above, the Republicans had correctly calculated that they could win without the South.
Considerations of justice or the rule of law apparently played little or no role in this decision.
>In 1896, however, a well-organized paramilitary group overthrew the Republican mayor of Wilmington NC,
1898, right?
I remember when the city of Wilmington commemorated that in 1998, and how unaware I’d been – vivid memory of sitting reading about it on the internet in an apartment I gave up soon after. But I would have told you I was reading Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption – the Last Battle of the Civil War around the same time, and that didn’t come out till 8 years later. Historical memory …
But the north hadn’t intervened in Southern politics in years by then. 1888 was a bigger turning point – with Republicans gaining control in DC but failing to pass the ‘Force Bill” that would have established federal oversight of elections.
As a result, disenfranchisement continued on a state by state basis (as you point out). In Tennessee, oddly, a prohibition referendum was the last gasp of black voting rights. Anti-liquor forces hoped for majorities from religious African Americans. When their referendum failed, they created a narrative of dissolute black voters under the sway of liquor interests, who had to be suppressed. But that happened after the election 1888, long before Wilmington.
Wilmington was the last nail in the coffin.
A new study argues (with a mountain of detailed and often gruesome detail) that around 1650 BCE, a Tunguska-like airburst, only stronger, wiped away several cities (including Jericho) and over a hundred settlements in the Jordan Valley, and moreover salted the earth for miles around. Very unpleasant.
Strongly recommended (if you can deal with a bit of gruesome detail). The main focus is a large town (estimated at 8000 inhabitants), Tall al-Ḥammām, which looks like after a nuclear attack – detailed comparisons are made to the Trinity test. The salt comes from local sediments or the Dead Sea.
And yes, the many authors mention Sodom, though they refuse to speculate further after mentioning that stones & fire fall from the sky in the story. Jericho (if that’s what it is) was abandoned for ~ 300 years, Tall al-Ḥammām for ~ 600, because of the salt.
Interesting that they also found another Middle Eastern site, Abu Hureyra in Syria, which shows signs of a similar impact in 12,800 BP. I don’t think it’s because the authors are prone to seeing impacts everywhere: it’s that they work in the area, and these kinds of impacts might be uncomfortably common.
Oh, thank you.
Actually, I have seen multiple twitter threads by multiple scientists with relevant expertise who think that there’s something fishy going on with the Tall al-Ḥammām claim.
Copying and pasting a bit, and adding on (using the code tag to avoid overloading the spam checker with links):
1) A bioarchaeologist disputes the interpretation of the body parts found:
https://twitter.com/ChrisStantis/status/14404043803861606462) A zooarcheologist says that someone with actual osteological knowledge should be able to tell the difference between an infant bone and a small mammal bone:
https://twitter.com/FlintDibble/status/14404168478415462473) Multiple threads by an physicist who has specialized in researching the evidence of meteorite airbursts (and was cited by the paper) sees problems:
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440097126856282113https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440377970497966089https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440490620854800385https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441041953932537863(more to come)
4) An archaeologist points out that they may have misused the software that generated their unified radiocarbon dating from the various radiocarbon dates :
https://twitter.com/MTB_Archaeology/status/14404733356876308655) Another archeologist disputes that the city walls look any different from expected non-impact disaster damage. She also points out problems with the proper diligence expected of archaeologists, and the interpretation of the osteological taphonomy.
https://twitter.com/petrabonegirl/status/1440833392006688768Possibly more to come . . .
Dr. Megan A. Perry (@petrabonegirl):
rozele, above:
*shakes head sadly*
The words of the prophets are written on language blogs, and twitter slogs…
Dept of Oh Wait, There’s More:
6) Geoarchaeologist provides more detail in disputing that anything unusual happened at the site:
https://twitter.com/SoilManDan/status/14410122334761861147) Another geoarchaeologist points out that lots of finds look vitrified — because people in the past worked with fire:
https://twitter.com/NErbSatullo/status/14406150366915010598) A geologist comments on the microdiamonds and shocked quartz, and points out that these can also be found in the area of faults — like the Dead Sea Rift — which is right where the place is located:
(didn’t properly thread all of the tweets)
https://twitter.com/elleryfrahm/status/1440510054369677314https://twitter.com/elleryfrahm/status/1440705165338701832https://twitter.com/elleryfrahm/status/14407149213400719399) Meta-level discussion of this paper in the context of “biblical archaeology”:
https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1440654636705140747still more to come?
[ Tall al-Ḥammām: less of a Tunguska-type airburst, more of a bad archaeology piñata? ]
Oy. What a thorough cluster-[pig’s breakfast] it is.
The previous publication.
When a “scandalous” result that can be confirmed or disproven is published in a sceintific journal, it is not bad sceince.
There is evidence you need to present to make everyone believe in your result, and there is evidence you need to present to make someone check your result. There is such a genre: please, check my result.
These guys are funny, and they believe that precise methods can prove their interpretation to be right. They presented it in such a form that you actually can go and check. I sympathize to this: I beleive, science is when people go and check and bullshit is when everything is decided by consensus among renowned specialists.
The meaningful question is whether they presented enough evidence for someone to go and check.
It’s too late at night to check all the Twitter threads, or even just the most interesting ones.
But:
Mammal ribs are not diagnostic, unless they’re from a sea cow. Besides, they’re talking about pretty small fragments, and the resolution of the question would be completely irrelevant to the point of the paragraph it’s mentioned in.
The paper spends a lot of pages on showing one thing after another that fire, even if the whole city burns, simply cannot do.
What the what?
You get very pathetically shocked quartz, with 2 or 3 fracture planes, from explosive volcanism (e.g. Mt. St. Helens). To get grains with as many fracture planes as illustrated in the paper, you need a nuke or an impact. There’s simply no other way to reach several gigapascals. Shocked quartz doesn’t just lie around in California!
As far as I’m concerned this is (roughly) the archaeological equivalent of the papers on Sino-Caucasian; i.e. they present a lot of evidence in favor of their point of view, and they’re somewhat aware that their evidence is a little sloppy but there’s so much of it that it’s probably right, and in any case at least it doesn’t look blatantly wrong.
That said, to be honest, the whole “we know that impact sites contain X, oh, let’s look for X in this site, yay! we found it! …in trace amounts” setup (rinse and repeat for several different values of X) honestly looked a little grasping-for-conclusion-y even on my first read.
“We set out to prove that T.-al-H. was impacted by a meteor, and we found several very convincing-looking lines of evidence (that by themselves could also all* mean other things, but there’s a lot of them)”.
Notably it doesn’t seem (as far as I could recall) that they looked for any evidence against the meteoric theory.
*) except the shocked quartz, apparently
Things like iridium are expected in trace amounts.
Again, there’s not just the shocked quartz, there’s also the iridium, the molten bricks, the extreme power necessary to pulverize bricks and bones together over a wide area, and other things I don’t remember from 24 hours ago.
They didn’t look for evidence for it either. They collected observations and, one by one, eliminated potential explanations until only an air blast and an impact were left.
By “funny”, I mean, their archaeologist (Silvia) seems to love cosmic explanations. I know nothing about the guys who wrote the paper, but, of course, I expect wishful thinking. In other words, I think they can be freaks and the mental procedures they used to process the data might be noisy.
I just really think that there is no point in discussing whether it is “true” when it can be just checked. And it is not that freaks never discover something interesting.
Silvia, associated with Trinity Southwest University (an unaccredited Christian school, conveniently set in a storefront in a shopping mall) is a long-time seeker of archaeological proofs of biblical narratives.
Another commenter pointed out that while the bones were evaluaed by a medical doctor, no archaeological osteologist is among the authors; the analysis of trauma in bones from archaeological contexts is a specialty; a regular medical doctor would not be qualified to evaluate them. That series of tweets (here) is my favorite analysis of the paper. It was written by a bioarchaeologist who has worked for decades on another tell nearby.
Many people involved with this work and with Abu Hureyra are prponents of the not-without-its-problems Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. The Abu Hureyra destruction date is around the time of the onset of the YD.
“Skepticism increased when it was reported that one of the lead authors of the original paper had practiced geophysics without a license.”
(Can you be prosecuted for practicing linguistics without a licence in the US?)
The hypothesis does seem to have some advocates whose style does not inspire confidence …
After a story with the Syrian school in Noginsk [it involved armed masked people in search for ISIS] I started suspecting something and asked my German friend if it is possible to just teach kids [without any official status] in Germany. She does not know, she said, but she thinks a license is necessary, because who knows what you will teach to them.
On the other hand:
I do not think that we can say much about frequency of such events.
@David Marjanović:
Or a lightning strike, as the geologist points out, and links to: Lightning-induced shock lamellae in quartz
(
https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2015-5218)While it isn’t necessarily what happened, a city destroyed by fire and struck by lightning might well result in vitrified mud/clay and shocked quartz being found.
Edit: Also, I note this thread (continuation of (3)):
(
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1440816755161518082)also addresses the shocked quartz issue.
From that thread by Mark Boslough:
@DM again:
Yes, but “molten bricks” (city-wide) and “pulverized bricks and bones together” (as a single instantaneous event) are exactly what is disputed by the other archaeologists.
Another continuation of (3) above:
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441041953932537863https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441236518660493327https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441458596659613706[This one includes a challenge from the dig director of TeH to debate the issue. MB accepts – for a twitter debate ]
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441536868038758402[This one starts to address the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis]
The event that they are trying to explain – if, of course, the event actually happened, but they refer to other people’s work – is interesting.
They are saying that the region was abandoned and resettled again several hundreds years later. If this is true, it is interesting and needs an explanation.
Everyone heard about this, of course; it includes what was thought to be the oldest city in the world, that too was abandoned around 1550 (+/-50) BC. But they are telling there is a whole collection of such cities (of whiches theirs was even larger, as I understand them).
Now, they prefer a dinosaur-style explanation, but there is a weird extinction event to explain anyway.
Lightning is addressed and dismissed in the paper, I’ll have to read that again…
Germany is in the unusual situation that homeschooling is completely illegal. All children must not merely be taught (as in neighboring countries), they must go to school, period.
That’s what I thought; and indeed the paper prefers an airburst to an impact for the single reason that no crater has yet been found, which is not terribly convincing on a floodplain next to a very deep lake indeed. But if a nuclear explosion on a tower can do it… how is that “completely different physics”? It’s a large explosion all the same.
An argument for an airburst and against an impact actually emerges from elsewhere in the paper, even though it’s not made explicit: the size of the damaged area puts a limit on the size of the impactor, and an impactor that size is expected to blow up in the air instead of reaching the ground.
Oh, wow. Chris Stantis managed to look at fig. 44 without reading its caption.
“Pulverized mudbrick” is in the figure, and the yellow circles are also in the figure. But “Pulverized mudbrick” does not refer to the yellow circles.
The yellow circles highlight the charcoal fragments. “Pulverized mudbrick” is the matrix, the entire background of the picture, around the charcoal fragments and the bones; the label “Pulverized mudbrick” is placed on the pulverized mudbrick.
I have nothing against discussions on Twitter, but, people, don’t tweet faster than you read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That thread also claims several times that the paper flat-out states TeH to be Sodom. It’s actually much more careful. The 8 occurrences of “Sodom” in the paper are the following:
Three on p. 5–6:
One on p. 53:
One on p. 57:
After the first quote, I expected a detailed investigation of the text of the Sodom story. That never came. The six points in the second quote are all there is. Individually and together, the three quotes only state that a description of an airburst or impact destroying a city seems to have been incorporated into the Sodom story when that story was composed; that’s a perfectly fair point to make.
The last quote actually emphasizes that such events are perfectly natural – as opposed to miracles.
The other three occurences are all in the references:
Interestingly, those three references are not cited in the passages quoted above. 10 is cited a single time, on p. 3:
(Yes, I clicked through all 200 occurrences of the string 10 in the paper, except those in the references.)
148 is cited a single time on p. 49:
170 is likewise cited a single time on p. 53:
At worst, these are desperate attempts to get some fundamentalist works cited. No argument in the paper depends on them.
So, the last author is a fundamentalist at a diploma mill with a printer, and he managed to get his thesis* at that same diploma mill cited in the paper once (for the “ongoing debate” over whether TeH is Sodom, in the first quote above). That’s bad, but it doesn’t seem to be able to do much damage to the paper. He’s the only author at that institution; he’s neither the first nor the corresponding author. The first author, who presumably did most of the work, is in the geology program of a perfectly respectable university.
* 2. “Silvia, P. J. The Middle Bronze Age civilization-ending destruction of the Middle Ghor. Ph.D. thesis, Trinity Southwest University (2015).”
…and I’m only halfway through the first Twitter thread. I don’t think I’ll have time for this in the rest of this month. 🙁
*Hastily checking where the author of the paper about Breton syntax that I am reading printed her diploma. I think I also now need to know her sexual orientation. Is it gay Breton or lesbian Breton?*
Disbelieving commentary from a space scientist: Did An Asteroid Destroy A Biblical City? Take These Claims With a Pillar Of Salt.
A) Tunguska-like airburst events are very rare. It would be hugely unlikely to have two asteroids airburst at such close locations so close together in time. (That is, rare for the airburst to occur very close to the earth’s surface. Most asteroids either disintegrate in the upper atmosphere, so anything that reaches the earth’s surface is already small and molten and spread over a large area; or is a much more coherent piece of rock that doesn’t disintegrate/forms an impact crater.)
B) Shocked quartz does not get that much shock from airburst events: there’s simply not enough kinetic energy in air. (The Tunguska event did flatten trees, but they were still recognisable as trees with their cellular structure.)
A space scientist with a fine Scottish accent, btw.
@David Marjanović: For a sufficiently big and abrupt explosion, there is no difference in the form of the blast wave; the Sedov solution is universal. All that matters in that case are the energy of the explosion, the density of the surrounding air, and how far you are away from the center. However, Mark Boslough’s thing is modeling atmospheric impacts as something entirely different; this image from Wikipedia shows the kind of columnar structure that his models feature. I don’t know enough to adjudge whether those models are more realistic. What we know about the Tunguska Event certainly suggests that it was more Sedov like; however, there’s obviously still a lot of uncertainty even about what happened at Tunguska, and we don’t know how typical it was (although the well-recorded occurrence of the Tunguska Event does not affect the probability that another similar event could also have occurred in the geologically recent past).
eyewitness description of this 3600-year-old catastrophic event may have been passed down as an oral tradition that eventually became the written biblical account about the destruction of Sodom.
Yes quite plausible. But in that timescale, the event could have happened anywhere in the Mediterranean/Middle East basin, and the description transferred.
And the description itself seems to me much more like a volcano/very similar to Pliny’s description of Vesuvius/Pompeii.
This multi-century abandonment is particularly puzzling, given that this area contains the most fertile agricultural land …
Don’t I remember from another thread that abandoning settlements that had been riven by plague was a thing? Burn the place to the ground (fire!), quarantine it for a few decades, bulldoze it to rubble (making it look like the aftermath of an explosion), build again on top.
Fire is expected. Usually the plague is Homo sapiens.
But abandoning the region for several hundreds years looks weird. The Middle East is a rather dencely populated region, and Jordan is not one river among 70 rivers in the middle East.
Google says:
“The four major rivers in the Middle Eastern region are the Indus, Jordan, Tigris, and Euphrates. ”
It is tiny, compared to the Nile, but it is what they have:(
Abandoning the valley for centuries!?
More of (3) continued:
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441799634385469450https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441827787480829958https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1442309550284034051@DM:
I am hardly an expert, but I note that the nuke on a tower left not only a crater, but also a layer of fused vitrified minerals (trinitite), and also that the height of the tower is far lower than the estimated height of the proposed airburst (in the case of Tunguska, frex, it was many kilometers (5-10km, says WikiP, 12km says Boslough)).
One of Boslough’s tweets from the latest thread:
Huh? The paper only posits one.
Is that a misunderstanding of the mention of the hunter-gatherer camp at Abu Hureyra in Syria, supposedly destroyed by an airburst nine thousand years earlier?
The presentation of finds of trinitite (though not a continuous layer) takes up a few pages of the paper. The similarity in the photos, for what that’s worth, is striking.
@David Marjanović:
I suspect that “close” in the quoted statement was meant in the geological sense in both instances.
@DM:
Or rather, meltglass compared with (the specific type of meltglass that is) trinitite.
I suspect (although again, not an expert) that the same argument about shocked quartz would apply — that the heat/pressure from a high airburst, specifically, would not be enough to form meltglass.
Probably relevant: no mention of any kind of meltglass from the Tunguska airburst (although the search is now poisoned because [Tunguska meltglass] of course brings up the TeH paper and references to it). But the WikiP page for Tunguska event has no mention of such meltglass or tektites, and the WikiP page for tektites has no mention of Tunguska. So.
If you are using Google, click “tools” below the search window. You can set a time range.
P.S., sorry, likely it is obvious, I just answered mechanically:)
https://twitter.com/acbrittingham1/status/1440559337466781705Hm.
That’s a mighty professional looking source, yup, yup.
Hot enough to melt zircon and discolor bone.
Another oddity: the caption to the photograph of the site says it was processed by Photoshop, and gives the version number and a link to Adobe’s website. It does not say what the processing actually did. That proves nothing, but shows an odd unprofessionalism.
Was a time when people heaped irrelevant information in papers about which computer they used and what software. This is thankfully mostly over (such information can occasionally make a difference in principle, but most often it does not.)
@Owlmirror I suspect that “close” in the quoted statement was meant in the geological sense in both instances.
Thank you, yes exactly. Asteroid arrivals are at a scale of millions of years. (But a separation of 9,000 years means it can’t have been one asteroid that broke up in the upper atmosphere with two airbursts.)
@AntC: As I said above, the fact that the separation between the purported blast and the known Tunguska Event is much less than the mean separation between such events has no bearing on the probability on whether the first event actually occurred. Arguing otherwise is gambler’s fallacy.
This recent NASA presentation, based on this open source publication of many asteroid airburst simulations, gives the Tunguska event an airburst altitude range of 5-15km, and blast pressure of . . . 4 psi. Mark Boslough is not one of the authors, but one can see why he is so dismissive of TeH claims of shocked quartz etc, given that the authors of the above get about the same numbers for the blast pressure (4 psi ~= 0.27 bar, vs “order of magnitude is 0.1 bar” from Boslough’s simulation)
The quartz is shocked.
The paper posits a larger bolide than the one of Tunguska, and consequently an airburst at a lower altitude.
Yes, especially on the part of the editor and the reviewers.
Looks like they were too lazy to look up the primary sources – which I agree they should have.
Not at that size, no.
How is 4 psi enough to knock down trees?
How is 4 psi enough to knock down trees?
You’d be surprised how many square inches there are in a tree.
Sarcasm aside, I’ve found a scale online that claims “5 psi: Wooden utility poles snapped”, so it seems at least the right order of magnitude.
Well, I think for trees we need the dynamic pressure of wind, not the pressure in the shockwave.
1 psi would be a wind about 100 m/s.
The pressure will be much greater for faster winds (it depends on v^2 and the denstity) and you will have flying trees. For slower winds it will be much lesser.
Boslough needs a ‘weak Tunguska’, so he assumed that the forest was unhealthy, and noted that wind can get faster when crossing ridges.
In his model in the distance of 20km the wind is 14 m/s, but near a ridge (a perfect pointed ridge in his picture) it gets fast. He choses the value of 33 m/s.
https://cfwebprod.sandia.gov/cfdocs/CompResearch/docs/Boslough_Crawford_HVIS_2008.pdf
On the last page of the PDF of the NASA presentation I linked to:
1 m/s = 3.6 km/hr, so those wind-speeds are 172.8-180 km/hr
That sounds about right.
FWIW, the usual design wind speed around here is 34 m/s. That’s per definition peak wind and conceived as a very short and local gush. The massive wind from a nucear explosion or an asteroide impact is something very different, even if the top speed might be about the same..
This post at Retraction Watch summarizes some of the criticisms of the Scientific Reports paper. One particularly notable thing is that scientific image manipulation watchdog Elizabeth Bik has spotted signs of fakery in one of the images.
(I should perhaps say that one of the authors, Christopher R. Moore, is somebody that I have met, although he is not one of the researchers at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina that I really know.)
Er.
Looks like someone wanted to remove a logo, but did not want to crop the image.
From the replies to Bik’s tweet:
“They obviously need to provide the original photo to clear this up. Just once, I’d like this to be because the archaeologists left their Snickers wrappers too close to the dig.”
“Hah, it could be the shoes of the photographer or someone standing too close
An ever present problem!”
But yeah, that requires an explanation.
several more
At the top of that page:
# The prestigious international journal Nature has expanded its scope beyond science and is now publishing papers in the field of Biblical archaeology. A paper published today asks the question “Did God smite the sinners of Sodom with an asteroid?” #
Wonders never cease: a “homophobic” asteroid.
Assteroid.
Dang it ! Missed an opportunity there.
per asspera ad asstra…
The Sodomites seem to have offended not so much by “sodomy” but by their somewhat striking inhospitality. The notion that it was homosexuality that was the basic problem seems to be a fairly major retcon.
The main lesson that we learn is that is unwise to threaten to rape angels, especially angels who have been sent to see whether they should destroy your city or not. It creates a bad impression.
Any worthwhile god is going to smite people for inhospitality, and quite right too. That nice Nigel Farage had better keep under cover if he knows what’s good for him, especially during thunderstorms. And asteroid strikes, of course.
For a quick-and-easy exercise in OT exegesis, use a search engine that will find you all the instances (in the KJV) of “smite/smiteth/smitten” etc (hopefully you can just type smit in the box and get them all w/o many false positives) and tally up the various instances of smiting into praiseworthy, blameworthy or hard-to-say.
ETA: Unless it’s a search engine unusually wise in the ways of ablauts, you will need to run a separate search to pick up the instances of “smote” and “smotest.”
The main lesson that we learn is that is unwise to threaten to rape angels
The way I heard, it was just a friendly offer to a couple of cute dudes from out of town. To call that “rape” suggests that those angels had serious issues with their sexuality. All they had to do was Just Say No. To get hysterical about it creates a bad impression. And going on to throw handbags and asteroids doesn’t improve matters.
instances (in the KJV) of “smite/smiteth/smitten”
Errr. So I went to do as I was told and quickly found that God didn’t “smite” Sodom and Gomorrah. In verse 19:13 “the men” promised to “destroy” the place and when the action commenced in 19:24 LORD just rained brimstone and fire on them and overthrew them in 19:25. The only smiting happened in 19:11 and it was smiting with blindness. And in chapter 18, where the remarkable bargaining down is happening, nobody speaks of smiting, only of destruction.
The Sodomites seem to have offended not so much by “sodomy” but by their somewhat striking inhospitality. The notion that it was homosexuality that was the basic problem seems to be a fairly major retcon.
Indeed. Richard Kay wrote a whole book on what the sin of Sodom may have been, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV, which I recommend to all interested parties.
Okay, okay, search instead for instances of destr*, if thou wilt. I assume that in the early 17th century context “smite” didn’t sound any more distinctive-because-archaic than “destroy,” and the latter is a bit stronger, since a smiting is potentially survivable.
A quick look at BDB shows that Hebrew root נכה, which KJV associates mainly with smiting (but occasionaly with slaying), in all it’s variations has 501 occurences, which I am not going to research. Judging by the same BDB, most of them are non-deadly smitings, but some are, including the one in Lev. 24:17 “Anyone who kills a living soul must be definitely put to death” the killing is done with “smite” root. So maybe all people executed for poisonings were executed wrongly.
I think, FWIW, that the tale of the fate of Sodom should perhaps be viewed through the lens of the somewhat smaller disaster some millennia later of the Tower of Siloam. Exegetes are perhaps unduly eager to find a theory that the Sodomites were engaged in some particularly exotic and distinctive sin that is definitely not currently pursued in their own city, which is thus (they wish to conclude) at no risk of wrath and destruction. That seems to me a foolish way to think about it. As was said in the word given by the LORD concerning the sinful Los Angelenos:
On the thirty-first floor
A gold-plated door
Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain
“Lesbian” is a similar word.
some particularly exotic and distinctive sin
It’s always appealing to imagine that the really serious sins are those that you yourself are not actually tempted to commit at all. Bizarre sins are helpful in maintaining this comforting illusion.
MInd you, as I read it, the actual sin of Sodom was not particularly bizarre at all. It’s there whenever you read about hordes of refugees coming to dilute our precious “Christian” culture with their horrid ways, for example. Put them on Ascension Island! They have no claim on us! Parasites!
David, then I have a problem, because more than once a homeless guy asked me to let him stay in my house, but I only helped damsels in distress.
Start with damsels and work up from there.
But to be on the safe side I wouldn’t go out in thunderstorms without a properly earthed hat.
What’s the most exotic sin mentioned in the Bible?
I thought of boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk, but it’s probably just a dietary preference, not a sin.
The prohibition of wearing wool and linen fabrics in one garment is pretty exotic (if you didn’t grow up with it, of course).
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1443771728052703234
The original versions of the edited pictures. I was going to find them myself (I was quite confident that they already published these pictures) but someone has already done this.
But honestly, this all is disgusting. I mean, the criticism in Twitter.
Oh, great. Now people are going to believe that’s a quote from the paper. *facepalm*
That must be why Sodomie has ended up meaning “bestiality” in German.
OK, this is majorly weird.
OK, this is majorly weird.
In my case the effect was different.
I worried, but it is absolutely obvious that Silvia (the archaeology guy with them) would prefer the original picture, and very likely thought that it is the original picture.
the tale of the fate of Sodom should perhaps be viewed through the lens of the somewhat smaller disaster some millennia later of the Tower of Siloam
Bible-internally, a particularly striking parallel to the story of Sodom is to be found in Judges 19, where the locals show up after dark wanting to rape their town’s male guest, but end up settling for his concubine, whom they end up killing as well. In this case the crime is punished not by miraculous intervention but by concerted human action. Apparently this Deliverance-like combination of inhospitability, rape threats, and indiscriminate appetites was something the compilers expected to happen every so often – a part of human nature, as it were, which needed to be addressed.
It’s also paralleled by the story of the flood: a hero chosen to save the worthy few, who later passes out drunk and is molested by his son/daughters.
We read all this early in grade school, and thankfully some of us were too young to understand what was going on and be upset by it. The Judges 19 story is especially awful.
The Catholic world seems to have forgotten the Book of Judges altogether. It’s in every Bible, everyone knows it’s there, and that’s it.
Candida Moss usually focuses on the NT, but she has some comments on the OT as well.
https://thedailybeast.com/sodoms-tragic-story-isnt-the-meteor-its-the-biblical-rape-culture
Being a rape victim in biblical law almost always incurs the death penalty. Or being given to the rapist as a wife.
I myself can’t wait for the geo-archaeological explanation of how Lot’s wife really was turned to a pillar of salt.
Another disturbing parallel between the Sodom story and Judges 19 is that both Lot and the Ephraimite in Gibeah tell their townsmen “Please, don’t rape my guest(s), who I’ve never met before. Rape my daughter(s) instead.”
Was there an ethos in which letting the neighbors have their way with your daughters was normal?
The story does offer a counterpoint to the tribalism of the rest of Torah. The moral seems to be “you should have stayed with the Jebusites.”
They finally explain the photoshopping. Technically innocuous, yes, but wildly unprofessional, like a lot of the things Boslough and others have been pointing out. This in itself does not disprove the results, just makes them untrustworthy. The more direct arguments against their paper (bones, temperatures, radiocarbon, shocked quartz) are another story.
WP article on chapters 19-21 says that the rabbinic tradition views the whole episode as a warning against family strife. If levite’s young wife/concubine didn’t become angry with him (or prostituted herself, Hebrew is not certain on this point) or if the levite himself was more attentive to his wife, nothing like that would happen.
I am very surprised that Catholics completely forgot the story of Samson.
This in itself does not disprove the results, just makes them untrustworthy.
Boslough is a liar.
like a lot of the things Boslough and others have been pointing out.
Because they are bullying the authors.
Does Catholic doctrine consider Samson a martyr (rox), or a suicide (sux)?
Boslough is a liar.
Well, then.
Boslough is a liar … Because they are bullying the authors.
Apparently you have a dog in this fight that you haven’t owned up to yet.
The story in Judges 19–21 that starts in with the inhospitality of the Gibeahites and the revenge taken against them ends up segueing into and spending more time on the actions taken against the tribe of Benjamin. The other Hebrews are said to take revenge against the Benjaminites for not participating in the earlier revenge campaign against the Gibeahites. Then, perhaps having decided that their actions had been unduly harsh, the men of the other tribes plot to allow the few surviving Benjaminites to carry off their daughters, so that the tribe will not go extinct.
Some commentators have interpreted the vengeance on the Benjaminites as an interpolation, perhaps added contemporaneously to the condemnation of King Saul (a Benjaminite) added to the immediately following scroll. Both stories feature the Benjaminites being punished for being insufficiently genocidal, and both may have been introduced to provide theological justifications for the tribe’s probably tenuous position among the tribes of the later northern kingdom of Israel.
The most horrific line of the whole horrific chapter of Judges 19 is verse 28. Even more so than verse 29, which itself is the stuff of nightmares. When you’ve left your concubine outside to be gang-raped all night to save yourself, the proper morning greeting is not, “Get up, let’s go.”
I think the point of Judges is meant to be the Hobbesian one that even tyranny is better than anarchy; as the very last verse pretty much says outright.
Whoever wrote the story was a skilful artist, though. The apparently casual detail about the dead woman’s hands being “on the threshold” is masterly.
The dorky smile on that dog turd emoji is a detail worthy of a master. I often go back to study it when putting the final touches on a putdown.
Similarly, the bible sports many ingratiating details. That’s why people don’t put it down even after stepping in it.
There are indeed many different modes of excellence.
(Sadly, I am unfamiliar with the oeuvre to which you allude, but I am happy to take your word for it.)
When you have a moment, do search for “dog turd emoji”. Or “tas de crotte emoji”, for that cosmopolitan touch.
It’s quite harmless, even ironic:
# Cet émoji ironique est aimé par beaucoup de monde et est utilisé dans de nombreuses et diverses significations (toujours avec une connotation humoristique). #
We can also connect these stories (Sodom and Levite’s Concubine) with Abraham and Sarah’s repeated (at least 3 times) stories of presenting S. as A.’s sister and therefore legitimizing giving her away as a sexual partner in various foreign lands. Which maybe telling us that ancient Hebrews saw sexual predation on foreigners in one’s midst as something routine, but as time went on they view it with increasing disapproval.
Abraham was just a considerate guest, unlike the angels.
Yes. Interesting examples. I would extend your point to say that pimping out one’s female relatives also seems routine.
To me, the predation is ugly but sadly familiar. But the offering up of one’s daughters or wife, so blandly, is very hard to fathom. I can’t get that globe rotating or revolving in my model of the universe.
@D. O.: The third time the wife-sister story is repeated (Genesis 26), it’s actually Isaac and Rebekah. It seems like it was a very common bit of folklore.
Right. A full wiki article on the topic, eh?
Abraham and Sarah’s repeated (at least 3 times) stories of presenting S. as A.’s sister
But the offering up of one’s daughters or wife, so blandly, is very hard to fathom
I suspect that attitude has been hard to fathom for quite some time, though not necessarily always in quite the same way. In his interreligious polemics against the Torah, I notice that Ibn Hazm (11th c.) took some time to argue that the stories about Abraham presenting Sarah as his sister were logically incoherent and repulsive. In the case of Lot, however, he contents himself with insisting that obviously he must have been offering to marry his daughters off with all proper formalities to the leaders of this mob, rather than whatever your dirty mind was thinking. Seems like one case where having men doing most of the interpretation makes for some blind spots.
Was Abraham just trying to get a son and heir (or a daughter to care for him and Sarah in their centuries as OAP)? It seems possible (although perhaps nowhere stated in the Bible) that Sarah may have intimated to him that the lack of offspring might be due to his own physical shortcomings, or to a certain lack of zeal in his attempts in deploying them😊.
I think this is about the ancient institution of guest friendship. Rape, certainly, but honorable and well-regulated. When a man (always a man) is travelling and is welcomed into your house, you owe him food and shelter, but also the company of your daughter or sister or wife to accomodate his needs, and if his needs goes in another direction, and your culture acknowledges that, surely a servant boy or concubine’s son should be offered. What I sense is that this obligation was mutual. When a traveller came visiting with an entourage of female relatives and servants, he had the same obligation towards his host.
Somewhere in the long unwritten history the customs changed. When societies grow I think it develops naturally that this obligation towards the host would extend to his superior — though maybe easier in a clan society built on personal loyalty and protection than in a city. In this perspective the stories of Sodom and of Judges 19 are about the clash between city officials trying to enforce the obligation of the guest on the level of society, as a token of loyalty by the host, and the righteous few who practice it only on the man-to-man level.
rob v.
1. to enforce hospitality
2. to enforce generosity
3. ….
At least we know that Lot’s wife was named Esther, for she was an organic salt.
Greek xenia extended to slaves as a matter of course, but definitely not to wives or sisters.
Oh, yes. But at what point in history, or size of the household, does this distinction become tenable?
The slave/wife distinction was pretty blurry in Jacob’s household.
Peter Freuchen claimed that when he visited remote Inuit settlements, his duty as a guest was to impregnate as many women as he could (to refresh the gene pool). I’m not sure that it was a duty reluctantly performed, though. Or even that his interpretation was correct. But something similar could just possibly be the origin of the expectation of getting laid when you visited somebody.
The guest host relationship was of course different then, though I’m dubious it was quite what you’re saying. The Levite doesn’t seem to have needed to express a reason why he didn’t want to submit himself to the townsmen. The story reads less like the townsmen felt he owed them an obligation, more like they believed they could take advantage of his weak position.
At any rate, it’s worth recognizing that Lot and the Ephraimite weren’t offering their daughters to their guests or foreigners who could broaden the gene pool, but as a way of appeasing neighbors with whom they could have arranged a marriage or a coupling at any previous moment in their lives. It seemed more like “People are angry? Maybe sex with my daughters can calm everyone down.” I continue to find it hard to integrate into a world-view.
I do think it’s interesting to see it as a moment of incipient identity, and to recognize that the new identity involved changing sexual mores. The Levite believes he should not stay with Jebusites, but instead push on to Israelite territory. Why, if they’re going to treat him thus? The Israelites he chances upon do something that makes them outlaws to other Israelites, though apparently not to anyone else, since it’s only the 12 tribes he sends the body parts to, only they that respond. (And what of Benjamin, who end up rallying around Gibeah? Did the Levite actually send a message to Benjamin too, thinking they would take his side? The number 12 may be of ritual significance here, but it’s still surprising the author didn’t address the problem.)
Not that Judges 19 is necessarily based on even a kernel of truth. Simply that it seems difficult to avoid a reading some similar motive for the author of the story.
More broadly, Judeo-Christian ethics and identity seem to have developed in significant part as a rejection of the casual temple sex mores of Classical paganism. Is Judges 19 near the beginning of that development, either as a real (though mythologized) historical event or as a story whose author wanted to recast Israelite identity.
A related question is which identity valued women more highly. Is one aspect of the development that Israelites were learning to treat women not as mere property, but as extremely valuable property, versus the various pagans who (in Italy) didn’t bother to name their daughters, and (in Canaan) gave their daughters away on whims?
Yes, I’m aware that in terms of who is doing whom a favour, the biblical narrative is very far from the tall tale about the Inuit. The one just reminded me of the other.
pagans who (in Italy) didn’t bother to name their daughters
The Romans may not have named their daughters, but free Roman women had a lot more liberty than their individually-labelled Greek cousins. Polybius (patron saint of all Stockholm Syndrome victims) was quite taken aback to find respectable women at Roman dinner parties.
the offering up of one’s daughters or wife, so blandly, is very hard to fathom. I can’t get that globe rotating or revolving in my model of the universe.
i’m always fascinated by the persistence of would-be explanations that rely on ‘hospitality’ and such in order to avoid dealing with the core element: daughters, sisters, wives, etc being definitionally the property of a man, who thus had the ability to do whatever he wanted with them (be it providing them to other men for sex, as in these stories about the bnei terah, or killing them, as in the stories of tamar, jephthah’s unnamed daughter, etc.). in order to wrap your head around the model, all you have to do is remember that for the men in these stories, and the men who wrote them down, women are not people in anything like the sense that they themselves and their head-of-household / future-head-of-household peers are.
it’s not like the principle has faded much, though it’s a lot less explicit these days. here in the u.s., it’s enshrined in an array of laws and legal precedents allowing physical violence by parents and their proxies towards children (euphemized as ‘corporal punishment’, ‘in-patient treatment’, ‘conservatorship’, etc); requiring parental approval for life-saving medical procedures (in particular to end unwanted and unchosen pregnancies, to preserve mental health, and to avoid easily preventable diseases from mumps to COVID-19); allowing parents to enforce their children’s participation in religious activities (including ones that directly expose them to physical harm and to people known to habitually harm young people); ensuring practical impunity for most men who kill women they’re in sexual relationships with (in particular those men authorized by the state to kill, whether abroad or domestically); etc.
Yeah, what she said. If I could make one sweeping change in the universe, it would be to make women fully equal to men in all legal and social senses everywhere in the world. Then let the chips fall where they may!
“‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now”
–attr. some Nobel-laureate dude, prob. a typical male
(While things like that tend to make me ill, I’ll ignore that for the moment.) The whole subject leaves many questions open, some probably answered long ago, some which cannot be answered. The most detailed information on life in Palestine 3000 years ago comes from wealthy men, who wrote about other wealthy men. The story of women, the poor, and slaves has to be inferred from the background. Were slaves equally men and women? Were they enslaved by coercion, or just by economics? Were they Israelites as well as captives from other nations? Were slaves allowed to marry among themselves, and if so, were married female slaves more protected from their owners/employers?
rozele: i’m always fascinated by the persistence of would-be explanations that rely on ‘hospitality’ and such in order to avoid dealing with the core element: daughters, sisters, wives, etc being definitionally the property of a man
I don’t think there’s a contradiction. When women are property, what counts for civilized behaviour between men may well extend to the right to physically exploit eachother’s women (and male slaves).
It’s still necessary to discuss the moral systems that such arrangements are part of, and how and why they evolve. I have no problem seeing patriarchal societies using women as commodities, as expendable resources, as a natural provision for honored guests. I might even speculate that the system where wives and daughters are locked up to prevent contact with anybody outside the household arises as an extension of the system where providing women is a natural obligation of an honourable host. Being able to provide women without having to expend your immediate kin becomes a marker of status, and status becomes ideal, and ideal becomes moral.
Even so, while women have been sold and killed and kept in isolation and raped through all human history, it’s a fact that institutions change, and that the roles and rights and protection of women, and children, and slaves also change. Some times are bad, some are much worse, but whatever the form of male dominance, it has always been asserted with moral conviction. Trying to understand history means also trying to understand the development of the ruling ethos.
These Old Testament stories are interesting exactly because they make little moral sense, and apparently did so even to those who wrote them down. There was a clear understanding that they were important, and that their male heroes were moral men, but the tragic clash of moral imperatives is lost. I tried to suggest one such moral conflict, which may have been understood as a clash between civilization and barbary at the time the stories were first composed, and thus as a moral justification for a tribal war.
That is not to say there was anything but a complete lack of concern for women both on and off the moral highground..
Yes, apart from appalling treatment of women in these stories, which is obvious one might want to find some logic behind them, however twisted and foreign to us. It seems to me that the main story in Judges 19-21 is not the gang rape/murder, but the later war. And the story of the levite’s concubine was a pretext. But people have done privately a lot of outrageous things and if one needs a justification for war (remember, vae victis, Benjamite cities were exterminated, so I don’t see much of a moral high ground on anybody’s part) there is always something. It is interesting, though strange, to me that this particular combination (gang rape/murder of a stranger’s woman) is considered vile enough to start a war over. This probably tells us something, though I cannot figure what.
that their male heroes were moral men
I don’t think that’s the case at all: the “heroes” are frequently portrayed as acting strikingly immorally, not just in our enlightened latter-day terms, but in the narrator’s eyes and in-universe. Later attempts to explain it all away are deeply unconvincing special pleading and misplaced piety (horribly misplaced, in fact, as it leads to attempted justifications for what the actual text straightforwardly presents as wrong.)
On islands and also in oasis trade centers, it is a well known custom for visiting traders to be greeted by the lovely and hospitable daughters of the local families, I have read about this in Marco Polo (Xinjiang), Pierre Bayle (Iceland) and various sources (Hawaii).
Both Melville and Twain wrote discreetly about the lovely and hospitable women of the Pacific Islands. Both married into respectable New England Puritan families, so their accounts are little blurrier than we would wish.
Should we assume that in every case the women had no say in the matter just because the story is told that way? I can see a wife or a daughter wanting to make their own personal alliance with a powerful and wealthy man and just using the husband/father as a go between. In the cases I just mentioned, i’m prety sure that daughters who steered business to their family operation would raise their status within the family.
Should we assume that in every case the women had no say in the matter just because the story is told that way?
We shouldn’t assume anything, but it seems extremely unlikely that the women had much say in the matter. “She wanted it, really she did” is not a defense that wears well, historically.
A lot of these mythological stories, whether Biblical or otherwise (for example, the Iliad and Odyssey—both narratives in which the role of women as property is a key element—share this feature) are Iron Age renderings of events that supposedly took place in the late Bronze Age. And whether the stories actually date back as far as the second millennium B. C. E., there were almost certainly hundreds of years between the earliest versions of the stories and the standard versions that we have today, which date from well into the first millennium.
These stories must have existed in semi-standardized versions for some time, but we know they were redacted into modern form in Classical times. (The early semi-standardized versions were not necessarily written, however. Whether or not the authentic “Homer” was actually blind, he was unquestionably illiterate.) For the Greek epics, we have a fairly clear idea of where and when the finalized versions date from. For the Tanakh, the situation is obviously much murkier. However, even if one does not accept the full details of the Documentary Hypothesis, it is clear that there must have existed several canonical documents that contributed to the final redactions. We know that the redactors were not simply retelling the stories in their own words, because of the inclusion of so many clear doublets, many of which there would be no reason to include, unless the redactors were trying, at least some of the time, to copy their existing sources directly into their redacted version. A second, even more compelling, line of evidence is that there are evident correlations between the style of the verbiage in various sections of the Torah and the subject matter; once again, this indicates that a preexisting wording was being copied into the final document—although there are also many places where the various layers of redactors made their own changes.
These stories were quite old by the time they were set in their final written forms. The versions we have today were set down by scribes in Iron Age societies that were significantly more urban and generally rather different from the Bronze Age milieus of the stories themselves. The specific wording of the stories is a mishmosh of passages from various stages in documents’ histories, and the later redactors did not necessarily fully understand the stories or their societal contexts. For example, the Second-Temple-era contributors to the Priestly Source seem to try to talk around the fact that they don’t actually know what the Urim and the Thummim looked like, nor how they were used for divination. Or there is the incident with Ham and Noah, which we discussed extensively earlier this year; the context suggests that uncovering his nakedness may have originally been a euphemism for some kind of sexual assault, but the behavior of the other brothers, which seems to require a literal interpretation, may have arisen through a misapprehension by a later redactor.
So, to come to my point, the versions of these stories that we have may present a fairly confused picture of the moral questions associated with female sexual availability (among other subjects). The stories were elements of a received tradition; however, things that might have been assumed to be obvious moral imperatives by an audience of nomadic herd-owning men in Canaan (or Mycenean landowners on the other side of the sea), ca. 1200 B. C. E., were not necessarily still seen in the same way by the time the stories were standardized. So it may be dicey trying to draw inferences about the roles played by women in the societies of these stories, because the stories themselves are not really associated with a single, fixed cultural context.
& @Lars Mathiesen, John Emerson: I just remembered that it is a plot point in Waterworld that when Kevin Costner’s character arrives that the artificial atoll where the first half of the film takes place, he refuses to copulate with and impregnate one of the local girls. This arouses suspicion that he has something to hide, although it is not ultimately clear whether he primarily wants to hide the fact that he has gills or he is really just not interested.
My surprise is not that men disposed of women as property. It’s that they sold them so cheap. One can imagine the Ephraimite’s daughters bringing him an alliance in town. Instead he was willing to give them to win forbearance from his neighbors for some guy he met that afternoon.
On the issue of whether “women’s opinions didn’t matter” can be applied as a general rule to old testament society, we seem to be forgetting that the story begins with a Levite whose wife up and left him for months.
Whether women are capable of taking action on their own is an entirely separate issue from whether they and their wishes and opinions are taken seriously by men. The former is common, the latter not.
In some cultures and historical stages women have autonomy and powers of their own, including freedom to be “adulterous”, and their men had to go along with what they did.The Bible stories certainly don’t portray it that way, but they were centuries after the event, if there was an event, and perhaps they were just saving Abraham’s pride by telling it the way they did..
I sometimes wish this blog had a thumbs up button because there are so many posts I’d like to acknowledge as good though I have no useful reply.
Qui tacet, consentire videtur.
In a comment thread that may not work as intended, though, since it implies an obligation to combat, with new comments, comments one doesn’t approve of or agree with. Otherwise there’s no way to tell what a commenter thinks. OTOH silence, however interpreted, reduces the total number of comments, a goal most earnestly to be desired in general.
A thumbs-up is a vote. One of the functions of a vote is to cut off the proliferation of opinions, at least momentarily. Afterwards, the tree will recover and grow more vigorously. This usually starts already at the exit polls.
For all the reasons Stu points out, I’m fine if the thumbs-up button is only made available to me.
As Brett implies, the principle of lectio difficilior suggests that these awkward stories are fairly early in date, and reflect a rather different period’s mores; but what did the scribes who wrote them down make of them? It’s clear that the reactions have changed over time. For a modern reader, the obvious problem with these stories revolves around consent. For Ibn Hazm (who, I suspect, was fairly representative in this regard of medieval readers in general), the obvious problem was rather felt to revolve around honour; a patriarch could legitimately marry off his daughters without consulting them, but making or letting them (let alone his wife) engage in extramarital sex was out of bounds. For the Classical period, I have no idea, but I imagine sources like Josephus must provide some indications.
What I said is rather odd, I admit. If Sarah was an active agent, then Abraham was a cuckold and inadequate male. If Abraham was the active agent he was like a pimp or a lackey. The story as told presents him as active at the price of making him a pimp and a lackey, but at least not a cuckold.
I have no idea whatsoever of what the Jewish interpretation of this story is. I remember that in my Lutheran tradition this episode was not discussed. Abraham was regarded as important because he was obedient to God and willing to sacrifice his son, but did not do so because God changed the rules for everyone. This story took place before Moses and the Ten Commandments, prior to the Law as I understand..
The stories as told do seem to stress the obedience of wives and daughters to their husband or father.
And very peripherally, Mahalelel is apparently a spare patriarch reserved for future use, because I’ve never heard of him and there seem to be few stories about him and almost no one is named after him.
One of the few (about 4 years old):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL42NHT6qC4AcjKSXd_DGpGn8pe7wgwBcd
For a modern reader, the obvious problem with these stories revolves around consent.
Arranged marriage is still here, and there is any number of people who married this way. The harm that what was about to be done to Lot’s daughters, in turn extends far beyond rape.
Thus no, it is not “consent”.
Bigger things happen both times and attract attention of the modern reader.
I am pretty sure the story of Abraham and Sarah is a typical tribal origin story and not particularly fantastic at that.
So probably something like that actually happened and the story was passed down to their descendants as oral tradition.
No moral or ethical lesson there.
Just the things which happened to our ancestors.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
I see that hat’s previous efforts to get this thread to focus on the seeming wackiness of the taboo against mixing linen and wool did not yield fruit
No, no, a thread on that topic would be woolly and would unravel anyway. It was not intended to make a garment.
After grinding through Levi-Strauss’s Raw and Cooked tetralogy, my takeaway was that all indigenous American myths originate in men’s guilt at mistreating women, and that North American myths are just the same as South American ones, just upside down and backwards. [NB so is the moon, in the southern hemisphere.] I’m afraid I can’t give a precise reference for this without rereading the whole thing, sorry.
But I want to point out the persistence of this asymmetry in modern mythology, \ie economics, which pays no attention to the cost of biological and cultural reproduction (`women’s work’), because it’s not monetized and thus invisible. It’s remarkable how much of this misogyny is visible in, for example, in contemporary cutting-edge economics blogs. By their commentors ye shall know them.
@ J W Brewster above: apparently it’s OK to eat locusts because they’re very active? They have an unusual metabolism which makes them rich in oil…
“A thing which actualy happened — well, it happened 2 or 3 times to 2 different couples, so it would be a *kind” of thing that happened in legends about a past which was already very distant when the Bible was written down. So, I think no.
Jack Morava: not just women’s work, but all of physical reality is invisible to economics except when it is monetized, either as a resource or as a cost (e.g. cost of hurricanes, cost of polluted air, cost of global warming). The result has been to be that the environment is given no regard until there’s a crisis of some kind, such as a water shortage or reduction of agricultural production. And almost all important economic decisions are made on the basis of immediate-term profit (within about a 5 year window).
@ John Emerson: Absolutely! Abuse of Mother Gaia, cf Lewis Thompson, Lives of a Cell?
Economics ignores the fact that living beings are periodic phenomena: a chicken is the way an egg reproduces itself. Homo economicus is not an individual but a periodic equivalence class, with its reproductive costs suppressed.
Thinking more of Judges 19 and similar examples, but without any actual knowledge (which won’t deter me) I think we can look at the fact that the outrage happened specifically to the levite’s concubine. Levites were economically dependent on the rest of the Isreali tribes and probably militarily too. If the rape happened against a woman from a landed tribe than it would be a matter between the two tribes to settle and obviously if that happened within a tribe nobody would be in the least concerned. A point against this theory is that the actual text doesn’t even mention the point.
My second stray thought is that both Judges 19 and the Sodom story involve an offer of host’s daughters to emphasize how unreasonable the attackers were. It is as if however wrongheaded the demands of the mobs have been, they have had a kernel of legitimacy, but after rejecting a perfectly valid counteroffer they have lost any claim to forbearance.
And likewise, members of the “underlying population” (Veblen’s phrase) only exist in economics if they own property, are employed, or are employable. Otherwise they’re just an unnecessary cost or a kind of luxury consumption.
Economics ignores the fact that living beings are periodic phenomena: a chicken is the way an egg reproduces itself. Homo economicus is not an individual but a periodic equivalence class, with its reproductive costs suppressed.
Far from being suppressed, the reproductive costs of Arbeitskraft (Schlaf) and Arbeiter (Beischlaf), and the question of who should carry them, have been topics central to economics from the 19C onwards. Interest payments and taxes fall due periodically – these are not ignored by economists.
Periodicity is merely a particular kind of predictability, which is the main topic of every science. Predictability with wriggle room for innovation, I guess you could say.
The economics of poultry farming require exact attention to the periodic behavior of eggs, viz. when they lay chickens.
@ John Emerson: Indeed: \eg children, the ill, elderly…
back to the Red Sea: (sorry, incapable of including the Hebrew):
For Levi as the patronymic corresponding to Leah see Wellinghausen’s Prolegomena (ET 145). I do not remember to have seen it pointed out that Sarah [..,..] corresponds just as closely with Israel. The masculine name corresponding to Sarah is Seraiah […], which stands to Israel as Hezekaiah does to Ezekiel. Now it is well-known that Judah was not originally included in the name of Israel, but was only a brother tribe; see the books of Samuel passim, and especially 2 Sam 5.1. It is also known that Abraham was a Judaean hero; thus we understand how Sarah as the eponyma of Israel was Abraham’s sister before she became his wife and the mother of Israel and Judah alike.
W Robertson Smith, Kinship and marriage in early Arabia, ch I p 34 (1885)
The book is available in full at Google Books; the footnote jm cites is on pp. 34-35. Here’s an image of the first part, with the Hebrew:
What is going on between the Levite and the father of the paramour (פִילֶגֶשׁ), when the father keeps saying, no, no, stay and eat, keeping the Levite for several days. Is the father attempting to establish a formal relationship of marriage? Can this be achieved indirectly, by having him stay a full week or something?
The Levite’s sojourn with the father takes up about a third of the chapter. Seems like it was deemed important. Again on the fifth day, the father urges the Levite to stay, and he “tarries till afternoon”. This delay is responsible for the events at Gibeah, since otherwise, they could have made normal arrangements rather than arriving in Gibeah after dark. I don’t know how close they are to their destination, but it’s possible they would have reached the Levite’s home in Ephraim. Gibeah is nearly in Ephraim. The old man who hosts them is returning from work in his field in Ephraim. The Levite’s initial journey to Bethlehem doesn’t mention a night’s stay.
The concubine is aware of the danger, urging them to stay in Jebus.
Does staying half the day point to an issue? Was the Levite uncertain whether to make her his wife, and his indecisiveness left them vulnerable?
@ Stu Clayton: OK, I may be blinded by ignorance. But infrastructure and social cost really don’t seem very important in current discussions…
I do not know why, but here
https://books.google.com/books?id=Z12fpjj53hwC (William Robertson Smith, Ignác Goldziher, 1903)
does not open, but
https://books.google.com/books?id=PVMIAAAAQAAJ (William Robertson Smith, 1885
does. Perhaps I still would be able to access the former with VPN.
@jack morava: infrastructure renewal, and how it is to be financed, is a hot economic topic in US politics just now.
It sounds as if you feel “social cost” should be more prominent in current economic discussions. That would, however, require monetizing the many aspects of “social” – but you don’t seem to like monetizing things. Anyway, there are zillions of discussions around, and millions of them are about economics.
John Emerson knows tons about these things, I know nothing. I carp while he pikes.
but you don’t seem to like monetizing things
That’s not the point, the point is that if you look only at monetizing things, you will miss most of what’s important in life. This is surely not the first time you have encountered this concept.
It’s also true that if you look only at particle physics, or skin diseases, you will miss most of what’s important in life. Are there actually people who do the former, and risk the latter ? Must be some out-of-the-way coterie I haven’t encountered in my everyday cosmopolitan life.
Judging from the headlines that CNN, Huffpost, Spiegel etc put up to interest their readers, I get the impression that nobody’s missing anything under the sun.
@ Stu Clayton, re monetizing things: somewhere Flann O’Brian says something like, come on, let’s talk about something real, like sleep…
`Marx claimed that money was a reification (a fetish) of the production processes – the labor – that creates the values that money measures.’
http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/def/reification.htm
Too many of the entities floating around in (socio?)/economics are not very `observable’ in any very stable sense. In the current economy it seems possible to buy enough economists to make serious quantitative discussion impossible or meaningless. Big data may eventually clear things up a bit, but it seems to me we are currently in the pre-Boltzmann days of people who didn’t understand the difference between heat and temperature.
come on, let’s talk about something real, like sleep…
Excellent conceit !
we are currently in the situation of people who didn’t understand the difference between heat and temperature
Granted ! I fondly remember the days when I was always in heat, but didn’t have a temperature – or so I imagined. Fever
It’s also true that if you look only at particle physics, or skin diseases, you will miss most of what’s important in life. Are there actually people who do the former, and risk the latter ? Must be some out-of-the-way coterie I haven’t encountered in my everyday cosmopolitan life.
You really don’t read the papers, do you?
Only the headlines. Everybody puts on a show of single-mindedness, to attract attention, but offline they pursue the important things in life like everybody else. Whatever these may be.
@ Stu re Peggy Lee,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsBak0oCgdY
We have a poison ivy infestation, I have to do a lot of laundry, will have to sign off for a while. Best regards, sincerely, ( : + {)}
@jack
I see now that you probably know my old friends Walter and Anne Neumann. Maybe, in re homotopy theory, even Hans Baues from Bonn, many moons ago
Dear Stu,
We can’t go on meeting like this! I’m jmorava1@jh.edu among other things. I figured we were in each others’ closures but I’m a kind of outlier… Hope to hear from you soon
In economics and even more so, finance things not monetized are non-factors, and major decisions both by business and by government are increasingly governed solely by finance. It is true that individuals live their lives in terms of many other factors, but huge decisions are made by single-minded institutions. EG, millions of people may want to save the Amazon rainforest, and only a few may want to plunder it, but the plunderers guided solely by finance are organized into disciplined, well-financed organizations (corporations but also states) which are in a position to achieve their financial goals and organized to do so, while the miliions of others judging by non-monetized criteria can just watch or do futile protests. Environmentalists occasionally win a victory here or there, but the steady trend in terms of facts on the ground is against them.
the father of the paramour (פִילֶגֶשׁ)
Incidentally, this word pilɛ́gɛš happens to be a probable Indo-European loanword into Hebrew, related to Greek pallakê.
Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, on פִּלֶגֶשׁ:
(I don’t understand what he means by “it is difficult to derive the Hebrew form directly from Greek and Latin because they have no clear lndo-European etymology.” The different vowels do, however, argue against a direct borrowing.)
The dog poop mark Stu is referring to is known in Japanese as doguro (nothing to do with dogs, means curled up like a snake), maki-guso, or maki-unko (spiral shit). It’s been around in Japanese manga for many years. In fact, I asked a couple of Japanese kids in about 1977 whether they did maki-unko and they told me “Of course not, to do a maki-unko you’d have to do this” (accompanied by rotation of hips).
Is that his guest?
millions of people may want to save the Amazon rainforest, and only a few may want to plunder it, but the plunderers guided solely by finance
I got an impression that much of deforestation in the Amazon is actually guided by nationalism.
There are people in these countries who think that the Amazon region should be colonized and developed and settled as quickly as possible otherwise there is a risk of losing large chunk of the country to external interests (for example, under pretense of protecting the rain forest or indigenous peoples).
Separate, but related issue is the lack of government control. Power vacuum in large portions of the Amazon tends to be filled by drug cartels or guerrilla movements, so naturally there is also a desire to stop that by colonization and economic development of the region (accompanied as usual by deforestation).
In short, to save the Amazon you need to persuade the Brazilians that it needs to be saved and that it’s in their own national interests.
As I understand, currently they are not persuaded at all and think that it’s all Western plot to steal half of their country.
As I understand, currently they are not persuaded at all and think that it’s all Western plot to steal half of their country.
Not wanting to be told what to do by outsiders with a history of rapacity and hypocrisy is understandable.
When they realise what they’ve done it will be too late, of course.
>>some guy he met that afternoon
>Is that his guest?
Yes, except when I went back, I realized he didn’t meet him till after sunset.
You’re assuming that the Brazilian government is controlled by the Brazillian people as a whole, which it never has been and seldom is anywhere. The most influential group in Brazil is, as everywhere, the well-off. . Persuading the majority of Brazilians wouldn’t do anything. Nationalism is just one form of elite rule, and the government, whatever its protestations, is motivated by various sorts of payoffs, just as the businesses are motivated by immediate term profit.The people in Brazil who are destroying the rainforest are well-organized and well-financed (often by non-Brazilians) with the law behind them.
The people running the show are all too willing to sell the rainforest to outsiders as long as they get a cut.
Well, every time something like this is pronounced by a Westerner, what they actually hear is “you natives can’t rule yourselves, your ruling elite is corrupt, so for your own good let us conquer your country and take on the white man’s burden of making things better there”.
I got an impression that much of deforestation in the Amazon is actually guided by nationalism.
…and now I’m imagining it as the Brazilian version of the Virgin Lands campaign.
Probably even older analogies are appropriate.
As part of the agrarian reform in Brazil, they redistribute public lands in the new colonization frontiers (including the Amazon) to landless peasants.
Stolypin reform, Brazilian style.
Well, the key actors in the plundering of the Amazon are the various players in the (monetized) international markets for whatever it is (timber, palm oil, beef, not completely sure.) And most of these players are not Brazilian, though there are local representatives such as Bolsinaro, who is certainly getting his. At some PR level I suppose nationalism is a factor, but in the long term this doesn’t do Brazil any good, and a high proportion of the money ends up abroad.
To pick up from a while ago: I would have thought that it’s OK to eat locusts because when you’ve got locusts, that’s all you’ve got.
Although locusts are clearly described in the Torah as being kosher, there is much discussion in Israel, says Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky…
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21847517
OTOH
And there went forth a wind from the Lord, and it brought quails from the sea, and let them fall beside the camp . . . And the people rose all that day, and all night, and all the next day, and gathered the quails . . . While the meat was yet between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague. (Num 11: 31–3)
Mary Douglas, Leviticus as literature, p 170:
https://monoskop.org/images/2/21/Douglas_Mary_Leviticus_As_Literature_2000.pdf
There was a scholar who tried to convince Muslims of Cape Town that snoek is haram.
He failed.
There is BTW a controversy out there about whether the forested and seemingly-lightly-populated Amazon is really Pristine and Primeval or simply the result of previously developed land being overrun by nature after the indigenous population circa 1500 was largely wiped out by European diseases. https://news.mongabay.com/2005/10/pre-columbian-amazon-supported-millions-of-people/
There are parts of New England that are more heavily-forested and lightly populated than was the case a few centuries ago. Once a sufficient supply of more productive-per-acre farmland was readily available farther west, some marginal farmland in New England was slowly abandoned, and in places where there wasn’t a plausible new non-agricultural use for the acreage it just reverted back to forest.
There is BTW a controversy out there about whether the forested and seemingly-lightly-populated Amazon is really Pristine and Primeval or simply the result of previously developed land being overrun by nature after the indigenous population circa 1500 was largely wiped out by European diseases.
Is there a real (scholarly) controversy or is it just a rear-guard action by romantics who like their vision of the forest primeval? I was under the impression that the latter idea was well accepted, but I don’t have any recent or specialist knowledge.
As I understand the pristineness of the amazon has been more or less disproven, at least for considerable parts. The big problem is that tropical soils are very poor, because all organic matter is quickly taken up by plants, bacteria, fungi, insects, etc. So it recovers poorly after it has been stripped. Temperate soils are locked up in a deep freeze for several months a year and is never in the tropical steam bath conditions ideal for “deacay”, so over the millenia you can accumulate up to 60* of humus-rich black earth (chernozem).
Soil chemistry terminology is from Russian: chernozem, podzol, etc.
All this is from one afternoon spent with a geography book 40 years ago, whuch has served me in good stead.
Per Wiki, in the Ukraine there is actually a billion dollar (almost) black market for rich chernozem soil, which is trucked away. .
There was a scholar who tried to convince Muslims of Cape Town that snoek is haram.
How’d he manage to come up with an argument for that? It’s a fish, right?
Snoek’s scientific name, “Thyrsites atun” = Thersites tuna??? There’s a Hat question. The ugliest and most obnoxious of the tunas? (It’s a mackeral though).
@Lameen, it was Abu Bakr Effendi.
Modern references (those I was able to find in reasonable time) converge on a book The Mosques of Bo-Kaap: A Social History of Islam at the Cape by Achmat Davids.
https://books.google.com/books?id=drMXAAAAIAAJ .
“snoek” innie boek:
p.54: “His ruling that crayfish and snoek was Haram (unacceptable for consumption by Muslims) had caused a rift in the Muslim community.[16]”
p.225 “ We can well remember the indignation with which the Malays were told that they had no right to eat Krief or Snoek – both being unclean, the one a creeping thing and the other a fish without scales.[6] About the worst way of converting people from their opinions is to interfere with their tastes – especially in matter of eating and drinking. Fancy a Malay abstaining from Snoek and Crawfish! ”
p.227 “6. A source informs that the Muslim fishermen at Kalk Bay as late as 1950 still did not eat snoek or crayfish. A petition was also taken around to have Abubakr Effendi removed from the Cape after the crayfish issue. (See Achmat Saddik versus Abdol Rakiep – 1873.)“
Well, it’s not possible that the entire rainforest was ever replaced by a cultivated landscape; in that case very little of the present biodiversity would have survived. But the more easily accessible places along the rivers are a different story. Maybe there’s a controversy about how much area that amounts to – but more likely some journalist mistook “we don’t have the data, maybe it was like this, maybe it was like that” as two warring schools of scholars because their imagination of how science works comes straight out of the 1930s or earlier.
Sadly plausible.
I remembering reading that Madagascar lost 90 per cent of its forests.
This claim was repeated in every book and article on Madagascar, but then I read a refutation.
It turns out nobody actually knows how much forest was there in the first place, but the notion that Madagascar used to be 100% forested until very recently is likely wrong.
Looking at the maps and photos left by the French colonial regime, it was calculated that maybe 20-30% of the forest cover which existed in the first half of the 20th century was lost since independence.
Snoek, Wikipedia: “It is prepared most often by grilling, frying or smoking. Snoek is oily, extremely bony (although the bones are large and easily removed from the cooked fish) and has very fine scales which are almost undetectable, making it unnecessary to scale the fish while cleaning. Snoek has a very distinctive taste.”
And:
Snoek at LH.
Snoek has a very distinctive taste
In my idiolect, that means it tastes effin’ ‘orrible.
Years ago, in Finland, I was treated to a meal of smoked lamprey. The taste was indeed distinctive. It was consumed with large quantities of beer, in a fruitless effort to wash the distinctive taste from one’s mouth.
David L. it is one of the most quoted Soviet comical sketches.
The line was “the taste is …. Peculiar”.
There was no implication that it is bad. It was a compliment to a generic unknown rarity in an imaginary situation. But people quote it to denote a wide range of tastes, including what you described.
I learned this year that the recent Reform Mishkan HaSeder haggadah seems to use “split” consistently to describe the parting of the sea.
Snoek’s scientific name, “Thyrsites atun” = Thersites tuna??? There’s a Hat question
Scroll down to the post for 11 March here for an account of this name. (I can’t find a reference to θυρσίτης being used as a name for a fish, rather than an herb, as the post authors mention; but cf. Latin tursio, recorded by Athenaeus as θυρσίων?) Cuvier’s publication of Thyrsites is on p. 196 here.
I have nothing to add except that I got to spend 20 minutes in the Bo-Kaap Museum before closing time. There was a room dedicated to the Effendi family, but nothing about a snoek and crayfish affair.
To me it would mean something like “Do you believe in mumbo-jumbo like crystals and auras?”
Gale was SBNR but definitely didn’t believe in those things. I told her a story about the pianist Artur Schnabel who when asked if he believed in God, replied that he believed in something much greater than that. The smile she gave me….
Given me a good solid atheist any day in preference!
Sorry, atheism is too much of a religion (in the sense ‘faith-based system’) for me. I am not, however, just skeptical about god(s): rather I don’t know if they exist (which is skepticism), but I also don’t think anyone else knows either (which is agnosticism).
even reading the Tarot
In my twenties I did a lot of Tarot and I Ching readings for friends and sometimes myself, using them as tools for focusing intuition. I didn’t believe in them: belief did not enter into it.
It also covers deep religious feelings
My maternal great-grandfather put himself down as kirchlos on official Imperial German forms, meaning that he read his Bible and interpreted it himself, and that he used his grand mal seizures as revelations.
true love
For me a matter “not of belief but of experience”, as Northrop Frye said of ghosts. Except that he (said he) had no experience of the latter, whereas I do have experience of the former.
Is not it a notion “under construction” invented by pollers?
My guess would be that it was first reported to poll-takers, then by them, and finally adopted by others from poll-takers.
Abraham and Sarah’s repeated (at least 3 times) stories of presenting S. as A.’s sister and therefore legitimizing giving her away as a sexual partner in various foreign lands.
My take on this is that Abraham figures that the relevant king will assume that Abraham will accept the marriage (forced or otherwise) of his sister to the relevant king, but obvs he isn’t going to acquiesce to having his wife taken away from him. A rational king would kill Abraham first, cf. Uriah/Bathsheba/David. So the stratagem leaves both Abraham and Sarah alive.
In my idiolect, that means it tastes effin’ ‘orrible.
Quite so. To my mind, coffee also has a very distinctive taste, and so I don’t drink it. I might take it as a medicine, except that it screws with my blood sugar even in pill form, not to mention the ‘orrible rebound headaches.
David M.: Well, it’s not possible that the entire rainforest was ever replaced by a cultivated landscape; in that case very little of the present biodiversity would have survived. But the more easily accessible places along the rivers are a different story.
Not exactly the rainforest, but close enough:
Heiko Prümers et al: Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon, Nature, 2022.
We could speculate that the cities were Arawakan or Tupi-Guarani speaking. Arawakan languages are probably intrusive in Bolivia, but Tupi-Guarani looks like it might have spread along the rivers and then the coast from somewhere close to these ruins.
Urbananism?
What is the ur-banana?
Fascinating.
And Nature hasn’t been professionally proofread in a long time, if ever.
Y: Urbananism?
“The civic-ceremonial architecture of these large settlement sites includes stepped platforms, on top of which lie U-shaped structures”
Our new friend the Botulist on the Marajoara Culture of the Amazon Delta. I had no idea of its existence, not to mention its style of prestige pottery, Perhaps not coincidentally, it flourished in the same period as the Casarabe Culture.
A densely populated Amazonia would mean busy trade on a heavily trafficked Amazonian river system. The Arawakan, Tupian and Cariban languages all spread widely across South America in this period.
An interview with the archaeologist Anna Roosevelt, who’s been working in the rainforest all her professional life. Some snippets:
On the Orinoco:
On Taperinha near Santarém:
On pottery:
On the Upano Valley discovery:
How do we approach an understanding of the movements of peoples and languages before Columbus? Ancient DNA would obviously be helpful, but the combination of a tropical climate, cremation burials, and difficult conditions for archaeology means that we may wait in vain So it’s cultures and horizons. Roosevelt’s statement that the pottery of Santarém belongs to the same Incise and Punctuated Horizon as the first farmers of the Orinoco floodplains makes me think that this style of pottery is associated with the Cariban languages.
Trying to check this hypothesis, I find:
Loretta O’Connor, Pieter Muysken: The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology, Cambridge UP (2014)
Google Preview gives me quite a bit of it. The initial search terms led me to Love Eriksen and Ana Vilacy Galucio’s chapter the Tupian Expansion, but I also get Love Eriksen and Swintha Danielsen’s the Arawakan Matrix. None of the chapters are complete, but it’s enough to tell that also Eriksen and Vilacy Galucio connect IPH with the Cariban languages. The other elite style, the Polychrome, is associated first with the Arawakan languages, and later with the Tupí-Guarani expansion. The Arawakan languages are believed to have spread with a riverine and coastal trade network that spanned the whole lowland, starting from the Orinoco around 900 BCE. The Tupian languages spread in two waves. The first expansion, eastwards from Rondonia, may have started in the last centuries BCE and seems to have been a wave of settlement of headwater regions unused by the Arawakan peoples that dominated along the main waterways. The Tupian peoples were probably warlike, but centuries of exchange and interaction followed, and the Tupian peoples adopted and adapted Arawakan systems of prestige including Polychrome pottery, probably starting near the Marajó Island. In 900 CE there’s a major upheaval with destruction of the great Arawakan settlements and spread of the new Tupi-Guarani forms of Polychrome pottery. This is associated with a new predatory ideology among the Tupí-Guarani subgroup of warfare, captive-taking and even ritual cannibalism. the Tupí-Guarani started spreading up and down the river and along the Brazilian coast, often establishing themselves as dominant partners in violent relationships with local groups while also willingly adopting cultural traits from them. After the arrival of the Europeans, the culturally flexible Tupí-Guarani peoples adapted well to the new situation, and languages of locally dominant Tupí-Guarani groups became lingua francas in large swathes of the lowland.
Fascinating stuff, thanks! So much to learn…
Corn is a C4 plant, so the carbon it fixes is heavily shifted toward ¹³C; and you are what you eat.
And then what you get is Children of the Corn.
I don’t mean to claim that I’ve found anything near a full story. For one thing, pottery and languages don’t quite add up. It seems that Polychrome Pottery developed after the Arawakan expansion and spread within the Arawakan network, while Incise and Punctuated was picked up by Caribans (maybe from a Proto-Arawakan speaking culture on the Orinoco).and spread with the Cariban expansion.
All that stuff is interesting, but it’s what I set out to find. The real mindblow was the importance of the Orinoco. It really shouldn’t have been.
I tried to keep that long comment short. Too short, I think now.
On the Arawakan languages I might have added that they seem to have been in close contact with local languages but also to have been in continuous contact with eachother for a long time after the initial expansion. The Arawakan languages have influenced and been influenced by languages all over the Amazon Basin, and there are now few features that are specifically Arawakan rather than generally Amazonian. Hence, innovations and retentions don’t line up to a nice family tree, and hence-hence, the chapter title the Arawakan matrix.
Both Cariban and Tupian are said to diverge roughly on par with Romance (isn’t everything?), while Arawakan goes deeper. The Tupí-Guarani sub-branch of Tupian is pretty shallow.
Another interpretation of the Tupian distribution might be that Tupian spread first and was pushed into the lesser waterways by the expanding Arawakan network. If they raided the Arawakans, that would explain the defensive structures of the large pre-upheaval Arawakan settlements. Tupí-Guarani would then be the bounceback when they had developed strategies that could bring down the Arawakans, e.g. making the rivers so unsafe that cooperation between Arawakan settlements broke down.
The Tupí-Guarani sub-branch of Tupian is pretty shallow.
About like Spanish and Portuguese, I always heard.
Of course there are dozens of language isolates and small families that are just as interesting. Some are probably relics of pristine diversity, others may represent earlier waves of migration. But until the most recent layers have been carefully peeled off, there’s no way to tell
said to diverge roughly on par with Romance (isn’t everything?)
Lots of things, at any rate. Mind you, that’s probably because you can demonstrate genetic relatedness at that level fairly conclusively without needing to spend years of your life on it.
I suspect it’s also a convenient point of comparison with the familiar, like Brits saying things are “the size of Wales.” It’s not always very accurate, either: I’ve seen Bantu, for example, labelled as roughly as diverse as Romance, which is a pretty major underestimate, even if you arbitrarily leave out all the Northwestern Bantu languages. Not even French and Romanian can tip the scales for Romance there …
Perhaps successful expansion events that produce diversity that can be observed today are indeed more likely in certain epochs. IE is extremely successful. And Afro-Asiatic.
Germanic not as much in the sense: where is Scandinavian diversity?
Sounds like a temporal version of Johanna Nicols’ Spread Zones/Residual Zones thing.
Spread Eras and Residual Eras. Quite plausible, in fact …
Some of it must have been erased by the events discussed/speculated on mainly in the “Son of Yamnaya” thread. Other parts still exist – Älvdalsk is stuffed with remarkable archaisms (alongside remarkable innovations), and Gutnish may not even be Northwest Germanic really.
Which events (approximately)? It’s a long thread:(
What I meant is that Scandinavia does not play a role comparable to Formosa. The map and history seem to allow this…Officina gentium, vagina etc.
Conversely, it is not very diverse.
I think this highlights the problem with measuring distance in Roman units. When dialects remain in close contact, the forces of convergence may balance the forces of divergence, and independent development doesn’t start. But the forces are sociolinguistic. In the case of Scandinavian, possibly Non-NG Gutnish was dragged into the continuum, while thoroughly NG Älfdalian and Icelandic escaped.
Also the various absolute monarchs insisting on single languages for chancellery and school use can’t have helped diversity survive. From what I read, the districts north of Älvdalen are just as different from the Standard and each other as Övdalsk is (with mutual comprehensibility limited to 20-50km or so), but they remain steadfastly rural as opposed to nouveau bourgeois and so lack a Facebook-fueled lobby. If they had been described by non-Swedes 100 years ago, they might have rivalled Formosa.
(The Swedish establishment lets the ethnographers run the dialect inventory. Worthies they may be, but they are not equipped to recognize separate languages).
Lars, do you mean absence of descriptions, inadequate descriptions or adequate descriptions and inadequate classification?
There are other very divergent dialects in Northern Sweden, but I believe Älfdalian (and its closest neighbours) is special in the remarkable archaism*. A major contributing factor to the divergence may ave been conscription during the
military dicatiorshiphouse of Vasa. After a common Dachsprache was established in the barracks, parish dialects were free to evolve independently, and (probably more importantly) when people no longer grew up hearing the slightly different ways of speech of the neighboring parishes, the perception of distance grew.* I could be wrong. The old dialects may also be underresearched.
Trond,
(1) Why did people stop to hear dialects of the neighbouring parishes (but not their own dialects) and why did not the Dachsprache cause levelling?
(2) is this the usual account of the history of Swedish Dachsprache?
(1) Why do people stop using their primary language to strangers? Habits? Politeness, convenience, prestige? Sometimes leveling happen, sometimes not. I don’t know why.
(2) I have no idea, but I didn’t invent it from scratch. 17th-18th century Sweden was more thoroughly militarized than most.
“Sometimes leveling happen, sometimes not. I don’t know why.”
Sigh.
Look, if WP does not have the general theory of dialect levelling and shift, it is your responsibility to build one!
About (1) – I am just not sure I understand you.
Do you mean that people began to address people from neighbouring parishes (presumably speaking something very similar) in the Dachsprache, while still talking in their own dialect with people from their own parish?
Sometimes I do build general theories from scratch, sometimes I don’t. I don’t know why.
Well, I have a pretty good idea of some confounding factors:
1. Time
2. More important tasks to procrastinate
3. Risk of being called out on it
Update; Yes, that’s what I mean. The result can be fast dialect divergence — even between households. I think I have the idea from descriptions of Low German and Irish after they became submerged by High German and English.
“even between households” – aha, thanks! So one factor is not “how different your interlocutor’s language is” but simply belonging to the same community…. It did not occur to me.
“More important tasks to procrastinate” – yes.
The destiny of humanity is in your hands. For every Important yet unsolved Problem, if you don’t start solving it right now, everyone will keep wandering in Darkness. But there are really too many of them.
So you decide the humanity is hopeless and go to a restaurant with your girlfriend. (well, in my case not restaurant, but anyway).
As Kafka (is said to have) said: There is hope, but not for us.
(so let’s drink for Atlases like us who keep the destiny of the whole humanity on our humble shoulders…)
И немедленно выпили.
Dalecarlian languages – a somewhat disappointing Wikipedia article.
@drasvi, I haven’t had the interest to seek out dialect descriptions, but my impression is that they exist and that there are people in the relevant departments of linguistics who would be able to adequately inform the ethnographers if they should care to ask. But that the latter are more interested in what kind of tablet weaving was used to border women’s traditional bonnets. So adequate classification exists, but is not reflected in policy.
It really upset some apple carts when Övdalsk got an ISO language identifier, because government had to find another explanation for why Finnish and Sami speakers could get support for home language in daycare and Övdalsk speakers couldn’t. Before that, of course they couldn’t because they were just speaking Swedish. (I don’t know what the current explanation is, though, and recognition might not mean much in practice. When I was living in the Stockholm area, the public school system didn’t dispute that my stepson was legally entitled to home language instruction, but it was “sadly” unable to find a resource despite the fact that Danish is the second largest minority language after Finnish and there was probably hundreds of Danish natives working in the school system).
Well, dialects of the Uzbek language belong to three groups of Turkic…
Lars, thank you.
Right, from DM’s link I found the following from The Institute for Language and Folklore (in their own words, a Swedish government authority that builds, collects and disseminates knowledge about Sweden’s language and culture):
I.e., any North Germanic language variety spoken in an area that Sweden appropriated in the past, magically became a dialect of Swedish, never mind what any linguists might think.
Except Norway, because they threw the Swedes out.
Well, obviously, Swedish dialects have generally not developed freely and independently from a Scandinavian proto-language. They have interacted for their whole history, and developed in interaction with neighboring dialects. If not, no geographic classification of dialects would make sense.
Otherwise it’s very close to a sociolinguistic definition of dialect and language: The language is defined by the shared Dachsprache, and the dialects are the related spoken varieties used by communities that share the Dachsprache. I have no problem with the acknowledgment that the Dachsprache has been imposed politically. The problem (which makes the definition political/prescriptive rather than sociolinguistic/descriptive) is the implicit assumption that the varieties also develop in sociolinguistic community with the Dachsprache, and I don’t think that’s true for (at least) Älfdalian. It seems to have been kept separate from Swedish by its speakers for a long time.
Norwegian dialects wouldn’t qualify. Swedish never became the language of administration or instruction in Norway. The union with Sweden made the danophile ecucated class rally around Danish and even cast it as a patriotic project.
My point is, more or less, that Sweden is a signatory to conventions that mandate protection of minority languages, but through a politically informed process The Institute for Language and Folklore has decided that Övdalsk is a dialect, not a separate language, so the conventions don’t apply. No independent assessment is imagined in the process, which is very convenient for the Swedish government since as we’ve seen, once the ISO stopped listening to the ethnographer in charge of answering inconvenient questions, it turned out that everybody else agreed that Övdalsk is a separate language.
As I see it, that’s cheating. There are governments in the world pulling semantic tricks about much more serious matters than this so maybe the Swedes shouldn’t be dinged for it on any of those rankings, but I would love the irony if they got told “You lost to the Norwegians again because you keep lying about languages being dialects.”
(I don’t think any variants of Danish could arguably be seen as a separate language. There might be questions about Platt vs Standard German in southern Jutland which probably get lumped as “German” when it comes to representation and consultation with the relevant Danish authorities, under a system set up after the reunification of 1920, but I haven’t heard about conflicts over the question).
“assumption that the varieties also develop in sociolinguistic community”
@Trond, I’m not sure I understand what sort of relationship for you is defining for the pair dialect-Dachsprache and what different sort is assumed here.
Also, what action follows from this, which makes it prescriptive? I think to be prescriptive it must somehow influence our actions.
I fiercely object to the definition based on distance (which I call political and prescriptive).
The sociolinguistical one too looks much like a description of a certain usage of these two words:
What are they speaking? Arabic. Why is it so strange? Because it’s a different dialect.
But this usage is relative. One thing (Moroccan darija) is a dialect OF the other (Arabic in general). What does not make much sense is saying that Arabic (in general) is a langauge (one kind of things) and Moroccan darija is “just a dialect” (another kind).
(A more familar claim is that Arabic (written) is a language and the darija is a dialect. It is a dialect because it is not taught in schools and is not used in books. I agree that there is a difference here, but.)
I agree that the Swedish definition carefully dodges the issue. My point was meant to be that even avoiding politics there are no objective, measurable distance criteria. Every language with more than a handful of speakers has dialects, and with a sociolinguistic definition it’s the degree of independence that defines if a dialect or a group of languages is a language. It means not only that a dialect can become an independent language, but a language can be caught in the gravity field of another and become a dialect, or a dialect of one language can become a dialect of another. All three have happened in the history of Swedish.
I also think that basing protection for minority cultures on rigid lines drawn through a blurry landscape is untenable.
And so do the dialects of the Crimean Tatar language!
See also: “German dialect” vs. “Dutch dialect”.
@DM, Crimean is two, no? (and Uzbek is the same two and Karluk)
@Trond, I agree with you, but I see no reason to be nicer to linguists than to Sweden.
I expect honesty from sceintists. If A and B are farther from each other than C and D, why not just say that it means that… A and B are farther from each other than C and D?
Why introduce in descriptive linguistics this political crap about langauges and dialects?
My two reasons to object to the concept of “a language” as distinct from “dialect” are:
(1) I don’t like levelling as in Russia. I value dialects. (But levelling can be convenient to schoolchildren).
The Arabic approach is inconvenient differently. The literary Arabic does not level dialect (unlike local koines). As result Arab children speak many languages:)
(2) We don’t understand how such things work.
What do we need – and what to do to achieve what. So we need a theory to based language planning upon.
Three, except the third is, apparently, actually this…
@DM, I somehow missed Kipchak-Cuman:(( Which is a shame, because Karaim is related.
As for Nogai… the steppe extends into Crimea, and Nogais were the dominant steppe people (before Catherine the great etc.)
Why introduce in descriptive linguistics this political crap about languages and dialects?
Because languages don’t exist in a sociopolitical vacuum, so a completely agnostic approach to language naming can’t really be carried through. You’d have to ignore the speakers’ own views about the boundaries of “their language”, for one thing, even in cases where the speakers actually do all agree on the matter (which they actually do more often than not.) It might be feasible to do that if there was a robust objective alternative, but there isn’t – and never can be. In the circumstances, the best that can be done is to use existing names – along with a lot of explanatory footnotes.
The Kusaasi and their neighbours call languages after the ethnic groups that use them, in a way extremely reminiscent of what Europeans do. For example, as far as I can discover, the Yansi actually speak Mooré, but in Kusaal they speak Yaan, not Mɔɔl. On the other hand, both the French and the English speak Nasaal, a language which thus includes some strikingly divergent dialects, with really quite low mutual comprehensibility …
It’s easy to poke fun at this, but it’s not really different in kind from what the ISO codes do.
The ISO codes for languages leave a lot to be desired, but I don’t think there is any way to make them systematically better. Probably the best that can be done is piecemeal correction of outright errors (like Ethnologue classifying Nabit as a dialect of Gurenne; though so far efforts to amend that have failed.)
The moral is probably not to take the ISO codes seriously, or at least not to try to use them for anything for which they are manifestly not suitable.* If they are used to justify things like spending decisions, I would think that what is going on there is that the ISO codes are the result of the very same political pressures that have led to the spending choices, not that the politicians have mysteriously decided to pay attention to academic linguists. That gets the causal relationship wrong.
* Not sure what they are suitable for, exactly. Justifying the existence of Ethnologue, now it’s decided to take the Way of the Elzevier, maybe.
@drasvi: Are linguists introducing those things? I think linguists are perfectly fine with describing on different levels of generalization or abstraction. When working with a certain variety, whether it’s a dialect of some larger entity doesn’t even come into it. Except it does. A description of Swedish would be incomplete without a description of the underlying variation. Conversely, a description of Överkalix traditional dialect or Young Male Malmö Multiethnolect or Contemporary Standard Educated Swedish would be incomplete without a description of the sociolinguistic situation around it.
Are linguists introducing those things?
Well, no: that’s pretty much what I’m saying. But even linguists* need to communicate comprehensibly with muggles. I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/fragment-agon
* Not Chomskyites, obviously. For them, it is necessary not to communicate comprehensibly. Or the magic might die, and that would be Bad.
@David E.: I know, and I didn’t even try to disagree. I replied to drasvi. (Apparently, forgetting to update before posting is a side effect of thumbing intermittently while watching one’s spouse’s favorite K-drama.)
“When working with a certain variety, whether it’s a dialect of some larger entity doesn’t even come into it.”
Exactly.
Because the distinction has nothing to do with descriptive linguistics.
@DE, Trond, there is such a thing as applied linguistics. It is informed by descriptive linguistics and solves problems offered by the society (which is too informed by descriptive linguistics and includes linguists – cf. “Aryans”).
In this case we want to be nicer to languages (as such) and speakers. For this we need to figure out what does that mean and also how to achieve our goals. At the moment we don’t know this.
The distinction between “a langauge” and “a dialect” comes from the society. But the discussion of the problem is usually based on the assumptions, that
(a) this distinction is made by descriptive linguistics (it is science! If linguists distinguish between langauges and dialects they must have a reason! – here I’m quoting someone, an applied linguist by the way)
(b) we know what we need and how to achive that.
(c) we should be nicer to langauges, but not dialects. Now we just need to ask linguists to identify those…
And actual descriptive linguists who take part in such discussions support these misconceptions.
Your project sounds admirable, drasvi: but for the life of me I can’t see how it could be actually implemented even in principle (I don’t think it’s just a matter of practical difficulties.)
Are you going to use code numbers for languages/dialects to avoid unfortunate associations with existing sociopolitical labels (something like Guthrie’s Bantu classification, perhaps)?
There is no principled way of distinguishing between “language” and “dialect” on purely language-internal criteria. The distinction turns crucially on people’s actual ways of living: how used they are to communicating with other groups, their attitudes to members of those groups, how motivated they are to communicate. The distinction doesn’t even make sense if you try to divorce language from its full social contexts (and why would you even try to do such a foolish thing anyway, unless you’re some sort of benighted Chomskyan?)
If you say that, fine, just call everything a “language” and ban “dialect” from polite discourse (or vice versa), where do you stop? I speak differently from my wife. Do we thus speak different languages in just the same way as I (almost always) speak differently from a monoglot Russian speaker? If not, what new term will we need to capture the considerably greater similarities between the languages spoken by me and by my wife? We need some sort of standard terminology here. Just because the boundaries of the concepts are fuzzy, it doesn’t make those concepts useless.
I get the impression that what you really mean is that linguists are somehow colluding in the oppression of e.g. people who speak AAVE by using terms like “dialect” at all. If so, you’re pointing your indignation at the wrong target. The way forward is not to ban the word “dlalect” but to point out that “Standard English” is also a “dlaiect”, in exactly the same sense. This is precisely what academic linguists have actually been doing more or less since academic linguistics came into existence. The perversions of a Lynne Truss and her kind have nothing at all to do with actual linguists or linguistics.
@DE, what project?
This:
“…be nicer to languages (as such) and speakers. For this we need to figure out what does that mean and also how to achieve our goals. ”
?
I may be being unfair to Truss, whose book I have not and never will read; from the fuss about it, I gather that it attributes magical properties to punctuation, and I dare say she might find (say) AAVE perfectly fine if there were few enough commas in it when it was written down. Alas, I will never know.
But you know the sort of person I mean. We seem to have more of them in Anglophonia than you Russians do. (They used to be very well ensconced among Welsh speakers, too, though in their defence that may have been partly an overreaction to the ignorant English regarding the entire Welsh language as a debased “dialect” unfitted for the productive workers and soldiers of a modern Nation State.)
This … ?
Yes, that. I can’t see what you’re proposing that academic linguists aren’t already pretty committed to. There was a statement put out by the LSA* on this (I think in response to some Trumpite excess) that was about as hardcore on this point as well can be. (In fact, I thought it was a bit OTT … and I am very Woke. Oh yes.)
* Even the LSA. (Bunch of Chomskyites. Look at Language these days. Hmph. Grumble. Bloomfield turning in his grave. Mumble. Grumble.)
@DE, I don’t understand your pessimism then… I say “nicer”, this sounds realistic:)
And I say, apart of various obstacles posed by the society itself, one important obstacle is just that we don’t know what exactly “nicer” means and how to achieve what.
I don’t think this obstacle is something language science and scientists can’t overcome. Advancing our understanding of such complex issues is their (language scientists’) job.
As a lip service to language enthusiasts OR sincere support OR the central and important point of nationalist program states used to “support” minority languages by intoroducing mandatory lessons in school. If the goal is “giving foreign kids some vague impression of what this language is about”, this makes sense. Sadly the goal is very different.
Perhaps specialists could offer a better plan…
So my point (which I think you misunderstood) is:
assuming that (a) the distinction between “a dialect” and “a langauge” is descriptive and scientific and made by linguists rather than by the society (b) we know what to do (c) and thus what we need is to identify “languages” correctly (and not like CCP) distracts us from discussing important things.
Also I DO use the word “dialect”. As you must have noticed.
Why would I ban it?
But:
there is a relative sense, “A is a dialect OF B”. Here dialect means “variety” but unlike the word “variety” it is only applied to languages. E.g. “In this city they speak a very peculiar variety/dialect of Russian”. This is not very different from “Semitic dialect of Afroasiatic”.
and
there is an absolute sense, “A is a dialect”.
This is something very rare in normal communication. E.g. “School textbooks in darija? That’s… ridiculous! Moroccan darija is not a langauge!”.
These two senses are quite different and we are discussing the latter.
assuming that (a) the distinction between “a dialect” and “a langauge” is descriptive and scientific and made by linguists rather than by the society
A false dichotomy. As I said, the distinction is inescapably sociological. So I don’t grant the assumption.
there is an absolute sense
No: as your own examples show. To call something a dialect necessarily means you are comparing it with some other form of speech. Like “sister”, “dialect” is a term implying a relationship – in all academic linguistic contexts. There is no absolute measure of the degree of similarity needed for word to apply. It’s not possible to create one in any way that refers only to language-internal criteria, even in principle.
If there had only ever been one human being, the word “sister” would have been meaningless. If there had only ever been one speaker, the word “dialect” would have been meaningless.
The only thing we are indeed not concerned with is the use of “dialect” just to mean “inferior language.” That is purely a non-academic usage: it has no place in modern linguistics. This is surely quite uncontroversial.
The only thing we are indeed not concerned with is the use of “dialect” just to mean “inferior language.”
i would love to not be concerned with this, and for it to have no place in modern linguistics. i think that the word carries that near-universal “non-academic” usage so deeply that it isn’t extricable from it, and the ways that that usage creeps into how it’s used in the academy is the best possible illustration of that. if we want a term that doesn’t carry that baggage, we need to use a term that doesn’t carry that baggage.
like maybe the one that already exists? the rather cute backformation, “lect”.
my constant other reference point for this is the way that professional linguists refuse to use the extremely well-established technical term “noun class” about most lects, and insist on using “gender”, which has absolutely no effect except to reintroduce a massive set of baggage that they then proceed to deny even exists. it takes a 5-minute conversation to persuade a person who isn’t a professional linguist that using the term that has more precision and less baggage is the better move. decades of actually using the better term – but only for certain lects – have not had that effect on the pros. same with “dialect”. the function, in any practical sense, of using it is to make it possible for the baggage to stay in the conversation even as it’s denied.
@rozele, indeed. I prefer to say language variant, but I don’t know if it’s better. And there’s a point where I feel it’s a bit silly to talk about, e.g., Danish and Swedish which both are Dachsprachen in their own right, as variants of Modern North Germanic or something, though I know there are claims that one of them would be called a dialect of the other if history had unfolded differently.
But to me it would be fine to say that London English and Scots are variants of the same language, and leave the minority language status of each within various political entities up to a sociopolitical assessment.
i think i’d prefer to lean into more precision, and say they’re closely related lects, whose speakers define them as different languages, or at times consider scots an inferior version of english. “minority language status”, though, has nothing to do with linguistic descriptions or criteria, it’s a pretty purely political category even when it’s being talked about spanning varying legal criteria.
the thing that stands out, to me, is that in sweden being a state-recognized minority language comes with material supports that actually mean something. it’s been phenomenal for yiddish, i know directly, and i would hope for the other designees. and i believe that’s a pretty rare and special thing, in the world, so i can understand how the terminological questions have specific and significant stakes in sweden that are easy for us to step away from into abstractions.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Sweden granted protected minority status to five languages. The reports and recommendations show that there are serious problems fulfilling the obligations, especially when it comes to primary education. This mostly has to do with the availability of teachers.
The situation in Norway is similar, though especially Kven culture has become markedly more visible in recent years. I don’t know to what degree the work to protect Kven in Norway is coordinated with that of the related Finnish exolect Meänkieli in Sweden and to what degree both make use of Finnish resources. One would want both to protect the uniqueness and independence of the local varieties and to promote (re)development of larger and more self-sustained speech communities.
my constant other reference point for this is the way that professional linguists refuse to use the extremely well-established technical term “noun class” about most lects
In Bantu linguistics, “gender” means a particular pairing of a singular and a plural noun class. That may be regrettable, but it’s scarcely possible to do anything about it at this point. This has nothing at all to do with attitudes to biological sex, which is irrelevant as far as the Bantu systems are concerned. It just isn’t the case that the concepts are simply interchangeable.
The Arawa language Kulina has both a (binary) noun class system and a completely orthogonal masculine/feminine system, where assignment follows biological sex for people and animals but is otherwise not predictable. Both systems induce grammatical agreement: this is not a question of “declensions.”
To say that calling that “grammatical gender” is due to an improper ideology is attribute reactionary attitudes to the linguists involved quite falsely.
Not every language works like Indo-European.
“Lect” is fine as a term, but it doesn’t mean the same as “dialect”: it’s much more general. Unless you ban all discussion of “the-things-formerly-known-as-dialects” you still need another term than just “lect.” “Topolect” won’t do, because it’s specifically tied to the language variety of a place. “Significant language variant/set of idiolects shared by a group with some common sociopolitical features, and sufficiently internally uniform to be susceptible of a coherent description as a single entity” captures it, I think …
DE, I agree that the absolute sense is socio-something. But for sociolinguistics it is too crude.
It does describe a certain usage. E.g. in my example about the darija (from an actual conversation).
As for the relative sense… It merely means a variety. Whenever you speak of several languages as a unity, you can call a member of the group its dialect. It is not necessarily socio-. They don’t have to communicate to each other, for example. If my Russian friends in Montenegro form their own dialect of Russian within next several centuries, it is still going to be a Russian dialect whenever I find it convenient to call it so.
Then you can of course say “no, it is not a Russian dialect!” referring to a certain convention.
I get the impression that (as often) we basically agree, but are using our terms differently enough that we just seem not to be agreeing.
DE, oh yes)
You keep repeating various ideas which I consider an essential part of my own point….
Synergy …
“…it is still going to be a Russian dialect whenever I find it convenient to call it so.
Then you can of course say “no, it is not a Russian dialect!” referring to a certain convention.”
….and the debate seems pointless because there are communicative needs and there are conventions and these don’t always coincide.
What I mean is a situation when I call it so because I want to emphasise that it retains some interesting archaisms from the Soviet era – and you object because you usually call it Upper Pizdarian.
Honestly, I see no problem if Swedish is just called pluricentric (I know the word usually means something else, not distinct vernaculars) or whatever and various Germanics in Sweden are called Xish Swedish and Yish Swedish (where X and Y are place names). We have Nynorsk and Bokmal after all.
PS Pizdaria is a funny FYLOSC word, I’m not sure what it means, but pizda is “cunt” (certain virgins can of course interpret it as dissimilated pizzeria… if they like:) I’m having in mine a certain freind of mine who said she does not feel offended by such words because she has no idea what they mean).
I get the impression that (as often) we basically agree, but are using our terms differently enough that we just seem not to be agreeing.
Discourse is hostage to the conflicts between languages, dialects and registers. “Mutual intelligibility” is sometimes not sufficient for mutual comprehension. It is a low bar, good enough for tourists. A traditional way to reduce the iterations of misunderstanding and frustration is for one side to get with the program of the other.
A more radical way is to just stop iterating when you’re fed up. Don’t go to the door anymore when Jehovah’s Witnesses are ringing. Instead of hoping against hope for synergy, block off that entropy leak. Be polite while saving your sanity.
In dealing with obstreperous programmers, I have my senior moments – senior programmer moments, that is. Not infrequently I am confronted with such weird and wild-eyed claims, rejecting my code review findings, that I briefly doubt my own knowledge. So I write a bit of code to convince myself that my knowledge is sound. Then the hard part begins – explaining what’s what to the learn-resistant. After a few attempts, I call on their superiors to decide the matter. Being polite while calling the police to save my sanity.
@DE, well, I begain from trying to explain why I keep so fiercely objecting to the concept of a language as distinct from dialect.
What I meant (and what could have confused you!) is that I object to presenting them as a descriptive category.
But note that “a language as distinct from a dialect” clearly refers to what I call the “absolute” sense (see above about the darija, the implication being that unlike Fus·ha it is not a language but a dialect).
I object to presenting them as a descriptive category
“Descriptive” does not imply the exclusion of sociopolitical facts; on the contrary, an adequate description must include such stuff. Imagine trying to describe Japanese or Korean verb flexion without any reference to how Japanese or Korean society functions. Information on that is essential to a proper description of either language.
Again, you can generally get a long way with a descriptive grammar of a single (dia)lect without having to pay attention to related (dia)lects, but even that kind of ground-level analysis ends up having to deal with related forms of speech to produce an adequate description.
A major part of this is borrowings. Thus, Actual Spoken Welsh no longer has the finite impersonal form of verbs or a subjunctive, but still uses examples borrowed from Literary Welsh. It’s not just borrowing from hifalutin lects into unposh lects that happens, either: Agolle Kusaal has several loans from Toende Kusaal, which can fairly be called the other “topolect” in this case. (Toende speakers think it’s more prestigious than Agolle, and good luck to them, but nobody else does.) These loans violate several phonological principles of Agolle Kusaal; you could just list them all individually as “exceptions”, I suppose, but that misses the unifying explanation of how and why they are exceptional. Pointing that out seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate part of a “descriptive” grammar.
This is all bound up with the fact that you can’t describe any language adequately in isolation from its actual social context. You can’t even do that with the idiolect of a single speaker. You just can’t draw any neat division between pure description and the sociology of language use; to suppose otherwise involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature of human language. Chomskyanism …
DE, yes, but I don’t see how we arrive to “X is not a language!” from here.
Besides while each dialect is usually a part of some system, an unrelated language can be the other part of the system.
For sociolinguistics the distinction between “a languege” and “a dialect” – and I do not mean the relative sense as in “A is a dialect of B”, I mean the absolute sense “A is a dialect” – is too crude.
I do not mean the relative sense as in “A is a dialect of B”, I mean the absolute sense “A is a dialect”
As DE says, there is no such “absolute sense” except in the usage of laypeople who are irrelevant here. No linguist talks that way, so I am not sure who you are arguing with.
And no, I’m not arguing against the relative sense!
But people arrive from
1. “North Russian dialects” to
2. “Rusyn is not a dialect of Russian, North Russian is” to
3. “Don’t call it ‘Rusyn dialect’!” to
4. “Rusyn is a language, not a dialect. North Russian is not a language, it is a dialect’
easily. And this is the absolute meaning.
In China 2 is impossible (you can’t say that Cantonese is not a dialect of Chinese, because Chinese is not Mandarin) but 3 “Don’t call it Cantonese dialect!” is what people commonly say.
@LH?! I’m sorry, but even if you personally would avoid saying “X is not a language” – I mean, actually uttering these words – you are very willing to say that something IS a language because it is not mutually intelligible with soemthing else.
With a clear implication that whatever is mutually intelligible with the same something either is not a language, or is not necessarily one.
Pretending that no one is going to understand you this way is either silly or dishonest. You very much do use the word in the absolute sense. “A language is a group of mutually intelligible dialects” is about the absolute sense and nothing else.
And there are ennumerable Arab linguists who would (in certain contexts like the proposal to replace the literary langauge with a dialect) say that the Moroccan darija is not a language.
But people
People say all sorts of idiotic things. Are you talking about random people on the street or linguists? If the former, why? How are they relevant?
I’m speaking of you personally.
And people on the street are important. When I speak about being “nicer” to languages and speakers, I mean people on the street should be nicer.
We tell them what languages are, and it is important how they understand us.
Every dialect is a language.
For a linguist, to call a language a “dialect” is to relate it (on some basis, possibly social, maybe comparative-linguistic) to some other more or less similar language, which for the purpose of the comparison is therefore always also a dialect. Such comparisons are necessarily commutative.
For many non-linguists (not all), to call a language a “dialect” is to imply that it is defective in some way, usually with respect to another language (which therefore cannot be called a “dialect” in this context) but occasionally just defective in general (your “absolute” sense.)
No academic linguist uses the term in this second way.
I take rozele to be saying that because this second use exists, academic linguists should stop using the word altogether, just as they should stop using the word “gender” in the technical linguistic sense which has been current for over two millennia now. I myself do not believe that those who persecute minorities are at all influenced by the technical usages of academic linguists, or that changing such usage would materially help any persecuted minority. If it has any effect at all, I would have thought that linguists’ determination to stand by their own usage would undermine the loaded use of these words by reactionaries, but such people are extremely unlikely to care anyway, If they were led by fact, they wouldn’t hold the views they do in the first place.
And people on the street are important. When I speak about being “nicer” to languages and speakers, I mean people on the street should be nicer. We tell them what languages are, and it is important how they understand us.
Formally, Lenin set out your principles in Что делать? Just replace “the struggle against the bourgeoisie” with “the struggle to be nice”. Led by “us”, of course.
Stu, “people on the street” here are contrasted to “linguists”.
People (not linguists) tell applied linguists what problem to solve.
Descriptive linguists inform people and inform applied linguists.
People (not linguists) tell applied linguists what problem to solve.
A recipe for chaos and conflict, not just in linguistics. You’re proposing a policy that the blind lead the half-sighted ? I don’t know of many “people” who have problems for linguists to solve.
@DE, how do you think, is the author if these words a linguist or not? I personally have no idea (from some WP talk page).
Usually people refer to Trudgill and Chambers’ Dialectology. But it says: “One way of looking at this has often been to say that ‘a language is a collection of mutually intelligible dialects’.” without specifying whose way of looking it often “has been”.
Nevertherless “In particular, we are faced with the problem of how we can distinguish between a language and a dialect, and the related problem of how we can decide what a language is.” does implies difference between dialects and “langauges”.
(Of course, all languages are defective. Perhaps the word that needs to be banned from linguistics to get this point across to the non-linguist masses is not “dialect”, but “language.”)
@drasvi:
If that’s by a linguist, they need to brush up on logic. The definition leads to the conclusion that nobody speaks an actual language at all (except perhaps the last few speakers of a dying language,) Nobody speaks French or English or Russian or Welsh or Kusaal … in fact, it is impossible that anyone could. A language (unless it is totally uniform) cannot be spoken: only a dialect can. This seems to be an unhelpful conception of “language.”
Perhaps the word that needs to be banned from linguistics to get this point across to the non-linguist masses is not “dialect”, but “language.”
A mere half-measure. I’m for banning talk of “linguistics” and “people” (not linguistics and people, of course). And also talk of “being nice”. That would be nice.
Be careful what you wish for. If you ban “people”, people will start saying “persons.”
I think part of the problem (or part of a related problem) is that those who aspire to a “scientific” or “objective” analysis of linguistic phenomena imagine they are viewing everything from some entirely neutral standpoint that is entirely external to the social contexts in which different language varieties exist and rub up against each other. Which is perhaps a noble aspiration, but also means that they may unduly deprecate ways of talking about language that are deictic and contextual. If I happen to be in New Zealand, I speak English “with a foreign accent.” In the place where I live, it’s the visiting Kiwi who will be speaking English “with a foreign accent.” That doesn’t make “with a foreign accent” a useless (much less insulting) description of someone’s speech. It’s no more useless than describing something as being located “here” versus “there.” You just need to know the speaker’s frame of reference to interpret the statement correctly. Maybe in a scientific publication you want to give absolute locations rather than relative locations, but don’t be snippy about people speaking otherwise in other genres and contexts.
“Russian” is just the current common word for a set of deviant northern/northeastern dialects of Ukrainian, innit? (“Ukrainian” in turn is how we describe what happens to Rusyn when it descends from the purity of its mountain homeland and gets muddled up in the mouths of flatlanders.)
drasvi, do you also think mathematicians should stop talking about infinity (and defining different kinds of infinity) because people on the street think “infinite” means “a really large number”? People on the street are important!
…Speaking of which, these two papers explain that Nepali has both a m/f/n gender system and a Chinese-style classifier system that are orthogonal to each other, and what it all means for the feminine forms of “3” & “4” in Sanskrit and Celtic.
No doubt spoken in East Bumfuck, Texas…
Both “language” and “dialect” are abstractions: so too are specific cases like “French”, “Parisian French” and even “my own individual idiolect of English.” It’s a matter of levels of abstraction, obviously: less obvious, maybe, is that it is also a matter of what you abstract over. That is not given a priori; and in linguistic matters, the scope of your abstraction is very likely going to be determined by the sociopolitical criteria that you already use, which have no necessary connection with the actual distributions found in the data at all.
If you abstract over the speech of the inhabitants of the area which was traditionally the domain of the chiefs of Bolgatanga, behold! Nabit is a dialect of Gurenne (they actually are closely related, though not mutually comprehensible.) If you abstract over the speech of the whole of the quondam Upper East Region of Ghana, Nabit is mysteriously transmuted into a dialect of a nameless language which has Toende and Agolle Kusaal as other dialects. Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
“drasvi, do you also think mathematicians should stop talking about infinity (and defining different kinds of infinity) because people on the street think “infinite” means “a really large number”? People on the street are important!”
@LH, no I do not. Two reasons:
(1) you say yourself “there is no such “absolute sense” ” and “No linguist talks that way“. Meanwhile you personally do use this absolute sense.
I think I can object to linguists when they use the word this way. Infinity is fine.
(2) these definitions are used in discussions about what CCP does, about language planning and other such things.
These things are done by…. people on the street. And these people are informed by linguists.
We are discussing applied linguistics.
Meanwhile you personally do use this absolute sense.
O RLY? Where?
LH, well, your post: DISTINGUISHING LANGUAGE FROM DIALECT.
“Søren Wichmann, a Danish linguist, discusses a perennial problem and presents a promising solution; after describing the many ways in which it’s hard to pinpoint the difference between a language and a dialect, he continues:”
I think here you recognise that it is a “problem” not not just ridiculous nonsense.
But that’s just short for “a dialect of a language” — see the later quote “it takes about a millennium for dialects to become languages.” There is no such thing as “a dialect” not meaning “a dialect of a language,” as far as I know. The “problem” is how to decide when it makes sense to talk about separate languages rather than dialects of a language, and it’s a problem with no single answer; context is all.
(This is the post drasvi is referring to.)
@LH, of course it is a dialect of a language – I don’t think I ever have seen anyone discussing dialects which are not varieties of something.
Arabic learners can say in English “learning a dialect” but even though they are not interesting in anything other than the literary Arabic language and “dialects”, they would hardly use this word if all langauges of the world were Arabics:)
Nevertheless “difference between a langauge and a dialect” implies that the former is not a dialect of anything and the latter is not a language.
And what about my point (2)? We are not just talking about science. We need to figure out what to do about, say, minority languages. “We” in this case are not linguists it is we people – at least in the part “to do” it is we people. We linguists (or langauge enthusiasts etc.) in turn inform us people on such matters.
So yes, it is important in what categories people think of languages. And this has to do with what linguists tell people.
Nevertheless “difference between a langauge and a dialect” implies that the former is not a dialect of anything and the latter is not a language.
It doesn’t imply that in the usage of linguists, which is the only usage that counts. Let the man in the street learn something about linguistics.
What definitions based on distance describe is a small language continuum.
It is not qualitatively different from a large continuum. Also there are many ways to divide a large continuum in small ones.
“A language continuum” makes sense, but there no need to call it “language”.
This per se is not a reason to argue. There are all sorts of definitions in books. What I don’t like is exactly how we discuss language planning.
“which is the only usage that counts”
Bullshit. You keep ignoring my point.
That paper is also predicated on the idea that you can robustly decide whether a language is a “dialect” of another (and vice versa: this is linguistics) based entirely on a short vocabulary list. It “solves” the problem by the simple expedient of ignoring everything that actually makes it a problem at all.
(This is, admittedly, slightly unfair, inasmuch as the paper claims that its pet metric shows a sort of bimodal distribution more or less correlating with traditional judgments about dialect-versus-languageness. So it does make a substantive claim. But it’s still just a toy model that’s been tweaked to fit the data. It’s not an actual hypothesis. And the reasoning behind it is a paragon of question-begging. Note the claim that “problematic” cases can be definitively settled by applying the metric. The happy outcome is that the metric thereby becomes infallible. If other evidence doesn’t fit, well, the other evidence is just wrong, obviously.)
@drasvi:
I doubt whether Hat is deliberately ignoring your point: more that you haven’t been altogether clear. (I know the feeling: my own obscurities are not invariably deliberate.)
My interpretation (subject to your correction) of that point is, Yes, linguists have their own technical meaning of “dlalect”, and that’s all well and good, but they ought to be doing more to combat the pejorative meaning of the word as it is used by some non-linguists.
If that is what you mean (and it may not be), what should academic linguists be doing that they are not doing already? Would it help if they abandoned the term “dialect” altogether (even for internal use only)?
(Probably the best solution would be for all discussion of the matter to take place in Welsh: tafodiaeth is “dialect, language.” Strict cynghanedd would not be insisted upon, however. One must be realistic.)
@DE, don’t you see how this:
“Then there is the conventional linguistic definition, according to which a language is a group of mutually intelligible dialects, whereas a dialect is a dialect rather than a language if it is mutually intelligible with another dialect (of the same language).” – you find it disagreable – logically follwos from your and LH’s words? And they are not “linguists’ own techinical words” – they are used by linguists when they address others.
No it doesn’t follow, because it misses the crucial point that a dialect is a language. If the writer is a linguist (you don’t give an actual source), I would think that they agree: they’ve just expressed themselves very badly and misleadingly. Linguists quite often do …
They are attempting to convey the point that mutual intelligibility is the central notion in what linguists mean by “dialects” (true, as far as it goes, though very difficult to apply rigorously in practice, and not the only relevant criterion.)
But by the way they’ve put it, they have accidentally implied such an abstract meaning for “language” (sc. as a collection of dialects) that it would mean that nobody could speak an actual language (like French, or English), any more than anybody can speak Language (in the abstract sense of “language in general.”) The only “language” it would be possible to actually speak would be one which had no dialects, so that there was nothing for it to be mutually intelligible with, and thereby be demoted from being a language to a dialect. Obviously it’s not possible to actually speak something which is not even a language at all, so “dialects” also cannot be spoken, and communication in French or English or Russian or Welsh or Kusaal is impossible. Yimas may be a possibility, though.
I wasn’t objecting to what I take the ideology to be, which is true – as a sort of first approximation; I was objecting to the incoherent expression of it.
But you haven’t answered my question.
“Russian” is just the current common word for a set of deviant northern/northeastern dialects of Ukrainian, innit?
No.
As an example of how actual field linguists approach these questions in a highly practical setting:
https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/9184
This is SIL people specifically interested in whether the Toende dialect of Kusaal ought to have its own separate Bible translation.* A lot of the data is very rough-and-ready, but the interesting bit is the kind of question they ask and what they count as relevant.
Part of it is mutual comprehensibility: the issue turns out to be far from simple and not reducible to a nice simple figure. Another is lexical similarity: that turns out to be messy and complicated too. And they rightly also explore the question of speaker attitudes: do Toende Kusaal speakers themselves feel they speak a different language from Agolle speakers? Do they think one of the dialects is more prestigious than the other?
This is not perfect stuff. And it does not – cannot – provide any neat simple answers, because neat simple answers do not exist.
But it is vastly more “scientific” than that awful paper which blithely asserts that all these complex questions can be reduced to doing some sums with forty lexical items.
* Interestingly, it now does (partially), but for reasons which have everything to do with the fact that all the Kusaasi in Burkina Faso speak the Toende dialect. In the end, it was the political border (an arbitrary line drawn by the Brits and the French a hundred years ago) that decided the matter, and not the issues addressed by this paper at all.
But that’s the point: the line between the two is a line through a dialect continuum, and all of East Slavic put together is less diverse than FYLOSC anyway. And all of Slavic is less diverse than German, except for those parts of the vocabulary that are most contingent on religious and political history.
Political history is of course the reason why the people who do insist that East Slavic is a single language call it “Russian”.
“But you haven’t answered my question.”
@DE, thanks, I missed it somehow.
May I explain what bothers me? “What I don’t like is exactly how we discuss language planning.“.
Say… The usual argument against what China does is: “such and such language is a language!”.
It is based on an assumption that once something is a “language” (and not a dialect), there is a set of actions we can take to maintain it and please its speakers. Dialects don’t deserve this.
(1) I value dialects.
(2) Cantonese is a language used by a large, rich, industrialised group of people. For many it is L2.
It is the direction of language shift. So is Shanghainese.
But many languages are not like this. And we do NOT have a “set of actions” which would help to maintain it.
The usual argument against what China does is: “such and such language is a language!”.
You’re not arguing with us, you’re arguing with those people (I won’t say “straw men” because I’m sure such people exist). Nobody here disagrees with you; we all “value dialects.”
There are two quite distinct issues involved with Cantonese: one is the dialect vs language thing, where the academic linguistic consensus is uniformly that Cantonese is a different language from Mandarin (the only dissenter among real linguists from this line I’ve seen was Chinese and resident in Shanghai, so his toeing of the Party line is eminently understandable.)
The other is the determination of the leadership of China to destroy all forms of speech within the People’s Republic other than Mandarin. While misclassification of other Sinitic languages as “dialects” of Mandarin doubtless fits well with the general plan, in fact the eradication effort is applied just as enthusiastically (or more so) to Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur …
So the dialectic/language issue is beside the point, really. In itself, there is nothing too objectionable about the Chinese determination to call all the Sinitic languages “dialects”: as I’ve been saying, there are other factors beside the language-internal which it is perfectly reasonable (in principle) to take into account in deciding how to use the terms. And it’s not just the current leadership that take this line, either; non-totalitarian Chinese have often felt that cultural unity trumps mutual unintelligibility. After all, so do Germans.
The issue is the deliberate effort to destroy linguistic and cultural diversity, not what you call the speech-forms in question.
(While I have no wish to even appear to defend the PRC regime, it is also worth remembering that there is nothing specifically Communist or totalitarian about this plan: they are following the nineteenth-century ethnostate-building template deliberately and enthusiastically carried through in France, Britain, Japan …)
@LH, wait a second.
Can we put aside for a while who’s doing something wrong? I think it is obvious that the answer is “everyone”. Linguists are the target of my criticism because I beleive they have certain responsibilities which others don’t have. I generally tend to be critical of feminists because I’m a feminist, believers because I am a believer, Muslims because I have close Muslim freinds (I love them and love means identifying with them).
Can we talk of what I think should be done? By linguists specifically.
We all want to be nicer to langauges and their speakers. I use “nicer” because we don’t understand what exactly that means.
Yes, we value diversity. Existing diversity, not just new diversity which would arise within the lingua franca.
Existing diversity can (in principle) only decreace with time. New diversity arises constantly. Apart of this, languages just evolve/transform.
We don’t really understand what trajectory of this system would “good” in the modern world.
And we also want to be nicer to speakers and it is not clear what that means.
So what we need is figuring out what exactly “nicer” means and developing a theory which can predict when a dialect will flourish, when the diversity won’t decreace, and then – within applied linguists armed with this theory – to develop specific proposals.
So that linguists could tell to others: “if we do X the result will be Y”.
I think at the moment we can offer… Nothing. Just nothing.
Changing the situation on the one hand requires serious research (more than what is being done now) and on the other hand is simply very important. This is what linguistics should be doing.
And this is 1000 times more important than Chomsky’s project and many other projects.
______
Now, what I don’t like:
– how the conversation – when it happens at all – usually happens from the position of “we know what to do, and some [good, democratic] countries are ready to do that and others [bad] don’t do that”.
This clearly distracts from the above.
– how it is centered on the concept of “language”. I don’t think this concept has much to do with what we need.
As for valuing dialects – yes, but I am not saying that LH personally does not value them.
I’m saying that when the conversation about what is actually done and should be done is focused on “languages” this of course means we are not discussing dialects.
When the criticism is all about how countries treat languages as dialects when they should treat them as languages.
Linguists are in fact actively involved with supporting minority and endangered languages all over the world. There has also been a vast amount of academic work already into language death, how it comes about in detail, and what might help prevent it or not. I agree with you that this is much more important than Chomskyan mental self-abuse, but I don’t see why you target academic linguists as a problem. The problem is just not with linguists having no good ideas about this. It’s with politicians seeing no benefit in paying any attention to them.
Linguists qua linguists actually have a pretty limited ability to prevent language marginalisation and death. The drivers of that are largely economic, coupled with instititutional racism in various guises and the long toxic legacy of colonialism.
Solutions (if they exist) lie in politics, not linguistics.
And we also want to be nicer to speakers and it is not clear what that means.
On general, non-linguistic grounds, I propose to politely ask authorities to do less authoriting. If people want to abandon their local language in favor of a national language or a lingua franca, let them do it. If they want to keep it, let them keep it. If some of them want one thing and others want another, let everyone do what they want. Maybe if people want to keep their language/dialect/whatever, but don’t have resources, give them some resources. Or don’t give, if you don’t want to, but at least leave them alone.
@D.O. this is one possible approach.
Except children usually have to study (or even be taught in) a local major language in school.*
Another possible idea is that when an artist or linguist tells speakers “your dialect is COOL!” people can be willing to agree and there is nothing wrong about telling people that.
____
* Which is often supported by the majority of people and even by speakers of other languages. E.g. because all universities teach in Russian and without a university diploma you can’t get a job.
But same is true for everything.
We have a very particular system and usually people just want to reproduce it (or even consider it given by God) and are more concerned with what they can achieve within the system.
@DE, how did you manage to convert a suggestion that more research should be directed as something into “linguists are a problem” ?
…that more research [efforts] should be directed a[t] something…
(typos)
Well, that has a pretty clear implicature that not enough research has been conducted to date. While I am naturally all in favour of research opportunities for linguists, especially those of a kind which might support actual fieldwork and data-gathering, I reiterate that lack of relevant research into the issues really isn’t the problem: it’s lack or the political will to implement existing research findings.
Combined with the fact that there are extremely powerful economic and social forces tending to the destruction of minority languages. Welsh, for example, has historically been much more seriously damaged by the industrialisation of South Wales and concomitant large-scale influx of monoglot Anglophones than by the deliberate English government efforts to destroy the language. Modern nation states destroy minority languages even without active effort. It’s not a simple morality tale, either: modern nation states do also being prosperity (sometimes.) The horrible PRC regime has probably brought more people out of abject poverty than any other state ever. We here at the Hattery all love languages, quite rightly; but other things are at least as important.
“Well, that has a pretty clear implicature that not enough research has been conducted to date.”
Absolutely.
It is just not the same as “linguists are a problem”.
Similarly, open questions in biology don’t mean that biologists are a problem. They’re people who solve problems:)
Solutions (if they exist) lie in politics, not linguistics.
yes, exactly! which is why linguistics needs to [look at how it’s always been, and choose how it’s now going to be] politicized, as a field! in the ways, for example, that parts of some fields have been by the experience of climate denialism. and, similarly, that process happening only in parts of a field is clearly not enough.
@DE:
all of your examples are excellent illustrations of why “gender” as it’s used in the field needs to go. f’rinstance: sure, there are languages with two categories of noun for some purposes, and often “man” and “woman” go into different categories (not always: they pluralize the same in english, for example). but there’s no reason to use a reference to that piece of trivia to name the categories: you might as well call it “kashrus”, because “khazer” is in one category and “ku” is in the other. why not just call the entire format “noun classes”, and start from the notion that they can be multiple and intersecting? seems more sensible than extending the limited terminology of a model entirely based in the prestige languages of european linguists. and all the more because, there are plenty of languages that don’t put those words into different categories, or do, but not categories that work the same way.
@DE, I don’t know how to react at “why you target linguists as a problem”.
But yes, I am very exactly saying that “not enough research has been conducted”.
Two things:
– that this question is very important. I don’t think I can name another such important question.
– and that much more efforts should be directed at it.
Now, what I am criticising is the assumption – and in your case confident assurance – that “enough research has been conducted”.
Actually “implicature that not enough research has been conducted” sounds crazy – I don’t think there is a question where the conducted studies are “enough”. Science is about moving forward.
It is not about reaching Enlightenment where you “know everything”.
But perhaps you mean “enough” for some very particular purpose.
@DE, by the way: we achieved something!
First, I think you understood what I’m traying to say. Not why I am trying to say it, but at least what:) A part of it (there is another part about “language”).
Second, we disagree!
All Threads are One at LH:
https://languagehat.com/can-north-africans-understand-maltese/
A fine example of the whole language/dialect thing, how mutual comprehensibility is not a simple all-or-nothing matter and how linguistics (in the narrowest sense) is only part of the question.
@DE, as I said, the idea that “enough reasearch has been conducted” seems outlandish to me.
Outlandish for any scientific question, and for this one in particular. No, linguistics does not have a predictive model for the dynamics of language shift. It just does not have it, period.
But that is theory. Meanwhile what I meant (and this takes much more effort) is applied linguistics. Not only being able and willing (both are not true presently) to tell the public and politicians that if they keep doing what they’re doing sauch and such changes to their native langauge are expected in such and such time – but also offering more or less realistic (compatible with the modern world) plans.
Do this and that (Plan 1) OR do this and that (Plan 2) and likely people will keep using the langauge (that is apart of some subtle questions like whether this langauge will retain certain characteristics).
Whether people are ready to implement what linguists would propose or not, just knowing this will make a difference.
@drasvi quote: @DE, as I said, the idea that “enough reasearch has been conducted” seems outlandish to me.
You have latched onto the word “enough” like a tick onto a dog. What DE wrote is:
Well, that has a pretty clear implicature that not enough research has been conducted to date. While I am naturally all in favour of research opportunities for linguists, especially those of a kind which might support actual fieldwork and data-gathering, I reiterate that lack of relevant research into the issues really isn’t the problem: it’s lack or the political will to implement existing research findings.
DE does not say “enough research has been conducted”.
Rather, DE says that, in his view, more research won’t help matters, because the problem is not the amount of research. The problem is “the lack or [of] the political will to implement existing research findings”.
You appear to believe that more and more research findings would somehow create the political will to do something based on those findings. Well, maybe it could, maybe it wouldn’t. It seems to be your opinion that it could. However, misrepresenting DE’s opinion and then calling it outlandish are hardly arguments in support of your opinion. They’re more like browbeating.
If that is your idea of how to convert the heathen, you won’t get past the post. This post or any other.
Stu, DE said what he said and I sincerely take it to be his opinion.
Your interpretation basically means “enough for all practical purposes”. Apparently it seems terribly different to you. I am surpised.
Again sincerely.
In rational arguments, invocations of surprise and sincerity are irrelevant. And purity of motive as well.
As to “again sincerely”, see Hamlet.
“…are not invoked” – it’s good that I resisted the urge to call you an asshole! I did not know that the argument is rational…
Whether people are ready to implement what linguists would propose or not, just knowing this will make a difference.
That’s a nice idea, but I regret to say I don’t think it will. Basically, nobody but linguists cares what linguists say.
Virtue rewarded.
I hereby validate Stu’s exegesis of my pronouncements.
(Also, his correction of my spelling. He is Worthy.)
@LH, I don’t really understand you. You complain at people’s counter-arguments to your anarchism.
And I understand you (here), because these counter-arguments are all going to be “let’s fix 72 variables, now let’s say that the 73d variable (which is dependent on some of the other 72…) can’t be modified. Let’s repeat this with every single variable. Now we have PROVEN that nothing can be changed and the word order is installed by God”.
This is not to say I understand how anarchism may or can possibly work, but I can’t prove that it can’t and can’t even produce an argument which I would believe that makes it look likely that it can’t.
And yet, when I point at, for example, that translating all (ALL!) scientific literature published yearly in English requires a sum* well below what some not SMALL countries spend on “culture”, and even what some rich guys (individually) from oil countries spend on propaganda or culture… You say of course no one will ever do that, and and that I’m an unrealistic dreamer. Meanwhile it is just a fact (unknown to most such people).
___
*It also requres translators:)
@LH we have Hebrew!!!
Surely there are many communities where “making a difference” requires some much less radical effort than with Hebrew – and where speakers have the will.
@LH we have Hebrew!!!
Yes, and that’s not because of linguists. I honestly don’t understand what you think is the causal transmission line between linguists saying something and the world changing. And what does this have to do with anarchism? The whole point is that I am fully aware that my ideas will change nothing and that the world is not going to stop being ruled by states based on violence. You seem to think that all that’s required is that a few clever people decide something, and then poof — heaven on earth!
I hope you understand that I’m not opposing your ideas, which I admire, I’m just perplexed at your wild overestimation of the influence of linguists.
“wild overestimation of the influence of linguists.”
@LH, “make a difference” is not “wild”.
Yes, and that’s not because of linguists
Indeed not.
I am pretty sure that a consortium of modern linguistic experts, magically transported back to Ben-Yehuda’s day, would unanimously have recommended Yiddish instead as the common language of the Aliyah. The revival of Hebrew was a thoroughly political endeavour. The results of this endeavour are of great linguistic (and human) interest, but nobody would ever have suggested it on (narrow) linguistic grounds.
In fact, the mindset behind it was 19th-century ethnonationalist ideas about “nation states”; the very same ideology that has destroyed so much linguistic diversity elsewhere.
DE, yes.
Presumably that changes something? What?
The point is that there are communities that have a way more “will” than what we need. I don’t see where the complaints at the lack of will come from.
Yes, of course there also communities who lack this will, and what? They don’t make work of linguists useless. People who don’t want to buy an iPhone or people who can’t afford one – the vast majority of people that is – also don’t make iPhones useless.
If you think that whenever a community has the will, it is going to be the kind of will that takes no interest in linguistics and is hostile to it…. Er.
Er what? That seems to me pretty much a universal. I know of no community that takes an interest in linguistics except the community of linguists.