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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Has anyone got anything to say about this idea that the Pictish carvings are writing system rather than... er... pictures? (Essex University mathematicians say so). |
Got a link?
| Last year I invented a game in which people had to distinguish Pictish drawings (or "writing") from contemporary Scandinavian drawings (writing?) and shall we say the difference wasn't obvious. |
(I found) you mentioned this before (pg 69, 70) and I mentioned "a semi-circular carving of Loki(?) that reminds me of the Pictish moon-shaped symbol..."
Dredged up some some old posts, such as
...off the top of my head:
1. Many of the Pictish stones have been translated: they're in Norse. (Whether the rest weren't in the scope of the research project or they're known to be something else, I don't know.)
2. As far as I know, clues to Pictishness are only found around the edges.
3. Someone mentioned Pictish remains of Mediterranean type, but was not able to say whether they were called Pictish just because they were in "Pictish territory" (and the Picts are presumed indigenous). Now you mention it, I dunno what was deciphered as Norse. There's script as well as animals, arrows and wotnot?
Something has changed in the last 5 years though. Links in this post have disappeared and I can't find the original "furnace stone" or "furnace shield" anywhere now.
They call this a furnace stone and they reckon it's Loki, with his lips stitched together. This seems to be the only example like it.
http://www.csf.edu/art/artwork/rp_6_10.jpg
http://members.ttlc.net/~tyrell/images/Furnace%20Stone1.gif
And there are plenty of V-rods like these to be googled up.
http://altreligion.about.com/library/graphics/symbols/pictvrod.jpg
The topological similarity is striking, but whether that means the Pictish symbol is a stylised face or the furnace stone was styled after the Pictish symbol, I dunno. (The dates might be critical, but since one site says the furnace stone is 4th century and another says 10th century, I'm none the wiser.)
I find the whole area of Celtic art utterly confused with Viking art, so which way the influences went and when is something else that'll stay in the back of my mind. That furnace stone has been re-invented in trinkets like this:
The original is rougher-and-readier and therefore resembles the Pictish carving a bit more, as I recall.
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Grant
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bernie wrote | The top three countries in the world in terms of economic growth at the present moment are China, Indonesia and Laos all of which have a large percentage of state capitalism and state direction. |
Yeah, but they are playing catch-up. Also, regulations in China are far fewer than in the developed world. If you set up a factory in the UK you would have to worry about pensions, equal opportunities for women, blacks and gays, maternity and paternity leave, ageism, the environment, global warming. The Chinese don't worry about such things.
All previous major industrial states have built up their power behind economic walls - first Britain (the empire), then Germany and the USA (tariffs), and then Japan (tariffs and xenophobia)in the 60s. China is the latest and their weapon of choice is an artificial exchange rate, low wages and an absence of employee rights.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I was recently waiting for a flight in Delhi, when I overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now do I realise that they were speaking "Globish", the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.
-- Globish |
Is this how Latin came about? With Italian being its basis rather than English?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, not a bad wheeze. We may have been misled by Latin's prestige. But how does 'Globish' come about? Are these globetrotting peacekeepers really like penned up slaves? English is now such an (the) international language, and compulsory education so widespread, that it is difficult to imagine anybody who reaches the level of international travel in the first place not knowing a fair bit of English.
Is Esperanto unlike Latin and if so in what manner?
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Google "Pictish + language + Exeter" and there's plenty of stuff on the same subject to scroll through. I read about it in the New Scientist. I don't know if their articles are freely available on line, but the stuff that is bears the same info.
Interestingly the Exeter team said they didn't know if the stuff around the margins was part of the language or just decoration, so they were talking about the stuff in the middle, which to any philistine looks like - a picture of a hunt, a picture of a wolf eating a bloke, an old drunk on horseback, a battle, etc.
The Loki head is fascinating. I hadn't seen it. Though surely it is one thing to styles a discrete image and quite another to generate a written language.
The experts refer to some 250 Pictish images but you can only find some 30 with ease.
If there is a continuum in the artistic tradition from Ireland through Scotland to Southern Scandinavia, presumably the ethnic picture in the "Dark Ages" was much more complex than it's painted.
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Surely "Globish" is just intermediate English as taught to EFL students around the...er... globe. In other words, our mother tongue stripped of metaphor, irony, tongue-in-cheek and "colour".
It's a pidgin for globetrotters.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Is this how Latin came about? With Italian being its basis rather than English? |
I've thought e-loud myself about whether the Romans were actually from somewhere else. Even so, just setting up in Italy isn't enough to make Italian important. Greek and Phoenician were languages to know all around the Mediterranean even in France, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey...
Was Italy/Italian in a position anything like English, Greek or Phoenician in Latin's formative years?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | I've thought e-loud myself about whether the Romans were actually from somewhere else. |
Somewhere like Anatolia perhaps?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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As a frinstance, yes.
But I take back the question about the status of Italian as a (however big The World was) World language, coz pidginizing a language means learning it badly; and I can't see grammatical onerousness growing from that.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Ishmael wrote: | | DPCrisp wrote: | | I've thought e-loud myself about whether the Romans were actually from somewhere else. |
Somewhere like Anatolia perhaps? |
Constantinople - city of Constantine... constant... unchanged... original.
The original Rome... and a classic Khan-tsar to boot!
Yup, the Romans hailed from Anatolia.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Constant = Eternal
Rome = The Eternal City.
Interesting.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | DPCrisp wrote: | | I've thought e-loud myself about whether the Romans were actually from somewhere else. |
Somewhere like Anatolia perhaps? |
In general, Foundation Myths usually have some connection to the truth, no matter how tenuous, don't you agree?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Can't remember when I first iterated, but back on page 57 I re-iterated that "I tabled the theory (just to lay claim to it as early as possible) that Japanese is artificialised Chinese".
I would now like to do the same with Basque.
How Fast Do Languages Change?, page 23:
| An interesting example of a language which has a lot of modern borrowed vocabulary but the complex grammatical structure of an "old language" is Basque. It has never embraced the concept of prepositional phrases, for example, and still has a far more complicated set of case endings than either Latin or Ancient Greek. |
That's good to know. The hunch that the Basques were a separate (presumed earlier) wave of in-comers related to the MegalithiCelts is virtually proven. |
Everywhere I look everyone is rather pleased that none of the cases made for Basque's kinship is convincing. They do talk about a lot of borrowing from Spanish and French, but I can't find any simple percentages of Romance and other cognates in Basque vocabulary. That would probably reveal the truth quite simply.
Does anyone have the data?
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The problem here is "what is a language's vocabulary?"
The Spanish will tell you that there are only a couple of hundred words that are authentically Basque and, for example, they will scoffingly tell you that Basque for "television" is "telebista". It doesn't help to point out that "televisóon" is a calque of an English coinage based on a Greek prefix and a Latin base. They still firmly believe that "televisión" is a Spanish word.
Now you can happily go about your life speaking only Euskera (Basque) and a couple of thousand people do. So, if we imagine a functioning vocabulary for modern life to include, say, 5000 words, then we can guestimate that 5% of Basque words are "pure".
We should of course bear in mind that the number of English words that can be traced back to between 1200-1350 (minus the obvious Francien, Norman and Norse adoptions) isn't probably much higher. And if you take a AE point-of-view and don't see an Ango-Saxon usage as proof of a word being "pure" then the number would sink below 5%, I imagine.
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The problem that you have here, Dan, is not just the question of vocabulary. Basque is from a structural and grammatical viewpoint really really different. The books say that there are similarities with some languages from the Caucasus which I know nothing about. I am in the process of doing a teach yourself Basque course at the moment and I can tell you that it is the strangest language that I have come across and so different from Spanish or French that kinship looks pretty unbelievable.
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