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Ishtar
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | This is no use if you are trading with countries that are non-literate. Or for that matter people who are illiterate. Surely the majority in either case. |
Would it really matter if they were illiterate so long as you were literate? You only need to represent their sounds in your writing. (If I'm understanding correctly)
| Mick Harper wrote: | | ...that's the whole point of being a Phoenician. |
Right, so I can speak Japanese without ever understanding the writing or even hearing a Japanese speaker. I only need to read the romaji. Knowing what it is I'm saying is the difficult part. Luckily my tour book has a picture of tin mine next to "Suzu"
But is this how it was done in the past?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Would it really matter if they were illiterate so long as you were literate? You only need to represent their sounds in your writing. (If I'm understanding correctly) |
That's the whole point, you can proceed either way. But imagine the same situation if you yourself have only an ideogrammatic script. How will that assist? At best, and assuming you have mastered all five thousand of your own ideograms (a tall order in itself for people other than professional scribes), you could utter the word 'tin' phonetically by going the cartouche route and using the the words for toffee, ink and night -- but there is no guarantee that these sounds will be represented in your own language/script.
By the way, and pace Ishmael's theory about phi and the English alphabet, knowing the order of the letters in the alphabet becomes very important because you can look up t-i-n in the way you cannot look up toffee, ink, night in ideograms (by the way, how do dictionaries work in Chinese?)
However, writing this I realise there are questions about whether you. a Phoenician, are reading from a prepared script or not. Would you all go in for some mental role-play to assist in this?
In theory, as we discovered before, ideogrammatric scripts can be read in any language. In theory Japanese people can read a Chinese newspaper so long as they are using the same words for the same ideograms. But they would read out loud in two completely different languages.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| So before I'd even think of heading off into the mountains to look for some halfmad longbearded wildeyed Hermit I'd want to be sure of having a local interpreter certified by my port-town contacts and maybe three or four stout lads armed with some of those swords and shields I brought in trade last year |
It's unlikely there would be a local interpreter on tap. You might come across one in the pub I suppose. Or perhaps the hermit was trained up as the local interpreter and you would recognise him by his uniform, that funny-shaped staff, not to be confused with common-or-garden walking sticks sold by the yobs down the pub. Symbols speak too.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Leon makes the usual mistake of supposing the past is a foreign country. |
Technologically, and in terms of population numbers, urban/rural population distribution or common means of travel it is a foreign country. What's more like present-day Britain, present-day France or Bronze-Age Britain? What's different about France except that the French speak another language and know how to cook?
| You can't hide a tin mine. |
It's hidden to me if I don't know where it is, and you proposed that. Isn't that why I'm supposed to talk with the Hermit?
| Is this how we do it today? No. We use Google instant interpreting which does the job fine. |
Maybe you do. If I relied on Google instant interpreting to understand all these Spaniards where I live... 'Pardon me a minute, Sr Gonzalez, I'll just turn on my laptop to find out what it is you're saying to me... What's that? You no comprende ingles. Right, well first I'll get it to translate what I just said to you, then I'll check out what you said to me, okay? By the way, what exactly was it you said? Could you just write it down for me? ...Still no comprende? You stupid dago, what's the matter with you!'
| Blimey, you do like to increase your unit costs. |
Got me on that one. Stupid idea altogether. No sense taking half a dozen armed men, they can easily be outnumbered if the mountain folks are hostile. In fact I won't go looking for the tin mine at all. What am I going to do, bring a ton of tin on my back? or put together a train of pack-mules? Sod that. I'm a sea-trader, not Indiana Jones. Let them bring the tin down to the port and put a price on it.
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| It's unlikely there would be a local interpreter on tap. You might come across one in the pub I suppose. Or perhaps the hermit was trained up as the local interpreter |
Well yes, if he was in the pub he'd certainly be on tap. 'Give us six pints of interpreter there, will you mate. This round's on me, lads.' But hang on. First you say there is no interpreter, or it's unlikely, and then there is one. Or two: the one in the pub and the hermit. Might be. Perhaps. The question posed, however, was, how do you communicate with the hermit, the implication being that you don't have a language in common.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | that first a in 'actual'...easy isn't it? It's a-for-apple. No, it isn't. It's a different a-sound. |
You've a better ear than I have, Gunga Mick. But okay, I'll suppose that this is an absolutely scientific conclusion based on computerised graphic sound analysis, and that the /k/ and /p/ sounds that follow the /ae/ create a distinction in it too subtle for the human ear, which is what I am equipped with (a steal from Peter Cook).
But then, what are you driving at? It wouldn't occur to anyone to create two different letters to represent that infinitessimal difference. And yet you seem to be suggesting that logically the ancient alphabet inventors would have been stymied because they couldn't represent the supposed infinity of sounds that every language contains (literally this can't be true, because languages are finite, but I don't think it's even hyperbolically true).
You cannot alphabetise a language, you say. Well then, what were those Phoenicians, Arabs, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans doing when they made up their alphabets or adapted the one before? I'm a bit thick I admit: after all, I studied English Lit, which is even more pointless than studying Political "Science", even did a course in ye olde AS which I passed by being able to pronounce it very convincingly, didn't understand a thing, and it was you and not me who perceived that English is not derived from Anglo-Saxon, had to kick myself for missing that one...
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Ishmael wrote: | ץוק
And you say it means "pin"?
Fascinating. |
I forgot to mention that the symbol "y" in Greek is pronounced as the English "n".
piy = pin. |
Funny that ץוק 'potz' is basically the same word as puits i.e. well and that pins are among the most commonly found votive offerings in wells, especially bent pins. Why bent? To appear more thorn-like perhaps. Other votive offerings though seem to have been deliberately broken too.
I don't see an immediate connection between wells and pins. Historians and folklorists view them as 'something to do with fertility'; seems to me there are overtones of sympathetic magic to do with transference between owner of said pin, the sufferer, and the healing properties of 'holy' wells.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Ok. Wait a second. I need to sort out what you are saying. Initially you wrote,
| Hatty wrote: | | In Hebrew the same word קוץ ('quotz') can be used for thorn and spine as in other languages (épine in French, spina in Italian); |
קוץ (right-to-left) = pin (definition)
I then reversed the order of the letters like so:
ץוק (left-to-right)
...which looks like piy.
I pointed out that the "y" symbol (a symbol associated with the word "thorn") has an "n" sound in Greek, making "pin" a valid pronunciation of the letters piy. Thus....
קוץ, meaning "pin", when reversed, forms ץוק, or piy, which some might pronounce as pin.
Are you now telling me that there is a hebrey word "ץוק" (right-to-left) that means "well"?
| pins are among the most commonly found votive offerings in wells, especially bent pins. Why bent? To appear more thorn-like perhaps....Historians and folklorists view them as 'something to do with fertility'; seems to me there are overtones of sympathetic magic....the healing properties of 'holy' wells. |
Pins. Sleeping beauty pricks her finger with one. Some say it represent the onset of menstruation. Maybe it represent the deflowering of the virgin.
Did young girls who wished to marry stand at a well, prick their fingers, and throw the pin within? Does the "prick" represent the "prick" they hope will cause them similarly to bleed?
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Hatty wrote: | | pins are among the most commonly found votive offerings in wells, especially bent pins. Why bent? |
Bent pins = fish hooks.
F=V=W
Wishing well = Fishing well.
They were places to make offerings to the water deities to ensure (wish for) a good days fishing.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Chad wrote: | Bent pins = fish hooks.
F=V=W
Wishing well = Fishing well.
They were places to make offerings to the water deities to ensure (wish for) a good days fishing. |
That's a good suggestion, and makes sense of the rigmarole of leaving rag offerings on the bushes around the well. Makes me think of making holes in the ice for trapping and of 'prayer rags' communicating with the spirits. Success in hunting is surely uppermost and altogether more serious than the fertility rituals folklorists keep referring to.
'Sacred eels' kept in wells were used for divination purposes apparently which is clearly a throw-back to some no longer understood or needed role. (Eels are kept as pets, in a kind of fish tank rather than a 'sacred' pool, in one of the Polynesian islands we were told in the recent South Pacific series but they never said why).
Some wells were rather perversely known as cursing wells, little figures with pins stuck in them were found at the bottom. You could interpret them as victims of curses in a vodoo-ish fashion which is no doubt what disapproving churchmen did but it makes as much if not more sense to think of spearing or netting prey. Trying to translate meanings of found objects is like catching an eel, very slippery subject.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Are you now telling me that there is a hebrey word "ץוק" (right-to-left) that means "well"? |
There's no Hebrew word 'potz' as far as I know. There are however numerous 'well' words in European languages that sound like or are spelt like potz.
I then reversed the order of the letters like so:
ץוק (left-to-right) ...which looks like piy. |
Puy. Volcanic cone in French. cf. puig in Catalan meaning hill.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Sod that. I'm a sea-trader, not Indiana Jones. Let them bring the tin down to the port and put a price on it. |
I agree. How would you find the port though? 'Course if you'd stopped off en route to pick up a Carthaginian it'd be two for the price of one, translator and navigator. Mount Batten (Plymouth Sound) seems to have been the port of call if wiki is to be believed, viz:
| According to excavations reported by Barry Cunliffe in 1988, Mount Batten was the site of the earliest trade with Europe yet discovered in Britain, operating from the late Bronze Age, peaking in the late Iron Age and continuing in operation throughout the Roman period. |
Between traders weights and figures would be paramount rather than conversational skills wouldn't they? And an expert to assess the quality of the product(s) being traded.
Cornish tinners apparently had a law banning foreigners, known as Saracens, from advancing inland. Not exactly encouraging Indiana Jones style exploration by the sound of it.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Chad wrote: | Wishing well = Fishing well.
They were places to make offerings to the water deities to ensure (wish for) a good days fishing. |
Wow.
Though I'm not sure of the second part. Fishing for something but I doubt it's fish.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Hatty wrote: | | 'Sacred eels' kept in wells were used for divination purposes apparently which is clearly a throw-back to some no longer understood or needed role. (Eels are kept as pets, in a kind of fish tank rather than a 'sacred' pool, in one of the Polynesian islands we were told in the recent South Pacific series but they never said why). |
Do they somehow keep the water fresh???
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Hatty wrote: | Success in hunting is surely uppermost and altogether more serious than the fertility rituals folklorists keep referring to.
'Sacred eels' kept in wells were used for divination purposes apparently which is clearly a throw-back to some no longer understood or needed role. |
Sacred eels/serpents swimming around in wells... I don't think we can dismiss the fertility connection.
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