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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| 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? |
Got in one, chum. These five 'peoples' are remembered today precisely because they took their own languages (respectively prolly Canaanite, Demotic Arabic, modern Greek, dialectial Albanian and rustic Italian) and pared them down to a completely phonetic version. The reason you haven't heard of the other 95% of Albanian-speakers is because they couldn't write their language and therefore historians-- who deal only in written evidence-- ignore them. Actually they don't believe in their existence but that is how we get in.
We are a broad church. All are welcome.
| even did a course in ye olde AS which I passed by being able to pronounce it very convincingly, |
Well done again! A/S can be pronouced from the off because it is a completely phonetic (ie artificial) language. Same with Latin. Same practically with French after a thousand years of being cleaned up by literary types. Same actually with all the languages popularly taught in school. It's all so easy-peasy compared with Chinese or Gyppo which require a caste of priests. That is why alphabetic languages conquered the world, they were easy to learn and hence spoken by traders, soldiers and other action types.
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| It was you and not me who perceived that English is not derived from Anglo-Saxon, had to kick myself for missing that one... |
I doubt that I would have done so had my brain invested a coupla years in studying A/S only because it was the forerunner of English. It's an important AE lesson. And being a polymathic genius of course. Always helps.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Ishmael wrote: | | 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. |
I didn't mean to imply they would be fishing down the well... just using it as a shrine to make offerings.
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Grant
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Mick,
I'm getting confused about this alphabetised language stuff. Are you suggesting that
a) Latin and Anglo-Saxon became important because their speakers bothered to work our how to alphabetise them or
b) Latin and Anglo-Saxon were languages which were made up so that various tribes could understand each other, making them a kind of pidgin?
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Ishmael wrote: | | 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??? |
I was thinking the same thing.
People often keep goldfish in water butts, to keep them from becoming infested with mosquito and midge larvae.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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My goodness.
Looks to me like we're unravelling another mystery.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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You two are marvels. I wouldn't be surprised to find that wells containing eels (also fish in some cases apparently) were not in village centres but beside tracks in relative isolation. Long-distance travellers clearly needed water-stops but wouldn't want to go wandering off into unknown territory.
A hermit or whoever tended a well would depend on alms; eels would presumably be an emergency food source, maybe also a deterrent to anyone tempted to make off with coins left in the well especially if they were seen as sacred.
I wonder if there's a connection with the salmon of wisdom, and hazel nuts perhaps since hazel, a common tree, is often near water and hazelnuts another valuable foodstuff. Only Authorised Personnel would be permitted to eat the fish and/or nuts, in this instance the hermit guardian of the well, whose wisdom could be attributed to his diet.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I'm getting confused about this alphabetised language stuff. Are you suggesting that
a) Latin and Anglo-Saxon became important because their speakers bothered to work our how to alphabetise them or |
Yes. The example of Israelis and Hebrew is the model to keep in mind. Imagine an alternate Israel where everybody insisted on carrying on speaking the language they arrived with (Russian, English, Amharic etc) or decided to adopt the language they found already established there (Arabic). But now consider how easily, how painlessly, how quickly they actually achieved a tight little group of people by virtue of being the only people in the world speaking a particular language. Ditto the early Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings etc. Anybody in fact you ever heard of because they are the only people writing. Imagine modern history if the Arabs ran Hollywood!
| b) Latin and Anglo-Saxon were languages which were made up so that various tribes could understand each other, making them a kind of pidgin? |
No, this model might have been important when explaining the emergence of alphabetic language in the first place but Latin (for instance) is the opposite of a pidgin. However that is not to say that pidgins based on Latin (Dog Latin, Soldier's Latin but not Vulgar Latin which is early written Italian) did not arise later quite naturally in a polyglot empire.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| 'Give us six pints of interpreter there, will you mate. This round's on me, lads.' |
I didn't intend to appear flippant. Bad habit of mine, sorry. It seems to me that hermits and the hermetic tradition carry with them a sense of translation and/or interpretation (of knowledge not just linguistics), cf. Mercury and transformation of substances in alchemy.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Sacred eels/serpents swimming around in wells... I don't think we can dismiss the fertility connection. |
I don't think fertility is the issue. Snakes were said to have healing properties and indeed they do according to tests carried out using snake venom as analgesics which compared favourably with morphine. The symbol of the snake-entwined caduceus in medicine is not a coincidence.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Hatty wrote: | | I don't think fertility is the issue. |
I'm not so sure.
The symbolism is very powerful. A phallic eel entering a ktenic well... to ensure the life sustaining properties of what lies within.
The sacred well would have been multifunctional, just like any modern place of worship.... somewhere to leave offerings, ask favours of the gods, perform rituals... nothing has really changed.
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| I didn't intend to appear flippant. Bad habit of mine, sorry. |
On the contrary, Hatty, I was being flippant, and if anyone should apologise, it's me. But it's all part of the game, isn't it, no harm intended. Couldn't resist the temptation.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Chad wrote: | The symbolism is very powerful. A phallic eel entering a ktenic well... to ensure the life sustaining properties of what lies within.
The sacred well would have been multifunctional, just like any modern place of worship... somewhere to leave offerings, ask favours of the gods, perform rituals... nothing has really changed. |
Yes, you can't pin down the multi-layered associations of creatures, mythical or real, into a specific category. There's an echo of dragons being the guardians of treasure perhaps. If you look at medieval paintings of St George and the dragon they're quite ambiguous, not necessarily triumphal celebrations of Christianity over paganism.
I like the idea of fish or eels performing a much-needed service. Wouldn't surprise me if emblematic animals hadn't all at some point and in some way been high up in the utilitarian pecking order -- as we've seen with ravens. Goes for plants too. I read that holly was an important source of iron for deer, specially in winter months presumably. So much for 'holy' tree.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| But it's all part of the game, isn't it, no harm intended. Couldn't resist the temptation. |
You never know with people who've newly joined if they'll object to being contradicted, berated or ignored. But it's fertile soil for ideas.
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| I doubt that I would have done so had my brain invested a coupla years in studying A/S only because it was the forerunner of English. It's an important AE lesson. |
Nah, it was only one semester. I may be thick, but I'm not a masochist. I'd say swallowing the forerunner story is one more detail of the psycho-intellectual-emotional-spiritual conditioning that growing up in human society entails. But there's a cure for every ill. Back to the fray.
Granted, all written language is artificial, Nick Hornby as well as Will Shakespeare. It's an artifice, therefore artificial by definition.
But isn't spoken language also an artifice? If there were a natural language, which would mean a natural correspondence between thing and name and a natural syntax (not to mention an objective differentiation of the things), there would be only one language. But no: vocabulary and the specific elements of grammar are arbitrary.
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Now when you say that languages cannot be alphabetised because there are a great number of sounds in any language, do you mean dialectal variation? If you did, I would understand your meaning to be: alphabetisation is always based on a single, usually urban dialect and ignores the others, therefore the whole language is not alphabetised, but only a fragment of it.
But apparently you don't, because your example for the notion that every language contains 'an infinity of sounds' is that the initial sound of actual and apple are different even in the mouth of the same speaker, which makes dialect distinctions irrelevant. I say that even if that difference exists, it's insignificant because it's only perceivable by polymath geniuses, and so any given language uses, say, thirty or forty categories of your multitudinous sounds, which we dullards perceive as only thirty or forty sounds. So where's the obstacle to alphabetising?
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