MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Is You Being Served? (Linguistics)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

berniegreen wrote:
One classic example is enough to prove my point:


It doesn't prove your point at all.

Wallace and Darwin were products of the same cultural template. They had access to identical intellectual resources. They were both creatures of a time and place that were, in all essentials, identical. Wallace and Darwin are perfect examples of twin branches springing from a single point of origin.

Now if you find a Kalahari Bushman who came up with the theory of evolution...

p.s. Did you honestly believe me ignorant of the history lesson you provided?
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

berniegreen wrote:
For example, a Japanese child of, say, 4 years can hear and recognise the difference between "l" and "r" (as used in English speech). A Japanese adult cannot. An adult English speaker finds it very difficult to hear and correctly pronounce the consonantal sound represented by the Hiragana characters which are called in English "RA", "RI", "RU", "RE" and "RO", but which are normally pronounced at a midway point between "r", "l" and "d". But Australian primary school kids learning Japanese for the first time have no problems at all.


All of this reinforces Mick's argument.
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ishmael wrote:
What effect would 500 years of alphabetization -- using a foreign character set derived from another spoken language no less -- have upon the spoken form of a language like Thai?

But the Thais don't have a foreign character set. The Thais invented their own alphabet --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet .
Your problem here is that you are operating with the false paradigm of "a single point of origin".


No.

My problem was that I posed a hypothetical question without labeling it as such. The slow learners have had some trouble keeping up.
Send private message
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ishmael wrote:
berniegreen wrote:
One classic example is enough to prove my point:

It doesn't prove your point at all.

Wallace and Darwin were products of the same cultural template. They had access to identical intellectual resources. They were both creatures of a time and place that were, in all essentials, identical. Wallace and Darwin are perfect examples of twin branches springing from a single point of origin.

Now if you find a Kalahari Bushman who came up with the theory of evolution...

p.s. Did you honestly believe me ignorant of the history lesson you provided?

Don't be such a prick!
A "SINGLE point of origin" is a SINGULARITY !!!! It doesn't mean multiple points of origin which may happen to share a common heritage and culture.
Send private message Send e-mail
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ishmael wrote:

My problem was that I posed a hypothetical question without labeling it as such.

OK. But your "hypothetical question" was based on crap. Now, if you have a serious point, why don't you try again on some non crapulous basis.
Send private message Send e-mail
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

berniegreen wrote:
[When I said, "no single point of origin for the 'alphabetisation' process", I meant] multiple points of origin which may happen to share a common heritage and culture.


Oh!

Well then. I see.

So these "points of origin" for the "alphabetization process" -- did they or didn't they share a "common heritage and culture"?

And if they did... what exactly was your point with the original claim? I'm lost.
Send private message
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ishmael wrote:
So these "points of origin" for the "alphabetization process" -- did they or didn't they share a "common heritage and culture"?

No they did not. For example the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries were invented by the Japanese in about the 5th century AD. They may have been based on Chinese "sound" characters but there is absolutely no connection whatsoever with the alphabets originating in the middle east and/or Europe.

I'm sure you know the story of how Egyptian Demotic developed from the hieroglyphs, but you may not know that almost exactly the same process happened quite separately and independently with the Maya - i.e. a wholly pictographic set of glyphs that over time became adapted for the encoding of sound.

Unless one posits some inter-galactic visitor visiting the earth and whispering into the ears of different earthlings, I am not sure how one can imagine there was a "single point of origin".
Send private message Send e-mail
Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I'm sure you know the story of how Egyptian Demotic developed from the hieroglyphs, but you may not know that almost exactly the same process happened quite separately and independently with the Maya - i.e. a wholly pictographic set of glyphs that over time became adapted for the encoding of sound.

I didn't know that. How strange that the Mayans built pyramids too. One could be forgiven for concluding a cultural exchange took place, from which direction is uncertain.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

but you may not know that almost exactly the same process happened quite separately and independently with the Maya

More grist for my mill. All cultures have a) proper names and b) foreign words, neither of which are containable within a glyph system. So using a glyph to stand in for its own first phoneme is an obvious development. The rest follows however only when the glyphocracy loses its control over literacy generally. As for instance the Chinese mandarins still haven't.
Send private message
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Hatty wrote:
I didn't know that. How strange that the Mayans built pyramids too. One could be forgiven for concluding a cultural exchange took place, from which direction is uncertain.

Yes, an attractive notion but, sadly there are two things going against it.

1) If there had been some interchange we might hope to see some similarities or at least correspondences in the sets of glyphs. But they are very dissimilar.

2) The prime Egyptian pyramid building boom was (and I am open to correction here) about 2,500 years before the Mayan's.
Send private message Send e-mail
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Mick Harper wrote:
but you may not know that almost exactly the same process happened quite separately and independently with the Maya

More grist for my mill. All cultures have a) proper names and b) foreign words, neither of which are containable within a glyph system. So using a glyph to stand in for its own first phoneme is an obvious development. The rest follows however only when the glyphocracy loses its control over literacy generally. As for instance the Chinese mandarins still haven't.

I entirely agree your main point and also that it was true of the mandarinate up to WW2. I am not so sure that it remains the case today, though.
Send private message Send e-mail
Chad


In: Ramsbottom
View user's profile
Reply with quote

berniegreen wrote:
2) The prime Egyptian pyramid building boom was (and I am open to correction here) about 2,500 years before the Mayan's.

I wouldn't take the comparative dates too seriously.

Isaac Newton spent the last two decades of his life investigating the chronology of Ancient Egypt and he came to the conclusion that it was about 1,800 years too long. He was of course ridiculed for this at the time because it contradicted the established chronology, but given a choice between Newton and a group fourteenth-century monks with a vested interest... I know who my money would be on.

Add in a few hundred years for the dodgy dark ages, plus the normal uncertainties of any dating technique... and the two cultures could be almost contemporaneous.
Send private message
berniegreen



View user's profile
Reply with quote

In response to Chad's last
Granted your point with respect to man-made chronologies, but can't we do any better with modern science based dating methods?

I am pretty sure I read somewhere that they had dated the Mayan stuff to circa 500AD using carbon dating, tree rings (or whatever they are called) and so on. Why can't they do the same for the Egyptians?
Send private message Send e-mail
Chad


In: Ramsbottom
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Bernie wrote:
I am pretty sure I read somewhere that they had dated the Mayan stuff to circa 500AD using carbon dating, tree rings (or whatever they are called) and so on. Why can't they do the same for the Egyptians?


Dendrochronology (tree ring dating) works quite well for American datings, where they have a fairly continuous record from very long lived trees, but in the Old World it's only good for about the last eight hundred years, beyond that it's very iffy. Carbon dating (for the historical period) is useless because it is calibrated against the accepted chronology of Ancient Egypt... leading to an incestuous circularity.

There are some who would suggest a date of 500AD (or more specifically 1500 years ago) is not unreasonable for the Egyptian pyramids.
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

berniegreen wrote:
Ishmael wrote:
So these "points of origin" for the "alphabetization process" -- did they or didn't they share a "common heritage and culture"?

No they did not.


Well then your example with Wallace and Darwin, which you claimed was "enough to prove your point" (indeed!) was woefully inadequate now, wasn't it?

And it made you so upset when I humbly pointed out this inadequacy.

Please provide then an actual instance where the same innovation has been observed to spontaneously arise from truly independent contexts.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10  Next

Jump to:  
Page 8 of 10

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group