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| Ishmael wrote: | | berniegreen wrote: | | On the balance of probabilities which appears the more likely? |
Others writing on the subject have resolved the paradox differently. But I've taken us off-topic. |
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Donmillion wrote: | | The German and Georgian finds were outliers, washed up along ancient trade routes, one imagines. At least, that's the usual explanation for such OOPARTs (Out Of Place ARTefacts). |
In that case then, you antipodean eejit, (written affectionately) when you wrote...
| Since Linear B tablets have been found as far apart as Germany and Georgia, there's strong support for their authenticity. |
�you were talking through your arse and (as usual) simply fluffing up you argument with fish fingers.
Spurious finds of Linear B tablets in Germany and Georgia add absolutely nothing to the authentication process.
Likewise, when you lump in the mono-dialectic King James Bible with the multi-dialectic Beowulf and Homer, you are doing nothing to bolster your basic argument.
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You may have sunshine on your side, Chad, about the Biblical example being a bit too much embroidery, but I don't agree with your position about the outliers on the Linear B stuff.
I reckon Don is making a very substantial point about how we can have confidence in the reliability of the historical record without the need to fantasise about forgeries.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Please elaborate.
How do OOPARTs prove authenticity?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Would someone explain why, four hundred years later, I can understand (almost) every word of the King James Bible, whereas Chaucer in 1400 could not understand (almost) any word of a 1000 AD Anglo-Saxon document? I understand you can wobble the parameters a little but does chalk turn into cheese in four hundred years, or doesn't it?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Re Linear-B and Homer, scholars are under the delusion that the Greek Dark Ages (c 1200 - c 600 BC) actually happened and therefore place the Trojan War before 1200 and Homeric poetry after 600 (even though they are forever scrambling Homer back in time to cover the join).
Remember, lads and lassies, that Troy is flourishing c 700, Linear-B is Greek writing c 650. Homer is writing in c 600 and the "Classical" period begins c 550.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Remember, lads and lassies, that Troy is flourishing c 700, Linear-B is Greek writing c 650. Homer is writing in c 600 and the "Classical" period begins c 550. |
Sure. But I'm convinced that's only the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle to find its rightful place.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| berniegreen wrote: | | Okay. Point me to it or let us pursue it elsewhere. |
It's a big library. Explore it.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Would someone explain why, four hundred years later, I can understand (almost) every word of the King James Bible, whereas Chaucer in 1400 could not understand (almost) any word of a 1000 AD Anglo-Saxon document? I understand you can wobble the parameters a little but does chalk turn into cheese in four hundred years, or doesn't it? |
The real mystery for me is .... not why Chaucer could not understand a 1000 AD Saxon document (it's a foreign language).
It's not why Don has convinced himself that this is a form of Olde English (it's orthodoxy).
It is how come you can write THOBR and still retain a belief in this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
That is a real mystery.......
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Would someone explain why, four hundred years later, I can understand (almost) every word of the King James Bible, whereas Chaucer in 1400 could not understand (almost) any word of a 1000 AD Anglo-Saxon document? I understand you can wobble the parameters a little but does chalk turn into cheese in four hundred years, or doesn't it? |
Sigh. (See earlier advice to ... someone ... who asked a similar question. And incidentally, what were Chaucer's actual words when you asked him whether he could read an AD 1000 AS document? And was it a Northern, Midlands, or Southern dialect document? 'Cos it'd make a lot of difference. Or are you presuming that, because you can't read AS [although I've earlier quoted a passage from c. AD 1050 that everyone in this forum should have been able to read], therefore Chaucer couldn't read it either? As Ishmael would say, You know tits about what Chaucer could or could not do.)
Norwegian invasions into the north of England introduced a dialect with many similarities to AS, but many differences, which made for communication difficulties when the two communities settled down alongside and among one another. This resulted in the dominant language (AS) being modified in numerous ways in the northern regions (lowland Scotland and northern England). To name a few:
- An erosion of inflectional endings that took the same form but meant different things in the two languages, and their gradual (or rapid, depending on your viewpoint) replacement by prepositions;
- The replacement of some already ambiguous AS pronouns by unambiguous Norse ones (e.g., "them" substituted for 3rd person plural "him");
- The replacement of a similarly ambiguous 3rd person verb ending "-eth" and plural ending "-ath" (compare e.g. healeth "he cures" with healath, "they cure") with unambiguous Norse equivalents (heals, healen).
Later, the Danish conquest of the Midlands produced a similar problem, with similar solutions creeping down from the North.
Then came the French invasion, which destroyed almost all literary use of AS, and ended once and for all the primacy of the "standardised" form, based on West Saxon, which had enabled the diverging dialects to write in a common language they didn't actually speak (much as today).
After the "deluge", we have the confusion of the ME period, with each author writing in his own dialect, since there was no longer any "standard model" of English to follow. As English replaced French as the official and legal language (14th Century), this situation became intolerable, and a form of standardisation for official and legal documents was developed in the Chancery court ("Chancery English"). Westminster, the home of Chancery, was in the East Midlands dialect area, as were Oxford and Cambridge, so Midlands English--the variety used by Chaucer--became the new authoritative standard for the court, for the law, and for the upper classes who particularly practised them. This "educated" English was greatly influenced in spelling and vocabulary by the French absorbed during the Norman period and, even more so (in terms of vocabulary), by the Latin and Greek taught at the universities in this period of the Renaissance.
Then came printing, and things became ossified still further.
This process took place over something like 700 years (not 400). with Northern English of the pre-Conquest period already showing many features of Chaucerian English which (as I've written previousl) subsequently filtered down from north to south.
Skipping to the publication of the King James Bible: Since then, of course, we've had the 17th-Century invasion and mass settlement of the Gemans and, with rather different grammar and vocabulary, the Swedes in the 18th. Printing was lost, and we had to revert to hand-copying of manuscripts over several generations. The language fragmented again, and only the re-emergence of English (much modified by its contact with the German and Swedish dialects) as the language of law and learning in the 19th century, and the re-invention of printing, re-established a more-or-less consistent standard language--an English very different in character from that of the KJV. And that, my friend, is why the KJV is so difficult to understand, 400 years (to the year) after it was first published.
Oh, but wait!--It isn't so difficult to understand, is it? And that's because all the things in that last paragraph didn't happen. England has been a stable country (give or take the Civil War, which didn't involve foreign invasion and settlement) throughout that period. The universities have flourished, schools have flourished (initially only for the gentry), dictionaries (Johnson's wasn't the first) and English grammars have flourished , and printing has ensured that more-or-less common written forms spread from "the south" (Oxford, Cambridge, London) throughout the country. As a result of this stability, compared with the huge social and linguistic instability of the period before c. 1150, the language hasn't changed much.
That's the orthodox explanation in a nutshell. The details are, inevitably, a lot more convincing than the broad outline, but the details don't seem to concern AE-ers in general. And my mission has been to bring the details to your attention.
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Duncan71
In: Calgary
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Don,
You say that the English language hasn't changed much in the past few centuries since England has been stable.
So it must somehow be logical that for the following languages in unstable regions that changed sovereignty in the past few centuries that:
Ruthenian (western Ukrainian) must have somehow incorporated thousands of Hungarian, Polish, German, Russian and Czech words in the past 500 years. No?
The southern Italian dialects must have borrowed thousands of German and Spanish words in that past 500 years? Does that sound about right?
Croatian must surely have thousands of words of Hungarian and German all having origins within the past 500 years. Does the Pope poo in the woods? Is the bear Catholic?
Then surely both Flemish and Wallonian have had oodles of German and Spanish words all incorporated into them in the past 500 year. Could you ever doubt it? In fact ... maybe German changed into Flemish and Spanish into Wallonian. Gradually mind you ... like five lifetimes of Bob Hope or George Burns.
Dollars to doughnuts, Finnish must have thousands of Swedish and Russian-sounding words in it ... without a doubt.
Of course there are all of those German, Swedish, Polish and Russian words in Estonian or even in Latvian. They might have even incorporated a prefix or a suffix or two.
All of these languages are spoken in regions that have changed hands politically in the past 500 years. All of the areas in which these languages were spoken changed hands in the years after Gutenberg's printing press. All of these areas were dominated by elites who originally were not native to the region. Some were ruled by elites that spoke very similar languages. Others were ruled by elites that spoke languages that could not be more different than those of the locals. Some regions had famous universities (Napoli, Catania, Lviv, and Helsinki) that have been in operation for hundreds of years and others didn't have one until the 19th century. Some of these universities taught (at least partially) in the written venacular. Some of these regions were affected by mass migrations from the areas which the rulers originated and others received hardly a soul. Some of these languages have been written for hundreds of years and others far more recently.
Surely, for the past 500 years, some or even all of these languages have changed nearly every word of themselves and probably changed case endings to boot ... little by little of course. After all ... that's the price of instability ... a gradual (but almost instantaneous and stupendously large) shift in the local lingo. Let me know if anything about the above languages rings true. While you're at it see if you can drum up some documents showing how all of these tongues morphed over the years due to foreign domination. I mean ... if it happened in England ... it had to have happened elsewhere with countless examples. Oughta be 'a piece of cake'.
Make sure to provide your thoughts in a post that includes thousands of countless details that none of the AE-ers will concern themselves with and, most important, make sure your post is at least the same number of words as James Clavell's novel 'SHOGUN'. If not, Ishmael will be sorely disappointed.
P.S. Please do not provide an answer like or akin to "Well, you know, they invented the printing press in the 16th century and all European languages ceased changing over night." You'll get sent to bed without any pudding.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Don has demonstrated something very important about history (and indeed the humanities in general). If the paradigm demands that A causes B then it is possible to write whole books (not just Don-length postings) on the journey from A to B. This is because human behaviour is a) so variegated but b) so poorly understood that A can always be shown to cause B irrespective of whether it does or not.
In THOBR I point out that the possibilities of error become even more attractive when actually B causes A.
Nemo: your anti-Aryan strictures do you great credit but perhaps you couild flesh out your objections? My own position (before your onslaught of course) is that the Celtic languages can safely be removed from the Indo-European family but I take the rest (unbelievably) on trust.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Duncan71 wrote: | Don,
You say that the English language hasn't changed much in the past few centuries since England has been stable.
So it must somehow be logical that for the following languages in unstable regions that changed sovereignty in the past few centuries that:
Ruthenian (western Ukrainian) must have somehow incorporated thousands of Hungarian, Polish, German, Russian and Czech words in the past 500 years. No? |
No. At least, I don't see that that conclusion follows from what I wrote about grammatical change, which didn't mention vocabulary change At All ('cept for pronouns).
| Duncan also wrote: | | Make sure to provide your thoughts in a post that includes thousands of countless details that none of the AE-ers will concern themselves with ... |
Not my job. You raised this issue, Duncan. How about you do some work? You've made a number of allegations throughout your posting; let's just start with the opening quote.
How many words of Norse and Norman French origin are supposed to have entered English (according to orthodoxy) in the period c. 800-c.1350 (start of Viking invasions to replacement of French by English in court and legal life)? You allege "thousands"--how many thousands?
Accepting for the moment that Ruthenian is a language (it's also described as a dialect, a group of dialects, and a group of languages), please tell us how many Hungarian, Polish, German, Russian and Czech words were incorporated into it (them) during "the past 500 years", and why that period was chosen (in terms of historical events equivalent to Norse, Danish, and French settlement and government in England). You seem to allege that there were very few, so how many were there?
You might also want to account for how Ruthenian diverged from Russian in the period from the 14th to the 17th centuries, and how much; and how three separate literary languages, Belarussian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian, developed out of Ruthenian during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the extent of the language change involved there.
But I suspect that getting your facts right would all be too much trouble ...
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Duncan71 wrote: | | I mean ... if it happened in England ... it had to have happened elsewhere with countless examples. |
Why? For Pete's sake, why?
What is the scientific principle (or is it an AE principle?) that says that a vague similarity in historical/social/linguistic circumstances between two regions must result in identical linguistic outcomes? You've only indicated vague similarity--while also pointng out numerous differences!
Is it a law along the lines of, "2 + 2 = 4, therefore 2 + 3 must also = 4, and since 2 + 4 isn't very different from 2 + 3, therefore 2 + 4 must = 4 as well"?
As well as carrying out the other tasks I set you, please provide details of exactly how close the historical, social, and linguistic developments in those linguistic regions were, to the situation in England in the period AD 800 - AD 1350, being sure to indicate the differences as well as the similarities, and to trace out their linguistic consequences.
I'm interested in the result (I don't know anything much about those languages), but I'm busy with English at the moment, and don't have time to do your research for you.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Don has demonstrated something very important about history (and indeed the humanities in general). |
And what it is, is the importance of gathering and organising the data before you come to conclusions about its significance. OR afterwards will do, but "Ishmael's scientific method" (well, perhaps not his, but everyone else's) demands that all the data be examined.
If the data seem to point towards explanation A, that explanation is not necessarily correct. But if the data show no sign of pointing towatds explanation B, explanation B is probably not correct.
The question is, when you examine the data about pre-Conquest AS, post-Conquest AS, early Middle English, mid-Middle English, and late Middle English, do they tend to point towards explanation A, explanation B, or even perhaps explanation C?
Let's not forget how I got into all this. After reading THOBR, I was very interested in the idea that there was an "English language," separate from AS, that was here (I'm back in London) before the Romans visited, and I wanted some supporting data. Neither Mick nor anyone else has provided a single datum supporting that proposition, only alternative explanations of Middle English. As a result, I began to look at the details myself and was (and am) impressed by the many similarities between Middle English (particularly early and southern ME) and AS, including grammatical gender. As a result of that, I began to insist that the AE hypothesis must account for these data. Whether I know tits about the scientific method or not, Ishmael is keen on it, and he'll know that it exists in order to provide explanations for the data.
So what explanations did we get? We've had:
- The idea that ME really is just "late A/S", somehow surviving after 1130; but with no indication, in that case, of when it was that "genuine" English began to replace it (there is no clear dividing line);
- The idea of incompetent AS scholars employed by ME gentry to write "AS" verse; but that idea was firmly disproved in the specific case for which it was raised;
- The idea that ME was "influenced" by AS; but again with no idea of how extensive this "influence" was, or what non-AS English was like without it, or when or why it died out (it was still there in Chaucer's time, at least).
There may have been others that I've forgotten, but each of the above makes for a more complicated explanation than the "orthodox" one, and is therefore less likely.
I thought there might be interest in my own explanation, which is based on the data, but not too much of the data:
Mick's right: early Middle English was really just late Anglo-Saxon. But something happened to change that. On 28 October, 1250 (on the feast of SS. Simon and Jude), an alien space-ship landed in Yorkshire. (There are historical data supprting this contention.) Aliens from that space-ship used mind-control devices (or just advanced teaching techniques) to inculcate a newly-created language, "English", among the monks, which in the following decades gradually spread through England from north to south, eventually replacing Anglo-Saxon throughout the country.
What data do I have to support this contention? Well:
- English manuscripts dating after 1250 (from, say, 1300) show extensive differences of language from those dating before 1250 (e.g., Brut at about 1200);
- A document from Bylands Abbey records (in Latin) that, on the date indicated, "a large round silver thing like a disk [res grandis, circumcircularis argentea disco quodom haud dissimils] flew slowly over [the Abbey], and excited the greatest terror" among the monks.
Sadly, the manuscript is damaged, and breaks off before recording the actual landing, so I've had to infer that. But since the UFO sighting was recorded in AD 1250; and since documents written in England c. 1200 were so close to Anglo-Saxon, and those written c. 1300 were so much closer to Modern English; and since the changes moved down from north to south over a couple of centuries--well, what other explanation could there be?
So we have data from c. 1200, from 1250, and from c. 1300, to support my theory: data from either side of the watershed.
Meanwhile, I still haven't given up on the idea of pre-Roman English (which I already had before reading THOBR--it was the main reason I bought THOBR, as a matter of fact). But we still haven't got those five, or even three, data points from before 1130, nor even one, to support the AE hypothesis.
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