Subject: [cybalist] Re: Mitanni, Hurrians, etc.
> afme@... writes:
>
> >And even if it is 60,000 [I'm not that fussy about dates] what took
place
> between 300,000 & 60,000
> -- we don't know. We probably never will. Entropy has swallowed the
> information.
=== That's a nice way to dispose of the issue, the information is still
there and the world responds to the kinds of question raised.
> >Wallis Budge, in his "Book of the Dead", mentions in the preface that by
at > least 6,000 BC the scribes had no idea what they copied, hence the
adaptation > into Demotic.
>
> -- there weren't any scribes in 6000 BCE. Writing hadn't been invented
yet.
=== IFFF by that you mean alphabetic writing, of course that's right. IF
that means any and all kinds, you're totally wrong. Alternatively one
could, archly <g> say; OHH< were you there? or "Raahhhly?. One suspects a
case of "If the past cannot be accommodated to the present it does not
exist">
> Sumerian cuneiform was developed after 3500 BCE and Egyptian hieroglyphs
somewhat later.
=== Dating is a very vexed issue. Feynmann, the scientist, once commented
that anyone who denied we have a history prior to about 10,000 BCE must be,
you know what. Printed in the Sci Am somewhere.
> The demotic Egyptian script later still.
>
> >in the conversion from Harappan script - stone age glyphs, I believe
>
> -- Bronze Age, actually; 3rd-2nd millenium BCE.
=== That's OUR dating and specialist confined as well, Indian scholars date
otherwise, now who's right? They were orally transmitted long before, so now
what? Take the Sepher Yetsirah, published 1613 AD Mantua, Spain, Elsevir,
I think.. Rabbinic scholarship, on the basis of phrases and words in common
with the Talmud, dates at 200 BC, and as a geometric contrivance its
conventions are much older. So it just depends as to which "unique Feature"
one elects and names as to how it comes up. Whoever 'composed' it date
unknown, was assuredly not thinking in or with words, so now how old is it?
I could "teach" it in ten minutes with a tray of sand, so what now about
communicable? IN words it's nearly incomprehensible unless one already knows
its conventions which were not that of word language.
> The Harappan script vanished with the civilization and when literacy
returned to India, it was using scripts derived from further west;
ultimately from the Semitic alphabets.
=== And because conceivably mildly misnamed and possibly somewhat mislocated
the whole argument falls flat? I've known the odd case of several sequences
in changes of mind on several matters.
> >whereas Western conventions date that as around 1500 BC, as the emergence
of
> the Vedas in written form.
>
> -- no, the Vedas were not written down until much later and in a script
> ultimately derived from Aramaic. They were probably _composed_ some time
in the 1000's BCE. Transmission was oral.
=== Again, opinions differ and depends on whom one reads.
> >Hmm, and by what means did such a vocab grow?
>
> -- people invent words as needed.
=== Really, I've invented the odd words and OED editors say of 1000s
invented barely a 100 er annum make it. Are all words so invented, and
there's no odd wrinkly uncertainties about it? I've got a private label for
this but won't use it.
> >Which languages?
>
> -- all languages are of roughly equivalent semantic efficiency.
Vocabulary
> aside, there's nothing that can be said in one that can't be said in
another.
=== Now quite by what means and basis and method was that conclusion arrived
at? And as to 'roughly" how roughly or merely by apodictic utterance?
Haven't used that word for about 45 years but it seems to fit.
> >Thus one has to read the entire textus and decide from context which is
> meant.
>
> -- you're confusing the script and the language. The first writing
systems
> were less efficient than alphabetic scripts; but that does not apply to
the
> languages themselves.
=== I'm sorry but that's mind reading of a kind. Or, more mildly, replaces
one opinion with another. I've seen a Chinese Mandarin scholar DO it, Took
him ten minutes and I asked why. It does not really do to pick a sentence
from a paragraph and context to "refute" it. Quite explicate, pleae, what
is intended to be converyed by "does not apply to the languages thmselves,
is that relevant to reading a language and if so, in quite what way?