foxnews.com/science/2016/12/ … habet.html
Scratching my head, book will be out in a few weeks, claims he deciphered some tablets not deciphered before, was a archaic form of Hebrew. Only some letters look familiar. Not sure how he figured out the rest.
Er, what about cuneiform and shit?
Not alphabets.
Neither is linear B.
Really? They consider cuneiform to be too symbolic to be a true alphabet or something?
Yes. For example, the concept of being comes from cuniform, it us a single character composed of four lines, in a star shape pattern. Lots of philosophy is descended from cuneiform concepts.
Given living languages are still directly descended from these language groups, not to mention old texts in multiple scripts, give us a excellent indicator of how it is all pronounced. Maybe not a good, it is a indicator. Hard to say how the locals talk, given they were constantly enslaving feral tribes to work the fiekds, can undoubtedk be quite vulgar.
Anyone interested in cuniform, lots of online dictionaries and resources, as well as texts. I occasion use them on this site, but nobody ever replies so I don’t do much with it here.
So is the defining characteristic of an alphabet that the symbols have to represent sounds instead of concepts?
No, defining concept is constanant or vowels separately.
Linear B would just write stuff like CCSR DST GT T.
That’s English, just consonates. Give it a solid try.
uCCiSoRe DoeS’T GeT iT.
See the guess work, between linguistic range and actual writing? Translations can get squirrely. Either the language spoken has to retard to match the special constraints of court scribes who keep pausing trying to guesstimate how to sound that shit out, or the verbal language remains organic and the court language diverge, becoming highly formulaic and unrelated whatsoever to the spoken tongue.
Out more modern phonetic emphasis on constonate and vowel representation being separate still isn’t well adapted in languages like English with hardly any accents in guessing how a word is supposed to be exactingly pronounced… Listen to the British, they have devolved into practically a new language, it isn’t even spoken English anymore, but we an read each other generally. Koine Greek towards the end of the Byzantine Empire looked a lot like it was during the early romanera, but I’ve seen enough scholars say spoken regional dialects didn’t much match up to it, like Latin. People were writing for accents that no longer existed.
I’m guessing your gonna criticize human use of language as bullshit and blame me for it? Don’t like it, learn Mandarin. The Japanese use the characters (they call it Kanji) and claim they can read chinese. They fucking can’t, I’ve seen them try to communicate writtingthey just look at each other like they are crazy illiterates.
evangelicalfocus.com/culture/210 … cal_exodus
He sure got a lot out of that scratch! I’m suspecting confirmation bias, at best, and using archeology as political tool, at worst. I mean, it’s not like it hasn’t been done before. For all we know, he may have scratched them up himself. Who knows what drives a biblical archeologist. 
Biblical archeology is fairly mainstream, and quite scientifically minded Pandora. They were the ones who started the excavations at Ur and across mesopotamia, we owe a lot to them, and modern archeologists for the most part have no issue with them, seeing them as colleges. My thread in the religious section is technically Biblical Archeology, given I gotta go through a lot of Christian theological texts putting together histories now, but the place I submitted it to, other than here, is a well known Neo-Platonist research group based out if the Netherlands. I spent the last 24 hours making a case, but also seeking out scrutiny from those best positioned to skeptically tear it apart from some of the top universities on the planet. It is how these things work.
That’s how it works- you read about something in a old text, in these cases biblical or later theological writings, locate a concrete place or artifact, put it up for dissection by others.
What us automatically illegitimate isn’t biblical archeology, but knee jerk rejection of it just cause you think your a atheists or different religion. I don’t presume this when I hear someone in India going off the Mahabharata looking for a site. Some if clearly a hoax, but for the most part they are legitimately inspired searches for archaeological sites, making sense of history.
We are moving into a very stupid era with this iconoclastic outlook on religion, no inherent limit to the extent we will socially censor ourselves, chucking out reason too as a mere superstition.
Some of his characters do match up to Hebrew characters, like the W shapes. Rest, I got my doubts, but I can’t see the comparison to the Egyptian hieroglyphics he claims, etc… Because the story didn’t include all that. It is quite reasonable it could of evolved that way, I just don’t know. Can’t affirm or deny it till I see the damn book.
I will remain skeptical on this issue.
Lack of advertising and interest.
I’m one of only a very small handful of philosophers around even interested in the philosophies in these eras, with a wide enough interest that I’m not limited to one age or era. My ability to link Sardanappulas to King Zhou is a good case, both are famous in either Assyriology or Sinology, very common topics, but so few actually read and make the connections. Ctesias got a bad rap because historians couldn’t make his histories match what “biblical archaeologists” dug up and started piecing together in the 19th century to the present. I recognized the story immediately because I’m a big strategy buff, it is blantantly the same person, same story, same supporting characters.
I contacted a professor at the University of Cornell who wrote a book how frustrated he was that all texts destroyed by Confucius didn’t survive, I said I had one- didn’t get a reply back, so a guy I know who I mentored in his joining the military just got stationed in Hawaii, just left, I used to run the Honolulu Philosophy group, gave him some philosophical concepts on language to memorize and a letter of introduction to Professor Ames so he can get a foot in to the university with my research as payment to tweak it. Think Ames will shit himself when he sees it, he is one of the best translators out there.
Our historians are a bit sluggish, all the professors I ever met aren’t exactly the highest specimens of philosophical thought. We have very few active philosophy of history groups left. The Marxists are dying off. Vico’s school is too. I’m jump starting a effort, but who knows if it will have any long term influence. Academia stiffles a lot. You can write a book easily, get PDFs put out, but professors are sluggish, slow thinkers.
If I ever went back to school for anything, it be for archeology. Just, I don’t know if I can restrict myself to just one site. I can go though a few dozen books a week, flipping through them, era by era, civilization by civilization. My mind is well practiced. Most aren’t. I see them struggle against nothing concepts, very shallow at times.
Ah…wouldn’t that eliminate ancient Hebrew, the very thing we’re discussing? One of the first things you learn in Biblical history classes is that their written language doesn’t have any vowels, just like in your example (except without the spaces), and how that makes translation difficult and pronunciation a guessing game.
My understanding is that written ancient Hebrew was an attempt to list the most fundamental concepts from which all other concepts (“angels”) could be formed. Cursings and blessings (“spells”) were scribed by casting concepts together into a bound word or phrase (memorable complexity). All utterances were considered influence upon any who heard them causing changes in minds and behaviors (aka “media” and “language”). Each fundamental concept had an associated common sound, such as the sound “ah” as the letter “A” to represent the concept of spirit - their first most fundamental essence and thus the first in the list (at the bottom).
Every language has vowels, and I know at least modern Hebrew indicates vowels. Farthest I ever got into Hebrew was learning numbers, but I do have a very small background in other local languages- I haven’t bothered with Hebrew just cause I haven’t yet. Many people know it, I trust then to translate while I root around in areas of philosophy not translated.
As to James, I’m guessing legal and economic needs will always trump written language, but maybe. I know the Jews early on were not always a cultural monolith and had side cults and lots of pagan influences, just like the middle ages with spells and witches. So, I can’t say one way or another, I will look into it. Just seems written language as developed by one group would mimick it’s every surrounding neighbor’s use, and that was administration of government and economic records.