quote:Originally posted by Lisa: But in this case, it was steven throwing a tantrum.
This is actually true. Lisa posted something non-factual, easily checkable, and didn't even admit she was wrong after being shown that she was wrong.
I have a flaw. I despise incompetence and factual inaccuracy, particular when/where it is spoken in a tone of authority. It drives me nearly crazy. I've had this flaw for at least 15 or 20 years. I haven't figured out how to beat it, at least not yet. Meanwhile...
One of the reasons I ban so frequently and quickly on my own message boards is because of the ongoing mess here. I see what comes of never banning anyone, ever, and I don't like it. I'm not saying my behavior is perfect. I know it's not. The same flaws I have IRL show up here.
quote:Originally posted by sinflower: The thing is, Lisa isn't a troll. She's not just stirring up drama, she believes in what she posts.
I think you're right about that, and that fact doesn't make me hopeful. I really don't like the idea of banning people who have looked at the facts, and who nevertheless still don't come to the right conclusions. However, my frustration with her is a real thing, and the whole thing is making me start to question my participation here. I really am not 100% sure the problem is solvable without either heavy moderation or outright banning, and I'm not sure that either one of those things will ever happen.
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quote:My branch manager was Greek, and she insisted that the Greeks invented the alphabet. I asked her what alpha means in Greek. Silence. I explained to her that all of the letters actually mean something in Hebrew. And only in Hebrew.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know why this would make the alphabet "yours."
What do the characters in the Hebrew alphabet mean? Are you sure that there are no other languages where letters have meaning?
I'm sorry I missed this before, Scott. Aleph means ox, and the original letter was a pictograph of an ox. Bet means house, and ditto about the original letter being a pictograph of it. Gimel is a camel, dalet is a door, etc. Whereas alpha, beta, gamma and delta have no meaning at all in Greek.
And no, there are no languages older than Hebrew which have an alphabetic writing system with letters whose names mean something in that language.
Because of a misdating of the strata in the Levant, inscriptions in Hebrew have been attributed to Canaanites, so you'll see such attributions in links like the one the Rabbit posted. But there's actually no evidence that the Canaanites left any writing at all, other than that which arises as an artifact of the dating.
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posted
Hm... why would the language develop that way? IIRC, Hebrew is a phonetic script...why tie the image that represents the human sound to a object, rather than a valueless symbol?
I still don't understand why this makes the alphabet "yours."
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This isn't true. The names are definitely of semitic origin (and quite possibly from early Hebrew), but there are several semitic languages in which the terms have meaning. Notably including Phoenician.
I'd be interested in reading your sources for the dating errors you mention.
Not that steven's really paying attention, but while Egyptians did have a writing system for which the names of the pictographs had meaning in their language, it definitely wasn't an alphabet. A subset of it could have been used as an alphabet, but wasn't, except by semitic people living in Egypt (well, an alphabet without vowels, which has a special name, but the big technical leap is the total abstraction of character sound from meaning).
The greeks did invent the alphabet with vowels, for which they deserve a certain amount of credit.
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Not that steven's really paying attention, but while Egyptians did have a writing system for which the names of the pictographs had meaning in their language, it definitely wasn't an alphabet. A subset of it could have been used as an alphabet, but wasn't, except by semitic people living in Egypt (well, an alphabet without vowels, which has a special name, but the big technical leap is the total abstraction of character sound from meaning).
Borrowing somebody else's symbols doesn't exactly equal inventing an alphabet from scratch. It also doesn't make the Hebrew alphabet somehow mystical or magical, contrary to Dan Winter's crazy assertions.
Mentioning Dan Winter in a thread on the Hebrew alphabet is probably not going to help much. Or maybe it will, I have no idea.
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posted
FWIW, I would very much like to understand the whole thing about nobody being there in 1868. I've heard the argument that there were no people called "Palestinians" before the creation of the Israeli state (or at some recent-ish period just prior to that).
What I don't get is the claim that the area was either: a) Completely empty, or b) Populated only by Jews
when it seems contrary to the on-the-ground information if you just visit the locales in question, and understand how the rural goat and sheep herding lifestyles work.
Anyway, if anyone has a good source for that assertion, and why Twain's remarks are relevant to the case, I'd sure like to know.
quote:Originally posted by Scott R: Hm... why would the language develop that way? IIRC, Hebrew is a phonetic script...why tie the image that represents the human sound to a object, rather than a valueless symbol?
I still don't understand why this makes the alphabet "yours."
Maybe you're not familiar with that turn of phrase. "Yeah, that's mine" can mean, "Yes, that's something I made".
As far as why it would develop that way, think about it. There's no such thing as a phonetic script. You want to create one. So you have a word: bayit, which means house. And you want a symbol to represent the first sound in that word. So you sketch a little house and call it beyt. You want a word to represent the first sound in the word gamal (camel), so you draw a little stylized camel and call it gimmel. You do this for all of the initial consonants you can think of, and presto: you have an alphabet (alephbet, rather).
I think the idea of valueless symbols is a fairly recent development in human history. It's like names. Nowadays, most people don't think of the meanings of names. It's all polly parrot. Names are picked for their sounds or after other people who had that name. It used to be that names weren't meaningless symbols, but actually said something.
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This isn't true. The names are definitely of semitic origin (and quite possibly from early Hebrew), but there are several semitic languages in which the terms have meaning. Notably including Phoenician.
Phoenician is just an Aramaicized dialect of Hebrew.
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: I'd be interested in reading your sources for the dating errors you mention.
The problem is, I'm lazy, and haven't gotten around to writing it yet.
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: The greeks did invent the alphabet with vowels, for which they deserve a certain amount of credit.
quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: FWIW, I would very much like to understand the whole thing about nobody being there in 1868. I've heard the argument that there were no people called "Palestinians" before the creation of the Israeli state (or at some recent-ish period just prior to that).
What I don't get is the claim that the area was either: a) Completely empty, or b) Populated only by Jews
I don't claim that. But it was extremely sparsely populated, and a significant percentage of the Arab population there was nomadic, and didn't see crossing the Jordan as crossing a border.
And when we started moving back there in larger numbers, the demographics changed. It led to an influx of more Arabs as well.
quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: when it seems contrary to the on-the-ground information if you just visit the locales in question, and understand how the rural goat and sheep herding lifestyles work.
There wasn't really a huge amount of that, either. The ground cover had been pretty much destroyed by the goat and sheep herding that had gone on for centuries.
quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: Anyway, if anyone has a good source for that assertion, and why Twain's remarks are relevant to the case, I'd sure like to know.
posted
Lisa, thanks for explaining. That makes sense.
Do the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu languages not have an alphabet? I'm not sure of the distinction.
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posted
Scott: Chinese has a logographic system, Japanese has a hybrid logographic/syllabary, and there is no Hindu language (that's a religion). Hindi, however, is written in several different alphabets, all of which are not so distant cousins of the early semitic alphabets (with some variations that are probably home-grown).
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posted
I have read it. The small bit she quotes is but a snippet from a larger context of them traveling through villages and tribal areas with larger populations. He's not exactly thrilled by the level of civilization he encounters there, true, but to pick the one spot he talks about as not having many people (he mentions three in an area of "some miles". Call it a day's ride -- what's that? At best we're talking 20 miles or so in a more-or-less straight line?
She ignores all the preceding and succeeding parts where he talks about people they encountered along the way, towns they went through.
It seems less than accurate of her.
At any rate, I think it's interesting, but it doesn't prove much.
Did you see my questions about the actual towns in the area and who might've lived there?
It seems germane to the issue of who might've been there.
On a related note: The "nomads aren't really the residents" argument is one that North America is trying to come to grips with now (200 years or so later) in relation to native peoples who were here before European settlers. In particular, the Western Expansion was considered a "better use"of "empty land" when in reality, it displaced people who had prior claims, did it generally without compensation, and in some (many cases) with violence -- on both sides.
From the Native American perspective, the fact that they crossed borders isn't really relevant. They had different borders.
I think the case could be made that nomadic Arab populations in Palestine have a similar claim.
As for the cities and towns, who lived there? Hebron, for example, seems to have had a large Arab population for centuries, but I don't have actual data. Is that incorrect? Was Hebron empty in 1868? Or...was it mostly Jewish at that time?
And, who were the Crusaders fighting in the Holy Land? Where did they live between battles. Did they claim the land as "theirs?"
You know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to claim (as the woman in your original link) does that people other than Jews have no claim to "the land."
The land includes a lot -- the cities, the towns, the oases and wells, etc.
Anyway, I'm repeating the same questions. She is clearly a fan of Israel, but I think she let her view get colored by her fandom.
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posted
Also, the earliest alphabets w/ letter meanings was developed in either Egypt (this one is likely but not confirmed yet) or the Sinai Peninsula (this is the current oldest record holder until the Egyptian findings are confirmable), not Israel.
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posted
I think, Samprimary, her point was that the alphabet was created by Semitic people; not that it was necessarily done in Israel.
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posted
the semitic languages as i recall are a branch of afroasiatic, and they originated before the jewish state and bled far more heavily into arabic cultures than jewish cultures. so unless there's a giant "3. ??? 4. Israel!" point of bragging rights I'm missing in this conversation, I don't see how that realistically translates into "yo, so alphabets are our doing, peace"
the earliest alphabet also had more egyptian influence in it than anything else and was even based off of hieroglyphics, soooooooo
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posted
Yeah, that's been covered. It pretty clearly developed from hieroglyphs, and that was very likely in Egypt, but by a semitic group (which one is unknown, but there were only so many semitic people at the time).
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Samprimary, you're just not getting this: all elements of the alphabet that are not directly attributable to jewish cultures are completely trivial. Further, this is self-evident so don't bother asking for evidence.
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And, clearly, that semitic people proabably developed an alphabet thousands of years ago makes it okay to take land away from people today.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Yeah, that's been covered. It pretty clearly developed from hieroglyphs, and that was very likely in Egypt, but by a semitic group (which one is unknown, but there were only so many semitic people at the time).
yes, and not all of them have an applicable linear association that ends up "4. Israel!"
Here is a comparison: 2,000 years in the future, some guy in the new north american union or w/e claims we Americans 'birthed' the locomotive. It's untrue — it was birthed elsewhere. He can't substantiate the claim by using notions like 'well, it was done by a specific people, some of whom went on to birth the American state' or 'and ultimately it was the americans who made the most important early use of the train' or w/e. 'birthed' is still the wrong term for America as a national entity to claim in any real sense, just like it is incorrect to claim israel can take claim for having 'birthed' the alphabet
see, if I love a national entity, I would at least represent it by supporting its supposed greatness only with factual claims. to do otherwise is a disservice to it.
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quote:Originally posted by natural_mystic: Samprimary, you're just not getting this: all elements of the alphabet that are not directly attributable to jewish cultures are completely trivial. Further, this is self-evident so don't bother asking for evidence.
quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: I don't understand how people can get angry at people over their computer.
Oh, the IRONY!
Because I flame people all the time and attack them on a personal level when they disagree with me, yup. I'm guessing you're referring to the OK GO thread? EDIT: steven was out of line too.
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
I appreciate that this thread has for the most part gotten back on a reasonable track, though I still don't like the snark much.
As I said elsewhere, I'm working with the Cards toward a more workable set of guidelines for forum participation. It's a slow process, especially the way my life has been going the past couple of months. However, there's no doubt that "deliberately, defiantly ignoring requests/directions from the moderator is not acceptable" (or something similarly worded) will be in there. Please consider it to be in force now. I consider flouting the rules because one feels it justified to be one of the biggest current problems (along with admittedly unclear rules -- again, working).
Also, for the time being (until it's determined whether subject banning is going to be a regular occurrence), when someone has been directed to stop participating in a thread, please try not to address them in a manner that encourages response. Take it to a separate thread (if the interaction isn't directly related to the reason the person was asked out of the thread) or to e-mail (or other method of communication outside the forum).
posted
You're more than free to subject ban me anytime. The first time I get subject banned, and I don't see someone else getting it too, I promise I'll leave entirely. That's why I left Ornery, a nonsense 2-week suspension, and I'll be willing to leave here too, I think.
You better apply that stuff fairly, or it's going to be the GrenMe effect all over.
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posted
PJ, I was reading this thread and planning on whistling at least one of the places where I felt Lisa went far over the line in what is acceptable. But, with you weighing in, that seems kind of moot. Should we consider that issue dead?
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