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Grand Fromage posted:I like the Chinese description of the Roman government: Sorry this is ages ago but can you share original language source on this so I can
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Aug 13, 2018 06:25
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Mantis42 posted:It's Gan Ying as quoted by vol. 88 of the Book of Later Han. Thanks my dude.
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Aug 13, 2018 11:39
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Jack2142 posted:Small Town China Rome, reminds me of when movies or media get set in a small town or filmed there you get a small explosion of tourism that fades away to a semi-ironic trickle. My knowledge of this is mostly limited to the PNW, but I have three examples. Can verify that Monteriggione has a small Assassin’s Creed shop that was probably bigger closer to the time the games were made.
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Jun 30, 2020 04:19
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Grand Fromage posted:Accent is weird. Some people seem to be able to sound native at any age they learn a language, others can speak a language fluently but just cannot get rid of the accent no matter what they do. It certainly seems like your chances of sounding native are better the younger you are. I'm one of the latter, I am not bad at learning languages but I cannot pronounce them like a native, I do my best but I'm always going to sound like an English speaker. It’s kind of insane. I have two kids, both raised trilingual in English, Cantonese, Mandarin. Both speak English as a first language and Mandarin as a second. A, the elder, speaks unaccented English, accented Mandarin and accented Cantonese. B, the younger, speaks without an accent in all three languages. He is also a talented mimic, able to copy accents with little deviation.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:23
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In the context of the above posts - leaving aside the slightly odd ones claiming that one or another Roman politician was morally better than the rest (they may have been but it doesn’t matter, the system produced an inevitable outcome) - is there evidence for monarchy as a compromise to restore stability, in place of ambitious nobles jockeying for power? (Never mind that it didn’t serve that function long term, my question is about whether it was perceived that way at the time, a thousand and a half years before Hobbes)
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Jul 8, 2020 06:42
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FAUXTON posted:if you look at it as monarchy being an evolution of dictatorship yes Did contemporaries (who were well informed enough to know that the republic had fallen despite keeping the trappings around) perceive the Augustan heirs as something different from “kings”?
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Jul 8, 2020 07:08
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Never expected to see “Theban Sympathiser” used without irony in 2020, but then this has been a year for surprises.
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Jul 24, 2020 02:54
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A propos Aristotle’s love in a cold climate racial theories, I remember reading years ago an official communication from I think a Shahanshah of Persia to a Roman emperor in which the honorifics and titles up front include a phrase like “[ruler of the Persians], who are the most beautiful of peoples, being neither pallid nor too dark.” I remembered it as being in Justinian’s Flea but I can’t find it in my kindle edition. Has anyone else read or seen this?
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Aug 23, 2020 08:25
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The dynamic on the German/Balkan frontier seems to have been Rome and its neighbours carrying out periodic raids against each other for a long time: people died in these raids, which IMO is enough to explain mutual distrust and a widening cycle of violence. If Peter Heather is to be believed, the Romans mostly raided to break up political confederations and assassinate potential unifiers, and the tribes raided back to steal wealth mostly in the form of technologically advanced goods that their societies couldn’t easily produce. Farming tools seem to have been a big part of this, interestingly enough.
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Aug 31, 2020 03:27
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Arglebargle III posted:Up until the early 20th century there were still hill tribes in southern China who were well-known for abducting lowland girls and keeping them as slaves. “Up until the early 20th century” is optimistic; there remained until at least the 1990s a brisk illegal trade in stolen children to the remote countryside for desperate families that need the labour, and I wouldn’t like to commit to the practice having ended today. I was recently reading David Graff’s Medieval Chinese Warfare, which asserts that during the post-Three Kingdoms pre-Tang period there was too much productive land available relative to the peasants available to farm it (due to lots of people dying), leading the petty kings/warlords to spend a lot of time invading each other to steal population who could be resettled and set to work. It’s not exactly slavery, but it’s not exactly not slavery, either. The Tang penal code also has the crime of móu pàn (谋叛), a subset of treason that includes leaving the country or your city without permission, although I don’t know how far down the social scale this would have been applied. Abducting people for sale also seems to have been common enough to be treated in the Tang code as equivalent to conspiracy to murder, which suggests the existence of an active market in human misery. Again; not slavery in the Roman and certainly not the triangle trade sense, but not exactly not slavery either. E: naturally abduction for sale of a relative is a more serious crime than abduction for sale of a stranger. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 06:29
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Almond Crunch posted:Li He is only one Tang poet who fits this sort of mold--precisely because of the later-deified rockstar of Tang Poetry-- Han Yu : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Yu. Han Yu was awesome though; lover, fighter, poet and famous for reading on the toilet.
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Oct 21, 2020 04:56
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Mr. Nice! posted:It's quite possible that some forms of writing are older than we know because all of the records have long since been swallowed by the sea. F’htagn. It’s certainly a plausible hypothesis that there was a traumatic flood event somewhere in prehistory, given the frequency with which it pops up among unrelated cultures. But it might just be that floods happen everywhere and everyone hates them.
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Feb 10, 2021 07:58
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Grevling posted:Tolkien was into that This interview is hilarious and anyone who hasn’t listened to it should, if only to hear the mid-20th-century version of a professorial type absolutely dunking on a journalist who is desperately trying to get a gotcha.
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Feb 20, 2021 10:26
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I honestly can’t imagine the amount of background stress that must have been common in the pre-modern world. So much randomness. I suppose if you go to dangerous parts of the world now you would find people shaped by the same kinds of forces but it’s still hard for me to imagine. Contrast that with Ea-Nasir ripping people off with shoddy copper ingots, which is completely relatable and humanising, and you have in a nutshell why history is the most interesting subject for me. Familiar elements and then bugfuck crazy alien mindsets.
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Feb 28, 2021 11:16
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Gaius Marius posted:I know Wellington was loving one of Napoleon's mistress's so that almost counts More than one: didn’t he spend the years after Waterloo methodically tracking down and seducing several of them?
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Mar 4, 2021 11:31
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This whole chat about religion and language is awesome and I love all the posts about it. E: also I read the Emma Southon book on murder in Rome and it’s great. It doesn’t bother me at all that she writes like we post in here tbh, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there (my favourite is the excerpt from a legal text along the lines of “what should be the penalty if you’re playing proto-football and the ball hits a barber causing him to slip and accidentally cut the throat of the slave that he’s shaving, and how liable should the barber be for setting up shop next to where people play ball regularly, like a total moron, and also how liable should the slave be for sitting in the chair at such a stupidly dangerous barbershop?” (Which gave me flashbacks to law school exam questions). Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Apr 25, 2021 |
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Apr 25, 2021 04:45
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JJN is extremely readable and gives you the kind of narrative overview of Byzantium that makes a good grounding, which involves taking a lot of questionable sources largely at face value. Then if you want to have more detail later you can dive in deeper.
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Jun 14, 2021 00:39
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Crab Dad posted:I just visited last September and saw at least one villa with the funniest paintings that just had to be a brothel. “Private bathouse” it was labeled though. I’m not sure that even qualifies as an euphemism.
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Jun 15, 2021 08:26
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So if I’m reading that right, urbanisation is a kind of great filter that has a risk of causing society-wide collapse (possibly Malthusian-style)? I wonder if that’s behind the Bronze Age collapse as well? E: I can imagine a hypothesis that urbanisation causes specialisation, but if you run out of food after your population has specialised then everything can go to poo poo.
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Jul 30, 2021 14:33
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Bit of a tangent but I recall reading that belief in mystical protection against bullets is extraordinarily resilient given how easy it is to falsify.
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Jul 31, 2021 11:01
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ChubbyChecker posted:that's a decent comparison What is the lightest weight armour one could fit to an elephant to make it reasonably protected against missiles?
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Jun 19, 2022 16:20
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I admire the simplicity of “what do you know of [X]?” as a question. E: keep Latin drop-kick Greek, we used Cambridge Latin Course and we liked it. Or at least we liked Caecilius and family, except Quintus. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 04:46
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I don’t think it’s a western view particularly, here in China plenty of people will talk about Tang as an open minded, inclusive iteration of the country. It’s a folk understanding IMO.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:39
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kaschei posted:IDGI, is she saying "I could afford to ignore lessons as I'm the daughter of the king, but you're only a daughter-in-law so you better keep studying?" I think it’s either “you’re making me look bad” or “stay in your lane”.
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Oct 13, 2022 10:46
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So the currency of the secret world in cultist simulator (spintria, -ae, secret tokens used by secret world types) is actually the “femboi”? E: yep, it’s definitely intentional, per google images: 
Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 10:01
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Freudian posted:Allegedly that's how Constantinople eventually fell, a single door left open. 1453 Was An Inside Job
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Oct 31, 2022 23:32
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cheetah7071 posted:i think the byzantines are pretty cool but i would prefer if i never experience a civil war fought over a religious debate that only makes sense in greek Just what I’d expect from a fukkin iconoclast.
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Nov 1, 2022 05:41
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Mad Hamish posted:
Well there was that one guy in Chicago
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Nov 19, 2022 04:11
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barbecue at the folks posted:
I play the Nobunaga’s Ambition series of strategy games in Chinese and it’s funny to me that I can read the hanzi but have no idea what the Japanese reading is. Outside of the big memorable guys I can recognise from their pictures, I basically have no idea how any of their names are pronounced, and that’s before they go through any of the hundreds of name changes that they seemed to really like doing.
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Jan 5, 2024 11:27
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Nenonen posted:Deez R Maniples Actually it’s pronounced deez Manibus
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Feb 23, 2024 05:58
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